ABSTRACT
As Hobbes's thought enters the domain of eschatology, it begins to make use of apocalyptic: both that part of the content of acknowledged revelation which had to do with the acts of God promised for a future, and the doctrines and speculations, for historical reasons largely heterodox or heretical, which had been built up around it. He insists unremittingly on the literal and physical nature of Christ's return, the literal, physical and political character of his kingdom after the resurrection of the saints. It is to be exercised on earth, 44 and indeed from J erusa"' lem,45 since 'salvation is of the Jews (ex ]udaeis, that is, begins at the Jews)'; the speculation is of the same order as that which represented the conversion of the Jews as a necessary preliminary to a millennia! regnum Christi. Formally, Hobbes is not a millen"' nialist, or at least a pre,.,millennialist, since his kingdom of Christ follows and does not precede the end of this world;46 but as the allusion to Jerusalem shows, his 'world to come' so closely repli ... cates this world that the distinction tends to disappear. On an earth indistinguishable from this one, Christ in his risen human body is to reign for ever over the elect in theirs, and 'for ever' has no other meaning than that time as we know it in this life is 43 De Cive (English Works, ii, p. 248) and Leviathan, iii, 40 (Oakeshott, p. 315)
prolonged ad infinitum.41 The risen saints will neither beget nor die; since Hobbes refuses to accept eternal torment, or any evil greater than personal death, he has the damned resurrected to face the certainty of a second and eternal death, not to be suffered before they have begotten children in the state of damnation, who will continue to all eternity the generations of men doomed to perish utterly without help from the God who visibly and humanly reigns over them.48 Since Hobbes could as well have extinguished the damned without allowing them to breed, his theory of damna ... tion is gratuitous; and since he knew more clearly than most men that damnation consists in the deprivation of hope, it appears more than usually abominable. Its importance, however, is that it underlines both the material and the temporal nature of his hereafter. Salvation and damnation both happen in the world of matter and of time. As Hobbes denies that eternity is a nunc,.,stans or 'eternal now', and will permit it only to be an infinite pro,. longation of the time we know, 49 so his 'heaven' is located in no spiritual and (until we ask where God is now) hardly any spatial realm, but essentially in time-in the infinite future of the material world. 50 It is this which links his hereafter to the millennium of the Protestant sects; Gerrard Winstanley had already shown that Christ's resurrection could be described exclusively in terms of a transformation of this world's conditions. Again, Hobbes's determination to acknowledge no processes outside the world of matter, space and time led him to follow many radical sectarians and much contemporary higher criticism51 in propounding the doctrine of mortalism, according to which the soul could have no 47 Ibicl., iv, 44 (Oakeshott, pp. 411-12): the damned to be renewed 'as long
existence apart from the body, but must perish with it at death and enjoy immortality only with it on resurrection. 52 This too was an apocalyptic heresy: immortality did not consist in the soul's existence outside time, but was a gift to be received by the elect in an infinite future. Clearly, what is going on is a conjunc,. cion of some kind between Hobbes's philosophical materialism and the apocalyptic and millennialist speculation reaching a high,. water mark in England about the time that Leviathan was pub,. lished, a conjunction occurring at the point where salvation could be presented as a temporal, a historical and even a millennia! process; and we have to understand this conjunction if we are to understand Hobbes's political eschatology.
