ABSTRACT
If a God of history could be effectively employed in answer to the God of the schoolmen, he had become a paradigm for the saints and enthusiasts, who employed revelation and apocalypse as means of asserting their immediate spiritual links with him. Hobbes employed both materialist and nominalist weapons to destroy the concept of spirit altogether and leave our contact with God confined to knowledge of his words, and the content of those words virtually confined to acts and affirmations of his power. Experience of God was conceivable only in the past and the future, the two times of the existence of his civil kingdom. To orthodox Christians this seemed, understandably and perhaps rightly, incompatible both with Christian faith as they had re" ceived it and with the existence of God as they considered they believed in him. But we cannot conclude that it was Hobbes's intention to affirm God's non,.existence. He was simply denying that faith could affirm the existence of any but a God of history, and the more he repeated that denial the more he affirmed that God's reality; he was left with the irreducible concept of a God whose being was power, who was believed to have exerted power in the past and to have promised that he would return to exert power in the future, and with a conceptual system that included belief and historical authorities and from which he made no attempt to eliminate them. Having used apocalyptic against the scholastics, he could not eliminate it by further secularization; for if apocalyptic is a device for drawing God back into time, and if secularization is defined as the affirmation of the supremacy of time, then we need more than secularization to destroy apoca" lyptic. We need the replacement of belief by something else. Hobbes made no attempt to effect such a substitution. He treated belief with epistemological and brutal literalness, but the result was to leave intact the structure of historical authority towards which belief was directed. That structure included a future and an eschatology, and so Hobbes remained-inescapably but with no sign of a will to escape on his part-the author of two prophetic books.
