The Problem of Hobbes and the Bible: A Textometric Approach

Context

During the elaboration of his political theory,

the materialist

philosopher

Thomas

Hobbes

(1588-1679)

developed a complex relation with the Bible. Although he credited himself with the scientific foundation of politics,

in

The

Elements

of Law

(1640)

,

De Cive

(1642, 1647)

,

and

the English and Latin

Leviathan

(

1651, 1668

),

Hobbes

made an increasing use of Scriptural evidence in support of his arguments.

While

fight

ing

Scholastic philosop

h

y on its

own

ground,

not only

did he

la

y

the

foundations of
modern
B
iblical criticism,
but
he
also

provide
d

a

marked
ly heterodox interpretation
of
a growing number
of Scriptural
passages.

And y
et
,
t
he hundreds of Biblical quotations s
prinkled
in the political writings,
Hobbes’s

simultaneous use of
multiple Scriptural sources and his
inconsistent
handling of the source-texts make it
hard
to account for the nature and development of Hobbes’s treatment of the Bible.

That is why, w
ith the notable exception of the pioneering study by Harold W. Jones (
Jones,
1984), even modern scholarship has rarely dared to venture in a methodical examination of Hobbes’s
B
iblical knowledge and exegesis (Pacchi
et al.
, 198
8
; Somos, 2015).

O

bjectives

With this poster, we aim to showcase the benefits of a textometric approach to
what
Jones
defined
“
the problem of Hobbes and the Bible”
.
W
e draw on pilot evidence from

the
ongoing

Digital Theological Hobbes

project,
where
textometric functionalities
are
put in the service of the study of Hobbes’s
Biblical
discussions
thanks to
a
TXM-based
corpus of diplomatic transcriptions of
the
English political works.

Based on the
preliminary results obtained from the exploitation of

the
prototype
corpus, we
argue

that
the
unique combination of automatic and semi-automatic tools
of

the TXM so
f
tware
platform

<

>

(

Heiden,

2010

)
will enable to achieve
the following milestones:

1) a

n

index of Hobbes’s explicit Scriptural quotations in the political works;

2

) a quantitative and qualitative representation of both the evolution of Hobbes’s exegetical discussions and their growing impact on his political theor

y;

3

) the systematic contextualization of Hobbes’s Biblical references in his politic

al science

;

4

) the intertextual reconstruction of

the

Scriptural sources

of a relevant sample of quotations

.

First

r

esults

Our first results are the following:

1)

the

TXM-based

prototype

corpus of

diplomatic transcriptions of

Hobbes’s

English political works

,

built by
linguistically annotat
ing,
refining

and importing

the
XML-TEI
P5
-
encoded
(TEI Consortium, 2019)
EEBO-TCP

transcriptions
(Kichuk, 2007)
of

Human Nature

,

De Corpore Politico

,

Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society

and

Leviathan

(
freely accessible at
<

https://github.com/textcreationpartnership

>
)
into the open-source and TEI-oriented TXM software platform
.

-

TCP files are
annotated with standard spellings, parts of speech and lemmata
by MorhAdorner <
> (Burns, 2013)
;

-

th

e

corpus is

i

nstrumented by

qualitative

(

like KWIC concordances

and

lexical

pattern progression graphs

)

and quantitative

(

like

lexical

pattern frequency lists,

co-occurrence

analyses, factorial

correspondence

analyses,

contrastive word specificit

ies

)

analysis tools;

-
the URS annotation
service

allows to manually annotate word sequenc
es
according to
a
Unit-Relation-Schema model

(Heiden, 2018).

2)

a demo of

the

automatic and semi-automatic tools

of

the

TXM-based

prototype

corpus

,
in order to:

-
systematic
ally

map and index
Hobbes’s
Scriptural
references ‘in vacuo’, i.e. “out of their contexts and with no consideration of the textual bases on which rest the quotations” (Jones, 1984:
274
),
see

Figs.

1 and

2

;

-

ground

the contextual study of Hobbes’s Biblical citations

and

the

intertextual analysis

of their

sources

by means of the URS

manual annotation service

,

see

Fig.

3

.

Conclusion

B
y shedding new light on Hobbes’s knowledge, use and handling of the Scriptures over time, we will

take a fundamental step forward in accomplishing Jones’s research agenda.
However,
we
will
also
make a methodological contribution to
many historical humanities. T
he
textometric
analysis of Hobbes’s
exegetical practices

will actually allow the development of a
computational approach to
the study of Biblical reception that could be applied to many modern textual corpora.

Fig. 1

KWIC concordance of Hobbes

’s Biblical references (book-chapter-verse pattern and verse pattern) in the prototype corpus and full-text view of the highlighted concordance line in the synoptic edition of
De Cive

Fig. 2
Hierarchical index of Hobbes’s Biblical references (book-chapter-verse pattern and verse pattern) and their progression graph in the
Leviathan
sub-corpus. By clicking on the 58th occurrence of the graph, its KWIC concordance opens below it

F

i

g.

3

URS manual annotation of

the

quotation ‘

Numb

. 1.4.’

taken from

The Elements of Law

as: a reference devoid of citation (R), a simple quotation (S), and a reference to the Old Testament (OT).

The ‘context’ property allows the extraction of the title of the chapter section

analysed

:

Parallel of the Twelve Princes of Israel, and the Twelve Apostles