Curley, Edwin. “‘I Durst Not Write So Boldly’ or, How to Read Hobbes’s Theological-political Treatise.” Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e Politica, Pp497–593 (1992).
Excerpt:
“One of the most tantalizing anecdotes in Aubrey’s not so brief life of Hobbes concerns Hobbes’ (alleged) reaction to Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP). As recently emended, the entire passage runs as follows:
When Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus first came out [1670], Mr. Edmund Waller sent it to my lord of Devonshire and desired him to send him word what Mr. Hobbes said of it. Mr. H. told his lordship:- Ne judicate ne judicemini [“Judge not that ye be not judged”- Matthew 7:1] He told me he had outthrown him a bar’s length, for he durst not write so boldly.[1]
The natural reading of this is that Hobbes thought Spinoza had said things which he, Hobbes, would have liked to say, but did not dare say in print, for fear of persecution. Leo Strauss was fond of the passage, since it lends support to his interpretation of Hobbes as an atheist, forced by the repression of his times to conceal his atheism in a cloak of insincere professions of (relative) religious orthodoxy.[2]
[1] Brief Lives, chiefly of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 and 1696, ed. from the author’s mss. by Andrew Clark, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898, vol. I, p. 357. But Clark reads “he had cut through me a bar’s length.” After examining Aubrey’s ms., V. de S. Pinto proposed substituting “outthrowne” (in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 15 September 1950, p. 581). On Pinto’s reading, the reference is to “the old game of throwing the bar,” a trial of strength in which players contended to see which one could throw the bar the farthest.
[2] Strauss does not always claim that Hobbes was an atheist. In Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, he writes: “From an agnosticism such as that of Hobbes, it is only a step to atheism, a step which this philosopher himself however never took.” (New York: Schocken Books, 1965, p. 101, English trans. of Die Religionskritik Spinozas, Berlin 1930.) The Hobbes of Strauss’ Political Philosophy of Hobbes (U of Chicago P, 1963, but first published in 1936) is at no point a believing Christian (p. 74), though he is somewhat sympathetic to natural religion (p. 76), acknowledging at all times that we can at least have knowledge of the existence of a first cause. The Hobbes of Strauss’ Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press, 1950, pp. 198-99) evidently is an atheist, though not demonstrably so. The Hobbes of “On the Basis of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy” (first published in French in Critique, 1954; published in English in What is Political Philosophy?, NY: Free Press, 1959) is an atheist, and demonstrably so. Strauss does not discuss the passage from Aubrey in any of the above works, though he refers to it as one he likes to quote in “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy 3(1979): 111-118 (the English original of a lecture first published in Hebrew in Iyyun 5(1954):110-126).”