The ‘Mortall God’ Vindicated

Abstract This brief concluding chapter traces the argumentative structure Hobbes erected to vindicate the sovereign from all taints of injustice. The conceptual building blocks of Hobbes’s civil theodicy, the chapter point outs, are all relational notions. For Hobbes, the same action can be just towards some persons and unjust towards others; obligations can be owed to you but not to me; and (paradoxically) people may have the right vis-à-vis others to do what divine law forbids them to. The relational character of law, justice, right, and obligation allows Hobbes to hold that sovereigns governing in ways contrary to natural law wrong God—but not their subjects. Hobbes’s civil theodicy is argumentatively overdetermined: supported by multiple, sometimes mutually incompatible lines of argument. Hobbes’s reasons for pursuing argumentative overdetermination, the chapter suggests, were partly rhetorical, partly required by systematic considerations. The chapter closes by reassessing Hobbes’s relation to political realism and to realism about war.