| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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For many, Hobbes embodied this threat, and his “ideas therefore became the target of virulent opposition from orthodox spokesmen” (14–15). Others were also attacked by the anti-atheist literature, such as “Charles Blount, John Toland, and the early Deists, or libertines like the Earl of Rochester” (232). They “had the temerity to put into print extreme versions of the naturalistic and secularist ideas about which, at an intellectual level, ‘atheist’ accusations expressed concern.” Yet it was Hobbes who “[a]mong contemporary authors, was most commonly identified as a materialist” (226). He was “a godsend to orthodox writers, because he directly expressed ideas of a kind that…otherwise remained frustratingly hard to pinpoint in published works; this explains the ferocity with which he was attacked” (238). His role as a provocateur is most dramatically seen in his clash with the Church of England, which saw him as a challenge to its moral authority. He was widely blamed “for the atheism and libertinism which were seen as dangerously prevalent among the rising generation, and orthodox theologians therefore attacked him assiduously,” (113) though it may be apparent retrospectively that “the actual connection between [libertinism] and irreligion was much weaker than contemporaries believed” (233).
Traherne’s personal animus toward Hobbes follows specifically from their different positions on the existence of a summum bonum, or a supreme good for one and all. Hobbes categorically rejects this Aristotelian/scholastic notion in Leviathan, giving his unpious conception of Felicity in the process: