Castigations of Mr Hobbes

Bramhall's 1658 follow-up reply to Hobbes — including 'The Catching of Leviathan'

Tradition: High-Church Anglicanism / anti-Hobbist controversy / political-theological polemic

Bramhall's 1658 final salvo against Hobbes — including 'The Catching of Leviathan'

Published in 1658 as Bramhall's last major work (he would return briefly to Ireland after the 1660 Restoration to become Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, but would die in 1663 with no further major publications), 'Castigations of Mr Hobbes His Last Animadversions in the Case Concerning Liberty and Universal Necessity' replies to Hobbes's 'The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance' (1656). The Bramhall-Hobbes exchange had now been continuing for thirteen years: the original 1645 Paris discussion (when both were in exile); Hobbes's 1654 unauthorised publication of his side (under the title 'Of Libertie and Necessitie'); Bramhall's 1655 reply ('A Defence of True Liberty'); Hobbes's 1656 response (which Hobbes had wanted to title 'Of Liberty and Necessity, the Second Part' but published as 'The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance'); and now Bramhall's 1658 reply, his final entry in the exchange. The book's form is characteristic of seventeenth-century printed controversy: Bramhall reprints Hobbes's text in full, then inserts paragraph-length critical responses. The substantive philosophical issues are the same as in 1655: libertarian free will versus deterministic-mechanistic necessitarianism; the relations between will and intellect; the nature of moral responsibility under causal determinism; the metaphysical status of contingency. But the 1658 entry adds a substantial appendix: 'The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale' — Bramhall's most extensive engagement with Hobbes's broader political-theological position in 'Leviathan' (1651), arguing that Hobbes's materialism is implicitly atheist, his ecclesiology Erastian-tyrannical, his contractarian sovereignty incompatible with natural law and Christian conscience, and his overall system corrosive of every existing civil and ecclesial order. The 'Catching of Leviathan' appendix became the principal high-Church Anglican anti-Hobbist treatise; Bramhall's framework shaped subsequent Anglican-political philosophy for two generations.