From the Image of Christ to the Imagining of the Sovereign: Donne, Hobbes, and the Eclipse of Participation and Transformation

This chapter explores how Thomas Hobbes evacuates from the imagination the participatory and transformative dimensions exemplified in earlier approaches to this mental activity. I take as representative of the participatory and transformative imagination the treatment of the image of Christ in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 13 (“What if this present were the world’s last night”). The poem delineates a phenomenologically and hermeneutically rich, and spiritually transformative, encounter with this image by the poem’s speaker. The image of Christ in Donne’s poem is not a mere fabrication of the fancy, but rather derives from an act of the imagination which metaphysically participates in divine reality. In contrast, Hobbesian imagination rests upon a radical materialist ontology which denies all spiritual reality and reduces existence to matter in motion. This chapter explores the implications of this reductive metaphysics for imagining the divine and for how we encounter images. As we shall see, in Hobbesian thought the political sovereign and God are both constructions and projections of the human imagination, and as constructions the sovereign and God converge—and serve their chief purpose—as the site upon which political order is founded. Further, images in Hobbes are frequently depicted as being imposed upon people, with the imagination construed as a resource to be exploited for the sake of ensuring political stability. Rather than envision imagination as a site of participation, and rather than an encounter with the image being a space of spiritual transformation, Hobbes presents the imagination as raw material to be shaped and the image as a tool to achieve this shaping. Whereas the imaginative encounter with Christ in Donne is a means of knowing the self and its spiritual condition, and of experiencing the self’s integration with the source of its being, the imagination in Hobbes is indicative of an atomized self, functioning either as producer of the artifices which ground political order or as a passive resource to be shaped by images. The chapter concludes by critically examining how the Hobbesian imagination has been valorized as the triumph of literary construction and of a purely human poesis (making) of the social and political world. It questions this valorization by considering Hobbesian poesis in light of modernity’s fetishizing of narrowly conceived forms of productivity.