The Author of Sin and Demoniacs

Abstract

The view that Hobbes was an English Calvinist is supported by considering his positions on two issues, the author of sin and demoniacs. Hobbes’s debate with Bishop John Bramhall is structurally similar to two other debates in seventeenth-century England between Calvinists and Arminians. Hobbes, along with William Barlee and William Twisse, claimed that God is the cause of evil but not its author. Bramhall, Thomas Pierce, and Thomas Jackson accused the Calvinists of holding that God is not only the cause but also the author of sin. On the issue of demoniacs, Hobbes follows the great biblical scholar Joseph Mede, who had support from important English Calvinists, in holding that demoniacs were madmen, and the idea that they were possessed by the devil was imported from pagan religions.