This article aims to highlight the tensions linked to the Hobbesian appreciation of the first Christian communities. Several features of these communities seem to contradict the basic assumptions of Hobbes’ own theory: the absence of private property; the ability of faith in the ‘kingdom to come’ to reconcile individual’s interest and morality and thus guarantee peace independent of State; the strength with which charity and self-sacrifice assert themselves as signs of power and obtain recognition that in turn increases power; the orientation of the struggle for recognition to moral ends, and the democratic forms of self-organization conveyed by this morality. Against the image of natural man as inclined to contention, distrust and vanity, the original Christian communities are based on a form of trust which is not established by pacts, but is rather freely given through love and charity. This trust replaces pride with humility, the thirst for domination with the determination to serve, and the desire to excel with the patience of the last. The ethical choice made by its members, the education that makes it possible, and the salvific myth that supports it, give rise to a community without sovereignty —one which is founded upon a friendship conveyed by the economy of the gift and on a non-hierarchical coordination of powers—. This community is radically democratic precisely because it is based on a consensus and not upon the coercion and command that characterize democracy as a form of government. The dream of a «society [...] without common
power» is the beating heart of Hobbesian theological-political discourse: a utopia that must be affirmed in order to deconstruct the political claims of the Church of Rome reduced a «kingdom of darkness». Yet, at the same time, it must be removed so that it cannot undermine the power of the Leviathan as the only earthly God of the «children of pride».