Thursday 13 June 2013


          Thomas Jefferson and Benedictus Spinoza: atheists or ‘’God intoxicated men’’?

 

The whole history of these books (the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine...

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

This Blog will address Thomas Jefferson and Benedictus Spinoza rationalist religiosity. Despite any attempts to rewrite history to make Jefferson into a Christian, little about his rationalist religiosity resembles that of Christianity. Although Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence wrote of the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God (a term used from Spinoza), nothing is said in the document about Christianity.

Even if Jefferson believed in a Creator, he rejected the superstitions and mysticism of Christianity (as Spinoza) and went so far as to edit the gospels; removing the miracles and mysticism of Jesus (the Jefferson Bible) having only what he claimed was the moral philosophy of Jesus.

The Declaration of Independence echoes Spinoza and partially Locke, but no references to Christianity are made there.

Locke was influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent five seminal years in Amsterdam, in exile because of the political troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury.

 However, Locke's claims on religious freedom did not go as far as Spinoza's. He remained firm in defending Christianity as the one true religion against Spinoza's pantheism. In some of the essential ways in which Spinoza and Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza's collected works were in Jefferson's library, so Spinoza's influence may not just have been by way of Locke.)

We can hear the sound of Spinoza addressing us in Jefferson's appeal to the “laws of nature and of nature's God.” This is the language of Spinoza's pantheistic religion, which makes no reference to revelation or mysticism, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered exclusively through human reason.

Jefferson and Spinoza: atheists or a “God intoxicated men?”

It was in his Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza published it anonymously in 1670 for fear of persecution in response to the critique of biblical faith that it put forward) where he argued that government protection of religious freedom was an imperative of a religion rightly understood (a new form of materialist spirituality).

The Theological-Political Treatise will be as disturbing to most religious groups today as it was to most seventeenth-century Europeans. Indeed, the suggestion that liberty of thought and discussion is good and necessary because it protects faith from the arrogance of Power, is nearly the opposite of what our common idea of Religion believes and what seventeenth-century Europeans thought.

So what to make of Spinoza’s claim that religion and liberty can exist together? Can a materialist spirituality finally triumph in this political and ethical framework? And what could have encouraged the young German romantic Novalis, at the end of the eighteenth century, to call Spinoza, who had been depicted for more than a hundred years by the established political and religious authorities as godless, “the absolutely God-intoxicated man” — a sentiment fully shared in the middle of the nineteenth century by Nietzsche? In short, understanding the sense in which Spinoza reconciled religion and individual absolute freedom of thought is no small undertaking; it represents a fundamental achievement to reach if we want to create new ideas of political and religious experience.

 In Spinoza’s philosophy, God/nature is represented by philosophy and science, not religious obedience and submission.

Only the former leads to true blessedness (i.e. peace of mind).

There is no place in Spinoza’s system for a sense of religious mystery in the face of nature. Such an attitude is to be removed by the intelligibility and innermost simplicity of things. Religious wonder is exclusively fed by ignorance, he claims. For Spinoza, anyone who would approach nature/God with the kind of worshipful attitude usually demanded by the religious obedience to the very idea of Power and superstition, represents the latter.

Jefferson was raised as an Anglican and always maintained some affiliation with the Anglican Church. While a student at William and Mary College, he began to read the Scottish moral philosophers and other authors who became themselves students of church history. These scholars opened the door for Jefferson's rationalist criticism of prevailing religious institutions and beliefs.  However, it was the English Unitarian minister and scientist, Joseph Priestley, who had the most profound impact on his thought. According to Priestley's Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1782, the teachings of Jesus and his exclusively human character were obscured in the early Christian centuries.  It is probably relevant to say that Jefferson first acquired from Joseph Priestley features of his world view and faith which he found confirmed to his satisfaction by further thought and study for the rest of his life. These included a strong critique of all forms of Platonic or Christian metaphysics; a firm conviction that Jesus' moral teaching was compatible with natural law as it may be inferred from the sciences; and an authentic Unitarian view of Jesus (rejecting any dogma on the Trinity). Jefferson's earliest writings on religion exhibit a heavy reliance on reason, and the belief that morality comes not from special revelation but from careful attention to our innermost moral sense(as Spinoza affirmed in the seventeenth century). He considered Jesus as a teacher of inspiring morality and ethics. Jefferson found the Unitarian understanding of Jesus compatible with his own. In 1822 he predicted that "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die as a Unitarian...." Jefferson requested that a Unitarian minister be sent to his area of Virginia. "....Missionaries from Cambridge (Harvard Divinity School) would soon be greeted with more welcome, than from the tritheistical school of Andover."

However, as a ‘’God intoxicated man’’, Jefferson also studied Paine's the Age of Reason and agreed with Paine's convictions that it was a grave injustice to lock God into a sacred text. Jefferson absorbed Paine’s naturalism and sought to comprehend God in the laws of the universe, not in doctrinal truths locked in scripture (as Spinoza said in the seventeenth-century).

For both Paine and Jefferson, the God in the Bible did not appeal to reason. That God required complex doctrines and priestly authority to guide in His discovery, excluding many from relating to God on a private and personal basis. God was not only reachable but also understandable by reason. Based largely on Paine's influence, Jefferson focused his critique upon such exclusiveness, seeking to free the concept of Religion from darkness and superstition.

Another major influence upon Jefferson’s rationalist religiosity was Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Jefferson recorded sixty pages in his "Literary Bible" quoting and paraphrasing Bolingbroke, the only section specifically about Christianity, arguing against inspiration of the Bible because it was full of "gross defects and palpable falsehoods... "

For both Bolingbroke and Jefferson, those (referring to religious ministers specifically) relying on doctrines based on revelation and metaphysics had created an imperfect and flawed image of God. Adapting the religious ideas of Bolingbroke along with Spinoza, Paine, and Priestley, Jefferson forged a rationalist form of religiosity and elevated God to the stature of Rational Creator; Nature’s God. This is the language of Spinoza's pantheistic religion, which makes no reference to any revelation or mysticism, but rather to moral and ethical truths that must be discovered through human reason.

Jefferson and Spinoza: atheists or ’’God intoxicated men?’’

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