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?’’
#maurodilullojefferson
