Faith of the Founders #8: Jefferson, the Trinity, Faith, and the Occult
Making Wisdom Popular
The “Faith of the Founders” blog series is a multi-part, multi-year, bite-size, fact-focused attempt to unpack the profound and ubiquitous role of faith in the American Founding. You can read all the individual articles here.
I have been a great admirer of America’s Founders for many years. I remain an admirer. But I also recognize they and the various philosophies they believed in were sometimes deeply flawed. Today’s post is about one such instance.
In a letter to his fellow revolutionary and former President, John Adams, dated August 22, 1813, Thomas Jefferson made clear that he rejected the Trinity, and the Christian concept of Faith, and thereby the very idea of revelation itself.
The historical background of Jefferson’s letter is the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, which, in laymen’s terms, defined that Jesus Christ was the Son of God from all eternity. This was done to refute a new heresy called Arianism, named after the Egyptian priest, Arius, who taught that Jesus Christ was not the Son from all eternity, but had been endowed with “divinity” at a point after his creation. In other words, he had become the Son of God. He was not the Son of God by nature. Arius’ teaching thus contradicted the Christian belief in the Trinity—that there is one God in three Persons from all eternity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
To distinguish orthodox Catholic belief in the Trinity against Arian errors, the Council of Nicaea taught that the Son (Jesus Christ) was homoousious, or the “same substance” as the Father. In other words, He was part of the Godhead from all eternity, and thus the Son of God from all eternity. He didn’t become the Son of God. He always was, is, and shall be the Son of God. In doing so, the Council rejected the Arian description of Christ as homoiousious, or of a “similar substance” as the Father. If Christ was merely of a “similar substance” as the Father, then He was not God from all eternity, and God the Father was not a Father from all eternity. The entire Christian mystery and economy of salvation is thereby destroyed.
With that background in mind, we proceed to Jefferson’s letter:
It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one: to divide mankind by a single letter into ὁμοουςιans [homoousious, or “same substance”], and ὁμοιουςιans [homoiousious, or “similar substance”]. But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies.
Jefferson failed to realize that there is all the difference in the world between “same substance” and “similar substance,” however many letters it took to distinguish them. If Christ was not God and Son from all eternity, then God was not a Father from all eternity. Arianism thus destroys the Fatherhood of God, making Christianity into a form of Islam, which from the beginning openly attacked the Christian notion of the Fatherhood of God, and the practice of referring to God as “Our Father.” Indeed, if God is not Father, then our adoption into the family of God is destroyed, for we are no longer adopted as sons and daughter in the body of God the Son by a loving Father, but may attain what Jesus attained by our own powers, rather than through the freely bestowed gift of adoption through God’s grace.
This is why Arianism was both fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, and compatible with the occult, which in the modern world has been promulgated primarily by Freemasonry. (See Pope Leo XIII’s 1884 encyclical Human Genus) Occultism in all its varieties asserts basically the same thing as Arius: divinity may be achieved; the divine principle is within each individual, waiting only to be activated by our efforts at self-improvement. Jesus is not the unique and eternal Son of God, but merely a son of God who achieved “divinity” by his own efforts. In this sense, Jesus is merely an example for us. If Jesus is God from all eternity, then we human beings may only share in His sonship through the divine gift of grace. If Jesus Christ is like God, then we human beings can achieve a state of divinity like he did on our own, exactly as various occult groups have claimed for millennia (a topic I will be writing about more in the future).
One premise inculcates dependence on God befitting a creature. The other inculcates independence of God befitting the pride of Lucifer. Indeed, one cannot help but hear the echoes of the serpent in the Garden: “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…” [Gen. 3:5]
That is why the one letter matters so much, Mr. Jefferson—because being God, and being like God are two entirely different things. For a man who was so passionate about words, Jefferson often hypocritically denied their importance when it came to the Catholic Church.
As was common for enlightenment “philosophers” like Jefferson, he also projected back onto the history of the Catholic Church his own prejudices with regard to motives. For example, he claimed that by making such crucial distinctions, the Council of Nicaea engaged in “the craft” by which priests gained “power” and “profit.” This would have struck many of the bishops who were at Nicaea and defended its decrees as absurd, given that many of them were persecuted, sometimes killed, by the Arians. Some were even targeted by Roman Emperors.
Perhaps the most famous example is St. Athanasius. While not a bishop at the time, he attended the Council as a deacon, and when he became Bishop of Alexandria, he unwaveringly defended it against the Arians. He showed that belief in the Trinity was of apostolic origin—indeed, the word had been used long before the Council of Nicaea—and Christians had always believed that Jesus was the Son of God from all eternity. He also showed how undermining this belief destroyed the entire Christian idea of grace, salvation, and eternal life. In return for his labors, he was exiled from his own church at least five times, and many of his flock were killed, tortured, or otherwise persecuted. In a letter to all the bishops of the Catholic Church, St. Athanasius wrote that the persecution was the worst in the entire history of the Church:
Our sufferings have been dreadful beyond endurance, and it is impossible to describe them in suitable terms…I was anxious myself to write you a brief account thereof, that you may know for certain, that such things have never before been committed against the Church, from the day that our Savior when He was taken up, gave command to His disciples, saying, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” [Matt. 28:19]
So much for “the power and the profit of priests” Jefferson spoke about. But doubting Thomas went even further:
We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.
It’s no surprise that Jefferson, a non-Catholic, would reject the idea of an authoritative priesthood. But he also rejected the Christian idea of Faith, which is a gift by which God reveals a part of His inner life to His creation, a revelation we either accept or reject. By its nature, Faith is higher than reason—for it must be revealed by God’s own initiative; and also compatible with it—for God, as Creator, is the origin of the reason and order we observe in the universe.
Jefferson, on the other hand, believed the human mind could only believe propositions it had arrived at by its own powers (i.e. reason alone). This necessarily means that, while Jefferson in many places affirms his belief in a creator God, and one who even occasionally intervenes in human affairs, this God is either uninterested in revealing anything of Himself to man that man could not discover by his own reason, or he is incapable of doing so.
In other words, Jefferson’s notion of reason necessarily means one of two things, possibly both:
(1) Man’s mind is powerful enough to completely understand God; and/or
(2) God has not, or cannot reveal something about His nature to man which exceeds man’s reason.
The first notion makes God unnecessary and irrelevant. The second notion, ironically, is itself a proposition that cannot be known by the very reason Jefferson asserts as the sole criteria of belief—namely that God has not, or cannot reveal something. If He has not revealed something, how does Jefferson know that? Such a revelation would necessarily exceed reason, but Jefferson has denied this possibility. If He cannot reveal something, then this “God” is either unnecessary and/or irrelevant to humanity. The second notion collapses into the first. In this sense, Jefferson’s views were in full accord with Masonic beliefs, which Pope Leo XIII described as “naturalism” in his encyclical on Freemasonry, Humanum Genus:
Now, the fundamental doctrine of the naturalists, which they sufficiently make known by their very name, is that human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide. Laying this down, they care little for duties to God, or pervert them by erroneous and vague opinions. For they deny that anything has been taught by God; they allow no dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by the human intelligence, nor any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of his authority. And since it is the special and exclusive duty of the Catholic Church fully to set forth in words truths divinely received, to teach, besides other divine helps to salvation, the authority of its office, and to defend the same with perfect purity, it is against the Church that the rage and attack of the enemies are principally directed.
This is, indeed, a description of Mr. Jefferson’s views—whether he belonged to any Freemasonic or otherwise occult society or not.
It’s no wonder that Jefferson’s “theology,” while paying lip service to God, took him and many of his generation further and further away from Christian truth throughout their lives, and led to apostasy in many formerly Christian nations. God and man, for all practical purposes, have become equals in Jefferson’s system—just as they had in Arius’. Jefferson never claims this, but it is an unavoidable consequence of his premises. Hence his belief that all individuals must “moralize for ourselves,” and “follow the oracle of our conscience.” The idea that anyone could be bound by something he had not concluded through his own reason was anathema to Jefferson. We again hear the echoes of the serpent, that upon becoming “like God,” we shall “[know] good and evil.” [Gen. 3:5]
How this is compatible with any coherent notion of society is perhaps the question at the heart of the current debate over liberalism.
In holding such beliefs, Jefferson shows he was simply following the path that necessarily succeeded the protestant notion of private judgment. His statements—confident, caustic, and demagogic—were simultaneously full of errors, hidden premises, and undeveloped conclusions. In this regard, he fits St. Paul’s description of those who claimed to be wise becoming fools. [Rom. 1:22]
But while claiming to advance the cause of truth, Mr. Jefferson was simply following a path that necessarily and logically flowed from innovations instantiated in western civilization by protestantism in the 16th century. As Pope Leo XIII observed in his encyclical Immortale Dei (November 1, 1885), “that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society.”
What began as interpreting Scripture on one’s own necessarily led to interpreting morality on one’s own. Jefferson asserted the right to do both. Both are predicated on a view of the human person as autonomous and naked before God. As such, they are profoundly contrary to any notion of either supernatural or even natural society, since even on the natural level, man is a political and communal creature—a reality confirmed by both reason and revelation (see Aristotle’s Politics, and Gen. 2:18).
What first undermined the Church and the supernatural order of grace eventually undermined the State and the natural order of reason. Looking at our society today, it is difficult to deny this progression.
For all his virtues, we can partially thank Mr. Jefferson for that.