THERE'S A NAME FOR CHRISTIAN DEISTS...CHRISTIANS:

The infamous philosophe: On Roger Pearson's "Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom." (Mark Molesky, December 2005, The New Criterion)

Pearson’s overview and analysis of Voltaire’s complicated relationship with Catholicism is particularly revealing. For more than sixty years, the infamous philosophe preached religious toleration in a society where Protestant worship could send a man or woman to prison for life; his highly publicized defense of French Huguenots brought his name back into prominence years after his plays ceased to attract large audiences. Yet the Jesuit-educated Voltaire never went so far as to renounce his faith. He remained friends with numerous clerics from the highest levels of the Church hierarchy throughout his life (he kept a Jesuit around as a chess partner). And although he constantly threatened the limits of doctrinal acceptability, he took care never to cross the line that led to excommunication. True, he would cheekily refuse communion in his final days: “Monsieur l’abbé, I would remind you that I am constantly spitting blood. We really must avoid getting the Almighty’s blood mixed up with mine.” But he also saw fit to prepare a written statement in which he expressed a desire “to die in the holy Catholic religion into which I was born, hoping that God in His divine mercy will deign to forgive me all my errors; and that if I have offended the Church I beg forgiveness of God and of it.”

In the end, Voltaire succeeded in finagling a Christian burial. When he died in Paris on May 30, 1778, all of France wondered openly how the Church would handle the death of one of its most implacable foes. With a matter as delicate and controversial as the funeral of a national icon (or heretic?), Parisian church officials chose a course of action not uncommon for people in their situation; they punted. After allowing for a secret autopsy (his brain and heart were removed), they re-clothed Voltaire’s corpse, propped it up in a carriage, and sent it on its way out of the city as if he were still alive. Fortunately for Voltaire, his nephew, the Abbé Mignot, was in possession of a pile of papers testifying to his uncle’s fitness for Catholic internment. And so, when the playwright had reached a point of decomposition beyond which his retinue could endure, Mignot quickly located a church, shoved the testimonials in the face of the local cleric, and thus sent his uncle into the beyond with the proper seal of approval. The grandees of the church were furious—and that, one assumes, is how François-Marie would have wanted it.

But was Voltaire’s interest in remaining Catholic just a matter of social propriety or some kind of cynical acceptance of Pascal’s wager? According to Pearson, the prince of reason not only believed in God but at least on one occasion displayed a depth of religious feeling bordering on—dare one say—the Romantic. In early 1776, Voltaire awoke at three in the morning to view the sunrise from the top of a nearby mountain peak. As the first tendrils of light broke across the horizon, he dropped to the ground prostrate before the heavens. “I believe, I believe in you,” he chanted. “Almighty God, I believe!”

Voltaire had no patience for atheism. The myriad wonders of the universe proved His existence, and the laws of Nature, as outlined by Newton, were testament to His divine plan. He would have been as horrified by Europe’s loss of faith over the last two centuries as he would Robespierre’s overblown and pretentious Cult of the Supreme Being.

As the tide of Reason recedes it's left a lot of detritus high and dry in its wake. None imparts a worse stench than the Christophobic notion that the Founders were Deists and the Republic a function of the Enlightenment. So, it's especially amusing that the Deist icon wasn't even one.

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The Deist Minimum (Avery Cardinal Dulles, January 2005, First Things)

In his public pronouncements as a statesman and legislator, Jefferson expressed what he considered to belong to the common and public core of religion. He kept his more personal opinions to himself, refraining from putting them in any writing that might find its way into print, but he occasionally penned confidential memoranda for himself and a few friends.

Jefferson’s public religion appears in the Declaration of Independence, which refers to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” to “inalienable” rights conferred upon all human beings by their Creator, and to “the protection of divine Providence.” In his first inaugural address, in 1801, Jefferson spoke of how the American people were “enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence.” In his second inaugural, four years later, he emphasized the nation’s need for the favor and enlightenment of Providence and asked his hearers to unite with him in supplication to “that Being in whose hands we are.”

One of Jefferson’s firmest principles, as we know, was that of religious freedom. In 1777, as a legislator, he composed what later became the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which embodies his personal conviction that the government should exercise no coercion in religious matters. In his famous letter of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association he referred to the “wall of separation between Church and State”—a term that had previously been used by the Baptist Roger Williams. But as we have seen, he did not hesitate to bring religion into his public pronouncements. As President he frequently attended religious services in Congress. While opposing a federal religious establishment, “he personally encouraged and symbolically supported religion by attending public church services in the Capitol,” as Daniel Driesbach has written.

Like his contemporaries Franklin, Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison, Jefferson was convinced that the republic could not stand without a high level of public morality, and that moral behavior could not survive in the absence of divine authority as its sanction. Obedience to the teachings of Jesus and reflection on the purity of Jesus’ life could enable people to overcome their selfishness and parochialism.

Jefferson’s friend Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) maintained that the authentic teachings of Jesus were vastly superior to those of Socrates or any other pagan but that they had been overlaid by a thick cover of legend and mythology, which must be stripped away for the truth to shine forth in its pristine brilliance. Priestley’s work made a deep impression on Jefferson and enabled him to regard himself as a Christian. Following in Priestley’s footsteps, Jefferson undertook to retrieve the true teachings of Jesus, especially in matters of morals. To this end he made two compilations of texts concerning Jesus from the New Testament. The first, entitled The Philosophy of Jesus, was completed in 1804 but has been lost. The second, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus, is usually known as the Jefferson Bible. It was composed in his later years and published only after his death. Omitting all references to the miraculous and the supernatural, Jefferson selected what he took to be authentic sayings of Jesus as a moral teacher. The precepts of the Nazarene, he asserted, were “the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man.” The religion of Jesus, he believed, was so simple that it could be understood by a child, but the writers of the New Testament, especially Paul, overlaid it with mythology derived from Platonist sources. The sage of Monticello forthrightly dismissed dogmas such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, which he found unintelligible.

Jefferson’s religion, however, was not purely philosophical. For a living religion, he knew, scope must be given to the inclinations of the heart. He was enraptured by the beauty of the Psalms, which in his opinion surpassed all the hymnists of every language and of every time, including the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter so much admired by his friend John Adams. When he attended church services as an old man, the sounds of familiar hymns would bring tears to his eyes.

In his plan of studies for the University of Virginia Jefferson wanted natural religion to be taught to the exclusion of all doctrine attributed to revelation. But he knew that religion could not be purely academic and therefore recognized the importance of worship in the churches. He took pride in the fact that students at his university had opportunities to worship in Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist services in the sanctuary at Charlottesville. Interdenominational competition, he believed, was the best protection against fanaticism. In matters of religion the aphorism “united we stand, divided we fall” had to be reversed. Divided we stand, he said, but united we fall.

In summary, then, Jefferson was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death, but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher. He was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God.

Jefferson’s religion is fairly typical of the American form of deism in his day. [...]

We can discern several reasons why deism, which once looked so promising, proved unable to sustain itself. Deism drew its vitality from the oppressive policies of the religious establishments against which it was reacting. In the minds of the Enlightenment thinkers, confessional religion, unless checked by law or by free competition, led inevitably to tyranny and persecution. But this assumption was based on a time-conditioned union or alliance between throne and altar, not on the gospel of Christ, which gave Caesar no authority over the things of God.

Jefferson himself came gradually to this realization. As a young adult he seems to have held that Christian faith was favorable to despotism and hostile to free society. But his friend Benjamin Rush convinced him that Christianity and republicanism were, so to speak, made for each other. As Eugene Sheridan has written, Rush regarded Christianity as “part of a divine plan to bring about the kingdom of God on earth by freeing mankind from the burden of royal and ecclesiastical oppression through the spread of the principles of human equality and Christian charity.” With Rush’s help Jefferson found a way of accepting Christianity without diminishing his commitment to the freedom of conscience. Deism, therefore, was not necessary to offset religious oppression. [...]

Although deism portrayed itself as a pure product of unaided reason, it was not what it claimed to be. Its basic tenets concerning God, the virtuous life, and rewards beyond the grave were in fact derived from Christianity, the faith in which the deists themselves had been reared. It is doubtful whether anyone who had not been brought up in a biblical religion could embrace the tenets of deism. The children of deists rarely persevered in the faith of their parents.

Deism also suffered from grave philosophical weaknesses. Its leading proponents were pamphleteers such as Toland and Tindal in England and Encyclopedists such as Diderot in France. They lacked the metaphysical principles needed to build a viable natural theology. Empiricists like Locke and rationalists like Newton lacked the rich ontology of Thomas Aquinas and the medieval schoolmen. Their epistemology was a shallow empiricism and their cosmology a universalized physics, both of which crumbled when faced with the penetrating critiques of David Hume and Immanuel Kant.

Additionally, the deist system suffered from some internal tensions. If there is an omnipotent God, capable of designing the entire universe and launching it into existence, it seems strange to hold that this God cannot intervene in the world He had made or derogate from the laws He had established. He might have good reasons for bestowing some added benefits not contained in the work of creation. American deists such as Jefferson and Franklin did not rule out all divine intervention. They were convinced that God punished evil and rewarded virtue both in this life and in the next. They also encouraged prayer in ways that seemed inconsistent with deism in its pure form.

If God was infinite in being, moreover, it was unreasonable to reject the notion of mystery. It would seem quite natural to suppose that there are depths of the divine being surpassing all that could be inferred from the created world. We cannot know what is going on in the minds of our fellow human beings unless they manifest it by word or deed. How much less, then, could we grasp the thoughts of God unless He were to disclose them to us by revelation? Since God knows far more about Himself and His plans than His creatures do, it is difficult to see why He could not reveal truths hidden from reason that would be important for persons such as ourselves. Throughout the centuries Christianity has held that central articles of faith, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the atoning death of Christ, are revealed truths. We can understand them to some extent even if we cannot penetrate the full richness of their meaning.

Yet more, the deist God, who ceased to be active after launching the world into existence, seemed to be a useless vestige of the God of biblical religion. If God never intervened in the world, His existence could only be, from a human perspective, superfluous. It would be pointless to pray to Him or expect any blessings from Him. The pupils of the deists, carrying the critique of religion one stage further, questioned the existence of this idle Supreme Being. Thus deism came to be a halfway house on the road to atheism. Toland drifted gradually from deism into pantheism. Voltaire was unable to dissuade his erstwhile allies Diderot and d’Holbach from abandoning the deist camp and embracing atheism. In the United States atheism surfaced more slowly but was defended in the nineteenth century by Robert Ingersoll among others.

Yet another weakness in the deist system was the time-conditioned nature of its cosmological underpinnings. The system presupposed the static unalterable order of nature that appealed to mathematicians like Isaac Newton. But as the positive sciences matured, the universe appeared to be far less orderly than the deists had assumed. Eventually the Newtonian system would be superseded by the theories of Darwin and Huxley, Einstein and Heisenberg. William Paley’s depiction of God as the cosmic watchmaker lost its plausibility.

Deism also failed as a religion. Its static deity was a pallid reflection of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus Christ. The religion of the New Testament and of orthodox Christianity offered hope and consolation that lay far beyond the powers of deism. The gospel assures us that God never ceases to be active in the world: He freely calls us to Himself, hears our prayers, and enriches our lives with His grace. The doctrine that God became man in order to raise us to a share in His own divine life satisfied a deep desire of the human heart to which deism could not respond. It was impossible to enter into communion of life and love with the cold and distant God of deism.

Finally, the deist reconstruction of the historical Jesus lacked any serious foundation in biblical research. Jefferson claimed that it was “obvious and easy” to distinguish the authentic words of Jesus from those attributed to him by later Christians. In his view they were “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” But even the most confident members of the Jesus Seminar today would make no such claim. Jefferson fell into the common error of simply projecting onto Jesus the moral ideals of his age. [...]

Today, therefore, we are faced with new questions. Can the biblical religions maintain themselves and win new adherents or must they resign themselves to becoming a minority? Should the American consensus be modified to make room for a broader pluralism? Can Islam, the Eastern religions, New Age religion, and even agnosticism and atheism, find equal acceptance in American society?

Jefferson would probably have insisted on the positive articles of deism as a required minimum. For him and the other Founding Fathers, the good of society requires a people who believe in one almighty God, in providence, in a divinely given moral code, in a future life, and in divinely administered rewards and punishments. He and they expected that the example and teachings of Jesus, as known from the Gospels, would be accepted in principle by the great majority of citizens.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 7, 2005 10:38 AM