Mr. Jefferson's Own Words
CALVIN AND COSMOLOGY
To John Adams
Monticello, April 11, 1823
1823041
DEAR SIR, -- The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may
continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of `mon
Dieu! jusque � quand'! would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin in addressing his
god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was
Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5.
points is not the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent
governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to
believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.
Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general
dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a
god. Now one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians: the other five sixths
then, who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian revelation, are without a knolege of
the existence of a god! This gives compleatly a gain de cause to the disciples of Ocellus,
Timaeus, Spinosa, Diderot and D'Holbach. The argument which they rest on as triumphant and
unanswerable is that, in every hypothesis of Cosmogony you must admit an eternal
pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never
to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then that
it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is
now going on, and may for ever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and
witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of
the world, a being whom we see not, and know not, of whose form substance and mode or
place of existence, or of action no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to
delineate or comprehend. On the contrary I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when
we take a view of the Universe, in it's parts general or particular, it is impossible for
the human mind not to percieve and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and
indefinite power in every atom of it's composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies,
so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the
structure of our earth itself, with it's distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere,
animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms
of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their
generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there
is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all
things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in
their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident
proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it's course
and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in
their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under
other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring
power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be
reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and
powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro' all time, they
have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an
eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.
Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of the few in the
other hypothesis. Some early Christians indeed have believed in the coeternal
pre-existance of both the Creator and the world, without changing their relation of cause
and effect. That this was the opinion of St. Thomas, we are informed by Cardinal Toleto,
in these words `Deus ab aeterno fuit jam omnipotens, sicut cum produxit mundum. Ab aeterno
potuit producere mundum. -- Si sol ab aeterno esset, lumen ab aeterno esset; et si pes,
similiter vestigium. At lumen et vestigium effectus sunt efficientis solis et pedis;
potuit ergo cum caus� aeterna effectus coaeterna esse. Cujus sententiae est S. Thomas
Theologorum primus' Cardinal Toleta.
Of the nature of this being we know nothing. Jesus tells us that `God
is a spirit.' 4. John 24. but without defining what a spirit is {pneyma o Theos}. Down to
the 3d. century we know that it was still deemed material; but of a lighter subtler matter
than our gross bodies. So says Origen. `Deus igitur, cui anima similis est, juxta
Originem, reapte corporalis est; sed graviorum tantum ratione corporum incorporeus.' These
are the words of Huet in his commentary on Origen. Origen himself says `appelatio
{asomaton} apud nostros scriptores est inusitata et incognita.' So also Tertullian `quis
autem negabit Deum esse corpus, etsi deus spiritus? Spiritus etiam corporis sui generis,
in su� effigie.' Tertullian. These two fathers were of the 3d. century. Calvin's character of this supreme being seems chiefly copied from
that of the Jews. But the reformation of these blasphemous attributes, and
substitution of those more worthy, pure and sublime, seems to have been the chief object
of Jesus in his discources to the Jews: and his doctrine of the Cosmogony of the world is
very clearly laid down in the 3 first verses of the 1st. chapter of John, in these words,
`{en arche en o logos, kai o logos en pros ton Theon kai Theos en o logos. `otos en en
arche pros ton Theon. Panta de ayto egeneto, kai choris ayto egeneto ode en, o gegonen}.
Which truly translated means `in the beginning God existed, and reason (or mind) was with
God, and that mind was God. This was in the beginning with God. All things were created by
it, and without it was made not one thing which was made'. Yet this text, so plainly
declaring the doctrine of Jesus that the world was created by the supreme, intelligent
being, has been perverted by modern Christians to build up a second person of their
tritheism by a mistranslation of the word {logos}. One of it's legitimate meanings indeed
is `a word.' But, in that sense, it makes an unmeaning jargon: while the other meaning
`reason', equally legitimate, explains rationally the eternal preexistence of God, and his
creation of the world. Knowing how incomprehensible it was that `a word,' the mere action
or articulation of the voice and organs of speech could create a world, they undertake to
make of this articulation a second preexisting being, and ascribe to him, and not to God,
the creation of the universe. The Atheist here plumes himself on the uselessness of such a
God, and the simpler hypothesis of a self-existent universe.
The truth is that the greatest enemies to
the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have
perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and
without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when
the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a
virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of
Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United
States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive
and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.
So much for your quotation of Calvin's `mon dieu! jusqu'a quand' in
which, when addressed to the God of Jesus, and our God, I join you cordially, and await
his time and will with more readiness than reluctance. May we meet there again, in
Congress, with our antient Colleagues, and recieve with them the seal of approbation `Well
done, good and faithful servants.'
