Note: This is a reconstruction of the post mentioned in this week’s Flotsam: the one eaten by WordPress. Turns out I exaggerated a bit and the opening few paragraphs at least survived, though everything after the ‘Council of Nicea’ bit – that is, basically all of my own thoughts – is a reconstruction, and I seem to recall the original being a good deal meatier and more expansive. Such is life.

Last night I followed a citation trail to one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters to John Adams (by the way, anyone interested in that period: this site is a must-have. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it), one of the very unfortunate ones where Jefferson gets onto the subject of Christianity.

(I do love his opening greeting, though:

“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 à quand”! would make me immortal.”)

During the course of the letter he makes a lot of odd statements, including 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,” apparently unaware that Catholic dogma holds the opposite (and honestly it’s a surprise to me that this should be claimed by any Christian sect). Or his ascribing to St. Thomas the idea that the world is co-eternal with God, when even the passage he quotes only presents it as a possibility, and St. Thomas explicitly rejects that idea as contrary to Scripture; his point being only that there was nothing apart from revelation to show that it was not so (ST. I.Q46.A1 and A2: Jefferson seems to be quoting a paraphrased version of one of St. Thomas’s replies to an objection). He also classifies the Virgin Birth with “Minerva springing from the head of Jupiter” and hopes both will be done away with by “the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States” to restore “the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Now, no one necessarily asks that the philosophe from Virginia should know his theology, but one example of this really stood out to me. That he attacks the notion of the Trinity by ascribing it to “a mistranslation of the word λογος.” by “modern Christians to build up a second person of their tritheism”.

Which raises the question of just how recent does he think Trinitarianism is? Or at least it would if we didn’t know from his other letters (and from a fairly safe inference) that he knows about St. Athanasius and the Council of Nicea, so the ‘modern Christians’ line makes no sense.

(I also note his great confidence that he and his fellows will receive the welcome “Well done, good and faithful servants,” without a suggestion that this may be dependent on God’s mercy, but that’s a topic for another time).

And this is what I find so interesting: Thomas Jefferson is self-evidently (see what I did there?) a brilliant man. His letters are sprinkled with untranslated quotations of Latin, Greek, French, and other languages, he is a masterful stylist, and he has a strong command of ideas.

At the same time, he apparently bases his conclusion on the idea that no one at the Council of Nicea knew Greek like he does.

That is, we have an erudite, scholarly conclusion grounded in undeniable learning and all resting on a vision of history that any reasonably-adept school-boy should realize to be nonsense.

Now, I’m not trying to go after Jefferson in particular here; this is the kind of mistake that a lot of people, and especially very intelligent and very educated people make, and it’s one reason I’m increasingly of the opinion that intelligence has very little correlation with being correct. Oh, intelligence and learning can drive your on to great, uncharted realms of ideas, but it can also create enough mental momentum to barrel completely off the tracks and go crashing through the realms of nonsense, hurried on by its own power like the train in Unstoppable.

This is one reason why dogma is so important to reasoning; it provides a kind of curb-rail to prevent the mind from escaping the bonds of reality. At the very least it forces the mind to pause and check one’s assumptions (at which point it might recall something like, “Oh, wait; for my reading to be true, I’d have to somehow account for the whole history of the Greek churches…”). This is also why great philosophers, like Aristotle, take common usage as an important factor in discerning the truth. Again, it’s to prevent the mind from becoming too complacently free in its reasoning.

This is the foundation of Intellectual Humility. Now, this virtue is often framed as “being willing to admit you may be wrong,” but that’s not quite it. A better description would be “being willing to admit that your own powers of reasoning are not the standard for belief.” It is not so much “I believe in the Trinity, though of course I may be wrong,” as it is, “I don’t understand the Trinity, but I still believe in it because I know my powers of reasoning are limited and I trust those who tell me it is so.”

Dogma and Intellectual Humility, of course, go hand in hand; the willingness to accept that, if your reasoning seems to contradict revealed truth, then either you are misunderstanding the dogma or your reasoning is off. And since there are few things that an intelligent man values so much as his power of reasoning to conclusion and the joy of feeling himself to be right, it is a great virtue to be able to take that beautiful chain of logic, say “Who am I to question my God?” and lay it aside.