Nature and the God of the Declaration of Independence | The American Spectator

Until the founding of the United States of America, the nations of the West did not have to set forth the reasons for their existence and the basis of their authority. Land and blood established the cohesive commonality. Monarchs and aristocracies ruled by the power they had in their hands and justified it, at their own discretion, by claiming a divine right to rule, which the unified religious authority of the Christian West usually backed up.

The war of ideas that was the Reformation spilled over into a war of kingdoms as well. To reestablish peace, new concepts of justification of the political order had to be found. Chief among the thinkers responsible for the new order was Hugo Grotius, who relied on the idea of the small set of universal laws that governed all humanity that he found in rabbinic literature as grounding precedent for a new system of international order.

Grotius’ younger contemporary, John Selden of England, followed Grotius into a consideration of the Seven Laws as the basis for the unwritten English Constitution that he championed with elegant argument and wily parliamentary strategy.

But the unwritten English Constitution did not establish the nation of England, or Britain.

It had to wait until 249 years ago for a nation to be established by a statement of principles and an argument for the legitimacy of its existence.

It begins by acknowledging that taking on the power of independent nationhood alone is not sufficient. Rather, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

What this implies is that respect for the opinions of mankind is proper and necessary in political change, as otherwise the change could only increase human harmony accidentally. Even when one is dissolving the bonds that have connected them formerly, and as a result, will likely encounter violent and deadly opposition, the obligation to respect the opinions of humankind requires this giving account.

Why would that not be an exercise in futility? Why not just be done with it? Certainly, many revolutions just happen, and if explanations are given to others, that would only be post hoc if at all.

The reason is that the Declaration is premised on the idea of their being a higher order than any constituted human authority. It is only in accord with that higher order that our lower order its legitimacy. And so the argument proceeds to state how the British lost their right to rule by violating that higher order, enumerating many specific instances of violations.

All the violations are failures to protect the higher-order rights that are the birth right of every human being. Those rights in their most elemental and universal form are set out at the beginning of the Declaration: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The legitimate role of government, it declares, is to “secure these rights.” Failure to do so, by consequence, delegitimizes a government, for its power set against the higher power. The British government, having failed to secure these rights for the Americans, lost its legitimacy, and therefore the Americans will independently proceed to found a government to do that job properly.

In its first two paragraphs, the Declaration names this higher order on which all legitimacy is based with three names — Nature, Nature’s God, and the Creator. All three are used to indicate the same thing even though they are clearly meant to represent the different religious sensibilities of the Americans on whose behalf the Declaration is written.

Nature, the first name to appear, is closest to the sensibility of the man chosen to write the Declaration. Jefferson was a Deist who believed that to ascribe supernatural intervention in the world was superstition. Divine law for him was equivalent to the laws of nature. Much as Spinoza in the previous century had thought to derive ethics from nature with the same certainty and precision as Kepler and Newton set out the courses of the stars and the trajectories of projectiles, so too Jefferson believed that it was Nature itself that declared humans were equal and had rights to live, to govern themselves, and to use their properties of mind and body to enjoy movable properties and land.

Hugo Grotius was a champion of such a view. His De iure belli ac pacis (On the Laws of War and Peace) was well-known to Jefferson and Adams. In it, Grotius set out a structure of law comparable to the Noahide laws and thus harmonious with the tradition of divine law of the Bible and its traditions. Yet, in the spirit of the modern age, he famously wrote:

What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede [etiamsi daremus] that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him.

Grotius clearly did not want to be a person of utmost wickedness, but he did backhandedly concede that the concept of law he espoused would be true even for those who did not share his beliefs about God — absolutely crucial for a Europe whose religious unity had been shattered and had shown itself incapable of being restored by force.

Deists did not much believe in God’s ongoing attention to the affairs of humans once His lawful natural order had been established. The Declaration invoked that idea of Nature as the superordinate principle that is the source of unalienable rights.

But Jefferson realized that most Americans had more traditional theistic beliefs, based on the Bible. He did not shrink from invoking the Biblical God before those fellow citizens in his inaugural address:

May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.

No doubt, Jefferson would have explained his words to a Deistic critic as politically necessary poetic license, but they served his purpose there and here, in the Declaration. In the Declaration, however, he uses the simple Biblical name for that — Creator. Jefferson was good at exhorting the many to a common cause. Much as he said in his inaugural that “we are all Republicans; we are all Federalists,” so here, too, the subtext is that whatever our religious creed, we are all united in this cause.

That leaves for last the term Nature’s God.

The Abrahamic religions each wrestled with the question of the relation of nature to God during the Middle Ages. Islam’s natural philosophers met staunch opposition from traditional theologians. Judaism was convulsed twice over whether natural philosophy and Torah were compatible, with the traditionalists even denouncing their philosophical opponents to the Inquisition as atheists. And though Christendom’s philosophers found their way into an integrated intellectual culture, the Reformation and the scientific revolution resulted in a splitting away of philosophy from religion.

Thus, in Christian Europe, Grotius had to flirt with “utmost wickedness” to come up with an idea of law that would have the sanction satisfying both the philosophers and the pious. And so Jefferson could write comfortably of Nature’s God.

John Adams was on the small committee that both chose Jefferson to write the Declaration and then edited it. Adams did not share Jefferson’s strict Deism. He made clear years later in his correspondence with Jefferson how he disagreed with Jefferson’s disparagement of the Jewish law tradition. In a letter to Jefferson written November 14, 1813, he cited the greatest books of the Jewish law tradition, suggesting to Jefferson that perhaps they might hold the key to the religious “Corruptions” of which Jefferson complained.

Adams was standing on the shoulders of a great predecessor, an architect of Parliamentary freedom from monarchical tyranny. Grotius’s younger colleague, John Selden had seen what Adams believed he and Jefferson were trying to realize themselves — a law capable of motivating individuals to govern themselves, capable of surviving in the people’s affections even in exile, even under unrelenting persecution.

For Selden and for Adams, natural law did not mean that it could be derived like Euclid’s geometry, merely from contemplation of the natural world. For them, and for the many lawyers like Adams trained in the Common Law tradition through the work of Selden’s student Hale, natural law was what is present in the culture of self-government of which the oral Common Law tradition, like the Jewish law tradition, was a foremost exemplar.

Jefferson’s magnificent writing brought the disparate views of Adams and himself together, along with the great mass of American patriots. It still points its way to freedom, something that we dare not take for granted even after 249 years. It is still in the business of transforming the world in the most beneficent way. Why not give it another read?

In the light of the Highest Principle the Declaration invokes, let us unite to make the divine spirit of freedom living, present, and compelling in every aspect of our American lives.

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