In the 250th year of independence, it is altogether fitting that Americans should return to the Declaration of Independence and meditate on its teachings. For the more passively familiar we are with the words, the more sterile they risk becoming in our hearts and minds. In this light, it is a pleasure to comment on Dr. Spinks’ thoughtful essay, whose close reading of the Declaration will surely be reinvigorating to citizens and scholars alike.
Returning to the text of the Declaration need not entail the idea that America is merely a propositional republic, as if Americans in the founding era were not a fusion of folkways, tied together by a common language, mores, and similar political and religious views. The fact that the Declaration arose out of a broadly Christian civilization, rather than a Confucian, Muslim, or Native American (etc.) civilization, is not a contested fact.
More contestable is the sustainability question. In other words, does a natural rights republic need a particular religious spirit animating its people in order to “keep” the regime that the Constitution created? The Preamble of the Constitution announces its purpose to “secure the blessings of liberty”—a clear reference to the unalienable rights of the Declaration. But our Constitution, John Adams warned, “was made only for a moral and religious People,” because the limited government it envisioned could not restrain human passions unleashed from the bridles of religious principle.
My point in mentioning this is not to adjudicate Adams’ claim about religion. It is only to suggest that Adams’ view (like the one Publius expresses in Federalist #2) is compatible with Abraham Lincoln’s dictum that America is dedicated to a proposition, or set of propositions, that are summarized in the Declaration of Independence. Those propositions guide, or should guide, our political institutions. But they are not necessarily exhaustive of what constitutes “We the People.”
Spinks’ central claim is that the Declaration is fundamentally a theological document with an anthropological teaching. He contends that readings of the Declaration that ignore theology “have largely failed.” He therefore aims, through a close, “textualist” reading, to tease out the Declaration’s implications about who God is, His causal relation to the world and man, and the implications of those relationships for politics. What we get is a refreshing reflection on words that, 250 years after they were penned, remain the promise to which the American people are dedicated.
Spinks’ principal conclusion about the central role of the Creator in the American Proposition is both right in itself and a welcome corrective to the mistaken portrayals of the Declaration and the Founders’ religious beliefs as deistic or even secular. Where we have some disagreements are in the details. I shall focus on the contested meaning of the phrases “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “all men are created equal.”
Spinks doubts that the Declaration intends “self-evident” to mean simply “obvious.” He contends that the locution “We hold” is the crucial clue, because it “implies that everybody else does not find them obvious.” Nor does Spinks think the Declaration’s principles are of the logically entailed sort that Adams said “every man must assent to as soon as proposed”—like the axiom that three angles of a triangle are always equal to two right angles. Instead, Spinks proposes, the self-evident truths are held by “faith.”
I found it unfortunate that he did not elaborate on what he meant by “faith.” The Declaration doesn’t use the term. At the time of the Declaration, the primary meaning of “faith” in English was belief in revealed truths of Christianity and trust in God. This definition hearkens back to the New Testament, where Paul defined faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”
The best explanation of what Paul means is that posited by Thomas Aquinas. I won’t rehash his reasoning here except to quote his reconstruction of Paul’s definition: “faith is a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent.” Why non-apparent? For the Christian believer, the central tenets of his faith, i.e., the Incarnation, the Passion and Resurrection, and the Holy Trinity, are not matters he directly witnessed and/or deduced by unaided reason. While these things about Christ’s life can be shown to be likely, even probable, readings of the historical evidence, this is not yet faith. For faith is a supernatural gift from God, and the propositional content of faith is affirmed by the believer on the basis of God’s authority.
The propositions in the Declaration are clearly not of this sort because they do not need to be revealed to be known and affirmed. The Declaration invokes neither supernatural revelation in general, nor the Bible in particular, as the ground for its claims.
Perhaps Spinks has in mind a more general notion of faith as adherence, belief or a “tenet held” on “trust,” as it were. Shakespeare used the word that way in in King Lear:
Which to believe of her,
Must be a faith, that reason, without miracle.
Should never plant in me.
But here faith that Cordelia merited her terrible treatment by Lear is said to be contrary to reasoned judgment: it would require a miracle to believe it.
The propositions of the Declaration don’t seem to be in this category, either.
Indeed, the propositions of the Declaration are held forth to mankind, not as contrary to reason or even “beyond” reason, but as reasonable. With John Courtney Murray, I would say that the Founders assumed a realist epistemology, which is to say that they believed affirmation of true propositions yielded knowledge of truth. By truth was meant something like Thomas Aquinas’s formulation adequatiointellectus rei, the conformity of the intellect with the real. As Murray points out, the idea is that there are truths, and we hold them—or, from our perspective 250 years later, we must hold them—if we want to live in a just polity.
I would add that the Declaration’s invocation of the first-person plural in effect says: we believe that we are the reasonable party in the transatlantic moral and constitutional dispute. Indeed, the patriots had patiently attempted to reason with Parliament and the King for over a decade during the pamphlet debates—appealing to what they thought were commonly held principles of right reason and the English Constitution—a dialogue that culminated in the Declaration. It is therefore a context that the Declaration cannot be correctly understood apart from. As I have argued in another place, the patriot pamphleteers appealed to or assumed a broadly classical and Christian natural law framework.
I have thus argued that in important respects, the American Proposition has continuities with Thomistic natural law theory. Notably, Aquinas distinguished two senses of self-evidence that may help illuminate the meaning of self-evidence in the Declaration. First are those principles of the sort John Adams identified. Once you understand the meaning of the terms, you immediately grasp the truth of the proposition. For example, “every whole is greater than its part,” is grasped once one understands the meaning of “whole” and “part.” Such propositions are self-evident “to us.”
A second set of propositions are self-evident “in themselves,” but not necessarily to “everyone.” Such propositions are self-evident only to the learned, as the proposition “no angel is circumscriptively in a place,” a proposition evident to one trained in angelology, but not necessarily to the common man.
I suggest the Declaration’s notion of “self-evidence” lies somewhere in between these two categories. One need not have the elite training of a Locke or a Jefferson (analogous to the training of a divine master) to “see” these truths. Yet, one needs to have a modicum of education and worldly experience—knowledge of the world, man, things, i.e., the creation through which the Creator makes his existence evident.
If I am correct, then, the Declaration suggests its “self-evident” principles are not knowable in an epistemological vacuum. Instead, their knowledge presupposes a specific historical, social, religious epistemological context. This does not necessarily subvert the universal validity of the Declaration’s principles, just as Aristotle’s articulation of the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics from within the social-historical context of ancient Greece does not thereby necessarily undermine their universal validity. But it is not a coincidence that they were articulated in a specific time and place.
The first self-evident truth held forth is: “all men are created equal.” This proposition, Spinks contends, is not true in virtue of man’s shared rational nature, nor in his capacity to kill other humans, but rather in the absolute uniqueness of each human being. He writes:
All humans, better, each human, has been created, each has been intended—brought into being by care and not chance—to be just as they are, with their certain attributes and abilities, quirks and capacities, even inadequacies. To be created is to be unique, and to be unique is to be created…The Creator-creature relationship is absolutely individual. And therefore each human being is absolutely individual. And that fact is what makes each human being equal to any other…To be equal is to have been created.
So stated, the argument proves too much. The unique, individuating qualities of substances (e.g., this matter, this pedigree, this time and place generated, these particular quirks, etc.) is true not only of human creatures, but of all sorts of nonrational creatures. All God’s creatures have unique individuating qualities and are radically existentially dependent. The metaphysical “distance” between all creatures, each of whom depends on its creator for its esse, and the Creator, who is Existence Itself, is infinite. This is why Spinks’ claim that “To be equal is to have been created,” cannot be correct, unless we are to suppose that the Declaration sets forth equal rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness for the beasts—a notion that the Founders rejected and Americans continue to reject every Fourth of July, when they barbecue and consume animal meats in their annual celebration of Independence.
In short, it turns out that both our shared human nature, including its distinguishing principles of reason and free will, and our createdness are essential to making sense of human equality. The natural law tradition—from Cicero to Thomas Aquinas to Richard Hooker to John Locke, to the American Founders—has long held that our shared nature (proximately) grounds our natural liberty and equality. But Spinks has a point about the ancients’ ambiguous affirmation of this conception of human dignity. If nature were some eternal essence or form circulating through matter, individual instances that don’t fully “measure up” to the perfect form are all too easily discarded, as “deformed” infants were in ancient Greece. The Christian teachings of the imago dei inhering in every individual and Christ’s radical injunctions to love were necessary correctives to even the noblest ancient pagan philosophy and are part of the background to the Declaration.
Moreover, even if one accepted the reality of universal natures or forms, one could ask: why not seek to transcend human nature, as the transhumanists advocate? Spinks correctly points out that unalienable rights come packaged with obligations to the Creator, whence they came. Here I would note that an ancient Aristotelian essentialism, while superior to modern materialism, would prove an insufficient ground for the Declaration’s teachings.
Without a Creator obligating the creature to pursue his happiness—an obligation flowing from the Creator’s imprinting upon the creature the Form whence flows the set of inclinations toward the goods he is required to pursue—human nature could at best generate “norms.” But, transhumanists would be quick to point out, such merely “hypothetical” imperatives are binding only if. That is, the norm would take the form of: if A wanted to pursue human happiness, A would do x. Metaphysically speaking, eternal essences or natures in a clockmaker deist or atheistic universe could in no way morally obligate a person who revolts against human nature itself. In truth, the laws of nature and natural rights of the Declaration have the character of categorial imperatives, which they could only have in virtue of man’s relationship to his Creator.
A more pressing objection can be raised. How can the proposition “all men are created equal” be self-evident when that proposition smuggles in a proposition that itself is not self-evident—namely, God exists.
The solution, again, is that it is not self-evident to us in the way the previously noted examples are. But the Declaration does seem to assume what Christian doctors from St. John Damascene to C.S. Lewis have also assumed, namely, that by nature humans have at least a general and confused knowledge of God insofar as they desire their complete happiness, which is God Himself.
In this respect, Spinks’ discussion of the Declaration’s teleological view of the right to pursue happiness is illuminating. The Declaration reflects the belief that:
the Creator has given all human beings the needed tools, all for an ultimate purpose, an ultimate fulfillment…it is a promise to our nature: we were each created to search for our final end…So our pursuit of happiness must be right.
Spinks makes a number of other observations ranging from doubtful to intriguing. I only have space to comment on one example of each.
First, an example of the doubtful: Spinks argues that the right to life entails that no government has the right to kill. This claim seems to require us to believe that George Washington did not have the authority to, e.g., execute John André as retributive justice for his role in Benedict Arnold’s traitorous plot to deliver West Point to the British.
This strikes me as a misunderstanding of the meaning of unalienable, which at first blush means incapable of transfer. I take the core idea to be that life and liberty are not the sorts of things that can be priced, traded, bought and sold—transferred—like chattel. Human dignity resists commodification because human beings are endowed with a worth that is immeasurable.
But this doesn’t deny that within the context of polity, life and liberty are conditional goods that can be misused and therefore civilly forfeited, as when a person grossly violates the natural rights of others. Moreover, life can be rightly sacrificed for some higher end. The Declaration asserts that States have the “Power to levy War,” which is why States could conscript soldiers into the Continental Army and lawfully require them to kill without violating their natural rights. In concluding the Declaration by pledging to each other their “lives,” the signers clearly indicated their view that war can be just, that the Revolutionary War, already being fought, was a just war, and (hence) that killing can be just.
An example of the intriguing: Spinks argues that “the Creator is love” can be inferred from the Declaration. This is a very interesting insight that deepens our understanding of the Declaration’s theological teachings. The idea deserves further discussion. From at least one Christian perspective, the title God is Love—or at least its full understanding—is uniquely derived from revelation of the Trinity. How does the “natural” knowledge of the Creator expressed in the Declaration relate to the knowledge of God Christians affirm through faith? Does the love of Nature’s God anticipate or point toward the Christian God?
These are just the sorts of questions that a serious theological reading of the Declaration provokes. While I have dwelt upon some of our differences over the meaning of self-evidence and created equal, Spinks’ overarching point, that the Declaration “puts theology and culture above politics and statecraft,” is spot on. I have also suggested just a couple ways in which Spinks’ interpretation has much to teach us. And I suspect his method of approaching the Founding from the perspective of a theologian will continue to be a fruitful for scholars and citizens alike.
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