Were Jefferson's Trinity of Bacon, Locke, & Newton the "demigods" of Civilizational Deconstruction? Rist: Locke Proves "natural rights" are a metaphysical lie if stripped of Christian theology...Fortin: Locke/Bacon Exposes how the trinity traded classical virtue for low, commercial self-interest....Kraynak: Locke Details how autonomous rights turn into a tyranny of radical self-idolatry...Manent: Diagnoses the "neutral state" as a spiritual vacuum that leaves mankind unmoored...Kalb: Bacon/Newton Reveals how treating the world as a machine builds a soulless technocratic cage."

Google AI Overview:

Thomas Jefferson’s "trinity" refers to the three greatest men the world had ever produced, whom he identified as Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke. [1]

Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton are celebrated as the ultimate intellectual "demigods" of the Enlightenment who completely reshaped science, philosophy, and modern political thought. [1, 2]

[My question:] How would John Rist, Robert kraynak, Jeffery Kalb, Pierre Manet and Fr. Ernest Fortin critque Jefferson’s "trinity of genius"?:

Alongside Robert Kraynak, James Kalb, Pierre Manent, and Ernest Fortin, Rist helps complete a unified, comprehensive indictment of the modern Enlightenment project. These five traditionalist, classical, and Catholic scholars would view the portraits of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton hanging at Monticello not as symbols of human emancipation, but as the intellectual blueprints for civilizational and spiritual decay.

They would systematically critique Jefferson’s trinity using the following interconnected arguments:

1. John Rist: The Metaphysical Illusion of "Human Rights"

Rist, an Augustinian-Platonist scholar, would launch an immediate strike against Jefferson’s reliance on John Locke. Rist argues that the modern concept of "human rights" is a parasitic idea; it tries to retain the moral prestige of the Christian belief that humans have sacred value, while discarding the Christian metaphysics required to ground that belief. [1, 2]

• The Critique: Rist would argue that without a transcendent God who creates human souls in His image, Locke's "natural rights" are an illusion—mere "nonsense on stilts."
• The Verdict: By substituting a trinity of materialist English empiricists for the Holy Trinity, Jefferson built America on a massive intellectual contradiction. Rist would argue that when you cut rights away from God, they become entirely subjective, eventually degrading into whatever the state or individual desires dictate. [1]

2. Ernest Fortin: The Erosion of Classical Virtue

Fortin focuses on how the trinity fundamentally lowered the moral horizon of human society.

• The Critique: Like Rist, Fortin targets Locke. Classical philosophy (Aristotle) and Christian tradition taught that politics must guide citizens toward virtue, holiness, and the common good. Locke flipped this, asserting that society exists merely to protect individual rights, property, and self-interest.
• The Verdict: Jefferson’s adulation of the trinity anchored the American experiment in a low, commercial individualism. By pairing Locke's self-interest with Bacon’s mandate to "master nature," Jefferson severed human intellect from absolute moral law.

3. Robert Kraynak: The Tyranny of Absolute Human Autonomy

Kraynak tracks the practical evolution of Locke’s philosophy, explaining how autonomous "rights" inevitably turn destructive.

• The Critique: Kraynak argues that by replacing obedience to a divine moral order with absolute individual liberty, Jefferson unleashed "the infinity of human desire."
• The Verdict: When human beings are told they possess rights completely untethered from divine duties, those rights inevitably expand. They mutate from "life and liberty" into a radical entitlement to personal gratification that eventually swallows up traditional authority, the family, and true community.

4. Pierre Manent: The "Flight from the Good"

Manent, the French political philosopher, analyzes how the trinity built a hollow, unstable political architecture.

• The Critique: Manent argues that the modern project of Bacon and Locke was a defensive retreat. Instead of taking its bearings from the cosmic "Good," it took its bearings from a "flight from evil" (the fear of violent death).
• The Verdict: By utilizing Newton's mechanistic worldview, Jefferson attempted to construct a "morally neutral" state machine. Manent argues that a public square completely emptied of higher moral purpose does not produce ultimate freedom; instead, it leaves modern man unmoored, constantly inventing fragile, artificial rules to keep a fractured society from collapsing.

5. James Kalb: The Birth of the Technocratic Cage

Kalb brings the critique into the 21st century, showing how the combination of Bacon (knowledge as power) and Newton (the world as a machine) ultimately backfires on human liberty.

• The Critique: Kalb argues that the trinity redefined the purpose of knowledge. It changed from the contemplation of ultimate truth into a tool for controlling and optimizing the physical and social world.
• The Verdict: When you treat society like a Newtonian equation and rights like a legal algorithm, you don't get liberty; you get the modern technocratic state. Kalb would argue that Jefferson's Enlightenment ideals inevitably collapse into a cold, administrative managerial elite that flattens genuine human culture, religious expression, and local identity for the sake of bureaucratic "efficiency."

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The Grand Panel: A Shared Verdict

Critic	Primary Target	The Civilizational Deconstruction
John Rist	Locke	Proves "natural rights" are a metaphysical lie if stripped of Christian theology.
Ernest Fortin	Locke / Bacon	Exposes how the trinity traded classical virtue for low, commercial self-interest.
Robert Kraynak	Locke	Details how autonomous rights turn into a tyranny of radical self-idolatry.
Pierre Manent	The Whole Trinity	Diagnoses the "neutral state" as a spiritual vacuum that leaves mankind unmoored.
James Kalb	Bacon / Newton	Reveals how treating the world as a machine builds a soulless technocratic cage.

In short, these five thinkers would look at Monticello and declare that Jefferson's "trinity of genius" was a tragic act of civilizational sabotage. They would argue that while Jefferson believed he was hanging the portraits of mankind's great liberators, he was actually worshiping the men who dismantled the spiritual, moral, and metaphysical foundations of Western civilization.

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia and for the restoration of the Church.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

The Catholic Monitor

The Catholic Monitor

https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com

I ask all The Catholic Monitor readers to also pray for the end of this war. Watch "Trump Calls Putin To Get Iran War Offramp! w/ Scott Ritter" on YouTube: ...Read more Please Pray for Trump to end the Iran War: Watch "Trump Calls Putin To Get Iran War Offramp! w/ Scott Ritter" on YouTubeFranklin & Graham calls on Christians to pray for 'end to the bloodshed' ahead of Trump-Putin summit...7mo

Please Pray for Trump to end the Iran War: Watch "Trump Calls Putin To ... Daily news from a Catholic perspective on issues relating to current events in the Catholic Church, world politi...

Conclave Notes:

Has the Trad Media fallen into a COVID-like mass formation with Leo XVI? While it's humorous to see the former anti-Francis Trad pundits suddenly acting like teen age girls infatuated with Leo, it could lead to a Trojan Horse effect

It appears that a group of Bishops or Cardinals needs to give Leo XIV Dubia questions on if he still supports "Invalid and Sacrilegious" Confession

"Prevost’s reported support...allowing divorced & civilly 'remarried'...to receive Holy Communion": “Whoever…helps...promulgation of heresy…is suspected of heresy.” - The Catholic Monitor

-- Open letter urges Pope Leo XIV to correct ‘scandalous incoherence’ in Amoris Laetitia...[Wow! Even notorious Popesplainer Fr.] Harrison warns that Pope Francis taught a ‘dangerous self-contradiction’ on Communion for the divorced and ‘remarried,’ petitioning Pope Leo to correct the record. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/08/open-letter-urges-pope-leo-xiv-to.html]

--  Dr. Seifert, regarded as one of the greatest living Catholic philosophers, founding Rector of the International Academy of Philosopher & friend of John Paul II, to Cardinals: INVESTIGATE FRANCIS' HERESIES, VALIDITY BEFORE THE CONCLAVE.."If Francis is found guilty of heresy or apostasy, then: - His cardinal appointments would be invalid" [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/dr-seifert-philosopher-personal-friend.html] 

-- Are the Cardinals who will participate in the upcoming conclave authentically appointed & morally justified in voting, or will the shadow of Francis's possible illegitimacy cast itself over the next papacy?  [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/are-cardinals-who-will-participate-in.html]

-- 5 Dubia Questions for 1P5's Steve Skojec & All faithful Catholics especially Francis is definitely Pope Cardinals, Bishops & pundits [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/06/5-dubia-questions-for-steve-skojec.html]

Francis Notes:

l– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html 

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the [J6] DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.

Pray an Our Father now for America.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.