Thomas Jefferson: Our Philosopher

"My Dear Jefferson," Preface

Justice requires that you inquire into the life both of him who confesses and of him who denies, that by his deeds it may be apparent what kind of man each is.

~ St. Justin the Martyr

There are two ways by which we judge the men of times long past; men who are not immediately remembered by even the elders of land. Their memory lives in us, their ghosts still haunt our home; yet, no one can recollect ever meeting them. We intimately know them; we judge them and we condemn or vindicate them posthumously; yet we have only interacted with them in folk tales and pages. The testimony of their life and death, and their own writings are the only standards by which we can judge anyone, especially those we have not met. The Honorable Thomas Jefferson of Virginia is no exception to such posthumous judgement; rather, he may just suffer at the hands of his posterity more than any other of our great Founding Fathers. Far from falling into the gentle obscurity that John Adams, James Madison, and John Jay enjoyed; Thomas Jefferson has been the subject of generations of scrutiny, slander, and abuse at the hands of obtuse academics and illiterate apologists of every niche opinion alike. I present this short essay as an introduction to a series of ponderings and reflections I plan to write as I drink from the deep and cool well that is the writings and life of Thomas Jefferson. This essay is not merely a defense of him as a man, but serves also as a prayer to the readers of this publication to refrain from rashness and uncritical prejudice which has so long plagued those who have ventured to pontificate on the most misunderstood¹ of our Founding Fathers.

My Patron Saint, the Blessed Saint John of Damascus, once wrote a Philosophical treatise called, The Fount of Knowledge.² To Preface this work, St. John says:

“First of all I shall set forth the best contributors of the philosophers of the Greeks, because whatever there is of good has been given to man from above by God, since ‘every best gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.’ If, however, there is anything contrary to the truth, then it is a dark invention of the deceit of Satan and a fiction of the mind of an evil spirit, as that eminent theologian Gregory once said. In imitation of the method of the bee, I shall make my composition from those things which are conformable with the truth and from our enemies themselves gather the fruit of salvation. But all that is worthless and falsely labeled as knowledge, I shall reject.”³

There is much accusatory slander which has been aimed at Jefferson from all sides. The modern American-Left decries his slave-owning, but founds their radical egalitarianism firmly in his words.⁴ The modern American-Right decries him as a pseudo-Jacobin, but appreciates his still socially conservative “libertarianism.” While the alt-right denounces him, in union with the Traditional Christians who may not otherwise be “alt-right,” as a nothing more than an enlightenment philosopher forever to be banished with the likes of Locke and Hume into the intellectual equivalent of a Leper colony.⁵ As will, hopefully, become readily apparent as we dive deeper into Jefferson’s work: He escapes all of these modern boxes. Most condemnations of him are presentist, or anachronistic at best, and outright arrogance from those who have not read a word of his texts at worst.

While it is true that Jefferson edited the New Testament into what is, now, so famously called the Jeffersonian Bible, it is equally true of that text of moral philosophy that, according to Saul Padover, “Apart from Dr. Rush, only two or three other persons, among them John Adams, ever saw it.” The fact that Thomas Jefferson did not ever intend to publish the text, or the multiple letters that he sent in relation to it,⁶ is substantiated by way of a letter which he wrote to a Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith⁷ —it is here, on this letter that I beg pardon to linger on for the remainder of this inquiry. Thomas Jefferson, for what appears to be, the only known time, makes a private and complete exposition of his personal, and self-proclaimed, “Christian” faith.

He first addresses the woman’s concern about his orthodoxy which was motivated by “the rumor supposed to proceed from a letter of mine [Jefferson’s] to Charles Thomson, on the subject of the Christian religion. It is true that in writing to the translator of the Bible and Testament, that subject was mentioned: but equally so that no adherence to any particular mode of Christianity was there expressed; nor any change of opinions suggested.”⁸ And, emphatic and trustworthy words of the same letter: “I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor change another’s creed. I have ever judged the religion of others by their lives; and by this test, my dear Madam, I have been satisfied yours must be an excellent one, to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness, for it is in our lives and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me.”⁹

It is here, dear reader, that I invoke the words of Saints Justin again, in that text addressed “To the Emperor Titus Ælius Adrianus Antoninus Pius Augustus Cæsar, and to his son Verissimus the Philosopher, and to Lucius the Philosopher, the natural son of Cæsar, and the adopted son of Pius, a lover of learning, and to the sacred Senate, with the whole People of the Romans,”¹⁰ in which he says: “Justice requires that you inquire into the life both of him who confesses and of him who denies, that by his deeds it may be apparent what kind of man each is.” What kind of man was Thomas Jefferson, we may justly ask? Certainly, far from a perfect one, as he himself says, “I may have erred at times. No doubt I have erred. For this is the law of human nature.”¹¹ But he was undeniably a man who, however mistaken he may have been, cast his line into the fishin’ hole of eternal truth, and reeled in a keeper on more than one occasion.

St. John of Damascus does not “First of all… set forth the best contributors of the philosophers of the Greeks” because they were more “correct” in their understanding of eternal truths than anyone else. He was chiefly concerned with them on the same grounds that St. Paul was at the Areopagus:¹² The Greek thinkers were the foundation of the culture both were interacting with; finding common ground with them meant finding common ground with those born, bred, and reared in the soil nourished by the likes of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Of Socrates, St. Justin says:

“…when Socrates endeavored, by true reason and examination, to bring these things to light, and deliver men from the demons, then the demons themselves, by means of men who rejoiced in iniquity, compassed his death, as an atheist and a profane person, on the charge that ‘he was introducing new divinities;’ and in our case they display a similar activity. For not only among the Greeks did reason (Logos) prevail to condemn these things through Socrates, but also among the Barbarians were they condemned by Reason (or the Word, the Logos) Himself, who took shape, and became man, and was called Jesus Christ; and in obedience to Him, we not only deny that they who did such things as these are gods, but assert that they are wicked and impious demons, whose actions will not bear comparison with those even of men desirous of virtue.”¹³

And of Plato, he says:

“…what we expect and have learned from Christ, and teach. And Plato, in like manner, used to say that Rhadamanthus and Minos would punish the wicked who came before them; and we say that the same thing will be done, but at the hand of Christ, and upon the wicked in the same bodies united again to their spirits which are now to undergo everlasting punishment; and not only, as Plato said, for a period of a thousand years.”¹⁴

As much as we, the descendants of the Founding Fathers, may claim Socrates and Plato as our forefathers; they are not the foundation of our society. While it is true that our Fathers were heavily influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy, from Homer to Plato to Epicurus and Seneca to Boethius; our Founders were unique insofar as they are our Founding Fathers. Why must we, the Honeybee’s of our land, refuse to collect the “fruits of salvation” from our own fathers? May we never be so negligent.

Thomas Jefferson concluded his letter thus: “I have left the world in silence, to judge of causes from their effects: and I am consoled in this course, my dear friend, when I perceive the candor with which I am judged by your justice and discernment… The imputations of irreligion having spent their force, they think an imputation of change might now be turned to account as a bolster for their duperies. I shall leave them hereafter to grope in the dark.”¹⁵

We could join in the ranks letting loose our arrows at our Fathers; or, we could refuse to draw our bow, and rather, sit at their feet and draw from them what is in accordance with truth, recognizing that the truths they discovered are a gift, and, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”¹⁶ This is what Thomas Jefferson asks of us, to judge him by his life and death; and it is equally the precedence that Church history and good sense has thus established. Let us never forsake God and Country.

I hope to expound the work of Thomas Jefferson, to reflect on his life and philosophy through the many writings that he has handed down to us, in order to parse out “what kind of man he [was],”¹⁷ and to collect every ounce of nectar which was so shamefully neglected by generations passed.

---

Thank you for reading. Each and every one of my essays are, and will always be free; if you’d like to support, please consider buying me a drink! In true Southern fashion, every essay I write is done so with the encouragement of several glasses of whiskey.

Respectfully,

John, Son of Dick

1. Joseph J. Ellis in the preface to his book, “American Sphinx,” reflecting the general opinion of Jefferson as an elusive thinker, says: “Our chief quarry, after all, is Jefferson’s character, the animating principles that informed his public and private life and made him the significant statesman and distinctive man he was. As I have found him, there really is a core of convictions and apprehensions at his center. Although he was endlessly elusive and extraordinarily adroit at covering his tracks, there were bedrock Jeffersonian values that determined the shape of the political vision he projected so successfully onto his world and that remain such a potent influence on ours. Moreover, again as I have found him, Jefferson consistently and tenaciously sustained his allegiance to those core convictions from the time he first appeared on the national stage in 1775 until his exquisitely timed death on July 4, 1826. Jefferson’s much-touted contradictions and inconsistencies were quite real, to be sure, but his psychological agility, his capacity to play hide-and-seek within himself, was a protective device he developed to prevent his truly radical and highly romantic personal vision from colliding with reality. As I try to show in chapter 1, subsequent generations, including our own, have certainly discovered multiple meanings in the Jeffersonian vision, which naturally lends itself to diverse interpretations, but Jefferson himself knew what he meant and meant what he believed.”

2. The Fathers of the Church, Volume XXXVII

3. ibid.

4. Be it the Declaration of Independence, or Jefferson’s multiple condemnations of slavery as an unjust institution scattered all throughout his writings (his Rights of British Americans tract is the readiest example).

5. A small town or city which was set apart as a quarantine area for those afflicted with Leprosy. The healthy population scarcely, if ever, visited for fear of contracting the disease.

6. See the paper titled: Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrine of Jesus Compared with those of Others, April, 1803, to Dr. Benjamin Rush (and several others), and, Letter titled The Principles of Jesus, October 13, 1813, to John Adams.

7. Personal Creed, August 6, 1816

8. ibid.

9. ibid.

10. The First Apology

11. Farewell Speech as Vice-President, February 28, 1801

12. Acts 17:16-34

13. The First Apology

14. ibid.

15. Personal Creed, August 6, 1816

16. James 1:17, KJV

17. The First Apology