The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
MORAL PRINCIPLES / EPICUREAN IDEAS
As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine
(not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything
rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
Epictetus, indeed, has given us what was good of the Stoics; all
beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great
crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his
doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero
engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting.
His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms
incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects
usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions,
they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear
fabrications as delirious, of their own invention. These they fathered
blasphemously on him whom they claimed as their founder, but who would
disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of his
religion so justly excite. Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in
the Memorabilia of Xenophon; for Plato makes him one of his
collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his
name; a liberty of which we are told Socrates himself complained.
Seneca is indeed a fine moralist, disfiguring his work at times with
some stoicisms, and affecting too much of antithesis and point, yet
giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality.
But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his
own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his
from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its
luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that
as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of
the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man;
outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. Epictetus
and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of
the duties and charities we owe to others. The establishment of the
innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the
rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from
artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by
a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one
to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning.
It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the
heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over
human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this
work is to be begun by winnowing the grain from the chaff of the
historians of his life. I have sometimes thought of translating
Epictetus (for he has never been tolerably translated into English) by
adding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus from the Syntagma of
Gassendi, and an abstract from the Evangelists of whatever has the
stamp of the eloquence and fine imagination of Jesus. The last I
attempted too hastily some twelve or fifteen years ago. It was the
work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through
the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day. But
with one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My
business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I
endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of
mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy,
equally indifferent to hope and fear.
I take the liberty of observing that you are not a true disciple of
our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you
are yielding. One of his canons, you know, was that "the
indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater
pain, is to be avoided." Your love of repose will lead, in its
progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind,
an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of
body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the
happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure;
fortitude, you know, is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches
us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like
cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at
every turn of our road. Weigh this matter well; brace yourself up.
to William Short, 31 October 1819
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