Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Short (October 31, 1819):
As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & 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. the merit of his philosophy is in the beauties of his style. diffuse rapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. his prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been defied 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 time 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 it’s lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dung hill, 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 & Epicurus give us laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties & 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 misconstructions of his words by his pretended votaries, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestly has succesfully 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 & 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) of 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 12. or 15. years ago. it was the work of 2. or 3. nights only at Washington, after getting thro’ 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 wearisomness 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 & fear.
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