Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comforts and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief in his aid and love. In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudices on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the lightness, but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well as those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics.

This fascinating letter, a beautiful relic of Enlightenment empiricism, shows not only Jefferson's reverence for reason but his distrust-no, his downright distaste-for revelation, as he enjoins Carr to examine the Evangelists' claims to having been inspired. Jefferson's private opinions on the Revelation of St. John, expressed in a letter to Alexander Smyth, are characteristic, and worth quoting.

It is between 50. and 60. years since I read it, and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a Maniac, no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nighdy dreams. ... I cannot so far respect them as to consider them as an allegorical narrative of events, past or subsequent. There is not enough coherence in them to countenance any suite of rational ideas.... What has no meaning admits no explanation. And pardon me if I say, with the candor of friendship, that I think your time too valuable, and your understanding of too high an order, to be wasted on these paralogisms. You will perceive, I hope, also that I do not consider them as reveladons of the supreme being, whom I would not so far blaspheme as to impute to him a pretension of revelation, couched at the same time in terms which, he would know, were never to be understood by those to whom they were addressed.

The final sentence is in classic deist idiom, with its reference to a benign "supreme being" who could not possibly have any wish needlessly to mystify his creatures.

Jefferson's personal creed, as he described in confidence to trustworthy friends such as John Adams, Benjamin Waterhouse, Dr. Joseph Priestley, and William Short, was a simple one. He believed, in the deist manner, in one God, a benign creator whose only revelation to man is made through Nature and Reason. He believed, or wished to believe (sometimes he didn't seem too sure) in an afterlife. So far as Christian dogma goes, these two propositions are all that he believed, and he listed under the category "artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects," all the following doctrines: "The immaculate conception of Jesus, His deification, the creation of the world by Him, His miraculous powers, His resurrection and visible ascension, His corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders or Hierarchy, etc." "The day will come," he asserted (over-optimistically, as usual), "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." He was particularly scathing on the concept of the Trinity, scoffing at "the hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, [which] had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs. ... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea?"