Thomas Jefferson's Bible
Presented on: Thursday, February 14, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 7 of 13
Jefferson's Bible: The Religion of Liberty
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, February 14, 1985
Transcript:
The date is February the 14th 1985. This is the 8th lecture in a series of lectures on Hermetic America by Roger Weir. Tonight's lecture is entitled: Jefferson's Bible: The Religion of Liberty.
We come now to him a very difficult issue. Most of you have been following this and realized that we are finally at the eye of the hurricane of American history. It finally arrived at the spot where no one dares look in our time. Because the issues have reasserted themselves again. Only this time they have an unconscious amperage and they have a projective archetypal energy which makes it undiscernible in terms of human beings and only detectable in terms of mass movements. But in Jefferson's time it was still visible in terms of people. There were still actors upon this most precarious stage of history. And Jefferson was the central player. He became the central player, as you come to understand, because Benjamin Franklin had prepared the scene. He had set the stage. He had made the costumes. He had largely written the script.
Jefferson recounts in his letters, when they're able to be consulted. You know the works of Jefferson still are unpublished. The Princeton University Press Edition has gotten to 1791 and they were forced to stop there. Because the publication of the 1790s letters of Jefferson would literally tear this country apart. Because Jefferson put his finger on an issue, as I said before, which is still bothering this country. The 1790s of course saw the birth of political parties in this country. What is impossible to understand is that it is a religious issue. That it is a spiritual issue that has no physical shaping's to it. And only in an occult center with a few mature minds could we lay this issue out. And turn it before our attention have come to understand the incredible events that led to the formulation of the United States. And have brought it all back so that it is current again.
Jefferson in his letters recounts that when he accepted George Washington's appointment to be the first secretary of state he had just come back from five years in France. He had supposed that he was going to at last again retire to Monticello. But the pressing demands of Washington for balance in his administration convinced Jefferson that he was in fact the necessary figure. Washington of course under the tremendous gun of responsibility that had been engendered in the Constitutional Convention. You may recall that the Constitutional Convention was authorized in its delegations to amend the Articles of Confederation. Which had largely been drawn up in the Revolutionary period under the aegis of Franklin and Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were not at the Constitutional Convention. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence only four signed the Constitution. and one of those four Franklin said specifically for the other two Pennsylvania delegates beside himself, the only reason we're signing is that we have to have something to work with. And the faults of this document will be so glaring that our countrymen will soon rectify the scene.
The Constitutional Convention usurped its authority and drew out the Constitution from a power group standpoint. Who are to be known as the Federalists. Who were energized by thirty-year-old New York lawyer named Alexander Hamilton. And all this happened when Jefferson was in France and Franklin was ill in Philadelphia. And Washington because of his integrity realized that he was on the hot seat. All of the power groups that had a voice had given up the Revolution and had gone back leaning towards a monarchy with Washington to be the king. And Washington too good a soldier, having fought too long and having understood too well what the Revolutionary War was fought for, refused to take the bit. and instead as a manly warrior, as a general, as a great rock upon which someone may found trust, Washington sought to bring all of the parties out in the open. And let them resolve themselves in the only controllable arena that was left to his jurisdiction. The only battlefield where he could still command. And that was in his cabinet. And so Washington's first cabinet was significant. It was a symbolic arrangement of individuals representing all the major power groups. And in order to balance the Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Washington told Jefferson I need you. The country needs you. You must be represented here.
And so on his way to take office Jefferson stopped to see the old 84 year old Benjamin Franklin just a few weeks before he died. Like a master navigator checking in with the old pilot. And Jefferson recounts in one of his letters how the old ailing Franklin motioned over to his table, and he said to Jefferson there is a sheaf of papers there, please fetch them. And Jefferson recounts how he came over to the bed and the young grandson William Botch of Franklin was there. And he looked through the manuscript just paging through. And he saw it was a number of sheets almost a large cuarto of sheets. And it was a complete account Franklin's personal handwriting account of the last power struggle in the negotiations with the British Empire. And Jefferson looked to Franklin and Franklin said keep it. and Jefferson said I'll be glad to read it now return it to you. And Franklin said keep it. And Jefferson the third time said well when I finish reading it I'll make sure that it's cared for and sent back to you, and Franklin against it you keep it. He went to the cabinet post and news came that Franklin had died.
So Jefferson recounts in the letter how he sent for William Temple Franklin, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin who has made his executive heir. And Jefferson handed over the manuscript. And when he did he had this clear vision that he had done something wrong. And he said the grandson William Temple Bache just folded it as if it were scraps of paper and stuffed it in his pocket. Said he would take care of it. And Jefferson said that the feeling that something was wrong. the casualness of the way the manuscript was treated. He realized that Franklin had meant for him personally to guard this insight. To guard this history. To take care of this baton of the meaningfulness. The central ritual mystery of the revolution was that the British Empire did not think that it had lost the Revolutionary War but that round one was over and they would win it all back again.
And Jefferson realized as the years went on and the decades went on and it remained unpublished, along with all of Franklin's other works, remained unpublished, that the British had bought off the grandson. Which they had. They paid him seven thousand pounds sterling just to do nothing. Take your time editing the papers. No one will say anything there are a lot of papers. That's how they talk to you. Take your time and toward the end of your life put out a nice homey selection. Make Franklin sort of a sort of a homey fellow with an eye for the ladies but don't let anyone see how important he was.
He was the man of the century. He was the revolutionary. He was the one who said we have to open up the structural nature of man's mind. The time has come. We've had great individuals in history now it's time to have a nation of individuals who are free. Liberty. Not free to just walk around through the forest but free in the sense of opening up the mind to see nature for what it was. To see the divinity for what it was. To see man for what it was. And with that directness, with the confidence of an accurate image base then to decide what they would do. And Franklin constantly was saying we don't know what man will do because we have never had a society of free men. well we've had aristocracies, we've had oligarchies. We've never had a society of free men. Generation after generation of free men and we don't know what they'll do. And the only thing we can do is create conditions that will work for them in whatever way they want.
Jefferson was the only individual who understood that message. That life meaning from Benjamin Franklin. In a comprehensive way, the vision had passed on. In a very real way, Franklin was the Merlin and Thomas Jefferson was King Arthur. And Jefferson raised around him a round table of individuals with integrity who would not buckle. James Madison, Monroe, the old revolutionaries Elbridge Gerry, Edward Rutledge, a number of them. But he was the only one who had any power. Because the power had been totally usurped. Sopped up chopped. Put in the pocket in the back rooms of the Constitutional Convention and afterwards.
And the key to it was to translate the medium of action into money. And to make a National Bank the guaranteer of the valuation of that money. And to keep control of the National Bank and thereby the monetary supply in the hands of a political few, the Federalist Party. And as long as that obtained then one could keep ones handle on the spigot of activity. because whatever was being done then was done this way. And the only threat, the only possible angle from where that control, that power rule, could be jeopardized was from the people themselves. From the rights of the people. And so the rights of the people had to be translated into law, into legalities. And if one controlled the legal mind and the monetary nature of action, then one was secure upon the throne(?). And so a tyranny of lawyers and a tyranny of bankers came together and braided itself together in the 1790s. And it looked like it was all over because it was fait de complete. They had control.
But Jefferson was a champion. Jefferson was like Franklin. He was the greatest mind of his time. And considering the massive profundity of the problem. Realizing that one cannot tackle it piece by piece, bit by bit, issue by issue, like a master strategist he looked for the navel in the issue. Where in fact in human experience, in human capacity, does all this come to bear? Where is a place in the structure where there's a center? Any system has to have a center. That's the only attackable, workable battlefield. And he found that the center of that federalist dream in Empire was Christianity. It was an idea of Christianity more than Christianity itself. And so Jefferson mooted to himself a way to open up this entire issue of the National tyranny that was in the making. The usurpation of power by the moneyed fueled lawyers and how to return the country back to the people. And the core of it was to understand the nature of Christianity. To take away the Roman Empire element out of Christianity and restore Christianity back to its primordial. It used to be called primitive Christianity but its primordial nature. In its primordial nature was that there is a direct link between the individual person and the Godhead. That there is no necessary structure in between the individual and the Godhead. That the lord of hosts and the individual person can have direct single contact without any go-between. without any structure or system in between themselves.
And Jefferson mooting this over and over again realized that this stuff how was the core. And it took him a long time to find the handle on that sword because it was buried into stone of ignorance like it always is.
He wrote in notes on the state of Virginia 1787. 1787 well that's when the Constitution convention was. He wrote, "all the powers of government legislative, executive and judiciary results to the legislative body the concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands. and not by a single one. 173 despits will surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the Republic of Venice. As little will and **(inaudible)** that they are chosen by ourselves. Elective despotism was not the government we fought for but one which should not only be founded on free principles but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of majesty as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
He said, "That for this reason that convention which passed the ordinance of government laid its foundation on this basis that the legislative executive and judiciarydepartment should be separate anddistinct. So that no person should exercise the powers of more than one of them at the same time. But no barrier was provided between these several powers. The judiciary and executive members were left dependent on the legislative for the subsistence in office. And some of them for their continuance in it."
And then he went on to write, quoting Caesar, that eventually they will figure out the pattern. men want power. they will have it. They will figure it out. What is this pattern that they will come to understand finally? Then he quotes Caesar, with money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. That's how the Roman Empire began. That's why they killed Caesar because he figured out the key to the whole issue. If you tilt everyone on each other by their own natural grade and keep that tilt tilted by fear, everything works magically.
Jefferson wrote, "Nor should our assembly be diluted by the integrity of their own purposes. And conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this as in the country from which we derive our origin will have seized the head of government and be spread by them through the body of the people. When they will purchase the voices of the people and make them pay the price."
Does that sound like what the phone companies do? We need this equipment to serve you better therefore raising their fees so we can have the equipment to serve you better. Pay up. Well now when all of your banking and all of your shopping and everything is done by phone, which will be keyed into in the next decade, if you don't pay your phone bill you won't be able to do anything.
Jefferson said when they will purchase the voices of the people and make them pay the price, human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic. And will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they have gotten hold of it. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered. This was his reply to the Constitutional Convention. Saying they have got the power show all set up. And I'm over here and Franklin is ill. And all the rest of us were out in our several states and countryside's and cities and this group drew up a document giving themselves carte blanche. And now we have to go through with it. Now we're trapped.
When Jefferson entered into the cabinet and became a positive Alexander Hamilton, Washington was forced to become neutral. he was forced not to take sides because it was a real dynamite situation. A man named Daniel Shay had found sheriffs at his door because he couldn't pay. Taxes had been assessed against his business. They do just what the sheriff's deputies do now. You know if you owe some money to someone and you don't pay off they can get a court order to get the sheriff's come and they put a lock at all your assets. And you have to pay before they unlock it. And they stand there with guns. Well Daniel Shay, two hundred years ago, said no died. And he went I got his neighbors and friends when I got down there old Minutemen long rifles and they said we have fought the tyrants before over taxation and we'll fight them again. Because you may have changed your uniforms and your so-called nationality but you are the same people. You're doing the same thing. And Shay's rebellion scared, I think the word at that time would be Jesus out of them. Because the next time a group tried to pull this kind of a protest Washington sent 12 thousand armed men with cannons. Because the entire system was going to be jeopardized.
So Washington had to remain neutral because they were walking on a powder keg. And he realized that he could not take the leadership role on any side. He had to maintain himself in a neutral background in order to maintain some kind of a context where in this issue could be fought out by words instead of guns. Because the nation could not, the new nascent nation could not stand a civil war as a counter-revolutionary adjunct to the American Revolution. Oh yeah every time there's a revolution, three or four years later there's a counter-revolution.
In a weird way the civil war was put off for 70 years. The inevitable Civil War that followed the American Revolution. And that's why when Lincoln was trying to hold the country together he had to conceive of a vision of what, what is this government. And if you go back to the Gettysburg Address he doesn't talk about the Constitution he talks about the people. This structure is of, for and by the people and that's what it is. Is not a legal entity. It's not a monetary investment. Its a life force of freedom for the very people who would exist(?). And that takes metaphysical penetration of vision in order to see that through all of the mess. And for Jefferson he was there at the beginning and saw the steam and the smoke starting to rise. And he realized we have to do something now in order to straighten this out or we will never get it right.
And all through the 1790s the goad in the background was that the French had tried to imitate the Americans in their revolution but they hadn't done the one necessary thing. They hadn't prepared the people for independence, for freedom. And when the people got power they were still the slobs that they had been in drunken bitter cynical reaction to the thumb of the courtly power for centuries. And so they acted like slobs and brought on Napoleon. Because by the time two or three years of this went on everybody was ready to have anybody who could order the situation. And Napoleon simply took the situation in hand and if you didn't cooperate you were dead. And if you did cooperate you were there to serve and expand the dream of the Emperor. All during the 1790s this French static was clouding the American issue.
And so Jefferson trying to find that center of the pattern that was workable found the religious issue. His power of vision, his penetrating capacity to see the navel of human activity and at the core of that was Christianity. And at the core of that was Jesus. And so Jefferson had to come face to face with the issue of Jesus Christ. And that took him a long time to understand.
One of the major figures that helped him out in this was Joseph Priestley. If you're at all scientifically educated, you know Joseph Priestley as the discoverer of oxygen. He was one of the first great chemists. The first man ever separated element, a basic building block of nature of reality. If you're religiously educated you know him as one of the earliest Unitarian ministers in England. Very famous. His histories of Christianity where the deep myth..mystified Christianity the true history of the church without the corruption and so forth. In 1791, the mobs attacked Priestley house in Manchester. Priestley was a fine individual approaching 60, used to have meetings with the Lunar Society. People like James Watt and Matthew Boulton. All the makers of the Industrial Revolution in England met together in Manchester on weekends. Just like Franklin's **(inaudible)**. Because they patterned themselves on Franklin's Sutah(?) because David Hartley and Joseph Priestley were all correspondents of Franklin. Franklin had raised the English group just like he'd raised the French group. Just like he had raised the American group. He was a great grandpappy of this whole international entourage of men who had opened up their minds to understand with each other what is this world that we live in. What are we? What are we doing?
The Lunar Society celebrated Bastille Day, July 14 1791. And the mob of the workers incited by those in power, industrially and politically, in Manchester said these guys are anti-christian. And they burned Priestley's house down. They burned all of his libraries. They destroyed all of the scientific equipment. Priestley escaped with his life to London and he realized that he was still endangered and so following his three sons he moved to Pennsylvania. He moved to where the two branches of the Susquehanna River come together and form the main river that goes down to Philadelphia. North up in the foothills of the Appalachians. It's a National Monument in the United States, Priestley's house.
It was Priestley who was the living bridge, the living contact, that helped Jefferson focused and resolve this tremendous religious problem that he had which was also the problem of the nation. Which was focused on the figure of Jesus. And was Priestley's writings that helped Jefferson find enough perspective so that he could bring his tremendous capacity to bear. And when he did he found the core of the situation, he found the plug that held this whole federalist Empire, British Empire, Roman Empire system together and he pulled the plug. And he pulled the plug in 1800. That's when he became president of the United States. And Jefferson said to work right away to return the country to the people. And the first thing he did before he abolished income taxes, because income taxes are one of the necessary struts(?) in this fiction(?). It makes the monetary hold have teeth. Without it, it doesn't really have teeth. But before he abolished income taxes and balanced the budget and got rid of the national debt. that's what Jefferson did in his first administration. But before that even, he wrote a beautiful letter to Joseph Priestley.
And he said, I think I have the letter here. I think I have the letter here. Joseph Priestley in Washington DC, March 21st, that's the vernal equinox, 1801. Jefferson had just taken office about six weeks before. To Dr. Joseph Priestley, "Dear sir, I learned some time ago that you were in Philadelphia. But it was only for a fortnight and I supposed you were gone. It was not till yesterday I received information that you were still there. Had been feeling very ill but were on the recovery. I sincerely rejoiced that you are so. Yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind. And for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous. Bigots may be an exception. What an effort my dear sir, of bigotry and politics and religion we have gone through."
This is at the end of the 1790s. This is an 1801 when Jefferson had won. The man was so scarred emotionally that the Federalists thought in one last-gasp we will cripple the son of the dome. So they tried a smear campaign against Jefferson's morality. And that's when all the charges came out that he was sleeping with black slaves and fathering children by them and everything. The truth is is that the black slave he was accused of sleeping with was actually a child by his wife's father, John Wayles, W-a-y-l-e-s. John Wayles lost his third wife to smallpox. it crushed him and he took solace with a slave who was half white. Her name was Betty Hemings. Her father had been captive Hemings. And so the children of John Wayles and Betty Hemings were three quarters white. And the last child, there were six of them, was called Sally, Sally Hemings. She was actually the half-sister of Jefferson's wife. And when Jefferson's wife died she made him promise not to ever set another woman over their children. That is don't get married again. And take care of my family. And so Jefferson took care of those black slaves, the Hemings, as if they were a part of his family because they were. And Jefferson would never in his lifetime reveal the true issue.
In 1802 the Federalists Tory Group, hired the perfect kind of yellow journalist back writer a man named Colander, he started all this smear campaign. Jefferson, religious man, look at this...look at this....look at this. Jefferson says to Priestley, "What an effort my dear sir, of bigotry and politics and religion that we have gone through. The barbarians really flattered themselves that they should be able to bring back the times of vandalism. When ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. Proscribed means sentenced to termination. When you're proscribed your name is put on a list to be killed. All scientific developments were going to be halted. Their innovations, we don't need them they disturb the system.
You see this was the era not only the birth of the United States but the birth of science. the birth of technology in an applied way, called industry as opposed to Industrial. Which is owned by somebody who's making money. But industry in the sense of applied effort for the benefit of all. All of this came together at the same time. All this was being born at the same time. And there was in any other country in the world where the birth of Liberty was successfully maneuvered through this tremendous era except in this United States. Because Jefferson was at the wheel. He wouldn't give up. He learned from the old master Ben Franklin. And by that time that Franklin stood alone next to the fireplace with all the Lords of the British Empire calling him every name in the book, Franklin not changing expression. Taking it, all taking it all for hours on end. Because he wasn't there to react as an individual. He was there as the pilot of the ship of state. We're gonna have a free people. We're going to have a country of millions of free people and there's nothing they can say or do thats gonna stop it.
Franklin in one letter to a British friend who was pro-empire said, "Look at all this activity that you have gone through. In Concord. in Lexington. You've killed a hundred and fifty Yankees. The cost of twenty thousand pounds a head. And in that time period sixty thousand people have been born in this country. If you just use your reason man. it's inevitable." Jefferson sent the same kind of message to Napoleon through James Monroe. He said tell him yourself. Tell him directly. Tell him from me in French. We took a survey you have 30 thousand people of French descent on the North American continent. And we're sending 45,000 a month through the Cumberland Gap. And if you want to fight you're going to be completely out manned. They understood vision, instruction.
This is what they talked about when they talked about enlightenment and rationality. That not only does the world make sense but man makes sense. And that all of it is in the convoy(?). it's in a harmony. And the only thing that an individual has to do to protect it is to keep that ardor of harmony flowing in his visionary capacity because man has a natural religious sense. We call it gliblymorality but it's very deep. Morality isactually the way in which God's natural law works in man. And you don't need any priest craft to tell you. You don't need any rituals to refine it. But you do need to be educated to be yourself. Because centuries and millennia of blindness and ignorance have crippled man so much that he needs a little help standing up for the first generation or two. But then all of the crutches that have helped him stand up have to be taken away because there will come a time when there are generations that are born free. And they won't need to be propped up and then all these crutches are going to get in their way. And so government has to be prepared to change it to at a certain time and get out of the people's way. Because they're going to go where we can't even envision.
That's when Jefferson said you know every 19 years we should dissolve the whole structure of government. And let those people at that time reconstituted whatever way suits them best. They'll be practical about it. They're gonna want to live. They're gonna take care of their kids and each other. They won't go too far away. But if they keep doing this eventually the 10th or 20th or hundredth time down the line, they're gonna get very why is about self-government and they're gonna do it right. Eventually they'll learn to do it right. But we have to provide for them at this crucial juncture because they're learning to leave the nursery. And they can't crawl out into the world the freedom they have to stand up like in and walk out on their own. And that's what we're doing he's said, again and again.
He said to Priestley, 1801, he had just taken office as the president of the United States. "They pretended to praise and encourage education but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards not forwards for improvement. The President himself declaring in one of his answers to addresses that we were never to expect to go beyond them in real science, our ancestors. This was the real ground of all the attacks on you." Remember they had burned Priestley's home in England. "This was the real ground of all the attacks on you. wasn't just that you were a scientist who doesn't believe the church doctrine to a tea. It's that man you were a threat because you're looking at the core of what holds this illusion together. This delusion together. And if we wake up to that that whole structure is going to collapse." And Jefferson saying, "Those who live by mystery and charlatanry fear you. Would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy. The most sublime and benevolent but most perverted system that ever shone on man. Endeavor to crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame. But with(?) the Lilliputians upon Gulliver, our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and Industry had thrown them. Science and honesty are replaced on their high ground. And you, my dear sir, as their great apostle are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that in the first moments of my public action I can **(inaudible)** you would welcome to our land. Tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem. Cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good like you, into stain the legitimacy of that liable on legislation which under the form of a law was for some time placed among them. As the storm is now subsiding and the horizon becoming serene it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. We can no longer say that there is nothing new under the sun for this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. A mighty wave of public opinion which is rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is its so quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its true level again. The order and good says displayed in this recovery from delusion and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, really the street be speaks in strength of character in our nation which all bodes well for the duration of our Republic. Now much better satisfied now that stability than there was before it was tried. I have been above all things paused(?) by the prospect which opened on us in the event of a non election of a president."
And if you remember that the election of 1800 was a complete lodger head(?). Because of the constitutional power fiasco because it could be manipulated. Oh yeah the Constitution permits manipulation of power. Because it could be manipulated the election of 1800 was thrown into the house representatives. And for days and weeks on end they were unable to resolve the election. And finally on the 36th ballot Jefferson was elected third president. The man who was on the other side who was vice president with Aaron Burr. Aaron Burr ran it like Benedict Arnald, one of the archetypal traitors in American history. Because the powerplay had not only put competition to Mr. Jefferson but had infiltrated his whole situation with someone that **(inaudible)**.
He writes, How wonderfully we have come out of this. But then he writes succinctly, "There is something that we can do not just for me but for this country. Not just for this country but for the new men and women who are coming up. You can write for us an accurate history of Christianity without the church structure. Let us see exactly who Jesus was. Let it be exactly what is the **(inaudible a few words)** of true morality that he taught was. And you're the man to do it. You have all the research."
They had written a beautiful ship history of four varnas(?) of Christianity after the fall of the Western Empire. That is he filled in the period that came at the beginning of **(inaudible)** history. Before the fall of Rome in 410 AD. He had just written a wonderful little book that compared Socrates and Jesus. And Jefferson had more than a coach going back to Washington DC, says you're the man that do it. And then Priestly died in the next year. And Jefferson was hung out on a limb because he had just seen the vision of what was necessary, what was needed. And the very man that he had chosen was now gone. and in this turmoil(?) Jefferson realized again, like the sort of cosmic hero that he was, that he's going to have to do it himself.
So he brought all the material he could. He was in the white house. He was trying to re-**(inaudible)**the whole country. And in between all those tasks, alone at night, burning the midnight oil Jefferson put together The Philosophy of Jesus. The demystified essential moral code that was at the core of the Christian teachings. Without the church. No priests. No church structure. No committies of counsel throughout the ages. None of it. Just a simple direct code of morality which the individual could rely upon to be trustworthy toward themself and towards others. Whether it was a simple act of personal decision or a granite coming together of four or five million individuals to make country.
And in 1804 Jefferson put together the philosophy of Jesus. A little pamphlet. it's been very difficult to get a hold of it. In fact it was largely confused by most historians until 1858. A man named Herman Randall who did the earliest great life of Jefferson in three volumes in 1858, discovered that there had been two distinct books that Jefferson had put together. The one was in 1803/1804 which was The Philosophy of Jesus. And then in 1820, a year in his retirement in the village he put together The Life and Morals of Jesus. That's the second book that publishes the Jefferson Bible. But both of them are published together finally just last year by Princeton University Press called Jefferson's Extract From The Gospel. And what Jefferson was doing in these books was putting his visionary figure on exactly the place, the focus in the mentality of western man and in the history of Western man where the force of empire is turned around and left free, so that becomes a code of personal morality for the individual. And prepares him then for the liberty of vision which alone permits self-government.
Well let's take a break and we'll come back after that and look at these books.
If you can...if you can bring yourselves and your mind the back into my high focus here. I don't mean to do beat mine but these issues are poignant. What is the...what is the crux that changes religiion(?) from personal experience to a **(inaudible)** institution? What takes it out of the hands of the person and puts into the designs of a **(inaudible)**. A church. An empire.
In Christianity the issue is the Trinity. You can assume(?) as you have a conception of the Trinity you have to understand it. And in order to understand that **(inaudible)** you have to have a theology. And we're just support and **(inaudible)** before a theology, you have to have a theocratic history and a church structure. And a whole thing devolves on that. Oddly enough. Strangely enough.
Jefferson was such an old revolutionary fighter that he went for the jugular vein. The issue is that we have to see Jesus as a man and not as a theological creation. That if we have to take a scissors to our Bibles, let's do it. Let's cut out all of the theocratic embellishment. Let's get down to what was said. Let's get down to just the word. Alright we have a problem with translation. All right we have a problem with translation. My friend Joseph Priestley has read Hebrew since he was a teenager. He also read Sheldon and **(inaudible)**. He read Arabic and Greek. **(inaudible a few words)** an intellectual. He spoke about a dozen languages. All the languages of the earth and all the ancient languages. He read all the **(inaudible)** fragments as well as the translation and laid them out as best he could. And Jefferson took them under his arm and in the White House late night put it together.
Now in the volume that he did in 1820, in order to make it as broad as possible he put the Greek and Latin and French and English all together across the page. Inviting the individual, you make up your own mind. If you think the English text has been tampered with, here's the Greek text. Here's the latin text. Here's the French text. But if you put them all together with all these different languages you can begin to get the gist for yourself. The gist...the focus of Jesus is not in some theocratic structure but in the person.
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...of Jesus is not in some theocratic structure but in the person. You can say that part of the person called the soul, that's all right too. But it's personal. Its direct. Its individual. And all anyone else can do is give you information, widen your database, simplify or sophisticate your image base. But you have to make the decisions. You have to put it together. And if you give up this right that right transmitts itself into the hands of others as power. And that's how rights lose their Liberty and become power for others. Because it's such an important nexus. It's really at the core of everything. And if someone controls all those rights transmitted into power, that's like the dictatorship of the empires. And that's exactly what we're fighting here. That's exactly it.
He wrote a letter to Madison in 1826. Jefferson was at the end of his life. He would die April 2nd 1826. He was 84 years old, 83. Monticello February 17th 1826. This is a quarter of a century after that letter to Joseph Priestley. He's been busy all that time. can you imagine that? All that time. He writes to Madison about the University of Virginia after just setting up. He's designed it. He's architecturally designed the buildings. He's intellectually designed the library. He made the list for the books and bought the books and put them in there. They were designing the syllabus. And he's saying to Madison we have to watch out now in the selection of our law professor. Because of all the professions in this country the one most easily tempted to usurp rights into power are the lawyers. Because eventually it's going to be a judicial tyranny that bates...breaks the back of the Republic. In our selection of our law professor we must be rigorously attempted to his political principles. He's writing to Madison. Jefferson to Madison. Not talking about what party does he belong to. They're not talking about that level at all. They're talking about cosmic ultimates. They're talking about the enlightened human being who is open to the natural cosmos in a direct personal way and has a scientific outlook and rational equanimity to check himself all the time. And a moral sense to do it right. Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty. It's the price of it. Not the monetary price. It's the insurance of its reality.
He writes, "You will recollect that before the Revolution Koch Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs" In the sense of being committed to the rational enlightenment of all men. "But when his black-letter texts and uncouth but cunning learning got out of fashion and the honey to Mansfieldism of Blackstone". These are British Empire legal minds. Mansfield, Blackstone and so forth we're the ones who conceived of the legalism that justified the British Empire. Because in the 18th century the British Empire was very very very strong. But in the 19th century it dominated the world. The map of the British Empire in 1900 span the whole world. Jefferson saying to Madison remember, remember. He said, "It used to be that the lawyers when we were in the revolution had open minds and they were committed to helping their fellow man. Now everything has changed." He said, "From that moment that profession began to slide into Toryism in nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They're all towards beefing up the system because the system is going to make them money. And with money they can ensure the control of the system. They suppose themselves indeed to be enlightened because they no longer know what enlightenment or republicanism means. It is in our seminary,"
He uses the religious term for a university. "It's in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept alive. The real secret tradition of Liberty. The structure of the mind that can envision Liberty accurately and the quality of moral character that can produce it in the world. So this vestal flame is to be kept alive. It is thence from the University of Virginia. It's the only place we can really protect for a while now. Thence is to spread a new over our own and sister states. If we are true and vigilant in our trust within a dozen or twenty years a majority of our own legislature will be from one school and many disciples will have carried its doctrines home with them to their several states. And we will have thus leaven the whole mass of ignorance."nn This is to Madison in 1826.
Thedifficulty was that that movement becametruncated. It just started and a few years later Andrew Jackson got into the White House. And Andrew Jackson was a back woodsman. An unsophisticate. An honest man. But the critics of him said he rode his horse into the White House. And in the inaugural parade there were no persons of power. There were the blacks who were freed. There were the backwoodsman with their Coonskin caps. All of the American people helped themselves they all walked into the White House and had a party and started eating all the food. And Jackson said that's right because the White House belongs to the people. When the oil lamps burned in the back rooms and they said this looks to us like the French Revolution is coming here. We've got to do something about that. We've got to stop this.
And Jackson was the last Republican president until the whole Republican idea vision was recast. It was recast in the 1850s. And the first candidate they put forth was John C Fremont. Which Californians remember from their history. He lost to Buchanan in 1856. But their second candidate Abraham Lincoln won. Because the situation had gotten out of hand and only somebody with primal vision could have held it together. Because the recast Republicans were the ones who have the vision of why are we doing this. Why is anything here at all? Where did all this come from? What really was the story? And most importantly what qualities of humanity and morality and intelligence do we have to have to entertain that vision in a realistic way and to apply it to our lives. And make it come to be. That's why Lincoln is so great. Because it brought the Jeffersonian vision back. He said this is why. Not for control that's not the issue. It's not North against South. It's not industrial against planters. In fact the Civil War is between two power faction groups. The north and the south both were power faction groups. One based on northern industry and that one based on southern industry. But the losers were going to be the American people. So he said the civil war is being fought for the American people. Not for the victory of any power group. And because Lincoln held that vision tenaciously, would not let it go. He was like Jefferson. He was a monumental hero. You couldn't have picked abhagavad-gita warrior any better for the time in place than Jefferson or Lincoln. He wouldn't let go. So Lincoln was killed when the Civil War was seen to be coming to a close so that he wouldn't reconstruct the country along those pristine visionary lines.
Well they called it reconstruction. The reconstruction of the carpetbaggers. Our power group one and your power group lost is the way that they talked at that time. And of course that chubrease(?), that pride led directly to Theodore Roosevelt. Carry a big stick. Yeah the Philippines are ours. Cuba is ours. Maybe when we get big enough I will take Ireland back. That's...that's what was happening. All this is nascent here with Jefferson because he understood.
Two weeks before Jefferson died. Less than that ten days before he died. The last letter that Jefferson ever wrote, June 24th 1826. To a friend named Roger Whiteman. he was a chairman of the Independence Day celebration. Was going to be fifty years to the day. And he wrote to Jefferson can you come to the celebration. I mean who, who should be at the celebration but you. But Jefferson was was ill. You know what he had chronic diarrhea. He drank mineral water all his life from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. And his system had become leached out by the excessive minerals in the mineral water. And he died of chronic diarrhea. He couldn't keep anything down. That's how he died.
So he wrote to White, "Respected sir, the kind invitation I received from you and the part of the citizens of the city of Washington to be present with them at their celebration." How revolutionary. He never let go of it. It's the country belongs to the people. the celebration is their celebration. As one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own and the fate of the world, it's flattering to myself and it's heightened by the honourable accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness to be deprived by it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. But acquiescence is a duty under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to control. I should indeed with peculiar delight have met and exchanged their congratulations personally with the small band. The remnant of that host of worthiess who joined with us on that day in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country between submission or the sword. And have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens after half a century of experience and prosperity continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, that I believe it will be, to some part sooner to others later but finally to all, to the whole world, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves. No one ever terrorizes us without our permission. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of thought. All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs. Nor favorite few born booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are downs of hope for others. For ourselves let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rites in an undiminished devotion to them." And of course he goes on to thank him again for the invitation.
The core, the key, the trigger where tyranny locks us in to the whole response syndrome is by inducing us to give up our personal contact with divinity. And to say that it has to be mediated through some structure. That it has to be theologically informed and refined and ritualized. And that all of this is necessary for our own good and therefore we have to put this control into the hands of others. Who are experts. Who are specialists. Who are professionals. And they are going to take good care of us as long as we trust them to do it.
For Jefferson when he put together The Philosophy of Jesus, he realized Priestley's book comparing Socrates in Jesus, the best of the classical world. The best of the religious insight. But Socrates was excellent in his kind but he taught an elite few. He taught the young men of Athens. The wealthy young men who could afford the time. And had the intelligence, had the intellect, to go through the Socratic dialogues with him. It was elitist. If not in terms of money and positions certainly in terms of intelligence. But Jesus as a person talked to everybody Everybody. Doesn't matter whether you understand some theological argument. It doesn't interfere with your god-given right to distinguish between good and evil for yourself. Long as you're not deluded. Any human being can do it. and so Jefferson attacked the Trinitarian position as a subtle way by which theocratic structure was induced in between men and his contact with the divine. You have to figure it out. It's not self-evident. If you put three dots upstanding for the three persons of the Trinity and then put a circle around for that as the unity you've got all kinds of issues there. You can go on as we have gone on for thousands of years figuring out what that means.
So that language instead of being an expressive key from the individual becomes a hermeneutical enterprise of interpretive responses between people all mediated by a theologically structured background. Which of course allows it to be unresolved and go on and on and on. Road without end. And what Jefferson was doing with his Philosophy of Jesus is saying, look there is no theology at all necessary here. There was no Christian Church. He was a sophisticated representative of the Hebraic religious genius that said that the individual has the right by design to have an immediate contact with a divine. Now that was the whole issue. So that the rights of man begin there if we understand it right. Because the emphasis is not on theological subtlety but on personal morality. The ethics of our life are the only way in which we need to work out that relationality, that relationship.
So The Philosophy of Jesus was put together in the white house by our third president. And he attempted to bring all of the Gospels into harmony by having The Philosophy of Jesus laid out. And its title page, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth abstracted from the account of his life and doctrines given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Being an abridgment of the New Testament for the use of the Indians unembarrassed with the matters of fast or faith beyond the level of their comprehensions. It's in his own handwriting on the title page. Wait a minute, for the use of the Indians. Jefferson here is bringing his Franklinesque open cosmic comprehension to bear. That's right we have all got to be Indians, in a very special way, in order to be Americans in order to be free. A very peculiar mysterious until you understand it and then suddenly is like the veils of mist lifting and everything becomes understandable. There was a mystery in this country.
Benjamin Franklin wrote in some of his letters of a strange account that he was in the deepest coal mines in the world and they were in the United States. And they were on the Delaware coastal area, very close to the seashore. And they went down into the ground at an angle and went underneath the sea. And Franklin personally went and toured those coal mines. And when he was going through he noticed that the strata of the cold strata we're all bent at a certain angle. And at the top of the strata you could take a pick and you could pick away at the exact top of this coal strata and there in the slate, a millimeter above the coal when the coal would come away there were impressions of leaves and ferns in the slate. Now the old theocratic religion said the world is created in 4004 BC. Franklin says there's no way that that coal is only 6,000 years old. There's no way that there are impressions of ferns and leaves underneath the Atlantic Ocean. There must be almost infinities of time to have allowed all this to occur. And then Jefferson refined it further. Because Jefferson put his finger on it.
Jefferson was the greatest collector of American English dictionaries with Indian languages. When he left the White House he had more than 50 volumes of all the American Indian languages with English. That trunk incidentally was stolen in Jamestown. It turned up later and everything was torn up and ripped up and everything lost. But the American Indian languages were for Jefferson the core. The human heartedness of what Franklin had discovered in nature. Franklin saw it as a natural mystery, a natural phenomena. Jefferson saw it is focused even more on the American Indian as the prototype of natural man. Because Jefferson was the first to have the great insight that languages developed. And it takes time for languages to develop. It takes time for Spanish and French and Italian to differentiate themselves from Latin. It takes centuries if not millennia. The American Indian languages have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. That they are so old that they have lost any kind of cognate sense between them. And therefore the American Indians are ancient as the hills. And man has been around for so long that we have to use geologic terms to describe him. And that the theologic structure that's been foisted upon man's religious understanding of himself and nature is completely a delusion. Because he's not making up a speculation. The languages existed before any Europeans came. They were differentiated before anybody came. Nobody made that data up. Nobody fudged those documents. And the only rational explanation is that those languages were so separate because it took tens of thousands of years for them to differentiate themselves.
And Jefferson loved the American Indians just like Franklin because they were like the core, the root core of the natural man. They didn't have any theological structure. The Great Spirit was available in a personal Vision Quest. Well it's the only guarantee of Liberty that there is. they were primordial man before there was any kind of a complication by empires.
And Jefferson said we have all got to look at the New Testament just like the Indians look at it. We have to see it in that natural, primordialness. And then we see Jesus as a man. That he occurs to us has a glowing excellent beacon that man can regain his natural rationality about the divinity. About himself. the delusions fall aside. This is what was going on. and he says we know that his mission was co-opted by theocratic structures because in our own time we've seen the same darn thing happen with her attempts at Liberty. And we know that they there were Federalists back then working to co-opt this whole scene even then. So the important thing is not to lose track of that insight. That if we get trapped thinking that there's some mental structure which we metaphysically have to spin out to understand, we lose that keen edge of personal directness. Which is the only true indicator of morality. which is the only way in which the visionary capacity of Liberty is maintained in the individual. so Jefferson was extremely careful on these points in these issues.
Jefferson wrote to John Adams. This is in the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson in two volumes published by the University of North Carolina press Chapel Hill, 1959. In volume 2 page 591, Jefferson to Adams, Monticello April 11th 1823. "Dear sir, the wishes expressed in your last letter that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist would make me immortal." He loved Adams at this time. They had made amends and they are two old men who could just talk straight to each other. They'd already had all the shenanigans you can have. And they got down finally where they just talk to each other as they pleased. "I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist which I can never be. Or rather his religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God he did. the being described in his five points is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore. The creator and benevolent governor of the world. But a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to atheism by their general dogma that without a revelation there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a God. Now one-sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians. The other 5/6 then who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian revelation are without a knowledge of the existence of a god?"
This gives completely a Ghandi Clause to the disciples of a Seles, Tamayo, Spinoza, De Niro and DeHalbach. The argument which they rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is that in every hypothesis of cosmogony you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something. And according to the rule of sound philosophy you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. That's Leibniz principle of sufficient reason. Well these were literate gentlemen, very literature.
"They say then then it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world as it is now going on and may go on forever. By the principle of reproduction which we see in witness. Than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause or creator of the world. Being whom we see not and no not the whose form substance and mode or place of existence or of action no sense informs us. No power of the mind enables us to the villainy or comprehend. On the contrary I hold without appeal to revelation, that when we take a view of the universe in its parts general or particular it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The structure of the earth itself with its distribution of lands, waters and atmospheres. Animal and vegetable bodies examined in all their minutness particles. Insects, mere atoms of life yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth. The mineral substances, their generation and uses. It is impossible I say for the human mind not to believe that there is in all this design cause and effect up to an ultimate cause. A fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator. While permitted to exist in their present forms and their regenerator into new and other forms.
You know Jefferson was the first archaeologist. When he was president they found some bones. Large bones. And Jefferson sent people to the site and he had an excavated and that was the first dinosaur skeleton ever turned up. Nobody wanted to say anything. Nobody had never seen anything like this. Nobody knew that there was anything like this. Jefferson said well keep it because our children or our children's children, they'll...they'll have the vision they'll understand what this is. It was just another indication that the earth is old and ancient. That man is not a child. We've been mature for a million years. Now we're still capable of being deluded and that's what has to be changed.
He writes further to Adams. And in the letter concludes with some Greek phrases which he translates then. "It truly means that in the beginning God existed. And reason or mind was with God and that mind was God. This was in the beginning with God. All the things were created by it and without it was made not one thing that was made." And he says then, "This text so plainly declaring the doctrine of Jesus". This is from John. "The doctrine of Jesus that the world was created by the supreme intelligent being has been perverted by modern Christians to build up a second person of their trithyism. By a mistranslated imputation of the word logos. One of its legitimate mean...meanings indeed is a word. But in that sense it makes an unmeaning jargon. While the other meaning, reason, equally legitimate explains rationally the eternal pre-existence of God and his creation of the world. Knowing how incomprehensible it was that he word the mere action or articulation of the voice in organs of speech could create a world they would undertake to make of this articulation a second pre-existing being. And ascribed to him not to God the creation of the universe. The Atheist here plumes himself on the uselessness of such a god and the simpler hypothesis of a self existent universe. The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them. Who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible. And without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father and the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding and restore to us they primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." Then he closes by saying, "So much for your quotation of Calvinist mon dieu."
As you can see from just the glimpse that we have it's almost impossible to conceive of Jefferson. That in our current miseducated state we have been given such a delusive digest of American history in our childhood and in our lives that we are shocked to realize what we don't know about even the basics. even the fundamentals. Is it a can of worms? Don't think so, I think it's called the torch of Liberty. I think that's what they called it.
Well we'll do more next week and just keep in there slugging
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