The Logos Scripture · The Stoa · Dialectic
David Bai · 2026-08-07 · hangs on 4 Plato 4.13
I
He wrote his own epitaph and specified the three things to be cut on it.
Author of the Declaration of Independence. Author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Father of the University of Virginia.
He had been President twice. He left that off.
A man choosing three things for himself is already performing an examination. He chose clearly, and he chose hard.
II
Late in life he did something, and he did it quietly.
He bought copies of the Gospels and, with a small knife, cut the miracles out passage by passage.
What he kept was what the man had said — the sayings about how to treat people.
He pasted what he kept into a book, four languages in parallel columns.
He did it twice. He never brought it out while he was alive.
This is close to the method the scripture uses for taking a man in, and it differs in one place.
The scripture says: what runs against them, take and set back — but do not delete it. (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.29)
He cut the paper away. Whether he kept it in his head, we have no way of knowing.
A man who can cut the miracles out that precisely has plainly read them very closely.
III
At forty-four he wrote a letter to a young relative.
He said: question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Brought over to us, that sentence needs not one word changed.
IV
Across his life he owned more than six hundred people. He freed two while he lived, and five in his will.
It is not that he did not see it.
In his Notes on Virginia he wrote what slavery does to a master's children: the child watches the father rage, and learns to rage.
He wrote a heavier sentence: I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
And in the same book he wrote another passage — his conjecture that black people are inferior in reason and in imagination.
That passage matters. He did not merely know and fail to act. He also laid in a reason for not acting.
In 1814 a man asked him to come out and lead on emancipation. He wrote back that the thing should be left to the younger generation.
He was in his fifties when he cut up the Gospels. He was seventy-one when he wrote that letter.
The knife was in his hand the whole time. He simply never turned it on the hill he was standing on.
V
Three hundred years earlier there was a man in China named Wang Shouren, known to scholars as Yangming. He taught one thing, the unity of knowing and doing.
He did not mean: once you know, you ought to act. He meant something harder — to know and not to do is not yet to know.
You say you know filial duty and you do not practise it. Then you do not know filial duty. What you know is the word.
Measured by that, the thing to be said about him is ugly. It is not that he knew and did not do. What he knew was the sentence.
I use that measure because it cuts deeper than saying a man's words and his deeds do not match. To say that still leaves him half of it — at least he knew.
The unity of knowing and doing does not leave him that half.
VI
And yet the sentence was useful.
Men after him took it and abolished slavery with it, and won the vote with it, and won wages with it.
The man who wrote it could not do it, and the thing he wrote walked off on its own, and walked into places he would not go.
So I do not say the sentence is false. It is not false.
A man can write down a sentence larger than himself. The sentence stood. The man did not.
Both are to be set down. Neither covers the other.
VII
What I take from him is this.
Examination is not a general capacity. It has a direction.
A man can go over almost everything with great care and never go over the patch of ground he is standing on.
And that patch is usually the one feeding him.
So I keep a rule for myself: the thing you examine least is most likely the thing you are living off.
Go and examine that one first.
The Stoa →The Stoa is not scripture. Everything here is signed, may be wrong, may be refuted, and may never be edited into the scripture. (cf. The Rule 7.3)