GODS.

(Origin of the Pagan Gods.)

What the Heathens have said of Jupiter's original, seemed to me for a long time so unaccountable, that the more I thought on it, the more monstrous it appeared to me, and such, in a word, as I could not apprehend how the philosophers could maintain it; but I have at last discovered that they might be led into that error by a sort of reasoning, the weakness where

of it was no easy thing for them to find out Let us see, first of all, what Hesiod says of the genealogy of the gods. Hesiod de Deor. Generat. ver. 116. ⁴⁴ He begins with the Chaos; this is the first being he lays down; afterwards he brings in the Earth and Love. He adds, that Erebus and the Night were begotten by the Chaos, and that Æther and the Day proceeded from the marriage of Erebus and Night, and that the Earth, without any marriage begot Heaven and the Sea; and afterwards, being married to Heaven, she produced Oceanus, Rhea, Themis, Thetys, Saturn, &c. This extraordinary, fruitful marriage gave but little comfort to the Earth; for Heaven, her husband, shut up all her children as soon as they were born. She encouraged them to revenge, and they did it so effectually that Saturn, with a stroke of a scythe, cut off his father’s organs of generation, and cast them into the Sea. They produced a froth, from which sprang the Goddess Venus. The children of Saturn and Rhea, were Vesta, Ceres, Juno, Pluto, Neptune, Jupiter. This is what I take from Hesiod’s poem. Some other genealogists See Cicero, de Natura. Deor. lib. iii, cap. xvii. ⁴⁵ have said, that Æther and the Day, children of Erebus and the Night, were the father and mother of Heaven, and had for their brothers and sisters, Love, Fraud, Fear, Labour, Envy, Destiny, Old Age, Death, Darkness, Misery, Dreams, &c. We have seen, in another place, how Carneades made use of this genealogy to confute the theology of the Stoics. I shall only say now that, according to this tree of consanguinity, there must have been necessarily some god, whose father was not a god; for if, on one hand, it had been granted to Carneades that Heaven, Æther, the Day, Erebus, the Night, were Gods, they would have denied on the other, that the Chaos, which was antecedent to all these divine beings was a God; and consequently they were forced to say, that the Gods had been made of a matter which was not a God, and without an efficient cause which had the nature of a God. -

This is certainly a thought which contradicts the most solid and the most evident notions of natural reason; nevertheless, some great philosophers have supposed the generations of the gods, and have assigned them a cause of their being, which was not a god. “Anaximenes omnes rerum causas infinito aëri dédit, nec deos negavit aut tacuit: non tamen ab ipsis aërum factum, sed ipsos ex aere ortos credidit. August, de Civit. Dei, lib. viii, cap. ii, page m. 711. ⁴⁶ —Anaximenes ascribed the causes of all things to the infinite air, nor did he deny, or say nothing of the gods; yet he did not believe that the air was made by them, but that they had sprung from the air.” By these words of St Augustin, we better understand the doctrine of Anaximenes, than by those of Cicero: “Anaximenes aëra deum statuit, eumque gigni, esseque immensum et infinitum, et semper in motu. Cicero de Nature Deorum, lib. i, cap. x. ⁴⁷ Anaximenes supposed the air to be God, and that it was immense and infinite, and always in motion.” Cicero does not seem to have well related the opinion of this philosopher; for since Anaximenes made the air the principle of all things, and ascribed to it immensity and infinity, we must believe that he supposed it eternal and unproduced; and that if he called it God, under this notion, he did not believe the generation of God in that respect. When therefore he said, that the infinite air was the cause of all beings, and that the Gods themselves were produced from it, he did not ascribe to it the name and nature of God, in the same sense that he ascribed it to the Gods, which owed their origin and existence to the air. Perhaps he was willing, in order to avoid all disputes about words, to give the name of God to the immense and infinite air, which he looked upon as the principle of all things; but he did not pretend,that Saturn,

Rhea, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Minerva, and the other Gods which the Heathens adored, were that air, or had produced it: he supposed, on the contrary, that that air was their principle, as well as that of other beings which compose the universe. He gave this principle a perpetual motion, whence it may be concluded that he took it for an imminent cause, which produced in itself infinite effects without end; and he reckoned amongst those effects, not only the stars and meteors, plants, stones, and metals, but also the gods and men.

This doctrine however, was merely at the bottom Spinozism; for, according to this opinion God, or the eternal and necessary being of Anaximenes, was the only substance; of which heaven and earth, the animals, &c. were but modifications. Thales was perhaps of such an opinion, who taught that water was the principle of all things. Perhaps he called it God on that account. This was the God he meant, when he said that, God not having been produced, was the oldest of all beings. He added that, the world being the work of God, was the most beautiful of all beings. Spinoza would acknowledge this; he does not deny that God is the cause of all things, that is to say, the imminent cause, which modifies itself a thousand different ways, whence results what we call the world, and the whole universe in general. If Thales said also that the world is animated and full of spirits, this signified perhaps that water, the principle of all things, the unproduced God, had so modified itself, that it had formed a soul dispersed through all the bodies, and the particular spirits like the Gods, which were adored by the Heathens. This would help us to comprehend what we have seen elsewhere, and which is doubtless very surprising, namely, that Thales and the other natural philosophers, who lived before Anaxagoras, explained the generation of the world, without interposing the direction of a divine Thales and Anaximenes could not admit it, if they

supposed, the one that water, and the other, that air was the principle of all things, a principle eternal and unproduced; for though, to avoid contention about words, they called this universal and uncreated principle God, they could not consider it as an intelligent cause antecedently to the particular beings which it formed, since it produced them in itself, and from itself, as an imminent cause, and not as a cause external, and distinct from its matter. But because Anaxagoras was the first who acknowledged a spirit distinct from the matter of the world, a pure spirit and unmixed with body, he must have reasoned otherwise than the natural philosophers, his predecessors. He might say, arguing consistently, that the world has been formed by the direction of a spirit, that disentangled and put the parts of matter into order. His hypothesis admitted an intelligence antecedent to the formation of the world; the other hypothesis supposed nothing before the world, except the chaos, or water, or air, &c. And so they were to give a beginning to intelligent beings, as well as to the coarsest creatures. All things proceeded from the first principle, by way of generation or reproduction. Jupiter, the greatest of the Gods, Saturn his father, and Heaven his grandfather, Æther his great grand-father, and all the genealogy upwards, was a particular being, which owed its origin, birth, and existence, to eternal and uncreated matter; the principle of all things; the chaos, according to Hesiod; water, according to Thales; and air, according to Anaximenes. But you will say, did not Thales acknowledge that the Gods knew the very thoughts of men. I answer, that we can only conclude from it, that he ascribed a vast extent of knowledge to some of the beings which the water had produced, and which were called Jupiter, Juno, Venus, Neptune, &c. Homer, who so pompously describes the power of the Gods, says that all proceeded from the ocean.

The great and prodigious absurdity of these hypotheses consists in saying that the Goda endowed with

great knowledge were formed from a principle which knows nothing; for neither the chaos, nor the air, nor the sea, are thinking beings. How then could they be the total cause of those divine natures which, in the system of the poets, and of the most ancient natural philosophers, know so many things? but though those hypotheses be never so false and absurd, I no longer wonder, as I did, how they could be admitted by philosophers. Most of them supposed that the soul of man was material. They believed, therefore, that it was formed of the subtilest parts of the blood, or of the seed. Now, when once this step is made, one may go a great way in a little time. Set experience aside; consult only the ideas of the theory, and it will not appear more easy for matter received in the womb, to be converted into a child, who by eating and drinking grows into a man of great understanding, than for a child to be born of a tree. Hence, a Heathen thinks it possible that, at the beginning, men were born either from the mud of the earth, or from some liquor dropped from heaven. It is not quite certain that the late Dr. Darwin did not think so too.—Ed. ⁴⁸ When this seems to be possible, it is easy to go on, and to believe what the poets did of the birth of Venus.

We may infer from all this, that there is nothing more dangerous or contagious than to lay down a false principle. It is a bad leaven, which though it be but small, may spoil the whole lump. One absurdity once laid down, draws after it many others. If you only err concerning the nature of the human soul; if you think that it is not a substance distinct from matter; that error will lead you to believe that there are gods, who at first were born from fermentation, and afterwards multiplied by marriage. I cannot conclude, without observing a thing at which I am amazed. Nothing appears to me grounded upon clearer and more distinct ideas than the immateriality

of every thinking being, and yet some Christian philosophers maintain, that matter is capable of thinking; and they are philosophers of great parts, and of a most profound meditation. Can we depend, after this, on the clearness of ideas? but do not these philosophers see that, upon such a foundation, the ancient Heathens might err so far as to say, that all intelligent substances had a beginning; and that eternally there was nothing besides matter: this was the opinion of the philosopher Anaximenes, as we have seen above. It was also the doctrine of Anaximander, his master. This inconvenience cannot be prevented by this corrective; namely, that matter becomes thinking, only by a particular gift of God. It would be true, notwithstanding, that in its nature it is susceptible of thought; and that, to make it actually thinking, it suffices to put it in motion, or to order its parts in a certain manner: whence it follows that an eternal, unintelligent, but moveable matter, might have produced both gods and men, as the poets and some Heathen philosophers have foolishly given out.

Art. Jupiter.