Person (monotheism)

“ Monotheism brings mono-nomism. The moral law, which is absolute, self-identical, eternal and immutable in the holy nature and will of God, becomes universal and irrepealable not only for the earth but for all the moral universe. ”

“ For the purpose of this argument I take Monotheism to be the doctrine ‘that the universe owes its existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-existent, eternal, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous, and benevolent personal being, who is distinct from and independent of what he has created.’ By wisdom and will I mean that which I should mean using the same words of any animal able to perceive, remember, reflect, judge, and determine, and active in that ability or those abilities. ”

“ The chief divinity becomes the only divinity; a god becomes God. But divinity, in becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness necessary, beyond nature,—in heaven. Finally, in transcendental idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally united ”

“ Monotheism, on the contrary, the rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human being—consequently the belief in a normal God, beside whom there are only false, spurious Gods—has perhaps been the greatest danger of mankind in the past: man was then threatened by that premature state of inertia, which, so far as we can see, most of the 180other species of animals reached long ago, as creatures who all believe in one normal animal and ideal in their species, and definitely translated their morality of custom into flesh and blood. ”

“ The theory has been held in the past, and is still held, that monotheism was the primitive form of religion and that the worship of many spirits or many gods is a corruption of primitive thought due to man's intellectual feebleness or to his moral depravity. It is urged that such a monotheistic system was the natural one for unsophisticated man. ”

“ On the other hand, I have sought to show—in my little book The Idea of God—that the Infinite and Eternal Power that animates the universe must be psychical in its nature, that any attempt to reduce it to mechanical force must end in absurdity, and that the only kind of monism which will stand the test of an ultimate analysis is monotheism. ”

“ Given a sufficient time, philosophy tends to abstract the personal qualities from the Deity concept of pure monotheism, thus reducing this idea of an unrelated God to the status of a pantheistic Absolute. ”

“ All these sad but insuperable facts—truly the dark side of nature—are made intelligible to religious faith by amphitheism; they are the "works of the devil," who opposes and disturbs the perfect moral order in the world of the "good God." For pure monotheism which knows only one God, one perfect highest being, they remain unintelligible. If, with a monotheistic creed, any one still continues to talk of the moral order of the world, he in so doing shuts his eyes to the undeniable facts of history, both natural and civil. ”

“ Author of all things, He is the beginning and the end of all law, as of all religion. The first command of the Decalogue announces the principle of Monotheism — that there is only one living and true God, who is the Creator of all things, and the only object of human worship. ”

“ Is the Christian view of the world inseparably bound up with this ancient outlook, or can it be purged of it? Is the moral fervor and idealism of Christianity its essential and permanent contribution, a contribution to a rational appreciation of human life? Probing still deeper, let us not be afraid to ask ourselves whether the surgery which this thesis implies does not involve the daring of a break with theism as only a developed form of primitive animism? In ethical monotheism, may not the monotheism be the protecting envelope from which the butterfly has already flown? ”

“ In the long run we know that the mob triumphed, and that every religion of the West was orientalised, every superstition and neurotic tendency developed, and philosophy was brought to its knees utterly debased, until its function was merely to be the apologist of all that superstition taught or did. For the present, rational thinking men were alive. When they died, exclusive monotheism came, carrying before it, like a flood, the greatness of the former world. ”

“ They create mental contradictions. Consequently, the gods are arranged in a hierarchy. Finally, the idea of one God, or of monotheism, developed. The belief arose that every phenomenon is produced by the immediate action of the one God. As man’s vision widened and his observations increased in scope and depth, the concept of a monotheistic universe became clarified. Monotheism is the climax of the theological stage of thinking. ”

“ If Man is the same in all ages, differing only in degree of development, and this element is natural to him, then we must expect to find such expressions of it in the poets and philosophers; in the religion of India, Greece, and Rome. Men of the same spiritual elevation see everywhere the same spiritual truth. If this doctrine of Monotheism proceed from tradition alone, then it must be more clear and distinct as we approach the source of the tradition. ”

“ They stood between men and the Gods. Divine symbols became more rare. Inspiration was not usual; a miracle was a most uncommon thing; the favourites of heaven were children born of the Gods; admitted to intercourse with them, or enabled by them to do wonderful works. Now Monotheism would restore inspiration to all. By representing God as spiritual and omnipresent, it brings him within every man's reach; by making Him infinitely perfect, it shows his Wisdom, Love, and Will always the same. ”

“ Last of all came Monotheism, concentrating still further the theological explanation of the universe, but rendering it still more incoherent and irrational, for "the conception of a single God involves a type of absolute perfection complete in each of the three aspects of human nature, affection, thought, and action. ”

“ Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and, suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and staring face. ”

“ But Monotheism here stands in a very different relation to science.’ ‘If a uniform mode of work on a large scale is attributed to the one God, the mutual connexion of things in their origin and action becomes not only a possible, but even a necessary consequence of the assumption. ”

“ Monotheism and polytheism are alike in their origin. The one has imputed to different beings all the phenomena in the different departments of Nature, one being having the charge and superintendence of one department and another being having another department. Good and evil have thus been parceled out to different deities or demons. On the other hand, monotheism attributes all to some one being, and his existence is no [Pg 343] more rational than the existence of the whole catalogue of the mythologies of all antiquity, or the stupid beliefs of the present barbarous tribes. ”

“ This tendency to multiply their deities, to deify mere abstractions, and to recognise a distinct deity as presiding over every common act and process of life, weakened or destroyed the sense of the personality of the gods, and thus indirectly promoted that advance to Monotheism which philosophy had made in a different direction. ”

“ Accordingly, while the belief in good spirits tended towards the formation of the doctrine of Monotheism, the belief in evil spirits led naturally to the acceptance of a single supreme evil deity, conceived as embodying all that is bad, destructive, and immoral. ”

“ The advance of modern science carries us irresistibly to what some German philosophers call monism, but I prefer to call it monotheism. In getting rid of the Devil and regarding the universe as the multiform manifestation of a single all-pervading Deity, we become for the first time pure and uncompromising monotheists,—believers in the ever-living, unchange [Pg 23] able, and all-wise Heavenly Father, in whom we may declare our trust without the faintest trace of mental reservation. ”

“ Monotheism and Monodiabolism, both originating simultaneously in the monistic tendencies of man's mental evolution, together constitute a Dualism which to many is still the most acceptable world-conception. Nevertheless, it is not the final goal of human philosophy. As soon as the thinkers of mankind become aware of the Dualism implied in this interpretation of the world, the tendency is again manifested towards a higher conception, which is a purely monistic view. ”

“ It may be seen from the reality and truth of this theory how much mistaken those men are who hold, owing to their religious prejudices or to their systems of logic and history, that monotheism was the first intuition of man, or at any rate of the privileged races. [Pg 105] This is altogether impossible, since such an opinion is opposed to the genuine development of the intelligence, to its primitive constitution and progress, and to the essential solidarity of human and animal nature. ”

“ But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate. ”

“ The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain? ”

“ Thus, out of the earlier Monotheism grew up that full-blown Amphitheism which at present rules the modern Cosmology of civilized peoples; and which appears in Science as the thoroughly perverted Dualism against which we have contended most determinedly in our General Morphology. ”

“ These heathen were worshipping the same source and standard of goodness before which they themselves had been doing homage. A new sense of human brotherhood stirred within the exclusive race, and with it the perception that there is one Father of all men. Religion threw off all lingering polytheistic notions and soared to the vision of One God. Monotheism dates as a clear consciousness from this era.51 It was saved from becoming an abstract, philosophic conception, merging good and evil in a common source, by the stern ethical dualism of the Persians. ”

“ For a spiritual Monotheism, while it awakens a consciousness of the holiness of God, and the sinfulness of the creature, tends to make fear prevail over love, and the sense of separation over the sense of union. The idea of the unity of the Divine and the human—an original unity which yet has to be realized by self-sacrifice—and the corresponding idea that the individual or natural life must be lost in order to save it, were set before humanity, as in one great living picture, in the life and death of Christ. ”

“ A greater proof of the unnaturalness of Monotheism to the human mind before a certain period in its development, could not well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, Christianity, has persisted to the present time in giving partial satisfaction to the mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its theology the thoroughly polytheistic conception of a devil. ”

“ This is natural; as soon as certain faculties of the imagination awoke in man, such as astonishment, curiosity, he would seek to understand all that passed around him; his first idea would be that all the phenomena in nature would proceed from the presence inherent in them of a power compelling to action in the same way as man feels himself obliged to act. This belief in the course of age would easily tend towards fetishism, then to polytheism and finally to monotheism ”

“ The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs. ”

“ In every heart was an altar to the Unknown God. Not that it was customary to attach any idea of unity to these unseen powers. The supposition that in ancient times and in very unenlightened conditions, before mythology had grown, a monotheism prevailed, which afterwards at various times was revived by reformers, is a belief that should have passed away when the delights of savage life and the praises of a state of nature ceased to be the themes of philosophers. ”

“ The passage to Monotheism is then easy. [33] The spiritual leaders of every nation,—obedient souls into whom the spirit enters and makes them Sons of God and prophets,—see the meaning which the popular notion hides; they expose what is false, proclaim the eternal truth, and as their recompense are stoned, exiled, or slain. ”

“ When the march of thought towards unity has reached its limit in pure monotheism, the work of theologians and especially of metaphysicians tends to refine the conception of divinity, assumed as First Cause, or moral ideal, or both at once, but always as an inaccessible ideal, visible only in occasional glimpses. The logical, necessary, inevitable consequence is the weakening of the emotional state. ”