Polytheism

“ Then, at the very best, polytheism must be far from good,—at its highest, it must be low. Were it much better than it has ever been—had it all the merits of Greek polytheism, without any of its faults, save those which are inherent in the very nature of polytheism—it would still be but a poor religion, for its essential and irremediable defects are such as to render it altogether incapable of truly satisfying the nature of man. ”

“ It cannot be denied, but that heathen polytheism still exists amongst this people, and hangs as a drag upon its religious and ecclesiastical life. It drags down divine to physical representations, and fills the earth with dead images and superstition. ”

“ The form in which religion generally presents itself in early history is what we commonly call Polytheism, though it is quite possible—a matter about which I am not careful curiously to dogmatise—that there may have been in some places an original Dualism, like the ancient Persian, or even a Monotheism, out of which the Polytheism was developed. ”

“ Hence I declared to thee that nothing could save the Christian faith from the imputation of polytheism except the assumption that the God of the Christians, like the original myth of all primitive faith, hath in himself a double spiritual sex-hood, of which Christ is the Son, 'begotten,' not created; 'conceived,' not made; divine, because as the son of man is human, the Son of God must be divine. ”

“ For there cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever may have been the starting-point, there lay in the popular theology a tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself in kindred but not always easily recognisable forms, like the children of a family or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism as the type under which history presents the objects of religious faith in the earliest times, we have to remark that under this common name, as in the case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in speculative idea and in social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the face. ”

“ It was this primitive intuition which supplied either the subject or the predicate in all the religions of the world, and without it no religion, whether true or false, whether revealed or natural, could have had even its first beginning. It is too often forgotten by those who [353] believe that a polytheistic worship was the most natural unfolding of religious life, that polytheism must everywhere have been preceded by a more or less conscious theism. In no language does the plural exist before the singular. ”

“ The theistic scheme of the old Greek polytheistic period is the broadest and finest that the ancient polytheism produced. It recognized a divine element in all sides of human life, from the lowest to the highest; it marked out the various directions of human feeling and effort, and in its final outcome it reached the conception of a unity in the divine government of the world, and gave expression to man's best aspirations for the present and for the future. ”

“ Our ideas of polytheism being chiefly derived from Greece and Rome, we understand by it a certain more or less organized system of gods, different in power and rank, and all subordinate to a supreme God, a Zeus or Jupiter. The Vedic polytheism differs from the Greek and Roman polytheism, and, I may add, likewise from the polytheism of the Ural-Altaic, the Polynesian, the American, and most of the African races, in the same manner as a confederacy of village communities differs from a monarchy. ”

“ Polytheism was shown to be the soil from which all trinitarian conceptions naturally spring—the Brahmanic, Zoroastrian, Homeric, Plotinian, as well as the Christian trinity— the latter being a Greek idea engrafted on a Jewish stalk. ”

“ There has evidently been a fore-time, though it is prehistorical, when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest, reflecting a primitive and precarious condition of human society. I take polytheism to have been, in this earliest stage, the wild growth of superstitious imagination, varied indefinitely by the pressure of circumstance, by accident, by popular caprice, or by the good or evil fortunes of the community. ”

“ Whether monotheism was a discovery or a recovery, whether it rose on the ruins of polytheism, or whether polytheism is a corruption of a purer faith, is a question we need not attempt to settle. Nor need we decide the priority of claim to the title of religion as between nature-worship, or ancestor-worship, or ghost-worship. The farther we go back in history the more obviously true is the charge of anthropomorphism so commonly brought against religion. ”

“ As, century after century, the ages roll on, polytheism comes back under the disguise of mariolatry and the adoration of saints; image worship becomes as rampant as in old Egypt; adoration of relics takes the place of the old fetich-worship ”

“ In the measure in which reason advances either on the path of scientific investigation or of philosophical specu lation, polytheism must retreat and disappear; in the measure in which it discerns unity, order, system, moral government, indications of spiritual character and design in the world, monotheism must rise and spread. ”

“ When Christianity first raised its head, it was told that polytheism alone was religion.” Continuing in this strain, he condemns every system of religion which stands opposed to another, and infers from the fact of Pg 754 such opposition the necessary falsity of them all. He even goes to the extent of affirming that the doctrines of the Catholic Church changed age by age, according to the tone of the prevailing philosophy. ”

“ This was, in fact, a necessary part of heathenism itself; for the very essence of polytheism is the belief that each people has its own gods, and, therefore, springing from them, its own traditions of right and wrong. From its own gods each people hoped for blessings and prosperity in its national and corporate capacity. To offend or alienate them was to risk the existence of the civil community, and what was the will of the gods of any particular nation was to be learned from the primitive original tradition of that nation. ”

“ The ten commandments, in their simplest form, are generally admitted to be relics of the Mosaic age. To account for the first and most important of these we have, in particular, to call in the authority of Moses. “I am Jahveh thy god; thou shalt have none other gods beside me,” is the foundation stone of the development of monotheism. It implies the existence of polytheism, but it decrees that polytheism shall be abolished. If the people, or any class of the people, continuously obeyed it, they had in time to become pure monotheists. ”

“ The essence of polytheism is the worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarily the author and the authority of all things. Men are feeling more and more that there are many spiritual forces in the universe, and the wisest men feel that some are to be trusted more than others. There will be a tendency, I think, to take a favourite force, or in other words a familiar spirit. ”

“ Polytheism, in its inextricable confusion of the persons and functions of the great divinities, and in its assignment of the sovereignty of the world to a supreme being who combines in himself the attributes of several such minor deities, tends toward the doctrine of fundamental unity. ”

“ The many gods of polytheism are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,—the abstractions of the mere popular mind—are by certain periods reduced to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities, somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to which they belong. ”

“ Now the absolute character of theological philosophy, by which the comparison between Polytheism and Catholicism was instituted, prevented men from conceiving the bare possibility of any further stage. ”

“ Polytheism, the doctrine of a plurality of gods, has prevailed in every part of the world. The most interesting pantheons of the gods were those of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The Hebrews, who were polytheists, borrowed their gods from Assyria and Babylonia. ”

“ Lecky names as the alternative forces that underlie every115 important movement of mankind,81 a sense of human dignity and a sense of sin, are distinctive marks of polytheism and monotheism. Monotheism, with its one God so far removed from man, inspires a feeling of human nothingness in comparison with him. Polytheism, with its far more anthropomorphic and less awful gods, does not dwarf man thus, but enables him freely to compare himself with the divinities he worships. ”

“ Again, as all derivative languages are found to be shaded by one primitive language, so all derivative religions will, on examination, be found to be shaded by the one primitive religion. That is, the leading or fundamental idea will be found more or less unclouded in all the more modern religions. Now, which is it that shades all religions? Is it Polytheism or Monotheism? Is the fundamental thought of either found in all the others? Will any one pretend that Polytheism is the primitive religion? Is its leading thought of many gods, found in all religions? ”

“ On looking at the most renowned nations of the ancient heathen world, we see the people prostrating themselves before innumerable divinities; and we are ready to conclude that polytheism is the natural belief of man, unenlightened by revelation. ”

“ General rôle of polytheism. Polytheism has played a great rôle in the religious history of the world. Representing in general a thoughtful protest against the earlier shapeless mass of spirits, it expressed more definitely the belief in the intellectual and moral divine control of all things. It flourished at a time when there was no general demand in human thought for coöperation in 451supernatural Powers. The sense of variety in the world was predominant, corresponding to the absence of coöperation among the tribes and nations of the world ”

“ And if, when we regard this idolatrous polytheism in itself, one is lost in wonder at its ever having arisen, at its existence, at its continuance, so, when one regards it as throned in the customs, feelings, convictions, and interests of society, one wonders how any moral force could ever overthrow it. ”

“ This comparison expresses well enough the opinion which tends to prevail amongst our savants on the subject of the historical development of religions. The idea of the only God is at the root,—it is primitive; polytheism is derivative. A forgotten, and as it were slumbering, monotheism exists beneath the worship of idols; it is the concealed trunk which supports them, but the idols have absorbed all the sap. ”

“ It is hardly likely that a fitter opportunity will soon offer for an examination of the claims of Christianity. We have nothing to dread but the deadness and indifference of the public mind. It is not credible that polytheism should stand a day upon any fair comparison of it with the religion of Christ. You yourself are not a believer (pardon my boldness) in the ineffable stupidities of the common religion. ”

“ In the very earliest times, before history was written, it is supposed that the religion of all these nations was monotheistic, and that polytheism was a development as men became wicked and sensual. The knowledge of the one God was gradually lost, although an indefinite belief remained that there was a supreme power over all the other gods, at least a deity of higher rank than the gods of the people, who reigned over them as Lord of lords. ”

“ A further explanation, perhaps, is that each new religion that was introduced at Rome did not oppose and did not contradict polytheism, the principle of polytheism being precisely that there are many gods; whereas Christianity denying all those gods and affirming that there is only one, and that all others must be despised as non-existent, inveighed against, denied, and ruined or threatened to destroy the very essence of polytheism. ”

“ In like manner, the various systems of Polytheism were local, and animated with no spirit of propagandism. Each country had its own divinities; and as a miserable substitute for one, supreme omnipresent being, the number of local deities was so, multiplied that Polytheism was likely to break down of its weight. So far from excluding the Gods of a conquered territory, conquest only served to enlarge the boundaries of idolatry; until, as in the Pantheon at Rome, thousands of divinities were assembled in friendly embrace, representatives of the diversified worship of mankind. ”

“ The doctrine which they do widely hold, and which opens to them a course tending in one or other of these directions, is polytheism culminating in the rule of one supreme divinity. High above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of local nature-spirits, of the great deities of class and element, there are to be discerned in barbaric theology shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity, henceforth to be traced onward in expanding power and brightening glory along the history of religion. ”

“ But all the contents of the human mind, like those of the material world, are subject to a constant evolution, or progressive change of form into something more perfect; and so Polytheism has an inherent tendency to further development, being indeed itself the result of a similar development of mythology. This tendency paves the way for the approach of Monotheism; for this it is to which the polytheistic stages of religion tend in their further development. ”