A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
Other verdicts of this kind by Ihne, Jevons, and others, will no
better bear examination. (See Christianity and Mythology, pt. i,
ch. iii, § 3.) Dr. Warde Fowler, the latest English specialist
to handle the question, confidently supports the strange thesis
(dating from Schwartz) that the multitude of deities and daimons
of the early Latins were never thought of as personal, or as
possessing sex, until Greek mythology and sculpture set the
fashion of such conceptions, whereupon "this later and foreign
notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of
the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer
who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking"
(The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 147). That
is to say, the conception of the Gods in the imageless period was
an "older way of thinking," in which deities called by male and
female names, and often addressed as Pater and Mater, were not
really thought of as anthropomorphic at all! How the early Romans
conceived their non-imaged deities Dr. Fowler naturally does not
attempt to suggest. We get merely the unreasoned and unexplained
negative formula that "we may take it as certain that even the
greater deities of the calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus,
and Vesta, were not thought of as existing in any sense in human
form, nor as personal beings having any human characteristics. The
early Romans were destitute of mythological fancy...."
Either, then, the early Romans were psychologically alien to
every other primitive or barbaric people, as known to modern
anthropology, or, by parity of reasoning, all anthropomorphism
is the spontaneous creation of sculptors, who had no ground
whatever in previous psychosis for making images of Gods. The
Greeks, on this view, had no anthropomorphic notion of their
deities until suddenly sculptors began to make images of them,
whereupon everybody promptly and obediently anthropomorphized!
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