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
Some unbelievers there doubtless were after Petronius, whose perdurable
maxim that "Fear first made Gods in the world," [833] adopted in
the next generation by Statius, [834] was too pregnant with truth
to miss all acceptance among thinking men. The fact that Statius in
his verse ranked Domitian with the Gods made its truth none the less
pointed. The Alexandrian rationalist Chaeremon, who had been appointed
one of the tutors of Nero, had explained the Egyptian religion as
a mere allegorizing of the physical order of the universe. [835]
It has been remarked too that in the next century the appointment of
the freethinking Greek Lucian by Marcus Aurelius to a post of high
authority in Egypt showed that his writings gave no great offence
at court, [836] where, indeed, save under the two great Antonines,
religious seriousness was rare. These, however, were the exceptions:
the whole cast of mind developed under the autocracy, whether in the
good or in the bad, made for belief and acquiescence or superstition
rather than for searching doubt and sustained reasoning.
The statement of Mosheim or of his commentators (Eccles. Hist. 1
Cent. Pt. I, ch. i, § 21, note; Murdock's trans. Reid's ed.) that
Juvenal (Sat. xiii, 86) "complains of the many atheists at Rome" is
a perversion of the passage cited. Juvenal's allusion to those who
put all things down to fortune and deny a moral government of the
world begins with the phrase "sunt qui," "there are (those) who";
he makes far more account of the many superstitious, and never
suggests that the atheists are numerous in his day. Neither does he
"complain"; on the contrary, his allusion to the atheists as such
is non-condemnatory as compared with his attacks on pious rogues,
and is thus part of the ground for holding that he was himself
something of a freethinker--one of the last among the literary
men. In the tenth Satire (346 sqq.) he puts the slightly theistic
doctrine, sometimes highly praised (ed. Ruperti, 1817, in loc.),
that men should not pray for anything, but leave the decision to
the Gods, to whom man is dearer than to himself. There too occurs
the famous doctrine (356) that if anything is to be prayed for it
should be the mens sana in corpore sano, and the strong soul void
of the fear of death. The accompanying phrase about offering "the
intestines and the sacred sausages of a whitish pig" is flatly
contemptuous of religious ceremonial; and the closing lines,
placing the source of virtue and happiness within, are strictly
naturalistic. In the two last:--
Nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia; nos [or sed] te
Nos facimus, Fortuna, Deam, coeloque locamus,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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