A Treatise of the Laws of Nature. Richard Cumberland
Sun” (Διόνυσον διὸς νοῦν) “Dionysus, the Mind of Jove, because the Mind of the World. The World is called Heaven, which they call Jove. Whence Aratus, being to speak of Heaven, saith, Let us take our rise from Jove.” So in an antient Inscription, the visible Heaven is intituled, Eternal, the best and greatest, Jupiter.107 Agreeably to which Sense of the antient Pagans, that Tradition of theirs, reported by Aristotle, is to be understood touching the Divinity of the Heavens. “It hath been delivered to us by those of very antient Times, both that the Stars are Gods, and that the Divinity containeth the whole of Nature.”108
This Notion was so familiar with the Pagans, that Strabo, writing of Moses, could not but suppose the Gods of his Religion to be of this Nature and Notion; “That which containeth us all, and the Earth, and the Sea, which we call Heaven, and the World, and the Nature of the whole,” Universal Mundane Nature.109 So Juvenal describes the God of the Jews.
Nil praeter Nubes & Caeli numen adorant.
They Worship no Deity but the Clouds and the Heavens.110
So Diodorus Siculus reporteth Moses to have been of Opinion, “That the Heaven which surroundeth the Earth, is the only God and Lord of all.” These Pagans did not imagine, that the Jews could Worship any other God than their supreme Jove, the Heaven, which, in the larger Sense of the Word, signifieth the whole corporeal World.
Pliny thus; “The World, or the Heavenly Canopy, must, in Reason, be thought a Deity.” Such a Deity was the European-Pagans Jove, and such a Deity was the Asiatick Bel, or Baal; for that Name, as Selden111 informs us, means the Heaven, the Comprehension of the Aether, and the Stars; and the Heaven was called Bel by the Chaldeans, as Eustathius reporteth from the Antients; and Philo saith of the Chaldeans, “They suppos’d the visible World, or Heaven, the Supreme Deity.”112 The Proclivitie of Heathen Mankind to such a Notion of the supreme Deity is visible in a late Writer of the Affairs of China. “A mighty Nation of the Tartars, though they are not, by what appeareth, of any particular Religion, but in differently receive all Religions, which they are acquainted with, and conform themselves to all, not knowing, or caring to know, what it is they adore, and they have no Knowledge of the Idols, or Deities, which the Antients ador’d; nor doth it appear, that they receive, or retain those first Notions which the Instinct of Nature, without the Assistance of any supernatural Light, impresseth upon the very Breast of every Man; yet they Worship the Heavens, and to these they pay their greatest Adoration; and this maketh the greatest Impression upon the Minds of the People.”113 Of the barbarous Nation of the Gallans, bordering Habissina, we have this Account. “They have no Idols, and but very little Divine Worship. If you ask them concerning God, or any supreme Deity, or who it is that governeth the Earth with so much Order and Constancy? They answer, Heaven, which embraceth in their View all the rest.”114 A great Nation on the North of Japan, are said to have no other Religion, save only the Worship of Heaven; and the supreme Deity of the Chinese is said to be the Heaven, which they suppose increate, without Beginning, unbodily, and a Spirit.115
According to the Testimony of the Scriptures, and of Heathen Authors the consent of all the Christian, and the best of the Hebrew Writers, the first and earliest Idolatry of the Heathen, was the Worship of the Lights of Heaven, which inferreth the Antiquity of the Worship of Heaven, and that the first Original Pagan Theism, was the deifying the Mundane System. Vossius indeed affirmeth, (agreeably to their Opinion, who suppose the Sun to have been the Pagans Supreme Deity,) that their Worship of the Coelestial Lights was antecedent to the Worship of the Aether, Heaven, or the World; which is a supposition altogether as groundless, and unreasonable, as if he should suppose them the Worshippers of Mountains and Rivers, before they were the Worshippers of their great Goddess, the Earth.116 Plato supposes, that the Worship of the Heaven and the Stars was the eldest Religion of the Pagans; and that the Worship of the Heaven was contemporary with that of the Stars, both amongst the Greeks and Barbarians. The Greeks receiv’d Astronomy, and the Knowledge of those Coelestial Deities, the Stars, from the Barbarians, those antient Pagan Nations, which were the Inventors of Astronomy, and which, in Aegypt and Syria, had great Advantage for the Knowledge of the Stars, because of the Serenity of their Country. The Theology, therefore, of those antient Pagan Nations may be understood from the Greek Theology of the elder Times, which Plato, in his Cratylas, thus representeth. “The first Inhabitants of Greece seem, as many of the Barbarians now, to have thought, that the Sun, and the Moon, and the Earth, and the Stars, and the Heaven, were the only Gods. When they beheld these running round perpetually, they call’d them Θεοὺς from Θέω which signifieth, to run. Afterwards taking Notice, that there were other Gods, they called them also by the same Name.” As the first Inhabitants of Greece deified, not only the Sun, Moon, and Stars, but the Heaven above them: So, when Diodorus saith of the Men of antient Times, “That, beholding the World and universal Mundane Nature, being struck with Admiration, they thought the prime eternal Gods were the Sun and Moon, calling the one Osiris, and the other Isis”; this is not to be understood, as if they deified the Sun and Moon, exclusively of the rest of the World above them: But, beholding the World and universal Mundane Nature, and being struck with Admiration, they deified it, and such illustrious Parts of it, as the Sun and Moon. So, when Maimonides saith of the Zabii, that their Tenet was, “There is no other God but the Stars”;117 this is not to be understood exclusively of the Heaven, as if the Zabii did not suppose it the Supreme Deity; for the same Author saith of them; “All the Zabaists held the Eternity of the World; for the Heavens, according to them, are the Deity.” So Philo saith of the Chaldeans, “They suppose the Stars to be Gods, and the Heaven and the World” (which must consequently be the Supreme) “to which they refer the Fates of Men, acknowledging no Cause of Things abstract from Sensibles.”118 If the first Heathen deified the Lights of Heaven, because of their Amplitude, Pulchritude, Utility, and Residence in Heaven, they could not fail, upon the same Account, to deify the illustrious Canopy of Heaven.
The one Mundane System Jove is, in some sort, the multitude and variety of the Pagans Gods and Goddesses; and there is a certain Polytheism of theirs, which is nothing more than a Polyonymy of this one Supreme God, or a calling him by various Names. For it is not unusual with the Pagan Theologers, to reduce the Multitude and Variety of their Deities to one Jupiter, in various Senses, and upon various Accounts. Sometimes they consider the Mundane System Jove, as Originally and Comprehensively the All of their Deities, as Valerius Soranus representeth them.
Jupiter Omnipotens, Regum Rex ipse deumque,
Progenitor Genitrixque Deum, Deus unus & omnis.
Omnipotent Jupiter, the King of Kings and Gods,
The Father and Mother of the Gods, one God and all Gods.119
Thus Jupiter is all the Gods; not as if there was no Polity of Gods; but as the Founder, the Father and Mother, of the Polity, and a Deity comprehensive of all the Deities; for Jupiter is the same with Pan, universal mundane Nature, whom, in the Certamina at Athens, they look’d upon as a Pantheon, the comprehension of all the Gods. So the Author of the Orphick Verses, “having suppos’d the World a great Animal, and having call’d this Mundane Animal Jupiter,” placeth Heaven, the Earth, the Sea, and the Whole of the Universe in Jupiter’s Womb,
Πάντες τ’ ἀθάνατοι μάχαρε’ θεοὶ ἠδε θέιναι.
And all the blessed immortal Gods and Goddesses.
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