Part I, Chapter XII, 1

OF RELIGION

Since signs and fruits of religion are found only in human beings, there is no reason to doubt that the seed of religion, too, is found only in them, and consists in some peculiar quality, or at least some remarkable degree of a quality, absent from other living creatures.

First, it is peculiar to human nature to inquire into the causes of the events people see—some more than others, but all curious enough to investigate the causes of their own good and ill fortune.

Second, on seeing anything that has a beginning, a person thinks it must also have had a cause determining it to begin when it did, rather than sooner or later.

Third, whereas beasts have no other happiness than enjoying their daily food, rest, and desires, having little or no foresight of the future because they do not observe and remember the order, sequence, and dependence of the things they see, human beings observe how one event has been produced by another and remember what preceded and followed. When a person cannot be sure of the true causes of things—for the causes of good and ill fortune are mostly invisible—that person supposes causes suggested by the imagination, or trusts the authority of others believed to be friends and wiser than oneself.

The Natural Cause of Religion: Anxiety about the Future. The first two qualities give rise to anxiety. For, being assured that all things that have happened or will happen have causes, a person who continually strives to guard against feared evils and obtain desired goods cannot help being perpetually concerned about the future. Everyone, and especially those who look too far ahead, is thus in a condition like that of Prometheus. For Prometheus—whose name means the prudent man—was bound to Mount Caucasus, a place with a wide view, where an eagle fed on his liver, devouring by day as much as was restored by night. So the person who looks too far ahead in caring for the future has a heart gnawed all day by fear of death, poverty, or some other calamity, and finds no rest or respite from anxiety except in sleep.

This perpetual fear, which always accompanies humankind in ignorance of causes, as though in the dark, must have an object. And when nothing can be seen, people can blame nothing for their good or ill fortune except some invisible power or agent. Perhaps it was in this sense that some ancient poets said the gods were first created by human fear; said of the gods—that is, the many gods of the Gentiles—it is quite true. But acknowledgment of one eternal, infinite, and omnipotent God can more readily be traced to the human desire to know the causes of natural bodies and their various properties and actions than to fear of what may befall us in the future. For whoever reasons from an effect to its next immediate cause, and thence to the cause of that cause, pursuing causes in depth, will at last arrive at the conclusion that there must be—as even the pagan philosophers admitted—one First Mover, that is, a first and eternal cause of everything, which is what people mean by God. All this can occur without a thought for one's fortune, concern for which both inclines people to fear and hinders their search for the causes of other things, thereby giving occasion for the invention of as many gods as there are people who invent them.

As for the matter or substance of the invisible agents thus imagined, natural thought could suggest nothing but the substance of the human soul; and people supposed that the human soul had the same substance as what appears in a dream to a sleeper or in a mirror to someone awake. Not knowing that these appearances are nothing but creations of the imagination, they take them for real, external substances and call them ghosts, as the Latins called them imagines and umbrae. They thought them spirits, that is, thin airy bodies, and imagined the invisible agents they feared to be like them, except that such agents appear and vanish at will. But the idea that these spirits are incorporeal or immaterial could never arise naturally in anyone's mind. For though people may join words of contradictory meaning, such as spirit and incorporeal, they can never imagine anything answering to them. Thus those who by their own reflection come to acknowledge one infinite, omnipotent, eternal God prefer to confess that he is incomprehensible and beyond their understanding, rather than define his nature as an incorporeal spirit and then admit that their definition cannot be understood. Or, if they do give him that title, they do so not dogmatically, intending to make the divine nature understood, but piously, honoring him with descriptions whose meanings are as far as possible from the grossness of visible bodies.

Next, as to how they think these invisible agents produce their effects—that is, what immediate causes they use to bring things about—people who do not know what we mean by causing, which is nearly everyone, have no rule for conjecture but observing and remembering what they have seen precede a similar effect on earlier occasions, without perceiving any dependence or connection between the preceding and subsequent events. Thus from similar things in the past they expect similar things in the future, and superstitiously hope for good or ill luck from things that play no part in causing it. So the Athenians, for their war at Lepanto, demanded another Phormio; the Pompeian faction, for its war in Africa, another Scipio; and others since have done likewise on various occasions. In the same way, people attribute their fortune to a bystander, to a lucky or unlucky place, or to spoken words, especially when the name of God occurs in them, as in charms and conjuring—the liturgy of witches—believing that these can turn a stone into bread, bread into a human being, or anything into anything else.

Third, the worship people naturally offer to invisible powers can consist only of the expressions of reverence they would use toward other people: gifts, petitions, thanks, bodily submission, respectful addresses, sober conduct, prepared words, and oaths—that is, assurances of promises to one another—invoking those powers. Beyond this, reason suggests nothing; it leaves people either to stop there or to rely for further ceremonies on those they believe wiser than themselves.

Lastly, as to how these invisible powers reveal to people what will come to pass, especially their good or ill fortune in general or success or failure in a particular undertaking, people are naturally at a loss. But because they habitually conjecture about the future from the past, they readily treat chance events, after one or two coincidences, as signs foretelling similar encounters ever afterward, and also believe similar predictions from others of whom they have once formed a good opinion.

In these four things—belief in ghosts, ignorance of secondary causes, devotion toward what people fear, and the taking of chance events for omens—consists the natural seed of religion. Owing to the differing imaginations, judgments, and Passions of different people, it has grown into ceremonies so varied that those practiced by one person are mostly ridiculous to another.

For these seeds have been cultivated by two kinds of people. The first have nourished and ordered them according to their own invention. The second have done so at God's command and direction. Both, however, have acted with the purpose of making those who relied on them more disposed to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society. Thus religion of the first kind is part of human politics and teaches part of the duty earthly kings require of their subjects. Religion of the second kind is divine politics and contains precepts for those who have made themselves subjects in the Kingdome of God. Of the first kind were all the founders of Common-wealths and the lawgivers of the Gentiles; of the second were Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Savior, through whom the laws of the Kingdome of God have come down to us.

As for the part of religion consisting in beliefs about the nature of invisible powers, almost nothing with a name has failed, among the Gentiles in one place or another, to be regarded as a god or a devil, or to be imagined by their poets as animated, inhabited, or possessed by some spirit.

The unformed matter of the world was a god named Chaos.

Heaven, the ocean, the planets, fire, earth, and the winds were all gods.

Men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, and a leek were deified. They also filled almost every place with spirits called demons: the plains with Pan and Panises, or satyrs; the woods with fauns and nymphs; the sea with Tritons and other nymphs; every river and fountain with a ghost bearing its name and with nymphs; every house with its Lares, or familiar spirits; every person with a Genius; hell with ghosts and spiritual officers such as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and at night every place with larvae, lemures, ghosts of the dead, and a whole kingdom of fairies and bogeymen. They also ascribed divinity and built temples to mere accidents and qualities, such as Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Contention, Virtue, Honor, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like. When they prayed for or against these, they prayed to them as though ghosts of those names hovered overhead, bestowing or withholding the good or evil for or against which they prayed. They invoked their own wit under the name of Muses, their own ignorance under the name of Fortune, their own lust under the name of Cupid, their own rage under the name of Furies, and their private parts under the name of Priapus; they attributed their sexual defilements to incubi and succubae. In short, there was nothing a poet could introduce as a character in a poem that they did not make into a god or a devil.

The same authors of Gentile religion observed the second ground of religion: people's ignorance of causes and their consequent readiness to attribute their fortune to things on which it had no apparent dependence. They took the opportunity to foist on that ignorance, in place of secondary causes, a class of secondary, ministering gods. They attributed fertility to Venus, the arts to Apollo, subtlety and craft to Mercury, tempests and storms to Aeolus, and other effects to other gods, so that among the pagans the variety of gods was nearly as great as the variety of human occupations.

To the worship people naturally considered appropriate for their gods—offerings, prayers, thanks, and the other observances mentioned above—those same Gentile legislators added images in painting and sculpture. Their purpose was that the less informed, who make up most of the people, might imagine that the gods represented were actually enclosed and, as it were, housed in these images, and so stand in greater awe of them. They endowed the images with lands, houses, officers, and revenues set apart from every other human use—that is, consecrated and made holy to these idols—as well as caves, groves, woods, mountains, and entire islands. They attributed to them not only shapes, some human, some animal, some monstrous, but also the faculties and Passions of human beings and animals: sensation, speech, sex, lust, and procreation, not only by mingling gods with one another to propagate their kind but also by mingling them with men and women to beget mongrel gods, mere lodgers in heaven, such as Bacchus, Hercules, and others. They gave them anger, revenge, and other Passions of living creatures, along with the actions flowing from them: fraud, theft, adultery, sodomy, and any vice that could be taken as an effect of power or a cause of pleasure—all those vices that among human beings are regarded as offenses against law rather than honor.

ON RELIGION

Only humans show signs or results of religion. So there is no reason to doubt that the seed of religion exists only in humans as well. It consists of some quality unique to us, or at least of an especially high degree of a quality not found to the same extent in other living creatures.

First, people naturally ask about the causes of events they see. Some ask more than others, but everyone is curious enough to search for the causes of their own good and bad fortune.

Second, when people see something that had a beginning, they also think it had a cause that determined why it began at that particular time rather than earlier or later.

Third, animals find happiness only in enjoying their daily food, comfort, and sexual pleasures. They have little or no foresight, because they do not observe and remember the order, sequence, and dependence of things they see. People, by contrast, observe how one event produces another and remember which comes before and which follows. When they cannot be sure of the real causes of things—and the causes of good and bad fortune are usually invisible—they suppose that the causes are whatever their imaginations suggest. Or they trust the authority of others whom they consider their friends and think wiser than themselves.

The natural cause of religion: anxiety about the future. The first two qualities create anxiety. People are sure that everything that has happened or will happen has a cause. Someone constantly trying to protect themselves from the bad things they fear and secure the good things they want must therefore always worry about the future. Everyone, especially those who plan too far ahead, is like Prometheus. His name means the prudent man. He was bound to Mount Caucasus, with its wide view, where an eagle fed on his liver and ate by day as much as grew back by night. Similarly, someone who looks too far ahead in worrying about the future has their heart gnawed all day by fear of death, poverty, or other disasters. Only sleep offers a rest from that anxiety.

This constant fear accompanies people when they do not know the causes of things and are, so to speak, in the dark. It must be directed at something. When they can see nothing to blame for their good or bad fortune, they blame some invisible power or agent. Perhaps this is what certain ancient poets meant when they said that human fear first created the gods. That is true of the gods they meant: the many gods of the pagans. But belief in one eternal, infinite, all-powerful God is more easily traced to people's desire to know the causes and distinct powers and workings of natural bodies than to fear of their own future. A person who starts with an observed effect and reasons back to its immediate cause, then to the cause of that cause, and pursues causes deeply enough, will finally conclude—as even the pagan philosophers admitted—that there must be one First Mover: the first and eternal cause of everything. That is what people mean by God. This reasoning needs no concern about personal fortune. Such concern encourages fear and keeps people from investigating other causes, thus giving them reason to invent as many gods as there are people to invent them.

As for the matter or substance of these imagined invisible agents, natural thought gave people no model except the human soul. They supposed that the soul had the same substance as the figure someone sees in a dream while asleep or in a mirror while awake. Not knowing that such appearances are products of the imagination, people took them for real substances outside themselves. So they called them ghosts; the Latins called them Imagines and Umbrae. They considered them spirits, meaning thin, airy bodies, and pictured the invisible agents they feared in the same way, except that these agents appeared and vanished whenever they chose. But no one could arrive naturally at the idea that such spirits were bodiless or immaterial. People can combine words with contradictory meanings, such as spirit and incorporeal, but cannot imagine anything corresponding to the combination. Therefore those who come by their own reflection to recognize one infinite, all-powerful, eternal God prefer to admit that he is beyond their understanding. They prefer that to defining his nature as an incorporeal spirit and then admitting that their definition is unintelligible. Or, if they give him such a title, they do so not to make a dogmatic claim that explains the divine nature, but out of reverence: they honor him with descriptions as far removed as possible from the coarse nature of visible bodies.

Next, consider how people thought these invisible agents produced their effects: what immediate causes they used to bring things about. People who do not understand what we mean by causation—and that is nearly everyone—have no way to guess except by observing and remembering what they have seen happen before a similar effect on one or more earlier occasions. They do not see any dependence or connection between the earlier event and the later one. Consequently, they expect similar past events to be followed by similar future events. Superstitiously, they expect good or bad luck from things that play no part in causing it. For instance, the Athenians asked for another Phormio for their war at Lepanto, and Pompey's faction wanted another Scipio for their war in Africa. Others have done the same on many later occasions. Likewise, people attribute their fortunes to a bystander, a lucky or unlucky place, or spoken words, especially words containing God's name. This is the practice of charming and conjuring—the liturgy of witches. They even believe that such acts can turn stone into bread, bread into a person, or any thing into any other thing.

Third, the worship people naturally offer invisible powers can only consist of the signs of respect they would show people: gifts, requests, thanks, bodily submission, thoughtful ways of addressing them, restrained behavior, words chosen in advance, and oaths that invoke them to assure each other of promises. Reason suggests nothing beyond this. People must either stop there or rely on those they think wiser than themselves to supply further ceremonies.

Lastly, people are naturally at a loss about how these invisible powers tell them what will happen later, especially what their general fortune will be or whether a particular undertaking will succeed or fail. They are accustomed to guessing the future from the past. So after just one or two coincidences, they readily take chance events as signs predicting similar events forever afterward. They are also ready to believe similar predictions from anyone of whom they have formed a good opinion.

These four things—the belief in ghosts, ignorance of intermediate causes, devotion toward what people fear, and the treatment of chance events as predictions—make up the natural seed of religion. Because people's imaginations, judgments, and passions differ, this seed has grown into such different ceremonies that those practiced by one person usually seem ridiculous to another.

Two kinds of people have cultivated these seeds. One has nurtured and organized them according to its own inventions. The other has done so by God's command and direction. Both have sought to make the people who relied on them more inclined to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society. The first kind of religion is therefore a part of human politics. It teaches some of the duties that earthly kings require of their subjects. The second kind is divine politics. It gives instructions to those who have made themselves subjects in the Kingdome of God. The first kind includes all the founders of Common-wealths and the lawgivers of the pagan nations. The second includes Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Savior, through whom we received the laws of the Kingdome of God.

As for religious beliefs about the nature of invisible powers, there is almost nothing with a name that pagans somewhere have not regarded as a god or devil, or that their poets have not portrayed as living, inhabited, or possessed by a spirit.

The unformed matter of the world was a god named Chaos.

The heavens, the ocean, the planets, fire, earth, and winds were all gods.

Men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, and a leek were made gods. People also filled nearly every place with spirits called Daemons: plains with Pan and Panises or Satyrs; woods with Fauns and Nymphs; the sea with Tritons and other Nymphs; every river and fountain with a ghost bearing its name and with Nymphs; every house with its Lares, or household spirits; every person with their Genius; hell with ghosts and spirit officers such as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and all places at night with Larvae, Lemures, ghosts of the dead, and an entire realm of fairies and frightening spirits. They even treated mere occurrences and qualities as divine and built temples to them: Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Conflict, Virtue, Honor, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like. When people prayed for or against these things, they prayed to them as though ghosts with those names hovered overhead, granting or withholding the good or evil they prayed about. They also invoked their own intelligence as the Muses, their ignorance as Fortune, their sexual desire as Cupid, their rage as the Furies, and their genitals as Priapus. They blamed sexual emissions on Incubi and Succubae. In short, there was nothing a poet could turn into a character in a poem that they did not make a god or a devil.

The same founders of pagan religion saw the second basis of religion: people's ignorance of causes. This ignorance made people apt to assign their fortunes to things with no apparent causal connection to them. So the founders took advantage of that ignorance and offered a class of lesser, ministering gods in place of intermediate causes. They credited Venus with fertility, Apollo with the arts, Mercury with cleverness and craft, Aeolus with storms and tempests, and other gods with other effects. Among the pagans there were almost as many kinds of gods as there were kinds of activity.

The same pagan lawgivers added painted and sculpted images to the kinds of worship people naturally thought suitable for their gods, such as offerings, prayers, thanks, and the other practices already mentioned. They wanted the less informed people—that is, the majority—to think the gods depicted by the images really lived inside them, and therefore to fear them more. They gave these idols land, buildings, officials, and income reserved from every other human use. They consecrated caves, groves, woods, mountains, and whole islands to them. They assigned the idols shapes, some human, some animal, and some monstrous. They also gave them the abilities and passions of humans and animals: perception, speech, sex, sexual desire, and reproduction. They imagined gods mating not only with one another to produce more gods, but also with human men and women to produce mixed offspring, mere lodgers in heaven, like Bacchus, Hercules, and others. They gave the gods anger, revenge, and other animal passions, along with the actions that come from those passions: fraud, theft, adultery, sodomy, and any vice that might be taken as a sign of power or a source of pleasure. These were all vices that people regarded as violations of law rather than of honor.