Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus I: Demonstratio Christiana

To prove the thesis many apologists employ a psychological argument, drawn from the native weakness of human nature. But the necessity of revelation does not arise from an internal weakness, but from external difficulties; for, unless we exaggerate this weakness more than is fitting (after the norm of ultrasupranaturalism), from it we can only conclude that revelation is useful or convenient, or at most that it is morally necessary for a perfect and complete, not for a fitting, knowledge of natural religion. Thus St. Thomas,¹ whose words the apologists we speak of cite, proves only the conveniency of revelation for the complete knowledge of natural religion, not the necessity of revelation for a merely adequate knowledge of the same religion. Moreover St. Thomas, loc. cit., already presupposes the existence of revelation, asking whether Christians draw the truths of natural religion more conveniently from philosophy or from revelation and believe them by faith; but we are not yet permitted to presuppose the existence of revelation. Hence it is dangerous and difficult to establish the necessity of revelation psychologically or a priori, arguing from human nature itself. In fact, since nature is so constituted that it can absolutely know natural religion, the question is only whether in the concrete, amid the obstacles of the pagans, it knows this religion or not. The answer to this question is found nowhere except in the history of the gentiles, who lived and live outside the compass of the revelation of the Old and New Testament. If the gentiles in the course of so many centuries never attained a fitting natural religion, they demonstrate in fact the moral impossibility of attaining that religion. To this impotence of their own efforts corresponds the moral necessity of divine aid, i.e. of revelation.

Now history establishes that the pagan peoples, having once lapsed from monotheism, never recovered a fitting knowledge of natural religion.

To illustrate the matter we briefly review the religions of the uncultivated, the cultivated, the most cultivated pagan peoples, and finally of the greatest philosophers among them.

1. The religion of the uncultivated ("primitive," "natural") pagan peoples, who inhabited or still inhabit America, Africa, Oceania and part of Asia (negroes, Indians, uncultivated Mongols). That they originally acknowledged and worshipped one God appears evident.

For they fear even to the present the Great Spirit, who inhabiting heaven rules over nature, men, and spirits. Besides him, however, they venerate innumerable gods, namely good and evil spirits, the stars, the elements of the world, wooden and stone images. And that they may render their gods propitious to themselves, they offer them prayers and sacrifices, sometimes even human ones. This cult is on every side surrounded by shamanism, magic and sorcery. The moral life of the uncultivated is for the most part corrupted by voluptuous unchastity, monstrous cruelty, horrible injustice (children, old men, slaves are very often killed or buried alive).

2. The religion of the cultivated pagan peoples, sprung from the Indo-Germanic, Mongolian, Hamitic and Semitic stock.

a) To the Semitic stock are assigned the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Canaanites, Aramaeans, Sabaeans, Edomites, Ammonites and Moabites, the Arabs and the Hebrew-Israelites. Originally all Semites adored one true God under the name El, Il, Ilu, Allah, Alloho.

Gradually, however, they fell irreparably into naturalistic polytheism, making gods of the things of nature and the stars of heaven; multiplying through their cities local gods and goddesses. Religious worship for the most part ran counter to the supreme principles of morality, e.g. to the god Moloch they offered human sacrifices; Astarte, the goddess of love, they honored with unchastities. From this ruin only the Israelites are excepted, as having been endowed with revelation, and likewise the later Arabs through Muhammad, by whom they were brought back to monotheism by the aid of the Old and New Testament.

b) The Hamites belong to the uncultivated peoples, except the Egyptians. As the theological books and the inscriptions testify, the more ancient Egyptians worshipped one only God, the creator of heaven and earth. In the course of time, however, many gods, both national and local, appear: shades, elements, stars; finally especially animals (the bull Apis, the crocodile, the cat) enjoyed divine worship. That the Egyptians were especially given to magic is well known.

c) The cultivated Mongols, namely the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese (500,000,000), once professed pure monotheism. As their sacred books testify (King), one God Shang-ti ("great and only"; "emperor of emperors") or Thien ("heaven = lord of heaven") is the creator, governor, remunerator of all things. Gradually, however, to the worship of one God was joined the cult of guardian spirits or invisible beings, and also the cult of ancestors, who are counted among the spirits. By which process polytheism gradually prevailed. In the sixth century B.C. Confucius, attempting to renew the earlier religion, in fact destroyed it utterly, preaching a moralism without a personal God and a religious worship purely political and subservient to convenience and utility. Thus he prepared the way for pantheism, scepticism, atheism, with which from the first century B.C. Indian Buddhism was mingled. The modern Mongols profess a gross idolatry and a religious indifferentism, united by the single bond of a superstitious cult of ancestors.

d) To the Indo-Germans are counted especially the Indians, Iranians, Germans and Scandinavians, Celts and Slavs, Greeks and Romans. That they anciently practiced the same monotheistic religion and adored one God, whom they called "father of heaven" (Diaus Pitar [Sanskrit], Zeus Pater [Gr.], Diespiter = Iuppiter [Lat.], Tyr [Germ.], Tius [Goth.], Osòs, deus, deinos), is certainly established. The later Indo-Germans, however, abandoned monotheism.

The Indians fell into pantheistic Brahmanism: Brahma is the universal and indeterminate being, from which the gods, the world, men, all things emanate. This pantheism the Buddha ("the wise"; by his proper name he is called Sakyamuni) in the sixth century B.C. changed into pessimism, scepticism and atheism, preaching: Nirvana, i.e. nothingness, to be the end of all religion and of life. The modern Indians adore partly Brahma, partly Buddha, together with innumerable other gods, whom they honor with superstitious and magical rites.

The Iranians (Armenians, Persians, Medes) in the sixth century B.C. were taught by Zoroaster or Zarathustra the Zend-Avesta religion (zend-avesta = books of the law). This religion essentially consists in a dualism. For it acknowledges two gods: Ormazd, the principle of good, and Ahriman, the principle of evil, to whom a third was afterwards added, Mithra, the solar god. To this insipid mythology were added certain most excellent doctrines and laws drawn from the Old Testament.

The ancient religion of the Celts, Germans, Scandinavians and Slavs cannot be clearly defined. We certainly know, however, that polytheism flourished among them. They acknowledged several principal gods, to whom many secondary divinities were added. To all these they offered sacrifices, sometimes even human ones. Their religious worship was debased by superstitious, impure and cruel rites.

3. The religion of the most cultivated pagan peoples, namely the Greeks and Romans, abounds in errors.

Above all it displays a depraved notion of the divinity. For although the supreme god Jupiter recalled the memory of primordial monotheism, nevertheless an insane polytheism flourished. Many principal gods and goddesses, almost innumerable secondary, national and local ones, were adored; indeed, eminent men (heroes), the forces of nature, rivers and springs (nymphs), animals, trees (dryads), images were reckoned among the number of the gods.

Religious worship was equally unworthy of God. Venus was worshipped by unchastity, Bacchus by drunkenness, Mercury and Laverna by theft and fraud; Jupiter himself was infamous for adulteries and other crimes. Sacrifice, the center of religious worship, was turned into a horrible crime; dread cruelty, foulest luxury and deadly superstition made up the elements of the sacrifices. "Not only human blood, but much more wickedly, human modesty perished, as it were, immolated."²

The principles of morals, therefore, since they were harmed even by the religious rites, were far less acknowledged in profane life and in public law. Suffice it to recall that slaves were deprived of liberty and often killed, infants exposed to death, men very often sacrificed to the gods, and that the most unchaste love of boys and the promiscuity of the sexes were commonly tolerated. Indeed the very conscience of these crimes had so perished that no one perpetrating those enormous crimes was thought to be evil, nor thought himself evil.

But this sad face was shown not only by the religion of the common people:

4. The religion of the pagan philosophers. Although the best and greatest philosophers taught certain splendid things, nevertheless their religious doctrine agreed neither with natural theology nor with natural ethics.

The doctrine of one, personal, provident God and creator was, as far as we know, rightly understood by none of the pagan philosophers.

Many philosophers did not acknowledge a supramundane God: the Ionians taught the divinity to be a natural force, the Pythagoreans the soul of the world, the Stoics and Eleatics the world itself, the Sceptics admitted none at all, so that Juvenal could sing: That shades exist and realms beneath the ground Not even boys believe, save those not yet washed in the bath.³

Those, however, who admitted a numen distinct from the world thought of it uncertainly and falsely. Socrates approved the Delphic oracles (as Plato and Alcibiades testify), and dying sacrificed a cock to Aesculapius. Plato subjected God to fate, held the world to be eternal, admitted secondary gods, contended that souls are particles of the divinity. Aristotle denied providence, contended that the world is eternal. Cicero denied divine prescience, seems to admit several gods, and maintained that we know nothing certain about the nature of the gods. "All these (philosophers)," says St. Augustine, "and others of the like kind, and even Plato himself, thought that sacred rites must be performed to very many gods."⁴ The philosophers' ignorance of God is followed by: a doctrine of morals adverse to the first laws of nature. No pagan philosopher taught that God is to be loved; none knew the nature of sin, of virtue, of holiness. Socrates calls good what is pleasant to man, evil what is harmful to himself; he approves luxury; he taught that the sum of moral duties is bounded by the civil laws. Plato professed almost the same errors as his master, defending besides drunkenness at the Bacchanalia, the exposure of infants and of the infirm, the community of wives, abortion, monstrous lusts and the concubitus of males, and dread slavery. Aristotle approved nearly all these things, praising in addition lascivious images, and calling the love of God absurd. Cicero taught only civil virtue, commanded hatred and vengeance against enemies, excused lying and perjury. The herd of Epicurus, preaching a voluptuous life, denied all virtue and all sin. The Stoics, holding and doing about the same, placed morality only in bearing and doing all things with a proud and unperturbed mind. — Finally, the principle and sanction of all morality, namely the immortality of the soul, scarcely any of the ethnic philosophers believed with certainty. Plato himself, who of all men thought and wrote more rightly about immortality, nevertheless seems to have doubted it.⁵ Whence Cicero, diligently going through Plato's book on the soul, says: "I know not how it is that, while I am reading, I assent; when I have laid down the book, and have begun to think with myself about the immortality of souls, all that assent slips away."⁶ Of the same book Paulinus of Nola more truly sings: "Which, besides the title, contains nothing certain within."⁷

It is indeed true that, after the promulgation of the gospel of Christ, the ethnic philosophers felt somewhat better about religion. Yet it is evident that they drew the few things, which are true and good and which they proclaim, from the Christian religion. Thus the later Stoics: Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus show a knowledge of sacred Scripture. The Neo-platonists professedly attempted to regenerate the pagan religion with Christian ideas and institutions, though in vain. The "modern pagans" too, although they attack Christian revelation, nevertheless draw from it almost all the truths which they set forth. But if they recede from it, they immediately pass into atheism or monism, and thence deny the supreme principle of all natural theology and ethics.

With these things set forth, the argument from historical induction for the necessity of revelation is altogether conclusive. Revelation is morally necessary in the present condition, if it is established that the human race, from the time at which it is found in this condition, by its own effort has never sufficiently known natural religion.

But it is established that in the present condition neither the uncultivated, nor the cultivated, nor the most cultivated peoples, indeed not even their foremost philosophers, have ever sufficiently known natural religion. Therefore revelation is morally necessary in the present condition for the human race for a fitting knowledge of natural religion.

A fortiori the conveniency of revelation, or its moral necessity broadly taken, urges. Revelation, namely, is a help and a benefit most greatly to be desired for all men "for attaining more easily and more universally those things which are already contained in the natural manifestation and could be understood from it."⁸

Which doctrine the First Vatican Council splendidly comprehends thus: "To this divine revelation it is indeed to be attributed, that those things which among divine matters are not of themselves impervious to human reason can, in the present condition of the human race, be known by all with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error.

Not, however, for this reason is revelation to be called absolutely necessary, but because God out of his infinite goodness has ordained man to a supernatural end, namely to share in the divine goods, which wholly surpass the understanding of the human mind."⁹