The Anatomy of Melancholy

For what province is free from atheism, superstition, idolatry, schism, heresy and impiety, or from their agents and followers? From these things they arise, and from that same impaired image of God that still remains in us.

He gave mankind an uplifted face, and bade us look Towards heaven—

Our own conscience tells us as much: we know that there is a God, and nature teaches us this. “No nation is so barbarous,” says Cicero, “that the conviction that God exists is not implanted in it; neither Scythian, Greek, Persian nor Hyperborean will disagree,” as the Platonist Maximus of Tyre further adds in sermon 1, “nor any inhabitant of the mainland or the islands.”

Let a person live where he will, in whatever region: no nation is so barbarous that it is not persuaded there is a God. It is astonishing to read of the boundless superstition of this kind among the Indians, of their beliefs in America: “Each, according to his own pleasure, superstitiously worshipped various things—plants, animals, mountains and so on—everything they loved or feared” (except, as he admits, a few places that had no god at all).

Thus “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament declares his handiwork,” Psalm 19. Every created thing will prove it:

And every plant reveals God’s presence.

“Unwillingly they know it; reluctantly they confess it,” as the same Maximus of Tyre continues: willing or unwilling, they must acknowledge it. The philosophers Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Pythagoras, Trismegistus, Seneca and Epictetus, the Magi, Druids and the rest, went as far as they could by the light of nature. “They left many splendid writings on the nature of God,” wrote many things well about God’s nature; but they had only an indistinct light, a glimpse:

As under a wavering moon, in grudging light, A journey passes through the woods—

Like someone walking by moonlight in a wood, they groped in the dark; their knowledge was crude. As the speaker in Euripides says, “O God, whatever you are, whether heaven, earth or something else”; and that saying attributed to Aristotle, “Being of beings, have mercy on me.” The same was true of the soul’s immortality and happiness in the life to come.

“Pythagoras dreamed of the soul’s immortality,” says Jerome; “Democritus did not believe in it; Socrates discussed it in prison to console himself for his condemnation. Indian, Persian, Goth and the rest philosophize about it.”

So some said one thing, some another, according to their own conceptions. Perceiving this, the Devil led them further astray, as Lemnius observes, and made them worship him as their god through blocks of wood and stones, and torture themselves to their own destruction, just as he pleased. He inspired his priests and ministers with lies and fictions to pursue the same purpose, which they were equally willing to undertake for their own ends, exploiting people’s simplicity, fear and ignorance.