Demosthenes and questioning the gods

[alanajoli]

One of our regular library patrons always has interesting myth tidbits for me, since he knows I'm a myth geek. Today, he and I got talking about philosophy, and I started trying to track back a quote he was pretty sure belonged to Demosthenes. The gist was this: Man created the gods and myth to explain the world. So I had to do some looking,

Comments

[dqg_neal]

"In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him."
Although not so nearly as old of a quote. Trying to remember where the original concept of that came from.

"Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen." -Michel de Montaigne

“Men create the gods in their own image.” - Xenophages

[alanajoli]

Xenophages for the win! He's, what, a century or two earlier than Demosthenes or Aristotle?

I congratulate you on your fact-checking/research skills (and/or your innate knowledge of the topic).

[randyhoyt]

The quote that comes to my mind is by Xenophanes: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes]. (Is that the same person as "Xenophages"?)

> But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or
> were able to draw with their hands and do the work
> that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the
> gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they
> would make their bodies such as they each had
> themselves.

His dates are roughly 570-480 BCE. Many of the Greek philosophers in the sixth through fourth centuries questioned the myths of the gods, but I get the sense that they all (even Xenophanes) believed in gods or a god of some sort -- they didn't argue against the existence of divine being(s) in general.

[alanajoli]

Many of the Greek philosophers in the sixth through fourth centuries questioned the myths of the gods, but I get the sense that they all (even Xenophanes) believed in gods or a god of some sort -- they didn't argue against the existence of divine being(s) in general.

See, that's what I was thinking, too. The idea of men creating the image of gods as men seems to go hand in hand with Classical Greek art. But in a different conversation, a friend pointed out a figure called Diagoras the Atheist who was a contemporary of Xenophanes (or slightly after). Wikipedia has a link to his philosophy, and it certainly looks like the root of modern atheism.

[randyhoyt]

I think that true, modern atheism like this would have been fairly uncommon in ancient Greece, though it certainly seems that Diagoras sounds like one. (One of my philosophy professors, himself an atheist, suspected that many of the great minds of ancient Greece were really closet atheists ... but I suppose there's just no way to know that.) Much more common than atheism was a re-definition of God in more abstract terms by Aristotle, the Stoics, and others.

Thanks for the link to Diagoras!

[jongibbs]

I don't know if this is of any use to you, but you might find it interesting - it's based on the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica.
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Demosthenes

[alanajoli]

What a cool resource! I'll definitely need to bookmark that. (It didn't directly address my Demosthenes question, but I can definitely see where a 1911 encyclopedia could come in handy for research...)