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, because I thought that was actually pretty early for a thought that more often gets attributed to Marx ("Man creates God, then gets on his knees and worships his invention.") or Rousseau ("God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor."*). Though Demosthenes was a contemporary of Aristotle, and was therefore post Socrates, I had assumed that the rationalist thought of that era tended to leave the gods where they were and get on with logical thought, rather than bothering about their existence.

The best quote I can find from Demosthenes online that goes along with the general idea is this: "Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." (This rather seems the principle around which quite a lot of urban fantasy novels, alongside the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, are based, as it allows the supernatural to exist alongside the mundane without the mundane world giving much notice.)

So I'm putting the call out to all of the intelligent and wonderful (and possibly better read in ancient philosophy than me) people who read this blog: is there a Demosthenes quote like the one my acquaintance recalled? Is the concept of inventing mythology as explanations as old as the Greek rationalists, or is it more of a modernist notion?

--

*I had actually always attributed this quote to Mark Twain, though substituting "gentleman" for "likable sort." I've always liked it, because I felt it commented more on human consciousness than higher powers of any sort, but that could just be my reading of it, out of context.

Comments

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

"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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagoras_of_Melos#Philosophy) and it certainly looks like the root of modern atheism.

[randyhoyt.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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...)