Society and its Purpose
Appendix 6. (303).
G. D. Romagnosi made several attempts to establish the precise steps normally taken as nations become more civilised. These endeavours are to be praised although this Italian philosopher, in following foreign authors, made gratuitous hypotheses rather than facts the basis of his theories. One of these totally gratuitous hypotheses, altogether contrary to genuine fact, presupposes feticism as the first form of religion to appear in the infancy of nations. According to this theory, people cannot arrive at monotheism without first passing through the superstition called Sabaism.
Another completely anti-historical hypothesis, which contains a still more serious error than the previous theory, is Romagnosi’s supposition that the doctrine of the unity of God does not pertain to primitive tradition but depends on philosophical abstraction. As a result, Romagnosi infers that the one God adored by the world is only man himself with all his limits removed:
| The second extreme comes much later when wiser people have succeeded in
forming an idea of the interior human being with his intellectual qualities and
moral virtues. They go on to abstract every limit and defect from this being,
and make him the unique author and conserver of nature and the object of the
majority’s belief. (Supplementi ed Illustrazioni alla Seconda Parte delle Ricerche Storiche sull’India antica di Robertson, note 1) |
I have commented on this opinion of Romagnosi under its religious aspect in an article in Annali di Scienze Religiose published at Rome. Its invalidity could be shown simply by stating that it is a mere hypothesis, although we could also add that it is contrary to the most ancient traditions. Finally, we could observe that Romagnosi’s supposition proves his profound ignorance of Christian theology, which teaches that the Almighty is not a human being whose limits have been removed, but being in its essence with which neither human beings nor any other created thing have anything in common, or any true likeness; their only relationship with God is that which theologians call analogy. It is impossible, therefore, to arrive at the concept of the one God of the Christians through abstraction by starting from the concept of human being.
Moreover, the teaching that makes of God a nature having nothing in common with anything we know was already acknowledged by pagans. Plato teaches it expressly. The later Platonists dealt with it ex professo as we can see in Plotinus (Enneads, bk. 4, c. 2) who maintained that we can predicate of God nothing that we know, not even the word `essence’ or the word `being’.
This totally negative idea of God, an idea separate from every knowable thing, was common in Greece before Christ. It was also known in India before its diffusion in Greece. This explains the following extraordinary definition found in the Oupnekhat:
| He is great and not great; he surrounds and does not surround all things; he is light and not light; he has a face totally covered with veils and not covered; he is and is not the lion that devours all things; he is and is not terrible; he is and is not happiness; he makes light of death and dies; he is venerable and not venerable; he says and does not say, `I am in everything’ (Oupn. 50, n. 178). Elsewhere, it says: Those who say `we have understood him’ have not understood him; those who have not understood him have understood him; those who have understood him have not understood him. |
Romagnosi, therefore, does not know what constitutes the true system of monotheists and adorers of the one God; his reasoning is based on his own imperfect, false concept of the only God.
I would add finally that Romagnosi, led by his own systematic way of thought to the strangest absurdities, does not flinch before them. It is in fact absurd, and almost ridiculously so, to maintain as Romagnosi does that civilisation has advanced further amongst indigenous Americans than in India because Americans adore one God while Indians as a whole are idolatrous. He says:
| In some ways, we ought to prefer the ancient inhabitants of Peru and the
Society Islands, granted that we know the Peruvians believed in the Great
Spirit and that the inhabitants of the Hawaiian and Society Islands
acknowledged a supreme Lord of all visible and invisible things. (Supplementi ed Illustrazioni alla Seconda Parte delle Ricerche Storiche sull’India antica di Robertson, art. 3, §1) |