Xenophanes (575 - 480 BC): “One God is supreme among all gods and men. His form is not like that of mortals. His thoughts are not their thoughts”.
Pythagoras (580 - 500 BC): declared at the height of his mathematical system of philosophy that “there are men and there are gods. All values ought to be placed in the unity of the unseen God”.
Heraclitus: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes such as fire when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each”.
Plato (427 - 347 BC): After acknowledging the existence of God and seeing the regularity of His creation, declared that “God determines what is good and what is bad”.
Socrates (469 - 399): “God only is wise”
Aristotle: “God is a living Being, eternal, most good; life and duration belong to God”
Plotinus (204 - 270 AD): “God transcends the ‘All'. God is present through all things”.
St. Augustine : “God is eternal in the sense of being timeless. In God there is none before or after, but only one Eternal present”.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1226 - 1274): “Some think this unnecessary (i.e. proof of the existence of God) since (they say) is self evident. If we knew God's essence, this would be true,….. But we do not know His essence except very imperfectly. Wise men knew more of His essence than does the ignorant and angels know more than either. But no creature knows enough of it to be able to deduce God's existence from his essence. God created the world out of nothing …… He cannot fail; He cannot be weary; or forget or repent or be angry or sad. He cannot make a man have no soul or make the sum of the angels of a triangle be not two right angles. He cannot undo the past, commit sins, make another God or make himself not exist”.
Boethius (a pagan philosopher and a friend of the Emperor Theodoric at whose command he was executed) had this to say about God in his “Consolations” (1524):
“This substance of God consisteth in nothing
else but in goodness; can God do evil?
No ….. Virtuous men are always powerful
and bad men always weak, for both desire
the good but only the virtuous get it.
The wicked are more unfortunate if they
escape punishment than when they suffer it.
In wise men there is no place for hatred”.
Cicero (104 - 43 BC ): “Among men themselves there is no nation so savage and ferocious as not to admit the necessity of believing in a God ….. from whence we conclude that every man must recognise a Deity who has any recollection and knowledge of his own origin”.
Chaucer (1340 - 1400): “All the most noble acts, I dare say, and victories in the old Testament won under God who is omnipotent, were won in abstinence, were won in prayer”.
St. Bonaventure (1221 - 1274): “This universe of things is a ladder whereby we may ascend to God since among these things, some are God's footprints, some God's image, some corporeal, some spiritual, some temporal, some eternal and hence some outside of us and some inside; it follows that if we are to attain to the contemplation of the first principle and source of all things, ….. we enter into our own souls which are the images of the eternal God”.
The Holy Koran (Chapter 10 v. 115): “Unto Allah belongeth the sovereignty of the heavens and the Earth. He quickeneth and giveth death”.
Martin Luther (1483 - 1546): “The first thing that we must do is to consider the matter with great earnestness and whatever we attempt not to trust in our own strength and wisdom alone even if the powers of all the world were ours; for God would not endure that a good work should be begun, trusting to our own strength and wisdom. The greater the might of the foe, the greater is the misfortune if we do not act in the fear of God and with humanity. If Popes and Romanists have hitherto, with the devil's help, thrown kings into confusion, they may still do so if we attempt things with our own strength and skill without God's help. Therefore, let us rouse ourselves, fellow Germans and fear God more than man, that we be not answerable for all the poor souls that are so miserably lost through the wicked devilish Government of the Romanists”.
John Calvin (1509 - 1564): “No one has been the counselor of God capable of affording us any certainty respecting his will or furnishing us any assurance of his disposition towards us what He chose to give or deny us. He alone can furnish us with a testimony respecting himself by giving a sign…..”.
The thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England
Adopted in the reign of Elizabeth 1 ( 1558 - 1603 )
Article One: “There is but one living and true God, everlasting without body parts, a passion of infinite power, wisdom and goodness, the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible…..”.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1629):
“God has no ends”.
“In those things that signify greatness and power, to say he is infinite is not to honour him”
“Therefore to attribute figure to Him is not honour, for all figure is finite”.
“Nor say that he is in this place or that place, for whatsoever is in a place is bounded and finite; nor there be more Gods than one, because it implies them all finite, for there cannot be more than one infinity”.
John Locke (1632 - 1704):
“God, I believe speaks differently, from men”.
Diogenes Laertius (The Stoics):
“They also say that God is a living being, immortal, natural, perfect and intellectual in his happiness, unsusceptible of any kind of evil, having a fore-knowledge of the world and of all that is in the world however, that he has not the figure of a man. He is a creator of the universe, and as it were, the father of all things in common. A portion of him pervades everything and is called by different names according to its powers”.
“They call him Dia as being the cause of everything, and Zenia, in as much as he is the cause of life or because he pervades life. And Athena with reference to the extension of his dominant power over the earth”.
“And Hera on account of his extension through the air. And Hephaistos on account of his pervading fire which is the chief instrument of art, and Poseidon as pervading moisture and Demeter as pervading the Earth. And in the same way regarding some other of his peculiar attributes, they have given him other names”.
Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744):
“Say first of God above………….
Through world unnumbered……the God be known
It is ours to trace him only in our own
He who through vast immensity can pierce
See worlds on worlds, compose one universe
Observer how system into system runs
What other planets circle other suns
What varied beings, peoples, every star
Many tell why heaven has made us as we are”.
Voltaire (1964 - 1778):
Logomacos : Barbarian, who has told you there is a God?
Dondindac : The whole of nature
Logomacos : What idea have you of God
Dondindac : The idea of my creator, of my master who will reward me if I do good and punish me if I do ill
Logomacos : Trash, nonsense all that ….. Is God secumdum quid or in essence?
Dondindac : Idon't understand you
Logomacos : British fool, Is God in one place, beyond all places or in all places?
Dondindac : I have no idea ….. just as you please
Logomacos : These blockheads are troublesome. Let us go step by step. What is God?
Dondindac : My sovereign, my Judge, my Father.
Logomaous : That's not what I am asking you. What is his nature?
Dondindac : To be potent and good
Logomacos : But is he corporeal or spiritual?
Dondindac : How should I know?
Logomacos : What! You don't know what a spirit is?
Mary Baker Eddy (1821 - 1910):
“God is incorporeal, divine supreme, infinite mind, spirit, soul, principle, life, Truth, Love”.
Wendell Phillips (1811 - 1884):
“One on God's side is a majority”
Archbishop Vining:
“It is preposterous for men to think that they could run God's world without reference to God”.
Origen (185 - 254), Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677), Barn Gottfried Von Liebnitz (1664 - 1716) and George Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) and a few other philosophers who have made no secret of their belief in the existence of that primordial essence we call God.
This copious testimony of sages from all ages seems to indicate that sensible men all over the world acclaim the existence of God. It is therefore too late in the day for other sensible men to do otherwise.
The idea of god in african tradition
To the Yorubas, God is Olorun . The ordinary man interpreting this word might regard it as simply “The Owner of the Firmament of Heaven”, Oni orun or Oli orun, which, by employing the usual elision common to most African words, becomes “ Olorun ”.
According to Fela Sowande, the Deity is Olorun , not necessarily because He is the owner of heaven, but because he is the Oluwo Orun , or Olu Awon Orun , “the Master of the Masters of the Sacred Mysteries of the Inner Courts of Heaven”. He does not directly involve Himself in human affairs because the spiritual force generated by Him is so potent that to do so might be fatal to man. In this context, Olorun becomes akin to the Great Unmanifest of Western tradition and the Ain of Jewish tradition. The admirable dissertation of Fela Sowande conceived of an African Trinity consisting of Olorun, Eleda and Olodumare. Eleda , he associated with the Creator; but in an abstruse sense, he declared that “ Eleda does not create life as we would understand that term. He is, however, the root from which comes that which makes it possible for life to manifest”. On Olodumare , whom he analysed as Olodu omo Are , he conceived of a potency, which is “Mighty and Vast, without father, without mother, Self-existing, Self-born”. He then concluded that Olodumare is the least rarefied of the three, and that even at that stage, He is still “neither matter nor conditioner of matter”.
According to Profesdsor Bolaji Idowu, Olorun is self- explanatory… the name thus means “The Owner or Lord of Heaven”. It may also be the shortened form of
Olu Orun , “The Chief or Ruler of Heaven”. The learned Professor then reffered to three eminent scholars, who gave their respective opinions: A.B. Ellis who thought that Olorun enjoys “a life of complete idleness and repose”, E. Geoffrey Parrinder who reffered to Olorun as “the supreme but unworshipped God for whom Africans maintained no shrine” and Leo Froebenius who thought that Olorun “leads an entirely platonic, mythological existence” and concludes that these scholars suffering perhaps from incomplete research or genuine mistake, had equated Olodumare with a “deus incertus” or “deus remotus”. He however proceeded to explain that the concept of the Deity in Yoruba tradition is that of a Being possessing superlative qualities, one who is unchanging, constant, permanent, reliable, one who could not be represented in Images, “neither can they think of confining within Space, Him whose appelation is Ate-Re-Re- K'aiye – He who spreads over the “whole extent of Earth”.
According to Dr. J. Olumide Lucas, Olorun was “a being of unique character, possessing attributes far too noble, far too abstract to have originated from the thought of a primitive people. He is credited with Omnipresence, Omniscience and Omnipotence. He is the just and impartial Judge, sometimes meting out judgement on the wicked in this world and certainly bringing all men to judgement in the next world”. Lucas' reference to primitivity was intended to justify his conclusions that the Yorubas were not primitive people since, by his own researches, he had succeeded in proving philologically that the Yorubas migrated from ancient Egypt and had carried with them the wisdom of the great Egyptians of old.
Eleda , according to Lucas, is the creator of the Universe and Olodumare is the exalted One. From the above, we may conclude that the Yoruba idea of God is not founded on any animistic imagery of a local Divinity but on the existence of a Universal entity, Almighty, Invisible and Supreme, who dwells in realms beyond the circle of manifestation enjoying a triune existence comparable to the doctrine of the “Sancta et Individua Trinitatis” of Christianity.
Olorun, Eleda and Olodumare are therefore synonyms of the Kabalistic conception of the Ain, The Ain Soph and the Ain Soph Aur, or that trichotomy of spiritual force collectively known as the Veils of Negative Exitence. In a much more esoteric sense,
Olorun is the Ring Cosmos.
Eleda is the Ring Chaos.
Olodumare is the Ring Pass not.
These abstruse concepts might be lacking in the essential logic to communicate them to the people at large; but to the initiates of the mysteries, the more recondite the principle, the more acceptable it is in satisfaction of the urge to keep the gates properly tyled to prevent abuse and desecration.
The belief of Africans in the interference of certain emissaries of the Deity in the affairs of men is not different from the belief of the Greeks and Romans in Zeus, Aphrodite, Pallas Athene and Hermes. Indeed the modern preoccupation of Western tradition is to find a place for the gods of the Greeks and Romans in the Tree of Life, thus harmonising the so-called Pantheism of the Greeks and Romans with the complex monotheism of Jewish tradition.
