When D. P. Walker wrote about “ancient theology” or prisca theologia, he firmly linked it to Christianity and Platonism (Walker 1972). On the first page of his book, Walker defined the term as follows:
By the term “Ancient Theology” I mean a certain tradition of Christian apologetic theology which rests on misdated texts. Many of the early Fathers, in particular Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius, in their apologetic works directed against pagan philosophers, made use of supposedly very ancient texts: Hermetica, Orphica, Sibylline Prophecies, Pythagorean Carmina Aurea, etc., most of which in fact date from the first four centuries of our era. These texts, written by the Ancient Theologians Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, were shown to contain vestiges of the true religion: monotheism, the Trinity, the creation of the world out of nothing through the Word, and so forth. It was from these that Plato took the religious truths to be found in his writings. (Walker 1972:1)
Walker described a revival of such “ancient theology” in the Renaissance and in “platonizing theologians from Ficino to Cudworth” who wanted to “integrate Platonism and Neoplatonism into Christianity, so that their own religious and philosophical beliefs might coincide” (p. 2). After the debunking of the genuineness and antiquity of the texts favored by these ancient theologians, the movement ought to have died; but Walker detected “a few isolated survivals” such as Athanasius Kircher, Pierre-Daniel Huët, and the Jesuit figurists of the French China mission (p. 194). For Walker the last Mohican of this movement, so to say, is Chevalier Andrew Michael RAMSAY (1686–1743), whose views are described in the final chapter of The Ancient Theology. But seen through the lens of our concerns here, one could easily extend this line to various figures in this book, for example, Jean Calmette, John Zephaniah Holwell, Abbé Vincent Mignot, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Guillaume Sainte-Croix, and also to William Jones (App 2009).
To better understand such phenomena we have to go beyond the narrow confines of the Christian God and Platonism. There are many movements that link themselves to some kind of “original,” “pure,” “genuine” teaching, claim its authority, use it to criticize “degenerate” accretions, and attempt to legitimize their “reform” on its basis. Such links can take a variety of forms. In Chapter 4 we saw how in the eighth and ninth centuries the Buddhist reform movement known as Zen cooked up a lineage of “mind to mind” transmission with the aim of connecting the teaching of the religion’s Indian founder figure, Buddha, with their own views. The tuned-up and misdated Forty-Two Sections Sutra that ended up impressing so many people, including its first European translator de Guignes, was one (of course unanticipated) outcome of this strategy. Such “Ur-tradition” movements, as I propose to call them, invariably create a “transmission” scenario of their “original” teaching or revelation; in the case of Zen this consisted in an elaborate invented genealogy with colorful transmission figures like Bodhidharma and “patriarchs” consisting mostly of pious legends. Such invented genealogies and transmissions are embodied in symbols and legends emphasizing the link between the “original” teaching and the movement’s doctrine. “Genuine,” “oldest” texts are naturally of central importance for such movements, since they tend to regard the purity of teaching as directly proportional to its closeness to origins.
A common characteristic of such “Ur-tradition” movements is a tripartite scheme of “golden age,” “degeneration,” and “regeneration.” The raison d’être of such movements is the revival of a purportedly most ancient, genuine, “original” teaching after a long period of degeneration. Hence their need to define an “original” teaching, establish a line of its transmission, identify stages and kinds of degeneration, and present themselves as the agent of “regeneration” of the original “ancient” teaching. Such need often arises in a milieu of doctrinal rivalry or in a crisis, for example, when “new” religions or reform movements want to establish and legitimize themselves or when an established religion is threatened by powerful alternatives.
When young Christianity evolved from a Jewish reform movement and was accused of being a “new religion” and an invention, ancient connections were needed to provide legitimacy and add historical weight to the religion. The adoption of the Hebrew Bible as “Old Testament,” grimly opposed by some early Christians, linked the young religion and its “New Testament” effectively to the very creation of the world, to paradise, and to the Ur-religion of the first humans in the golden age. Legends, texts, and symbols were created to illustrate this “Old-to-New” link. For example, the savior’s cross on Golgotha had to get a pedigree connecting it to the Hebrew Bible’s paradise tree; and the original sinner Adam’s skull had to be brought via Noah’s ark to Palestine in order to get buried on the very hill near Jerusalem where Adam’s original sin eventually got expunged by the New Testament’s “second Adam” on the cross (Figure 11). Theologians use the word “typology” for such attempts to discover Christian teachings or forebodings thereof in the Old Testament.
Similar links to an “oldest,” “purest,” and “original” teaching are abundant not only in the history of religions but also, for example, in freemasonry and various “esoteric” movements. They also tend to invent links to an original “founder,” “ancient” teachings and texts, lineages, symbols of the original doctrine and its transmission, eminent transmitter figures (“patriarchs”), and so on; and they usually criticize the degeneration of exactly those original and pure teachings that they claim to resuscitate. In such schemes the most ancient texts, symbols, and objects naturally play important roles, particularly if they seem mysterious: pyramids, hieroglyphs, runic letters, ancient texts buried in caves, and divine revelations stored on golden tablets in heaven or in some American prophet’s backyard . . .
In premodern Europe such “original” teachings were usually associated with Old Testament heroes who had the function of transmitters. A typical example that shows how various ancient religions were integrated in a genealogy linking them to primeval religion as well as its fulfillment in Christianity is Jacques Boulduc’s De Ecclesia ante legem (“On the Church before the [Mosaic] Law”) of 1626. Boulduc shows in a table how the extremely long lifespans of the patriarchs facilitated transmission: for example, Adam lived for 930 years and could instruct his descendants in person until his sixth-generation Ur-nephew Lamech, Noah’s father, was fifty-six years old. Adam’s son Seth was 120 years old when the first priestly functions were instituted; 266 years old when his son Enos first offered prayers in a dedicated house; and 800 years old when he took over the supreme pontificate of the “church before the law” at Adam’s untimely death (1630:148–49). In the second book, Boulduc shows that “all philosophers, both of Greece and of other regions, have their origin in the descendants of the prophet Noah” (p. 271) and includes in this transmission lineage even the “wise rather than malefic Persian magi [Magos Persas non maleficos, sed sapientes],” Egyptian prophets, Gallic druids, the “naked sages of India [Indis Gymnosophistae],” etc. (p. 273). Boulduc took special care to document through numerous quotations from ancient sources that the wise men who were variously called Semai, Semni, Semanai, Semnothei, and Samanaei1 “all have their name from Noah’s son Shem” and are therefore direct descendants of Noachic pure Ur-religion (p. 275). The same is true for the Brachmanes of India who were so closely associated with these Samanaei by St. Jerome (p. 277). Even “our Druids” worshipped “the only true God,” believed “in the immortality of the soul” as well as “the resurrection of our bodies,” and adored almost all the very God who “at some point in the future will become man through incarnation from a virgin” (pp. 278–79). The correct doctrinal linage of such descendants of Shem is guaranteed by the fact that “after the deluge, Shem brought the original religion of Enos’s descendants to renewed blossom [reflorescere fecit]” (p. 280). Boulduc also paid special attention to Enoch, the sixth-generation descendant of Adam who could boast of having lived no less than 308 years in Adam’s presence (pp. 148–49). This excellent patriarch, who at age 365 was prematurely removed from the eyes of the living and has been watching events ever since from his perch in the terrestrial or celestial paradise, had left behind “writings, that is, the book of Enoch, which contains nothing false or absurd” (p. 131). Noah had taken special care to “diligently preserve these writings of Enoch, placing them at the time of the deluge on the ark with no less solicitousness than the bones of Father Adam and some other patriarchs” (p. 138). Boulduc did not know where this famous Book of Enoch ended up, but some well-known passages in scripture specified that it conveyed important information about the activities of angels.
Figure 11. Adam’s skull underneath the cross. Collection of Drs. Valerio and Adriana Pozza, Padova, Italy.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, textual criticism began to undermine the very foundation of such tales, namely, the text of the Old Testament and particularly of its first five books (the Pentateuch). These books had always been attributed to Moses and regarded as the world’s oldest extant scripture. But in 1651 Thomas HOBBES (1588–1679) wrote in the third part of his Leviathan that the identity of “the original writers of the several Books of Holy Scripture” was not “made evident by any sufficient testimony of other history, which is the only proof of matter of fact” (Hobbes 1651:368). However, Hobbes did not deny that Moses had contributed some writings: “But though Moses did not compile those books entirely, and in the form we have them; yet he wrote all that which he is there said to have written” (p. 369). By contrast, Isaac LA PEYRÈRE (1596–1676)—who wrote earlier than Hobbes and influenced him though his book on the pre-Adamites appeared later—was far more radical in questioning whether Moses had in fact written any of the first five books of the Old Testament:
I know not by what author it is found out, that the Pentateuch is Moses his own copy. It is so reported, but not believed by all. These Reasons make one believe, that those Five Books are not the Originals, but copied out by another. Because Moses is there read to have died. For how could Moses write after his death? (La Peyrère 1656:204–5).
La Peyrère’s conclusion was shocking:
I need not trouble the reader much further, to prove a thing in itself sufficiently evident, that the five first Books of the Bible were not written by Moses, as is thought. Nor need any one wonder after this, when he reads many things confus’d and out of order, obscure, deficient, many things omitted and misplaced, when they shall consider with themselves that they are a heap of Copie confusedly taken. (p. 208)
Such textual criticism2 initiated “a chain of analyses that would end up transforming the evaluation of Scripture from a holy to a profane work” (Popkin 1987:73). Until La Peyrère, the Bible had always been regarded as a repository of divine revelation communicated by God (the “founder” figure) to a “transmitter” figure (in this case Moses). Unable to reconcile biblical chronology and events with newly discovered facts such as American “Indians” and Chinese historical records, La Peyrère came to the conclusion that the Bible contained not the history of all humankind but only that of a tiny group (namely, the Jews). His rejection of Moses’ authorship, of course, also entailed doubts about the Bible’s revelation status: if it was indeed revealed by God, then to whom? To a whole group of people whose notes were cut and pasted together to form a rather incoherent creation story with “many things confus’d and out of order”? At the end of the chain of events described by Popkin, the Bible was no longer “looked upon as Revelation from God, but as tales and beliefs of the primitive Hebrews, to be compared with the tales and beliefs of other Near Eastern groups” (p. 73), leading Thomas Paine to declare: “Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities or downright lies” (Paine 1795:4).
But such loss of biblical authority was a gradual and painful process that frequently elicited the kind of apologetic intervention evoked by Walker in The Ancient Theology. I doubt that Walker would have gone as far as including the Bible among his pseudepigraphic and misdated texts. Yet if one views phenomena like the Reformation from the perspective of Ur-traditions, the biblical text appears as a (misdated) record of “original teaching” used by reformers like Calvin and Luther in their effort to discard “Romish” degenerations and to restore what they took to be the “genuine,” “original” religion revealed by the “founder” God to “transmitters” from Adam and the antediluvian “patriarchs” to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and ultimately the authors of the New Testament. But this kind of Reformation was soon denounced as degenerate in its own right, for example, by the radical English deists who regarded “genuine” Christianity not as revealed to any particular Middle Eastern tribe but as engraved in every human heart. From this perspective, Christianity was—as Matthew TINDAL (1657–1733) in 1730 succinctly put it in the title of his famous bible of the Deists—exactly “as Old as Creation,” and the holy Gospel was no more than “a Republication of the Religion of Nature” (Tindal 1995). While biblical answers became suspect and alternative creation narratives began to be culled from apparently far more ancient sacred texts, the search for humankind’s origins, its “original” religion, and its oldest sacred scriptures had to begin again. In this “crisis of European consciousness,”3 a number of men sought to anchor Europe’s drifting worldview anew in the bedrock of remotest antiquity via a solid Ur-tradition chain. Among them was an Englishman who defended the Middle Eastern and biblical framework while dreaming of restoring Noah’s pure religion (Isaac Newton); a Scotsman who determined that China offered better vestiges of the Ur-religion and wanted to reinterpret the Bible accordingly (Andrew Ramsay); and the Irish protagonist of the next chapter, John Zephaniah Holwell, who presented Europe with an Indian Old Testament that—he alleged—was so much older and better than Moses’s patchwork that it could form the basis for the ultimate reformation of Christianity.
Isaac NEWTON (1642–1727) is, of course, known as one of the greatest scientists of all time, but his theological and chronological writings have become the focus of increasing attention. They amount to more than half a million words and are in great part still unpublished; but their study4 points to a central “Ur-tradition” pattern in Newton’s worldview. For example, modern specialists point out that “it can be shown how Newton regarded his natural philosophy as an integral part of a radical and comprehensive recovery of the true ancient religion, which had been revealed directly to man by God” (Gouk 1988:120); that Newton tried to prove “that his scientific work in the Principia was a rediscovery of the mystical philosophy which had passed to the Egyptians and the Greeks from the Jews” (Rattansi 1988:198); and that the great scientist “believed that alchemical writings preserved a secret knowledge which had been revealed by God” (Golinski 1988:158). Newton apparently saw himself as a regenerator of an Ur-wisdom that had been encoded in symbols and transmitted through dark and degenerate ages by a line of eminent men (patriarchs). The italicized words in this sentence are all elements of what I call Ur-traditions.
Newton developed such views over many decades but dared to discuss them only with a few close friends. But the last sentences of his famous Opticks let the reader catch a glimpse:
If natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature. And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true Author and Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the Government of Noah and his Sons before they corrupted themselves. (Newton 1730:381–82).
This closing passage suggests that for Newton the religion of the “golden age” or Ur-religion was preserved by Noah and his sons who were thoroughly monotheistic. Far from being only the religion of the Hebrews, this Ur-religion reigned for a long time everywhere, even in Egypt (Westfall 1982:27). But these “blinded heathen” who had initially shared Noah’s Ur-religion could barely remember the cardinal virtues because their religion at some point degenerated into the worship of false gods, objects of nature, and dead heroes and into the teaching of the transmigration of souls.
Newton had closely studied Thomas Burnet’s Archæologiæ philosophicæ of 1692 (see Chapter 3), and though the outlines of his historico-theological system were already developed in 1692, Burnet’s influence is unmistakable:
Like Burnet, Newton regarded Noah, rather than Abraham or Moses, as the original source of the true religion and learning; consequently, he, too, argued that vestiges of truth could be found among the ancient Gentile peoples as well as that of the Jews since all were descendants of Noah and his sons. Both also shared the belief that modern philosophy was contributing to the recovery of ancient truths which had been distorted after Noah’s death. (Gascoigne 1991:185)
Newton clearly thought that an initial divine revelation was the ultimate source of all religion, that this Ur-religion was once shared by all ancient peoples. Nevertheless, he sought to root his views firmly in the Old Testament narrative. Monogenesis and the universality of the great flood, for example, were nonnegotiable. Thus, all postdiluvial humans, gentiles and Hebrews alike, originally shared the religion transmitted by Noah and his sons, and vestiges of this religion could be found in all ancient cultures. Newton explained:
From all of which it is manifest that a certain general tradition was conserved for a very long time among the Peoples about those things which were passed down most distinctly from Noah and the first men to Abraham and from Abraham to Moses. And hence we can also hope that a history of the times which followed immediately after the flood can be deduced with some degree of truth from the traditions of Peoples. (Yahuda Ms. 16.2, f. 48; Westfall 1982:22–23)
But Newton did not go as far as taking Chinese chronology into account. He owned and studied Philippe Couplet’s 1687 work that was discussed in the previous chapter yet grew convinced that the famous burning of books by Emperor Shih Huangdi in the third century B.C.E had reduced all ancient Chinese history to legend. In the New College Manuscript (I, fol. 80v) Newton wrote,
And there are now no histories in China but what were written above 72 years of this conflagration. And therefore the story that Huan ti founded the monarchy of China 2697 years before Christ is a fable invented to make that Monarchy look ancient. The way of writing used by the Chinese was not fully invented before the days of Confucius the Chinese philosopher & he was born but 551 years before Christ & flourished only in one of the six old kingdoms into which China was then divided. (Manuel 1963:270)
Newton instead studied Middle Eastern chronologies and used them to defend the Bible as the most reliable source for remote antiquity. Moses had in his opinion originally written a history of creation, a book of the generations of Adam, and the book of the law. Though these oldest books “have long since been lost except what has been transcribed out of them in the Pentateuch now extant” and though the existing text of the Pentateuch was in his opinion redacted by Samuel rather than Moses (Manuel 1963:61), Newton remained firmly convinced that the first books of the Old Testament “are by far the oldest records now extant,” that the Bible is the most authentic history of the world, and that the Kingdom of Israel was the first large-scale political society with all the attributes of civilization (p. 89).5 Manetho of Heliopolis, Berosus the Chaldaean. and others had, like the Persian and Chinese historians, created extravagant chronologies that were infinitely less reliable and old. In a chapter of his Chronology dedicated to the Persian Empire, Newton wrote,
We need not then wonder, that the Egyptians have made the kings in the first dynasty of their monarchy, that which was seated at Thebes in the days of David, Solomon, and Rehoboam, so very ancient and so long-lived; since the Persians have done the like to their kings Adar and Hazael, who reigned an hundred years after the death of Solomon, “worshipping them as gods, and boasting of their antiquity, and not knowing,” saith Josephus, “that they were but modern.” (Newton 1785:5.263)
Newton employed such chronologies that “magnified their antiquities so exceedingly” (p. 263) in a manner that much resembled that of William Jones a century later, namely, to confirm the biblical account and vindicate biblical authority; but Jones was to use the even more hyperbolical Indian chronologies. Newton’s final system appeared, as Frank Manuel put it, “as a eulogy of Israel” and is evidence “for his central proposition that the Hebrews were the most ancient civilized people” (Manuel 1963:97). Though the Bible bestows greater antiquity on the Egyptian and Assyrian royal institutions than on the tribes of Israel, Newton “was able to cling to his idée fixe throughout the revision of the history of antiquity, both in the fragments and in the final Chronology” (p. 99).
Newton’s “ancient theology” was thus—unlike that of Ramsay and Holwell—still exclusively rooted in the Middle East and the Bible. Since events before the biblical deluge remained hazy due to the fragmentary character of the Pentateuch and the lack of reliable ancient pagan sources, Newton’s history of religions really starts with Noah and his sons. His true religion “most closely resembled that which prevailed at the time of Noah, immediately after the Deluge, before the idolatry—which to Newton was the root of all evil not only in religion but also in politics and even philosophy—began to corrupt it” (Gascoigne 1991:185). The symbol of this pure original religion is the Temple of Solomon (Figure 12), which not only features the eternal flame on a sacrificial altar at the center but also a geometrically precise representation of the heliocentric solar system.
Newton’s “prytanea,” sacred cultic places around a perpetual fire, symbolize God’s original revelation and are at the source of the transmission line.6 Cults with prytanea were for Newton the most ancient of all cults. According to him this religion with the sacred fire “seems to have been as well the most universal as ye most ancient of all religions & to have spread into all nations before other religions took place. There are many instances of nations receiving other religions after this but none (that I know) of any nation’s receiving this after any other. Nor did ever any other religion wch sprang up later become so general as this” (Westfall 1982:24).
This religion around the prytanea was professed by Noah and his sons. They spread “the true religion till ye nations corrupted it” (p. 25). This first corruption consisted in forgetting that the symbols in the prytanea (for example, lamps symbolizing heavenly bodies around the central “solar” flame) are symbols, leading men to engage in sidereal worship. It is of interest to note that Newton’s history of religion—and, I might add, Ur-traditions in general—are intimately linked to the encoding and decoding of symbols. Here the degeneration process begins with a misunderstanding of symbols; and this misunderstanding eventually leads to the worship of dead men and statues, the belief in the transmigration of souls, polytheism, the worship of animals, and other “Egyptian” inventions. In parallel with such religious degeneration, the false geocentric system took hold thanks to a late Egyptian, Ptolemy (pp. 25–26).
Figure 12 Newton’s map of Solomon’s temple (Newton 1785:5.244).
The first major postdiluvial regeneration was due to Moses who, according to Newton, “restored for a time the original true religion that was the common heritage of all mankind” (p. 26). But soon enough the degeneration process began anew, punctuated by calls of prophets for renewal, until Jesus came not to bring a new religion but rather to “restore the original true one” not solely for the Jews but for all mankind (p. 27). Soon enough, another round of degeneration set in with the Egyptian Athanasius, the doctrine of the Trinity, and Roman Catholic idolatry, which got worse and worse until the Reformation cleaned up some of the mess. But Protestantism and Anglicanism were not immune from corruption either, which is why Newton (who was adamantly opposed to the Trinity) felt the need to call—in a very muted voice and in heaps of unpublished notes and manuscripts—for one more restoration of true, pure, Noachic religion and wisdom.
In 1727, the very year of Newton’s death and one year before his Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended was published, a bestseller by Andrew Michael RAMSAY (1686–1743) appeared on the market both in French and English: the Travels of Cyrus (Les voyages de Cyrus). It saw over thirty editions in English and French and was translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek (Henderson 1952:109). The two volumes that Ramsay called his “Great work,” however, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion Unfolded in a Geometrical Order, only appeared posthumously in 1748 and 1749.
Ramsay grew up in modest circumstances in Ayr (Scotland), and after studying philosophy and theology at Glasgow and Edinburgh, he went to London in 1707 or 1708 to study mathematics with Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers (Walker 1972:234), a Swiss refugee who was perhaps Newton’s most intimate friend and was well informed about Newton’s unorthodox religious views. Newton’s preference for the prophet Daniel is reflected in Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus. In the preface to the revised edition, Ramsay gave his readers the following key to his bestselling book:
The Magi in Cyrus’s time were fallen into a kind of atheism, like that of Spinoza; Zoroaster, Hermes and Pythagoras adored one sole Deity, but they were deists; Eleazar resembled the Socinians, who were for subjecting religion to philosophy; Daniel represents a perfect Christian, and the hero of this book a young prince, who began to be corrupted by the maxims of irreligion. In order to set him right, the different philosophers with whom he converses successively unfold to him new truths mixt with errors. Zoroaster confutes the mistakes of the Magi; Pythagoras those of Zoroaster; Eleazar those of Pythagoras; Daniel rejects those of all the others, and his doctrine is the only one which the author adopts. (Ramsay 1814:xvii)
Ramsay’s goal was “to prove against the Atheists the existence of a Supreme Deity, who produced the world by his power and governs it by his wisdom,” and he wanted to show “that the earliest opinions of the most knowing and civilized nations come nearer the truth than those of latter ages” (p. xiv). According to Ramsay, the “theology of the Orientals” was far purer than that of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (pp. xiv–xv). If the most important point of The Travels of Cyrus was the demonstration that the primitive system of the world was monotheistic, Ramsay’s second major objective was described as follows:
The second point is to shew, in opposition to the Deists, that the principal doctrines of revealed religion, concerning the states of innocence, corruption and renovation, are as ancient as the world; that they were foundations of Noah’s religion; that he transmitted them to his children; that these traditions were spread throughout all nations; that the Pagans disfigured, degraded, and obscured them by their absurd fictions; and lastly, that these primitive truths have been no where preserved in their purity, except in the true religion. (pp. xv–xvi)
This passage presents in a nutshell some of the main elements of what I have called “Ur-tradition”: an Ur-teaching from a founder (here God and his original revelation); an overall scheme of golden age/degeneration/regeneration; a transmission lineage of the Ur-teaching; pivotal transmission figures; and the linking of this Ur-doctrine to the religion of the proponent that purportedly regenerates the true original creed. For Ramsay as for Newton, Noah’s religion seems to form a crucial juncture since he was the sole heir of antediluvial pure monotheism; and for both men the protagonist of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Daniel is another crucial “transmitter” figure. In his treatise on the prophecies of Daniel, Newton pointed out that already Ezekiel had joined “Daniel with Noah and Job, as most high in the favour of God” and that “Daniel was in the greatest credit amongst the Jews, till the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian: and to reject his prophecies, is to reject the Christian religion” (Newton 1785:5.311).
If some protagonists of the Old Testament are so highly valued as transmitters of Ur-religion, the question of the text’s reliability inevitably arises. Indeed, Newton’s treatise “Upon the Prophecies of Daniel” begins with a chapter “Concerning the compilers of the books of the Old Testament” (pp. 297–305). In the second volume of his “Great work,” Ramsay summarizes Newton’s argument as follows:
1. Several great men, both of the Greek and Latin Church, of the Roman and Protestant communion, think as the famous Sir Isaac Newton, That we have lost some books wrote by the patriarchs, both before and after the deluge, concerning the creation, first origin and primitive history of the world; and that the book of Genesis preserved was rather a short extract, than an exact copy of these original patriarchal records. It is certain, as Sir Isaac remarks, that Scripture mentions, in different places, several books lost, such as “the book of the generations of Adam; the book of the wars of God; The books of Enoch” (see Sir Isaac Newton’s observations upon Daniel, page 4 & 5). (Ramsay 1749:215)
Ramsay claims that he is not in a position “to decide such an important question” and has decided to “leave it to the decision of the learned,” but his second point immediately shows that he accepted Newton’s view:
If the Old Testament contains only “extracts” of the whole story and its originals are “lost,” are there any other, possibly more complete and reliable sources? The presentation of such sources was exactly the objective of the second volume of Ramsay’s “Great work”:
In the second part we shall show “That vestiges of all principal doctrines of the Christian religion are to be found in the monuments, writings, or mythologies of all nations, ages and religions; and that these vestiges are emanations of the primitive, antient, universal religion of mankind, transmitted from the beginning of the world by the Antidiluvians (sic) to the Postdiluvian patriarchs, and by them to their posterity that peopled the face of the earth.” (Ramsay 1748.iv–v)
Ramsay’s great quest was to collect all vestiges of the “original traditions of the patriarchal religion” from the writings of “the antient Hebrews, Chinese, Indians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans,” and he was convinced that even “among the ancient Gauls, Germans, Britons, and all other nations,” one would “find vestiges of the same truths” if we would possess any “records left of their doctrines” because “all flowed from the same source” (Ramsay 1749:iv). But if the records of the “antient Hebrews” were only fragmentary, those of the Egyptians indecipherable, those of the Indians and Persians still largely unknown, and those of the Greeks and Romans too young, where could such vestiges of Ur-religion be found?
Before he enters this discussion, Ramsay clarifies the origin of his Ur-tradition and firmly links Adam’s “perfect knowledge” to its regeneration through the Messiah:
According to the Mosaic accounts of the origin and propagation of mankind, the protoplast had a perfect knowledge of all the great principles of Natural and Revealed Religion. Adam created in a state of innocence, before sin and passion had darkened his understanding, who conversed with the Logos in paradise under a human form, must have had a perfect knowledge of the Deity, and of the love we owed to him. Adam, after the fall, could not but know the miserable state, into which he had plunged himself, with all his posterity. Scripture assures us, and all divines agree, that God, after having banished him from paradise, revealed to him the sacrifice, sufferings, and triumphs of the Messiah. Thus Adam must have had a perfect knowledge of all the great principles both of Natural and Revealed Religion. (p. 8)
This quoted passage also sets the stage for Ramsay’s “three states” scheme (initial perfection, degeneration or fall, and regeneration). Next comes the problem of a line of transmission of Adam’s initial wisdom:
Yea, he [Adam] must not only have instructed his children then existent in these sublime truths, but have given them orders to transmit the same notions to their posterity. All the holy patriarchs must have done the same, from generation to generation, till the deluge; when Noah, possessed with the same spirit, had, no doubt, the same care to hand down, to succeeding ages, those essential truths. Now, since the holy patriarchs, before and after the deluge, could and should have acted thus, it is sure they did so. (p. 9)
But such direct transmission was risky, which is why even Ur-tradition movements that emphasize “mind-to-mind” transmission tend to place their trust in ancient texts:
It is no ways probable, that such a wise man as Noah, who was instructed by, and conversed with the Logos, would have trusted to oral tradition alone, for the preservation and transmission of these divine lights, and sublime mysteries of faith to his posterity, and all the nations who were to cover the face of the earth. He, no doubt, took care to have them wrote in such characters as were then in use. All grant that the first way of writing was by hieroglyphics. (p. 9)
Ramsay mentions the famous pillars of stone and clay that were, according to Flavius Josephus and numerous Old Testament pseudepigraphs, designed to withstand both water and fire, but he rejects the view that they contained astronomical knowledge (p. 10). Rather, the symbolical characters on these pillars had the aim “to preserve and transmit to posterity some idea of the mysteries of religion” (p. 11). Here we have one more element of Ur-traditions: a code for the transmission of original doctrine. Ramsay thought that the inscriptions on the pillars were “Enochian or Noevian symbols” designed “to preserve the memory of these sacred truths” (p. 13). In this manner sacred texts were transmitted to all nations, thus forming a global written Ur-tradition:
Thus the symbolical characters, images and representations of divine intellectual truths, were much the same in all nations. Of this we have uncontestable proofs, since the symbols of the Chinese are very oft the same with those wrote upon the Egyptian obelisks yet preserved: for all the Chinese characters are hieroglyphics. We find also, that the Gauls, Germans and Britains long before they were conquered by Julius Caesar, had much the same symbolical representations of their sacred mysteries and Deities, as the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. (pp. 13–14)
Though these “Enochian or Noevian symbols” were “at first invented not to render religion mysterious, and cover it with an impenetrable veil, but, on the contrary, to render its sublime, intellectual, spiritual ideas sensible, visible and familiar to the vulgar,” their true original sense was soon forgotten; “men attach’d themselves to the letter, and the signs, without understanding the spirit and the thing signified,” and soon “the Pagans fell by degrees into gross idolatry and wild superstition” (pp. 14–15). Ramsay’s story about the degeneration of the original religion continues very much like Newton’s. Desire for power, greed, and priestcraft were some of the reasons why “the sacred, ancient and primitive symbols were degraded, obscured, misinterpreted, dismember’d, mangled and disfigured. The sacred became profane; the divine, human; and the most sublime truths were turn’d into wild fictions” (p. 16). Thus “the original sense was intirely perverted, the sign became the thing signified, and the reality was look’d upon as a symbol” (p. 19). Such degeneration took place not only in pagan nations but also with the Jews, and their claims of exclusive transmission form part of it:
We must not however think, that the Pagans alone were guilty of these degradations, alterations and false explications of the sacred symbols and ancient traditions. As men are much the same in all nations, ages and religions, and that human nature is an inexhaustible source of ignorance, self-love and cupidity, the members of the visible church both Jewish and Christian fell into far greater tho’ very different abuses, and misinterpretations of ancient tradition, than the Pagans. Tho’ the Jews had a law written not in a hieroglyphical style, but in vulgar language, yet they explain’d all the metaphorical descriptions of the divine nature and attributes in a literal sense, and form’d to themselves the idea of a partial, fantastic, furious, wrathful God who loved one nation only and hated all the rest. Because they were chosen to be the depositaries of the sacred oracles, and had the external means of salvation, they fancied that the God of the Israelites was not the God of the Gentiles; that he abandon’d all other nations to a total ignorance of his essence, and to inevitable damnation. (pp. 19–20)
Ramsay also included the Christians and declared at the beginning of his “Great work” that not only the Pagan mythologists who “adulterated by degrees the original traditions of the patriarchal religion” needed to be set straight but also the “Jewish rabbins, and then the Christian schoolmen” who “disfigured revealed religion, by many absurd opinions, popular errors, and wild fictions, which being neither founded in scripture, nor authorized by the consent of the universal church, ought not to pass for doctrines of faith” (Ramsay 1748:v). Ramsay obviously had a reformist agenda. But what did the “original” doctrine consist in? How could one hope to get some idea of Adam’s “perfect knowledge” without access to (and understanding of) “Enochian or Noevian symbols”?
When Ramsay wrote his books in the first half of the eighteenth century, a new avenue to humanity’s past had opened up through the study of Chinese. Long before students of Sanskrit began to throw light on Indian antiquities, a number of pioneer Sinologists studied the Chinese “hieroglyphs” and tried to make sense of China’s ancient texts. Though earlier books such as Juan Mendoza’s Historia . . . del gran reyno de la China (1596), Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault’s De Christiana Expeditione (1615), and Alvaro Semedo’s Imperio de la China (1642) had provided some enticing information about Chinese history, language, and religion, it was from the mid-seventeenth century that information about China’s antiquity really began to sink in. In 1662, when Bishop Edward Stillingfleet wrote his Origines sacrae (Sacred Origins), he sensed that the defense of biblical authority entered a new phase. “The disesteem of the Scriptures,” he wrote, “is the decay of religion” (Stillingfleet 1817:1.viii), and he mentioned threats from three main sides:
The most popular pretences of the Atheists of our age, have been the irreconcileableness of the account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient Heathen nations; the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures with the principles of reason; and the account which may be given of the origin of things, from principles of philosophy, without the Scriptures. These three therefore I have particularly set myself against, and directed against each of them several books. In the first, I have manifested that there is no ground of credibility in the account of ancient times, given by any Heathen nations, different from the Scriptures, which I have with so much care and diligence inquired into. (p. xiv)
The bishop’s book shows that his scope was still limited to Egypt, Phoenicia, Chaldaea, and Greece; and after less than one hundred pages, he declared his proof complete that “there is no credibility in any of those Heathen histories” (p. 94). One thing that bothered Stillingfleet about these “Heathen histories” and other new discoveries was that the defense of Scripture became increasingly costly. He hoped that his book would silence men like Isaac La Peyrère who claimed to defend the Bible but ended up undermining it, and he prayed “that from thence we may hope to hear no more of men before Adam to salve the authority of the Scriptures by” (p. xiv).
But while the bishop wrote these words, a new and much less easily discounted threat had already ominously raised its head in two publications by a Jesuit: Martino MARTINI’s Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655) and his Sinicae historiae decas prima (1658).7 The potential of this threat may have dawned on some early readers when Gabriel DE MAGALHAES (1610–77) declared in 16688 that Chinese characters predated Egyptian hieroglyphs; but it was a noted English architect and amateur antiquarian who was among the first to have a sense of its implications.
John WEBB (1611–72), the close collaborator of Inigo Jones and coauthor (1655) as well as author (1665) of two works on Stonehenge, published a book in 1669 that attempted to prove that Chinese is the sole remnant of antediluvial human language and that the Chinese still use the antediluvial writing system. Writing many decades before Ramsay, Webb also mentions the engravings made by Seth or Enoch on the two pillars of brick and stone and thinks that they must have been written in humankind’s original language. Based mainly on the Bible, Flavius Josephus, Walter Raleigh (1614), and Peter Heylin’s Cosmographie (1652), Webb concludes “that Noah carried the Primitive Language into the Ark with him, and that it continued pure and uncorrupted amongst his succeeding generations until the Confusion of Tongues at Babel” (Webb 1678:17). Until the great flood the whole earth was therefore “of one Language and one Lip” (p. 17).
The arguments of Jan Gorp (Goropius Becanus; 1569:473) and Walter Raleigh (1614:144) convinced Webb that Noah’s ark landed “in the confines of Tartaria, Persia, and India,” and he deemed it “very probable” that Noah “first inhabited India” before sending Nimrod and his followers to the Middle East (Webb 1678:20–21). He seconded Raleigh’s opinion “that India was the first Planted and Peopled Countrey after the Flood” (p. 25). Instead of going to Shinar in Mesopotamia, Noah and his followers “sent out Colonies to the more remote parts of Asia, till at length they setled (sic) in the remotest CHINA” (p. 26). Webb held it “for a matter undeniable, that the Plantation of India preceded that of Babel” and inclined to believe “that all the Eastern parts of Persia, with CHINA, and both the Indias, were peopled by such of the Sons of Sem, as went not with the rest to the Valley of Shinaar” (p. 27).
Webb’s scenario squarely contradicted the traditional narrative of the ark’s landing on Mt. Ararat and the Mesopotamian epicenter of dispersion. Webb did not question the universality of the great flood, but his speculation about Noah’s whereabouts after the flood (which the biblical account leaves unclear) led him to the conclusion that India and China were populated by the descendants of Noah and Shem and did not suffer from the disastrous confusion of tongues that befell the colonies that Noah had sent from India to the Middle East.
Rejecting Kircher’s scenario of the Egyptian origins of Indian and Chinese religion, Webb maintained, based on Raleigh’s calculation, that Noah’s son Cham had founded his kingdom in Egypt 191 years after the flood (p. 30) and that the Egyptians did not flourish until the times of Moses (p. 31). By contrast, China was “in all probability . . . after the Flood first planted either by Noah himself, or some of the sons of Sem, before the remove Shinaar”; thus, the “Principles of Theology, amongst the Chinois, . . . could not proceed from the wicked and idolatrous race of accursed Cham, but from those ones that were, de civitate Dei, of the City of God” (p. 32). The Indians and Chinese “retained the PRIMITIVE Tongue, as having received it from Noah, and likewise carry the same with them to their several Plantations, in what part of the East soever they setled themselves” (p. 32).
Whereas other writers such as La Peyrère began to doubt the universality of the flood, Webb transformed the confusion of tongues into a local Mesopotamian event that could not have affected India and “its Plantations in the East” where the “Language of Noah” reigned without any change (pp. 33–34). Webb’s intensive study of Martino Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655) and the Sinicae historiae decas prima (1658) convinced him, in the absence of evidence from India, that “the Language of the Empire of CHINA, is, the PRIMITIVE Tongue, which was common to the whole World before the Flood” (p. 44). Even the famous Isaac Vossius, so Webb claims, confirms that the Chinese “preserve a continued History compiled from their monuments, and annual exploits of four thousand five hundred yeares” and have “Writers . . . more antient than even Moses himself” (p. 48). Unlike the Indians and all other nations, the Chinese “have never been corrupted by intercourse with strangers” and have, “unknown indeed to other Nations,” continued “enjoying to themselves their own felicity at pleasure” (p. 48). The great antiquity of this isolated people could not be doubted in view of the evidence furnished by secular as well as Jesuit experts:
Whereby appears, that according to the vulgar Aera, which Martinius follows, and which makes from the Creation to the Flood of Noah one thousand six hundred fifty six years; and from thence to the coming of CHRIST into the World two thousand two hundred ninety four years; the Historical time of the Chinois begins several Ages, to wit, five hundred fifty three years before the Universal Deluge, computing to the year one thousand six hundred fifty eight: as Vossius doth. (p. 52)
Again relying on Martini, Webb argues that the only possible explanation of China’s ancient and uninterrupted historical records is that “this extreme part of Asia, whereof we treat, was for certain inhabited before the flood” and that the family of Noah, which alone could know of antediluvian events, had indeed settled there and saved ancient records on the ark (p. 55). He even speculated that Noah had built his ark in China since “no Countrey in the habitable Earth could better furnish Noah, with all manner of conveniences, and every sort of materials proper for the building of such a Machine than China” (p. 71).
Apart from humankind’s Ur-language, the Chinese had, of course, also safeguarded antediluvian Ur-religion: “But that of old, saith Martinius, the Chinois professed the true God from the Doctrine delivered them by Noah, there is no doubt to be made” (p. 88). The proof of this lies in the Chinese books where “this Theology of the Chinois, not by tradition, and a perpetual same” is found “successively written from Age to Age, ever since the universal Deluge, above seven hundred years before Moses was born” (p. 92). According to Webb’s Jesuit sources, idolatry was unknown to the Chinese “till after the birth of CHRIST, when for many Ages preceding, the whole World had followed Idols”; but when idolatry was imported to China “in the sixty fifth year after CHRIST, infected by an Indian Philosopher that crept into China,” it was of the very worst kind (p. 94).
Webb’s conclusion from all this was that, absent any ancient information from India, “China is the most antient, and in all probability, was, the first planted Countrey of the World after the flood” and that there is “no doubt to be made” that the Chinese knowledge “in Divine matters, of the true God especially, was taught them by Noah” (p. 116). With regard to the antediluvian writing system that survived in China equally unscathed by events in the rest of the world, Webb was convinced that antediluvian books had survived the flood; some parts of the books of Enoch were reportedly “found after the flood in Arabia Felix . . . of which Tertullian affirmeth, that he had seen and read some whole pages” (p. 147). Regarding the Chinese “hieroglyphics,” Webb found that their inventor “was Fohius their first Emperour, who according to the time that is given to the beginning of his reign might be contemporary with Enos” (p. 152).9 But the language extant in China is even older—in fact, it must be “as antient, as the World itself and Mankind” (p. 162). All Chinese books are written in this “true ORIGINAL Language,” whose characters “ever have been one and the same throughout their whole Empire” (p. 180). The characteristics of this language—picked up by Webb from Semedo, Martini, and Kircher—seemed to prove that Chinese is the language of paradise, which “perdures in its Antient purity without any change or alteration,”
And I must not omit, that several books yet live amongst them, written in their first and original Hieroglyphicks, which still remaining in their Libraries, are understood by all their Literati, though they are no longer used, except in some Inscriptions, and Seals instead of Coats of Arms. Among these sort of Books is extant one called Yeking of great Antiquity, as taking beginning with Fohius, and of as great esteem for the Arcana it contains. This Book seems much to confirm the opinion of those that would have the Inscription of Persepolis more antient than the flood. For, as This in Persia consists only in Triangles several wayes transversed: So That in China consists only of streight lines several wayes interrupted. It treats especially of Judicial Astrology, Politique Government; and occult Philosophy. (p. 190)
Such information and conclusions could not but interest Europe’s “antiquarians,” who were intrigued by the age, origin, and meaning of Mesopotamian cuneiform inscriptions, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the hexagrams of the Yijing, and the runic inscriptions of northern Europe. Were they all some kind of code from the dawn of time—a kind of Ur-shorthand—the key to which was exclusively preserved in that most mysterious and secluded of all ancient countries of the world, China?
Martino Martini began his Sinicae historiae decas prima of 1658—the first genuine history of China to appear in a European language10—with the reign of Fuxi (Fu Hsi; Webb’s Fohius) from 2952 to 2838 B.C.E. According to the widely accepted chronology of Archbishop James USSHER (1581–1656), the creation of Adam had taken place in 4004 B.C.E and the great flood in 2349 B.C.E. The reign of Martini’s Fuxi thus took place about six centuries before Noah’s flood. The Jesuits in China had long been aware of this discrepancy and had in 1637 received permission to use a Septuagint-based alternative chronology whose flood occurred in 2957 B.C.E., five years before Fuxi began his reign (Mungello 1989:127). Martini was convinced that East Asia was inhabited before the time of Noah’s flood, yet unlike John Webb, he “was willing to leave the problem unresolved” (p. 127) and thus stimulated a heated debate among chronologists and so-called antiquarians that continued well into the eighteenth century. Martini accepted the Chinese view that Fuxi had invented the trigrams and was fascinated by the sixty-four hexagrams that he associated with ancient mathematical knowledge and “a mystical philosophy similar to Pythagoras, but many centuries older” (Martini 1658:6). Though the Chinese “use it today mainly for divination and sortilege and either ignore or neglect its genuine meaning” (p. 6), Martini regarded this system as a repository of ancient wisdom transmitted from patriarch to patriarch since the time of Noah. He thought that the Yijing was China’s most ancient book and was convinced that Fuxi had invented the Chinese writing system that reminded him so much of the Egyptian hieroglyphs (p. 12) he had seen in the 1630s in Rome while studying under Athanasius Kircher.
Martini published his China atlas and history while traveling through Europe to drum up support for the accommodationist approach in the Jesuit mission, and during his stay in Rome (fall 1654 to January 1656), he gave his teacher much of the China-related information that ended up in Kircher’s famous China Illustrata (1667).11 But their view of Fuxi was completely at odds, and this difference is very significant. For Martini, Fuxi was a transmitter of “genuine meaning” and a great astronomer who had come to China some time before the confusion of tongues (Martini 1658:11). He was thus a member of the “good” transmission. Kircher, by contrast, followed Martini’s informer João Rodrigues (who had first identified Fuxi with Zoroaster) in asserting that Fuxi was a descendant of Ham and therefore a member of the “evil” transmission (Kircher 1987:214).
The difference between Webb and Martini on one hand and Rodrigues and Kircher on the other does not just concern the burning question of Egyptian or Chinese anteriority (which evoked passionate discussions well into the nineteenth century). It also lies at the heart of the protracted dispute about the Jesuit “accommodation” policy and formed the crux of the famous controversy about Chinese Rites in Paris when the Sorbonne in 1700 condemned the following propositions:
1. China had knowledge of the true God more than two thousand years before Jesus Christ.
2. China had the honor of sacrificing to God in the most ancient temple in the world.
3. China has honored God in a manner that can serve as an example even to Christians.
4. China has practiced a morality as pure as its religion.
5. China had the faith, humility, the interior and exterior cult, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the saintliness, the miracles, the spirit of God, and the purest charity, which is the characteristic and the perfection of the genuine religion.
6. Of all the nations of the world, China has been the most constantly favored by the graces of God.12
The controversy reached enormous proportions because it did not just involve China but also India (where the toleration of “Malabarian Rites” by Roberto de Nobili and his successors was based on a similar notion of pure ancient monotheism) and ultimately even Europe’s ancient religion and its druids. The two opposing views of China’s first emperor were emblematic of two completely different views of the past. I have earlier called them “inclusive” and “exclusive,” but even the “inclusive” view was in a sense exclusive since it also hijacked other people’s histories and religions and embedded them in a fundamentally biblical scenario. For example, Webb’s journey of Noah to China left the entire basic framework of the Old Testament narrative with its creator God, paradise, the Fall, the patriarchs, the deluge, and other biblical events intact and turned the Chinese into descendants of Noah. A metaphor from the commercial realm may be more to the point. What Webb, Martini, the China figurists, and Ramsay attempted can be called a “friendly takeover” whereas the approach of Rodrigues, Kircher, and the victors of the Rites controversy would constitute a “hostile takeover.” The “hostile takeover” group usually made the Chinese descend from Noah’s problem child Ham—the one who had mocked his drunken father—and regarded China’s ancient religion not as noachic monotheism but as an evil concoction reeking of polytheism, idolatry, and superstition of Egyptian or Chaldean ancestry. The Sorbonne accusers of Louis Daniel Le Comte’s and Charles Le Gobien’s writings were of this persuasion, and so were the exclusivists in Rome, China, and India who adamantly opposed the approach of Ricci, de Nobili, and Ur-traditionalists of all colors. This “hostile takeover” group won in the rites controversy, and its victory not only led to the prohibition of publications by “friendly takeover” promoters but also became a factor in the expulsion of missionaries from China and the eventual dissolution of the Jesuit order (see Chapter 7). Moreover, as is documented in this book, it exerted a profound influence on the growth of Orientalism. But so did the opposing faction.
The proponents of a “friendly takeover” put the Chinese and their first emperor into the transmission line tethered to Noah and his good son Shem and believed that they were soundly monotheistic and fundamentally good. The hazards of this sort of friendly takeover are shown in the tragic fate of Li Zubo, a Chinese Christian who was executed in 1665 for having asserted in a treatise that biblical teachings were carried to China by early descendants of Adam and Eve, that China’s founding father Fuxi was one of them, that biblical teachings had for many ages reigned in China, and that the old Chinese classics showed vestigial evidence of such teachings (Mungello 1989:93). Li wrote,
The first Chinese really descended from the men of Judea who had come to the East from the West, and the Teaching of Heaven is therefore what they recalled. When they produced and reared their children and grandchildren, they taught their households the traditions of the family, and this is the time when this teaching came to China. (trans. Rule 1986:99)
While Li’s treatise pleased the “accommodationist” faction and his Jesuit mentors, who possibly had a hand in its redaction, it enraged seal-carrying shareholders of the Chinese empire like the official Yang Guangxian, who launched a formal accusation and succeeded in having the unfortunate Li Zubo executed.
It seems that Chinese officials regarded this not exactly as a “friendly” takeover of their past. Yet some decades later some of the most extremist proponents of this view were studying the Yijing with the emperor’s consent right under the officials’ noses in the precincts of Beijing’s imperial palace. They were the Jesuit missionaries who are now commonly called “figurists,” a label that alludes to both their interest in “figures” or symbols and their central typological enterprise, which consisted in finding the New (their Christianity) prefigured in the Old (the Yijing and the Chinese classics). In a letter to Étienne Fourmont, Father Prémare expressed the aim of this group and of his own work as follows:
The ultimate and last goal to which I dedicate this Notice and all my other writings is to bring about, if I can, that the whole world realizes that the Christian religion is as old as the world, and that the God-Man was very certainly known to the man or men who invented the Chinese hieroglyphs and composed the Jing. (Abel-Rémusat 1829:2.266)13
The fact that Prémare included his Notitia Linguae Sinicae, the first comprehensive textbook of the Chinese language and of Chinese literature (Lundbæk 1991:64), in this dedication is significant: research of ancient Asian texts necessitated a thorough knowledge of language and literature, and it is certainly not by chance that the best Sinologists of the early eighteenth century were all deeply involved in the search for humankind’s earliest religion, whether they promoted figurism (Bouvet, de Prémare, Foucquet) or eventually rejected it on the basis of intensive study (de Visdelou). Although the “hostile takeover” policy of the Catholic Church and the Jesuit order prevented them from publishing (and even openly discussing) the results of their research, the effort to identify, date, and understand ancient texts while making use of available native commentaries, dictionaries, reference works, and literati advice was a very important event in the history of Orientalism and opened many doors. It influenced, among many others, pioneer anthropologists like Lafitau, historians like Olof Dalin and Paul Henri Mallet, and of course also via Ramsay a number of eighteenth-century Orientalists such as Holwell (Chapter 6); Mignot, Anquetil-Duperron, and Sainte-Croix (Chapter 7); and William Jones (App 2009).
A new phase in the study of ancient Asian materials began in earnest at the end of the seventeenth century, around the time when Jean-Paul BIGNON (1662–1743) became president of the Académie des Sciences (1692), began his reform of the Academy of Sciences (1699), became director of the Journal des Savants, gave it its lasting form (1701), and reorganized Europe’s largest library (the Royal Library in Paris that evolved into the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). It was Bignon who stacked the Collège Royal with instructors like Fourmont (Leung 2002:130); it was Bignon whom Father Bouvet wanted to get on board for his grand project of an academy in China (Collani 1989); it was Bignon who employed Huang, Fréret, and Fourmont to catalog Chinese books at the library and to produce Chinese grammars and dictionaries; it was Bignon who ordered Calmette and Pons to find and send the Vedas and other ancient Indian texts to Paris (see Chapter 6); and it was Bignon who supported Fourmont’s expensive project of carving over 100,000 Chinese characters in Paris (Leung 2002). The conversion of major libraries into state institutions open to the public, which Bignon oversaw, was a development with an immense impact on the production and dissemination of knowledge, including knowledge about the Orient. So was the promotion of scholarly journals like the Journal des Sçavans (later renamed Journal des Savants) that featured reviews of books from all over Europe and fulfilled a central function in the pan-European “République des lettres”.
Joachim BOUVET (1656–1730) first explained his figurist system in a letter to Bignon (dated September 15, 1705) that was originally intended for Leibniz (Collani 1989:26). Seeing features of Christianity prefigured in ancient (or seemingly ancient) sources was quite common throughout the history of Christianity, but Bouvet brought an amazing text into play:
One will be forced to admit that the canonical books of China are the most ancient works of natural law that can today be found among the heathens and even among the believers, not even excepting the Pentateuch of Moses; that is true at least for the book ye kim [Yijing] which can with assurance be regarded as the most ancient work known in the world. (p. 39)
The “veritable author” of this book is, according to Bouvet, the “holy Patriarch Enoch whose works, according to Tertullian, were rejected by the Jews because they talked too clearly of the Messiah and the incarnation of a God who would himself come to expiate the world” (p. 39). While the Chinese people thought that Fuxi was the Yijing’s author and inventor of its hieroglyphs and ancient “mystical science” (p. 39), Bouvet was convinced that the Chinese had—like many other peoples—unknowingly adopted the antediluvian biblical patriarch Enoch as a founder figure:
But we add and dare to affirm that this alleged founder of the Chinese monarchy is none other than he whom most ancient nations have recognized . . . as the founder not only of their laws and customs but also of their religion, sciences, ancient books, writing systems, and languages. Consequently the Fo-hi [Fuxi] of the Chinese, the Hermes or Mercury Trismegist of the Egyptians and Greeks, the Thot of the Alexandrians, the Idris or Adris of the Arabs, and the Enoch of the Hebrews are one and the same person who is revered by diverse nations under different names. (p. 42)
In this manner Bouvet attempted a friendly takeover of the remote antiquity of the world’s ancient nations, and the two reputedly oldest ones—Egypt and China—both got a biblical pedigree. This was more elegant than Huët’s attempt to hijack entire dynasties of gentile divinities by identifying them all as disguised members of Moses’s family, but it was nevertheless a takeover of global proportions. Whoever authored the Yijing, it was the oldest extant book of the world and therefore of the greatest interest:
In effect, in spite of its small volume and very simple figures, this work contains in a kind of natural, methodical, clear, and abbreviated algebra, as it were, the principles of all sciences and forms, and a system of nature and religion. Following the very simple principles on which it is wholly based, one discovers in it all the mysteries of the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the entire economy of symbolic science of this ancient nation, invented by Enoch, the true Mercury. Who could, in the face of such a perfect affinity between China and Egypt in such an extraordinary type of doctrine . . . deny that this must have come to them from a common origin and that their first master must necessarily have been identical? (p. 46)
But who had brought this oldest book, the Yijing, to China? Since Bouvet was in the “friendly takeover” camp this task fell to Noah’s good son Shem:
Indeed, Shem—who because of his rare piety and his seniority doubtlessly succeeded to his father’s sovereign dignity of priesthood and kingship—inherited the treasure trove of sacred hieroglyphic books that Noah had saved from the waters of the deluge after having received them from Methusalem, the nephew of Enoch with whom he had spent several centuries. This holy patriarch [Shem] preserved through his wise and religious policy almost the entire lineage of Noah in the cult of God and in the faithful observance of the natural law until about the end of the fifth century after the deluge when the numerous descendants were divided by divine order into several colonies in order to populate the earth. (p. 47)
The tribe that populated China was, in Bouvet’s scenario, “probably the most considerable of the colonies issued by Shem’s family,” and it was “only natural” that it received as heritage “from the very hands of Shem” some precious treasures: antique “vases, sacred texts, and most genuine hieroglyphic sources that certainly included the Yijing and the other ancient books of China” (p. 47). Thus, the ancient treasures of Enoch came to be transmitted “via the hands of Noah and Shem to China” (p. 48). Since both the transmission and its content were so pure, it is hardly surprising that China was “since the beginning of her foundation in possession of his [Enoch’s] sciences, his laws, and his religion in the highest degree of purity and perfection” and has ever since safeguarded its canonical books “with the same attachment and the same respect as the Hebrews show for the sacred books of the Old Testament” (p. 48).
So far we have here an Ur-religion and Ur-science revealed by the founder (God) to a line of patriarchs, plus a secure transmission in the form of texts and symbols in canonical books that are substantially older than the Old Testament but go back to the same source. While the Chinese were thus living in purity and perfection, the Egyptians—instructed by Cham “who was as abhorred by men for his impiety as his elder brother [Shem] was admired”—learned “the detestable and conjectural [supposé] meaning of the hieroglyphs, the diabolical secrets of magic, and the sacrilegious rites of idolatry” that Cham had smuggled onto the ark of his father (p. 48). But unfortunately, the Chinese had in the course of time forgotten the true significance of the “hieroglyphs” of their Enochian science as preserved in the Yijing, and of true Noevian Ur-religion. It is here that Bouvet and his disciples had to step in as regenerators of Ur-religion with the ability to introduce the Chinese, starting with their emperor, to the “genuine” meaning of their canonical books, their ancient religion, and that oldest book of the world, which contained all this. For those who could read it, the Yijing proves—as Prémare put it—that “the Christian religion is as old as this world” and that the oldest Chinese texts contain “vestiges of the dogmas of Christianity” (Prémare 1878:9, 51).
At the beginning of his Vestiges, Prémare lists the essential prefigured doctrines:
The Principal Dogmas of the Christian Religion Rediscovered in the Ancient Chinese Books
The following is the plan of this work:
1. I will first explain different points necessary for understanding the book.
2. I will speak of God as One and Trine.
3. I will treat of the question of the state of unspoiled and innocent Nature.
4. Then of the state of corrupted Nature, and separately of the rebellion of Angels and the fall of Adam.
5. Of restored Nature through Jesus Christ. This point, with God’s help, will be treated at length because of the importance of the subject and the abundance of material. (p. 22)
Bouvet and his disciples had, in spite of a number of differences, the same basic vision of Ur-tradition and shared the dream to show the Chinese and also Western skeptics that the world’s oldest books contain vestiges of a primitive revelation, form part of the antediluvian patriarchal transmission, and constitute an Oldest Testament containing the encoded prefiguration of central doctrines of Christianity.
As the idea of Asian antiquity and ancient wisdom slowly took hold among Europe’s cultured class, it also played a role in one of the famous controversies of the time: the struggle between the “ancients” and the “moderns.” In 1690 Sir William TEMPLE (1628–99) wrote in An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning that the Egyptians, who had the reputation of being the oldest civilization and the instructors of Moses, might themselves “have drawn much of their learning from the Indians” and explained:
To strengthen this conjecture, of much learning being derived from such remote and ancient fountains as the Indies, and perhaps China; it may be asserted with great evidence, that though we know little of the antiquities of India, beyond Alexander’s time, yet those of China are the oldest that any where pretend to any fair records; for these are agreed, by the missionary Jesuits, to extend so far above four thousand years, and with such appearance of clear and undeniable testimonies, that those religious men themselves, rather than question their truth, by finding them contrary to the vulgar chronology of the Scripture, are content to have recourse to that of the Septuagint, and thereby to salve the appearances in these records of the Chineses. (Temple 1814:3.455)
Sir William was aware that it “may look like a paradox, to deduce learning from regions accounted commonly so barbarous and rude” yet insisted that “whoever observes the account already given of the ancient Indian and Chinese learning and opinions, will easily find among them the seeds of all these Grecian productions and institutions”: the transmigrations of souls, the four cardinal virtues, abstinence from all meats that had animal life, the eternity of matter with perpetual changes of form, the indolence of the body and tranquility of mind, the care of education from the birth of children, the austere temperance of diet, and so on (p. 457).
With the return to Europe of Foucquet in 1722 and his residence in Rome from 1723 until his death in 1741, the Chinese figurist message and the notion that there are extremely old Chinese scriptures got a somewhat broader exposure. Among Foucquet’s interlocutors were Voltaire,14 Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Charles de Brosses, Étienne Fourmont, Joseph Spence, and Chevalier Ramsay (Witek 1982:308). Ramsay conversed with Foucquet in 1724, and Spence called him the “great friend of Foucquet” (pp. 310–14). During a lengthy talk, the former missionary confirmed that “the canonical Chinese books were truly more ancient than those of Moses” and that “their authors were unable to know these things except by the ancient tradition which should be recognized as having come from Adam through Seth and Enoch, who was the author of these books” (pp. 310–11). Foucquet must also have supplied Ramsay with some of his translations, as he certainly is the “gentleman of superior genius, who does not care to be mentioned” who allowed Ramsay to publish some “passages, which he translated himself out of some ancient Chinese books that have been brought into Europe” (Ramsay 1814:382–83). After citing some “ancient commentaries of the book Yking, i.e., the book of Changes” that “continually speak of a double heaven, a primitive and a posterior,” Ramsay included two pages of quotations from these commentaries as well as Daoist classics in his Of the Mythology of the Pagans appended to the Travels of Cyrus. The texts supplied by Foucquet were chosen to prove that the Chinese knew a golden age of innocence (“former heaven”), an age of degradation (“latter heaven”), and also “an ancient tradition common to all nations that the middle god was not to expiate and put an end to crimes but by his own great sufferings” (pp. 383–85). It is very likely that Ramsay’s basic scheme of a “primitive perfection of nature, its fall, and its restoration by a divine hero”—the scheme that he detected “in the mythologies of the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Chinese”—was inspired by, or even stemmed from, “the superior genius” of Foucquet.
Prémare, who remained in China, read Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus in 1731 and expressed his elation of having found a kindred soul in a letter to Fourmont on August 27, 1731 (Lundbæk 1991:171). After this welcome discovery, Prémare began to exchange letters with Ramsay and supplied him with the best of his writings. Ramsay used so much of them in his “Great work” that Lundbæk called him “Prémare’s editor” (p. 170).15 This material radically changed Ramsay’s view of the Bible. In the Travels of Cyrus he had acknowledged that some ancient peoples cannot be accused of having plagiarized Moses because “the Jews and their books were too long concealed in a corner of the earth, to be reasonably thought the primitive light of the Gentiles” and suggested that one “must go farther back even to the deluge” in order to prove the essential correctness of the biblical account (Ramsay 1814:390–91). At the time Ramsay was still convinced that the truth of the three states (initial perfection, the fall, and salvation through a Messiah) “has been transmitted to us from age to age, from the time of the deluge till now, by an universal tradition; other nations have obscured and altered this tradition by their fables; it has been preserved in its purity no where but in the holy scriptures, the authority of which cannot be disputed with any shadow of reason” (p. 390).
Figure 13. Yijing trigram charts (former and latter heaven) by Prémare (1878:79).
In his posthumously published “Great work,” however, Ramsay accepted Newton’s conjecture that the book of Genesis is only a short extract of older, lost sources (Ramsay 1749:215–16), and he supplied so much information missing in the Bible that the description of “the rapid Mosaical narration” as “rather an abridgment, than a full detail of that great legislator’s original writings” seems adequate. In the chapter on “the three states of degraded angelical nature,” Ramsay finally states without ambiguity:
As the book of Genesis is probably, but an extract and abridgment of the antidiluvian and Noevian traditions, concerning the creation, Moses, in his rapid narration, does not enter into any full description of the primitive state of the angelical world, nor so much as mention the fall of angels, which is only hinted at, by a transient word about the chaos. (p. 301)
Apart from missing information about the fall of angels, Ramsay was also concerned about the lack of Old Testament support for the Trinity, even though this must have been taught by the antediluvian patriarchs. Here, too, the Chinese transmission seemed more reliable:
If the Noevian patriarchs taught the great mystery of the Trinity to their children; if this sublime truth was transmitted to their posterity by the different heads of the families that peopled the various countries of the earth; if the most ancient of all nations the Chinese have such plain vestiges of this sacred truth in their original books, is it surprising, if we find some traces of the same doctrine among the Chaldeans and Persians, both descended from the same source? (p. 124)
In this last of his works, Ramsay keeps coming back to “the Chinese, the most ancient of all nations now existent under a regular form of government, uninterrupted almost, since the first times after the universal deluge” (pp. 124, 274) and to their closeness to the Ur-tradition:
As the Chinese are one of the most ancient people that inhabited the earth, and that were formed into a regular government soon after the deluge it is no wonder we find among them such venerable traces of the Noevian tradition. The nearer we approach to the origin of the world, the clearer is this tradition concerning a triplicity in the divine essence. We must not then be surprised, if we find some vestiges of the same truth in the following ages. The Chinese mythology, or rather theology, is a key to all the others less ancient, and more obscured by the succession of time. (p. 121)
Prémare’s texts had convinced Ramsay that “the canonical books of China contain many scattered fragments of the ancient Noevian, yea, antidiluvian tradition concerning the sublimest mysteries of faith” (p. 181), and he was in awe of the new kind of Orientalist research performed by “some very learned and great men who have lived twenty, thirty and forty years in China, studied the language of the country, seen these original books, and read the ancient commentarys upon them” (p. 181). But how did Ramsay see their system? He boiled it down to seven points:
1. They pretend to demonstrate, that all the Chinese characters were originally hieroglyphics, as those wrote upon the Egyptian obelisks . . . 2. These ancient monuments, characters, symbols and hieroglyphics were originally wrote upon pillars, or tables of stone and mettal, by some antidiluvian patriarch who foresaw the universal deluge, who knew the mysteries of religion, and who was desirous to preserve the memory of those sacred truths from shipwrack. 3. That tho’ those hieroglyphical monuments may have been adulterated, interpolated and ill copied in succeeding ages, yet they still contain many vestiges of the most essential doctrines of our most holy faith, as of God and his three essential attributes; of the sacred Trinity; of the pre-existence, suffering and triumph of the Messiah, of the fall of angels and men; and of the true means of reunion to our great original. (p. 181)
The remaining four points deal with the Chinese’s mistaken belief that they were the only people to possess this tradition because of their ignorance of Fuxi’s identity with Enoch; the mixup of past and future because of the lack of conjugation; and their ignorance of the true meaning of the ancient hieroglyphs that constitutes, as with other peoples, the origin of mythologies:
The original hieroglyphics transported from nation to nation were by succession of time falsely translated, adulterated, or misunderstood, and the true sense of the ancient traditions, being at last forgot, every nation explained them differently according to their fancy, and applied them as fabulous facts that had already happened, or to fictitious heroes, that had once lived in their own country. Hence arose all the different mythologies of the Eastern and Western, of the Southern and Northern nations, where the ground and canvass is still the same, tho’ the colourings and ornaments are different. (pp. 182–83)
These seven points that Ramsay attributes to the Chinese figurists had great repercussions in his work, since he consistently uses the translations of Father Prémare to render his demonstrations incontestable:
If these seven principles can be demonstrated, or at least proved in such a manner, as to render them not only possible and probable; but even, as uncontestable as any matters of fact can be, then we see, how some hints and vestiges of the same divine truths may, and must be found in all learned and religious nations, since they are so clear in the ancient monuments of China. (p. 183)
For orthodox readers who had followed Ramsay’s religious itinerary from Protestant theology studies in Scotland into the arms of the Catholic Church and from there toward François FÉNELON (1651–1715), the French mystic Madame GUYON (1648–1717), and finally the Jesuit figurists, Ramsay’s conclusions from all this must have been hard to swallow:
The only objection that can be made, is, that if this system be true, then the five canonical books of China would contain clearer revelations concerning the mysteries of our holy religion, than the Pentateuch, or the five canonical books of Moses. (p. 183)
Ramsay lets this objection stand without further comment; and since he continues to adduce Chinese evidence for his arguments, the readers could not fail to understand his answer to this objection.
Thus, the Yijing and the other ancient “canonical” books of ancient China had their brief but poignant moment of fame. The study of Chinese sources and the Jesuit figurist obsession with Enoch’s symbols left a permanent mark, as they directed Europe’s attention to the study of the most ancient Oriental texts and played a crucial role in opening a new phase of Orientalist research. The French king opened the eighteenth century at Versailles with a display of Chinese fireworks, and half a century later Voltaire began his universal history with a chapter on China. But by then Voltaire was already guessing that India had an even older civilization than China. But let us now turn to some other Ur-teachings discovered by Ramsay: doctrines that influenced men like Holwell, the protagonist of the next chapter.
The problem of the origin of evil was basic both for the radical deists who refused to accept any divine revelation and for men like Ramsay and Holwell in whose systems vestiges of a divine revelation to our first forefathers were central. In the Discourse upon the Theology and Mythology of the Pagans, Ramsay points out that even without the help of revelation and “left to the light of their reason alone,” men have always been shocked that evil could be “the work of a Being infinitely wise and powerful” and knew that “what is supremely good, could never produce any thing that was wicked or miserable” (Ramsay 1814:362).
From hence they concluded, that souls are not now what they were at first; that they are degraded, for some fault committed by them in a former state; that this life is a state of exile and expiation; and, in a word, that all beings are to be restored to their proper order. Tradition struck in with reason, and this tradition had spread over all nations certain opinions, which they held in common, with regard to the three states of the world, as I shall shew in this second part, which will be a sort of abridgment of the traditional doctrine of the ancients. (p. 362)
This “tradition” refers to the divine revelation transmitted from the earliest patriarchs whose vestiges are found among all ancient nations. The fact that it “strikes in with reason” is the overall theme of Ramsay’s Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, which argues that supernatural revelation is not opposed to reason, as the deists argued, but rather in perfect accord with it.
There are but two possible ways of coming to the knowledge of truth, by natural evidence, or by supernatural revelation. Both are emanations of that sovereign wisdom which alone has the right to command our assent, and both are employed in this essay. Tho’ natural light is not always sufficient to discover supernatural truths, yet revelation never contradicts reason. The former serves to exalt and ennoble, but never to degrade and extinguish the latter. (Ramsay 1748:iii)
One instance where man’s “natural light” is not sufficient for the discovery of “supernatural truths” is the question of the origin of evil. When young Cyrus in Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus interviews Pythagoras about this, Pythagoras—who in Ramsay’s portrait believes in an “infinite Being” that produced everything and is “only power, wisdom, and goodness”—ran through “all the different opinions of the philosophers,” but the best of Greek philosophy could not satisfy Cyrus (Ramsay 1814:225, 230). Of all the opinions he had heard regarding the origin of evil, the only one that made sense was one proposed by some Hebrews (p. 230). This “solution” stemmed from the Kabbala and was explained to Prince Cyrus by an “allegorist” called Eleazar, “one of the great geniuses of his age,” who was able to prove “that the religion of the Hebrews was not only the most ancient, but the most conformable to reason” (p. 290). This doctrine of “the Hebrew philosophers, concerning the three states of the world” is based on supernatural revelation that never contradicts reason, and since the Hebrew transmission of revelation is so ancient and pure, Eleazar knows details of Ur-tradition that do not necessarily appear in the vestiges of the heathens. According to him, God first “created divers orders of intelligences to make them happy,” but two kinds of spirits “lost their happiness by their disloyalty” (pp. 290–91). The cherubim of superior order did so by pride, rebelled, and their sphere of the heavens “became a dark chaos” (p. 292). The less perfect ischim became too attached to material objects and sensual pleasures and were punished less severely because they sinned through weakness rather than through pride. They were forced to be “souls which actually inhabit mortal bodies,” and when such a body dies they must occupy another (p. 292):
The organic moulds of all human bodies were shut up in that of Adam, and the order of generation was established; each soul awakens in such a body, and in such time, place and circumstances, as suit best with the decrees of eternal wisdom. The earth changed its form, it was no longer a garden of delights, but a place of banishment and misery, where the continual war of the elements subjected men to diseases and death. This is the hidden meaning of the great Hebrew lawgiver, when he speaks of the terrestrial paradise and of the fall of our first parents, Adam does not represent a single man, but all mankind. (p. 292)
One can discuss whether this solution ought to have satisfied Ramsay’s Cyrus; but variations of it involving the preexistence of souls were well known in Ramsay’s time; in fact, they stretch from the days of Origen to Henry MORE (1614–87) and to the Latter-day Saints knocking on our doors today. In his book on The Immortality of the Soul (1662), Henry More not only asserted that “the hypothesis of Praeexistence is more agreeable to Reason than any other Hypothesis” and “has the suffrage of all Philosophers in all Ages” but also that “the Gymnosophists of Aegypt, the Indian Brachmans, the Persian Magi, and all the learned of the Jews were of this Opinion” (More 1662:110). Preexistence of souls assumes that people’s souls “did once subsist in some other state; where, in several manners and degrees, they forfeited the favour of their Creatour” and were punished for their apostasy (p. 112). The main benefits of the preexisting soul theory are that original sin is committed by all souls and not just Adam; that nobody is, therefore, unjustly punished; and that God is cleared of accusations of meanness. This also has implications for the end of times when such souls are to be restituted to their original state, and it can accommodate a measure of transmigration of souls among humans.
According to Ramsay, other peoples preserved vestiges of the same Ur-tradition. For example, Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato who “endeavored to re-establish the ancient theology of the Orientals” (Ramsay 1814:359) believed in the “very ancient doctrine, common to all the Asiatics,” that “the souls of beasts are degraded spirits”; and their followers “thought the doctrine of transmigration less absurd” than believing that “the divine justice could inflict sufferings on intelligences that had never offended.” These philosophers held that “none but the depraved souls were destined to such a transmigration, and that it would one day be at an end, when they were purified from their crimes” (pp. 364–65). Plato wrote that the souls “free themselves from the impurities of their terrestrial prison” and after death retire to “the first earth, where souls made their abode before their degradation.” This means that our “second earth” was seen as a “low abyss” and a “prison” (pp. 366–67).
When souls no longer make their felicity consist in the knowledge of truth, and when lower pleasures turn them off from the love of the supreme Essence, they are thrown into some planet, there to undergo expiatory punishments, till they are cured by their sufferings. These planets are consequently, according to Plato’s notion, like hospitals or places instituted for the cure of distempered intelligences. (p. 371)
This was, according to Ramsay, “the system adopted by the heathen philosophers, whenever they attempted to explain the origin of evil,” and Pythagoras “had learned the same doctrine among the Egyptians” (p. 372). The core doctrine of the Egyptians was thus another vestige of primeval revelation. Their belief was
1. That the world was created without any physical or moral evil, by a Being infinitely good. 2. That several genii abusing their liberty, fell into crimes, and thereby into misery. 3. That these genii must suffer expiatory punishments, till they are purified and restored to their first state. 4. That the god Orus, the son of Isis and Osiris, and who fights with the evil principle, is a subordinate deity, like Jupiter the conductor the son of Saturn. (p. 378)
The Persian doctrine is less well known “because we have lost the ancient books of the first Persians” (p. 379); but Ramsay was convinced that “the doctrine of the Persian magi is a sequel of the doctrine of the Indian Brachmans” (p. 380), and he had consulted “what has been translated of the Vedam, which is the sacred book of the modern Bramins.” Though “its antiquity be not perhaps so great as it is affirmed to be, yet there is no denying that it contains the ancient traditions of those people, and of their philosophers” (p. 381). The Vedam of the Indians states
that souls are eternal emanations from the divine Essence, or at least that they were produced long before the formation of the world; that they were originally in a state of purity, but having sinned, were thrown down into the bodies of men, or of beasts, according to their respective demerits; so that the body, where the soul resides, is a sort of dungeon or prison. (p. 382)
This quotation stems from Abraham Roger and will be discussed in the next chapter since it forms the core of Holwell’s “Indian” text and of his conception of the world’s oldest religion. This view of souls that existed before the formation of the world in a state of purity, sinned, and were imprisoned in the bodies of humans and animals was linked by the Indians with the concept of transmigration. Ramsay saw this confirmed by a quotation from Kircher’s China Illustrata (1987:142–43): “Lastly, they hold that ‘after a certain number of transmigrations, all souls shall be re-united to their origin, re-admitted into the company of the gods, and deified’ ” (Ramsay 1814:382). Ramsay expressed his surprise about finding such a clear formulation in the Indian Veda but saw this as a confirmation of Indian influence on Pythagoras:
I should hardly have thought those traditions authentic, or have brought myself to trust to the translators of the Vedam, if this doctrine had not been perfectly agreeable to that of Pythagoras, which I gave an account of a little before. This philosopher taught the Greeks nothing but what be had learned from the Gymnosophists. (p. 382)
While Ramsay insisted—as a good Catholic should—that he was not defending such opinions, he acknowledged their efficacy in confounding “such philosophers as refuse to believe” (p. 390):
In all these systems we see that the ancient philosophers, in order to refute the objections of the impious concerning the origin and duration of evil, adopted the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, and their final restoration. Several fathers of the church have maintained the first opinion, as the only philosophical way of explaining original sin; and Origen made use of the latter, to oppose the libertines of his time. (p. 390)
But by presenting such doctrines as vestiges of primeval revelation and linking them to “the foundation of our religion” (pp. 390–91) Ramsay gave them a tacit seal of approval. In his posthumously published “Great work,” Ramsay’s approval was open enough for David HUME (1711–76) to conclude in his Natural History of Religion (1757) that Ramsay, “having thus thrown himself out of all received sects of Christianity,” was “obliged to advance a system of his own which is a kind of Origenism, and supposes the pre-existence of the souls both of men and beasts, and the eternal salvation and conversion of all men, beasts, and devils” (Hume 1976:86).
Hume was averse to Ramsay’s basic view of initial perfection, gradual decline, and return to perfection. He saw monotheism not as the religion of Paradise but rather as the result of a long, hard slog from utter primitivity:
’Tis a matter of fact uncontestable, that about 1700 years ago all mankind were idolaters. The doubtful and sceptical principles of a few philosophers, or the theism, and that too not entirely pure, of one or two nations, form no objection worth regarding. Behold then the clear testimony of history. The farther we mount up into antiquity, the more do we find mankind plunged into idolatry. No marks, no symptoms of any more perfect religion. The most antient records of human race still present us with polytheism as the popular and established system. The north, the south, the east, the west, give their unanimous testimony to the same fact. What can be opposed to so full an evidence? (p. 26)
Ramsay’s answer was, as Cudworth’s before him: ancient textual evidence! But unlike Cudworth who had to dig for signs of Ur-monotheism in the Middle East and in Egypt, Ramsay had informants supplying him with ancient Chinese evidence. Nevertheless, Europe was gradually warming to the idea, promoted by Hume, of humankind’s gradual rise from primitivity. This was diametrically opposed to Ramsay’s notion of a decline from initial perfection. But both Ur-theologians of the Ramsay-type and believers in progress from primitivity of the Hume-type were interested in evidence—particularly ancient texts from Asia, since this continent was (at least in Europe and Asia itself) universally considered to be the cradle of civilization. The hunt for such evidence was a task made for Orientalists, and the next chapters will present some of the men who tried to rise to this challenge.
