The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

226 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

and as in him there can be no distinction between conception and
birth, from all eternity‘he produces in himself another self.’He
is at once the divine father, mother, and son. Conceived of God,
born of God, without separating from God, these three persons
are God in God, and, far from dividing the primitive unity of
the divine nature, they all three combine to constitute his infinite
perfection.
“Doubtless the mind of the uneducated classes could neither
understand nor rise to such lofty heights. Human intelligence
supports with difficulty so pure an idea of an absolute being.
All the attributes of divinity—his immensity, his eternity, his
independence—place him at an infinite distance from ourselves;
to comprehend and participate in them, we must make him think
as we think, we must lend him our passions and subject him
to our laws. God must take upon him, with human nature,
all the weaknesses that accompany it, all the infirmities under
which it labours; in a word, the Word must become flesh. The
immaterial god must incarnate himself, must come to the land
of Egypt and people it with the gods, his children. Each of
the persons of the primitive trinity thus became independent
[246] and formed a new type, from which, in their turn, other lower
types emanated. From trinity to trinity, from personification
to personification, that truly incredible number of divinities
was soon reached, with forms sometimes grotesque and often
monstrous, who descended by almost insensible degrees from
the highest to the lowest ranks of nature. The scribes, the priests,
the officials, all the educated world, in fact, of Egyptian society,
never professed that gross paganism which caused Egypt to be
called with justice‘the mother of superstitions.’The various
names and innumerable forms attributed by the multitude to as
many distinct and independent divinities, were for them merely
names and forms of one and the same being. ‘God, when he
comes as a generator, and brings to light the latent forces of
the hidden causes, is called Ammon; when he is the spirit who