Note (return) — Chapter IV

And first, he proves most conclusively that Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod, 160 who are usually designated "the theologians" of Greece, but who were in fact the depravers and corrupters of pagan theology, do not teach the existence of a multitude of unmade, self-existent, and independent deities. Even they believed in the existence of one uncreated and eternal mind, one Supreme God, anterior and superior to all the gods of their mythology. They had some intuition, some apperception of the Divine, even before they had attached to it a sacred name. The gods of their mythology had all, save one, a temporal origin; they were generated of Chaos and Night, by an active principle called Love. "One might suspect," says Aristotle, that Hesiod, and if there be any other who made love or desire a principle of things, aimed at these very things (viz., the designation of the efficient cause of the world); for Parmenides, describing the generation of the universe, says: