It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic.  I do not know that the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any human mind.  And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that everything and each individual thing is God—­a proposition which I find unthinkable—­but that everything is divine, then it may be said without any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic.  Its gods not only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods.  And if demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same reality.  The divinization of everything was simply its humanization.  To say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated.  And this is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.

The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the former were immortal.  A god came to be identical with an immortal man and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his death he had not really died.  Of certain heroes it was believed that they were alive in the kingdom of the dead.  And this is a point of great importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.

In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some real monarch.  It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism.  Hence monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren.  Zeus, Jupiter, was in process of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwe originally one god among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god of the whole universe.

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin.  “It is only on the march and in time of war,” says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel,[38] “that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah.  The very name of Israel is martial, and means ‘God (El) fighteth,’ and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwe Cebaeoth—­the Jehovah of the armies of Israel.  It was on the battlefield that Jehovah’s presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace.”

God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man’s sense of divinity as a warlike, monarchical and social God.  He revealed himself to the people as a whole, not to the individual.  He was the God of a people and he jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone.  The transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of the prophets.  It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets that individualized the divinity.  And above all by making the divinity ethical.