Chapter 13.—That When It is
Expounded What Saturn Is, What Genius Is, It Comes to This, that
Both of Them are Shown to Be Jupiter.
But why speak more of this Jupiter,
with whom perchance all the rest are to be identified; so that, he
being all, the opinion as to the existence of many gods may remain
as a mere opinion, empty of all truth? And they are all to be
referred to him, if his various parts and powers are thought of as
so many gods, or if the principle of mind which they think to be
diffused through all things has received the names of many gods
from the various parts which the mass of this visible world
combines in itself, and from the manifold administration of
nature. For what is Saturn also? “One of the principal
gods,” he says, “who has dominion over all sowings.” Does
not the exposition of the verses of Valerius Soranus teach that
Jupiter is the world, and that he emits all seeds from himself, and
receives them into himself?
It is he, then, with whom is the
dominion of all sowings. What is Genius? “He is the god who
is set over, and has the power of begetting, all things.” Who
else than the world do they believe to have this power, to which it
has been said:
“Almighty Jove, progenitor and
mother?”
And when in another place he says that Genius
is the rational soul of every one, and therefore exists separately
in each individual, but that the corresponding soul of the world is
God, he just comes back to this same thing,—namely, that the soul
of the world itself is to be held to be, as it were, the universal
genius. This, therefore, is what he calls Jupiter. For if every
genius is a god, and the soul of every man a genius, it follows
that the soul of every man is a god. But if very absurdity
compels even these theologists themselves to shrink from this, it
remains that they call that genius god by special and pre-eminent
distinction, whom they call the soul of the world, and therefore
Jupiter.