ABSTRACT
The educated layman, particularly if he is of a religious cast of mind, will find it quite natural that we should now turn our attention to the gods of ancient Egypt. But to the historian of religion this by no means follows automatically. Even if he is a believer, he is obliged to regard matters historically – that is to say, he has to consider religious phenomena as they evolved. This means that one must take very seriously the possibility that God, who objectively is the primary cause and creator of all things and has been extant since time immemorial, was not envisaged by early man in human form. Jews, Christians and Muslims can cope with this difficulty fairly easily because they believe that in the beginning of things God did indeed exist but that later he assumed a particular form and name and proclaimed a particular doctrine. In other words, when faith in God was still in its initial phase, no one asked the question whether God existed objectively or not; instead men were solely concerned with natural phenomena. We may develop this simple proposition by quoting the startling remark by G. v. d. Leeuw, the eminent historian of religion, to the effect that ‘God is a latecomer in the history of religion’. 1 By this he meant that all over the world men first worshipped God in a non-personal form. This is only to be expected, for the notion of a divine being presupposes a mode of thinking that could not have existed at the dawn of human history. Let us recall our earlier statement that man created God according to his own image. This also means that the concept of a personal God, i.e. of a ‘Thou relationship’, presupposes a degree of consciousness that enabled man to regard himself as ‘I’ and to see other persons as ‘not I’.
