Voss, Gerhard Johann (Vossius)

VOSS, Gerhard Johann (Vossius). - Calvinist theologian and philologist, b. in Heidelberg to a Dutch family in 1577, d. in Amsterdam on 17 March 1649. He studied at Leiden and was a professor at Dordrecht, Leiden and Amsterdam.

As a philologist he wrote: Gramatica latina (1626), Gramatica graeca (1627), Ars rethoricae (1620), De historicis graecis (1623), De historicis latinis (1627). As a theologian he wrote: De theologia gentili et physiologia christiana, sive de origine et progressu idololatriae (Amsterdam 1641), which can be considered the first systematic treatise on the history of religions, although it complies with the theory of plagiarism, by virtue of which whatever truth is found in religions outside the Bible is either a survival of the primitive religion or a plagiarism of the Bible. The work deals in nine books with what for the pagans belongs to theology, that is, the deification of the forces or elements of nature which, on the other hand, for the Christian belong to physiology or the science of nature. The worship rendered to the various divinities is either proper: God, genii (bk. I); astral bodies (bk. II); terrestrial bodies, human, animal, vegetable, mineral (bks. III-VI); the universe or cosmos as a whole (bk. VII); or it is symbolic: abstract qualities of man (bk. VIII), symbols or simulacra of various form or matter (bk. IX). The documentation ranges from the ancient East to the peoples of northern Europe, from Britain to Russia.