Voss, Gerhard Johann (Vossius)

**VOSS, GERHARD JOHANNES (Vossius).** - Calvinist theologian and philologist, born in Heidelberg of a Dutch family in 1577, died in Amsterdam on March 17, 1649. He studied in Leiden and was a professor in 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 remains compliant with the plagiarism theory, according to which whatever truth is found in extra-biblical religions is either a survival of the primitive religion or a plagiarism of the Bible. The work discusses in nine books what pertains to theology for the pagans, that is, the divinization of the forces or elements of nature, which instead for the Christian pertain 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, human, animal, vegetable, mineral bodies (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 forms or materials (bk. IX). The documentation ranges from the ancient East to the populations of northern Europe from Britain to Russia.