Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism (Gr. anthrōpos, 'man,' and morphe, 'form'), the application, in a figurative way, to God, of terms which properly relate to human beings. Thus, in the Scriptures, we read of the eye, the ear, the arm, the hand of God; and of his remembering and forgetting. This appears to arise of necessity from our incapacity of forming conceptions of things spiritual, or finding any terms in which to express them, except by analogies derived from things cognisable by our senses, so that even the language of adoration is borrowed from the familiar things of this world. Anthropomorphism, too grossly understood, has led at various times in the history of the Christian Church to the form and parts of man being ascribed to the Divine Being. Thus the Audæans, a Syrian monastic sect which sprang up in the 4th century, were accused of holding that God was possessed of a human shape, and that the words 'God created man in his own image' are to be understood of this shape literally. The language of the Mormons is highly anthropomorphic. A tendency to anthropomorphism may indeed be regarded as always existing, and to a certain extent it is true that the human mind must rest on human analogies in its highest abstractions. Limiting the question for the sake of argument to natural grounds alone, we must explain not a little of the great success of Christianity in the history of the world to the marvellous manner in which the divine is unfolded through the human in the central figure; and such phenomena as apotheosis and canonisation, to say nothing of the cruder animism of less civilised conceptions, still show how natural and easy it comes to us to express the divine in terms of the human. Such a representation of the divine, moreover, has found countenance from the speculations of philosophers. Hobbes and Priestley ascribed to the Divine Being a sort of subtle body. Fichte, on the other hand, rejected the very doctrine of the personality of the Divine Being as anthropomorphic, and represented God as the moral order of the universe; Spinoza was resolutely anti-anthropomorphic in all his thoughts of God; and Feuerbach substituted for the objective personality of God a subjective consciousness of God in the human soul.—The term Anthropopathism is sometimes employed to denote the ascription to God of human affections and passions, though indeed this is really included in the more general term. The language of Scripture, in the many instances of this kind, must be interpreted according to the same general principles which are applicable in those of anthropomorphism strictly so called, with the same discrimination of the figurative from the literal, and the same constant recognition of the absolute spirituality of God.