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Updated: May 23, 2025
To me it seemed to be flinching under every rhythmic blow of those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sunset should bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught myself nodding to it a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance. Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism.
If we examine the remains of Christian art in those early centuries, in sarcophagus and mural painting, we find that it merely copied the contemporary pagan art, only changing the subjects portrayed, and introducing a further development in the symbolic interpretation of ordinary scenes. Christianity offered almost no field for the exercise of Greek anthropomorphism.
Despite its predominant anthropomorphism, however, the Bible does give us hints of God's spirituality so that the thoughtful reader may also have food for his thought. The same applies to all those passages in which the word "name" is inserted before the word God as the object of praise to indicate that we do not know God in his essence.
This metaphysical theory, one of the many varieties of mens agitat molem, being, like every other, a personal conception, it is superfluous to discuss or criticise its evident anthropomorphism. But, since we are dealing with hypotheses, I venture to risk a comparison between embryological development in physiology, instinct in psychophysiology, and the creative imagination in psychology.
Yet in ways which I have no space for, it abounds in the sort of anthropomorphism that might be expected from the average medium or average sitter, but not from George Eliot.
Poetry as a mania one of Plato's two higher forms of "divine" mania has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the "defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the scholastic realism of the Middle Age.
The passage of Scripture, "Thou hast put all under his feet," and that other one, so suggestive in its anthropomorphism, "The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool," imply, what the Assyrian sculptures fully bear out, that it was the practice of the ancient god-kings of the East to trample upon the conquered.
As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of God and run it into a human symbol. This persistent anthropomorphism is revealed in our religious ceremonies.
As a rule, one or the other of these two methods of criticism tends to predominate, in accordance with the genius of the race or period. Thus, the evolution of Greek religion is determined mainly by the development of science. Xenophanes attacks the religion of his times on the ground of its crude anthropomorphism.
The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of anthropomorphism.
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