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Updated: May 23, 2025
Anthropomorphism and idolatry constituted of necessity the faith of the mind in its youth, the theology of infancy and poesy. A harmless error, if they had not endeavored to make it a rule of conduct, and if they had been wise enough to respect the liberty of thought.
Thus we find among all men, savage and civilized, a certain unsteadiness in their notion of spirit, whether created or divine a continual tendency to corruption and anthropomorphism, due to the conflict between reason and imagination, resulting so often in the domination of the latter.
We are here concerned with the origin of a rationalistic movement which endeavors to defend a spiritual conception of God against a crude anthropomorphism, to vindicate a conception of his absolute unity against the threatened multiplication of his essence by the assumption of eternal attributes, and which puts stress upon God's justice rather than upon his omnipotence so as to save human freedom.
Could the force of folly farther go? Any devout Theist, who candidly thought over this petty fiction, would find its gross anthropomorphism inexpressibly shocking. Knowing that God was everywhere, Adam and Eve nevertheless "hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden." But they were soon dragged forth to the light.
Finally, let us note that the Hellenic imagination realized its gods through anthropomorphism they are the ideal forms of human attributes majesty, beauty, power, wisdom, etc.
Beyond these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of evolution.
Witchcraft and sorcery are the practical expressions of these beliefs; and they stand in the same relation to religious worship as the simple anthropomorphism of children, or savages, does to theology.
The one, as well as the other, is anthropomorphistic, and is an undoubtedly necessary form of our human reasoning. Compare, in reference to this whole question, also the clear analyses in the second volume of the work of Wigand, and the instructive lecture of the Duke of Argyll upon anthropomorphism in theology.
We have now in great measure arrived at the fundamental facts whence myth is derived, although, if I do not deceive myself, the ultimate fact, and the cause of this fact, have not yet been ascertained; namely, for what reason man personifies all phenomena, first vaguely projecting himself into them, and then exercising a distinct purpose of anthropomorphism, until in this way he has gradually modified the world according to his own image.
But he points out that there is an intolerable anthropomorphism involved in the idea, that it removes the Divine farther away from man, and that the union of Divine and human is held to obtain in one special case only that of Christ. He urges that in a religion of mediation, one or other, God or Christ, must be chosen as the centre.
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