United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Here Eucken shows that metaphysical concepts such as the Trinity have tended to become purely anthropomorphic and mythological, probably necessary at a certain level of religion, but which have now been superseded by truer conceptions of life and existence. There is no longer any meaning in asking whether the Founder was a "mere man" or a God. He was an intermediate reality between the two.
The logical conceptions and representative ideas, idols peculiar to the mind, which were at first involved in fetishtic and anthropomorphic images, are now divested of their earlier wrappings, and are classified as the intellectual ideas which they really are, and which they have become by the innate and reflex exercise of human thought.
If I said "yes" the anthropomorphic teaching was undoubted; while if the answer were in the negative I should be guilty of fostering the abominable denominational spirit which ruins this land. My reply must have been unconvincing, for I overheard the children later deciding, the Methodist Church having been barred as a place of residence, that the attic was the only remaining possibility.
Precision, accuracy, reliability any amount of it; but as to pity, mercy, love! The fact is, that famous simile of the angel playing at chess was a mistake. Very smart, I grant you, but altogether misleading. Why! the orthodox quote it as much as the others always a bad sign. It tickles these anthropomorphic fancies, which are at the bottom of all their creeds.
+225+. The lowest tribes known to us regard the whole world of nature and the human dead as things to be feared and usually as things to be propitiated. In most cases they conceive of some anthropomorphic being as the creator or arranger of the world. But in all cases they regard animals, plants, and inanimate objects as capable of doing extraordinary things.
The greater part of the Aristotelian material seems bodily taken from Maimonides, and so is the part dealing with the anthropomorphic expressions in the Bible. There is a different point of view in his exposition of the Muʿtazilite physics, which he presents in a more systematic and favorable light than Maimonides, defending it against the strictures of the latter.
The exact relation of this anthropomorphic imagination to the primitive sacred stocks and stones is not easy to ascertain; but it seems to have tended, on the one hand, to the realisation of the existence of the gods apart from such sacred objects, and thus to reduce the stocks and stones to the position of symbols a great advance in religious ideals; and, on the other hand, to the transformation of the stocks and stones into human form, not merely by giving them ears and eyes that they might hear and see, but also by making them take the image and character of the deity whom they represented.
Hence the intrinsic and inexhaustible idealism of Greek sculpture, to which I will presently return. Few works of art more fully and more attractively show the anthropomorphic tendency of Greek art than the sunrise vase of the British Museum. It shows us the whole morning pageant of nature humanized. On the right appears the sun-god driving a chariot of winged horses, who rise out of the sea.
He belongs to the school of evolution, and his book strongly confirms the truths of that theory; since from the primitive germs of myth, from the various and most simple forms of fetishes among all races, he gradually evolves these rude images into more, complex and anthropomorphic forms, until he attains the limits of natural and positive science.
The German poet, Schiller, who was a worshipper of Art and sensualistic beauty, and who regarded the sciences as the mere handmaids of Art, exalting the aesthetic above the moral nature in man, quite naturally regretted that he had not lived in the palmy days of the anthropomorphic creed of Hellas, before the dirge of Pan was chanted in the Isle of Naxos.
Word Of The Day