ANTHROPOMORPHISM

the attribution of human form or other human characteristics to any nonhuman object. In religion, the term is applied to any statement that depicts the deity as having a bodily form resembling that of human beings, or as possessing qualities of thought, will, or emotion that are continuous with those experienced by humans. Any reference to the divine as having a human body or a part of a human body is an anthropomorphisme.g., the hand of God, the eye of God, or the mouth of God. References to humanlike mental aspects are also regarded as anthropomorphismse.g., the will of God, the mind of God, the compassion of God, and even the love of God. The word anthropomorphism means literally in the form of man (derived from the Greek words anthropos, man, and morphe, form). Perhaps the best-known anthropomorphisms in religion are those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose gods resembled humans in almost everything except their immortality, their places of residence, and their magical powers over nature. Xenophanes (6th5th century BC) attacked the anthropomorphism of Homer and Hesiod in ascribing to the gods all deeds that are a shame and a disgrace among men: thieving, adultery, fraud. Similarly, Plato repudiated the crass anthropomorphism of traditional Homeric mythology and instead asserted the idea, in accord with Xenophanes, that God is one, and beyond human powers of comprehension. The classical Hebrew prophets, such as Amos and Isaiah, were vigorous critics of the gross anthropomorphism among the Hebrews of their day, reminding their listeners, for example, that the moral judgments of God were not based upon the tribal preferences that influence human judgment. The prophets did not entirely abandon anthropomorphism, however, but freely employed refined anthropomorphic symbols as indispensable to their concept of God as personal. The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes carried the critique of anthropomorphism further, approaching the idea of an impersonal cosmic force in place of the Hebraic personal God. It must be noted, however, that while many of the anthropomorphisms in the Old Testament were undoubtedly taken literally by their authors, many more are recognized and intended merely as poetic metaphors. Thus, there is a difference between the intention of the relatively early statement that the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend (Exodus 33:11) and that of the consciously poetic question directed by the Psalmist to God: How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? (Psalms 13:1). While many thinkers have believed it possible to purge theism (belief in the existence of God) of all traces of anthropomorphism, many others have regarded the latter as essential to theistic knowledge and language, since these areas are necessarily conditioned by man's experience of himself; the human subject invariably interprets nonhuman reality after analogies drawn from human experience. This problem raises philosophical questions about the validity of theism, idealism, or any other form of knowledge in which human experience provides an obvious model for interpreting or understanding reality.