Anthropomorphism

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ANTHROPOMORPHISM

ANTHROPOMORPHISM , from the Greek anthrōpos ("human being") and morphē ("form"), is a modern term, attested since the eighteenth century, denoting the practically universal tendency to form religious concepts and ideas and, on a more basic level, to experience the divine, or the "numinous" (the term is used here as a convenient shorthand, without necessarily implying commitment to Rudolf Otto's theories), in the categories and shapes most readily available to human thinking—namely, the human ones. The idea has a long history in Western thought. Ancient Greek, including patristic, literature referred (contemptuously) to "anthropomorphites," meaning people holding anthropomorphic ideas of the divine. This term was also used in Latin by Augustine to refer to those who because of their "carnal thought imagine God in the image of corruptible man" (Patrologia Latina 42.39), and, under his influence, it continued to be used by authors as late as Leibniz in the seventeenth century.

Definitions and Distinctions

In a more general sense, anthropomorphism can be defined as the description of nonmaterial, "spiritual" entities in physical, and specifically human, form. The idea of human form is an essential part of the definition, since otherwise one would have to deal with representations and manifestations of the divine in all possible material forms. Of course, sharp distinctions are often arbitrary and even misleading, especially since in many religious cultures, the gods often assume, both in mythology and in iconography, animal form (which is, strictly speaking, theriomorphism); mixed, hybrid, semianimal-semihuman form (which is, strictly speaking, therianthropism); or "unrealistic," wildly imaginative, or even grotesque forms. Deities may be conceived as wholly or partly animal, as were Hathor and Anubis, the cow goddess and jackal god in ancient Egyptian religion, or they may have animal avatāras, as does Viṣṇu, who appears as fish, tortoise, man-lion, and boar. Gods and goddesses may have multiple heads or arms, as does Brahma; goddesses may be many-breasted, as was the great goddess of Ephesus (Artemis); or they may be represented with ferociously "demonic" forms of face or figure and with nonnatural combinations of body parts, as are androgynes and some tricksters. Indian and ancient Egyptian religions, among others, provide a plethora of examples. Resorting once more to Otto's terminology, one could argue that it is precisely the nonhuman quality of theriomorphic or therianthropic representations that enables them to function as symbols of the numinous as the "wholly other."

While the phenomenon of anthropomorphism proper has been a central problem in the history of religions, theology, and religious philosophy (in terms of criticism of religion as well as of religion's internal struggles for a better self-understanding of its own symbolism), the transition from theriomorphism to anthropomorphism (according to the evolutionary view current until some decades ago) has often been viewed as marking a definite progress. Thus Hegel, in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, praised Greek religion because its anthropomorphism signified that "man, as that which is truly spiritual, constitutes that which is genuinely true in the Greek gods." Elsewhere, in Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel adds that Christianity is superior to Greek religion because it has taken anthropomorphism a decisive step farther: God is not merely the humanly shaped ideal of beauty and art but a "real, singular, individual, wholly God and wholly man, that has entered into the totality of the conditions of existence." This stands in marked contrast to the views of the German poet Schiller (1759–1805), who considered Christianity as inferior to Greek religion: "When the gods were more human, men were more divine" (The Gods of Greece). One hardly need add that in medieval polemics both Islam and Judaism condemned Christianity not only for its "polytheism" (meaning the doctrine of the Trinity) but also for its anthropomorphism.

A distinction is frequently made between physical anthropomorphism (anthropomorphism proper) and mental or psychological anthropomorphism, also called anthropopathism (i.e., not human form or shape but human feelings: love, hate, desire, anger, etc.). Thus, while there are only faint traces of anthropomorphism proper in the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament), God is described as loving, taking pity, forgiving, being angry and wroth (at sinners and evildoers), and avenging himself upon his enemies. Even when theological thinking progressively divests the deity of the "cruder" forms of physical and mental anthropomorphism, some irreducible elements remain. For example, certain types of theology of history (Heilsgeschichte ) imply that God "has a plan" for his creation or for humankind. In fact, religion is often expressed in terms of humanity's duty to serve the achievement of this divine plan and purpose. The ultimate residual anthropomorphism, however, is the theistic notion of God as personal, in contrast to an impersonal conception of the divine. Also, verbal imagery, no matter how metaphorical it is supposed to be, preserves this basic anthropomorphism: God is father, mother, lover, king, shepherd, judge. Verbal and iconic imagery can be very different things even when both are anthropomorphic. Thus Buddhism is an essentially metaphysical religion, yet Buddhist temples (Theravada no less than Mahayana) can be full to the bursting point with anthropomorphic images. Shinto mythology, on the other hand, is as anthropomorphic as can be, but a Shinto shrine (at least if uncontaminated by Buddhist influence) is as empty of statues and images as a mosque or a synagogue.

Another important distinction has to be made between what may be called primary and secondary anthropomorphism. The former reflects a simple, naive, uncritical (or precritical) level of immediate, concrete, "massive," and mythological imagination. The latter is more dogmatic and deliberate. It is fundamentalist in the sense that anthropomorphic assertions are made and defended not because they reflect the immediate level of religious consciousness but because they reflect a dogmatic position: holy scriptures or canonical traditions use anthropological language, hence this language has to be literally accepted and believed in. Many discussions in the history of Muslim theology have to be seen in the light of this distinction.

Theological and Philosophical Implications

A survey of all the instances of anthropomorphism in the world's religions would be tantamount to a survey of the mythologies and religious iconography of the world. This article will be limited to a brief review of the theological and philosophical implications of anthropomorphism, and even these will be surveyed mainly in the history of Western thought, not because analogous developments are lacking elsewhere, but because in the history of Western thought the problem has been dealt with more systematically and consistently. Western religious history also exhibits a very interesting special case, namely Christianity (cf. the dictum of Hegel cited above), since Christ is considered as more than just another divine avatāra, or manifestation, and hence the doctrine of the incarnation poses the problem of anthropology in its widest sense—that is, the doctrine of the nature of man and its relation to the divine—and in a very special way. But even aside from incarnation, the "personalist" element in theistic religion remains, as has been seen, an irreducible anthropomorphism. This situation was well defined by the German Old Testament scholar and theologian Bernhard Duhm when he said that the real problem for biblical religion was how to get rid not of anthropomorphism but "physiomorphism" in its representation of God.

Most religions start with straightforward and naive anthropomorphic ideas of the divine (gods, goddesses) and even in their more highly developed stages do not greatly mind that the simple folk maintain their "primitive" ideas, although the spiritual élite may consider anthropological imagery crude and substitute for it a more sophisticated language. Physical and anthropomorphic imagery is then explained (or explained away) as a symbolic reference to certain qualities of the divine that, in their turn, may later have to be further transcended by an even more spiritual understanding.

Anthropomorphism and the Criticism of Religion

The expression "criticism of religion" has to be understood on several levels. It need not necessarily be atheistic or irreligious. The expression merely signifies that religious representations and statements (whether primitive, popular, traditional, or otherwise normative) are criticized because of their allegedly crude and, at times, immoral character. This criticism can come from the outside—from philosophy, for example—or from inside—that is, when religious consciousness becomes more sophisticated, refined, and self-critical (often under the impact of philosophy from outside). Among the earliest and best-known examples of this tendency is the Greek author Xenophanes (fifth century bce), of whose writings only fragments have been preserved. He ironically notes that Ethiopians represent the gods as black, Thracians depict them as blue-eyed and red-haired, and "if oxen and horses … had hands and could paint," their images of gods would depict oxen and horses. Xenophanes thus anticipates the modern atheistic inversion of the Old Testament account of creation, to the effect that men create gods in their own image. He also attacks anthropopathism: "Homer and Hesiod attribute to the gods what among men would be considered reprehensible: stealing, adultery, and deceit." Yet Xenophanes was far from irreligious. He speaks of one God "who neither in shape … nor in thought" resembles anything human. He has no eyes and no ears, but himself is "wholly eye, wholly spirit, wholly ear."

Plato, too, objects to the all too human conception of the gods. For this reason he would also ban traditional Homeric mythology from his ideal republic, "no matter whether [these stories have] a hidden sense or not" (Republic 377–378). But the fact that Plato mentions the possibility of a hidden sense indicates one of the roads that religious thinking and apologetic would take in response to the critical challenge. This critical challenge, it must be reiterated, is not antireligious; it is, rather, a religious trend toward self-purification by purging itself of elements considered to be primitive and crude. The same tendency is in evidence in many parts of the Old Testament, and not only in the second of the Ten Commandments. It gathers strength, under the influence of Hellenistic philosophy, in, for example, the Targums (the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament), which, in their wish to eliminate all anthropomorphism, substitute for Hebrew phrases meaning "and God appeared unto," "God spoke," "God saw," "the hand of God," and so on such alternative phrases as "the glory of God appeared," "the power of God," and the like.

This "first purgation," however, does not solve the problem of mental anthropomorphism. When the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne wrote that "we may use words like Power, Truth, Justice, but we cannot conceive the thing itself.… None of our qualities can be attributed to the Divine Being without tainting it with our imperfection" (Essais 2.12), he merely summed up what Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers had already discussed in the Middle Ages. Their problem, like Montaigne's, was not the objectionable character of physical and of certain moral attributes, but the admissibility of attributes as such. The great twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (Mosheh ben Maimon), like the Muslim philosophers who had preceded him, taught with uncompromising radicalism that no positive attributes whatever can be predicated of God. It should come as no surprise that most of the efforts of Maimonides, who besides being a great philosopher was also a leading rabbinic authority, should be devoted to explaining away the many anthropomorphisms in the Bible. Once one embarks on this radical road, the next question becomes inevitable: is not "being" or "existence" also a human concept, and is not the definition of God as pure or absolute being also an anthropromorphism, although perhaps a very rarefied one?

Two main tendencies can be distinguished in response to this challenge. The one leads to a cessation of speech ("mystical silence"); the other to a more sophisticated theology based on an analysis of human consciousness.

Mysticism

The most radical method that religious consciousness can adopt to purge itself of anthropomorphism is the assertion that no adequate statements about the divine are possible in human language. In the West this tradition goes back to the Neoplatonic mystical theologian known as Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth century ce), who introduced into Christian terminology the "hidden godhead" and the "divine darkness." This tradition was transmitted to the Latin West by John Scottus Eriugena (ninth century ce), from whom it passed to Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics and to such English figures as Walter Hilton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and influenced later mystics (Jakob Boehme, Angelus Silesius) and even nonmystical, "mainline" theologians. Thomas Aquinas gave a place in his system to this theologia negativa, and Martin Luther thought highly of the mystical tract known as the Theologia Deutsch.

The challenge of anthropomorphism, or to be more precise, the critical reflection as to how to meet this challenge, thus turns out to be an important factor in the development of mysticism. But this radical mystical "purging" of language ultimately links up with agnostic and even nonreligious criticism. The central text in this respect is David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), written in the form of a conversation between three interlocutors: a skeptic, a Christian close to the mystical tradition, and a theist. The Christian mystic asserts that the divine essence, attributes, and manner of existence are a mystery to humans. The skeptic agrees, but admits the legitimacy of anthropological attributes (wisdom, thought, intention), because human beings simply do not have at their disposal any other form of expression. He merely warns against the mistake of assuming any similarity between one's words and the divine qualities. In other words, the mystical and the skeptical, even agnostic, criticisms of anthropomorphism tend to converge. The theist speaker is not slow to seize on this point. His theism is of a more sophisticated kind; it has absorbed and integrated the anti-anthropomorphic critique. But if all ideas about the divine are by definition totally incorrect and misleading, then religion and theology necessarily and automatically cease to be of any interest whatever. A spiritual being of which nothing can be predicated (no will, no emotion, no love) is, in actual fact, no spirit at all. Hume's argument that mysticism (including pantheism) and atheism ultimately converge has had far-reaching influence. Nineteenth-century philosophical atheism took up Hume's argument and used the critique of anthropomorphism as well as the dead end to which it leads as leverage for the shift from theology to anthropology: the essence of God is, in fact, nothing but one's projection, on a celestial screen, of the essence of human. Thus concluded, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872).

Other Attitudes toward Anthropomorphism

Aside from mysticism, Christian thought has responded in two ways to criticisms of anthropomorphism. The traditional, standard form of theistic theology tries on the one hand to purge from religion the kind of anthropomorphism that invites facile criticism and strives on the other hand to avoid the kind of radical "purging" that leads either to mystical silence or to atheism. The alternative is to speak of God, unapologetically and with a certain robust courage, knowing full well that such speech is valid "by analogy" only. The subject is one of the most complex in the history of theology. For the purpose of this article, it must suffice to point to the existence of this middle way, without going into technical details or analyzing the different types of "theology of analogy": analogy of attribution, mainly known in the form of "analogy of being" (analogia entis ), a central concept in official Roman Catholic theology; analogy of proportionality; analogy of faith (opposed by the Protestant theologian Karl Barth to the Roman Catholic concept of analogia entis ); analogy of relation; and so on. The theology of analogy uses a distinction made by the Muslim Aristotelian philospher Ibn Rushd (Averroës) between univocal, equivocal, and analogous predication. The former two were rejected by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) of the Roman Catholic church, which espoused "analogy."

Another, and typically modern, method of evading the problem of anthropomorphism is the view that holds all religious statements to be statements about one's religious consciousness. The father of this theory, in the history of Western thought, is the nineteenth-century German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. In the last resort, this view, too, represents a shift from theology to anthropology (as Feuerbach was quick to point out), with the difference that for Schleiermacher this shift serves religious understanding, whereas for Feuerbach it serves the radical critique of religion as such. Schleiermacher's insights are still operative in Rudolf Bultmann's program of "demythologizing" the gospel. According to Bultmann, all statements about God's concrete acts should be interpreted "existentially," except the notion of God acting (i.e., his saving intervention in human existence). The non-Bultmannian will, of course, ask why one should stop short at this particular anthropomorphism. This theology of religious consciousness has been condemned as heretical by both the Roman Catholic church (see the papal encyclical Pascendi, 1907) and Protestant orthodoxy (e.g., Karl Barth).

Conclusion

This article, although it focuses on the history of Western thought, is intended to give a coherent picture of the kind of problems generated by anthropomorphism. Similar phenomena, though less systematically elaborated, can be found in other religious traditions, for example, in the Vedantic impersonalist conception of the Absolute, which considers personalist theism and bhakti devotion as a lower form of religion. Mahāyāna Buddhism possesses a highly developed anthropomorphic and semianthropomorphic pantheon, but these figures are symbolic images to be transcended on the higher levels of meditation. Altogether, Eastern religions make greater allowance for differences in the levels of religious understanding between different kinds and conditions of humans. Some medieval Muslim theologians too advocated the (near-heretical) doctrine of "double truth," reminiscent of the Indian distinction between samvrti (conventional truth) and paramartha satya (absolute truth). Similarly, a more simple language and imagery, adapted to the capacities of the less mature and less advanced, is justified by Buddhists as upāya ("skillful means" for teaching the truth). Even Zen Buddhists in their daily practice worship statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, although theoretically they aspire to absolute nothingness and are taught to "kill the Buddha" if they encounter him as an obstacle on the way. A Hindu analogy would be the distinction between saguna and nirguna (i.e., the "qualified" versus the "unqualified" Absolute). The Upaniṣadic neti, neti, or Nāgārjuna's "eightfold negation" could be adduced as Indian instances of a "negative theology." The religious, as distinct from the philosophical, problem could be summarized in the simple question: Can one pray to a nonanthropomorphic deity?

Bibliography

Jevons, Frank B. "Anthropomorphism." In Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 1. Edinburgh, 1908.

Jevons, Frank B. "Anthropomorphismus." In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 1. Stuttgart, 1950.

Leeuw, Gerardus van der. Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1938). 2 vols. Gloucester, Mass., 1967. See the index, s. v. Anthropomorphism.

Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Edited by Joseph Campbell. New York, 1946.

For articles related to anthropomorphism in Islam, see "Tashbih" and "Muʿtazila" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, 1913–1938) and "Hashwiyya," "Karramiyya," "Ibn Hazm," and "Ibn Tamiyya" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1960–).

New Sources

Barnhart, Joe E. "Anthropomorphism." In Modern Spiritualities: An Inquiry, edited by Laurence Brown, Bernard C. Farr, and R. Joseph Hoffmann. pp. 171–178. Amherst, N.Y., 1997.

Bekoff, Marc. "The Evolution of Animal Play, Emotions, and Social Morality: On Science, Theology, Spirituality, Personhood, and Love." Zygon 36, no. 4 (2001): 615–655.

Ferré, Frederick. "In Praise of Anthropomorphism." International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 no. 3, (1984): 203–212.