Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/137

Rh line of progress has been followed by tribes passing from the primitive state of the wild hunter, fisher, and fruit-gatherer to that of the settled tiller of the soil, for to this change of habit may be plainly in great part traced the expansion of industrial arts and the creation of higher social and political institutions. These, again, have followed their proper lines along the course of time. Among such are the immense legal development by which the primitive law of personal vengeance passed gradually away, leaving but a few surviving relics in the modern civilised world, and being replaced by the higher doctrine that crime is an offence against society, to be repressed for the public good. Another vast social change has been that from the patriarchal condition, in which the unit is the family under the despotic rule of its head, to the systems in which individuals make up a society whose government is centralised in a chief or king. In the growth of systematic civilisation, the art of writing has had an influence so intense, that of all tests to distinguish the barbaric from the civilised state, none is so generally effective as this, whether they have but the failing link with the past which mere memory furnishes, or can have recourse to written records of past history and written constitutions of present order. Lastly, still following the main lines of human culture, the primitive germs of religious institutions have to be traced in the childish faith and rude rites of savage life, and thence followed in their expansion into the vast systems administered by patriarchs and priests, henceforth taking under their charge the precepts of morality, and enforcing them under divine sanction, while also exercising in political life an authority beside or above the civil law. These illustrations may suffice to make it clear that although the science of culture is still but rudimentary and imperfect, it indicates the one sound and indispensable method for the study of human arts and institutions, that of placing each at its proper stage in a line of evolution, and explaining it by the action of new conditions upon the previous stage whence it was derived. (Author:Edward Burnett Tylor)

 

 ANTHROPOMORPHISM is a term used in theological writings to denote the figure by which words expressing human organs and activities are applied to the divine Being ; in short, it is the conception and representation of God as possessed of corporeal and human properties. Originally and literally the word implied only the ascrib ing to God a physical form resembling the human body, and consequently included under it all forms of expression which attribute to Him the exercise of physical organs and senses. But its meaning was soon extended so as to comprehend all representations of God which require Him either to be in himself corporeally extended, or to possess a corporeal body as the necessary condition of His activity. In this wider sense all theories were designated anthro pomorphic, which identified God with light or the physical universe, or which placed alongside of Him a primeval, uncreated matter. Primitive ideas of God are necessarily framed by man from the analogy of his own nature. He is, however, able to represent God to himself under the analogy of his mental or spiritual, as well as under that of his material nature. This more refined form was called anthropo- pathism, and is that mode of contemplating the divine attributes founded on the analogy of God to the human spirit All forms of expression which ascribe to God passions, intelligence, or volition, rest ultimately upon this supposed analogy. In modern theology and philosophy, it is this mode of thought that usually receives the name of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is inseparable from early religion. The first dim intuition of God as the ruler of the universe, on whom we depend, cannot at an early time be seized in all its purity by reason. Sense and imagination are developed before reason, and in semi-barbarous intelli gences completely overbalance it. The object of their faith is not God himself, but God as manifested in nature and history. It is only through ideas derived from sensible objects and elevated by the imagination that man can clothe his primitive thought of God with attributes that enable him to realise it, to bring it home to himself. He must represent God as in all respects like himself, superior only in power. The very words by which alone he can give expression to the first workings of his consciousness of God carry with them a sensible meaning, and hence react powerfully on the development of his belief. They imperceptibly fix attention upon the physical facts involved in them, and their merely symbolic use is forgotten. Hence arise myths. Even among peoples in whom the growth of the religious consciousness was extraordinarily favoured, strong traces of anthropomorphism are to be found. In the Hebrew literature there is a prevailing anthropomorphic idea of God. He is represented as seeing, hearing, smelling; as having a visible, corporeal presence; as hating, loving, and repenting. Although the pure idea of God as a spirit, as the very essence of being, is distinctly recognised and insisted upon by the prophets and lawgivers, the people demanded a visible symbol, a sensible emblem of their faith. Great part of the cere monial law is taken up with the attempt to reconcile this desire for visible symbol with the purer requirements of their faith. Christian thought freed itself completely from the yoke of this crude anthropomorphism by its fundamental axiom that God is a spirit. Theology since then has had to steer its course with care between two opposite tendencies : one striving to attain to a living per sonal community with God through Christ, and thereby running the risk of introducing foreign elements into the idea of God; the other, from undue fear of anthropo morphism, tending to reduce the idea of God to a blank negation, a substance without qualities. In the history of the church these tendencies appeared at a very early period. In the Clementine homilies, but particularly in Tertullian (see Adv. Praxean, c. vii. ; De Came Christi, c. xi.) there is distinct anthropomorphism. Tertullian declares that nothing can have real being that is not extended, corporeal; God, therefore, he seems to identify with an ethereal being of light. An example of the finer form in which human affections are ascribed to God may be found in Lactantius (De Ira Dei, c. ii.) The Alex andrian theologians, from their philosophical training, were specially opposed to anthropomorphism, but in their hands the danger of the opposite tendency is seen. According to some of them, we know God only by negation, we know what He is not, not what He is. Others (e.g., Irenseus, Novatian) declare that all the predicates of God are only in image; and that, from the finitude of our minds, we must use terms expressing not God s nature, but our own ignorance. Phrases in Scripture which seemed to be anthropomorphic were explained by the Fathers as revela tions of God in such a way as to be intelligible to us. This revelation was called (see Chrysostom, Horn. iii. c. 3) con descension or divine economy. The church itself was not free from anthropomorphism of the crudest type. In the 2d century Melito, bishop of Sardis, wrote a book concerning the corporeity of God, and in the 4th century Audams, in Mesopotamia, held