in statues of the most exquisite art.
Israel shows us animal images, doubtless of a ruder sort, when Yahweh is
worshipped in the northern kingdom under the image of a steer. (Some
scholars think the title "mighty one of Jacob," Psalm cxxxii., 2, 5, _et
al_., [Hebrew: abir] as if from [Hebrew: avir] is really "steer"
[Hebrew: abir] "of Jacob.") But the higher religion of Israel inclined
to morality more than to art, and forbade image worship altogether. This
prepared the way for the conception of God as an immaterial Spirit. True
mythical anthropomorphisms occur in early parts of the Old Testament
(e.g. Genesis iii. 8, cf. vi. 2), though in the majority of Old
Testament passages such expressions are merely verbal (e.g. Isaiah lix.
1). In the Christian Church (and again in early Mahommedanism) simple
minds believed in the corporeal nature of God. Gibbon and other writers
quote from John Cassian the tale of the poor monk, who, being convinced
of his error, burst into tears, exclaiming, "You have taken away my God!
I have none now whom I can worship!" According to a fragment of Origen
(on Genesis i. 26), Melito of Sardis shared this belief. Many have
thought Melito's work, [Greek: peri ensomatou theou], must have been a
treatise on the Incarnation; but it is hard to think that Origen could
blunder so. Epiphanius tells of Audaeus of Mesopotamia and his
followers, Puritan sectaries in the 4th century, who were orthodox
except for this belief and for Quartodecimanism (see EASTER).
Tertullian, who is sometimes called an anthropomorphist, stood for the
Stoical doctrine, that all reality, even the divine, is in a sense
material.

The reaction against anthropomorphism begins in Greek philosophy with
the satirical spirit of Xenophanes (540 B.C.), who puts the case as
broadly as any. The "greatest God" resembles man "neither in form nor in
mind." In Judaism--unless we should refer to the prophets' polemic
against images--a reaction is due to the introduction of the codified
law. God seemed to grow more remote. The old sacred name Yahweh is never
pronounced; even "God" is avoided for allusive titles like "heaven" or
"place." Still, amid all this, the God of Judaism remains a personal,
almost a limited, being. In Philo we see Jewish scruples uniting with
others drawn from Greek philosophy. For, though the quarrel with popular
anthropomorphism was patched up, and the gods of the Pantheon were
described by Stoics and Epicureans as manl