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 manlike in form, philosophy nevertheless tended to highly abstract conceptions of supreme, or real, deity. Philo followed out the line of this tradition in teaching that God cannot be named. How much exactly he meant is disputed. The same inheritance of Greek philosophy appears in the Christian fathers, especially Origen. He names and condemns the "anthropomorphites," who ascribe a human body to God (on Romans i., _sub fin_.; Rufinus' Latin version). In Arabian philosophy the reaction sought to deny that God had any attributes. And, under the influence of Mahommedan Aristotelianism, the same paralysing speculation found entrance among the learned Jews of Spain (see MAIMONIDES).
Till modern times the philosophical reaction was not carried out with full vigour. Spinoza (_Ethics_, i. 15 and 17), representing here as elsewhere both a Jewish inheritance and a philosophical, but advancing further, sweeps away all community between God and man. So later J.G. Fichte and Matthew Arnold ("a magnified and non-natural man"),--strangely, in view of their strong belief in an objective moral order. For the use of the _word_ "anthropomorphic," or kindred forms, in this new spirit of condemnation for all conceptions of God as manlike--sense (b) noted above--see J.J. Rousseau in _Émile_ iv. (cited by Littré),--_Nous sommes pour la plupart de vrais anthropomorphites_. Rousseau is here speaking of the language of Christian theology,--a divine Spirit: divine Persons. At the present day this usage is universal. What it means on the lips of pantheists is plain. But when theists charge one another with "anthropomorphism," in order to rebuke what they deem unduly manlike conceptions of God, they stand on slippery ground. All theism implies the assertion of kinship between man, especially in his moral being, and God. As a brilliant theologian, B. Duhm, has said, physiomorphism is the enemy of Christian faith, not anthropomorphism.