anthropomorphism

A footnote to this section points Poe's readers to fourth century Syria and a heretical Christian sect known as the Anthropomorphites, who were condemned for suggesting that God had a human body (42).

In De Ecclesiastico Dogmate Gennadius of Marseilles classes Tertullian with the Anthropomorphites, the Audiani, and Melito of Sardis as purveyors of belief in the corporeality of God.

Proof of the suasive power of this proposal is that virtually no one retains a memory of the Church's straggle against the Egyptian anthropomorphites, while almost everyone is convinced that premodern science perpetuates the allegedly mythological tendency to distort the first things by casting them in comforting and familiar human forms.

Since Joseph's list of heresies ends with the Anthropomorphites, Grant and Menzies are certainly correct in dating the Hypomnestikon no earlier than the late fourth century.

Glasgow's notion that religious belief is a psychological delusion to be explained by the mechanism of projection is, of course, common to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer's sources in French materialism, including Helvetius and his friend Holbach: for thirty years Helvetius dined at Holbach's twice a week, while Holbach was writing works including The System of Nature: "theologians were, and always will be true anthropomorphites.