BIBLICAL ANTHROPOMORPHISM. - It is the depiction of God made in the sacred books, especially of the Old Testament, in "human form," either with bodily organs or phenomena of sensory life (anthropomorphism properly so called), or with activities, states and effects of the human intellect and will (more properly "anthropopathy").
The causes by which human likenesses or feelings are attributed to God go back to the very nature of knowledge, which derives from concrete sensory experience, and of the related human language, which is necessarily analogical and figurative when it must express the spiritual and the transcendent. The particular genius of the Semites, moreover, leads them to express themselves with a vivid concreteness that at times borders on crudeness; to this popular character is due the preponderance of anthropomorphisms in the Pentateuch, which nonetheless inculcates the prohibition of representing God in material form. The theophanies, frequent in the prophetic books, and the poetic style (Psalms), determine a broad use of the anthropomorphic style. Anthropomorphisms, as emerges from the general "biblical context," must be understood as metaphors or allegories, and not in a proper material sense, as the anthropomorphites or Audians advocated in the 4th century.
It is a principle of Catholic hermeneutics that Scripture does not indiscriminately attribute to God the elements of human nature and its activities. Never is there attributed to God, in accordance with the mythological inclination that manifests itself in the religious documents of the other peoples of the ancient East, a vicious action or an evil passion. The mixed feelings of perfection and imperfection are attributed to him only for their positive side and according to the most formal and excellent concept: "God has zeal without envy, is angered without agitation, has pity without suffering, repents without regretting any evil, is patient without suffering" (St. Augustine, De patientia, 1, 1: PL 40, 611). "The wings of God therefore signify his protection: his hands signify his operations, his feet his presence, his eyes the care he has for us, his face the knowledge he offers us of himself: and everything of an analogous kind that Holy Scripture recalls must be understood spiritually" (id., Epist. ad Fortunatianum, 148: PL 33, 628). Dante well expresses the causes and the nature of this literary procedure (cf. Paradiso, 4, 40-45).