Perfection and Imperfection of Josef Seifert's Theory of Pure Perfections

Abstract

“Now if cattle, horses or lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and perform works like men, horses like horses and cattle like cattle would draw the forms of gods, and make their bodies just like the body each of them had… Africans say their gods are snub-nosed and black, Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired.”1 The criticism levelled by the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes against the anthropomorphic way of representing the divine in his era has been constantly reiterated throughout the history of thought. Is it not really man who “created God in his own image and likeness,” as we read on the sarcophagus of the nineteenth-century atheist thinker Ludwig Feuerbach? Is not all idea of God’s being an idol, as the contemporary Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion appears to suggest?