God in Man's Image

It’s a new one on me:

On dit fort bien que, si les triangles faisaient un dieu, ils lui donneraient trois côtés.

It has been well said that if the triangles had a god, they would give it three sides.

--Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, LIX

Others have said it, before and after. Ludwig Feuerbach, the left Hegelian and precursor of Marx, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), sought to demonstrate that man created God in his own image, as a culmination of human self-alienation. At the other end of the scale, Xenophanes in the 6^th-5^th Century BC said that

The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black,
the Thracians that theirs have gray eyes and red hair.

[As reported in Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 7, 22].

To my taste, Montesquieu’s form (or the form reported by Montesquieu) is the most elegant and economical. It makes clear that we define God in terms of what defines as creatures who define God.