Xenophanes was a slasher in ancient Greece. He was a poet, a philosopher, a theologian and also an avid traveler. He has lived a long life and has travelled to a number of places. If Xenophanes is a person of today, he is certainly a key opinion leader, writing travel blogs and poems and doing Facebook live. But when you look up for his username, take care and don't mix it up with 'Xenophon', who was born in later era than Xenophanes and he was one of Socrates' students.
Xenophanes was against 2 things in life – human-looking gods and jocks. Through his understanding of poetry and satirical wit, he has written a lot of poems to satirize, criticize and think about issues in the culture of his days. His critique on theological issues has led to a rational inquiry of religious and spiritual themes evident in later philosophy, like Parmenides and his successors. For his problems with the jock culture, we will deal with that in the end.
Xenophanes was original because he was one of the first Western thinkers to have a string commitment in rationalism. Through his exercise of reason as evident in his writings, he was an original architect of rationalist theology, using reason and valid speculations, rather than mythological sources, to explore the concepts of the Divine. Xenophanes was well-versed in a number of different style of poetry, yet his poems always exhibited a satirical tone and impressive witticism.
The conception of gods has already been described in the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod. Xenophanes, who was alive centuries after the two epic poets, had issues with their ideas of the Divine. First, Xenophanes was very against the notion that the Greek gods and goddesses were anthropomorphic. In his poems, the pre-Socratic philosopher mocked the idea of human-looking gods, and stated that if an ox could conceive of a ‘god’, that god would likely look like an ox too. In a satirical comment that would be considered a nasty racial slur for today, Xenophanes believed that the Ethiopian gods would resemble Ethiopians with their own facial features, which he was not particularly fond of.
Why did Xenophanes think that humans would believe their gods to be mega-versions of themselves? With an explanation that had a lot of resonance to the science of today, he believed that the images of human-looking gods were merely the psychological projections of humans. Humans made their attempts to shift the center from the Divine back to themselves, and projected their own opinions on the attributes of gods. It is as if the ancient humans were saying: ‘The gods, after all, are just like us.’ Ironically, this opinion has shared similarities in the views of some future philosophers, who embraced atheist or materialist doctrines, yet that is in no way true that Xenophanes would have denied the existence of the Divine.
Other than the issue of human looks, what concerned Xenophanes even more with regard to the Homeric conception of the gods was that they were often immoral. Indeed, the divine family on Mount Olympus has often been compared to a dysfunctional family, and every member was more than capable to claim their fair share of moral transgressions. The immorality of the Homeric gods is often overlooked by many, yet to Xenophanes that was an important issue. Because the thinker opined that the behavior of these divine figures, who were expected as ‘role models’ for humanity, were morally inconsistent. The lack of objectivity in these antics paralleled human’s own projections of the Divine. What Xenophanes was looking for all the time was a theological outlook that was rational, objective, and could serve as an ethical guide to humanity.
‘One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought.’
-Xenophanes
‘All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears.’
-Xenophanes
Hence for Xenophanes’ rational theology, there was a single, non-anthropomorphic God, which he often termed ‘The One’. Xenophanes’ God, to start with, is timeless. Just that all the other Pre-Socratic thinkers’ ideas of First Cause, it exists outside of time and had no beginning or end. The Divine is also rational and omniscient – it knows everything in the world. It is omnipotent, meaning that it is so powerful that it has the ability to do anything possible. We may find these attributes similar to what we think about God, and indeed it is, because the philosopher’s revolutionary way of understanding God has shaped the way how later generations would have approaches the issues of religion.
There is a caveat to Xenophanes’ assessment. From a philological perspective, many commentators have questioned the implications of the word regarding the divine in Xenophanes’ original version. As we may not be aware there are some careless duplication errors, the commentators are unsettled by the fact that ancient thinker has used a plural form for the words ‘Greatest among gods and men'.’ That appears to be contradictory to the theological views he has been expressing throughout his poems, namely that there is only one God in the universe. Most commentators have agreed that the specific issue of wording should not impact our understanding of Xenophanes’ ‘One-God assumption’, for which he has maintained firmly and consistently throughout all his surviving work. Many scholars in the classical studies have advised the readers not to take the word too literally, saying that maybe the word ‘gods’ was just representative of Xenophanes’ often satirical tone. These ‘gods’ can just be the deputies and underbosses of the Big Boss, and no matter one wants to designate them as ‘gods’, ‘angels’ or ‘spirits’, the idea does not change. Xenophanes’ philosophical system is strictly rational and monotheistic.
Xenophanes’ opinions regarding the Divine has two important implications for later understanding of religion and spirituality. First, by abandoning the polytheistic system of Homeric gods, he introduced a monotheistic conception of the divine. Not only this has influenced much of the philosophical systems of the Presocratic thinkers, almost all these thinkers searched for and proposed a first cause of things, the theological outlook would influence many other religions that still existed today.
Second, by asserting a non-anthropomorphic divine figure , Xenophanes has provided the readers a more abstract conception of the greatest being. Ancient beliefs in gods tend to rely on some concrete conceptions, that the gods resemble humans, only are way more powerful and immortal. Early people may easily think that the gods resembled King Triton of Little Mermaid, without the little brat Ariel - an old gentleman with white beard, holder of a crane that symbolized power, and talked in a commanding yet fatherly tone. That makes sense as that would lead to an easier identification with the divine though this might be unintentional. That took the evolution of human mind to have the capacity to believe in an abstract idea, and thus Xenophanes conception could be seen as a revolutionary one.
Xenophanes’s divine foreshadowed the Parmenidian Being, but there was a difference in terms of both philosophers’ focus. Xenophanes had a more religious motivation and tried a provide a justified and rational picture of divinity, while Parmenides and his successors was concerned to postulate a metaphysical reality.
Xenophanes apparently did not share the ancient view of metempsychosis, the reincarnation of souls, with thinkers like Pherecydes and the Pythagoreans. In a satirical tone, he mocked at the notion that one should not harm a dog because the animal might be a reincarnation of one’s family in a previous life. Given this rather caustic-toned example, many would have proposed that the philosopher was not into this theory.
Xenophanes was a very special type of nerd. Believing in the power of reason, he despised the values of athleticism and festivity of his days. He certainly felt that a sound and rational mind was more preferred to physical prowess. In fact, his inclinations had a lot of influences on later Greek philosophy, as people turned their aspirations from Homeric warriors to orators with eloquence and intelligence. This slasher of the ancient times, who has contributed to so diverse fields and possessed such a dynamic stream of thoughts, was certainly no basketcase for current standard!
by Ed Law
Conatus Classics
