Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 570-ca.478 BCE) was a contemporary of Pythagoras, born fifty miles north of Miletus, a city famed for the birth of philosophy and home to the first Western philosopher, Thales. He is considered one of the most important of the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers for his arguments concerning the gods. He traveled widely reciting his poetry but is best known as the first person to claim one unmoving and eternal god in ancient Greece( Webspace.Ship.edu).
Later writers, perhaps influenced by two passing characterizations of Xenophanes by Plato (Sophist 242c-d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 986b18-27), identified him as the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy (which claimed that, despite the illusion of the senses, what exists is really a changeless, motionless, and eternal ‘One’).
This view has been largely rejected, however, and Xenophanes is now seen as a lone figure criticisizing the anthropomorphic deities of his time (with Parmenides, rightfully, acknowledged as the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy).
God is Not as Humans Suppose
In the surviving fragments that exist, Xenophanes argues that, “Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods whatever is infamy and reproach among men: theft and adultery and deveiving each other” and “Mortals suppose that the gods are born and have clothes and voices and shapes like their own. But if oxen, horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and fashion works as men do, horses would paint horse-like images of gods and oxen oxen-like ones, and each would fashion bodies like their own.
"The Ethiopians consider the gods flat-nosed and black; the Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. There is one god, among gods and men the greatest, not at all like mortals in body or mind. He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole. But without toil he moves everything by the thought of his mind"( Baird/Kaufmann, Ancient Philosophy).
God Cannot Be Claimed to Be Known
This god of Xenophanes’ was not in any way anthropomorphic and bore no resemblance whatsoever to either the gods of ancient Greece nor a present-day monotheistic conception of God. Dr. C.G. Boeree writes, “There isonly one God, Xenophanes said, and that is the universe, Nature. This persepective is known as pantheism."
Even so, Xenophanes asserts that no one can claim to understand what this `god’ is, only that the god does exist. What the exact nature of this god is cannot be asserted confidently: “There has not been a man, nor will there be, who knows distinctly what I say about the gods or in regard to all things, for even if one chances for the most part to say what is true, still he would not know; but every one thinks he knows" ( History.Hanover.edu).
Xenophanes’ claim most certainly influenced later writers, most notably Plato and his Theory of Forms and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover; both of which posit, though by very different ways, the existence of a "higher truth" or a "single force" by which all was created or set in motion and, through them and the ethos of the Hebrew scriptures, laid the foundation for the Christian conception of God.
Sources:
Baird/Kaufmann, Ancient Philosophy, 5th Edition, 2008, New Jersey.
Boeree, The Ancient Greeks; The Pre-Socratics, 2000.
Gulyas/Perry, Xenophanes Fragments and Commentary.
Joshua Mark - Joshua J. Mark is a freelance writer, specializing in history, literature, religion and philosophy, who has been working and publishing ...
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