Xenophanes

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Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek poet and philosopher of the sixth century BCE, best known for his sustained attack on the gods of traditional religion and for the idea, advanced in fragments of verse, of one greatest god unlike mortals in body or in mind. Ancient and modern writers place his long life roughly between 570 and 478 BCE. He left Colophon, his Ionian birthplace, at about twenty-five — the city had fallen under Lydian and then Persian pressure — and by his own reckoning spent the next sixty-seven years carried about the Greek world, an exile turned wandering reciter. The tradition that gathers his biography, chiefly Diogenes Laertius in the ninth book of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers, attaches him to Elea in southern Italy and to Zancle and Catana in Sicily, and remembers him as a man who recited his own compositions rather than the lays of others, and who attacked the poets to their faces. He composed in epic hexameter, in elegiac couplets for the symposium, and in biting iambics, and into all three he folded the same restless scrutiny of how mortals talk about their gods.

His surviving work comes down only in quotation, gathered from later authors who cited him to praise, refute, or merely record. There is no book of Xenophanes; there are some forty-odd fragments, most of them a line or a few lines long, salvaged because a Clement of Alexandria, a Sextus Empiricus, a Simplicius, a Stobaeus had reason to repeat them. What those fragments preserve is a critic with an unusually sharp eye for how people make their gods.

The quarrel with the poets

For the archaic Greek world the gods were what Homer and Hesiod had said they were — the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Theogony were the nearest thing to scripture, the common education of the cities. Xenophanes took aim directly at that authority. Homer and Hesiod, he charged, had laid upon the gods every deed that counts among mortals as a shame and a reproach: theft, adultery, and the deceiving of one another. The Olympians of epic quarrel, seduce, lie, are wounded and bound and ransomed; Cronus devours his children, gods take sides in human wars. To Xenophanes this was not piety but slander dressed as worship — a divinity degraded to the level of the worst human conduct and then offered for reverence. The complaint is moral before it is metaphysical: a god worth the name cannot be a larger, stronger version of a disgraceful man.

Behind the moral charge lies a deeper, colder observation, and it is the one for which he is most quoted. Mortals, he noticed, suppose that the gods are born as they themselves are born, and that the gods wear clothing, and have a voice and a body like their own. The supposition is so natural that it passes unnoticed — until one looks across the borders of one’s own people. The Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and dark; the Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair. Each nation paints the divine in its own coloring and its own bone. (The Thracian detail — the people north of Greece, in Thrace, with their fair complexions — is exactly the foreign comparandum his Ionian audience would feel as strange.) And then the stroke that turns the observation into an argument: if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could draw and fashion works as men do, then horses would draw their gods in the shape of horses, oxen in the shape of oxen, each animal giving the gods the body it has itself. Belief, on this account, follows the shape of the believer. The image a worshipper forms of the divine is a portrait of the worshipper, scaled up and set on a throne. It is one of the earliest statements of what later thought would call the projection theory of religion, and it has been returned to, in altered keys, by writers down to the modern philosophy and psychology of religion — though Xenophanes deploys it not to abolish the divine but to purify the idea of it.

The one greatest god

The negative argument clears a space, and into that space Xenophanes sets a positive theology unlike anything in the poets. There is, he says, one god, greatest among gods and men, resembling mortals neither in form nor in thought. This god does not move from place to place as the Olympians stride and fly; he remains always in the same place, for it does not befit him to go now here, now there. He does not perceive piecemeal, with eyes here and ears there as a body does: whole he sees, whole he thinks, whole he hears. And he governs without exertion — without toil, by the thought of his mind alone, he shakes all things and holds them in their courses. A god who needs no hands, takes no steps, and acts by sheer intellection: this is mind (nous) abstracted from everything bodily, the very opposite of the wrestling, wounded gods of epic.

What exactly Xenophanes meant by this figure is, and has long been, a real question rather than a settled doctrine — and the fragments themselves do not close it. The phrase greatest among gods and men sits awkwardly beside any strict monotheism, since it seems to grant other gods at least a grammatical existence; some readers treat it as a polar idiom, a Greek way of saying greatest of all that does not literally populate a pantheon. Others read a henotheism, one supreme god presiding over lesser divine powers without denying them. Others again, following a thread already in Aristotle, take the one god to be the cosmos itself — the whole heaven gazed upon and called god — which would make Xenophanes less a monotheist than an early pantheist, a thinker for whom the order of the world is the divine. The fragments support a careful reader in more than one of these directions, and each leaves a different Xenophanes. What is not in doubt is the direction of the purification: away from the many shaped, storied, traveling gods of the poets and toward a single intelligence, motionless and bodiless, that moves all else. That motionless mover of all things by thought, set down in archaic verse, is a shape the later Greek imagination would keep returning to — in Aristotle’s unmoved mover, in the Neoplatonist ascent toward the One, in every theology that strips the divine of body and reaches it only by negation, the lineage that would come to be called apophatic.

What can be known

Xenophanes paired the theology with one of the first explicit reflections on the limits of human knowledge, and the pairing is deliberate. Having insisted that the divine is utterly unlike mortals, he drew the epistemic consequence: the clear and certain truth no man has ever seen, nor will any man ever know it — not about the gods, nor about all the things he himself speaks of. Even if someone should happen to say exactly how things stand, he would not know that he had; certainty is not given to mortals. What is allotted to all, instead, is opinion. This is not the despair of the later skeptics; it is a calibration. In another fragment he strikes a more hopeful note: the gods did not reveal all things to mortals from the beginning, but in time, by seeking, men find out something better. Knowledge is not handed down whole from heaven; it is won slowly, by inquiry, and it always falls short of the clear truth even as it improves. His own conclusions, accordingly, he offered as resembling the truth rather than as the truth itself — a self-limitation rare among the confident voices of early Greek thought, and the seed of a long distinction between knowledge and well-founded belief.

Among the early philosophers

Xenophanes belongs to the first generations of Greek thinkers who looked for an account of things reached by reflection rather than received from the poets — a company that included the Milesian inquirers into the world’s underlying stuff, and his rough contemporaries Pythagoras, whose doctrine of the transmigration of souls he is reported to have mocked, and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who paid him back with a famous barb: much learning, Heraclitus said, had not taught Xenophanes understanding. (The two were doing different work — Heraclitus seeking the hidden logos that orders the flux, Xenophanes purging the idea of god — and each found the other’s much-learning beside the point.) He composed natural speculations as well: that all things come from earth and water, that the sun is kindled afresh each day, that the rainbow is only a colored cloud, that seashells found inland and the imprints of fish in stone show the land was once under the sea and will be again. The same instinct runs through all of it — to explain the marvelous by the ordinary, and to refuse the gods a role the world’s own workings can fill.

Later tradition tied these threads into a tidy succession. Plato, in the Sophist, speaks of an “Eleatic tribe” of thinkers that began from Xenophanes and even earlier, and Aristotle, in the first book of the Metaphysics, treats him as the first to make things one, gazing upon the whole heaven and pronouncing the One to be god — though Aristotle adds, with a shrug, that Xenophanes made nothing clear and was somewhat rustic about it. From these remarks the doxographers built the standard genealogy: Xenophanes founder of the Eleatic school, teacher of Parmenides, ancestor of the strict monism that would dominate the next generation. Present-day scholars treat that lineage with care. The doxographers were prone to tidy succession-stories, arranging philosophers as masters and pupils for the sake of a clean narrative; the biographical link between Xenophanes and Parmenides is thin, and Xenophanes’ surviving lines argue nothing as rigorously as Parmenides would, nor do they assert the bare, changeless, indivisible Being on which Eleatic philosophy turns. His one motionless god is a theological figure, not yet a logic of existence. The succession is best read as a reconstruction looking backward for an origin — illuminating about how the Greeks organized their own intellectual past, less reliable as biography. What the genealogy does get right is the family resemblance: a movement that reached its first principle by reflection, and Xenophanes standing near its head.

Fragments, editions, and the modern reception

Because Xenophanes survives only in quotation, his text is a problem of scholarship: the fragments must be picked out of the authors who cite them, set in order, and judged for authenticity. The theological lines were preserved chiefly by Clement of Alexandria in the Stromata (the projection fragments and the one greatest god), by Sextus Empiricus (the indictment of Homer and Hesiod and the great fragment on the limits of knowledge), and by the sixth-century commentator Simplicius (the lines on the unmoving god who shakes all by mind); the doxographical summaries of his physics descend through the lost handbook of Theophrastus reconstructed by Hermann Diels in his Doxographi Graeci (Berlin, 1879). Diels gathered and numbered the fragments in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1903; later revised with Walther Kranz), whose “DK” numbering — Xenophanes occupies chapter 21, with the fragments cited as B1, B23, B34, and so on — remains the universal currency of Presocratic reference. The Diels-only editions of 1903 through 1922 are in the public domain, the source of the numbering still used in every classroom.

For an English reader, the public-domain base runs through John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1892; 4th edition 1930) and through Arthur Fairbanks’s The First Philosophers of Greece (London, 1898), which prints the Presocratic fragments with facing Greek and English and a translation of the ancient testimonia; the biographical frame comes from Diogenes Laertius, available in the Bohn translation of C. D. Yonge (1853) and the Loeb of R. D. Hicks (1925). The standard modern critical edition of Xenophanes in English is James Lesher’s Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments — A Text and Translation with a Commentary (University of Toronto Press, 1992), which prints the Greek with facing translation and a fragment-by-fragment commentary and devotes its closing essays precisely to the open questions — whether the one god is the cosmos, how the projection argument is meant to work, what opinion and seeking amount to in the epistemology; the volume was assessed in detail in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. The synoptic treatment that most students meet first is the Xenophanes chapter of G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield’s The Presocratic Philosophers (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1983), which sets the fragments against the doxographical testimonia and weighs the cosmos-versus-supreme-god reading without forcing a verdict. The thread of his thought is woven into the later Greek tradition that the encyclopedia’s own hosted Library preserves: it is in Plato’s Sophist that the Eleatic genealogy is first drawn, and it is the Platonic and Neoplatonic line — the long road toward the One — that carried the abstracted, bodiless divinity furthest.

His own positive god — austere, bodiless, knowing the whole at once and stirring all things by mind while himself unmoving — was set down not in a treatise but in verse, by a man with no city, reciting to whoever would listen across two generations of exile. Stripped of body, of motion, of birth and quarrel and the poets’ coloring, that god sits at the head of a long Greek movement away from the gods of the poets and toward a first principle reached by reflection — a first principle the Eleatics, the Platonists, and the Neoplatonists would each seek in their own way, and each name otherwise, but which Xenophanes was perhaps the first Greek to reach by argument and to write in verse.

→ In the library: Plato, Sophist (Jowett) — at 242d the dialogue traces the Eleatic genealogy back to Xenophanes and earlier

→ Related: Heraclitus · The One · Pythagoras · Plato · Aristotle · Socrates · Neoplatonism · Nous · Logos · Apophatic Theology · Theology · Thrace