Why Xenophanes was skeptical of traditional myths and gods that resemble humans

Xenophanes (ca. 570 - 478 BC) was a major thinker in early Greek philosophy. He was born in Colophon, on the western coast of what is today Turkey, which was not atypical among early Greek thinkers. His thoughts on the gods were profoundly influential and helped shape the rest of Greek philosophy.

The Greek poets — especially, Homer and Hesiod — had shaped an account of who the gods were that Xenophanes strongly opposed. The picture of the gods we get from Greek mythology depicts the gods as bad people: deeply imperfect and morally flawed. Their lifestyles are not totally different from ours: while they live on Mount Olympus, not in our cities, they will occasionally visit us in order to steal our wives and engage in petty games (that they might well lose).

They differ from us in only small and marginal ways (besides their immortality): they eat not food but ambrosia; they bleed not blood but ichor; and so on.

Xenophanes strongly disapproves.

While none of his works survive in full, we have fragments of his poetry and reports of some of his beliefs.

Here is an example:

“Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things/ that among men are sources of blame and censure:/ thieving, committing adultery, and deceiving each other”(DKB11).

This passage is crucial because not only is Xenophanes blaming Homer and Hesiod, he’s also revealing something important about how he approached traditional mythology: humans invent gods that share the characteristics of humanity.

Among humans, we observe that our problems are caused by thieving, adultery, deception, and so on, and so we project that picture of humanity onto our conceptions of the divine.

This is made clear in the following fragment:

“But mortals think that gods are born/ and have clothing, voice, and bodily frame just like theirs” (DKB14).

When we invent stories of the gods, we make the gods out to be just like us. Sure, they are not exactly like us, but the gods are generally human.

The technical word for this is ‘anthropomorphic’. We make the gods anthropomorphic when we make them resemble humans.

Xenophanes observed that the differences between the gods worshipped by different groups reflect differences between those groups. He says so here:

“The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark-skinned/ and the Thracians that they have blue eyes and red hair” (DKB16).

He took this to its logical extreme:

“But if oxen, horses, or lions had hands/ or could draw with their hands and create works like men,/ then horses would draw the shapes of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen/ and they would make the same kinds of bodies/ as each one possessed its own bodily frame” (DKB15).

Here’s the point: if humans anthropomorphize the gods, then oxen will make their gods look like oxen; horses will make theirs look like horses; and so on.

Each group makes its gods resemble the members of the group.

Clearly, Xenophanes encouraged a profound kind of skepticism towards the stories told by Homer and Hesiod. Traditional mythology attributes to the divine actions that are unworthy of the gods, even though they are routine behaviors of humans. Plus, everyone thinks that the gods look and act like them.

But is Xenophanes an atheist?

Not at all!

In fact, Xenophanes believed in a radically inhuman conception of the divine.

He is reported to have written the following:

“One god, among both gods and humans the greatest,/ neither in bodily frame similar to mortals nor in thought” (DKB23).

Xenophanes thinks that there is one god, the best and highest god, that is not similar to humans either in body or mind. This god is completely unlike the traditional Greek gods, then.

He doesn’t act like a human, and in fact, he is totally unmoving:

“He always stays in the same place, not moving at all,/ and it is not fitting that he travel now to one place, now to another” (DKB26).

That doesn’t mean that he can’t accomplish things. In reality, he makes everything tremble by means of his mind:

“But without any toil, by the organ of his mind, he makes all things tremble” (DKB25).

That’s how powerful his mind is: he can cause everything to tremble thanks to it!

That’s a really important difference between humans and this god. In humans, we use our body to make small differences in the physical world, and our mind does nothing like that all.

Xenophanes’ god, meanwhile, doesn’t rely on his body at all, and his mind is super powerful.

How persuasive was Xenophanes’ critique?

It isn’t obvious how influential he was upon the average Greek person, who perhaps wasn’t even aware that Xenophanes had developed this criticism in the first place. But upon later Greek philosophers, he was very influential.

Probably the most visible and pertinent example of his influence is Plato’s discussion of traditional religion in the Republic.

Plato, like Xenophanes, is no atheist. He, too, believes in a god who has a super powerful mind and doesn’t act by means of a body. Plato’s theology is way more worked-out and sophisticated than what we can piece together from fragments and reports of Xenophanes, but the two share a similar distrust of traditional religion.

Plato thinks that it is important to keep Homeric and Hesiodic myths away from key segments of society. For instance, we don’t want our soldiers reading about how the gods do bad things to people. Our soldiers should have received training and equipment that make them deadly. So, we want to ensure that they have good examples, not stories of how the gods occasionally rape and kill people, sometimes in obscene and gruesome ways.

These stories are bad lessons for our populace. Moreover, they say ridiculous things about the gods, in Plato’s mind. For starters, they maintain that the gods could ever be the cause of bad things, such as disease. In reality, Plato thinks, the gods can cause only good things, never bad.

Next, the gods cannot be bribed by a sacrifice or prayer. If the gods will something, then so be it; it isn’t like someone should be able to talk them out of it or persuade them to act otherwise by some means. The gods are not at all like humans in this respect.

In this way, Plato takes Xenophanes’ criticism and develops it, testifying to the importance of this early Greek philosopher.