XENOPHANES

XENOPHANES (c. 580–470 bce), Ionian poet, satirist, philosopher, and theologian, was born in Colophon, a wealthy city of Ionia under the influence of the Lydian kingdom. Because of Persians' invasion of the city, he had to flee to South Italy. He spent much of his life wandering through Sicily and Greece until he joined a Phokaian colony sent to Elea in Lucania, and he taught there, founding the Eleatic school. His pupil Parmenides was the founder of Western metaphysics. A friend of Empedocles, Xenophanes attacked Pythagoras and was attacked by Heraclitus. He has been considered both an amateur thinker and "a paradigm of the [pre-Socratic] genius" (Barnes, 1982, p. 82). In fact, he was a significant thinker and an innovator in many fields of research, such as natural sciences, morality, and gnosiology. His approach to the problems of human knowledge is so particular (and somewhat contradictory) that he can be defined as a sceptic, an empiricist, a rationalist, a fallibilist, a critical philosopher—or, more accurately, a natural epistemologist. A precise definition of his epistemological attitude clearly influences any evaluation of his theology (see fragment 34: "No man has seen, or ever will see, the exact truth about the gods").

As a religious thinker, Xenophanes has been identified as the founder of the Greek enlightenment, prior to Heraclitus and Hecataeus. From the complex of his polymath oeuvre (of which only 43 fragments and 52 controversial testimonia have been preserved) he emerges as a critical thinker, sceptical about any claims to knowledge in religious matters. As a consequence of the elusiveness and versatility of his thought in these matters, an ample variety of opinions has risen about his religious positions. If one emphasizes single facets of his teaching, it is possible to consider him a traditional polytheist, a revolutionary monotheist, a pantheist, or even an atheist or precursor of negative theology. What is clear is that with him there emerged in Greece the first form of scientific inquiry into indigenous and alien religious realities.

Xenophanes' first concern was God and the divine. He wrote: "One god is greatest among gods and men" (fragment 23). This does not mean that he was a monotheist. The fragments warrant attributing to Xenophanes the novel idea of a single god of unusual power (henotheism ), but not the stronger view that beyond this one god there could be nothing else worthy of the name. God is a body (testimonium 28), spherical in form, being alike and perceptive in all his parts (testimonia 1, 28, 33, and 34) and in a way coextensive with the whole universe (testimonium 31), and identical with the One (testimonia 30, 34 and 35). God is ungenerated and eternal (testimonia 28 and 31), motionless (fragment 26), and at the same time "shaking all things by the thought of his mind" (fragment 25). Apparently, this view anticipates Anaxagoras's Nous (intellect, mind—the intellectual principle that is separate from the mass that it governs), which is the ultimate source of movement, and the Aristotelian doctrine of the prime unmoved mover. Xenophanes was the first to regard the soul (psuchē) as "breath" (pneuma ), that is, moving air, full of vital energy (testimonium 1). His concept of time is cyclic: there is an unlimited number of worlds existing successively without overlapping one another, and a new generation begins again after each cosmic catastrophe (testimonia 1, 33, and 37)—the first manifestation of the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, later adopted by the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Earth (Gaia) is the root and the ultimate destination of all things (fragments 27, 28, 29, 33)—perhaps a survival of ancient pre-Olympian religiosity.

From the theological reflection combined with the scientific speculation, Xenophanes moved to scathing criticisms of the most objectionable aspects of Greek religion. He attacked poets (including Homer and Hesiod) for saying false and immoral things about the gods in their tales of divine warfare with Titans, giants, and centaurs (fragment 1); as well as in their attributions to the gods of things that are matters of reproach even among men—theft, adultery, and mutual deceit (fragments 11 and 12). Further, he repudiated the whole enterprise of divination through natural signs (testimonium 52) and the connected popular belief in the godship of celestial bodies (fragment 32 and testimonia 32 and 38–46). Subjects of stern rebuke are also the contemporary outbreaks of ecstatic religion such as the naturalism of the Bacchic cult (fragment 17) and the Pythagorean belief in the reincarnation of the human soul in any animal form (fragment 7). Had Xenophanes limited himself to these assertions, he would have emerged only as an innovative theologian, albeit one less insightful and less audacious than his near contemporary and fellow Ionian, Heraclitus of Ephesus. Nor would he have found a place among the pioneers of the comparative study of religion. As can be inferred from Aristotle's and Plutarch's testimonies (testimonium 13), the Ionian thinker perceived a marked affinity between the cult of the Greek Leucothea, worshipped with funeral dirges (threnoi ) although considered a deity (ergo, immortal for the Greeks), and the cult of the Egyptian Osiris, who was ritually mourned by his worshippers (as befitted a dead god) but was at the same time honored as a very high-ranking god. Thus, Xenophanes seems to have virtually highlighted—two and a half millennia before James Frazer (1854–1941)—the typological category of the dying/rising gods present on both sides of the Mediterranean. This ability for critical perception, which earned Xenophanes the mantle of "precursor of comparative ethnology" (Pettazzoni, 1954, p. 134), is certainly connected with his experience as an Ionian citizen who since birth had been familiar with the beliefs and customs of the other peoples of Anatolia: the Lydians, the Carians, and the Median-Persian invaders. Xenophanes could autoptically realize that the routes through which humans (and, by paradoxical analogy, the other animals) reach the representation of the divine are numberless. Starting with his criticism of the anthropomorphism typical of the Greek conception of divinity (fragment 14), Xenophanes came to make two famous assessments: "The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired"(fragment 16); and "But if horses or oxen or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves"(fragment 15). This can be viewed as the first application of a comparative perspective to the study of religion.

See Also

Atheism; Images; Knowledge and Ignorance; Monotheism; Parmenides; Plato; Pythagoras; Sociology; Stoicism; Transmigration.

Bibliography

All the fragments (21 B: 1–45) and the testimonia on Xenophanes' life and teaching (21 A: 1–52) are collected in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1, edited by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (6th ed., Berlin, 1951), which has an indispensable critical apparatus and German translation of the text. Diels's and Kranz's numeration is still the standard system of reference. A personal selection, in English translation and with substantial interpretation, is provided by Geoffrey S. Kirk in The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2d edition, edited by Geoffrey S. Kirk, John E. Raven, and M. Schofield (Cambridge, U.K., 1983), pp. 163–181. A complete edition with Greek text and Italian translation is given by Mario Untersteiner, Senofane's Testimonianze e frammenti (Firenze, Italy, 1956). The commentary and the introduction (especially "Senofane di fronte alla religiosità preellenica. Il politeismo" and "Il dio di Senofane," pp. 134–212) are important from the religiohistorical point of view. James H. Lesher, in Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments: A Text and Translation (Toronto, 1992), provides a very informative and perceptive commentary on most of the fragments (Greek text of all the fragments, with critical annotations) and the testimonia (English translation only). The interest of this work is philosophical but the main theological questions are examined with subtlety. Extensive bibliographies are provided by Untersteiner and Lesher.

Among the numerous general interpretations, Hermann Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford, 1975), pp. 325–337, and Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London, 1982), pp. 82–99, are representative of two divergent approaches: for the German scholar, even as a theologian, Xenophanes was "a staunch empiricist"; for the British philosopher, he was "the initiator of natural theology." Relevant themes of Xenophanes' religious thought are examined in various recent contributions. Michael Eisenstadt, in "Xenophanes' Proposed Reform of Greek Religion," Hermes 102 (1974): 142–150, argues for Xenophanes' approval of the worship of the Olympian gods in spite of the philosophical inadequacy of traditional religion. In "The Xenophanean Religious Thought: A Field of Various Interpretations," Kernos 2 (1989): 89–96, Aikaterini Lefka outlines the main approaches to the philosopher's teaching about god. Mark J. Edwards, in "Xenophanes' Christianus?," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 32 (1991): 219–228, seeks to demonstrate (somewhat unconvincingly) that the three crucial fragments cited by of Alexandria in the Stromateis (fragments 14, 15, 23) are attributable to a Christian or Jewish forger. Massimo Di Marco, in Sapienza italica. Studi su Senofane, Empedocle, Ippone (Rome, 1998), pp. 9–31, contributes a useful discussion on the controversial issue of Xenophanes' relationship with the Eleatic school. In a series of insightful articles—"Elea, Senofane e Leucothea," Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale Napoli 16 (1994): 137–155; "Senofane ed Elea," Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 95 (2000): 31–49; and "Il frammento Lebedev di Senofane," Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 98 (2001): 25–34—Giovanni Cerri reconstructs the polytheistic background (Leucothea, Persefone) against which Xenophanes built his characteristic theology.

Xenophanes is acknowledged as the founder of religious criticism by Raffaele Pettazzoni, in La religione nella Grecia antica fino ad Alessandro, Bologna, 1922, 2d ed. Turin, 1954, pp. 133-134, and in two standard histories of the comparative study of religion: Jan de Vries, Perspectives in the History of Religions (New York, 1967; 2d ed., Berkeley, Calif., 1977), pp. 3–5; and Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion. A History (London, 1975; 2d ed., 1986), pp. 3–4.

Giovanni Casadio (2005)