Xenophanes
From Philosopedia
Xenophanes (c. 570 B.C.E.–c. 480 B.C.E.)
Xenophanes of Colophon, unlike Homer and Hesiod, did not portray the gods anthropomorphically. Nietzsche, as pointed out by H. J. Blackham in New Humanist (January 1990), contrasted
- the healthy Greek popular idea of lusty human gods, decried by Xenophanes, with the pathological Judaeo-Christian slavish obedience to their idea of an Almighty. The idea of Xenophanes is neither the one nor the other, and can be assimilated to the Socinian or Deist disbelief in orthodox Christian dogmas.
Xenophanes’s outlook was somewhat pantheistic, if not entirely unbelieving, in his elegies and poetry. He was a satirist who preached the importance of understanding virtue. His contemporaries, J. M. Robertson writes, likely called Xenophanes an atheist more than anything else, for his references to any god was not physically or mentally anthropomorphic. “Mortals,” he wrote,
- suppose that the Gods are born, and wear man’s clothing, and have voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and make works of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle. . . . Ethiopians make their Gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have reddish hair and blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the Gods to be like themselves.
Like Epicurus, Xenophanes absolutely rejected all divination and also held the unpopular view that the Greeks erred by worshiping athletes extravagantly.
