Xenophanes (c. 570–480 BCE)

Xenophanes, one of the Presocratic philosophers, lived in Colophon (in Ionia, Asia Minor) until about 546 BCE, when he left following a conquest of Ionia by the Medes and began to travel the known world widely. He may have spent time in Elea (southern Italy), and Aristotle reports that he was said to have been a teacher of Parmenides. He observed fossils of sea animals in mountainous regions and conjectured that the sea must have covered those mountains in earlier times. He also is said to have thought that everything comes to be from earth and water (mud), which is why the remains are found in dried mud. Worlds (or world orders) may come and go, perhaps in cycles. Thus there is change in the physical world over time, and the physical world and its inhabitants exist in time.

Xenophanes did not accept the traditional Greek conception of a pantheon of many gods who fought with one another, lied, seduced, and could be placated by gifts from mortals. In the course of his travels to many regions around the Mediterranean, he had observed many different religious beliefs. He wrote that the Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black (like themselves), whereas the Thracians' gods are portrayed with red hair and gray eyes (characteristics of the Thracians themselves). Thus each human race creates an anthropomorphic god in its own image. Xenophanes thus concluded, as reported by Clement of Alexandria: “And if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could draw with their hands and do what man can do, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own.” He is thus contemptuous of any such view of the gods, or god, as like any mortal being. There must be one god, concluded Xenophanes, not like any mortal creature in body or in mind. This god “sees all over, thinks all over, hears all over” (Sextus Empiricus), a precursor of the more modern view of a god who is omnipresent, all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnibenevolent. The god imagined by Xenophanes does not move or change (it would not befit a god to do so) but sets all things in motion by pure thought. This anticipates Aristotle's prime mover, Augustine's God, and the mathematician-god of Leibniz. Thus for Xenophanes, one god exists and is the source of the world. (Some conclude that his god is equivalent to the world, that Xenophanes was an early pantheist, like Spinoza, but this would not be consistent, equating a god that does not change with a world full of change.)

One of the problems with the traditional Greek gods of Homer and Hesiod was that they were too much like humans, with all the flaws of humans but in greater measure. Xenophanes seemed to believe that god must represent a kind of perfection, an ideal; thus such a god would have to be one, not many (as the many gods would have to differ from one another to be many and thus be better or worse, more or less strong, and the like, [Page 1448]than one another, but god must be the best, the most perfect, and thus be only one). This god is eternal, does not change, does not come into being or pass away. Thus Xenophanes' god is timeless, or outside of time, or in all time.

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