Xenophanes, Anthropomorphism, and the Milesian Naturalists

Xenophanes, not to be confused with Xenophon, a rather brilliant historian who wrote practical treatises on everything ranging from horsemanship to taxation and is pretty much responsible for 90% of the contextual resources in Classical Civ A Level, is one of the most significant pre-socratic philosophers and predecessors to the Eleatics.

In order to understand Xenophanes, you need the context of the contemporary cultural climate of popular Greek religion against which he was reacting. Most of us are aware from childhood adventures into the colourful world of Greek mythology of the traditional pantheon of Olympian gods, with Zeus, Poseidon, Aphrodite and Hermes to give a few prominent examples, residing over the states of human affairs. While perhaps fantastical and whimsical tales to us now, this was the legitimate theology of Ancient Greece, as expounded in Homer, responsible for such brilliant epic poems as the Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod, who described the genealogy of the gods in the Theogony.

Xenophanes, however, had many qualms with this model of divinity and he produced, in response, the first recorded systematic account of divine nature. He is not questioning the existence of the divine, but rather the way in which the nature of it is discussed. The crucial factor in this assault on contemporary religion is a critique of anthropomorphism, a term stemming from the Greek words ἄνθρωπος ("human") and μορφή ("form"). As suggested by the etymology, this essentially means that the notion of the divine has suffered an attribution of distinctly human qualities as part of the endeavour of conceptualisation. The famous example he uses of this demonstrates the tendency to have a preconditioned mould into which a divine being will fit as based on the constitution of the thinker is as follows:

“But if horses or oxen or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men,horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen,and they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had”

As an alternative, he employs a cataphatic theology (defining the divine through positive declaratives) in which he delineates a being who bears no resemblance to humanity in either form or mind. This culminated in five key concepts; God is beyond human morality, cannot be likened to humanity, is eternal, is not part of a divine hierarchy and does not intervene in human affairs. This supposedly spherical being comprehends all things within himself but, contrary to traditional religion where the gods are active participants in the earthly world, is completely unmotivated by human affairs. One of the primary reasons this is significant, is that it opens the gateway to naturalistic interpretations of phenomena that do not rely on external interventions by the pantheon. In other words, we are epistemologically autonomous, and must use our faculties to inquire into the state of our world.

This attitude is unsurprising given the context of the Milesian Naturalists, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, three Ionian cosmologists who were pioneers of methodological naturalism. Moving away from the mythological explanations of celestial bodies and terrestrial phenomena, they focused on empirical observation, and identifying interactions of the elements as involved in a causal dynamic with these events. Alas, the poor Olympian gods and their continuous intervention was replaced with hylozoism (the belief that matter is alive) and material monism (that there is one basic material principle of the universe e.g. water or air). Xenophanes was certainly innovative, but he was also one part of the great journey pioneered by a line of sometimes questionable and always eccentric Greek philosophers that has led us to modern science.

After all, as Xenophanes says, “everything comes from the earth, and everything ends in the earth.”