 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Created in Our Image – Xenophanes against Greek Religion In Homer's Iliad, there's a rather steamy bit in which Hera decides to seduce her husband, Zeus. The reason Hera wants to do this is that she's backing the Greek invaders against the Trojans, and Zeus is on the Trojan side. So, in order to help the Greeks, she needs to get Zeus to stop paying attention for a while. And a surefire way to get a man's attention is to seduce him, right? So, with a little help from Aphrodite and the god Sleep, whom she bribes by promising to let him marry one of the divine graces, she persuades Zeus to lie with her, after which he falls into a deep post-coital snooze. While he's asleep, Hector, the Trojan's mightiest warrior, is badly wounded. Zeus, as you can imagine, is really annoyed when he wakes up. He says to Hera, in the translation of Martin Hammond, Impossible creature! It is surely your vile scheming that has put godlike Hector out of the battle, and panicked his army. You may soon be the first to feel the benefit of your troublesome mischief when I flog you with blows of the whip. Now, you may find it odd to think that the ancient Greeks told stories like this about the gods, the very same gods that they sacrificed to, prayed to, built temples to. But there are plenty of stories like this. For example, according to Hesiod, Zeus' father Cronus cut off the genitals of his own father, Ouranos, with a sickle, and then, Cronus' mother threw them in the water. It was out of the resulting froth that Aphrodite was born. In another tale, Aphrodite and Ares get caught committing adultery. The Greeks found it possible to recount such stories while still finding their gods worthy of worship. Their understanding of the gods found full expression in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. For the Greeks, these poems were something close to sacred texts. So, the philosophers of ancient Greece couldn't avoid engaging with Homer and Hesiod, any more than the philosophers of medieval Europe could have avoided engaging with the Bible. Greek philosophers, however, took a considerably more critical approach to religion than anything we can find in medieval Europe, and none more so than the subject of today's episode, Xenophanes. But let's start with a brief look at the gods in Homer, or rather, in one of the two poems ascribed to him, the Iliad. Last time, I was complaining about how little we know about the prezocratic, well, we know even less about Homer. In fact, there isn't even agreement about whether the two poems are the work of a single person as opposed to compilations that emerged over the course of generations. The Iliad, as you probably know already, is the story of the Trojan War, in which the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, lay siege to Troy in order to recover the beautiful Helen, you know, of her face is so beautiful it launched a thousand ships fame. The thousand ships her face launched were the ones carrying the Greeks to Troy. The Iliad covers only a little bit of the Trojan War. As it says in its opening lines, it focuses on the wrath of Achilles, the story of how Achilles is offended and refuses to fight, leading to a stalemate between the two armies, until his anger is roused and he comes out and kills Hector, the Trojan's main hero. Although the climax is a duel between Hector and Achilles, there are many heroes on both sides, including, on the Greek side, Odysseus, whose voyage home will be the subject of the Odyssey. There are also many side characters who aren't mighty heroes, even an occasional commoner or woman. The aged Priam also gets a good part, as a grieving father, after Achilles slays his son Hector and drags him around the city pulled by a chariot. But aside from the heroes, the main characters are the gods. The gods are involved whenever anything significant happens to the human characters. We've already had an example of this. Homer shows us that Hera needs to distract Zeus by getting him to go to sleep so that she can arrange for Hector to be wounded without Zeus's interference. The overall effect of this, from a philosophical point of view, is that Homer's gods are the explanations of last resort, or even of first resort. Nothing can happen without the gods being involved. At the very least, they need to allow humans to act. More often, it seems like human agency is just an extension of divine agency. When the warriors are brave, it's because the gods have put courage into their hearts. When they retreat, it's the gods who have drained away their willingness to fight. On the one hand, this makes the humans seem like mere playthings of the gods. But on the other hand, the Homeric gods are a lot like humans, and not even particularly well-behaved humans. They get angry, they quarrel, they deceive and seduce one another. So one might look at it from the other point of view and say that the human sphere has been extended to include the ultimate explanatory principles, namely the gods. This is one reason that that recent film version of The Trojan War, that one with Brad Pitt playing Achilles, was so disappointing, at least for those of us who were curious to see Homer's poem put on the big screen. By taking the gods out of the picture, the filmmakers eliminated the prime movers of Homer's story. Now let's turn to the other main text which tells us about Greek religion before the pre-Socratics, what you might call pre-pre-Socratic belief about the gods. This is by a farmer named Hesiod from the island of Boiotia, off the coast of mainland Greece. Hesiod wrote a poem called Works and Days, which has a lot to say about farming, as well as the gods, though Hesiod also finds time to complain about his lazy jerk of a brother. But the more important text for us is his Theogony, which as its title says, is a poem about the generation or birth of the gods. After a long opening prayer to the Muses, Hesiod tells us that the first of all things to come into being was the god Chaos, who seems to represent some kind of void or gaffe between the earth and the underworld. Then comes Gaia. Gaia is the earth, and she gives birth to the god Ouranos, which means heaven. They mate to produce a whole generation of gods, including Zeus' father, Cronos. This is a theme commonly found in other early religions, the mating of the earth and heaven, which produces other cosmic principles. So far this sounds a bit like some of what we've seen in the pre-Socratics. Thales says everything comes from water, Anaximenes says it all comes from air, Hesiod says it all comes from chaos and earth. Of course, in Hesiod's story the cosmic principles are gods, but still he's giving you a cosmology. Still, there are some big differences between Hesiod and the early philosophers of Miletus. Like the pre-Socratics, Hesiod is trying to explain things, but the things he tries to explain tend to be rather different. For instance, he tells a story in which Prometheus tricks Zeus into taking the bones and skins of an animal, rather than the meat. This is supposed to explain why the Greeks sacrifice animals to the gods, but are allowed to eat the meat rather than offering up the whole animal. And this, incidentally, is a common refrain in Homer. The gods are often pleased or annoyed with our heroes, because they do or don't sacrifice properly. But in general, Homer is much more interested in the human sphere than Hesiod is, at least in the Theogony. That makes the Theogony a more vivid comparison and contrast to our early pre-Socratic philosophers. Another important difference between Hesiod and the pre-Socratics is that Hesiod isn't arguing, even implicitly. Instead, he's declaiming, telling an epic tale that will convince with its power and instill awe as well as belief. Despite this, his gods turn out to be very much like the gods of Homer. They trick each other, they sleep with each other, they get angry, they fight wars. This might strike us as distinctly unphilosophical. But we should remember that all Greek philosophers from Thales to the Neoplatonists in the 5th century AD, more than a thousand years later, knew their Homer and Hesiod inside out. These poems are definitive works of not only religion, but also literature and history in the Greek world. They are a shared culture which binds together Greek civilization. Unsurprisingly, Plato and Aristotle often quote from both Homer and Hesiod, and they're happy to ascribe various philosophical doctrines to these great poets. For instance, in a dialogue called the Theaetetus, Plato associates Homer with Heraclitus' doctrine that everything is constantly changing. Aristotle, meanwhile, is always pleased if he can quote a line of Homer to illustrate a certain view. It shows that wise people tend to take the view seriously, Homer being the ultimate example of a wise person. This way of treating the poets is a little bit disconcerting. Did Plato and Aristotle really not know the difference between poetry and philosophy? As we'll see in later episodes, they certainly did, and in fact Plato has quite an axe to grind with Homer. But they were open to the idea that Homer or Hesiod might be addressing some of the same issues as the ones philosophers tackle, even if not in exactly the same way. It's really this that makes it possible for there to be a clash between the philosophers and the poets. If Homer had only talked about the wrath of Achilles and Odysseus' journey home, if Hesiod had only talked about farming and his useless brother, then Xenophanes would have had no complaints. The reason he went after the poets is that they dealt with a further subject on which Xenophanes had very firm views, namely the gods. Xenophanes was a poet himself, albeit not an author of epic verse. His philosophical fragments are in poetic meter, and our longest fragments from him are elegies. Sometimes he would probably have performed at banquets. He lived a long time. In one fragment he says that at the time of writing his poem, he's 92 years old. This plus the fact that it's hard to know when he was born means that he could have been a contemporary of several philosophers we haven't yet discussed, including Heraclitus, who criticized Xenophanes by name. But basically we're looking at a man who lived most of his long life in the 6th century BC. We do know where he was from, Colophon, a coastal city in Asia Minor on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey. It's a bit further north up the coast from Miletus where Thales and Aximander and Anaximides lived. Xenophanes seems to have travelled extensively. He went west as far as Sicily. Some later sources tell us that he went to Elea in mainland Italy, but they might have invented this because they want us to connect Xenophanes with Parmenides who was from Elea. Xenophanes represents a new development in pre-Socratic philosophy, because he's the first explicitly to attack the authority of the poets. Of course the Milesians, the subjects of our first two episodes, were departing from the poets also by replacing the gods with more complicated physical accounts of the cosmos. But Xenophanes was the first to really lay into Homer and Hesiod. One of his complaints was something I've already mentioned. The poets say scandalous things about the gods, telling stories of their adultery, their theft, their mutual deception. These gods aren't just like humans, they are all too human. And no wonder, says Xenophanes in another couple of fragments, because the conception we have of the gods is really a projection of human nature. The poets describe the gods as being born from parents, just like humans. They wear clothes, they talk. In fact, points out Xenophanes, it isn't just the poets. The Ethiopians think that the gods have black skin, like people from Ethiopia, whereas the fair-haired people from Thrace think that the gods have, you guessed it, fair hair. In what may be the first joke in the history of philosophy, albeit a joke with a serious message, Xenophanes sarcastically remarks that if cattle or horses could depict the gods, they would show them looking like cattle or horses. At first, this seems to be the sort of thing a sceptical atheist of modern times might say. We didn't create man in his image, we create god in our image. But Xenophanes was no atheist. Rather, he was motivated by respect for the gods, and thought it appalling to say that they engaged in adultery and theft, or even wearing clothes. Even in one of his non-philosophical poems, he said poets should devote pious hymns to the gods, and not speak of war or the clash between giants and titans, a favourite theme of mythic poetry. So part of Xenophanes' point was plain old moral outrage. Depicting Kronos castrating his father isn't appropriately reverential, it's just not sending a good message to all the kids out there. But he also has his own positive conception of god, which he thinks would be consistent with divinity and appropriately reverential. Xenophanes seems to have come up with this conception by reversing the approach of Homer and Hesiod. These gods won't be like humans, instead he'll be as much unlike humans as possible, and better in every way. Unlike us, god needs nothing, despite what the poets would have you believe. So you can stop sacrificing those animals, he doesn't need them. God doesn't move at all, there's nowhere he needs to go, and maybe he doesn't even have a body. On the other hand, like the Homeric and Hesiodic gods, he's very powerful. In fact, he can shake everything just by thinking, as Xenophanes puts it. This phrase echoes his nemesis Homer, who says in the Iliad that Zeus shakes Olympus. Another fragment of Xenophanes says that god sees, thinks, and hears as a whole. In other words, he does nothing but think and perceive. Perhaps most strikingly of all, Xenophanes says that God is one among gods and men, incomparable to mortals in body or thought. This fragment is a little confusing. God is one among gods? Is he saying that there's only one god? Or one god who's greater than all the other gods? If it's the former, then Xenophanes is abandoning not only the anthropomorphic conception of the gods we find in the poets, but even the idea that there are many gods. We might see this as another move in the direction of simplicity, as we found in the Milesians. They each had their single principle, be it water, air, or the infinite, and Xenophanes has his one god. So what about all the things that the poets explained by referring to their many gods? Here a nice example is what Xenophanes said about the rainbow. The Greeks had a goddess named Isis who was identified with the rainbow. Total rubbish, says Xenophanes. A rainbow is nothing but a cloud with some colours in it. As for the sun, it is not a god called Helios, it is a bunch of fire that has been gathered together. Here we can see Xenophanes extending the ideas of his Milesian predecessors as a way of replacing the poetic worldview. It's almost irresistible to call his new approach scientific, because it refers to physical stuff like clouds and fire, rather than gods and goddesses. But again like the Milesians, he has not gotten rid of religious sentiment. If anything, he's saying that proper respect for the divine should lead us to adopt his conception of a single god who does nothing but think, and has nothing in common with us, apart from the ability to think. But why is god thinking and not moving, or any of the other things we do? Maybe because thinking is the one thing humans can do that is worthy of god. But even here, Xenophanes insists that god is nothing like us, he is incomparable to us in both body and in thought. You'll notice for instance that we can't shake all things just by thinking about it. You can only imagine what Xenophanes' contemporaries might have thought about all this. Where does this arrogant dude from Ionia get off telling us everything we believe about our cherished gods is silly? And certainly Xenophanes, as I've presented him so far, seems if not arrogant, then at least blessed with tremendous self-confidence, shall we say. He's taking on the poets, the biggest target around. But other fragments give a different impression. In these fragments, he shows that he has a cautious and maybe even skeptical attitude towards what humans, including himself, can know. He says that no one really knows about the gods and other things he is telling us about. Rather, even if you are lucky enough to believe the truth, you won't know. This is just as revolutionary as his ideas about god. He's distinguishing between believing something and really knowing it, a distinction which will be tremendously important down the line when we get to Plato, for example. In fact, this is important for philosophy in general. What is philosophy if it isn't the attempt to sort out what we can know from what we merely believe? But it's not clear exactly what Xenophanes is saying here. What are the things no one can ever know? Well, he's claiming that at least the nature of god, or the gods, is beyond human grasp. In another fragment, in which it looks like he's talking about his own teachings, he says, let these things be believed as being like the truth. So where's that tremendous self-confidence now? It seems to have been replaced by a deep modesty about human powers of understanding. The best any of us can do is to find the most plausible and appropriate beliefs. But that doesn't stop Xenophanes from being pretty tough on people who fall short of these most plausible and appropriate beliefs, especially on a topic as important as the divine. We don't know, maybe, that god thinks and can shake all things by thinking, but we should believe it. Or as we sure as heck shouldn't believe, that god commits adultery. These themes from Xenophanes are going to reverberate throughout pre-Socratic philosophy and also in Plato and Aristotle. Other pre-Socratics will also distinguish between what we can merely believe and what we actually know, but they'll tend to be a lot more confident about their own views than Xenophanes was. We'll also keep seeing a kind of rivalry between the philosophers and the poets. That's true of Heraclitus, for instance, who we'll get to in two weeks' time. Heraclitus insults Hesiod and Xenophanes in the same breath, saying, they both show us that learning many things doesn't make you intelligent. Ouch. But first we'll be turning to another philosopher who Heraclitus insults in that same passage. This next philosopher will be one whose relationship to traditional Greek religion was much friendlier than Xenophanes'. Actually, he wasn't so much a friend of the gods as a close family member, because this next philosopher was supposedly the son of Apollo, or perhaps the son of Hermes. He could be in two places at the same time. He could see the future. He didn't eat beans, and his thigh was made of gold. Yes, it's Pythagoras, the topic of next week's episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.