Justified True Belief

(●) The first man in the West to say out loud that people make their gods in their own likeness. + Everybody has heard the objection. Your God is a projection, an outsized human being with a beard and a temper, invented by frightened people who needed a father in the sky. It gets put to Christians most weeks somewhere, and it is usually delivered as though it were news. It is about twenty-six centuries old, and the man who first put it into words was a wandering Greek poet who spent most of his life as a refugee. Xenophanes of Colophon looked at the gods of Homer, saw a family of immortals who stole, committed adultery and lied to each other, and said the obvious thing: these are not gods, these are us with the brakes off. Then he took the argument a step further than any modern version of it goes. If the Greeks make Greek gods, he said, and the Ethiopians make Ethiopian gods, and horses would make horse gods, then the fault is not in this religion or that one. It is in the imagination doing the making. What he did next is the reason he sits on a Christian shelf rather than an atheist one. Having cleared the field, he did not conclude that there was nothing there. He concluded that there was one god, greatest of all, and that this god was not like a human being in body or in mind. Seven centuries later a Christian teacher in Alexandria copied out those verses to use against the pagans, which is very nearly the only reason we still have them. His dates are a reconstruction rather than a record. He tells us he left home at twenty-five and had been wandering for sixty-seven years when he wrote one of the surviving poems, which makes him ninety-two and still working; the ancient sources disagree by decades about when that was. The c. 570 and c. 478 in the title are the conventional figures, and the later one marks the last year he can be shown alive, not a recorded death.

(●) c. 570 BC: Born at Colophon in Ionia, a Greek city rich enough to go to market in purple. + Colophon stood a little inland from the Aegean coast of what is now western Turkey, about a day’s walk north of Ephesus. It was one of the Ionian cities, the string of Greek towns along that coast that had grown fat on trade and had produced, in the generation just before his, the first men in Europe to try to explain the world without telling a story about gods. It also sat next door to Lydia, a kingdom whose wealth was proverbial, and it had picked up Lydian tastes the way a small town picks up the fashions of a nearby city. He remembered that, and not fondly. One of the surviving pieces of his verse looks back at the men of Colophon in the days before the Persians came: "They learnt dainty and unprofitable ways from the Lydians, so long as they were free from hateful tyranny; they went to the market-place with cloaks of purple dye, not less than a thousand of them all told, vainglorious and proud of their comely tresses, reeking with fragrance from cunning salves." A thousand men in purple, in a town you could walk across, all of them scented. It is the sort of detail a boy notices and a man never quite forgives. Almost nothing else about the childhood survives. His father was named Dexius, or possibly Orthomenes; the two ancient reports do not agree, and nobody has ever been able to choose between them.

(●) c. 546 BC: The Persians took Ionia, and at twenty-five he left Colophon and never had a home again. + Lydia, the rich kingdom next door that had sold Colophon its purple, was the power in that corner of the world until Cyrus of Persia broke it. Cyrus was the king who built the Persian empire, and once Lydia had fallen the Greek cities strung along the coast were simply the next thing in his path. He sent his general Harpagus down that coast to take them, one town at a time. Some of the Ionians surrendered. The people of Phocaea would not: they put their households on ships and sailed west rather than live under a Persian governor, and eventually founded a new town at Elea in southern Italy. Xenophanes left his own city somewhere in those years, and one of the two long poems he is credited with was about the settling of Elea, though not a line of it survives. Whether he sailed with the Phocaeans or only wrote up afterwards what they had done, nobody can say. Diogenes Laertius, a Greek biographer of the third century AD who gathered up everything the ancient world still remembered about the philosophers, records simply that he was banished from his native city, and putting that banishment in the year Harpagus came down the coast is a reconstruction, a sound one, but still a reconstruction. He never came back. He puts a number on it himself, in a poem written as an old man: "There are by this time threescore years and seven that have tossed my careworn soul up and down the land of Hellas; and there were then five-and-twenty years from my birth, if I can say aught truly about these matters." Twenty-five when he left, sixty-seven years on the road, and the arithmetic gives a man of ninety-two still composing. The loss stayed with the Greeks of that coast for a century, and he wrote the ache of it into a scene of perfect comfort. Here is how his countrymen talked among themselves once they had escaped: "This is the sort of thing we should say by the fireside in the winter-time, as we lie on soft couches after a good meal, drinking sweet wine and crunching chickpeas: ‘Of what country are you, and how old are you, good sir? And how old were you when the Mede appeared?’" The Mede is the Persian, and the question is the one every refugee community learns to ask a stranger. Not where do you live. How old were you when it happened.

(●) c. 545 BC onward: He sang for his supper in Sicily, and read the history of the world off a quarry wall. + Diogenes Laertius again, whose gossipy Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is the single richest source we have for the early Greek thinkers, says that after his banishment Xenophanes lived at Zancle and Catana, two Greek towns on the east coast of Sicily, the first on the strait that divides the island from Italy and the second under Mount Etna, and that he recited his own poems himself. That is how the man made his living: not as a philosopher with a school and fee-paying students, but as a guest at other men’s dinner tables, singing verses he had written, for a bed and a meal. The form he worked in was the elegy, which in Greek means a poem in a particular metre rather than a poem about death: the standard vehicle for after-dinner reflection, and short enough to perform between courses. He also wrote satires, which later writers called silloi, squint-eyed poems, and those were where he went after Homer. Somewhere in those Sicilian years he did something else, and it is the strangest fact about him. He looked at rock. Hippolytus, a Christian writer in Rome around AD 220, preserves the report: "Shells are found in midland districts and on hills, and he says that in the quarries at Syracuse has been found the imprint of a fish and of seaweed, at Paros the form of a bayleaf in the depth of the stone, and at Malta flat impressions of all marine animals." Seashells on a hilltop, a fish printed in the wall of a stone quarry miles from any water. His conclusion was that the land had once been sea and mud, and had dried, and would go back. Whether the argument was his own or borrowed from the Ionian thinkers before him is disputed. Either way, a man in the sixth century BC standing in a quarry and reasoning from a stone fish to the history of the ground he was standing on is doing something we would recognise.

(●) Somewhere in the sixty-seven years on the road: He told the Greek cities that a crowned wrestler was worth less to them than a good mind. + A Greek city that produced an Olympic victor went slightly mad with pride. The man was fed at public expense for life, given a front seat at the games, and handed a gift his family could pass down. Whole civic budgets bent around athletes, in a world where a city might be a few thousand people. Xenophanes wrote a poem about it and did not bother to be tactful. He runs through the events one by one, the foot race, the pentathlon, the wrestling, the boxing, the pankration where nearly anything was allowed, the chariot race, grants that the winner gets all the honours, and then says flatly that none of it is deserved as much as what he does: "Far better is our art than the strength of men and of horses!" And then the line that gives the argument its teeth, because it is about the city rather than about him: "it is not this that makes fat the store-houses of a city." Take a modern equivalent and the nerve of it comes through. A poet at a civic banquet, eating food he did not pay for, tells the assembled worthies that their star athlete has never put a loaf of bread on anybody’s table and that the money would have been better spent on a man who could think. He was not popular in the way a court poet is popular. He was a guest who said things.

(●) After c. 495 BC: He answered the doctrine of the travelling soul with a joke about a beaten puppy. + Pythagoras had taught, in southern Italy in the same decades, that the soul does not die with the body but passes into another living thing. Transmigration is the usual word for it, from a Latin verb meaning to move house, and moving house is very nearly the picture: one tenant, a long string of addresses, and the furniture left behind at every one of them. The practical upshot, if it is true, is that the animal in front of you may be somebody you used to know. Xenophanes was travelling the same coast in those years, and he had no patience for any of it. He did not write a refutation. He wrote four lines: "And now I will turn to another tale and point the way. . . . Once they say that he was passing by when a dog was being beaten and spoke this word: ‘Stop! don’t beat it! For it is the soul of a friend that I recognised when I heard its voice.’" He does not even name the man; Diogenes Laertius, who quotes the lines, tells us it is Pythagoras. Nor does he claim to have watched it happen. Once they say is how the story arrives, at second hand and already worn smooth, which reads as though Pythagoras were dead by the time the verses were made, and dating them after c. 495 BC is an inference from that and from nothing firmer. The tone is worth noticing, because it is the tone of the whole surviving body of his work. He is not a system-builder demolishing a rival system. He is a man at a dinner party doing an impression of somebody who has just recognised his late friend in a yelping dog, and letting his listeners hear how it sounds. Those few lines carry an accidental distinction: they are among the earliest surviving references to Pythagoras in Greek literature, and may well be the earliest of all. There is one rival for that honour, and the contest is close only because Xenophanes never actually writes the name down. He only says he. The earliest surviving use of the name itself belongs to Heraclitus of Ephesus, a philosopher of that same Ionian coast writing at much the same time, who is the first we know of to set it in his own words. Either way, one of the two first appearances the most famous mystic of the ancient world makes in the written record has him for a punchline.

(●) c. 478 BC: In his ninety-second year he was still on the road and still making verses. + Where and when he died, nobody wrote down. The last thing we can date is the poem that counts up the sixty-seven years, and even that has to be pinned to his birth, which the ancient authorities put anywhere across a span of fifty years. One tradition connects his old age with the court of Hieron, the ruler of Syracuse from 478 to 467 BC, which if true would make him a very old man among younger poets. Demetrius of Phalerum and Panaetius the Stoic both reported that he buried his sons with his own hands, and that is all we are told about his family. He founded nothing. There was no school, no successor, no institution to keep his name warm, and the two long poems he laboured over vanished completely. What survived is what other people happened to quote: a little over a hundred lines, scattered through the works of a gossiping biographer, a dinner-table anthologist, a sceptical philosopher, a commentator on Aristotle, a grammarian who wanted him for his spelling, and two Christian theologians who wanted his verses for an argument he never lived to hear. Plato, a century and a half later, would put a passing remark into the mouth of a visitor from Elea: "The Eleatic sect in our region, beginning with Xenophanes and even earlier, have their story that all things, as they are called, are really one" (Sophist 242d, Fowler translation). The Eleatics were the philosophers of that same town in southern Italy, Parmenides the greatest of them, and what they held is exactly what the sentence says: behind everything that changes and moves and comes apart, there is one thing that does not, and our eyes are misleading us about the rest. Aristotle would call him the first exponent of the One, which is that school’s name for the one thing. On the strength of those two remarks he spent two thousand years in the textbooks as the founder of a philosophical school. Modern scholars mostly doubt it: a man who spent his ninety-second year wandering did not settle down at Elea and found anything. The judgement is a compliment paid to him by people who could no longer read most of what he wrote.

What He Taught

(T1) The poets gave the gods every vice a man would be ashamed of. + Imagine a country where the only religious education anybody gets comes from two long poems, learned by heart in childhood and quoted for the rest of life the way an older generation quotes hymns. That was Greece, and the poems were the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Theogony of Hesiod. They were not scripture in the sense of a book claiming to be revealed, but they did the work scripture does: they told everybody who the gods were and what they were like. What they were like, if you actually read the poems and refuse to be charmed, is appalling. Zeus deceives his wife and sleeps with mortal women; Hera plots against him; Ares and Aphrodite are caught in adultery and the other gods come to laugh; Hermes steals cattle before he is a day old. Greeks knew all this perfectly well and mostly did not mind. The stories were beautiful, they were old, and objecting to them was like objecting to the weather. Xenophanes minded. His complaint is not that the stories are unhistorical, and it is not that they are indecent for children. It is that they are a slander against the divine. Whatever the greatest being is, it is not a thief, and it is not an adulterer, and a religion whose sacred poems say otherwise has got the whole thing backwards. A century and a half later Plato would banish those same stories from his ideal city on almost identical grounds, and the church fathers would quote Plato doing it. The line begins here, with a refugee poet who would not let the national literature off.

(Q) "Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another." + Source: Xenophanes, fragment 11 (Burnet translation). The fragments are numbered by the arrangement of Hermann Diels, the German scholar who in 1903 collected everything the ancient world quotes from the thinkers before Socrates; a fragment is a piece of the man’s own words, as against a report about him. This one survives because Sextus Empiricus, a sceptical philosopher of the second century AD, quoted it while arguing about the gods (T1).

(T2) Every nation carves gods that look like the people doing the carving. + The first observation is one anybody could make who had travelled as much as he had, and it lands harder for being so plainly put: "The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair." He had seen both. Ethiopians portrayed gods with Ethiopian faces; Thracians, from the cold country north of Greece, gave theirs the fair colouring of Thrace. Nobody, anywhere, worshipped an image that looked like a foreigner. From that he draws the general rule: "mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form." Not just faces. Clothing, speech, birth, the lot. Whatever a people is, that is what its gods turn out to be. And then he does the thing that makes him a philosopher rather than a tourist. He runs the rule past the edge of the human race to see whether it still holds, and it does. Give hands to horses and let them paint, and the gods on the temple wall will have four legs. This is a thought experiment, an imagined case built to test whether a principle holds where you cannot go and look, and it may be the earliest good one on record. Notice exactly how much this proves and how much it does not, because the modern version of the argument usually overshoots. That people picture God in their own image shows that the picturing is unreliable. It does not show that there is nothing being pictured. Xenophanes himself did not draw the wider conclusion, which is the most interesting thing about him.

(Q) "Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds." + Source: Xenophanes, fragment 15 (Burnet translation). Preserved by Clement of Alexandria, the Christian teacher who around AD 200 quoted these verses in the Stromata, his sprawling notebook of Greek learning turned against Greek religion, at book V chapter 14. Fragment 14, on gods born and clothed like their worshippers, stands a line away in the same chapter. Fragment 16, on the Ethiopians and the Thracians, comes down through Clement too, from a different book of the same work, book VII chapter 4 (T2).

(T3) There is one god, greatest of all, and he is not like a man in body or in mind. + Here is where he parts company with every debunker who has borrowed his argument since. Having shown that the gods of the poets are human beings written large, he does not put the pen down. He describes what he thinks is actually there, and the description is startling for a man writing around 540 BC. Take the four surviving verses together. There is one god, greatest among gods and men, unlike mortals in form and unlike them in thought. He perceives as a whole rather than through organs: "He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over." You and I do not. Sight comes to us through two small windows in the front of the head, hearing through two holes in the sides, and whatever is behind us has to be taken on trust until we turn around. The god of the verses has no windows to look out of, because he is not inside anything. He does not labour: "without toil he swayeth all things by the thought of his mind." And he does not travel, which for a Greek was the sharpest break of all, since the gods of Homer are forever going somewhere on an errand. "And he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither." A god who rules by thinking, who does not need to run messages, who has no eyes because he does not need any, is a long way from Olympus. It is close enough to what theologians would later say about God that Clement quoted it as though a Greek had stumbled into the truth. Whether he was a monotheist is genuinely disputed, and honesty requires saying so. The verse itself keeps the plural: greatest among gods and men. Aristotle read the whole doctrine as saying that the One is the universe, which would make him a pantheist rather than a monotheist. Pantheism holds that God and the world are the same thing, so that calling the world divine is all you are entitled to say. John Burnet, whose translations these are, agreed with him, and glossed the phrase about as bluntly as it can be glossed: what "One god" comes to here is "No god but the world." Others read the plural as a poet’s inherited idiom, no more binding than a modern writer’s "the gods must be laughing." The fragments are too few to settle it, and the man has been claimed by both sides for two thousand years.

(Q) "One god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought..." + Source: Xenophanes, fragment 23 (Burnet translation). The line breaks off where the quotation that preserved it breaks off. Clement of Alexandria introduces it in the Stromata, book V chapter 14, with a verdict of his own: "Rightly, then, Xenophanes of Colophon, teaching that God is one and incorporeal, adds." Incorporeal means without a body. The Ante-Nicene Fathers translation renders the verse: "One God there is ’midst gods and men supreme; In form, in mind, unlike to mortal men" (T3).

(T4) Nobody has ever had certain knowledge about the gods, and honest seeking is still worth doing. + A man who has just told you what the greatest god is like might be expected to claim he knows. He does the opposite, and the honesty of it is bracing. No one has ever had certain knowledge in these matters, he says, and no one ever will; and here is the sharp part, a man might happen to say the exact truth and still not know that he had, because he would have no way of checking. Being right by luck is not the same as knowing. That distinction is easier to feel than to define, so here is the everyday version of it. A shop puts a jar of coins on the counter with a card beside it inviting customers to guess how many are inside, and a man writes down four hundred and twelve, and at the end of the month they count them and there are four hundred and twelve, and he carries the jar home. He was right. He did not know. Nothing in his head was any different from the head of the woman who wrote four hundred, and if you had asked him that morning how he could be sure, he would have had nothing to tell you. Xenophanes’ point is that on the subject of the gods, everybody is standing at that counter. You might think that pulls the rug out from under everything he has just said, and he has been read that way. Sextus Empiricus, who quotes the lines, was a professional sceptic and made him an ancestor. But that is not quite what the verses do, because he keeps working after saying it, and he offers a second thought that does not sit in the sceptic’s mouth at all: the gods did not hand everything to us at the start, and by searching, over time, people find out better. Put the two together and you have something closer to an honest inquirer than to a man who has given up. Certainty is not on offer; improvement is. He is drawing a line between knowledge, which would be seeing the thing plainly, and what the Greeks called dokos, seeming, the best account a person can currently give. His own picture of the one god is offered as the better seeming, not as the settled fact, and he says as much: let these be taken as fancies something like the truth. The Christian answer to this is not that he was too modest. It is that he was right about what human searching can reach on its own, and that the searching is not where the matter ended.

(Q) "There never was nor will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so. But all may have their fancy." + Source: Xenophanes, fragment 34 (Burnet translation). Quoted more than once by Sextus Empiricus, and the ancient sceptics claimed him as an ancestor on the strength of it. "Fancy" translates dokos, seeming or opinion, the word he sets against knowledge; fragment 35 adds the qualification that these are to be taken as fancies something like the truth (T4).

(Q) "The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better." + Source: Xenophanes, fragment 18 (Burnet translation). Preserved by Stobaeus, a Greek anthologist of the fifth century AD who copied out passages he admired and so saved a great deal that would otherwise be gone. The sentence contains, in its first half, the whole of what a man without Scripture is left with, and in its second half, the reason he keeps going.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Christians copied out his verses to use against the pagans, and so are the reason we still have them. + Ancient books did not survive by being valuable. They survived by being copied, and a book got copied when somebody currently alive had a use for it. The two long poems Xenophanes worked hardest on are gone precisely because nobody needed them. The verses about the gods survived because a great many people did. Clement of Alexandria is the largest single reason. Around AD 200 he was running a Christian school in the most learned city in the Mediterranean, arguing with educated Greeks who thought the new faith was a religion for slaves. His method was to meet them inside their own literature, and in the fifth book of the Stromata he gathers the pagan writers who had said something true about God, with Xenophanes given pride of place: one god, incorporeal, unlike mortals in form or thought. Clement was building a case that Greek wisdom at its best had been borrowed from Hebrew wisdom, an argument later Christians have not generally kept. What he did keep, by writing it down, was fragments 23, 14 and 15, which stand together in that fifth book, and fragment 16, the Ethiopians and the Thracians, which he used two books later for the same purpose. Four of the most quoted passages in the history of philosophy exist today inside a Christian argument with the Greeks. Hippolytus, in Rome a generation later, did much the same in the Refutation of All Heresies, a book that traces Christian errors back to Greek philosophy and summarises the philosophy in the process. His Xenophanes chapter is where the seashells and the fish printed in the quarry wall come from. Refuting somebody turns out to be a reliable way of preserving them.

(†) The apostles took the same road against idols, and then went somewhere he could not follow. + Five centuries after Xenophanes, a Jew from Tarsus stood in Athens surrounded by statues and made an argument the old poet would have recognised in a heartbeat: "Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man" (Acts 17:29). The art and imagination of man is exactly the workshop Xenophanes had described, complete with the horses and their paintbrushes. Paul makes the same move again in writing, and this time with the diagnosis attached: "Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things" (Romans 1:22-23). Israel had been given the rule in one line at Sinai, long before either of them: no carved image, of anything (Exodus 20:4). And the Psalms had already laughed at the finished product, with the punchline aimed not at the statue but at the sculptor: those who make them become like them (Psalm 115:8). Christian writers have understood the overlap through what theologians call general revelation, the knowledge of God that is available to anyone through the world, the conscience and plain reasoning, as distinct from the special revelation given in Scripture. Paul appeals to it in the same speech, saying God arranged things so that people "should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him" (Acts 17:27), and it is hard to think of a better description of a Greek poet reasoning his way from a Thracian idol to a god who does not move. Feeling your way is what Xenophanes was doing. The whole point of the phrase is that it is done in the dark. Then the speech turns, and the turn is where the roads separate: "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30). The times of ignorance is Xenophanes’ world, and Paul does not sneer at it. He says it is over, because something has happened.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a god who cannot come near, a silence he made into a rule, and a knowledge that stops at guessing. + He got further without Scripture than almost anyone, and the distance still to travel is worth stating plainly, from his own verses rather than from anything later readers did with them. - The god who does not move. His finest line about the divine is also his hardest: "he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither" (fragment 26). He meant it as praise, and against the errand-running gods of Homer it is. But the Christian claim is precisely a motion: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). What Xenophanes ruled out as beneath the dignity of God is the thing Christians say God actually did, and it did not diminish him. - Revelation ruled out in advance. Cicero notes that of all the philosophers who said the gods exist, Xenophanes alone rejected divination completely (On Divination I.5). Divination was the Greek machinery for getting a word from heaven, and much of it deserved the contempt. But the rejection was total, and a god who never speaks is a god you can only guess at. Scripture opens on the other assumption: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). - Knowledge that stops at seeming. Fragment 34 says no one ever has certain knowledge of the gods. Christians grant a great deal of this: "now we see in a mirror dimly" (1 Corinthians 13:12). The difference is what accounts for the dimness. For Xenophanes it is that the searcher is looking from too far away at something that never comes closer. For John it is that nobody has ever seen God, and one has made him known (John 1:18). A dim mirror is still a mirror; there is a face in it. - A greatest god, and no more than that. Whatever his one god is, it has no name, makes no promise, keeps no covenant and forgives nobody. Aristotle read the doctrine as identifying that god with the universe, and the fragments are too few either to settle that reading or to see it off. Sway all things by the thought of your mind and you are still not the God who says "I have called you by name, you are mine" (Isaiah 43:1). None of this is a complaint against him. It is the measure of what unaided reasoning reached, which was a great deal, and of where it stopped, which is not a failure of nerve but the shape of the problem. He said himself that the gods do not reveal everything from the beginning and that seekers find in time what is better. Christians say he was right, and that the finding was not done by the seekers.