Xenophanes and natural theology

Natural theology is knowledge of the existence and nature of God that can be attained through the use of our natural rational powers, specifically through philosophical arguments.  Like many other themes in philosophy, it goes back to the very beginnings of the enterprise, in the work of the Pre-Socratics.  In another post I suggested that Anaximander, specifically, could arguably be seen as its founder.  The usual and certainly defensible view, though, is that that honor goes to Xenophanes.  In God and Greek Philosophy, Lloyd Gerson writes:

In Xenophanes we can discover the first clear instance of the Ionian speculative approach applied to natural theology.  That for which there is little evidence in Anaximander is more explicitly stated in Xenophanes… Accordingly, it seems appropriate to call Xenophanes the first natural theologian.  By this I mean that he is the first to attack the theology of the poets and to offer as a substitute a form of theology based upon argument. (p. 17)

What are probably the most famous passages from Xenophanes illustrate the attack in question.  He writes:

But mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves are), and that they wear man’s clothing and have human voice and body.

Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed, Thracians red-haired and with blue eyes.

But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own –horses like horses, cattle like cattle.

Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all things which are disreputable and worthy of blame when done by men; and they told of them many lawless deeds, stealing, adultery, and deception of each other.

The target here, of course, is a crudely anthropomorphic conception of deity.  When ascribing bodily attributes and moral failings to the gods, Xenophanes says, human beings are merely projecting their own features onto them.  Had he left it at that, Xenophanes’ position would seem to be a precursor of Ludwig Feuerbach’s nineteenth-century critique of theism as a mere projection of human attributes onto reality.  But he did not leave it at that.  Xenophanes’ beef with this anthropomorphism is not that it is too theistic but that it is not theistic enough.  What he wants to replace it with is not atheism but a purified, philosophical theism.  He says:

God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind.

But without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and thought.

Let’s note the several implications of these remarks.  We have, first, a kind of monotheism insofar as Xenophanes speaks of God as one and supreme.  It is true that he immediately goes on to refer to other “gods” over whom God is supreme.  But as Gerson notes, if the affirmation of multiple personal beings who are higher than human beings by itself made Xenophanes a “polytheist,” it would also make all those who believe in angels polytheists. 

That Xenophanes attributes mind and thought to God entails that his conception of God is not impersonal.  That he takes God to act through thought alone and to be unlike mortals in body indicates that he conceives of God as immaterial (though one could argue that he may mean only that even if God is in some sense corporeal, it is not the way in which we are corporeal).  That he takes God to act on all things, and without effort, indicates that he takes God to be omnipotent.

So far we have a set of attributes that would be recognized by all present-day theists.  But Xenophanes says more:

The whole [of god] sees, the whole perceives, the whole hears.

It always abides in the same place, not moved at all, nor is it fitting that it should move from one place to another.

The first of these remarks implies that there are no distinct parts in God associated with his seeing, perceiving, and hearing.  Rather, what he does he does as a whole.  This indicates a commitment to something like divine simplicity.  The second remark, which denies motion to God, indicates a commitment to divine immutability.  The attributes of simplicity and immutability are central to classical theism, but rejected by contemporary neo-theists or theistic personalists.  Naturally, that Xenophanes takes God to move all things without himself being moved also makes his theology a precursor of Aristotle’s notion of God as the prime unmoved mover.

What is the basis for Xenophanes’ conclusions?  It is not clear from the fragments we have.  Gerson takes him to be engaged in essentially the same sort of project Anaximander pursued, namely reasoning to the existence of a first principle and then deducing what that first principle must be like if it going to provide a satisfactory explanation of the cosmos.  Anaximander had argued that this first principle must be apeiron – “unbounded” or “unlimited,” radically unlike the things of our experience and without beginning or end.  On Gerson’s interpretation, Xenophanes is engaged in a similar sort of reasoning, arguing from the world to God as its first principle and deducing the divine attributes as corollaries of his being this first principle of all.  For example, if God is to be the ultimate explanation of all motion, he must not himself be in motion.

By contrast, Werner Jaeger, in his book The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, argues that Xenophanes is not engaged in this sort of reasoning.  Rather, his approach is to deduce the divine attributes by way of a reverent consideration of what it is “seemly” or “appropriate” to ascribe to deity (pp. 49-50).  The idea would be, for example, that it would be unseemly or inappropriate for God to be like us in body, or to engage in deception, or to be in motion.  Hence we must deny these things of him.

Interestingly, these competing interpretations of Xenophanes roughly correspond to two main approaches to deriving the divine attributes in contemporary natural theology, known as first-cause theology and perfect being theology.  First-cause theology begins by reasoning from the world to God as cause of the world, and then deduces the divine attributes from considerations about what something would have to be like in order to be such a first cause.  This is the approach we see in St. Thomas Aquinas, for example.  Perfect being theology begins with the idea that whatever else God is, he is supremely perfect, the greatest conceivable being.  It then proceeds to deduce the divine attributes from a consideration of what something would have to be like in order to be supremely perfect.  This is the approach we see in St. Anselm.  On Gerson’s interpretation of Xenophanes, he is essentially applying the method of first-cause theology, whereas on Jaeger’s interpretation, he is essentially applying the method of perfect being theology.

There is one further aspect of Xenophanes’ position that should be noted.  In his book Philosophy of Nature, Paul Feyerabend argues that in the process of transforming the notion of God, Xenophanes also transformed the notion of nature.  For the traditional views Xenophanes was criticizing not only effectively made the gods out to be part of the natural world.  They also thereby gave the natural world a quasi-divine status, insofar as the heavens were thought to be occupied by deities and “both for Thales and for the farmers of Boeotia all things were in motion and filled with gods” (p. 143).  As Feyerabend notes, “archaic thought does not sharply distinguish between cosmological concepts and theological ones” (Ibid.).  But Xenophanes’ thought implies such a distinction, taking, as it does, the fact that natural phenomena have various limitations to make them per se incompatible with divinity, rightly understood.

Feyerabend is critical of this development, but we needn’t and shouldn’t follow him in that judgment.  On the contrary, in transforming the concept of nature in the course of refining the concept of divinity, Xenophanes anticipated Christian classical theism’s crucial distinction between the natural and supernatural orders.