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Xenophanes Of Colophon: Myth Or The True Nature Of God?

707 Words3 Pages

Xenophanes of Colophon, a wondering Ionian philosopher of the 6th-5th centuries BCE, argued for the prominence of philosophizing, since such an activity could put a society in a better “state of eunomia (22B2),” or in a good, harmonious state of affairs. As a result, Xenophanes opposed the traditional depictions of the gods/divinity, as described in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, as being wrong and corrupting. I will demonstrate Xenophanes’ claims that poets’ depictions of the gods are incorrect since these are based solely on mortal opinion, which is only ever uncertain and is limited to mortals’ little knowledge of how the world is, rather than the true nature of the divine, which can be approached through inquiry. According to Xenophanes, in 22B18, the gods do not simply give divine knowledge to mortals; thus, any claim of divine inspiration (like Homer and Hesiod’s muses) are false. Furthermore, he claims that mortals cannot know or say anything about the gods with complete certainty, and even if a person gave a true argument about the divine, “he himself would not know, (rather)…. opinion is ordained for all (22B34).” …show more content…

For example, Xenophanes states that “each (people/species) would render the bodies (of the gods) to be of the same frame each of them have (22B15);” thus, stating that since mortals have the most familiarity with their own form (and not much knowledge about anything else), they wrongly attribute this aspect of themselves to the divine. On the contrary, the divine nature is naturally very difficult for humans to know (as implied in 22B34); therefore, it cannot be defined by the easiest of things a mortal can know (their form). As a result, mortal opinion alone is not sufficient enough to claim knowledge of the divine according to

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