By scornfully pointing out that even animals would do what humans have done and portray the gods with the same forms as their own, Xenophanes emphasized the foolishness that he thought men had displayed by believing in such man-made divinities.He pointed out that even among humans there are differences in the gods of different people:
The gods of Ethiopia are black, their noses flat;
In Thrace, their hair is red and eyes are blue.
However, though Xenophanes rejected the idea of anthropomorphic gods, he did not reject the gods themselves.He was not an atheist; rather he formed his own theories about the nature of the gods, beliefs which were almost entirely revolutionary at the time.Above all things Xenophanes valued wisdom, his own in particular.In one of his elegiac polemics about the great glory given to athletes, he wrote, "my wisdom is better than the strength of men and horses." Perhaps because of this, Xenophanes' own god was the ultimate expression of wisdom, an amorphous force of omnipotent intellect "resembling mortals neither in body or mind." Xenophanes was not monotheistic—he wrote, "God is one, the greatest of gods and men"—but he believed that this main god was the source of all things: "By effortless thought He controls all things with his mind." Because this god has no body, at least not in the human sense of the word,
He always remains in the same place, motionless;
it is not fitting for him to chase now here, now there.
Furthermore, this god is homogeneous and all-encompassing:"With all of his being, He sees and thinks and hears." This of course contrasts greatly with the Homeric concept of each god representing one particular phenomenon or being connected in any way with a particular human or humans. In fact, in his inconceivable power and infinite intellect, about which one cannot possibly jest, let alone deride, Xenophanes' god seems more like the later Judeo-Christian god than the human-like Homeric gods.
Radical as his theories were, Xenophanes never gained any followers. The scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant describes him as "a pagan philosopher who stands apart from the collective beliefs of a religion in which divinity occasionally appears in too human a light." And one must remember that in all the hundreds of years, before and after Xenophanes, when the Homeric gods were worshipped, "skepticism about [them], even at its most widespread, never acquired popular influence." Nevertheless, Xenophanes rejection of those gods survived as a powerful force and is essentially irrefutable. Over the next century, those who wished to support Homer's gods fell back on the argument of allegory, claiming that though the gods might not literally exist as Homer had depicted them, they were nevertheless true in the sense that they represented concepts or phenomena. Coinciding with the rise in this theory is the fact that at least some of those later proponents of Xenophanes' philosophy encountered firm opposition as their numbers grew. Protagoras, who lived later in the fifth century, was put on a trial as a result of statements similar to those of Xenophanes, managed to escape, and then ironically drowned in doing so. His book was publicly burned in Athens.
Clearly, even if Xenophanes himself did not gain notoriety and adherents because of his views, "his criticism can be seen as an early anticipation of a discernible wave of theological skepticism in the later fifth century BCE at Athens, associated with itinerant intellectuals and teachers called sophists." One might say that he came at the beginning of a period when Greek thought began to change fundamentally, when philosophers began to re-examine the old conceptions of belief, truth, and the nature of reality.Even allegorical interpretations of Homer can be seen as a new technique of finding truth, one that pushed the Homeric gods farther from literal fact into the realm of the abstract and so strengthened the "discontinuity between myth and history which made historical investigation in our sense possible." Paul Veyne, in his essay Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths, wrote often of the theory of different "programs of truth."Perhaps one could say that Xenophanes was the first among a group of philosophers who aided in separating the gods from the program of truth that was reality, history, facts, and subsequently relegating them to a new program, one that was neither real nor false, but rather a tertium quid, set apart from our world, beyond our complete understanding, and yet as profoundly influential as the old anthropomorphic gods of Homer who had dominated reality for so long.
