Finite or infinite?
60. Aristotle tried without success to discover from the poems of Xenophanes whether he regarded the world as finite or infinite. “He made no clear pronouncement on the subject,” he tells us.[[300]] Theophrastos, on the other hand, decided that he regarded it as spherical and finite because he said it was “equal every way.”[[301]] This, however, leads to very serious difficulties. We have seen already that Xenophanes said the sun went right on to infinity, and this agrees with his view of the earth as an infinitely extended plain. Still more difficult to reconcile with the idea of a spherical and finite world is the statement of fr. [28] that, while the earth has an upper limit which we see, it has no limit below. This is attested by Aristotle, who speaks of the earth being “infinitely rooted,” and adds that Empedokles criticised Xenophanes for holding this view.[[302]] It further appears from the fragment of Empedokles quoted by Aristotle that Xenophanes said the vast Air extended infinitely upwards.[[303]] We are therefore bound to try to find room for an infinite earth and an infinite air in a spherical and finite world! That comes of trying to find science in satire. If, on the other hand, we regard these statements from the same point of view as those about the heavenly bodies, we shall at once see what they most probably mean. The story of Ouranos and Gaia was always the chief scandal of the Theogony, and the infinite air gets rid of Ouranos altogether. As to the earth stretching infinitely downwards, that gets rid of Tartaros, which Homer described as situated at the bottommost limit of earth and sea, as far beneath Hades as heaven is above the earth.[[304]] This is pure conjecture, of course; but, if it is even possible, we are entitled to disbelieve that such startling contradictions occurred in a cosmological poem.
A more subtle explanation of the difficulty commended itself to the late Peripatetic who wrote an account of the Eleatic school, part of which is still extant in the Aristotelian corpus, and is generally known now as the treatise on Melissos, Xenophanes, and Gorgias.[[305]] He said that Xenophanes declared the world to be neither finite nor infinite, and he composed a series of arguments in support of this thesis, to which he added another like it, namely, that the world is neither in motion nor at rest. This has introduced endless confusion into our sources. Alexander used this treatise as well as the great work of Theophrastos, and Simplicius supposed the quotations from it to be from Theophrastos too. Having no copy of the poems he was completely baffled, and until recently all accounts of Xenophanes were vitiated by the same confusion. It may even be suggested that, but for this, we should have heard very little of the “philosophy of Xenophanes,” a way of speaking which is in the main a survival from the days before this scholastic exercise was recognised as having no authority.
God and the world.
61. In the passage of the Metaphysics just referred to, Aristotle speaks of Xenophanes as “the first partisan of the One,”[[306]] and the context shows that he means to suggest he was the first of the Eleatics. We have seen already that the certain facts of his life make it very unlikely that he settled at Elea and founded a school there, and it is probable that, as usual in such cases, Aristotle is simply reproducing certain statements of Plato. At any rate, Plato had spoken of the Eleatics as the “partisans of the Whole,”[[307]] and he had also spoken of the school as “starting with Xenophanes and even earlier.”[[308]] The last words, however, show clearly enough what he meant. Just as he called the Herakleiteans “followers of Homer and still more ancient teachers,”[[309]] so he attached the Eleatic school to Xenophanes and still earlier authorities. We have seen in other instances how these playful and ironical remarks of Plato were taken seriously by his successors, and we need not let this fresh instance of the same thing influence our general view of Xenophanes unduly.
Aristotle goes on to tell us that Xenophanes, “referring to the whole world,[[310]] said the One was god.” This clearly alludes to frs. [23-26], where all human attributes are denied of a god who is said to be one and “the greatest among gods and men.” It may be added that these verses gain very much in point if we may think of them as closely connected with frs. [11-16], instead of referring the one set of verses to the Satires and the other to a cosmological poem. It was probably in the same context that Xenophanes called the world or god “equal every way”[[311]] and denied that it breathed.[[312]] The statement that, there is no mastership among the gods[[313]] also goes very well with fr. [26]. A god has no wants, nor is it fitting for one god to be the servant of others, like Iris and Hermes in Homer.
Monotheism or polytheism.
62. That this “god” is just the world, Aristotle tells us, and the use of the word θεός is quite in accordance with Anaximander’s. Xenophanes regarded it as sentient, though without any special organs of sense, and it sways all things by the thought of its mind. He also calls it “one god,” and, if that is monotheism, then Xenophanes was a monotheist, though this is surely not how the word is generally understood. The fact is that the expression “one god” wakens all sorts of associations in our mind which did not exist at all for the Greeks of this time. His contemporaries would have been more likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else. As Eduard Meyer excellently says: “In Greece the question of one god or gods many hardly plays any part. Whether the divine power is thought of as a unity or a plurality, is irrelevant in comparison with the question whether it exists at all, and how its nature and its relation to the world is to be understood.”[[314]]
On the other hand, it is wrong to say with Freudenthal that Xenophanes was in any sense a polytheist.[[315]] That he should use the language of polytheism in his elegies is only what we should expect, and the other references to “gods” can be best explained as incidental to his attack on the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod. In one case, Freudenthal has pressed a proverbial way of speaking too hard.[[316]] Least of all can we admit that Xenophanes allowed the existence of subordinate or departmental gods; for it was just the existence of such that he was chiefly concerned to deny. At the same time, I cannot help thinking that Freudenthal was more nearly right than Wilamowitz, who says that Xenophanes “upheld the only real monotheism that has ever existed upon earth.”[[317]] Diels, I fancy, comes nearer the mark, when he calls it a “somewhat narrow pantheism.”[[318]] But all these views would have surprised Xenophanes himself about equally. He was really Goethe’s Weltkind, with prophets to right and left of him, and he would have smiled if he had known that one day he was to be regarded as a theologian.