Belief and Practice in Xenophanes’ Criticism of Traditional Religion

This chapter approaches the archaic philosopher-poet Xenophanes of Colophon both as a distinctive religious agent and as an instructive interpreter of traditional religious attitudes and practices. Xenophanes develops a category of belief ( dokos ) and employs it not only to express the status of his own theological and cosmological views but also to conceptualise traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as a cohesive system of beliefs. This system of beliefs comprises the interrelated and mutually reinforcing views that the gods are fundamentally human-like in biological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, moral, and political respects. The chapter explores Xenophanes’ critique of the different aspects of this system of beliefs, as well as the sources and grounds that underpin it. Finally, the chapter considers how Xenophanes closely relates expectations for veracity, propriety, and socio-political benefit in a way that suggests a requirement for harmony between religious belief and practice and, therefore, a conception of religious practice as theologically loaded. In the final analysis, Xenophanes teaches the modern student of Greek religion that a Greek thinker of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE had the conceptual and expressive resources to articulate a conception of traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as, at bottom, a system of beliefs.