Ancient philosophy. Eleatics School - the rational element in the understanding of God

The synthesis achieved between religion and philosophy in Pythagoreanism continues in the Eleatics school, but while in Pythagoreanism we have the predominance of the irrational-religious cult and the mystical element, the riders take the rational element in the understanding of God. The founder of the Eleatics philosophical school is Xenophan. It differs from Pythagoreanism in that it does not represent an organized society as it is in a variety of philosophical views, but the opposite is the only connection here is the equivalence of the philosophical views that the world is united, unpredictable and unchangeable, and that being is one and in its entirety invariably. Outside of this similarity to the basic view, the proletarians each have their own views and public destiny. Therefore, they are not a school in the narrow sense of the word.

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Xenophan was born in Colophon on the Maloasite coast, not far from the island of Samos, around 570 BC. Later, his native town was subjugated by the Persians, and he was about 25 years old and left the homeland and relocated to the newly founded Eleatics Greek-Colonial emigrant in southern Italy on the Tyrrhenian Sea. However, he did not only stand in Eleia, but he traveled all the southern Italian-Greek colonies because he was a folk singer, a poet, a rapson who, as he witnessed since he left his homeland for 67 years, wandered in the Greek lands with his grief and weight, and tortured for his doctrine. He died almost a centuries-old to 470 years, having spent his final years in deprivation. From Xenophan there are preserved elixirs, parodies and epigrams, and a learning poem "About nature". It is reported that in a whole 2000 verse he had greeted the tragedy of his homeland, his exile from Colophon, the founding of the colony of Elena and his distant wanderings, but this composition was lost. Xenophan's teaching is almost entirely religious philosophy. While Pythagoras was a clergyman himself, a religious envoy, Xenophan is a true religious philosopher and theorist.

First of all, he decides resolutely against anthropomorphism in religion, the attribution of God to human, physical, and spiritual qualities. In this respect, he does not hesitate to speak against Homer and Isidus because they "Many iniquities spoke of the gods and attributed to them what even among the people is considered shameful and condemned by all; they were telling the gods that they were stealing, deceiving and committing fornication. "(Fragment II). And it is unworthy, according to him, to be attributed similar qualities of the gods. It is unfair to be attributed to bodily qualities as to people because it limits, diminishes, and reduces them. The limitation is attributed to the gods: the Ethiopian is painting them as black and white as himself, the Thracians painting blue-eyed and blond, and the others paint them and portray them as themselves.

In the second place, Xenophan opposes the polytheism and first gives a philosophical argument in favor of the unity. "One God rules over the gods and men, for the Deity is the highest absolute thing, and the absolute can be only one." "God is one and greatest among the gods and men." "He is not similar to the mortals, neither by kind nor by thought." God must be one ... If I suppose there are many gods, then either there will be inequalities between them, some will be higher, some lower, then there are no actual gods, because by their very nature can not to have something above itself as more perfect: or the gods will be equal to each other, but in this case the essence of God is lost, which is that it is the best or worse than equal to it. So, if there is God, if he is one, what God ought to be, he must and can only be one.