Crucially, the humor, then, indicates that these depictions are, as one would expect, erroneous. The correlation observed is between properties of the one doing the depicting of a god with the depiction of the god. That’s how each animal gets started conceiving of the divine. The animal draws an outline of the god’s body using that shadow. An image may capture the comic intuition: In the process of drawing the gods, each animal’s body casts a shadow. What’s funny is that these are self-indulgent depictions, limited by the depictor’s imagination, which is bounded by the kind of animal it is. Imagine a horse crafting a god in his own image, an ox attributing to the divine the best of what he can conceive. So what’s funny about horses and horse gods? In doing so, we’ll ruin the joke, for sure, but that’s philosophy. To see this, we must make explicit what’s funny about horses drawing horse gods. We hold it that the observations function as a reductio ad ridiculum. What is the critical edge? They serve a critical religious program, but there is no overt argument in either. The same lesson is said to follow: Humans make their gods look like themselves. Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired. Clement also provides another Xenophanes fragment, one that he takes to provide parallel support for this interpretation:Įthiopians say their gods are snub-nosed and black To construct a god in your own image, he holds, is a form of idolatry. He portrays Xenophanes as a religious reformer, one committed to criticizing anthropomorphism in religion. The Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria is our source. Similar to horses, and oxen as similar to oxen, Horses would draw the figures of the gods as Or if they could draw with their hands and The famous Xenophanes fragment runs as follows: What is the intended critical edge of such observations? Suppose it’s true that horses would draw their gods as horses. The same, he holds, goes for lions and oxen. The Presocratic philosopher-poet Xenophanes famously noted that if horses could draw, they would draw their gods as horses.
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