Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VIII/Pseudo-Clementine Literature/The Clementine Homilies/Homily VI/Chapter 3

Chapter III.&#8212;Appion Proceeds to Interpret the Myths.

&#8220;There was once a time when nothing existed but chaos and a confused mixture of orderless elements, which were as yet simply heaped together. &#160; This nature testifies, and great men have been of opinion that it was so.&#160; Of these great men I shall bring forward to you him who excelled them all in wisdom, Homer, where he says, with a reference to the original confused mass, &#8216;But may you all become water and earth;&#8217; implying that from these all things had their origin, and that all things return to their first state, which is chaos, when the watery and earthy substances are separated.&#160; And Hesiod in the Theogony says, &#8216;Assuredly chaos was the very first to come into being.&#8217; &#160; Now, by &#8216;come into being,&#8217; he evidently means that chaos came into being, as having a beginning, and did not always exist, without beginning.&#160; And Orpheus likens chaos to an egg, in which was the confused mixture of the primordial elements.&#160; This chaos, which Orpheus calls an egg, is taken for granted by Hesiod, having a beginning, produced from infinite matter, and originated in the following way.