Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/469

 COSMOGONY

411

COSMOGONY

y is to be found in Hcsiod's "Tlioogony" (al)out ) B. c.) in verses 160 sqq., which C. A. Elton trans- ed as follows: —

First Chaos was; next ample-bosomed Earth, rhe seat immovable for evermore )f those Immortals who the snow-topped heights [nlialiit of Olympus, or the gloom Jf Tartarus, in the broad-tracked ground's abyss. Love then arose, most beautiful amongst rhe deathless deities; resistless, he 3f every god and every mortal man iJnnerves the limbs ; dissolves the wiser breast 3y reason steeled and quells the very soul. ?"rom Chaos, Erebos and ebon Night; ?rora Night the Day sprang forth and shining air A'hom to the love of Erebos she gave. Earth first produced the heaven and all the stars, 5he brought the lofty mountains forth, \nd next the sea. . . Then, with Heaven jonsorting. Ocean from her bosom burst kVith its deep eddying waters.

!^aos, then, is the starting-point of Hesiod's cos- gony. Chaos, however, must probably not be lerstood as "primeval matter" without harmony 1 order, but rather as the "empty void" or "place ^inal meaning (from x<^ in x"'"; X^o^am. "chasm", ). Hesiod, then,startsatinfinitespace;otherGreeks
 * he abstract ". To Hesiod x<i<" cannot have lost its
 * e Time, or xP'^i'ot, as a starting-point. The cos-

gony of Pherecydes (544 B. c.) claims a high place ong Greek theories as to the origin of the world, be- ise of the prominence given to Zeus, a personal ritual being, !is the origin of all things. " Zeus and ronos and Chthonia have always been and are the ec first beginnings; but the One I would consider ore the Two, and the Two after the One. Then ronos produced out of himself fire, air, and water, se I take to be the three Logical Elements, and out ? ])art s or a pcnlccosmrjs. ' ' Pherecydes' cosm.ogony i come down to us in some other slightly modified ms but Zeus is ever at the head. He seems also to i'c known of a primeval battle between Chronos and hioneus, but how it fits in with his cosmogony we 3W not. Chthonia seems to be the moist Proto- tter, neither dry earth nor sea, out of which Ge, or ! earth, is created. The stages of his cosmogony are Tcfore: God, Time, Matter — all three first princi- s, yet God is in some sense first ; God, when feeling a lire to create, changes himself into love, so that he y bring forth a Cosmos, i. e. a well-ordered world, nt and friendship. A noble idea, truly, only falling )rt of the Christian idea in conceiving time and mat- as eternal, Zeus thus being maker or fashioner, not ator, of heaven and earth.
 * hem arose a numerous jirogeny of gods divided into
 * of contraries, bringing its elements into agree-

\. cosmogony of almost the same date is that of Epi- nides, which seems in flat contrachction to that of erecydes; for it postulates two first principles, not ginating from Unity: Air and Night. Out of these se Tartarus etc. Later Orphic cosmogonies begin ne with Chronos, others with Water and Earth, ne with 'Aireipos 'TXij. In the last stage of the eek cosmogony the egg plays an important part, fier as evolutionarj- stage, as embrj-onic state of the •th, or merely to indicate the shape of the Cosmos. ft'e pos,srss no ancient Etruscan or Latin cosmogo- s,l)ut it is certain that the God Janus was a cosmo- lic deity; though Jupiter was summits, the highest 1, Janus was primus, the first of the gotls, an<l as
 * h he received sacrifice before even Jupiter. This

pient remitiisc'cnce of Janus a.s creator is made use of Oviil's "Metamorphoses", but in how far so late a iter represents early speculations we know not. aus is i^erhaps the Latin equivalent for the (!reek aos as origin of all things. Janus is said to be not

only initium mutuli, but mundia ttself, i. e the all-em- bracing.

Summary op Ancient Co.smogoniks. — Common to all is the effort to explain the origin of the world by as few elementary beings as possible. In order to arrive at the origin of all things, man began by abstraction from the actual differentiation of being which he saw around him to obtain some simple element imderlying all. Mere abstraction, however, or reduction from the compoiiinl to the simple, did not suffice, but some in- telligent causality was demanded by the intellect of man. Hence personification plays a great role in every cosmogony, and the actual function of creating, or rather forming and arranging the world as it now is, is ascribed to one intelligent personality; every people worshipped some deity, be he then Marduk orVaruna, or Bel or Ahura-Mazda, or Zeus or Janus. No ancient cosmogony, however, rose to the pure concept of cre- ation out of nothing by an infinite spirit ; for none succeeded in eliminating matter or its phenomena altogether, and conceiving a subsistent Intelligence which could create both matter and spirit. The first steps in this process of abstraction are simple enough and common to most cosmogonies ; once upon a time there were no men nor beasts, nor plants: no stars nor sky, no mountains and valleys, and neither dry land nor sea. Then only proto-matter remained. Some cosmogonies stopped here and were frankly material- istic; it probably depended on climatic surroundings what they conceived the proto-matter to be, whether clay or water, or air, or fire, or light (conceived as sub- stances). Other cosmogonies carried the process of abstraction farther. The variation between light and darkness, day and night, season and season cannot al- ways have been, hence these were also abstracted from ; naught therefore remained but Darkness, Night, Eternity. By thinking away all special localities in the imiverse, only Place remained in the abstract, or the Void. By thinking away all differences in the mental and spiritual sphere naught remained but Force in general. Force, Place, Time, and Darkness became personified cosmogonic elements. Some were able to abstract even from Force; to them only Place, Time, and Darkness remained. Some rightly argued that time was but the measure of phenomena, and by abstracting from phenomena Time ceased to be. To them only Space and Darkness remained; but then Darkness was conceived as the fluid filling the vessel of Space, and therefore could be abstracted from, and only the Void remained. All these ideas actually oc- cur m the different cosmogonies. Chaos is empty space; Chronos, Zrvan, Heh, abstract time; Nux, the unchangeable quintessence of time; Zeus, Tad, Ahura Mazda, Thot are spirit forces. Those cosmogonies which did not go so far ;us to personify space or time or darkness, but stopped short at the idea of some proto- substance, were faced by the problem whether this primeval substance was spirit, or matter, or both. Some answered, both, as the Egyptians (Nim) and the later Indians (Purusha); some answered that spirit was first, as some Babylonian thinkers (Ann), most Indians (T.ad, Brahma, Atman) and the Iranians (Ahura, Ahriman); some answeretl that matter was first, as Babylonians (.\psu Tiamat), Persians, and Egyi-)tians (Light, Ra) Phcvnicians (.\ir), Etruscans (.'Ether). Thus ancient thought wandered through the whole range of ]iossible theories, not, however, guided by mere caprie<". but forced to some conclusion which seemed to them inevitable. With regard to the immediate process according to which this worhl was produced, freer scope was given to unbridled fancy. Vet even here the analogy with the production of life in nature w:ls the guiding principle, the world was pro- duced as life comes from life by animal generations, or as the tree comes out of the seed, the flower o\it of the bud, or as the egg is laid by the bird. These imagina- tions are often Qombiued in a grotesque ensemble,