Chaos

CHAOS. - A notion found in the cosmogonic process (v. COSMOGONY) of civilized and primitive peoples, and which intends to represent the elementary principle from which things are derived or the condition pre-existing the creation of the universe.

The idea of ch. appears among certain civilizations of the ancient Middle East. For them the common character of ch. is aquosity. This is attested to us by the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation poem, for which the primordial ch. is formed by the divine triad Apsū-Tiāmat-Mummu (abyss, universal ocean and surging of the waters); the Egyptian papyri containing the cosmogonic tradition that was later systematized by the priests of Heliopolis in the story of the procreation of the divine Ennead issuing from the primordial ch. (Nūn); the Phoenician cosmogony handed down to us in the redaction of Philo of Byblos (in Eusebius, Praep. evang., I, 18, 1), which makes the universe be born from the watery ch. that, in union with the "spirit" (πνεῦμα), produces "desire" (πέθος); and, finally, Gen., I, 1-2, which knows ch. but considers it, in a wholly different way, as the condition, together with the darkness "that was upon the face of the abyss" and the waters "upon which the Spirit of God was moving," of the universe before there was light. It is to be noted that in these, as in other cosmogonies, ch. does not represent the ἀρχή but the ἀρχή of the universe, whence creation then proceeds in different ways (in Babylonia it evolves into polytheism, replaced by the Phoenicians with the development of the materialistic side, while in Genesis the One Creator is admitted as the sole agent): the idea of ch. derives, probably, from the same psychological experiences and needs. On the one hand the observation that, at birth, the human being is immersed in a fluid matter, as in putrefaction it dissolves after death, "of the rising of the earth from floods, of the fecundating power of rain and rivers; on the other, in connection with the idea of the struggle of natural phenomena (spring against winter, sun against darkness, etc.), one sees, in all likelihood, in the cosmogonic story, as a counterposition to the marvelous order of the cosmos, a formless, dark and monstrous principle (ἀρχή), over which the luminous order ends up triumphing. Now the most immediate and spontaneous representation of such a primordial state offers itself precisely in the form of waters and stormy clouds.

... Ἡ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα χάος γένατ... thus Hesiod (Theog., 116) introduces into the Greek world the word ch. as an indication of a cosmic principle. After ch. came earth, Tartarus, Eros. From ch. were born Erebos and Night.

For Hesiod ch. is the empty space antecedent to everything. Behind the mythological fiction, however, there must already have been a philosophical meaning, which the ancients themselves sought first of all in the etymology of the word. Thus Plato and Aristotle connected the word χάος with the root χε of χείνω, χάοιω, χάομα, with the meaning of opening, gaping wide, which leads precisely to a spatial concept: ch. is that which contains within itself all of nature. "In it, an ever-existing, impersonal and indeterminate principle, are united the exigency of the indestructibility and of the original unity of universal being." A unity that asserts itself — no differently than in the civilizations of the ancient Middle East — in the cosmogonic process which is a passage from the indistinct and chaotic primordial unity to the distinction of beings through the work of ch. "But besides this function of source of everything, the Hesiodic ch., as container of everything, exercises that of limit of the cosmic totality (εἰκτίνω τεχαὶ καὶ πέτρατα, Theog., 738) which it remains to envelop even after the formation of the cosmos."

After Hesiod ch. appears in a theogony attributed to Musaeus, of which few testimonies remain, and which posits Tartarus and Night as the first products of ch. (in Philodemus, p. 61 [ed. Gomperz]), and in the theogony of Acusilaus (in Damascius, De princip., 124 [ed. Kopp]), which — differing little from Hesiod — makes Erebos and Night proceed from it. While in the Orphic theogony, of which we possess several fragments, ch., the dark and immense abyss, is created, after the first being, Chronos.

In a later age the purely mythical aspect of the Hesiodic theogony is completely neglected in favor of whatever of natural philosophy can be found in it. Thus the Stoics, interpreting χάος in connection with χέω and χέομαι, arrived rather at a material conception, explaining it as the primordial water and thereby realizing a singular return to the ancient conceptions of the Middle East (Scol. Apollonius of Rhodes, 1, 498; Virgil, Ecl. 6, 31; Plutarch, Aqua an ign. util., 1). Nor will the Roman interpretation, which understands ch. as primordial matter, depart much from this interpretation (Ovid, Met., I, 7 ff.; 2, 299; Seneca, Thyest., 834; Lucan, 5, 634; 6, 696; Statius, Th., 3, 484; Martianus Capella, 9, 912; Lactantius, Div. inst., 1, 5; 2, 9 ff.).

Outside of myths or pseudo-scientific cosmogonic explanations, the word ch. is used, especially poetically, in many other senses: to indicate the space filled with darkness of the underworld (Ovid, Fast., 4, 600; Met., 10, 30; 14, 404; Virgil, Aen., 6, 265; Lucan, 6, 617; Valerius Flaccus, 2, 86; 7, 402; Statius, Silv., 3, 3, 210; 5, 1, 206; Plutarch, De primo frig., 17); a personal being, divinity of the underworld (Virgil, Aen., 4, 510; Seneca, Med., 9, 744); and, in general, the immeasurable darkness (Apollonius Rhod., 4, 1695; Statius, Silv., 3, 2, 92; Prudentius, Cath., 5, 3).

Mario Camozzini