CHAOS. — A notion found in the cosmogonic process (v. COSMOGONIA) of civilized and primitive peoples, intended to represent the elementary principle from which things derived, or the condition preceding the creation of the universe.
The idea of c. appears among certain civilizations of the ancient Near East. For them, the common characteristic of c. is its watery nature. This is attested by the Enuma Eliš, the Babylonian creation poem, according to which primordial c. is formed by the divine triad Apsū-Tiāmat-Mummu (abyss, universal ocean, and rushing of the waters); by the Egyptian papyri containing the cosmogonic tradition later systematized by the priests of Heliopolis in the story of the procreation of the divine Ennead emerging from primordial c. (Nūn); by the Phoenician cosmogony transmitted to us in the version of Philo of Byblos (in Eusebius, Praep. evang., I, 18, 1), which makes the universe arise from watery c. that, in union with the « spirit » (πνεῦμα), produces « desire » (πέθος); and, finally, by Gen., I, 1-2, which knows c. but considers it, in an entirely different manner, as the condition—together with the darkness « that was upon the face of the abyss » and the waters « over which the Spirit of God moved »—of the universe before there was light. It should be noted that in these, as in other cosmogonies, c. does not represent the ἀρχή but the ἀρχή of the universe, from which creation then proceeds in different ways (in Babylonia it develops into polytheism, replaced by the Phoenicians with the development of its materialistic aspect, whereas Genesis admits the One Creator as the sole agent): the idea of c. probably derives from identical psychological experiences and needs. On the one hand, the observation that, at birth, the human being is immersed in fluid matter, just as it dissolves in putrefaction after death, « of the emergence of the earth from floods, of the fructifying power of rain and rivers »; on the other hand, in connection with the idea of the struggle among natural phenomena (spring against winter, sun against darkness, etc.), one sees, with every likelihood, in the cosmogonic story, as a counterposition to the marvelous order of the cosmos, an unformed, dark, and monstrous principle (ἀρχή), over which luminous order ultimately triumphs. Now the most immediate and spontaneous representation of this primordial state is offered precisely in the form of waters and storm clouds.
... Ἡ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα χάος γένατ... thus Hesiod (Theog., 116) introduces into the Greek world the word c. as an indication of a cosmic principle. After c. came earth, Tartarus, and Eros. From c. were born Erebos and Night.
For Hesiod, c. is the empty space preceding everything. Behind the mythological fiction, however, there must already have been a philosophical meaning, which the ancients themselves sought above 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 “to open, to gape,” which leads precisely to a spatial concept: c. is that which contains all of nature within itself. « In it, an ever-existing, impersonal, and indeterminate principle, are united the demand for the indestructibility and the original unity of universal being ». A unity that asserts itself—not otherwise than in the civilizations of the ancient Near East—in the cosmogonic process, which is the passage from primordial indistinct and chaotic unity to the differentiation of beings through the work of c. « But in addition to this function as the source of everything, Hesiodic c., as that which contains everything, fulfills that of limiting the cosmic totality (εἰκτίνω τεχαὶ καὶ πέτρατα, Theog., 738), which it continues to envelop even after the formation of the cosmos ».
After Hesiod, c. appears in a theogony attributed to Musaeus, of which only a few testimonies remain, and which places Tartarus and Night as the first products of c. (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 II. In the Orphic theogony, of which we possess several fragments, c., 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 entirely neglected in favor of whatever natural philosophy may be found in II. Thus the Stoics, interpreting χάος in connection with χέω and χέομαι, arrived rather at a material conception, explaining it as primordial water and thereby effecting a curious return to the ancient conceptions of the ancient Near East (Schol. Apollonius Rhodius, 1, 498; Virgil, Ecl. 6, 31; Plutarch, Agua an ign. util., 1). Nor will the Roman interpretation differ greatly from this, understanding c. as primordial matter (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 myths or pseudo-scientific cosmogonic explanations, the word c. 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, a deity of the underworld (Virgil, Aen., 4, 510; Seneca, Med., 9, 744); and, in general, immeasurable darkness (Apollonius Rhodius, 4, 1695; Statius, Silv., 3, 2, 92; Prudentius, Cath., 5, 3).