CHAPTER 1
The Creation and Destruction of the World
Andrew D. Gregory
1. Introduction
The creation and destruction of the world were much discussed in antiquity, and the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic thinkers all made distinctive contributions. The term “creation” could in some ways be a little misleading. None of the ancient Greeks believed anything to be created out of nothing, ex nihilo; instead, the world we know was generated from some prior, less organized state of the universe. Nor should “creation” here be taken necessarily to imply a creator, or even some entity which organizes. The Greek notion of cosmos is also important. A cosmos was not only a well ordered place, it was often also thought of as aesthetically and/or morally good. I will use “universe” for all that there is and “cosmos” for a well-ordered world within the universe. In general, a cosmos consisted of earth, sun, moon, five planets, and some surrounding stars. In some views, one cosmos exhausted the universe, in others there were many cosmoi (plural of cosmos) within a universe, with variations on earth, sun, moon, and five planets. In some views, there was one cosmos, eternal once generated; in others, cosmoi were subject to destruction and replacement. One can classify Greek ideas on the creation and destruction of the world into four broad types:
- A single cosmos is generated, which then exists permanently, with no destruction.
- There are a succession of cosmoi. Only one exists at a time, but when one is destroyed another is generated in its place.
- There are multiple cosmoi which co-exist. These undergo destruction, but other cosmoi are generated which replace them.
- There is no generation or destruction of the cosmos. It has always been here and will always be here.
A different way of classifying theories of the creation and destruction of the world is in terms of whether cosmoi are generated by chance, with a multiplicity of accidents, or by design. The order of our cosmos might be explained by chance, with an infinite array of other accidental cosmoi of which our cosmos is one. Alternatively, someone or something may have guided the generation of our cosmos such that it has order. An interesting question is, then, whether all those who postulate chance have many different cosmoi, either co-existent or successive, and all those who postulate design have a unique cosmos. No ancient thinker held that a unique cosmos had come about by chance.
Two more questions relate to the sophistication of ancient thinking on the creation and destruction of the world. To what extent are ideas of space and time (finite, unlimited, infinite) coordinated with ideas on the creation and destruction of the world? Second, to what extent are parallel discussions of the origins of life coordinated with ideas on the creation and destruction of the world? On these questions hangs the answer to whether ancient discussions of the creation and destruction of the world were a loose collection of entertaining tales or a serious and coordinated philosophical investigation.
In terms of sources, from Plato onward, we have good evidence for what individuals and schools believed, both in relation to original texts and works by the commentators. In later antiquity, Neoplatonists and early Christians also theorized about the creation and destruction of the world. With the Presocratics, little original material has survived, and problematic are accounts preserved with the doxographers, who tend in some cases to assimilate differing views and elsewhere to see precursors to Christian views. Plato, as ever, has his own specific interpretive difficulties. His Timaeus gives a wonderful account of the generation of the world, but commentators have been split since antiquity on whether this is a literal or a metaphorical account.
2. Myth and Hesiod
Prior to the first philosophical accounts of the creation and destruction of the world, mythological and poetical explanations were given. Egyptian and Babylonian mytho-logies employed many gods to explain the origins of the world, and often the idea that land forms after water dries out, a notion probably derived from the seasonal flooding of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers. Typical of these is this Babylonian account:
Early Greek mythologies too, such as those of the Orphics, mixed creation in terms of the sexual couplings of the gods with idea of growth from a primeval egg. One issue here, on which there are a diverse range of positions, is how great the difference is (if any) between mythology and any philosophical account of the creation of the world. Some would say that there is no difference in structure, others that there is no difference in their function within society. One can argue for significant differences on the grounds that philosophical accounts are either parsimonious, invariantly reject the supernatural in contrast with myths, or are some combination of these premises. One can also argue that the key difference is process: philosophical theories need to be based on evidence and argument, and they need to be capable of justification relative to other theories in ways in which myths are not. Attempts to differentiate between myths and Greek philosophical theories of creation on the basis of the involvement of gods will not be successful, as many Greek theories invoke some form of god, though there are interesting comparisons to be made about the role of gods. A different approach is to differentiate between creation tales and cosmogony, where the end product of a cosmogony has the characteristics of a Greek cosmos but a creation tale does not.
Hesiod is often seen as an important bridge between creation myth and cosmogony.1 His account in the Theogony gives a logical sequence of events leading to the world as we know it, and, in contrast to many myths, there is a strict and well-organized genealogy of the gods described in the Theogony:
Hesiod is the first to make explicit that the world, once generated, will last forever. How sharp a division exists between Hesiod and the first philosophical accounts of the creation and destruction of the world is controversial. One view, championed by Cornford, Stokes, and West, argues that there is little difference, while others hold that philosophical cosmogony proper begins with the Milesians and that this is a different type of discourse from the myths of Hesiod. Most recently, Gregory (2013) suggests that Anaximander (TEGP 30), giving natural explanations for thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, whirlwinds, and typhoons, is a direct allusion to Hesiod’s Theogony 845–846, in particular, where these phenomena are explained in terms of the actions and wills of the gods.
3. The Milesians
There is a general principle for the Milesian thinkers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, that what we see around us is generated from some basic element (water, the unlimited, and air, respectively) and will ultimately be destroyed back into that basic element. Aristotle tells us:
We know little of Thales’ ideas on the formation of the world, but we are somewhat better informed about Anaximander and Anaximenes, although there remains controversy about their views. Anaximander supposed there to be an apeiron, probably best translated as “unlimited,” something without spatial or temporal limits or any distinction between its parts:
