At 17:51 03/02/99 -0000, you wrote:
>Dear list members,
>I would be very grateful if somebody could help me with the following
>question: when was the word abyss first introduced in the vocabulary of
>neoplatonic/augustinian philosophers? Abyss, in St. Bernard, is used to
>describe the impossibility of an close union between God and man. Only
>charity (caritas), he says, can be a means to reach God, but the gap
>remains. I believe there is grounds to think that St. Augustine could have
>been the first to introduce the word. Is there anybody who knows where in
>his work I can find it, and if it was not him, who used the word and where?
>I hope you'll forgive my ignorance, but I am not exactly a theologist and I
>need this information for literary reasons.
Latin "abyssus" is simply a transliteration of the Greek "abyssos" meaning
"bottomless".
The word is, of course, used to indicate the sea in Genesis 1:2, "et
tenebrae super faciem abyssi", and in several other places in the Bible:
meaning Hades, the place of the dead, in Romans 10:7, "aut quis descendit in
abyssum"; meaning Hell in Luke 8:31, "et rogabant illum ne imperaret illis
ut in abyssum irent"; and in Apoc. 9:1, "et data est illi clavis putei
abyssi". Obviously the word must occur in commentaries on these books, and
one might look at commentaries on the hexaemeron, the six days of creation
in Genesis 1, for discussions of the term.
Oriens.
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