medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Friday, August 8, 2008, at 1:03 pm, Diana Wright wrote:
> John Dillon wrote:
> > medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> >
> > On Tuesday, August 5, 2008, at 3:51 pm, Diana Wright wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Chaos is a yawning gap -- Gk verb, chanein, to yawn. For a place
>
> >> named
> >> Chaos or some variant, I would look for a ravine in the vicinity.
<SNIP>
> > Thanks for this. It's one of the accidents of survival that this
> word's earliest occurrence is the personification Chaos at Hesiod,
> _Theogony_, v. 116 and that subsequent uses in theological and
> cosmological discourse by early poets and philosophers so dominate the
> early record that its ordinary meanings of "gape" and "chasm" don't
> begin to show up in its entry in LSJ until meaning number 4, with
> citations from the Septuagint.
> >
> > I'd also forgotten the Chaos at Mycenae, which I gather is the name
> both of a ravine and of the torrent that flows through it.
> >
> >
> Contemporary Greek for that at Mycenae is Charadros [main noun f.
> charadra].
Actually, that's an attested ancient Doric form of _charadra_. A holdover from antiquity or a modern official toponym formed in some Doricizing version of katharevousa??
> Rare is the torrent in modern times.
Indeed. In this instance Charadros must now seem at least very largely ironic.
> I wonder how Chaos/ravine-gap ties in with the development of images
> of
> Hell?
I wonder when such a tie-in begins to be made. Neither of the LSJ's illustrations of _chaos_ from the Septuagint (Mi. 1:6; Za. 14:4) in the meaning of "any vast gulf or chasm" has anything to do with Hell. And the word seems altogether absent from the Greek New Testament. Nor, to judge from _chaos_' absence from Lampe's _Patristic Greek Lexicon_, will such a connection have been much on the minds of the Greek Fathers.
On the other hand, at Plutarch, _Moralia_, 953A (in the _De primo frigido_), _chaos_ is one of the terms people are said to use for the void in the center of the earth, along with _orphne_ ("darkness") and _Aides_ ("Hades"). Obviously, there's not a complete semantic identity among all three terms, so by itself this doesn't establish even the first pair of a sequence Chaos=Hades=Hell.
OTOH, the identity of Chaos with the populated Hades of ancient Greek afterlife is pretty clearly implied at _Anth. Plan._ 4. 91, verse 5, where Cerberus is referred to in the accusative as _Chaous kuna_. That's in a seemingly non-Christian epigram describing a monument on the acropolis of Pergamos/Pergamon depicting the labors of Hercules and will thus have come from a fairly ancient source.
Best again,
John Dillon
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