Tag Archives: Ovid

Essays, History of Science & Epistemology

Cosmogenesis (6) : The Creation in the Renaissance

1 Comment

Sequel of the preceding post Cosmogenesis (5) : The Order of the Creation

The Creation in the Renaissance

Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493, effectively marks the watershed between medieval scholarship and Renaissance speculation. It is the manifestation of a desire for completeness, amalgamating the principal accounts of the Creation (Genesis, Plato’s Timaeus, Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphoses) into a single, all-embracing narrative.

The Creation in a Renaissance Edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovide moralisé (Ovid Moralised) is a French text written in the late Middle Ages which regards Ovid's Metamorphoses as having anticipated the scriptures. The early humanists inherited this view and, throughout the 16th century, the Metamorphoses were treated as a manual of morality and wisdom and subjected to numerous glosses and commentaries. This edition, published in Lyons in 1519, includes commentaries by Raphael Regius, an Italian teacher of grammar and rhetoric, and Petrus Lavinius, a Dominican monk who was part of the humanist circle in Lyon. The engraving illustrating the Creation was inspired by the Italian woodcuts in the first edition of Regius' commentary, which was published in Venice in 1493. The fact that the artist drew the Creator as Christ rather than Jupiter shows how Ovid's poem had been adapted to match Christian legend. Ovid, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseos Libri Moralizati, Cum Pulcherrimis Fabularum Principalium Figuris, Lyons, Jacques Mareschal, 1519.
The Creation in a Renaissance Edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Ovide moralisé (Ovid Moralised) is a French text written in the late Middle Ages which regards Ovid’s Metamorphoses as having anticipated the scriptures. The early humanists inherited this view and, throughout the 16th century, the Metamorphoses were treated as a manual of morality and wisdom and subjected to numerous glosses and commentaries. This edition, published in Lyons in 1519, includes commentaries by Raphael Regius, an Italian teacher of grammar and rhetoric, and Petrus Lavinius, a Dominican monk who was part of the humanist circle in Lyon. The engraving illustrating the Creation was inspired by the Italian woodcuts in the first edition of Regius’ commentary, which was published in Venice in 1493. The fact that the artist drew the Creator as Christ rather than Jupiter shows how Ovid’s poem had been adapted to match Christian legend. Ovid, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseos Libri Moralizati, Cum Pulcherrimis Fabularum Principalium Figuris, Lyons, Jacques Mareschal, 1519.

Heptaplus (1490), by the Italian philosopher Pico Della Mirandola, is a scholarly exercise in seven volumes, each of seven chapters, which attempts to synthesise the various traditions deriving from the Creation myth: that of the Platonists and the Peripatetic School, that of the Evangelists, Church Fathers and Cabbalists, and that of the Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd). In particular Mirandola tries to find a hidden meaning to the first two words of Genesis, “In principio”, using the Cabbalist method of making anagrams.

In 1578 Guillaume de Saluste, known as Du Bartas, published an epic poem based on Genesis and inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses entitled La Sepmaine (The Week). In “The First Day” Du Bartas attempts to describe chaos by using words in a confused way, using puns and antonyms:

This primordial world was form without form,
A confused heap, a shapeless melange,
A void of voids, an uncontrolled mass,
A Chaos of Chaos, a random mound
Where all the elements were heaped together,
Where liquid quarrelled with solid,
Blunt with sharp, cold with hot,
Hard with soft, low with high,
Bitter with sweet: in short a war
In which the earth was one with the sky. [i] ” Continue reading →

Essays, History of Science & Epistemology

Cosmogenesis (2) : Chaos and Metamorphosis

Leave a comment

Sequel of the preceding post Cosmogenesis (1) : From Myth to Myth

Chaos and Metamorphosis

 

The ancient Greeks had a great variety of myths relating to the history of the world. Although they all shared a language and a culture, each village, each tribe had its own beliefs, its own version of the Creation story and its own gods who were responsible for cosmic order.

213 The Birth of the Gods According to Hesiod's Theogony (8th-7th century BC) is a history of the gods. It begins with Gaea, goddess of the Earth, the primordial element from which all the deities emerged. By herself she gave birth to the sea and the sky as well as to the gods Uranus and Pontus; by Uranus she then mothered numerous other deities: the Titans (including Cronos) and Titanesses, the Cyclops and the Giants. The work continues with an account of how Zeus became lord of the universe after decisive battles against the Titans and against the monster Typhoeus. This story of the creation of the world out of the struggle between the forces of order (cosmos) and the forces of disorder (chaos) had a strong influence on Greek cosmological thinking. In this illustration by Georges Braque, Hesiod is seen receiving the torch of Hebrew tradition from Moses. Hesiod, Theogony, Paris, Maeght, 1955.
The Birth of the Gods According to Hesiod’s Theogony (8th-7th century BC) is a history of the gods. It begins with Gaea, goddess of the Earth, the primordial element from which all the deities emerged. By herself she gave birth to the sea and the sky as well as to the gods Uranus and Pontus; by Uranus she then mothered numerous other deities: the Titans (including Cronos) and Titanesses, the Cyclops and the Giants. The work continues with an account of how Zeus became lord of the universe after decisive battles against the Titans and against the monster Typhoeus. This story of the creation of the world out of the struggle between the forces of order (cosmos) and the forces of disorder (chaos) had a strong influence on Greek cosmological thinking.
In this illustration by Georges Braque, Hesiod is seen receiving the torch of Hebrew tradition from Moses.
Hesiod, Theogony, Paris, Maeght, 1955.

Hesiod’s Theogony (8th-7th century BC) was the first attempt to synthesize these traditions, which probably dated back to the Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations. In recounting the stages in the emergence of the gods from primordial chaos Theogony offers an answer to the eternal questions of cosmogony: who created the world; what were the basic materials from which it was made; which came first, the gods, the stars or the elements?

Not only did Theogony have a strong influence on Greek thought, it also anticipated in many ways today’s theories of the origin of the world – particularly the idea of primordial chaos. Since the universe appears to have an ordered structure (albeit an imperfect one), it seems logical to regard the state which preceded the Creation as one of disorder and confusion. This notion has provoked greater controversy than almost any other in the history of cosmogony.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses also trawled Greek mythology, as well as Roman legend, in attempting to reconstruct the series of metamorphoses the world had undergone between the original state of Chaos and Julius Caesar’s supposed transformation into a star:

“Before the sea and the lands and the sky that covers all,
there was one face of nature in her whole orb
(they call it Chaos), a rough unordered mass,
nothing except inactive weight and heaped together
the discordant seeds of unassembled things.” [i] Continue reading →