greek-cosmologyfeatured in 30 works

Eternity of the World

Did the universe have a beginning, or has it always existed and will it last forever? — one of antiquity's deepest and most consequential disputes.

This is the long-running question of whether the cosmos is generated and perishable or ungenerated and everlasting. Aristotle (4th c. BCE) argued forcefully that the world is eternal, without beginning or end, against Plato's Timaeus, which depicts a craftsman-god fashioning the cosmos in time (though even that was debated as literal or figurative). The controversy became one of the great fault lines between Greek philosophy and the creation accounts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and was fought over for centuries by thinkers like Philoponus, Maimonides, and Aquinas.

A note on the opening of Genesis (Genesis 1:1-2): because verse 2 already describes a world of "tohu and bohu," with "darkness over the face of the deep (tehom)" and the spirit of God hovering over the waters, some readers — including serious ones — construe the passage to mean that God did not create from nothing but ordered stuff that was already there. On the strongest version of that reading, this pre-existing material would itself be eternal: a world-stuff with no beginning. Read that way, Genesis would seem to be quietly agreeing with the Greek picture of a cosmos that always was. The confusion is understandable, because the "pre-existent matter" construal of these verses is genuinely old and reputable (it turns partly on whether verse 1 is read as a finished act or as "when God began to create, the earth being unformed...").

But even on that reading, the text is not teaching what Aristotle teaches. Genesis opens by naming a definite inception — "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" — and the narrative's whole concern is to show God speaking an ordered world into being out of chaos, not to settle the metaphysics of how matter first came to exist. The unformed waters are described as the starting condition of the drama; they are never enthroned as an eternal first principle standing on their own. The classical tradition felt this strongly enough that the Talmud (Chagigah 12) lists tohu, bohu, darkness, and water among the things created on the first day. And the wider Scripture is emphatic that everything traces back to God's making: "The heavens are the work of your hands" (Psalm 102:26), and "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world... you are God" (Psalm 90:2). The Bible pictures a beginning, with God on the far side of it.

Aristotle's eternity of the world is a far stronger and quite different claim. For him the cosmos has no temporal beginning at all — the heavens and the underlying matter are everlasting and uncreated, never brought into being by anyone (De Caelo I.10-12; Physics VIII). This is not "God shaped pre-existing chaos at the start of time"; it is "there was no start, and no maker." A creation story that opens with primeval waters is, at most, describing the raw condition God works upon in the first moment. Aristotle is denying that there was ever a first moment, or a Worker, to speak of.

So the two ideas are genuinely distinct: a creation narrative with unformed waters in verse 2 — even read as ordered-from-chaos — is not a doctrine of a beginningless, makerless cosmos. The Greek thesis of an eternal, uncreated world entered Jewish thought as a live challenge only later — in the Hellenistic period, and above all through the medieval encounter with Aristotle among the falasifa, where thinkers like Maimonides had to argue against it explicitly (Guide of the Perplexed II). That is why this passage in Genesis is kept separate from the Greek concept of the eternity of the world.

How it traveled

Timaeus
Athens · -360
explains
Metaphysics
Chalcis · -322
explains
De caelo
Chalcis · -322
explains
De Xenophane, de Zenone, de Gorgia
Chalcis · -322
explains
Fragmenta varia
Athens · -287
explains
De Rerum Natura
Rome · -55
explains
Timaeus
Formiae · -45
explains
de Natura Deorum
Formiae · -43
applies
De animae procreatione in Timaeo
Chaeronea · 120
explains
De Stoicorum repugnantiis
Chaeronea · 120
explains
Adversus Mathematicos
Alexandria · 190
explains
Vitae philosophorum
— · 240
explains
Enneades
Rome · 270
explains
Chagigah
Sura (Babylonia) · 500
parallel
Bereshit Rabbah
Tiberias · 600
critique
Midrash Tanchuma Buber
Tiberias · 600
HaEmunot veHaDeot
Sura (Babylonia) · 933
critique
Duties of the Heart
Zaragoza (Saragossa) · 1080
critique
Kuzari
Jerusalem · 1120
critique
Guide for the Perplexed
Cairo · 1190
exposition
Yalkut Shimoni on Nach
Tiberias · 1250
Yalkut Shimoni on Torah
Tiberias · 1250
Zohar
Guadalajara · 1280
Sefer HaIkkarim
Soria · 1425
critique
Akeidat Yitzchak
Tarragona · 1490
critique
Abarbanel on Torah
Naples · 1505
critique
Avodat HaKodesh (Ibn Gabbai)
Cairo · 1523
Pardes Rimmonim
Tzfat · 1548
Ketem Paz on Zohar
Tzfat · 1561
Ohr HaChammah on Zohar
Tzfat · 1620

Key passages(20)

Bereshit Rabbah 1:9↗critique

Bereshit Rabbah · 400 CE