THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
discovering an ideal or formal principle of things. The Pythagoreans found it in numbers, geometrical forms, and relations; the Eleatics (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus) in the conceptual unity of being. A clever attempt to combine the Ionic and Eleatie standpoints was made by Empedocles, who defined four material and two ideal elements or roots of things — the former being earth, water, air, and fire, the latter the motive powers of love and hate, to one of which the union, to the other the separation of things in the process of world-formation is attributed. See Materialism.
In the main period of Greek philosophy the opposition between idealistic and realistic (or materialistic) cosmology recurs in the relation of the Platonic to the Aristotelian theory, then in that of the Stoic to the Epicurean. Plato, who considered ideas, and especially the highest, that of the Good, as the only eternal things, asserts the temporal nature of the world, or at most makes it to have been created by God, the absolute Good, out of matter without quality and actually unreal. First the Anima mundi, or soul of the world, was formed by harmonic union of indivisible and divisible substance, then the body of the world. The relation of the world-soul to the material universe corresponds, in the human microcosm, to that between the immortal soul with its seat in the head and the body with its two inferior souls. Aristotle, on the other hand, declared the world to be finite in space or extension, but infinite in time. According to him, the first thing to be set in motion by the " immovable mover " was the heaven of the fixed stars, as the highest of the spheres which surround the earth. The cosmology of the Stoics, in consequence of their generally idealistic attitude, approached more closely to the Platonic and the Eleatie than to Aristotle. They considered the world as eternal, but only in so far as it is the result or the image of the eternal power of the Godhead which works in it. This Godhead, who is in the world as an all-pervading breath, as a formative fire, as a rational soul, and includes in itself the individual rational type-forms or logoi spermutikoi, separates itself through a creative process into four elements, as well as into bodies formed by various combinations of them. After the expiration of a certain period things return, by a consumins; conflagration, once more into the Godhead, which then creates the world anew, only to destroy it once more when the time comes. Epicurus and his school, going back for their physics to the realistic natural philosophers, especially Democritus, affirm the eternity of space, and in it of atoms distinguished by size, shape, and weight. These atoms, tending downward on account of their weight, generate by collision certain movements which end in the rotary motion that forms worlds, countless in numljer. Animals and men are mere products of the earth; the formation of the latter (whose souls are substances with the nature of air and fire, consisting of refined atoms, diffused throughout the whole body) includes a gradual evolution toward perfection.
Coming to the philosophical movements which follow the close of independent intellectual life in
Greece (the last century B.C.), the Skeptics declared all certain knowledge on these subjects impossible, while the Eclectics, such as Cicero, attempted to combine various elements of the Platonic, Stoic, and Epicurean cosmology. These problems were taken up with still greater interest by the theosophic-syncretistic schools of the last century before and the first after Christ — especially the Jewish-Alexandrian school, the Neo-Pythagoreans, and the Neoplatonists. According to Philo, the principal representative of the first-named, in contrast with God as the absolute active principle, stands matter without form or quality as the principle of absolute passivity; the former produces first the world of ideas (the Logos or kosmos noetos), and then impresses the type of this ideal world on the eternal matter. The Logos, or divine ideal world, which according to this doctrine was the mediate cause of the world's existence, became in the Neo-Pythagorean, partially Gnostic system of Numenius of Apamea (c. 170) the demiurge, a second God beside the supreme and purely spiritual God, or Nous. This second God, who gains by contemplation of the transcendental archetypes the knowledge which enables him to exercise creative power on matter, constructs out of it the world as a sort of third God, or the offspring of the two higher ones. Finally, in Neoplatonism (q.v.), especially with Plotinus and Porphyry, the connecting principle in the formation of the universe is again the world of ideas, which is not, however, as with Plato, identified with the Godhead, but appears as an emanation or radiation from the highest Good. It generates souls in its image, together with the bodies dependent upon and governed by them, as well as the other beings perceptible by the sense or material. Matter in itself is a formless, negative substance which gains form and life first by the entrance of the higher powers, the logoi, which proceed from the Nous and its ideas.
3. The Gnostic-Manichean Cosmog'onies: The
ideal and abstract treatment of the question which has been seen in the speculation of these philosophers, together with much more fantastic and arbitrary solutions of the problem which come from the mythical cosmogonies of the still older period, was to a certain extent combined with Christian ideas in the Gnostic theories. All of them appeared as paganizing perversions of the Christian revelation. They have a more or less hostile attitude toward the Old Testament, although they usually attempt to find a place for its monotheistic teaching concerning the creation and government of the world in their practically pagan systems. For this purpose they make use of the peculiar figure of the demiurge. The demiurge of the Gnostics is not, however, a higher divine principle, like the Platonic Logos, but rather a representative of the life of the world as distinguished from God. He is generally considered from the standpoint of the natural world which is to be overcome and elevated into a higher form of existence in the spiritual kingdom of Christ. The creation accomplished by him is only an imperfect preliminary to rcdem[)tion; and this he is able to bring about
RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Creation and Preservation
neither by himself nor by the psychic Messiah sent by him. For it the spiritual Christ is required, the higher eon who is revealed at his baptism in Jordan as stronger than the demiurgic _ Messiah, coming to execute his mission by a docetic life and death. Gnostic speculation took two distinct forms— the Western, or Greek-Egyptian, based largely upon Platonic thought, and the Eastern, or Persian-Syrian, following more the dualistic thought of the Parsees. In the former the transition from the divine being and life to the development of the world appears as an emanation or the production of a series of hypostatic effluxes from the world of light (the Pleroma), growing weaker and less divine the farther they go, down to the demiurge, the lowest, to whom the formation of formless or empty matter is attributed. The latter class considered the world essentially as a product of conflict between the eons of the kingdom of light and Satan and his demons, in which matter, created and dominated by Satan and thus a positive efflux of the evil principle, forms the battle-ground, and is partially wrested from him by the good eons. See Gnosticism.
The history of Manicheanism, a theory of the world whose foundation is more pagan than Christian, has been shown by recent investigation to have a special importance for the development of Christian thought on its heretical side. The roots of this remarkable syncretistic religion reach down into the primitive age of Christianity, and are connected with the Jewish-Christian and Gnostic sects of the Elkesaites and Mandseans; and the offshoots of the developed Persian Manicheanism of the third century appear throughout the latter history of medieval sects, both Eastern and Western — Priscillians, Paulicians, Euchites, Bogomiles, and Albigenses. Some of their ideas, especially those relating to the creation of the world and of man, have even had their influence on the systems of some modern Christian theosophists, such as Weigel and Jakob Bohme. Both ancient and medieval Manicheanism dispensed with the figure of the demiurge, and made the whole earthly or material creation, including mankind, both body and soul, a product of Satan and his demons as imitators of the creative activity of the Light-god. See Mani- CHEANs; and Mand^ans.
4. Speculative Cosmogonies of the Modern Pantheistic-Materialistic Natural Philosophy: These are not without points of contact with the cosmological theories of the old Greek philosophers, and even with those of the Gnostic and of the old pagan mythologies. The principal difference is that modern pantheistic paganism more completely excludes the free creative and formative operation of a personal will. The most thoroughgoing in this direction is materialism proper or logical sensualism, as found in the systems of English freethinkers and deists since Hobbes, the French Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, and the scientific atomistic theories of modern Germany, best known through Haeckel. This, excluding a personal Creator and all spirit-life, together with freedom, immortality, and all ethical principles, recognizes only abstract matter, divided into an infinite num-
ber of hypothetical atoms, infinitely small, as the operative cause and explanation of all present and past phenomena of life. This view is most logically carried out in Czolbe's Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus (Leipsic, 1855), according to which the world is without beginning as without end; matter exists from eternity, in its smallest atoms as well as in its organic forms; it is absolutely without beginning, coeval with the world-soul, which may be considered as the principle which holds it together and vivifies it. See Encyclopedists; and Materialism.
In contrast with this sensualistic theory of the eternity of the world. Pantheism (q.v.) considers the universe, both in matter and form, as temporal, but regards it as the efflux or inevitable evolution of an eternal power of idea which underlies it. Where this absolute idea is considered as a primeval union of spirit and nature, or of thinking and extended substance, separating in creation, it leads to the realistic form of the pantheist theory, as represented by Spinoza and Schelling; where it is conceived as being entirely without substance, as absolute spirit, the idealistic form results, which is represented by Fichte and Hegel. For both schools the acceptance of a real creative act is impossible, since they deny any transcendence of God over nature, and consider it rather as a special form of divine existence, as a phase of development or method of manifestation of the divine principle dwelling in it and thus fully realizing itself. To all of these philosophers the world is practically an emanation of the primal divine spirit, a successive self-potentiation of the absolute idea, according to which this original nothing develops itself through the stages of ether, cosmic matter, coarse planetary matter, and organic substance up to the existence, both material and spiritual, of animal and human organisms. For the formation of space and of the earth as a body the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace is taken as a basis; for the origin of the geological structure of the earth, the quietistic theory of Lyell and his school; and for the analogous development of the organic species of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, the theory of evolution as held by Darwin and Spencer.
III. The Creation Theories of the Older Judaism and the Judaizing Christianity of Many Fathers and Modern Theologians: In contrast with the systems already discussed, which emphasize the cosmogonic element at the expense of the monotheistic, these latter dwell exclusively on God's action in creation, to the neglect of what may be accomplished by the powers and laws set in motion by him.
1. In Judaism Proper: Here not only is the creation of heaven and earth out of nothing strongly emphasized, but special stress is laid on the relative nothingness or weakness of the creature in comparison with God (Wisd. xi. 23; Ps. xxiii. 6; Isa. xlviii. 13; Judith xvi. 18; Ps. xcvii. 5; Mic. i. 4; Rev. vi. 13). In harmony with the unconditional supernaturalism, nay, acosmism of such a view, it is not surprising to find the six creative days of Genesis taken in the strict literal sense, or even minimized into mere points of time in a defi-