Elemental Life

Elemental Life December 1, 2014

After reviewing Greek texts that describe the “strife of the elements,” Eduard Schweitzer summarizes the grim world of the ancients:

He stresses “how widespread the conviction was that the four elements, though originally in a harmony of equilibrium, were continually threatening the existence of the world by their ‘mighty strife’ . . . and their unending interchange. . . . Everything within the sphere of earth is unhealthy and mortal . . . , even painful . . .  . If the Jewish high priest did not bring God’s Logos and the whole universe into the temple of God so that in the war of the elements peace is restored and God established as guardian of peace every year, the world would break down. . . . A predominance of fire or water, for instance, leads to the conflagration of the world, as Stoic philosophers often repeated . . . , or to the deluge . . . . Thus, all things in the world beneath the moon are subjected to motion and to change”(464).

It might seem that at least death could bring some relief, when the body returned the elements it had borrowed back to the cosmos. But only the pure found death liberating: “If the soul that wants to escape this world of futility is not pure enough, it is pulled down and imprisoned again by the ‘elements’ for 3,000 periods  . . . , bound by ‘untearable chains’ . . . . Instead of ascending through the elements . . . , in the appointed time-cycles giving back to each element what it has borrowed . . . , it descends again . . . . Even clinging already to the moon, it is thrust off and has to suffer and to pay penalties . . . . Therefore, men are to abstain from all things that burden the soul, from sexual intercourse and all kinds of food . . . as well as from ‘murder and perjury,’ ‘all defilement’  (. . .  usually meaning murder and perjury), ‘unjust and licentious’ ways . . . , and ‘earthward tendencies and material tastes’” (464)

No wonder it was great good news to be told that there was someone in whom all things “held together,” and that the same someone had delivered from slavery to the elements.

(Schweitzer, “Slaves of the elements and Worshipers of Angels: Gal 4:3, 9 and Col 2:8, 18, 20,” JBL 107:3 [1988] 455-68.) 


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