chapter 10 the monism of darkness and the dualism of limit and ...

46 CHAPTER 10
in themselves and from one another in eternity? There is no difference
there between one point and another; everything is fused in one
eternal present. According to Phoenician theology, the beginning
comes to be, the infinity of indeterminacy is broken by the imposition
of limit, term and boundary as soon as the spiritual principle, the blow
of wind as the first principle of primaeval dualism, desires its own
beginning, desires that it have an origin although it has none. Such
longing of the Spirit is hypostatized as Eros or Desire 4 . The
ontological realization of this desire cannot be anything other than the
combination of the first principle with the second, since nothing else
exists either in eternity or even in the newly-constituted Time. Strictly
speaking, the conjugation is not a union of the Spirit per se with
Chaos (that is to say, it is not a coition of the two supreme principles
with one another); such union has no sufficient reason to happen
earlier rather than later, hence no sufficient reason to happen in
general or at all. The combination and conjugation is between Desire
(i.e. of the Eros that the first principle hypostasizes once it comes to
desire beginning and origin, or identity and definition) and Chaos, or
rather between the Spirit-in-Desire (or the Desiring Spirit, or the
Spirit’s Desire) and Chaos. Logico-mythical thought lies beyond such
conceptual discriminations as those expressed in the triple disjunction
above. In the theology of Sidon, however, one can find, according to
Eudemus’ account, essential reverberations of the problematic lying
underneath. The discrimination explains also the fact that the Spirit
per se knows nothing about the outcome of its own longing for
beginning and origin and circumscription. The outcome is the
creation of the world. The union that stirs the process of the world’s
formation is a union of the Spirit qua Desire with Darkness. From this
copulation comes the semen of all creation (MÒÙ), which is the
primal mud, the origination and coming to be of all that exists, a
fecund moist rottenness which is produced from the coition of the
two principles as in sexual congress the genital liquids of the partners
create the foetus of existence 5 . The seminal slime which is the origin
and source of all-that-is develops into a world-creating Egg. - Thus we
can fully interpret and appreciate a very difficult passage from Philo
which has come down to us in Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica I, 10,
1-2 (FGrH 790 F2): ÙcÓ ÙáÓ ¬ÏˆÓ àÚ¯cÓ ñappleÔÙ›ıÂÙ·È (sc. ï ·Á¯Ô˘-
ÓÈ¿ıˆÓ) à¤Ú· ˙ÔÊÒ‰Ë Î·d appleÓÂ˘Ì·ÙÒ‰Ë j appleÓÔcÓ à¤ÚÔ˜ ˙ÔÊÒ‰Ô˘˜ ηd