THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of separating hate, and furthermore in three periods: that of the emerging separation of substances, that of their total severance by a complete preponderance of love;
after which the whirlpool of process, evenly freed of hate and love, of the motion of separation and combination, again flows into the ‘sphairos of harmony’. But flows
into it again as a temporal sphere; for even the sphairos is transitory, because severing hate invades it again and again and sets the life of nature in motion, together with
re­combining love. The peculiar contribution of Empedocles is therefore that he not only introduced concepts of value into the contemplation of nature, but that he tried
above all to divide up the motion of nature into periods through the alternating proportional shares of hate and love — with the ultimate extinction of both in a kind of
worldlessness in general. Mythical definitions also undoubtedly lay behind this as well, as in Heraclitus' theory of time as the ‘first body’ and especially in the Chronos
who began everything for Pherekydes. In fact, the mythical definitions of the Heraclitean body of time even have the same mythical origin as the powers of hate and
love in Empedocles, namely a Persian one. ‘Boundless time’ is at the head of the genesis of the world in the Zendavesta too; and in Persian myth the countermovements
of hate and love act more than ever as those of the destructive Ahriman, of the bright Ormuzd. And this Persian dualism, renewed many centuries later by
Mani and his sect, in turn stirred so many centuries after Empedocles a late classical thinker who was a — Manichaean, before he became a Church Father: Augustine.
It is therefore no leap over historical abysses at all if now at this point, almost over the heads of all the Greek philosophers who lie between them, Empedocles and
Augustine move closer together — linked by Persian myths, as thinkers of a struggle of process, of a perspective of the triumph of love, the triumph of light. And
Augustine's clear mission: to make room in society for Christ as against Caesar, naturally particularly sharpened the duality of hate and love, darkness and light. And
furthermore, the total insertion of Ahriman or the devilish element into the pole of hate, and Ormuzd or the divine element into the pole of love vastly dramatized the
world­process; from an alternating process relationship of hate and love it is turned into a battlefield between Satan and Christ. This new perspective appears, worldhistorically
harnessed between the Fall and the Last Judgment, in the twenty­two books of Augustine's ‘De civitate Dei’, a single preparatory activation of feudalclerical
society and much more besides. So that this book displays yet another context and content than that of social utopia which has already been dealt with, — a
content which fires, excites and aims at the whole of history. The repose posited as given of a Hen kai Pan, as a sphere or later as