World

Use in the book

Chapter 21 asks whether the world has a soul, is governed by providence, possesses a ruling part, and receives nourishment. The treatise transmitted under Aristotle’s name praises its beauty and order through the relation between kosmos and being ordered or adorned.

Places to read

1. I.21.headingThe world is examined as a possibly living and governed whole.
2. I.40.1.63The language of cosmic beauty turns on the shared vocabulary of order.
3. I.1.39eOnatas distinguishes God from the divine cosmos.
4. I.22.1f.2Using all the constituents explains the world’s completeness and uniqueness.
5. I.20.1f.3Different schools give different accounts of cosmic destruction.

Translation in this edition

“World” is usual, while “cosmos” can retain an audible wordplay or a particular philosophical register. To pan, “the all” or “the universe,” remains distinguishable where the source contrasts the expressions.

Images and comparisons

The account treats beauty and order as belonging to the world’s name. The lexicon explains that linguistic connection without making every description of the world into an allegory.

Completeness and dissolution

The Timaeus excerpt explains the world’s uniqueness through the maker’s use of every part of the four constituents: nothing remains from which a second such world could arise. The doxographical survey instead records positions on cosmic destruction, including Stoic conflagration and Empedoclean alternation of Love and Strife. The argument for completeness in one source and the account of dissolution in another must be followed under their own attributions.

Use in the book

The world is the primary gift whose true reception the Centuries seeks to teach. To possess it is not to acquire a legal title excluding other people. It is to recognize its services, apprehend its beauty, receive it as love, and participate in the happiness of its other enjoyers. Each additional person can enrich the gift rather than reduce a private share. The language of universal inheritance is therefore intelligible only through its mode of enjoyment.

The visible world is already astonishing, but it is not always the full extent of the term. Traherne insists that angels, celestial powers, and the enduring treasures beyond judgment also belong within the world’s comprehensive meaning. Heaven and earth are a beginning, not an adequate boundary to divine bounty. At the same time, ordinary created things retain their importance: air, water, light, and living bodies are neither discarded as mere preliminaries nor replaced by abstract spiritual satisfactions.

The word also names what must be overcome. Customs teach people to neglect common gifts in favour of scarce and competitive possessions, and vice disfigures relations that should be charitable. To contemn this world and enjoy the world are consequently compatible injunctions when their objects are distinguished. The rejection concerns a false order of esteem, not a declaration that the created sea, earth, or sun has become intrinsically evil.

The later account makes this distinction practical. Stars and sea retain their beauty; universal charity would change the world by removing oppression and rivalry. Trades and occupations could remain, supplying pleasant ornaments to shared life. This prevents the early polemic against invented riches from becoming an undifferentiated hostility to every human institution or artifact.

Finally, the world must be within the soul as well as around the body. Its idea in understanding is a living, voluntary act through which it is enjoyed and offered back to God. That inward world is more excellent in the particular respect that an end exceeds its means. The comparison does not make external reality imaginary. It shows what creation is for: a community of conscious, loving creatures who receive its goods, delight in the giver, and become goods for one another. World thus names an object to be understood and a relation to be learned, not a single inert background for devotional thought.

Places to read

1. I.18The world includes heavenly and enduring treasures beyond the immediate visible order.
2. I.33The manufactured economy of false riches disfigures common life.
3. I.35God’s freely given works support a shared inheritance and mutual joy.
4. II.90The world in the soul is an act of enjoyment and returning offering.
5. IV.24Vice rather than creation’s physical beauty is identified as the source of misery.

In this edition

Do not force world into one meaning throughout. Capitalization can emphasize its grandeur but does not reliably settle its extent. Contrasts such as enjoying and contemning the world require attention to the good creation and the corrupt order of esteem.

Use in the book

B 26 describes constituents coming together through Love into one kosmos, then being carried apart through Strife, within a passage that also reaches towards the All grown together as one. Whether this “single order” is an intermediate ordered world or should be aligned more closely with complete union is part of interpreting the sequence. The word alone does not decide the reconstruction.

B 134 describes sacred mind darting through the whole ordered world in swift thoughts. Here the scope of intelligent activity is foregrounded rather than the mechanical arrangement of regions. The subject is not named in the surviving quotation, so the passage should not be made into a complete cosmology of a world-soul or automatically identified with the Sphairos.

The associated “All” in B 172 and the void fragments makes the totality comprehensive and closed against addition from elsewhere. Yet kosmos and All are not therefore interchangeable in every sentence. One concerns order, the other total scope; the distinction permits questions about how the enduring totality becomes differently organised.

Places to read

1. B 26.5–12Love brings the constituents into a single order in a passage of cyclic alternation.
2. B 134.4–5Sacred mind traverses the whole ordered world with thoughts.
3. B 17.30–35The All cannot gain from outside or be emptied of its enduring sources.

Translation in this edition

“A single order” and “the whole ordered world” are the edition's context-sensitive renderings. The title World-order combines them for lookup without pretending that the poem supplies a formal definition of kosmos.

Use in the book

Aëtius at A32 calls the mixture of elements the cosmos. At A47 he says there is one cosmos, yet only a small portion of the All, with an inert remainder outside it. That is a distinctive report, not a spatial framework independently guaranteed by the surviving fragments. A50 assigns the world an egg-like shape and a limit outlined by the sun’s circuit. These are further doxographic claims about the differentiated world, which should not be conflated with the spherical Sphairos.

The cosmos is also temporary in the cycle reports. A52 describes it as perishing under the counter-prevailing powers; Simplicius names a cosmos of Strife that Love destroys while producing the Sphairos, then renewed separation makes a world like the present one. Aristotle at A42 reports both the omission of a Love-cosmogony and a former world under Love comparable with the current world under Strife.

The term thus names an arrangement whose history and extent are contested. It is not enough to say that Empedocles has “one universe”: the sources separately ask how many ordered worlds there are, what remains outside one world, how it forms, and whether comparable worlds recur in both directions of the cycle.

Places to read

1. A 32 (testimony)Aëtius I 7,28 (D. 303). Calls the mixture of the elements the cosmos.
2. A 47 (testimony)Aëtius I 5,2 (D. 291). Distinguishes one cosmos from the larger All.
3. A 50 (testimony)Aëtius II 31,4 and II 1,4. Assigns shape and boundary to the differentiated world.
4. A 52 (testimony)Simplicius, De caelo 293,18. Treats a cosmos as generated and destroyed within recurrent change.
5. A 42 (polemical)Aristotle, De caelo Γ 2; De gen. et corr. B 7. Discusses the cosmos as composed of separated elements and compares its present state under Strife with a former state under Love.

Translation in this edition

Do not let “cosmos,” “All,” “heaven” and “Sphairos” become interchangeable in translation. A52’s modern note overstates the explicit evidence for a named cosmos of Love.