St. Ephrem and Anaximander
Translations of Anaximander's fragment and an admonition from St. Ephrem's second hymn.
Anaximander was the first Greek philosopher to write, and Diogenes Laertius reports he was the first to draw on a map the outline of land and sea. There is a story that the boys in Miletus laughed at his singing, and that, when he heard of it, he rejoined, "Then to please the boys I must improve my singing." We have from him but a single fragment:
ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν
I’ve translated it four ways:
And from those things is the birth of beings, and their end comes about according to fate; for from injustice they make amends to one another in the course of time’s order.
The birth of beings is from what also their death comes to be: necessity. For they give justice to one another from injustice, according to time's order.
From these things, the Beginning says to beings that death also comes to them according to fate. For beings pay restitution for injustice to one another according to times’s disposition.
In accordance with fate, the Beings are born from things unnamed and with death go back into things unnamed; for it is through this, the course of time’s order, that they pay the cost of injustice to one another.
After years of reading and thinking about old philosophers like Anaximander, it was a punch in the gut this week to read the second hymn of St. Ephrem:
Blessed is the one who has not tasted the bitterness of the wisdom of the Greeks; Blessed is the one who has not relinquished the simplicity of the Apostles.1
More Genesis soon, along with three translator interviews!
St. Ephrem the Syrian, The Hymns on Faith, trans. Jeffrey T. Wickes, vol. 130, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 67.