Cháos in Later Traditions
The Romans kept the Greek name but changed its nature. Ovid made Cháos the raw material of creation, a Stoic-inspired mixture awaiting the divine craftsman (Metamorphoses 1.5–31). Christian exegetes then reached for Cháos to translate the ‘without form and void’ (tohu wabohu) of Genesis 1:2, binding Greek cosmogony to biblical creation and giving the Latin Fathers a pagan word for the state of the world before God's ordering word. Gnostic systems reversed the valuation entirely: Cháos became the fallen, ignorant realm from which the spark of the soul must escape, and the gap that Hesiod had found generative became a prison. In the high Middle Ages the word kept both senses at once — the primordial condition in exegesis, the confusion of sin in moral allegory. Through all these reinterpretations the original Greek sense, a yawning opening rather than a turbulent mess, was gradually buried, and only modern philology dug it back out.