Saturday, June 04, 2011

A cosmo-theological meander

There's an apocryphal quote I once heard (or dreamed up myself, since I can find no trace of it), attributed to St Thomas Aquinas. It's about the state of paradise before the Fall of Man. The line goes something like "It would be credulous to believe that, prior to the sin of Adam, lions ate grass."

Update 2016. It is not apocryphal but is found in Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Question 96, Article 1, reply to Objection 2.


Several months ago I wrote to the Blackfriars' webpage to ask about the apparent conflict between the accepted evolutionary view of how the universe and earth and its creatures unfolded and the orthodox Christian view. This is not about seven days. Even Saint Augustine thought that the seven days were symbolic. It's about how a world apparently created free of death suddenly became infected with it.

In the orthodox narrative, even if you don't take it literally, Adam and Eve, the human race in a nutshell, were created in a state without sin and without death. But due to their sin, they became mortal and inherently flawed.

In the evolutionary narrative, which most educated Westerners buy, death long preceded the arrival of homo sapiens. And homo sapiens was one more mortal form of its mortal line of always mortal ancestors.

I asked for some sage theologian to deal with the issue. I have not heard back.

As a non-practicing Catholic of Gnostic leanings --no easy feat, let me tell you-- I am fascinated by the problem of evil. As an explanation of how things are, Original Sin works pretty well. But as an explanation of how things got to be that way in the first place...not so good, if you buy the idea of a non-eternal universe.

For the orthodox, the Creation is a good thing which went wrong. For the Gnostics, it was created flawed; the creation and the fall were simultaneous. There never was, in this world, a Paradise.

(Although on Sunday afternoons for a few years, I was very much tempted to believe there was...)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

From Mark Twain's "The Diary of Adam and Eve":

She engages herself in many foolish things; among others, to study out why the animals called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other. This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other, and that would introduce what, as I understand it, is called "death"; and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the Park. Which is a pity, on some accounts.

--Nathan

Anonymous said...

From Mark Twain's "The Diary of Adam and Eve":

She engages herself in many foolish things; among others, to study out why the animals called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other. This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other, and that would introduce what, as I understand it, is called "death"; and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the Park. Which is a pity, on some accounts.

--Nathan

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