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Genesis, Creation, and Early Man

The Incorruption of the First-Created World

Vain are they who say that the Holy Fathers were “naive in science” and simply “didn’t know” about evolution (as if the Holy Spirit withheld this information from the Divinely inspired Fathers and Scriptures, and revealed it only to eighteenth-century Enlightenment man and his later descendants!).1 On the contrary, they knew quite well what was being said in Genesis. We know, therefore, that before the fall of Adam some 7,500 years ago, no creature experienced corruption [decay]; but the whole evidence for “evolution” lies precisely in the evidence of corruption which, supposedly, occurred before the “evolution of man”! Need we hesitate to know where the truth lies? If science finds that the Virgin Birth of Christ is outside the laws of nature as it knows them, we Orthodox Christians nonetheless believe it absolutely; in the same way, even if science finds the incorrupt creatures of the first period of the world’s existence “impossible” by the laws of nature it knows—we still believe as the Church and the Holy Fathers do.

And there is a specific reason why science cannot understand this mystery, which is set forth by the great Father St. Symeon the New Theologian in his 38th Homily:

The words and decrees of God become the law of nature. Therefore also the decree of God, uttered by Him as a result of the disobedience of the first Adam—that is, the decree to him of death and corruption—became the law of nature, eternal and unalterable. Therefore, in order to abrogate this decree, the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, was crucified and died, offering Himself as a sacrifice for the redemption of man from death.2

That is to say: the law of nature before Adam’s disobedience is different from the law of nature now in force, and it is therefore totally unknowable by science. … Certain it is that science cannot, on the basis of observing a creation which is everywhere corruptible and mortal, make even the slightest inference about a creation not subject to these laws. What was before the disobedience of Adam, and what is beyond the end of this corruptible world (when the creation will not be destroyed but totally transformed)—are totally outside the sphere of science and may be known only through Orthodox theology in accordance with God’s revelation to mankind. …

At this point the sincere Orthodox believer who is confused because he has been taught “evolution” from his childhood and cannot force himself to disbelieve in it all at once—will ask: Is it not still possible somehow to “reinterpret” the incorruptibility of Adam and the first creation so as not to be too much outside the fashions of contemporary ideas? To which the answer is: If you wish to “reinterpret” the state before the corruptible, fallen world we know—then you must likewise “reinterpret” the state after this fallen world, the future bliss of heaven, for the two correspond and only differ, as St. Symeon has pointed out in the long passage quoted above, in that the future state of the world will be fully spiritual, corresponding to the “spiritual body” of the men who will dwell in it, and no longer will it be possible for its incorruptibility to be lost. Do we Orthodox Christians believe that we will actually be immortal and incorruptible in that next life—if God will only number us among the saved—or only metaphorically and allegorically so? If we believe and think as the Holy Fathers do, then our future incorruptibility will be real, as was that of the creation and of Adam before his disobedience.

It is vain for us to imagine that we are more “sophisticated” than the Holy Fathers, being made so wise by modern “enlightenment” and science that we know better than they how to read and interpret the Divinely inspired Scriptures (as St. Basil says, considering ourselves “wiser than the revelations of the Spirit”).3 The superiority of modern knowledge over that of the Holy Fathers lies solely in one respect, which lies at the very bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge: in the quantity of scientific facts now available to us (but not everything that calls itself “scientific fact” is such!); in every other respect our knowledge is inferior to theirs. They knew far better than today’s scientists and philosophers the place of scientific knowledge in the whole hierarchy of knowledge; and they saw clearly that the proper interpretation of Genesis is the task of theology, not science, and it is facilitated, not at all by a knowledge of present-day scientific facts, but rather by advancement in spiritual life and understanding. That indeed is why the whole doctrine of creation is presented most clearly, precisely in the writings of a Father like St. Symeon the New Theologian, who attained the heights of spiritual life. The notion that we now, “enlightened” by science, can understand Genesis better than the Holy Fathers, is itself a result of that evolutionary philosophy which virtually everyone now holds quite unconsciously. …

Thus the whole structure of evolutionary ideas and philosophy concerning the supposedly corruptible creation before Adam is seen to be an elaborate fable like unto those the ancients had about their “gods,” and which were so well refuted by the God-bearing Fathers of the first Christian centuries. … If the world is acknowledged to be incorrupt before the disobedience of Adam, the need of evolutionists for “millions of years” vanishes: there are then no fossils, no extinct species, no “survival of the fittest” [before the fall of man].

Footnotes

  1. See Editor’s Note, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Vision, 2nd ed., p. 649: These sections of Fr. Seraphim’s notes were written over the course of several years. Sections 1 [The Incorruption of the First-Created World] and 13 [The Old Testament Chronology] were written in 1974; the rest cannot be precisely dated. Titles for sections 3 [Evolution and “Cosmic Religion”] and 9 [The Roman Catholic Idea of the State of Adam (according to Fr. Michael Pomazansky)] were provided by Fr. Seraphim; the other titles have been added by the editor [Hieromonk Damascene, Platina]. ↩

  2. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Homily 38.3, in Slova prepodobnago Simeona novago bogoslova 1 , p. 319 [Fr. Seraphim Rose, trans. St. Symeon the New Theologian: The First-Created Man, pp. 82-83. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994. Originally published in 1979 under the title The Sin of Adam and Our Redemption]. ↩

  3. St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 9.1, Fathers of the Church vol. 46, pp. 135-136 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947-). ↩