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Genesis, Creation, and Early Man

The Creation of Man

Genesis 1:26-31, 2:4-7

We have seen that the Creation of the Six Days is the work of the Holy Trinity, and in particular that the Father commands: “Let there be!” and the Son creates.

In the creation of man, however, a special consultation, as it were, is made between the Persons of the Trinity. Of this St. Basil says:

“Let Us make man” … This word was not yet used for any of the organized beings; there was light, and the commandment was simple: “God said, Let there be light.” The heaven was made, and there was no deliberation for the heaven. … Here, man is not yet, and there is a deliberation over man. God did not say, as for the other beings: “Let man be!” Recognize the dignity that belongs to you. He did not cause your origin by a commandment, but there was a consultation in God in order to know how to introduce into life this living being worthy of honor. … Why did God not say, “Make,” but “Let Us make man”? It is so that you might recognize the sovereignty. He desires that in bringing your attention on the Father, you would not deny the Son; He desires you to know that the Father has created by the Son and that the Son has created by the will of the Father, and that you should glorify the Father in the Son, and the Son in the Holy Spirit. … [But] He did not say: “And They created,” so that you might not draw from this a pretext for polytheism.1

Similarly, St. John Chrysostom says:

Why, when the heaven was created, was it not said: “Let Us make,” but rather: Let there be heaven, let there be light, and so concerning each part of creation; but here only is there added: “Let Us make,” by which is expressed counsel, deliberation, and communication with someone equal in honor? Who is it that is to be created that he is granted such honor? It is man—a great and wondrous living being, and for God more precious than all the creation. … There was counsel, deliberation, and communication, not because God has need of counsel—may this not be!—but in order by the very means of expression to show us the dignity of what is created. … And Who is it to Whom God says: “Let us make man”? It is the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, Father of the age to come,2 the Only Begotten Son of God Himself. To Him He says: “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” He did not say: “In Mine and Thine,” or “in Mine and Yours,” but “in Our image,” indicating a single image and a single likeness.3

St. Gregory the Theologian speaks very poetically about the creation of man as a mixture of the higher and lower worlds that God had already created. First:

He gave being to the world of thought [i.e., the world of intellectual beings, angels], as far as I can reason on these matters, and estimate great things in my own poor language. Then, when His first Creation was in good order, He conceives a second world, material and visible; and this a system of earth and sky and all that is in the midst of them; an admirable creation indeed when we look at the fair form of every part, but yet more worthy of admiration when we consider the harmony and unison of the whole, and how each part fits in with every other in fair order. … This was to show that He could call into being not only a nature akin to Himself [i.e., the angelic, invisible world] , but also one altogether alien to Him. For akin to Deity are those natures which are intellectual, and only to be comprehended by mind; but all of which sense can take cognizance are utterly alien to It; and of these the furthest removed from It are all those which are entirely destitute of soul and power of motion. Mind, then, and sense, thus distinguished from each other, had remained within their own boundaries, and bore in themselves the magnificence of the Creator-Word, silent praisers and thrilling heralds of His mighty work. Not yet was there any mingling of both, nor any mixture of these opposites, tokens of a greater wisdom and generosity in the creation ofnatures; nor as yet were the whole riches of goodness made known. Now the Creator-Word, determining to exhibit this, and to produce a single living being out of both (the invisible and the visible creation, I mean) fashions man; and taking a body from already existing matter, and placing in it a breath taken from Himself (which the Word knew to be an intelligent soul, and the image of God), as a sort of second world, great in littleness, He placed him on the earth, a new angel, a mingled worshipper, fully initiated into the visible creation, but only partially into the intellectual; king of all upon earth, but subject to the King above; earthly and heavenly; temporal and yet immortal; visible and yet intellectual; halfway between greatness and lowliness; in one person combining spirit and flesh; spirit because of the favor bestowed on him, flesh on account of the height to which he had been raised; the one that he might continue to live and glorify his benefactor, the other that he might suffer, and by suffering be put in remembrance, and be corrected if he became proud in his greatness; a living creature, trained here and then moved elsewhere; and to complete the mystery, deified by its inclination to God.4

What is this image of God? Different Holy Fathers have emphasized different aspects of the image of God in man: some have mentioned man’s dominion over the lower creation (which is mentioned specifically in the text of Genesis); others, his reason; still others, his freedom. St. Gregory of Nyssa sums up the meaning of the image of God most concisely:

He creates man for no other reason than that He is good; and being such, and having this as His reason for entering upon the creation of our nature, He would not exhibit the power of this goodness in an imperfect form, giving our nature some [one] of the things at His disposal, and grudging it a share in another: but the perfect form of goodness is here to be seen by His both bringing man into being from nothing, and fully supplying him with all good gifts. But since the list of individual good gifts is a long one, it is out of the question to apprehend it numerically. The language of Scripture therefore expresses it concisely by a comprehensive phrase, in saying that man was made “in the image of God”: for this is the same as to say that He made human nature participant in all good; for if the Deity is the fullness of good, and this is His image, then the image finds its resemblance to the Archetype in being filled with all good.5

What is the difference between the “image” and the “likeness” of God in man? The Holy Fathers explain that the image is given to us in full and cannot be lost; the likeness, however, was given in the beginning only potentially, and man himself was to work on attaining its perfection. St. Basil the Great teaches:

“Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” We possess the one by creation, we acquire the other by free will. In the first structure it is given us to be born in the image of God; by free will there is formed in us the being in the likeness of God. … “Let Us make man in Our image”: Let him possess by creation what is in the image, but let him also become according to the likeness. God has given the power for this; if He had created you also in the likeness, where would your privilege be? Why have you been crowned? And if the Creator had given you everything, how would the Kingdom of Heaven have opened for you? But it is proper that one part is given you, while the other has been left incomplete: this is so that you might complete it yourself and might be worthy of the reward which comes from God.6

In the very passage of Genesis which describes the creation of man, it is said that he was created “male and female.” Is this distinction, then, part of the image of God? St. Gregory of Nyssa explains that the Scripture refers here to a twofold creation of man:

That which was made “in the image” is one thing, and that which is now manifested in wretchedness is another. “God created man,” it says; “in the image of God He created him.” There is an end of the creation of that which was made “in the image”: then it makes a resumption of the account of creation, and says, “male and female created He them.” I presume that everyone knows that this is a departure from the Prototype: for “in Christ Jesus,” as the Apostle says, “there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). Yet the phrase declares that man is thus divided. Thus the creation of our nature is in a sense twofold: one made like to God, one divided according to this distinction: for something like this the passage darkly conveys by its arrangement, where it first says, “God created man, in the image of God He created him,” and then, adding to what has been said, “male and female He created them,“—a thing which is alien from our conceptions of God. I think that by these words Holy Scripture conveys to us a great and lofty doctrine; and the doctrine is this. While two natures—the Divine and incorporeal nature, and the irrational life of brutes—are separated from each other as extremes, human nature is the mean between them [this is similar to the idea of St. Gregory the Theologian we have already quoted]: for in the compound nature of man we may behold a part of each of the natures I have mentioned—of the Divine, the rational and intelligent element, which does not admit the distinction of male and female; of the irrational, our bodily form and structure, divided into male and female: for each of these elements is certainly to be found in all that partakes of human life. That the intellectual element, however, precedes the other, we learn as from one who gives in order an account of the making of man; and we learn also that his community and kindred with the irrational is for man a provision for reproduction. … He Who brought all things into being and fashioned man as a whole by His own will to the Divine image … saw beforehand by His all-seeing power the failure of their will to keep a direct course to what is good, and its consequent declension from the angelic life. In order that the multitude of human souls might not be cut short by its fall … He formed for our nature that contrivance for increase which befits those who had fallen into sin, implanting in mankind, instead of the angelic majesty of nature, that animal and irrational mode by which they now succeed one another.78

Thus the image of God, which, as the Holy Fathers teach, is to be found in the soul and not the body of man, has nothing to do with the division into male and female. In God’s idea of man, one might say—man as he will be in the Kingdom of Heaven—there is neither male nor female; but God, foreknowing man’s fall, made this division which is an inseparable part of man’s earthly existence.

However, the reality of sexual life did not come about before the fall of man. St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the passage, “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived” (Gen. 4: 1)—which occurred after the fall—says:

After the disobedience, after the banishment from Paradise, then it was that married life began. Before the disobedience, the first people lived like angels, and there was no talk of cohabitation. And how could this be, when they were free of bodily needs? Thus, in the beginning life was virginal; but when, because of the carelessness (of the first people) disobedience appeared and sin entered the world, virginity fled away from them, since they had become unworthy of such a great good, and in its place there entered into effect the law of married life.9

And St. John Damascene writes:

Virginity was practiced in Paradise. … After the fall, … to keep the race from dwindling and being destroyed by death, marriage was devised, so that by the begetting of children the race of men might be preserved. But they may ask: What, then, does “male and female” mean, and “increase and multiply”? To which we shall reply that the “increase and multiply” does not mean increasing by the marriage union exclusively, because if they had kept the commandment unbroken forever, God could have increased the race by some other means. But, since God, Who knows all things before they come to be, saw by His foreknowledge how they were to fall and be condemned to death, He made provision beforehand by creating them male and female and commanding them to increase and multiply.10

In this as in other respects, as we shall see later, man—like the rest of the creation—before the fall was in a state different from that after the fall, even though there is a continuity between these two states provided by God’s foreknowledge of the fall.

It should not be thought, however, that any of the Holy Fathers looked upon marriage as a “necessary evil” or denied that it is a state blessed by God. They regard it as a good thing in our present state of sin, but it is a good thing that is second to the higher state of virginity in which Adam and Eve lived before their fall, and which is shared even now by those who have followed the counsel of the Apostle Paul to be “even as I am” (1 Cor. 7:7-8). St. Gregory of Nyssa, the very Father who teaches so dearly the origin of marriage in our kinship with the beasts, also defends the institution of marriage in the dearest fashion. Thus, in his treatise On Virginity, he writes:

Let no one think that we depreciate marriage as an institution. We are well aware that it is not a stranger to God’s blessing. … But our view of marriage is this: that, while the pursuit of heavenly things should be a man’s first care, yet if he can use the advantages of marriage with sobriety and moderation, he need not despise this way of serving the state. … Marriage is the last stage of our separation from the life that was led in Paradise; marriage is the first thing to be left; it is the first station, as it were, for our departure to Christ.11

“Be fruitful and multiply” are the very words already addressed by God to the creatures of the water (Gen. 1 :22) and indicate man’s kinship with the lower creation and, through his fall, with their mode of sexual generation. But there is also a deeper meaning to these words. St. Basil writes:

There are two kinds of increase: that of the body, and that of the soul. The increase of the soul is the development of knowledge with the aim of perfection; the increase of the body is the development from smallness to normal stature. To the animals deprived of reason He therefore said “increase” according to bodily development, in the sense of completing nature; but to us He said “increase” according to the interior Man, in the line of progress that leads to God. This is what Paul did, stretching out towards that which is ahead, forgetting that which he leaves behind (Phil. 3:13). Such is the increase in spiritual things. … Multiply”: This blessing concerns the Church. Let the Divine word not be limited to a single individual, but let the Gospel of salvation be preached throughout the earth. “Multiply”: to whom is this order addressed?—To those who give birth according to the Gospel. … Thus, these words apply equally well to the animals deprived of reason, but they acquire a particular meaning when we have to do with the being who is in the image with which we have been honored.12

Man is to “have dominion,” also, not only over the external creation, but also over the beast-like passions that lurk within him. St. Basil writes:

You have dominion over every kind of savage beast. But, you will say, do I have savage beasts within me? Yes, many of them. It is even an immense crowd of savage beasts that you carry within yourself. Do not take this as an insult. Is not anger a small wild beast when it barks in your heart? Is it not more savage than the first dog that comes? And is not the trickery that crouches in a treacherous soul more ferocious than the bear of the caverns? … What kind of savage beast do we not have within us? … You were created to have dominion; you are the master of the passions, the master of savage beasts, the master of serpents, the master of birds … Be master of the thoughts within you in order to become master of all beings. Thus, the power which was given us through living beings prepares us to exercise dominion over ourselves.13

The beast-like passions are within us owing to our kinship with the animal creation through our fall. St. Gregory of Nyssa writes:

As brute life first entered into the world, and man, for the reason already mentioned, took something of their nature (I mean the mode of generation), he accordingly took at the same time a share of the other attributes contemplated in that nature; for the likeness of man to God is not found in anger, nor is pleasure a mark of the superior nature; cowardice also, and boldness, and the desire of gain, and the dislike of loss, and all the like, are far removed from that stamp which indicates Divinity. These attributes, then, human nature took to itself from the side of the brutes.14

This is a very profound teaching. The people who believe in evolutionary ideas say, “Man comes from monkeys; therefore, you’re an animal-like creature.” The Holy Fathers, however, say that we are a mingled creation, part heavenly, part earthly. In the earthly side, God made allowance for the animal-like mode of reproduction; and thus we see how animalistic we are when we let passions control us. We have these “animals” within ourselves, but we also have the heavenly side, to which we are striving to get back.

Here we are told that in the beginning, when the earth and all its creatures were still new and man had not fallen, not only men, but even the beasts, were given only green plants for food; the beasts were not meant to be, and in the beginning were not, carnivorous. Of this St. Basil says:

Let the Church neglect nothing: everything is a law. God did not say: “I have given you the fishes for food, I have given you the cattle, the reptiles, the quadrupeds.” It is not for this that He created, says the Scripture. In fact, the first legislation allowed the use of fruits, for we were still judged worthy of Paradise. What is the mystery which is concealed for you under this? To you, to the wild animals and the birds, says the Scripture, fruits, vegetation, and herbs [are given]. … We see, however, many wild animals who do not eat fruits. What fruit does the panther accept to nourish itself? What fruit can the lion satisfy himself with? Nevertheless, these beings, submitting to the law of nature, were nourished by fruits. But when man changed his way of life and departed from the limit which had been assigned him, the Lord, after the Flood, knowing that men were wasteful, allowed them the use of all foods: “Eat all that in the same way as edible plants” (cf. Gen. 9:3). By this allowance, the other animals also received the liberty to eat them. Since then the lion is a carnivore, since then also vultures watch for carrion. For the vultures were not yet looking over the earth at the very moment when the animals were born; in fact, nothing of what had received designation or existence had yet died so that the vultures might eat them. Nature had not yet divided, for it was in all its freshness; hunters did not capture, for such was not yet the practice of men; the beasts, for their part, did not yet tear their prey, for they were not carnivores. … But all followed the way of the swans, and all grazed on the grass of the meadow. … Such was the first creation, and such will be the restoration after this. Man will return to his ancient constitution in rejecting malice, a life weighed down with cares, the slavery of the soul with regard to daily worries. When he has renounced all this, he will return to that paradisal life which was not enslaved to the passions of the flesh, which is free, the life of closeness to God, a partaker of the life of the angels.15

This life of the original creation, it should be noted, is not the life of Paradise, into which man has not yet been led; it is the life of the earth outside of Paradise, which God has already blessed as man’s dwelling-place after his fall. St. Ephraim the Syrian writes of this:

God blessed our first ancestors on the earth, because, even before they sinned He prepared the earth for their dwelling; for, before they sinned, God knew that they would sin. … He blessed [man] before settling him in Paradise, on the earth, so that by the blessing, which was preceded by His goodness, He might weaken the power of the curse which soon struck the earth.16

In the beginning, therefore, before man’s fall, the whole earth was like a kind of Paradise. St. Symeon the New Theologian teaches:

God, in the beginning, before He planted Paradise and gave it over to the first-created ones, in five days set in order the earth and what is on it, and the heaven and what is in it. And on the Sixth Day He created Adam and placed him as lord and king of the whole visible creation. Then there was not yet Paradise. But this world was from God as a kind of Paradise, although it was material and sensuous. … God gave it over to the authority of Adam and all his descendants, as the Divine Scripture says (Gen. 1:26-30). … God gave over to man at the beginning this whole world as a kind of Paradise. … Adam was made with a body that was incorrupt, although material and not yet spiritual, and was placed by the Creator God as an immortal king over an incorrupt world, not only over Paradise, but also over the whole of creation which was under the heavens. … This whole creation in the beginning was incorrupt and was created by God in the manner of Paradise. But later it was subjected by God to corruption, and submitted to the futility of men.17

That is a remarkable view of the original creation.

The first chapter of Genesis is entirely devoted to the Six Days of Creation. In chapter 2, the creation of man is described in more detail.

One might say that chapter 1 describes the creation of humanity, both in the exalted sense as God’s image, and in its divided, earthly aspect as male and female; while in chapter 2 the specific creation of the first man Adam and the first woman Eve is set forth. Some of the other creations of the Six Days are also mentioned in chapter 2, but not in the strict chronological order of the first chapter. We should keep this in mind to avoid the elementary mistakes of rationalist critics who find “contradictions” between these two chapters and suppose there must be different authors of them.

This is a brief description of the state of the world before the appearance of man, emphasizing that without God there would have been nothing, that He brought everything into being out of nothing. St. John Chrysostom comments on this passage:

When [the Scripture] speaks of heaven and earth, it understands everything together that is in heaven and on earth. Therefore, just as in the account of the creatures [in chapter 1] it does not speak about all of them in order, but having mentioned the most important, it does not relate to us about each one in detail—so also this whole book, although it contains in itself much else, it calls the book of “the generations of the heaven and of the earth,” allowing us to conclude from the mention of them that in this book is to be included everything visible that is in heaven and on earth. … The Holy Spirit shows … what occurred first and what afterwards, and likewise the fact that the earth produced its seeds by the word and command of the Lord and began to give birth without needing either the cooperation of the sun, nor the moisture of rain, nor the tilling of man, who was not yet created … This [passage] means that what had not existed previously received existence, and what had not been appeared suddenly by His word and command. … All this is so that we might know that the earth, for the germination of its seeds, had no need of the cooperation of other elements, but the command of the Creator was sufficient for it.18

Here we are given as much as we can know of the how of man’s creation. There can be no doubt that the Holy Fathers understood by “dust” the literal dust of the earth; but when they speak of the “hands” of God which “took” this dust, they mean to emphasize the great care of God and His direct action in this work Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus writes:

When we hear in the account of Moses that God took dust from the earth and formed man, and we seek out the meaning of this utterance, we discover in it the special good disposition of God towards the human race. For the great Prophet notes, in his description of the creation, that God created all the other creatures by His word, while man He created with His own hands. … We do not say that the Divinity has hands … but we affirm that every one of these expressions indicates a greater care on God’s part for man than for the other creatures.19

St. Basil states that this verse emphasizes how different in his origin is man from the animals:

Above, the text says that God created; here it says how God created. If the verse had simply said that God created, you could have believed that He created [man] as He did the beasts, the wild animals, the plants, the grass. This is why, to avoid your placing him in the class of wild animals, the Divine word has made known the particular art which God has used for you: God took of the “dust from the earth.”20

The same Father tells of the difference between the “creation” of man and his “fashioning”:

God created the inward man, and fashioned the outward man. Fashioning is suited to the clay, and creation to that which is in the image. Thus, the flesh was fashioned, but the soul was created.21

The creation of man indicates both his greatness and his nothingness:

God took “dust from the earth” and “formed man.” In this word I have discovered the two affirmations that man is nothing and that man is great. If you consider nature alone, he is nothing and has no value; but if you regard the honor with which he has been treated, man is something great. … If you consider what it is that [God] took, what is man? But if you reflect on the One Who fashioned, what a great thing is man! Thus at the same time he is nothing because of the material, and great because of the honor (St. Basil).22

In the usual interpretation of the Holy Fathers, what was “breathed” into man was his soul. St. John Chrysostom writes:

‘And God formed man of dust from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul”! Moses used such a crude manner of speaking because he was speaking to people who could not listen to him otherwise, as we are able to do; and also to show us that it was pleasing to God’s love of mankind to make this thing created out of earth a participant of the rational nature of the soul, through which this living creature was manifest as excellent and perfect. “And He breathed into his face the breath of life”: that is, the inbreathing communicated to the one created out of earth the power of life, and thus the nature of the soul was formed. Therefore Moses added: “And man became a living soul”; that which was created out of dust, having received the inbreathing, the breath of life, “became a living soul.” What does “a living soul” mean? An active soul, which has the members of the body as the implements of its activities, submissive to its will.23

St. Seraphim of Sarov has a rather different interpretation of this passage of Scripture; in his “Conversation with Motovilov” he states that what was made from the dust of the earth was the entire human nature-body, soul, and spirit (“spirit” being the higher part of the soul)-and that what was breathed into this nature was the grace of the Holy Spirit. This is a different perspective on the creation of man (found in few other Fathers), and does not really contradict the usual interpretation that it was the soul that was breathed into man; those who hold the latter view also believe that man was created in the grace of God.

St. Gregory the Theologian speaks of the exalted nature of man, the highest part of whose nature comes not from earth but directly from God:

The soul is the breath of God, and while being heavenly, it endures being mixed with what is of the dust. It is a light enclosed in a cave, but still it is divine and inextinguishable. … The Word spoke, and having taken a part of the newly created earth, with His immortal hands formed my image and imparted to it His life; because He sent into it the Spirit, which is a ray of the invisible Divinity.24

Such expressions, however, should not lead us to the false opinion that the soul itself is Divine, or a part of God. St. John Chrysostom writes about this:

Certain senseless ones, being drawn away by their own conceptions, without thinking of anything in a God-befitting manner, and without paying any attention to the adaptation of the expressions (of Scripture), dare to say that the soul has proceeded from the Essence of God. O frenzy! O folly! How many paths of perdition has the devil opened up for those who will to serve him! … Thus, when you hear that God “breathed into his face the breath of life,” understand that, just as He brought forth the bodiless powers, so also He was pleased that the body of man, created out of dust, should have a rational soul which could make use of the bodily members.25

There are those today who would like to use the order of man’s creation in this verse to “prove” that man “evolved” from lower beasts: that his body or earthly nature came first in time, and his soul or state of being in God’s grace came second. Such an interpretation is quite impossible if we accept the Patristic understanding of man’s creation.

To begin with, we have seen that in the Patristic view the “days” of creation—whatever their precise “length” may have been—were very short periods of time; that God’s work in each of the days was swift, indeed, instantaneous; that at the end of the Six Days the world was still “new” and not yet given over to corruption and death.

Secondly, the Holy Fathers themselves insist that the creation of man is not to be understood chronologically; it is rather an ontological description that tells the makeup of man, but not the chronological order in which it occurred. When St. John Chrysostom states that “before” the inbreathing man was a “lifeless dummy,”26 or St. Seraphim states that he was not a “lifeless dummy” but a living and active human being—we must understand the word “before” in the ontological sense of “without.” But the creation of man itself—both body and soul, together with the grace in which man was made-was instantaneous. The Fathers found it necessary to set forth this teaching quite explicitly because in ancient times there were two opposed but equally false teachings on this subject: one, that of the Origenists, who stated that souls “preexisted” the creation of bodies and only entered their bodies as a “fall” from a higher state; and the other, that the body preexisted the soul and was therefore of a nobler nature. St. John Damascene teaches:

From the earth He formed his body and by His own inbreathing gave him a rational and understanding soul, which last we say is the divine image. … The body and the soul were formed at the same time-not one before and the other afterwards, as the ravings of Origen would have it.27

And St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches in more detail (referring both to the original creation of man and the conception of individual men today), after refuting the opposite error of Origen:

Others, on the contrary, marking the order of the creation ofman as stated by Moses, say chat the soul is second to the body in order of time, since God first took dust from the earth and formed man, and then animated the being thus formed by His breath. And by this argument they prove chat the flesh is more noble than the soul, that which was previously formed [more noble] than that which was afterwards infused into it. … Nor again are we in our doctrine to begin by making up man like a clay figure, and to say chat the soul came into being for the sake of this; for surely in that case the intellectual nature would be shown to be less precious than the clay figure. But as man is one, the being consisting of soul and body, we are to suppose that the beginning of his existence is one, common to both parts, so that he should not be found to be antecedent and posterior to himself, as if the bodily element were first in point of time, and the other were a later addition. … For as our nature is conceived as twofold, according to the apostolic teaching, made up of the visible man and the hidden man, if the one came first and the other supervened, the power of Him that made us will be shown to be in some way imperfect, as not being completely sufficient for the whole task at once, but dividing the work, and busying itself with each of the halves in turn.28

The idea of the “evolution” of man from a lower animal cannot be harmonized with the Patristic and Scriptural view of man’s creation, but requires a sharp break with it: If man “evolves” solely according to the laws of nature, then his rational nature, his soul, the image of God, differs not qualitatively but only quantitatively from the beasts; he is then a creature only of the earth, and there is no room for the Patristic view that he is partly of earth and partly of heaven, a “mixture” of two worlds, to use the phrase of St. Gregory the Theologian. But if, to escape such earthly thinking, a Christian evolutionist admits a Divine creation of man’s soul—“when his body was ready for it,” as some say—then he not only parts company with scientific thinkers, who will not admit “Divine” acts into their conceptual framework, but he also presents no consistent Christian outlook, mixing scientific speculations with “revealed” knowledge in a most haphazard way. In the Patristic-Scriptural view, the entire Six Days of Creation is a series of Divine acts; in the uniformitarian scientific view, the origins of things (as far back as scientists think they can be traced) are nothing but natural processes. These two views are as opposed as any two views can be, and any mixture of the two must be purely arbitrary and fanciful.

Footnotes

  1. St. Basil, On the Origin of Man 1.3-4, H. de Lubac, J. Danielou et al., eds. Sources Chretiennes. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1941—., 160.171-75 (Hereafter SC.) [Pocket Patristics Series. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977—., 30, pp. 32-33 (Hereafter PPS.)]. ↩

  2. See Isaiah 9:6 KJV ↩

  3. St. John Chrysostom, Eight Homilies on Genesis 2.1-2, Tvoreniya 4, pp. 735-37 [trans. Robert C. Hill, pp. 43-44]. ↩

  4. St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 45: Second Oration on Pascha 6-7, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church P. Schaff et al., eds. Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1952-1956; Reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994, 2 7, pp. 424-425. (Hereafter NPNF.) ↩

  5. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16.10, NPNF 2 5, p. 405. ↩

  6. St. Basil, On the Origin of Man 1.16-17, SC 160.207-11 [PPS 30, pp. 43-45]. ↩

  7. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16.7-9, 17.4, NPNF 2 5, pp. 405, 407. ↩

  8. That is, the whole sexual function [in man] is seen to be taken from the animal creation. It was not meant to be that way in the beginning. — Bl. Seraphim ↩

  9. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 18.4, Tvoreniya 4, pp. 160-61 [Fathers of the Church vol. 82, pp. 10-11 (18.12)]. ↩

  10. St. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 4.24, Fathers of the Church vol. 37, p. 394 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947—). ↩

  11. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity 8, 12, NPNF 2 5, pp. 352-53, 358. ↩

  12. St. Basil, On the Origin of Man 2.5, SC 160.235-39 [PPS 30, pp. 51-52]. ↩

  13. Ibid. 1.19, SC 160.217-21 [PPS 30, pp. 46-47]. ↩

  14. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 18, NPNF 2 5, pp. 407-8. ↩

  15. St. Basil, On the Origin of Man 2.6-7, SC 160.239-45 [PPS 30, pp. 52-54]. ↩

  16. St. Ephraim, Commentary on Genesis 1, Tvoreniya 6, pp. 304-5 [Fathers of the Church vol. 91, p. 95 (1.31.2)]. ↩

  17. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Homily 45.1,4, in The Sin of Adam, pp. 64, 67, 75 [Fr. Seraphim Rose, trans. St. Symeon the New Theologian: The First-Created Man, pp. 87-88, 90, 103. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994. Originally published in 1979 under the title The Sin of Adam and Our Redemption]. ↩

  18. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 12.2, Tvoreniya 4, pp. 95-96 [Fathers of the Church vol. 74, pp. 158-160 (12.4-6)]. ↩

  19. Blessed Theodoret, quoted in Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow and Kolomena, Pravoslavno-dogmaticheskoye bogosloviye (Orthodox dogmatic theology), vol. 1, pp. 430-43. ↩

  20. St. Basil, On the Origin of Man 2.4, SC 160.233 [PPS 30, p. 51]. ↩

  21. Ibid. 2.3, SC 160.233 [PPS 30, p. 50]. ↩

  22. Ibid. 2.2, SC 160.229-31 [PPS 30, p. 49]. ↩

  23. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 12.5, Tvoreniya 4, pp. 99-100 [Fathers of the Church vol. 74, pp. 165-166 (12.15)]. ↩

  24. St. Gregory the Theologian, Dogmatic Poem 8: On the Soul, lines 1-3, 70-73, Tvoreniya 2, pp. 31, 33 [PG 37.446A-447A, 452A; PPS 21, pp. 62, 65]. ↩

  25. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 13.2, Tvoreniya 4, pp. 103-4 [Fathers of the Church vol. 74, pp. 72-73 (13.7, 9)]. ↩

  26. Ibid. 12.5, p. 100 [Fathers of the Church vol. 74, p. 166 (12.16)]. ↩

  27. St. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 2.12, Fathers of the Church vol. 37, p. 235 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947—). ↩

  28. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 28.1, 29.1-2, NPNF 2 5, pp. 419-21. ↩