In the previous two posts I looked briefly at Augustine’s “Literal Meaning of Genesis” and its use by theistic evolutionists to bolster their case for a fairly figurative reading of Genesis. It should be stated clearly that the main question we are asking is “what is the most natural interpretation of Genesis?” We ask this particularly in the context of how Augustine understood Genesis some 1400 years before Darwin
The point put forward by some advocates of theistic evolution is that even prior to Darwin
As we have seen, to some degree, Augustine did allow that in the description of the initial creation of light, expanse, heaven and earth, the text is difficult to interpret and as such it is difficult to link a phrase from the text to a natural corollary with any degree of certainty. But what Augustine did NOT say is that the text of Genesis from the completion of the initial creation forward was difficult to understand or that any of the events described were less than historical. The best reading of the text for Augustine was the plainest.
What TE advocates fail to mention is that Augustine believed in a 6000 year old earth, in the historicity of Adam and Eve, in the historicity of the fall into sin, in the direct cause-effect relationship of sin and death, and even in the historicity of the Genesis flood. In other words, Augustine’s understanding of the text was very clearly in the camp of most Young Earth Creationism and not at all in the camp of TE. (Origen, who allegorized most of the Old Testament might be a more likely early exegete to whom TE folk can appeal, but Augustine – no.)
Even the title of Book 12 Chapter 10 is telling: “Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World's Past” Augustine here argues that secular records of the duration of certain kingdoms do not agree with each other, so he leans to the “sacred writings” of scripture, stating:
“They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.”
The point here is not to say that Augustine was perfectly correct in stating a 6000 year age is demanded by the text. The point is that he understood from the text that the Earth was younger than the prevailing wisdom of his day. (YEC advocates today generally allow for up to 20,000 years, still a far cry from 4.6 billion.)
In Book 12 Chapter 21, titled “That There Was Created at First But One Individual, and that the Human Race Was Created in Him” Augustine makes it clear that the entire human race, from a plain reading of the Biblical text, descended from a single human individual:
“And therefore God created only one single man …that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection. And indeed He did not even create the woman that was to be given him as his wife, as he created the man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive from one man.”
Note that his argument includes the idea that the human race is unified in the connection to a single original parent. Eve was created from Adam, preserving this unity. He suggests that not only the detail of the single parent is important, but the meaning implied by the detail is equally important.
He continues this argument in Book 12 Chapter 27, “That the Whole Plenitude of the Human Race Was Embraced in the First Man, and that God There Saw the Portion of It Which Was to Be Honored and Rewarded, and that Which Was to Be Condemned and Punished”. He writes:
“…Among the terrestrial animals man was made by Him in His own image, and, for the reason I have given, was made one individual…And human nature has nothing more appropriate…than the remembrance of that first parent of us all, whom God was pleased to create alone, that all men might be derived from one, and that they might thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude.”
Again, there is value in the implication of the idea of a single set of parents. We are one race. To corrupt the unity of the race is destructive and that unity is grounded in the single parent we all share. If our ancestors are diverse, then our unity is difficult to assert.
The most critical issue in the minds of YEC advocates, not only as a matter of exegesis but as a plank in a way of understanding the meaning of life is the relationship of death to sin. Augustine is absolutely clear on this point. In Book 13 Chapter 1, “Of the Fall of the First Man, Through Which Mortality Has Been Contracted” Augustine states that humans differ from angels. Angels are immortal even if they become corrupted. Humans who fall into corruption are condemned with mortality:
“…the natural order requires that we now discuss the fall of the first man …and of the origin and propagation of human death. For God had not made man like the angels, in such a condition that, even though they had sinned, they could none the more die. He had so made them, that if they discharged the obligations of obedience, an angelic immortality and a blessed eternity might ensue, without the intervention of death; but if they disobeyed, death should be visited on them with just sentence— which, too, has been spoken to in the preceding book.”
Many TE advocates make a case that the death that is incurred as a result of sin is a “spiritual” death, separation from God. Physical death to them is a natural occurrence, necessary to evolutionary progress and attested to by long ages and fossil evidence. Therefore, it is wrong to tie physical death to the curse brought about by human rebellion through a “wooden” reading of Genesis. Augustine would not allow for such a view. In Book 13 Chapter 2 “Of that Death Which Can Affect an Immortal Soul, and of that to Which the Body is Subject” he writes:
“The death, then, of the soul takes place when God forsakes it, as the death of the body when the soul forsakes it. Therefore the death of both— that is, of the whole man— occurs when the soul, forsaken by God, forsakes the body…And this death of the whole man is followed by that which, on the authority of the divine oracles, we call the second death. This the Saviour referred to when He said, Fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10:28)”
Augustine is quite clear that human rebellion leads not only to the second death, a spiritual and eternal separation from God which includes torment, but to physical death as the result of sin. This physical death, says Augustine, is a punishment and not a natural part of the created order. Even those who are “good”, those who are redeemed, still face this physical death as a consequence of general human rebellion. Death is never a “good” thing. And death is passed on from generation to generation.
Book 13 Chapter 3 “Whether Death, Which by the Sin of Our First Parents Has Passed Upon All Men, is the Punishment of Sin, Even to the Good”:
“But a question not to be shirked arises: Whether in very truth death, which separates soul and body, is good to the good? For if it be, how has it come to pass that such a thing should be the punishment of sin? For the first men would not have suffered death had they not sinned. …Wherefore we must say that the first men were indeed so created, that if they had not sinned, they would not have experienced any kind of death; but that, having become sinners, they were so punished with death, that whatsoever sprang from their stock should also be punished with the same death.”
There is no way to read Augustine and reconcile him to the idea that death as not a penalty for sin in the way that TE champions would attempt to read scripture. Augustine in his day was dealing with a different set of challenges to the faith, philosophers who viewed the material world as evil and thus concluded that death, freeing the soul from the shackles of the body, is a good thing. Augustine insists that the body is good in its original state and not a burden or a prison, rather the corruption of the body is a burden and a natural consequence of rebellion against God. The separation of soul from body is a direct punishment for sin.
Book 13 Chapter 16.— “Concerning the Philosophers Who Think that the Separation of Soul and Body is Not Penal, Though Plato Represents the Supreme Deity as Promising to the Inferior Gods that They Shall Never Be Dismissed from Their Bodies.”:
“But the philosophers against whom we are defending the city of God, that is, His Church seem to themselves to have good cause to deride us, because we say that the separation of the soul from the body is to be held as part of man's punishment. For they suppose that the blessedness of the soul then only is complete, when it is quite denuded of the body, and returns to God a pure and simple, and, as it were, naked soul.”
Augustine at this point argues not from scripture but from the contradictions such philosophers have with Plato himself, but his point remains. The body is good, death is a punishment for sin, and resurrection of the body is a component of the true faith.
Book 13 Chapter 23:
“What We are to Understand by the Animal and Spiritual Body; Or of Those Who Die in Adam, And of Those Who are Made Alive in Christ.”
Augustine takes Paul’s linking of Adam to Christ at face value, and makes the “principle” of death present tense, even though we may live physically for a time:
…And therefore the apostle does not say, The body indeed is doomed to die on account of sin, but he says, The body indeed is dead (present tense) because of sin. Then he adds, But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwells in you. Romans 8:10-11
And he makes a distinction between the first and second death, both of which are part of judgment on sin:
…But the second death is not common to all, those being excepted who were called according to His purpose. For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren. Romans 8:28-29 Those the grace of God has, by a Mediator, delivered from the second death.
Augustine argues for the historicity of some of the more unusual characters in the Old Testament by connecting the Biblical record to the accounts of secular historians.
In Book 15 Chapter 9 “Of the Long Life and Greater Stature of the Antediluvians.”
“…And so, too, they do not believe that the size of men's bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the same, when he speaks of that huge stone which had been fixed as a landmark, and which a strong man of those ancient times snatched up as he fought, and ran, and hurled, and cast it…thus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men.”
He speaks of actual remains of antediluvian beings, bones as a link to the past:
“…But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchres, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man's molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it.”
He plainly states we should trust the biblical account, even though many in his day denied it:
“…we are not on this account to withhold our faith from the sacred history, whose statements of past fact we are the more inexcusable in discrediting, as we see the accuracy of its prediction of what was future.”
Regarding the Genesis Flood, Augustine counts it as history, not mere “narrative” in Book 15 Chapter 27, titled: “Of the Ark and the Deluge, and that We Cannot Agree with Those Who Receive the Bare History, But Reject the Allegorical Interpretation, Nor with Those Who Maintain the Figurative and Not the Historical Meaning.”
His argument here is critical to the position of the TE crowd, who wish to argue that one can retain the moral, ethical and spiritual meaning of the Genesis narratives while conceding their historicity. Augustine is crystal clear that it is wrong to separate the two. To read Genesis for mere fact and miss the deeper meaning is wrong. It is equally wrong to look for meaning while denying the historical truth.
“Yet no one ought to suppose either that these things were written for no purpose, or that we should study only the historical truth, apart from any allegorical meanings; or, on the contrary, that they are only allegories, and that there were no such facts at all, or that, whether it be so or no, there is here no prophecy of the church.
“…And since this is so, if not even the most audacious will presume to assert that these things were written without a purpose, or that though the events really happened they mean nothing, or that they did not really happen, but are only allegory, or that at all events they are far from having any figurative reference to the church; if it has been made out that, on the other hand, we must rather believe that there was a wise purpose in their being committed to memory and to writing, and that they did happen, and have a significance, and that this significance has a prophetic reference to the church, then this book, having served this purpose, may now be closed, that we may go on to trace in the history subsequent to the deluge the courses of the two cities—the earthly, that lives according to men, and the heavenly, that lives according to God.”
Without question, Augustine accepted the historicity of Genesis from the creation of Adam to the death of Joseph. His treatment of the days before Adam leaves room for a degree of interpretation about the method of creation, but not about its supernatural character.
The point is this. To use Augustine to bolster an approach to scripture that renders Genesis as a story compatible with naturalism and common descent is highly misleading. Those who do so need to fess up. Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis is very similar to the interpretation put forth by YEC and is nothing at all like the interpretation suggested by TE. Whether Augustine was right or wrong is a separate matter, but one cannot honestly suggest his understanding of the Biblical text could ever coincide with TE.
In addition, it cannot be argued that such a "literalism" regarding Genesis is merely an aberration that resulted from the modernist/fundamentalist controversy of the early 20th century. Augustine is stating his view of the best interpretation of the text, 1200 years before Darwin and in contrast to those around him who argued for an older Earth and argued that death was a "good" and not a punishment for sin.
Those are Augustine's views. My own views, though just opinions of a layman, will follow.
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