History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom Part 3

These men have had the courage to point out these facts and to connect them with the truth that these Chaldean and Babylonian myths, legends, and theories were far earlier than those of the Hebrews, which so strikingly resemble them, and which we have in our sacred books; and they have also shown us how natural it was that the Jewish accounts of the creation should have been obtained at that remote period when the earliest Hebrews were among the Chaldeans, and how the great Hebrew poetic accounts of creation were drawn either from the sacred traditions of these earlier peoples or from antecedent sources common to various ancient nations.

In a summary which for profound thought and fearless integrity does honour not only to himself but to the great position which he holds, the Rev. Dr. Driver, Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church at Oxford, has recently stated the case fully and fairly. Having pointed out the fact that the Hebrews were one people out of many who thought upon the origin of the universe, he says that they "framed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for themselves or borrowed those of their neighbours"; that "of the theories current in a.s.syria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved, and these exhibit points of resemblance with the biblical narrative sufficient to warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of tradition."

After giving some extracts from the Chaldean creation tablets he says: "In the light of these facts it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the biblical narrative is drawn from the same source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best human sources available.... The materials which with other nations were combined into the crudest physical theories or a.s.sociated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become the vehicle of profound religious truth."

Not less honourable to the sister university and to himself is the statement recently made by the Rev. Dr. Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He says that to suppose that a Christian "must either renounce his confidence in the achievements of scientific research or abandon his faith in Scripture is a monstrous perversion of Christian freedom." He declares: "The old position is no longer tenable; a new position has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen, and hopefully held." He then goes on to compare the Hebrew story of creation with the earlier stories developed among kindred peoples, and especially with the pre-existing a.s.syro-Babylonian cosmogony, and shows that they are from the same source. He points out that any attempt to explain particular features of the story into harmony with the modern scientific ideas necessitates "a non-natural" interpretation; but he says that, if we adopt a natural interpretation, "we shall consider that the Hebrew description of the visible universe is unscientific as judged by modern standards, and that it shares the limitations of the imperfect knowledge of the age at which it was committed to writing." Regarding the account in Genesis of man's physical origin, he says that it "is expressed in the simple terms of prehistoric legend, of unscientific pictorial description."

In these statements and in a mult.i.tude of others made by eminent Christian investigators in other countries is indicated what the victory is which has now been fully won over the older theology.

Thus, from the a.s.syrian researches as well as from other sources, it has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at the leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of creation with which for nearly two thousand years all scientific discoveries have had to be "reconciled"--the accounts which blocked the way of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and Laplace--were simply transcribed or evolved from a ma.s.s of myths and legends largely derived by the Hebrews from their ancient relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a monotheistic sense, imperfectly welded together, and then thrown into poetic forms in the sacred books which we have inherited.

On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to the physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the universe, as we at present know it, is the result of an evolutionary process--that is, of the gradual working of physical laws upon an early condition of matter; on the other hand, we have other great groups of men devoted to historical, philological, and archaeological science whose researches all converge toward the conclusion that our sacred accounts of creation were the result of an evolution from an early chaos of rude opinion.

The great body of theologians who have so long resisted the conclusions of the men of science have claimed to be fighting especially for "the truth of Scripture," and their final answer to the simple conclusions of science regarding the evolution of the material universe has been the cry, "The Bible is true." And they are right--though in a sense n.o.bler than they have dreamed. Science, while conquering them, has found in our Scriptures a far n.o.bler truth than that literal historical exactness for which theologians have so long and so vainly contended. More and more as we consider the results of the long struggle in this field we are brought to the conclusion that the inestimable value of the great sacred books of the world is found in their revelation of the steady striving of our race after higher conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations, both in morals and religion. Unfolding and exhibiting this long-continued effort, each of the great sacred books of the world is precious, and all, in the highest sense, are true. Not one of them, indeed, conforms to the measure of what mankind has now reached in historical and scientific truth; to make a claim to such conformity is folly, for it simply exposes those who make it and the books for which it is made to loss of their just influence.

That to which the great sacred books of the world conform, and our own most of all, is the evolution of the highest conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations of our race from its childhood through the great turning-points in its history. Herein lies the truth of all bibles, and especially of our own. Of vast value they indeed often are as a record of historical outward fact; recent researches in the East are constantly increasing this value; but it is not for this that we prize them most: they are eminently precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into n.o.ble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in subst.i.tuting a new heaven and a new earth for the old--the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation--has added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely inspired.

In the light of these two evolutions, then--one of the visible universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend--science and theology, if the master minds in both are wise, may at last be reconciled. A great step in this reconciliation was recently seen at the main centre of theological thought among English-speaking people, when, in the collection of essays ent.i.tled Lux Mundi, emanating from the college established in these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Oxford, the legendary character of the creation accounts in our sacred books was acknowledged, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked, "May not the Holy Spirit at times have made use of myth and legend?"(10)

(10) For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of Genesis, by the Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in the Expositor for January, 1886; for the second series of citations, see the Early Narratives of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 1892. For evidence that even the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have come to discard the old literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as a "disproved theory of creation," see Princ.i.p.al John Tulloch, in Contemporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland--especially page 550.

II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN.

In one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediaeval gla.s.s-stainer has represented the Almighty as busily engaged in creating the animals, and there has just left the divine hands an elephant fully accoutred, with armour, harness, and housings, ready-for war. Similar representations appear in illuminated ma.n.u.scripts and even in early printed books, and, as the culmination of the whole, the Almighty is shown as fas.h.i.+oning the first man from a hillock of clay and extracting from his side, with evident effort, the first woman.

This view of the general process of creation had come from far, appearing under varying forms in various ancient cosmogonies. In the Egyptian temples at Philae and Denderah may still be seen representations of the Nile G.o.ds modelling lumps of clay into men, and a similar work is ascribed in the a.s.syrian tablets to the G.o.ds of Babylonia. Pa.s.sing into our own sacred books, these ideas became the starting point of a vast new development of theology.(11)

(11) For representations of Egyptian G.o.ds creating men out of lumps of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p. 156; for the Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals, see ibid., p. 543; see also George Smith, Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition, pp. 36, 72, and 93; also for similar legends in other ancient nations, Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, pp. 17 et seq.; for mediaeval representations of the creation of man and woman, see Didron, Iconographie, pp. 35, 178, 224, 537.

The fathers of the Church generally received each of the two conflicting creation legends in Genesis literally, and then, having done their best to reconcile them with each other and to mould them together, made them the final test of thought upon the universe and all things therein. At the beginning of the fourth century Lactantius struck the key-note of this mode of subordinating all other things in the study of creation to the literal text of Scripture, and he enforces his view of the creation of man by a bit of philology, saying the final being created "is called man because he is made from the ground--h.o.m.o ex humo."

In the second half of the same century this view as to the literal acceptance of the sacred text was rea.s.serted by St. Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that "Moses opened his mouth and poured forth what G.o.d had said to him." But a greater than either of them fastened this idea into the Christian theologies. St. Augustine, preparing his Commentary on the Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous sentence the law which has lasted in the Church until our own time: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind." The vigour of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the centuries: "Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas."

Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of influential churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for a modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held the minds of men firmly.

The great Dominican encyclopaedist, Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror of Nature, while mixing ideas brought from Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood firmly by the first of the accounts given in Genesis, and a.s.signed the special virtue of the number six as a reason why all things were created in six days; and in the later Middle Ages that eminent authority, Cardinal d' Ailly, accepted everything regarding creation in the sacred books literally. Only a faint dissent is seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this later period, who, while giving, in his book on the beginning of things, a full length woodcut showing the Almighty in the act of extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of new-formed Nature in the background, leans in his writings, like St. Augustine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of matter.

At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source of natural science. The allegorical and mystical interpretations of earlier theologians he utterly rejected. "Why," he asks, "should Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical creatures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and of a visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped? Moses calls things by their right names, as we ought to do.... I hold that the animals took their being at once upon the word of G.o.d, as did also the fishes in the sea."

Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of creation given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those who, by taking another view than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to expect a judge who will annihilate them." He insists that all species of animals were created in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and that no new species has ever appeared since. He dwells on the production of birds from the water as resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds, "If the question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that water is more akin to air than the earth is." As to difficulties in the scriptural account of creation, he tells us that G.o.d "wished by these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with astonishment."

The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly held this view. In the seventeenth century Bossuet threw his vast authority in its favour, and in his Discourse on Universal History, which has remained the foundation not only of theological but of general historical teaching in France down to the present republic, we find him calling attention to what he regards as the culminating act of creation, and a.s.serting that, literally, for the creation of man earth was used, and "the finger of G.o.d applied to corruptible matter."

The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently. In the seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time, attempted to reconcile the two main legends in Genesis by saying that of the "clean sort of beasts there were seven of every kind created, three couples for breeding and the odd one for Adam's sacrifice on his fall, which G.o.d foresaw"; and that of unclean beasts only one couple was created.

So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation that in these days it can scarcely be imagined. The Almighty was represented in theological literature, in the pictured Bibles, and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and venerable Nuremberg toymaker. At times the accounts in Genesis were ill.u.s.trated with even more literal exactness; thus, in connection with a well-known pa.s.sage in the sacred text, the Creator was shown as a tailor, seated, needle in hand, diligently sewing together skins of beasts into coats for Adam and Eve.

Such representations presented no difficulties to the docile minds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period; and in the same spirit, when the discovery of fossils began to provoke thought, these were declared to be "models of his works approved or rejected by the great Artificer,"

"outlines of future creations," "sports of Nature," or "objects placed in the strata to bring to naught human curiosity"; and this kind of explanation lingered on until in our own time an eminent naturalist, in his anxiety to save the literal account in Genesis, has urged that Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata, scattered the fossils through them, scratched the glacial furrows upon them, spread over them the marks of erosion by water, and set Niagara pouring--all in an instant--thus mystifying the world "for some inscrutable purpose, but for his own glory."(12)

(12) For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Inst.i.t., lib. ii, cap.

xi, in Migne, tome vi, pp. 311, 312; for St. Augustine's great phrase, see the De Genes. ad litt., ii, 5; for St. Ambrose, see lib. i, cap. ii; for Vincent of Beauvais, see the Speculum Naturale, lib. i, cap. ii, and lib. ii, cap. xv and x.x.x; also Bourgeat, Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856, especially chaps. vii, xii, and xvi; for Cardinal d"ailly, see the Imago Mundi, and for Reisch, see the various editions of the Margarita Philosophica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften, ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i; for Calvin's view of the creation of the animals, including the immutability of Species, see the Comm. in Gen., tome i of his Opera omnia, Amst., 1671, cap. i, v, xx, p. 5, also cap. ii, v, ii, p. 8, and elsewhere; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur l'Histoire universelle (in his OEuvres, tome v, Paris, 1846); for Lightfoot, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822; for Bede, see the Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, p.21; for Mr.

Gosse'smodern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos, London, 1857, pa.s.sim.

The next important development of theological reasoning had regard to the DIVISIONS of the animal kingdom.

Naturally, one of the first divisions which struck the inquiring mind was that between useful and noxious creatures, and the question therefore occurred, How could a good G.o.d create tigers and serpents, thorns and thistles? The answer was found in theological considerations upon SIN. To man's first disobedience all woes were due. Great men for eighteen hundred years developed the theory that before Adam's disobedience there was no death, and therefore neither ferocity nor venom.

Some typical utterances in the evolution of this doctrine are worthy of a pa.s.sing glance. St. Augustine expressly confirmed and emphasized the view that the vegetable as well as the animal kingdom was cursed on account of man's sin. Two hundred years later this utterance had been echoed on from father to father of the Church until it was caught by Bede; he declared that before man's fall animals were harmless, but were made poisonous or hurtful by Adam's sin, and he said, "Thus fierce and poisonous animals were created for terrifying man (because G.o.d foresaw that he would sin), in order that he might be made aware of the final punishment of h.e.l.l."

In the twelfth century this view was incorporated by Peter Lombard into his great theological work, the Sentences, which became a text-book of theology through the middle ages. He affirmed that "no created things would have been hurtful to man had he not sinned; they became hurtful for the sake of terrifying and punis.h.i.+ng vice or of proving and perfecting virtue; they were created harmless, and on account of sin became hurtful."

This theological theory regarding animals was brought out in the eighteenth century with great force by John Wesley. He declared that before Adam's sin "none of these attempted to devour or in any wise hurt one another"; "the spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie in wait for blood." Not only Wesley, but the eminent Dr. Adam Clarke and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas had the very greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and even among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own time, geology revealed the remains of vast mult.i.tudes of carnivorous creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by science over theology in this field.

A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the belief drawn by sundry old commentators from the condemnation of the serpent in Genesis--a belief, indeed, perfectly natural, since it was evidently that of the original writers of the account preserved in the first of our sacred books. This belief was that, until the tempting serpent was cursed by the Almighty, all serpents stood erect, walked, and talked.

This belief was handed down the ages as part of "the sacred deposit of the faith" until Watson, the most prolific writer of the evangelical reform in the eighteenth century and the standard theologian of the evangelical party, declared: "We have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its transformation; that he was then degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form." Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method diligently pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly two thousand years; but this "sacred deposit" also faded away when the geologists found abundant remains of fossil serpents dating from periods long before the appearance of man.

Troublesome questions also arose among theologians regarding animals cla.s.sed as "superfluous." St. Augustine was especially exercised thereby. He says: "I confess I am ignorant why mice and frogs were created, or flies and worms.... All creatures are either useful, hurtful, or superfluous to us.... As for the hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, or terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this life." As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the universe is thereby completed and finished." Luther, who followed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to follow him fully in this. To him a fly was not merely superfluous, it was noxious--sent by the devil to vex him when reading.

Another subject which gave rise to much searching of Scripture and long trains of theological reasoning was the difference between the creation of man and that of other living beings.

Great stress was laid by theologians, from St. Basil and St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from Luther to Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, G.o.d having created man "in his own image." What this statement meant was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that "Adam begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image."

In view of this and of well-known texts incorporated from older creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be widely held that, while man was directly moulded and fas.h.i.+oned separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice.

A question now arose naturally as to the DISTINCTIONS OF SPECIES among animals. The vast majority of theologians agreed in representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and named by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever afterward under exactly the same species.

This belief ripened into a dogma. Like so many other dogmas in the Church, Catholic and Protestant, its real origins are to be found rather in pagan philosophy than in the Christian Scriptures; it came far more from Plato and Aristotle than from Moses and St. Paul. But this was not considered: more and more it became necessary to believe that each and every difference of species was impressed by the Creator "in the beginning," and that no change had taken place or could have taken place since.

Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology progressed and revealed ever-increasing numbers of species; but through the Middle Ages, and indeed long after the Reformation, these difficulties were easily surmounted by making the ark of Noah larger and larger, and especially by holding that there had been a human error in regard to its measurement.(13)

(13) For St. Augustine, see De Genesis and De Trinitate, pa.s.sim; for Bede, see Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42; and De s.e.x Dierum Criatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p. 215; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententiae, lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682; for Wesley, Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from them and notes thereto in my chapter on Geology; for St. Augustine on "superfluous animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26; on Luther's view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, "Odio muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et h.o.e.reticorum"; for the agency of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte der Botanik, Munchen, 1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113.

But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics and laymen a human desire to go beyond these special points in the history of animated beings--a desire to know what the creation really IS.

Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, poor as they were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity in this field.

Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had made the first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, and had begun a development of studies in natural history which remains one of the leading achievements in the story of our race.

But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in the early Church--that all study of Nature was futile in view of the approaching end of the world--indicated so clearly in the New Testament and voiced so powerfully by Lactantius and St. Augustine--held back this current of thought for many centuries. Still, the better tendency in humanity continued to a.s.sert itself. There was, indeed, an influence coming from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves which wrought powerfully to this end; for, in spite of all that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to the futility of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the Psalms regarding the beauties and wonders of creation, in all the glow of the truest poetry, enn.o.bled the study even among those whom logic drew away from it.