2600 lines
132 KiB
D
2600 lines
132 KiB
D
40 page printout
|
||
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
This disk, its printout, or copies of either
|
||
are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
INTRODUCTION.
|
||
|
||
My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface
|
||
my eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the
|
||
Neva under my windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the
|
||
rays of the April sun into the great ice barrier which binds
|
||
together the modern quays and the old granite fortress where lie
|
||
the bones of the Romanoff Czars.
|
||
|
||
This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in
|
||
many places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a
|
||
whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in
|
||
shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a
|
||
great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above
|
||
are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up against
|
||
it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it
|
||
may resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching even
|
||
the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation to a
|
||
vast population, and leaving, after the subsidence of the flood, a
|
||
widespread residue of slime, a fertile breeding-bed for the germs
|
||
of disease.
|
||
|
||
But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier,
|
||
exposed more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of
|
||
channels they are making, will break away gradually, and the river
|
||
will flow on beneficent and beautiful.
|
||
|
||
My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujiks on the
|
||
Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth
|
||
into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the
|
||
modern world to medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which
|
||
still lingers among us -- a most serious barrier to religion and
|
||
morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society.
|
||
|
||
For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising --
|
||
the flood of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier
|
||
also, though honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a danger
|
||
-- danger of a sudden breaking away, distressing and calamitous,
|
||
sweeping before it not only outworn creeds and noxious dogmas, but
|
||
cherished principles and ideals, and even wrenching out most
|
||
precious religious and moral foundations of the whole social and
|
||
political fabric.
|
||
|
||
My hope is to aid -- even if it be but a little -- in the
|
||
gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason,
|
||
that the stream of "religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad
|
||
and clear, a blessing to humanity.
|
||
|
||
And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
1
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored
|
||
with Ezra Cornell in founding the university which bears his
|
||
honored name.
|
||
|
||
Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an
|
||
institution for advanced instruction and research, in which
|
||
science, pure and applied, should have an equal place with
|
||
literature; in which the study of literature, ancient and modern,
|
||
should be emancipated as much as possible from pedantry; and which
|
||
should be free from various useless trammels and vicious methods
|
||
which at that period hampered many, if not most, of the American
|
||
universities and colleges.
|
||
|
||
We had especially determined that the institution should be
|
||
under the control of no political party and of no single religious
|
||
sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent
|
||
provisions to this effect in the charter.
|
||
|
||
It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us
|
||
that in all this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian.
|
||
Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he had
|
||
from his fortune liberally aided every form of Christian effort
|
||
which he found going on about him, and among the permanent trustees
|
||
of the public library which he had already founded, he had named
|
||
all the clergymen of the town -- Catholic and Protestant. As for
|
||
myself, I had been bred a churchman, had recently been elected a
|
||
trustee of one church college, and a professor in another; those
|
||
nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious; and, if I may be
|
||
allowed to speak of a matter so personal to myself, my most
|
||
cherished friendships were among deeply religious men and women,
|
||
and my greatest sources of enjoyment were ecclesiastical
|
||
architecture, religious music, and the more devout forms of poetry.
|
||
So far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to
|
||
promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism, and
|
||
we saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and
|
||
universities, as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced
|
||
instruction then given in so many of them.
|
||
|
||
It required no great acuteness to see that a system of control
|
||
which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or
|
||
Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what
|
||
sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged, could
|
||
hardly do much to advance the moral, religious, or intellectual
|
||
development of mankind.
|
||
|
||
The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, so
|
||
cogent that we expected the cooperation of all good citizens, and
|
||
anticipated no opposition from any source,
|
||
|
||
As I look back across the intervening years, I know not
|
||
whether to be more astonished or amused at our simplicity.
|
||
|
||
Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it
|
||
confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze
|
||
throughout the State -- from the good Protestant bishop who
|
||
proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders, since to
|
||
the Church alone was given the command, "Go, teach all nations," to
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
2
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
the zealous priest who published a charge that Goldwin Smith -- a
|
||
profoundly Christian scholar -- had come to Cornell in order to
|
||
inculcate the "infidelity of the Westminster Review"; and from the
|
||
eminent divine who went from city to city denouncing the "atheistic
|
||
and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the
|
||
perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that
|
||
Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist,
|
||
was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" in the new institution.
|
||
|
||
As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were
|
||
introduced into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored clergymen
|
||
solemnly warned their flocks first against the "atheism," then
|
||
against the "infidelity," and finally against the "indifferentism
|
||
"of the university, as devoted pastors endeavored to dissuade young
|
||
men from matriculation, I took the defensive, and, in answer to
|
||
various attacks from pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted to
|
||
allay the fears of the public. "Sweet reasonableness" was fully
|
||
tried. There was established and endowed in the university perhaps
|
||
the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most vigorous
|
||
branches of the Christian Association, then in the United States;
|
||
but all this did nothing to ward off the attack. The clause in the
|
||
charter of the university forbidding it to give predominance to the
|
||
doctrines of any sect, and above all the fact that much prominence
|
||
was given to instruction in various branches of science, seemed to
|
||
prevent all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand on
|
||
the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that there was
|
||
borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty -- the antagonism
|
||
between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of
|
||
education in relation to it; therefore it was that, having been
|
||
invited to deliver a lecture in the great hall of the Cooper
|
||
Institute at New York, I took as my subject The Battlefields of
|
||
Science, maintaining this thesis which follows:
|
||
|
||
In all modern history, interfere with science in the supposed
|
||
interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference
|
||
may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion
|
||
and to science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all
|
||
untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to
|
||
religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has
|
||
invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of
|
||
science.
|
||
|
||
The lecture was next day published in the New York Tribune at
|
||
the request of Horace Greeley, its editor, who was also one of the
|
||
Cornell University trustees. As a result of this widespread
|
||
publication and of sundry attacks which it elicited, I was asked to
|
||
maintain my thesis before various university associations and
|
||
literary clubs; and I shall always remember with gratitude that
|
||
among those who stood by me and presented me on the lecture
|
||
platform with words of approval and cheer was my revered
|
||
instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, at that time
|
||
President of Yale College.
|
||
|
||
My lecture grew -- first into a couple of magazine articles,
|
||
and then into a little book called The Warfare of Science, for
|
||
which, when republished in England, Prof. John Tyndall wrote a
|
||
preface.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
3
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
Sundry translations of this little book were published, but
|
||
the most curious thing in its history is the fact that a very
|
||
friendly introduction to the Swedish translation was written by a
|
||
Lutheran bishop.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile Prof, John W. Draper published his book on The
|
||
Conflict between Science and Religion, a work of great ability,
|
||
which, as I then thought, ended the matter, So far as my giving it
|
||
further attention was concerned.
|
||
|
||
But two things led me to keep on developing my own work in
|
||
this field: First, I had become deeply interested in it, and could
|
||
not refrain from directing my observation and study to it;
|
||
secondly, much as I admired Draper's treatment of the questions
|
||
involved, his point of view and mode of looking at history were
|
||
different from mine.
|
||
|
||
He regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion.
|
||
I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle
|
||
between Science and Dogmatic Theology.
|
||
|
||
More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two
|
||
epochs in the evolution of human thought -- the theological and the
|
||
scientific.
|
||
|
||
So I kept on, and from time to time published New Chapters in
|
||
the rene as mag of Science magazine articles in The Popular Science
|
||
Monthly. This was done under many difficulties. For twenty years,
|
||
as President of Cornell University and Professor of History in that
|
||
institution, I was immersed in the work of its early development.
|
||
Besides this, I could not hold myself entirely aloof from public
|
||
affairs, and was three times sent by the Government of the United
|
||
States to do public duty abroad: first as a commissioner to Santo
|
||
Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to Germany, in 1879;
|
||
finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and was also called upon
|
||
by the State of New York to do considerable labor in connection
|
||
with international exhibitions at Philadelphia and at Paris. I was
|
||
also obliged from time to time to throw off by travel the effects
|
||
of overwork.
|
||
|
||
The variety of residence and occupation arising from these
|
||
causes may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this book which
|
||
might otherwise puzzle my reader.
|
||
|
||
While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials
|
||
over a very wide range -- in the New World, from Quebec to Santo
|
||
Domingo and from Boston to Mexico, San Francisco, and Seattle, and
|
||
in the Old World from Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to
|
||
Palermo -- they have often obliged me to write under circumstances
|
||
not very favorable: sometimes on an Atlantic steamer, sometimes on
|
||
a Nile boat, and not only in my, own library at Cornell, but in
|
||
those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich, Florence, and the British
|
||
Museum. This fact will explain to the benevolent reader not only
|
||
the citation of different editions of the same authority in
|
||
different chapters, but some iterations which in the steady quiet
|
||
of my own library would not have been made.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
4
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
It has been my constant endeavor to write for the general
|
||
reader, avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as possible
|
||
and stating the truth simply as it presents itself to me.
|
||
|
||
That errors of omission and commission will be found here and
|
||
there is probable -- nay, certain; but the substance of the book
|
||
will, I believe, be found fully true. I am encouraged in this
|
||
belief by the fact that, of the three bitter attacks which this
|
||
work in its earlier form has already encountered, one was purely
|
||
declamatory, objurgatory, and hortatory, and the others based upon
|
||
ignorance of facts easily pointed out.
|
||
|
||
And here I must express my thanks to those who have aided me.
|
||
First and above all to my former student and dear friend, Prof.
|
||
George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University, to whose contributions,
|
||
suggestions, criticisms, and cautions I am most deeply indebted;
|
||
also to my friends U.G. Weatherly, formerly Travelling Fellow of
|
||
Cornell, and now Assistant Professor in the University of Indiana,
|
||
-- Prof. and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof. William H. Hudson, of
|
||
Stanford University, -- and Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the
|
||
University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for extensive aid in
|
||
researches upon the lines I have indicated to them, but which I
|
||
could never have prosecuted without their cooperation. In libraries
|
||
at home and abroad they have all worked for me most effectively,
|
||
and I am deeply grateful to them.
|
||
|
||
This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift -- a tribute
|
||
to Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century of
|
||
its existence, and probably my last tribute.
|
||
|
||
The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its
|
||
foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over one hundred
|
||
and fifty; its students numbering but little short of two thousand;
|
||
its noble buildings and equipment; the munificent gifts, now
|
||
amounting to millions of dollars, which it has received from
|
||
public-spirited men and women; the evidences of public confidence
|
||
on all sides; and, above all, the adoption of its cardinal
|
||
principles and main features by various institutions of learning in
|
||
other States, show this abundantly. But there has been a triumph
|
||
far greater and wider. Everywhere among the leading modern nations
|
||
the same general tendency is seen. During the quarter-century, just
|
||
past the control of public instruction, not only in America but in
|
||
the leading nations of Europe, has passed more and more from the
|
||
clergy to the laity. Not only are the presidents of the larger
|
||
universities in the United States, with but one or two exceptions,
|
||
laymen, but the same thing is seen in the old European strongholds
|
||
of metaphysical theology. At my first visit to Oxford and
|
||
Cambridge, forty years ago, they were entirely under ecclesiastical
|
||
control. Now, all this is changed. An eminent member of the present
|
||
British Government has recently said, "A candidate for high
|
||
university position is handicapped by holy orders." I refer to this
|
||
with not the slightest feeling of hostility toward the clergy, for
|
||
I have none; among them are many of my dearest friends; no one
|
||
honors their proper work more than I; but the above fact is simply
|
||
noted as proving the continuance of that evolution which I have
|
||
endeavored to describe in this series of monographs -- an
|
||
evolution, indeed, in which the warfare of Theology against Science
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
5
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
has been one of the most active and powerful agents. My belief is
|
||
that in the field left to them -- their proper field -- the clergy
|
||
will more and more, as they cease to struggle against scientific
|
||
methods and conclusions, do work even nobler and more beautiful
|
||
than anything they have heretofore done. And this is saying much.
|
||
My conviction is that Science, though it has evidently conquered
|
||
Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of
|
||
thought, will go hand in hand with Religion; and that, although
|
||
theological control will continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in
|
||
the recognition of "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which
|
||
makes for righteousness," and in the love of God and of our
|
||
neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the
|
||
American institutions of learning but in the world at large. Thus
|
||
may the declaration of Micah as to the requirements of Jehovah, the
|
||
definition by St. James of "pure religion and undefiled," and,
|
||
above all, the precepts and ideals of the blessed Founder of
|
||
Christianity himself, be brought to bear more and more effectively
|
||
on mankind.
|
||
|
||
I close this preface some days after its first lines were
|
||
written. The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva the great
|
||
river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy; the mujiks are
|
||
forgotten.
|
||
A.D.W.
|
||
|
||
LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, ST. PETERSBURG,
|
||
April 14, 1894.
|
||
|
||
P.S. -- Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision to some
|
||
parts of my work, it has been withheld from the press until the
|
||
present date. CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y., August 15, 1895.
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* In this computerized version of this work all footnotes
|
||
will follow immediately after the astrach (*) and not at the bottom
|
||
of the page as in the printed voliams. These notes will be between
|
||
lines at the top and bottom (the same as this note) and we suggest
|
||
these notes be skipped over when reading for general information.
|
||
This is necessary to prevent the notes from being misplaced in the
|
||
various electronic formats this work will be transfered into.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE
|
||
WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER I.
|
||
|
||
FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION.
|
||
|
||
I. THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE.
|
||
|
||
AMONG those masses of cathedral sculpture which preserve so
|
||
much of medieval theology, one frequently recurring group is
|
||
noteworthy for its presentment of a time-honored doctrine regarding
|
||
the origin of the universe.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
The Almighty, in human form, sits benignly, making the sun,
|
||
moon, and stars, and hanging them from the solid firmament which
|
||
supports the "heaven above" and overarches the "earth beneath."
|
||
|
||
The furrows of thought on the Creator's brow show that in this
|
||
work he is obliged to contrive; the knotted muscles upon his arms
|
||
show that he is obliged to toil; naturally, then, the sculptors and
|
||
painters of the medieval and early modern period frequently
|
||
represented him as the writers whose conceptions they embodied had
|
||
done -- as, on the seventh day, weary after thought and toil,
|
||
enjoying well-earned repose and the plaudits of the hosts of
|
||
heaven.
|
||
|
||
In these thought-fossils of the cathedrals, and in other
|
||
revelations of the same idea through sculpture, painting, glass-
|
||
staining, mosaic work, and engraving, during the Middle Ages and
|
||
the two centuries following, culminated a belief which had been
|
||
developed through thousands of years, and which has determined the
|
||
world's thought until our own time.
|
||
|
||
Its beginnings lie far back in human history; we find them
|
||
among the early records of nearly all the great civilizations, and
|
||
they hold a most prominent place in the various sacred books of the
|
||
world. In nearly all of them is revealed the conception of a
|
||
Creator of whom man is an imperfect image, and who literally and
|
||
directly created the visible universe with his hands and fingers.
|
||
|
||
Among these theories, of especial interest to us are those
|
||
which controlled theological thought in Chaldea. The Assyrian
|
||
inscriptions which have been recently recovered and given to the
|
||
English-speaking peoples by Layard, George Smith, Sayce, and
|
||
others, show that in the ancient religions of Chaldea and Babylonia
|
||
there was elaborated a narrative of the creation which, in its most
|
||
important features, must have been the source of that in our own
|
||
sacred books. It has now become perfectly clear that from the same
|
||
sources which inspired the accounts of the creation of the universe
|
||
among the Chaldco-Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Phoenician, and
|
||
other ancient civilizations came the ideas which hold so prominent
|
||
a place in the sacred books of the Hebrews. In the two accounts
|
||
imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and also in the account of
|
||
which we have indications in the book of job and in the Proverbs,
|
||
there is presented, often Avith the greatest sublimity, the same
|
||
early conception of the Creator and of the creation -- the
|
||
conception, so natural in the childhood of civilization, of a
|
||
Creator who is an enlarged human being working literally with his
|
||
own hands, and of a creation which is "the work of his fingers." To
|
||
supplcirient this view there was developed the belief in this
|
||
Creator as one who, having
|
||
|
||
. . ."from his ample palm
|
||
Launched forth the rolling planets into space,"
|
||
|
||
sits on high, enthroned "upon the circle of the heavens,"
|
||
perpetually controlling and directing them.
|
||
|
||
From this idea of creation was evolved in time a somewhat
|
||
nobler view. Ancient thinkers, and especially, as is now found, in
|
||
Egypt, suggested that the main agency in creation was not the hands
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
and fingers of the Creator, but his voice. Hence was mingled with
|
||
the earlier, cruder belief regarding the origin of the earth and
|
||
heavenly bodies by the Almighty the more impressive idea that "he
|
||
spake and they were made" -- that they were brought into existence
|
||
by his word.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* Among the many mediaeval representations of the creation
|
||
of the universe, I especially recall from personal observation
|
||
those sculptured above the portals of the cathedrals of Freiburg
|
||
and Upsala, the paintings on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa,
|
||
and, most striking of all, the mosaics of the Cathedral of Monreale
|
||
and those in the Cappella Palatina at Palermo. Among peculiarities
|
||
showing the simplicity of the earlier conception the representation
|
||
of the repose of the Almighty on the seventh day is very striking.
|
||
He is shown as seated in almost the exact attitude of the "weary
|
||
Mercury" of classic sculpture -- bent, and with a very marked
|
||
expression of fatigue upon his countenance and in the whole
|
||
disposition of his body.
|
||
|
||
The Monreale mosaics are painted in the great work of Gravina,
|
||
and the Pisa frescoes in Didron's Iconographie, Paris, 1843, p.
|
||
598. For an exact statement of the resemblances which have settled
|
||
the question among the most eminent scholars in favour of the
|
||
derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see
|
||
Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 304,
|
||
306; also Franz Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien der
|
||
alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 3546; also George Smith's Chaldean
|
||
Genesis, especially the German translation with additions by
|
||
Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876, and Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das
|
||
Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, pp. 1-54, etc. See also Renan,
|
||
Histoire du peuple d'Israel, vol. i, chap. i, L'antique influence
|
||
babylonienne. Fro Egyptian views regarding creation, and especially
|
||
for the transition from the idea of creation by the hands and
|
||
fingers of the Creator to creation by his voice and his "word," see
|
||
Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 145-146.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
Among the early fathers of the Church this general view of
|
||
creation became fundamental; they impressed upon Christendom more
|
||
and more strongly the belief that the universe was created in a
|
||
perfectly literal sense by the hands or voice of God. Here and
|
||
there sundry theologians of larger mind attempted to give a more
|
||
spiritual view regarding some parts of the creative work, and of
|
||
these were St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine. Ready as they
|
||
were to accept the literal text of Scripture, they revolted against
|
||
the conception of an actual creation of the universe by the hands
|
||
and fingers of a Supreme Being, and in this they were followed by
|
||
Bede and a few others; but the more material conceptions prevailed,
|
||
and we find these taking shape not only in the sculptures and
|
||
mosaics and stained glass of cathedrals, and in the illuminations
|
||
of missals and psalters, but later, at the close of the Middle
|
||
Ages, in the pictured Bibles and in general literature.
|
||
|
||
Into the Anglo-Saxon mind this ancient material conception of
|
||
the creation was riveted by two poets whose works appealed
|
||
especially to the deeper religious feelings. In the seventh century
|
||
Coedmon paraphrased the account given in Genesis, bringing out this
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
material conception in the most literal form; and a thousand years
|
||
later Milton developed out of the various statements in the Old
|
||
Testament, mingled with a theology regarding "the creative Word"
|
||
which had been drawn from the New, his description of the creation
|
||
by the second person in the Trinity, than which nothing could be
|
||
more literal and material:
|
||
|
||
"He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal
|
||
store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things.
|
||
One foot he centered, and the other turned Round through the
|
||
vast profundity obscure, And said, ' Thus far extend, thus far
|
||
thy bounds: This be thy just circumference, O world!" *
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and the general subject
|
||
of the development of an evolution theory among the Greeks, see the
|
||
excellent work by Dr. Osborn, 'From the Greeks to Darwin, pp. 33
|
||
and following; for Caedmon, see any edition -- I have used
|
||
Bouterwek's, Gutersloh, 1854; for Milton, see Paradise Lost, book
|
||
vii, lines 225-231.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
So much for the orthodox view of the manner of creation.
|
||
|
||
The next point developed in this theologic evolution had
|
||
reference to the matter of which the universe was made, and it was
|
||
decided by an overwhelming majority that no material substance
|
||
existed before the creation of the material universe -- that "God
|
||
created everything out of nothing." Some venturesome thinkers,
|
||
basing their reasoning upon the first verses of Genesis, hinted at
|
||
a different view -- namely, that the mass, "without form and void,"
|
||
existed before the universe; but this doctrine was soon swept out
|
||
of sight. The vast majority of the fathers were explicit on this
|
||
point. Tertullian especially was very severe against those who took
|
||
any other view than that generally accepted as orthodox: he
|
||
declared that, if there had been any preexisting matter out of
|
||
which the world was formed, Scripture would have mentioned it; that
|
||
by not mentioning it God has given us a clear proof that there was
|
||
no such thing; and, after a manner not unknown in other theological
|
||
controversies, he threatens Hermogenes, who takes the opposite
|
||
view, with "the woe which impends on all who add to or take away
|
||
from the written word."
|
||
|
||
St. Augustine, who showed signs of a belief in a preexistence
|
||
of matter, made his peace with the prevailing belief by the simple
|
||
reasoning that, "although the world has been made of some material,
|
||
that very same material must have been made out of nothing."
|
||
|
||
In the wake of these great men the universal Church steadily
|
||
followed. The Fourth Lateran Council declared that God created
|
||
everything out of nothing; and at the present hour the vast
|
||
majority of the faithful -- whether Catholic or Protestant -- are
|
||
taught the same doctrine; on this point the syllabus of Pius IX and
|
||
the Westminster Catechism fully agree.*
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Tertullian, see Tertullian against Hermogenes, chaps.
|
||
xx and xxii; for St. Augustine regarding "creation from nothing,"
|
||
see the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, lib. i, cap. vi; for St.
|
||
Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib. i, cap. iv; for the decree of the
|
||
Fourth Lateran Council, and the view received in the Church to-day,
|
||
see the article Creation in Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
Having thus disposed of the manner and matter of creation, the
|
||
next subject taken up by theologians was the time required for the
|
||
great work.
|
||
|
||
Here came a difficulty. The first of the two accounts given in
|
||
Genesis extended the creative operation through six days, each of
|
||
an evening and a morning, with much explicit detail regarding the
|
||
progress made in each. But the second account spoke of "the day" in
|
||
which "the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." The
|
||
explicitness of the first account and its Naturalness to the minds
|
||
of the great mass of early theologians gave it at first a decided
|
||
advantage; but Jewish thinkers, like Philo, and Christian thinkers,
|
||
like Origen, forming higher conceptions of the Creator and his
|
||
work, were not content with this, and by them was launched upon the
|
||
troubled sea of Christian theology the idea that the creation was
|
||
instantaneous, this idea being strengthened not only by the second
|
||
of the Genesis legends, but by the great text, "He spake, and it
|
||
was done; he commanded, and it stood fast" -- or, as it appears in
|
||
the Vulgate and in most translations, "He spake, and they were
|
||
made; be commanded, and they were created."
|
||
|
||
As a result, it began to be held that the safe and proper
|
||
course was to believe literally both statements; that in some
|
||
mysterious manner God created the universe in six days, and yet
|
||
brought it all into existence in a moment. In spite of the outcries
|
||
of sundry great theologians, like Ephrem Syrus, that the universe
|
||
was created in exactly six days of twenty-four hours each, this
|
||
compromise was promoted by St. Athanasius and St. Basil in the
|
||
East, and by St. Augustine and St. Hilary in the West.
|
||
|
||
Serious difficulties were found in reconciling these two
|
||
views, which to the natural mind seem absolutely contradictory; but
|
||
by ingenious manipulation of texts, by dexterous play upon phrases,
|
||
and by the abundant use of metaphysics to dissolve away facts, a
|
||
reconciliation was effected, and men came at least to believe that
|
||
they believed in a creation of the universe instantaneous and at
|
||
the same time extended through six days.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Origen, see his Contra Cesum, cap. xxxvi, xxxvii also
|
||
his De Principibus, cap. v; for St. Augustine, see his De Genesi
|
||
contra Manichaeos and De Genesi ad Litteram, passim; for
|
||
Athanasius, see his Discourses against the Arians, ii, 48, 49.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
Some of the efforts to reconcile these two accounts were so
|
||
fruitful as to deserve especial record. The fathers, Eastern and
|
||
Western, developed out of the double account in Genesis, and the
|
||
indications in the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the book of Job, a
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
vast mass of sacred science bearing upon this point. As regards the
|
||
whole work of creation, stress was laid upon certain occult powers
|
||
in numerals. Philo Judaeus, while believing in an instantaneous
|
||
creation, had also declared that the world was created in six days
|
||
because" of all numbers six is the most productive"; he had
|
||
explained the creation of the heavenly bodies on the fourth day by
|
||
"the harmony of the number four"; of the animals on the fifth day
|
||
by the five senses; of man on the sixth day by the same virtues in
|
||
the number six which had caused it to be set as a limit to the
|
||
creative work; and, greatest of all, the rest on the seventh day by
|
||
the vast mass of mysterious virtues in the number seven.
|
||
|
||
St. Jerome held that the reason why God did not pronounce the
|
||
work of the second day "good" is to be found in the fact that there
|
||
is something essentially evil in the number two, and this was
|
||
echoed centuries afterward, afar off in Britain, by Bede.
|
||
|
||
St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church in the
|
||
following statement: "There are three classes of numbers -- the
|
||
more than perfect, the perfect, and the less than perfect,
|
||
according as the sum of them is greater than, equal to, or less
|
||
than the original number. Six is the first perfect number:
|
||
wherefore we must not say that six is a perfect number because God
|
||
finished all his works in six days, but that God finished all his
|
||
works in six days because six is a perfect number."
|
||
|
||
Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the medieval
|
||
Church until a year after the discovery of America, when the
|
||
Nuremberg Chronicle re-echoed it as follows: "The creation of
|
||
things is explained by the number six, the parts of which, one,
|
||
two, and three, assume the form of a triangle."
|
||
|
||
This view of the creation of the universe as instantaneous and
|
||
also as in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning,
|
||
became virtually universal. Peter Lombard and Hugo of St. Victor,
|
||
authorities of vast weight, gave it their sanction in the twelfth
|
||
century, and impressed it for ages upon the mind of the Church.
|
||
|
||
Both these lines of speculation -- as to the creation of
|
||
everything out of nothing, and the reconciling of the instantaneous
|
||
creation of the universe with its creation in six days -- were
|
||
still further developed by other great thinkers of the Middle Ages.
|
||
|
||
St. Hilary of Poictiers reconciled the two conceptions as
|
||
follows: "For, although according to Moses there is an appearance
|
||
of regular order in the fixing of the firmament, the laying bare of
|
||
the dry land, the gathering together of the waters, the formation
|
||
of the heavenly bodies, and the arising of living things from land
|
||
and water, yet the creation of the heavens, earth, and other
|
||
elements is seen to be the work of a single moment."
|
||
|
||
St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle
|
||
distinction which for ages cased the difficulties in the case he
|
||
taught in effect that God created the substance of things in a
|
||
moment, but gave to the work of separating, shaping, and adorning
|
||
this creation, six days.*
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Philo Judaeus, see his Creation of the World, chap.
|
||
iii; for St. Augustine on the powers of numbers in creation, see
|
||
his De Genesi ad Litteram, iv, chap. ii; for Peter Lombard, see the
|
||
Sentential, lib. ii, dist. xv, 5; and for Hugo of St. Victor, see
|
||
De Sacramentis, lib. i, pars i; also, Annotat. Elucidate in
|
||
Pentateuchum, cap. v, vi, vii; for St. Hilary, see De Trinitate,
|
||
lib. xii; for St. Thomas Aquinas, see his Summa Theologies, quest.
|
||
lxxxiv, arts. i and ii; the passage in the Aluremberg Chronicle,
|
||
1493, is in fol. iii; for Bossuet, see his Dissours sur l'Histoire
|
||
Universelle; for the sacredness of the number seven among the
|
||
Babylonians, see especially Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das
|
||
Alte Testament, pp. 21, 22; also George Smith et al,; for general
|
||
ideas on the occult powers of various numbers, especially the
|
||
number seven, and the influence of these ideas on theology and
|
||
science, see my chapter on astronomy. As to medieval ideas on the
|
||
same subject, see Detzel, Christliche Ikonografihie, Freiburg,
|
||
1894, pp. 44 and following.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
The early reformers accepted and developed the same view, and
|
||
Luther especially showed himself equal to the occasion. With his
|
||
usual boldness he declared, first, that Moses "spoke properly and
|
||
plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively," and that
|
||
therefore "the world with all creatures was created in six days."
|
||
And he then goes on to show how, by a great miracle, the whole
|
||
creation was also instantaneous.
|
||
|
||
Melanchthon also insisted that the universe was created out of
|
||
nothing and in a mysterious way, both in an instant and in six
|
||
days, citing the text: "He spake, and they were made."
|
||
|
||
Calvin opposed the idea of an instantaneous creation, and laid
|
||
especial stress on the creation in six days: having called
|
||
attention to the fact that the biblical chronology shows the world
|
||
to be not quite six thousand years old and that it is now near its
|
||
end, he says that "creation was extended through six days that it
|
||
might not be tedious for us to occupy the whole of life in the
|
||
consideration of it."
|
||
|
||
Peter Martyr clinched the matter by declaring: "So important
|
||
is it to comprehend the work of creation that we see the creed of
|
||
the Church take this as its starting point. Were this article taken
|
||
away there would be no original sin, the promise of Christ would
|
||
become void, and all the vital force of our religion would be
|
||
destroyed." The Westminster divines in drawing up their Confession
|
||
of Faith specially laid it down as necessary to believe that all
|
||
things visible and invisible were created not only out of nothing
|
||
but in exactly six days.
|
||
|
||
Nor were the Roman divines less strenuous than the Protestant
|
||
reformers regarding the necessity of holding closely to the so-
|
||
called Mosaic account of creation. As late as the middle of the
|
||
eighteenth century, when Buffon attempted to state simple
|
||
geological truths, the theological faculty of the Sorbonne forced
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
him to make and to publish a most ignominious recantation which
|
||
ended with these words: "I abandon everything in my book respecting
|
||
the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary
|
||
to the narrative of Moses."
|
||
|
||
Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the creation,
|
||
the matter used in it, and the time required for it, now exerted
|
||
themselves to fix its date.
|
||
|
||
The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the
|
||
Church, from Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this point are
|
||
presented in another chapter. Suffice it here that the general
|
||
conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming majority of the most
|
||
competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of
|
||
creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our era;
|
||
and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John
|
||
Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one
|
||
of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the
|
||
result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures,
|
||
that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all
|
||
together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that
|
||
"this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October
|
||
23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning."
|
||
|
||
Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's method, the result
|
||
of hundreds of years of biblical study and theological thought
|
||
since Bede in the eighth century, and Vincent of Beauvais in the
|
||
thirteenth, had declared that creation must have taken place in the
|
||
spring. Yet, alas! within two centuries after Lightfoot's great
|
||
biblical demonstration as to the exact hour of creation, it was
|
||
discovered that at that hour an exceedingly cultivated people,
|
||
enjoying all the fruits of a highly developed civilization, had
|
||
long been swarming in the great cities of Egypt, and that other
|
||
nations hardly less advanced had at that time reached a high
|
||
development in Asia.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Luther, see his Commentary on Genesis, 1545,
|
||
introduction, and his comments on chap. i, verse 12; the quotations
|
||
from Luther's commentary are taken mainly from the translation by
|
||
Henry Cole, D. D., Edinburgh, 1858; for Melanchthon, see Loci
|
||
Theologici, in Melanchthon, Malanchthon, Opera, ed. Betschneider,
|
||
vol. xxi, pp. 269, 270, also pp. 637, 638 -- in quoting the text
|
||
(Ps. xxiii, 9) I have used, as does Melanchthon himself, the form
|
||
of the Vulgate; for the citations from Calvin, see his Commentary
|
||
on Genesis (Opera omnia, Amsterdam, 1671, tom. i, cap. ii, p. 8);
|
||
also in the Institutes, Allen's translation, London, 1838, Vol- i,
|
||
chap. xv, pp. 126, 127; for Peter Martyr, see his Commentary on
|
||
Genesis, cited by Zbckler, vol. i, p. 690; for the articles in the
|
||
Westminster Confession of Faith, see chap. iv; for Buffon's
|
||
recantation, see Lyell, Principles of Theology, chap. iii, p. 57.
|
||
For Lightfoot's declaration, see his works, edited by Pitman,
|
||
London, 1822.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
But, strange as it may seem, even after theologians had thus
|
||
settled the manner of creation, the matter employed in it, the time
|
||
required for it, and the exact date of it, there remained virtually
|
||
unsettled the first and greatest question of all; and this was
|
||
nothing less than the question, WHO actually created the universe?
|
||
|
||
Various theories more or less nebulous, but all centered in
|
||
texts of Scripture, had swept through the mind of the Church. By
|
||
some theologians it was held virtually that the actual creative
|
||
agent was the third person of the Trinity, who, in the opening
|
||
words of our sublime creation poem, "moved upon the face of the
|
||
waters." By others it was held that the actual Creator was the
|
||
second person of the Trinity, in behalf of whose agency many texts
|
||
were cited from the New Testament. Others held that the actual
|
||
Creator was the first person, and this view was embodied in the two
|
||
great formulas known as the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, which
|
||
explicitly assigned the work to "God the Father Almighty, Maker of
|
||
heaven and earth." Others, finding a deep meaning in the words "Let
|
||
us make," ascribed in Genesis to the Creator, held that the entire
|
||
Trinity directly created all things; and still others, by curious
|
||
metaphysical processes, seemed to arrive at the idea that peculiar
|
||
combinations of two persons of the Trinity achieved the creation.
|
||
|
||
In all this there would seem to be considerable courage in
|
||
view of the fearful condemnations launched in the Athanasian Creed
|
||
against all who should "confound the persons" or "divide the
|
||
substance of the Trinity."
|
||
|
||
These various stages in the evolution of scholastic theology
|
||
were also embodied in sacred art, and especially in cathedral
|
||
sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, and in missal
|
||
painting.
|
||
|
||
The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third
|
||
person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos;
|
||
sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes as
|
||
the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable; sometimes
|
||
as the first and second persons, one being venerable and the other
|
||
youthful; and sometimes as three persons, one venerable and one
|
||
youthful, both wearing papal crowns, and each holding in his lips
|
||
a tip of the wing of the dove, which thus seems to proceed from
|
||
both and to be suspended between them.
|
||
|
||
Nor was this the most complete development of the medieval
|
||
idea. The Creator was sometimes represented with a single body, but
|
||
with three faces, thus showing that Christian belief had in some
|
||
pious minds gone through substantially the same cycle which an
|
||
earlier form of belief had made ages before in India, when the
|
||
Supreme Being was represented with one body but with the three
|
||
faces of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.
|
||
|
||
But at the beginning of the modern period the older view in
|
||
its primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Christians by the most
|
||
mighty genius in art the world has known; for in 1512, after four
|
||
years of Titanic labor, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes
|
||
within the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
They had been executed by the command and under the sanction
|
||
of the ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the conception of
|
||
Christian theology then dominant, and they remain to-day in all
|
||
their majesty to show the highest point ever attained by the older
|
||
thought upon the origin of the visible universe.
|
||
|
||
In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Father --
|
||
the first person of the Trinity -- in human form, august and
|
||
venerable, attended by angels and upborne by mighty winds, Sweeps
|
||
over the abyss, and, moving through successive compartments of the
|
||
great vault, accomplishes the Work of the creative days. With a
|
||
simple gesture he divides the light from the darkness, rears on
|
||
high the solid firmament, gathers together beneath it the seas, or
|
||
summons into existence the sun, moon, and planets, and sets them
|
||
circling about the earth.
|
||
|
||
In this sublime work culminated the thought of thousands of
|
||
years; the strongest minds accepted it or pretended to accept it,
|
||
and nearly two centuries later this conception, in accordance with
|
||
the first of the two accounts given in Genesis, was especially
|
||
enforced by Bossuet, and received a new lease of life in the
|
||
Church, both Catholic and Protestant.* But to these discussions was
|
||
added yet another, which, beginning in the early days of the
|
||
Church, was handed down the ages until it had died out among the
|
||
theologians of our own time.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For strange representations of the Creator and of the
|
||
creation by one, two, or three persons of the Trinity, see Didron,
|
||
Icomografihie Chretienne, pp. 35, 178, 224, 483, 567-580), and
|
||
elsewhere; also DetzeI as already cited. The most naive of all
|
||
survivals of the medieval idea of creation which the present writer
|
||
has ever seen was exhibited in 1894 on the banner of one of the
|
||
guilds at the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the
|
||
founding of the Munich Cathedral. Jesus of Nazareth, as a beautiful
|
||
boy and with a nimbus encircling his head, was shown turning and
|
||
shaping the globe on a lathe, which he keeps in motion with his
|
||
foot. The emblems of the Passion are about him, God the Father
|
||
looking approvingly upon him from a cloud, and the dove hovering
|
||
between the two. The date upon the banner was 1727.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
In the first of the biblical accounts light is created and the
|
||
distinction between. day and night thereby made on the first day,
|
||
while the sun and moon are not created until the fourth day. Masses
|
||
of profound theological and pseudo-scientific reasoning have been
|
||
developed to account for this -- masses so great that for ages they
|
||
have obscured the simple fact that the original text is a precious
|
||
revelation to us of one of the most ancient of recorded beliefs --
|
||
the belief that light and darkness are entities independent of the
|
||
heavenly bodies, and that the sun, moon, and stars exist not merely
|
||
to increase light but to "divide the day from the night, to be for
|
||
signs and for seasons, and for days and for years," and "to rule
|
||
the day and the night."
|
||
|
||
Of this belief we find survivals among the early fathers, and
|
||
especially in St. Ambrose. In his work on creation he tells us: "We
|
||
must remember that the light of day is one thing and the light of
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
the sun, moon, and stars another -- the sun by his rays appearing
|
||
to add lustre to the daylight. For before sunrise the day dawns,
|
||
but is not in full refulgence, for the sun adds still further to
|
||
its splendor." This idea became, one of the "treasures of sacred
|
||
knowledge committed to the Church," and was faithfully received by
|
||
the Middle Ages. The medieval mysteries and miracle plays give
|
||
curious evidences of this: In a performance of the creation, when
|
||
God separates light from darkness, the stage direction is, "Now a
|
||
painted cloth is to be exhibited, one half black and the other half
|
||
white." It was also given more permanent form. In the mosaics of
|
||
San Marco at Venice, in the frescoes of the Baptistery at Florence
|
||
and of the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, and in the altar
|
||
carving at Salerno, we find a striking realization of it -- the
|
||
Creator placing in the heavens two disks or living figures of equal
|
||
size, each suitably colored or inscribed to show that one
|
||
represents light and the other darkness. This conception was
|
||
without doubt that of the person or persons who compiled from the
|
||
Chaldean and other earlier statements the accounts of the creation
|
||
in the first of our sacred books.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For scriptural indications of the independent existence
|
||
of light and darkness, compare with the first verses of the first
|
||
chapter of Genesis such passages as Job xxxviii, 19, 24; for the
|
||
general prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmogonie PP.
|
||
31, 33, 41, 74, and passim; for the view of St. Ambrose regarding
|
||
the creation of light and of the sun, see his ffexameron, lib. 4,
|
||
cap. iii; for an excellent general statement, see Huxley, Mr.
|
||
Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, reprinted
|
||
in his Essays on Contriverted Questions, London, 1892, note, pp.
|
||
126 et seq.; for the acceptance in the miracle plays of the
|
||
scriptural idea of light and darkness as independent creations, see
|
||
Wright, Essays on Archaeological Subjects, vol. ii, P. 178; for an
|
||
account, with illustrations, of the mosaics, etc., representing
|
||
this idea, see Tikkanen, Die Genesis-mosaiken von San Marco,
|
||
Helsingfors, 1889, pp. 14 and 16 of text and Plates I and II. Very
|
||
naively the Salerno carver, not wishing to color the ivory which he
|
||
wrought, has inscribed on one disk the word "LUX" and on the other
|
||
"NOX." See also Didron, Iconographie, P. 482.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it was
|
||
held, virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that the
|
||
universe, as we now see it, was created literally and directly by
|
||
the voice or hands of the Almighty, or by both -- out of nothing --
|
||
in an instant or in six days, or in both -- about four thousand
|
||
years before the Christian era -- and for the convenience of the
|
||
dwellers upon the earth, which was at the base and foundation of
|
||
the whole structure.
|
||
|
||
But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of
|
||
another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as the
|
||
Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find recorded
|
||
the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of an evolution of the universe out of
|
||
the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the animal creation out
|
||
of the earth and sea. This idea, recast, partially at least, into
|
||
mono-theistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
neighbors and pupils of the Chaldeans -- the Hebrews; but its
|
||
growth in Christendom afterward was checked, as we shall hereafter
|
||
find, by the more powerful influence of other inherited statements
|
||
which appealed more intelligibly to the mind of the Church.
|
||
|
||
Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought by
|
||
the early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably transmitted
|
||
from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. In the minds of Ionians
|
||
like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly developed: the
|
||
first of these conceiving of the visible universe as the result of
|
||
processes of evolution, find the latter pressing further the same
|
||
mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development
|
||
recognized in modern science.
|
||
|
||
This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold
|
||
upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some ingenious,
|
||
some perverse. Plato, indeed, withstood it; but Aristotle sometimes
|
||
developed it in a manner which reminds us of modern views.
|
||
|
||
Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the
|
||
evolutionary process virtually to all things.
|
||
|
||
In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation
|
||
direct, material, and by means like those used by man, was all-
|
||
powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on evolution. From
|
||
the more simple and crude of the views of creation given in the
|
||
Babylonian legends, and thence incorporated into Genesis, rose the
|
||
stream of orthodox thought on the subject, which grew into a flood
|
||
and swept on through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Yet
|
||
here and there in the midst of this flood were high grounds of
|
||
thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena and Duns Scotus, among
|
||
the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, had caught some rays of
|
||
this ancient light, and passed on to their successors, in modified
|
||
form, doctrines of an evolutionary process in the universe.
|
||
|
||
In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary
|
||
theories seemed to take more definite form in the mind of Giordano
|
||
Bruno, who evidently divined the fundamental idea of what is now
|
||
known as the "nebular hypothesis"; but with his murder by the
|
||
Inquisition at Rome this idea seemed utterly to disappear --
|
||
dissipated by the flames which in 1600 consumed his body on the
|
||
Campo dei Fiori.
|
||
|
||
Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death the
|
||
world was led into a new realm of thought in which an evolution
|
||
theory of the visible universe was sure to be rapidly developed.
|
||
For there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our
|
||
race has produced -- Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and
|
||
Newton -- and when their work was done the old theological
|
||
conception of the universe was gone. "The spacious firmament on
|
||
high" -- "the crystalline spheres" -- the Almighty enthroned upon
|
||
"the circle of the heavens," and with his own hands, or with angels
|
||
as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion for the
|
||
benefit of the earth, opening and closing the "windows of heaven,"
|
||
letting down upon the earth the "waters above the firmament,"
|
||
"setting his bow in the cloud," hanging out "signs and wonders,"
|
||
hurling comets, "casting forth lightnings" to scare the wicked, and
|
||
"shaking the earth " in his wrath: all this had disappeared.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
These five men had given a new divine revelation to the world;
|
||
and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception,
|
||
destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had
|
||
shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice, all-
|
||
pervading law. The bitter opposition of theology to the first four
|
||
of these men is well known; but the fact is not so widely known
|
||
that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also
|
||
strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his
|
||
statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct
|
||
action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and
|
||
transferred it to material mechanism," 'and that he "substituted
|
||
gravitation for Providence." But, more than this, these men gave a
|
||
new basis for the theory of evolution as distinguished from the
|
||
theory of creation.
|
||
|
||
Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of
|
||
Descartes, erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view
|
||
of the lack of physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done
|
||
much to weaken the old conception. His theory of a universe brought
|
||
out of all-pervading matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by
|
||
movements in accordance with physical laws -- though it was but a
|
||
provisional hypothesis -- had done much to draw men's minds from
|
||
the old theological view of creation; it was an example of
|
||
intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the
|
||
advent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his almost
|
||
morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small
|
||
factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a
|
||
reception of the thoughts of more unfettered thinkers.
|
||
|
||
Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different
|
||
sort, but with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cudworth published
|
||
his Intellectual System of the Universe. To this day he remains, in
|
||
breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in tolerance, and
|
||
in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the English Church, and
|
||
his work was worthy of him. He purposed to build a fortress which
|
||
should protect Christianity against all dangerous theories of the
|
||
universe, ancient or modern. The foundations of the structure were
|
||
laid with old thoughts thrown often into new and striking forms;
|
||
but, as the superstructure arose more and more into view, while
|
||
genius marked every part of it, features appeared which gave the
|
||
rigidly orthodox serious misgivings. From the old theories of
|
||
direct personal action on the universe by the Almighty he broke
|
||
utterly. He dwelt on the action of law, rejected the continuous
|
||
exercise of miraculous intervention, pointed out the fact that in
|
||
the natural world there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued
|
||
vigorously in favor of the origin and maintenance of the universe
|
||
as a slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an
|
||
inward principle. The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might
|
||
well condemn this honest Baalim.
|
||
|
||
Toward the end of the next century a still more profound
|
||
genius, Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in
|
||
the light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it
|
||
never before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet
|
||
greater strength by mathematical reasoning of wonderful power and
|
||
extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that our
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
own solar system and others -- suns and planets, satellites, and
|
||
their various movements, distances, and magnitudes -- necessarily
|
||
result from the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws.
|
||
|
||
Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once
|
||
against "atheism," and war raged fiercely. Herschel and others
|
||
pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous. They showed
|
||
by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the hypothesis
|
||
accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite clamor, were
|
||
gaining ground, when the improved telescopes resolved some of the
|
||
patches of nebulous matter into multitudes of stars. The opponents
|
||
of the nebular hypothesis were overjoyed; they now sang paeans to
|
||
astronomy, because, as they said, it had proved the truth of
|
||
Scripture. They had jumped to the conclusion that all nebulae must
|
||
be alike; that, if some are made up of systems of stars, all must
|
||
be so made up; that none can be masses of attenuated gaseous
|
||
matter, because some are not.
|
||
|
||
Science halted for a time. The accepted doctrine became this:
|
||
that the only reason why all the nebulae are not resolved into
|
||
distinct stars is that our telescopes are not sufficiently
|
||
powerful. But in time came the discovery of the spectroscope and
|
||
spectrum analysis, and thence Fraunhofer's discovery that the
|
||
spectrum of an ignited gaseous body is non-continuous, with
|
||
interrupting lines; and Draper's discovery that the spectrum of an
|
||
ignited solid is continuous, with no interrupting lines. And now
|
||
the spectroscope was turned upon the nebulae, and many of them were
|
||
found to be gaseous. Here, then, was ground for the inference that
|
||
in these nebulous masses at different stages of condensation --
|
||
some apparently mere patches of mist, some with luminous centers --
|
||
we have the process of development actually going on, and
|
||
observations like those of Lord Rosse and Arrest gave yet further
|
||
confirmation to this view. Then came the great contribution of the
|
||
nineteenth century to physics, aiding to explain important parts of
|
||
the vast process by the mechanical theory of heat.
|
||
|
||
Again the nebular hypothesis came forth stronger than ever,
|
||
and about 1850 the beautiful experiment of Plateau on the rotation
|
||
of a fluid globe came in apparently to illustrate if not to confirm
|
||
it. Even so determined a defender of orthodoxy as Mr. Gladstone at
|
||
last acknowledged some form of a nebular hypothesis as probably
|
||
true.
|
||
|
||
Here, too, was exhibited that form of surrendering theological
|
||
views to science under the claim that science concurs with
|
||
theology, which we have seen in so many other fields; and, as
|
||
typical, an example may be given, which, however restricted in its
|
||
scope, throws light on the process by which such surrenders are
|
||
obtained. A few years since one of the most noted professors of
|
||
chemistry in the city of New York, under the auspices of one of its
|
||
most fashionable churches, gave a lecture which, as was claimed in
|
||
the public prints and in placards posted in the streets, was to
|
||
show that science supports the theory of creation given in the
|
||
sacred books ascribed to Moses. A large audience assembled, and a
|
||
brilliant series of elementary experiments with oxygen, hydrogen,
|
||
and carbonic acid was concluded by the Plateau demonstration. It
|
||
was beautifully made. As the colored globule of oil, representing
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
the earth, was revolved in a transparent medium of equal density,
|
||
as it became flattened at the poles, as rings then broke forth from
|
||
it and revolved about it, and, finally, as some of these rings
|
||
broke into satellites, which for a moment continued to circle about
|
||
the central mass, the audience, as well they might, rose and burst
|
||
into rapturous applause.
|
||
|
||
Thereupon a well-to-do citizen arose and moved the thanks of
|
||
the audience to the eminent professor for "this perfect
|
||
demonstration of the exact and literal conformity of the statements
|
||
given in Holy Scripture with the latest results of science." The
|
||
motion was carried unanimously and with applause, and the audience
|
||
dispersed, feeling that a great service had been rendered to
|
||
orthodoxy. Sancta silplicitas!
|
||
|
||
What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been seen
|
||
elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a broader stage.
|
||
Scores of theologians, chief among whom of late in zeal if not in
|
||
knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, have endeavored to "reconcile"
|
||
the two accounts in Genesis with each other and with the truths
|
||
regarding the origin of the universe gained by astronomy, geology,
|
||
geography, physics, and chemistry. The result has been recently
|
||
stated by an eminent theologian, the Hulsean Professor of Divinity
|
||
at the University of Cambridge. He declares, "No attempt at
|
||
reconciling Genesis with the exacting requirements of modern
|
||
sciences has ever been known to succeed without entailing a degree
|
||
of special pleading or forced interpretation to which, in such a
|
||
question, we should be wise to have no recourse."*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For an interesting reference to the outcry against
|
||
Newton, see McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, New York,
|
||
1890, pp. 103, 104; for germs of an evolutionary view among the
|
||
Babylonians, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, New
|
||
York, 1876, pp. 74, 75; for a germ of the same thought in
|
||
Lucretius, see his De Natura Rerum, lib. v, pp. 187-194, 447-454;
|
||
for Bruno's conjecture (in 1591), see Jevons, Ptincifiks of
|
||
Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 299; for Kant's statement, see
|
||
his Naturgeschichte des Hitnmets; for his part in the nebular
|
||
hypothesis, see Lange, Geschichte def Materialismus, vol. i. p.
|
||
266; for value of Plateau's beautiful experiment, very cautiously
|
||
estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36; also Elisic Reclus, The
|
||
Earth, translated by Woodward, vol. i, pp, 14-18, for an estimate
|
||
still more careful; for a general account of discoveries of the
|
||
nature of nebulae by spectroscope, see Draper, Conflict between
|
||
Religion and Science; for a careful discussion regarding the
|
||
spectra of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, see Schellen,
|
||
Spectrum Analysis, pp. 100 et seg.; for a very thorough discussion
|
||
of the bearings of discoveries made by spectrum analysis upon the
|
||
nebular hypothesis, ibid., pp. 532-537; for a presentation of the
|
||
difficulties yet unsolved, see an article by Plummer in the London
|
||
Popular Science Review for January 1875; for an excellent short
|
||
summary of recent observations and thought on this subject, see T.
|
||
Sterry Hunt, Address at the Priestley Centennial, pp. 7, 8; for an
|
||
interesting modification of this hypothesis, see Proctor's
|
||
writings; for a still more recent view, see Lockyer's two articles
|
||
on The Sun's Place in Nature, in Nature for February 14 and 25,
|
||
1895.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The revelations of another group of sciences, though sometimes
|
||
bitterly opposed and sometimes "reconciled" by theologians, have
|
||
finally set the whole question at rest. First, there have come the
|
||
biblical critics -- earnest Christian scholars, working for the
|
||
sake of truth -- and these have revealed beyond the shadow of a
|
||
reasonable doubt the existence of at least two distinct accounts of
|
||
creation in our book of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced to
|
||
agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with each
|
||
other. These scholars have further shown the two accounts to be not
|
||
the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but evidently
|
||
fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies, accepted in
|
||
good faith and brought together for the noblest of purposes by
|
||
those who put in order the first of our sacred books.
|
||
|
||
Next have come the archaeologists and philologists, the
|
||
devoted students of ancient monuments and records; of these are
|
||
such as Rawlinson, George Smith, Sayce, Oppert, Jensen, Schrader,
|
||
Delitzsch, and a phalanx of similarly devoted scholars, who have
|
||
deciphered a multitude of ancient texts, especially the
|
||
inscriptions found in the great library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh,
|
||
and have discovered therein an account of the origin of the world
|
||
identical in its most important features with the later accounts in
|
||
our own book of Genesis.
|
||
|
||
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 honor 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 neighbors that "of the theories current in Assyria 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 say: "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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
available. . . . The materials which with other nations were
|
||
combined into the crudest physical theories or associated 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 honorable 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
|
||
preexisting Assyro-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 multitude 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 Assyrian 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 mass 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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
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 nobler than they have dreamed.
|
||
Science, while conquering them, has found in our Scriptures a far
|
||
nobler 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, confirms 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 noble 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 substituting 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 center of theological thought among English-speaking
|
||
people, when, in the collection of essays entitled 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?*
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* 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 now 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 Principal John Tulloch, in Contemporary
|
||
Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland -- especially
|
||
page 550.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
|
||
II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS
|
||
AND MAN.
|
||
|
||
|
||
IN one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a medieval
|
||
glass-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 armor, harness, and housings, ready
|
||
for war. Similar representations appear in illuminated manuscripts
|
||
and even in early printed books, and, as the culmination of the
|
||
whole, the Almighty is shown as fashioning 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 bad 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 gods modelling lumps of clay into men,
|
||
and a similar work is ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to the gods
|
||
of Babylonia. Passing into our own sacred books, these ideas became
|
||
the starting point of a vast new development of theology.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of
|
||
lumps of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, Tee Dawn of History, p. 156
|
||
for the Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals, see
|
||
ibid., p. 543 also George Smith, Chaldean Account 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 medieval representations of the creation of man and
|
||
woman, see Didron, Iconografihie, pp- 35, 78, 224, 537.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
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 keynote of this mode of subordinating all
|
||
other things in the study of creation to the literal text of
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
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 -- homo ex hilmo."
|
||
|
||
In the second half of the same century this view as to the
|
||
literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St.
|
||
Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that "Moses
|
||
opened his mouth and poured forth what God 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 vigor of the sentence in its
|
||
original Latin carried it ringing down the centuries: "Major est
|
||
Scripture, auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas."
|
||
|
||
Through the medieval 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 assigned
|
||
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 preexistence of matter.
|
||
|
||
At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in
|
||
favor 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 God, 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
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
earth is." As to difficulties in the scriptural account of
|
||
creation, he tells us that God "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 Bossuct threw his vast
|
||
authority in its favor, and in his Discourse oiz 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 asserting that, literally, for the creation of
|
||
man earth was used, and "the finger of God 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 God 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 toy-maker. At times the accounts in Genesis were
|
||
illustrated with even more literal exactness; thus, in connection
|
||
with a well-known passage 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."*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Instit.,
|
||
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 xxx;
|
||
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 Philosofihica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's
|
||
Schriften, ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i;
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
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 Euvres, 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's modern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos,
|
||
London, 1857, passim.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
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 God 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 passing 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 God foresaw that he would sin),
|
||
in order that he might be made aware of the final punishment of
|
||
hell."
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
punishing 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 multitudes 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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
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 through 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 classed 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 Bossuct, and from Luther to
|
||
Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God 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 molded and fashioned
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
28
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
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.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For St. Augustine, see De Genesi and De Tinitate, passim;
|
||
for Bede, see Hexameron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38,
|
||
42; and De Sex Dierum Creations, in Migne, tome xciii, p, 215; for
|
||
Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententice, 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 hereticorum"; for the agency of Aristotle and
|
||
Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species into
|
||
Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichee der Botanik, Munchen,
|
||
1875, P. 107 and note, also p. 113.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
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 assert 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, ennobled the study even among those whom logic drew away
|
||
from it.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
29
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
But, as a matter of course, in the early Church and throughout
|
||
the Middle Ages all such studies were cast in a theologic mould.
|
||
Without some purpose of biblical illustration or spiritual
|
||
edification they were considered futile; too much prying into the
|
||
secrets of Nature was very generally held to be dangerous both to
|
||
body and soul; only for showing forth God's glory and his purposes
|
||
in the creation were such studies praiseworthy. The great work of
|
||
Aristotle was under eclipse. The early Christian thinkers gave
|
||
little attention to it, and that little was devoted to transforming
|
||
it into something absolutely opposed to his whole spirit and
|
||
method; in place of it they developed the Physiologus and the
|
||
Bestiaries, mingling scriptural statements, legends of the saints,
|
||
and fanciful inventions with Pious intent and childlike.
|
||
simplicity. In place of research came authority -- the authority of
|
||
the Scriptures as interpreted by the Physiologus and the Bestiaries
|
||
-- and these remained the principal source of thought on animated
|
||
Nature for over a thousand years.
|
||
|
||
Occasionally, indeed, fear was shown among the rulers in the
|
||
Church, even at such poor prying into the creation as this, and in
|
||
the fifth century a synod under Pope Gelasius administered a rebuke
|
||
to the Physiologus; but the interest in Nature was too strong: the
|
||
great work on Creation by St. Basil had drawn from the Physiologus
|
||
precious illustrations of Holy Writ, and the strongest of the early
|
||
popes, Gregory the Great, virtually sanctioned it.
|
||
|
||
Thus was developed a sacred science of creation and of the
|
||
divine purpose in Nature, which went on developing from the fourth
|
||
century to the nineteenth -- from St. Basil to St. Isidore of
|
||
Seville, from Isidore to Vincent of Beauvais, and from Vincent to
|
||
Archdeacon Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises.
|
||
|
||
Like all else in the Middle Ages, this sacred science was
|
||
developed purely by theological methods. Neglecting the wonders
|
||
which the dissection of the commonest animals' would have afforded
|
||
them, these naturalists attempted to throw light into Nature by
|
||
ingenious use of scriptural texts, by research among the lives of
|
||
the saints, and by the plentiful application of metaphysics. Hence
|
||
even such strong men as St. Isidore of Seville treasured up
|
||
accounts of the unicorn and dragons mentioned in the Scriptures and
|
||
of the phoenix and basilisk in profane writings. Hence such
|
||
contributions to knowledge as that the basilisk kills serpents by
|
||
his breath and men by his glance, that the lion when pursued
|
||
effaces his tracks with the end of his tail, that the pelican
|
||
nourishes her young with her own blood, that serpents lay aside
|
||
their venom before drinking, that the salamander quenches fire,
|
||
that the hyena can talk with shepherds, that certain birds are born
|
||
of the fruit of a certain tree when it happens to fall into the
|
||
water, with other masses of science equally valuable.
|
||
|
||
As to the method of bringing science to bear on Scripture, the
|
||
Plzysiologus gives an example, illustrating the passage in the book
|
||
of Job which speaks of the old lion perishing for lack of prey. Out
|
||
of the attempt to explain an unusual Hebrew word in the text there
|
||
came a curious development of error, until we find fully evolved an
|
||
account of the "ant-lion," which, it gives us to understand, was
|
||
the lion mentioned by Job, and it says: "As to the ant-lion, his
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
30
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
father hath the shape of a lion, his mother that of an ant; the
|
||
father liveth upon flesh and the mother upon herbs; these bring
|
||
forth the ant-lion, a compound of both and in part like to either;
|
||
for his fore part is like that of a lion and his hind part like
|
||
that of an ant. Being thus composed, he is neither able to eat
|
||
flesh like his father nor herbs like his mother, and so he
|
||
perisheth."
|
||
|
||
In the middle of the thirteenth century we have a triumph of
|
||
this theological method in the great work of the English Franciscan
|
||
Bartholomew on The Properties of Things. The theological method as
|
||
applied to science consists largely in accepting tradition and in
|
||
spinning arguments to fit it. In this field Bartholomew was a
|
||
master. Having begun with the intent mainly to explain the
|
||
allusions in Scripture to natural objects, he soon rises logically
|
||
into a survey of all Nature. Discussing the "cockatrice" of
|
||
Scripture, he tells us: "He drieth and burneth leaves with his
|
||
touch, and he is of so great venom and perilous that he slayeth and
|
||
wasteth him that nigheth him without tarrying; and yet the weasel
|
||
overcometh him, for the biting of the weasel is death to the
|
||
cockatrice. Nevertheless the biting of the cockatrice is death to
|
||
the weasel if the weasel eat not rue before. And though the
|
||
cockatrice be venomous without remedy while he is alive, yet he
|
||
looseth all the malice when he is burnt to ashes. His ashes be
|
||
accounted profitable in working of alchemy, and namely in turning
|
||
and changing of metals."
|
||
|
||
Bartholomew also enlightens us on the animals of Egypt, and
|
||
says, "If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he
|
||
slayeth him, and then he weepeth over him and swalloweth him."
|
||
|
||
Naturally this good Franciscan naturalist devotes much thought
|
||
to the "dragons" mentioned in Scripture. He says: "The dragon is
|
||
most greatest of all serpents, and oft he is drawn out of his den
|
||
and riseth up into the air, and the air is moved by him, and also
|
||
the sea swelleth against his venom, and he hath a crest, and
|
||
reareth his tongue, and hath teeth like a saw, and hath strength,
|
||
and not only in teeth but in tail, and grieveth with biting and
|
||
with stinging. Whom he findeth he slayeth. Oft four or five of them
|
||
fasten their tails together and rear up their heads, and sail over
|
||
the sea to get good meat. Between elephants and dragons is
|
||
everlasting fighting; for the dragon with his tail spanneth the
|
||
elephant, and the elephant with his nose throweth down the dragon.
|
||
. . . The cause why the dragon desireth his blood is the coldness
|
||
thereof, by the which the dragon desireth to cool himself. Jerome
|
||
saith that the dragon is a full thirsty beast, insomuch that he
|
||
openeth his mouth against the wind to quench the burning of his
|
||
thirst in that wise. Therefore, when he seeth ships in great wind
|
||
he flieth against the sail to take the cold wind, and overthroweth
|
||
the ship."
|
||
|
||
These ideas of Friar Bartholomew spread far and struck deep
|
||
into the popular mind. His book was translated into the principal
|
||
languages of Europe, and was one of those most generally read
|
||
during the Ages of Faith. It maintained its position nearly three
|
||
hundred years; even after the invention of printing it held its
|
||
own, and in the fifteenth century there were issued no less than
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
31
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
ten editions of it in Latin, four in French, and various versions
|
||
of it in Dutch, Spanish, and English. Preachers found it especially
|
||
useful in illustrating the ways of God to man. It was only when the
|
||
great voyages of discovery substituted ascertained fact for
|
||
theological reasoning in this province that its authority was
|
||
broken.
|
||
|
||
The same sort of science flourished in the Bestiaries, which
|
||
were used everywhere, and especially in the pulpits, for the
|
||
edification of the faithful. In all of these, as in that compiled
|
||
early in the thirteenth century by an ecclesiastic, William of
|
||
Normandy, we have this lesson, borrowed from the Physiologus: "The
|
||
lioness giveth birth to cubs which remain three days without life.
|
||
Then cometh the lion, breatheth upon them, and bringeth them to
|
||
life. . . . Thus it is that Jesus Christ during three days was
|
||
deprived of life, but God the Father raised him gloriously."
|
||
|
||
Pious use was constantly made of this science, especially by
|
||
monkish preachers. The phoenix rising from his ashes proves the
|
||
doctrine of the resurrection; the structure and mischief of monkeys
|
||
proves the existence of demons; the fact that certain monkeys have
|
||
no tails proves that Satan. has been shorn of his glory; the
|
||
weasel, which "constailtly changes its place, is a type of the man
|
||
estranged from the word of God, who findeth no rest."
|
||
|
||
The moral treatises of the time often took the form of works
|
||
on natural history, in order the more fully to exploit these
|
||
religious teachings of Nature. Thus from the book On Bees, of the
|
||
Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre', we learn that wasps persecute bees
|
||
and make war on them out of natural hatred"; and these, he tells
|
||
us, typify the demons who dwell in the air and with lightning and
|
||
tempest assail and vex mankind -- whereupon he fills a long chapter
|
||
with anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals. In like manner
|
||
his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his book The Ant
|
||
Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to have
|
||
horns and to grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of
|
||
atrocious heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite
|
||
against the truth; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out
|
||
of the sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use
|
||
of it, symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out
|
||
the gold of Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books to no
|
||
purpose.
|
||
|
||
This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in
|
||
art, and especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles overhanging
|
||
the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched
|
||
upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under archways or lurking
|
||
in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the
|
||
stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, wrought into the
|
||
tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders of psalters and
|
||
missals, these marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from
|
||
the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Exempla.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de
|
||
Xivrey, Traditions Telratologigues; also Hippeau's edition of the
|
||
Bestiaire de Cuillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieval
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
32
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
books of Exempla as the Lumen Natura; also Hoefer, Histoire de la
|
||
Zoologic; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilization Franraise,
|
||
Paris, 1885, vol. i, pp. 368, 369 also Cardinal Pitra, preface to
|
||
the Spicilegium Solismense, Paris, 1885, passim also Carus,
|
||
Geschichte der Zoologie; and, for an admirable summary, the article
|
||
Physiologus in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the illuminated
|
||
manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are some very
|
||
striking examples of grotesques. For admirably illustrated articles
|
||
on the Bestiaries, see Cahier and Martin, melanges d'archeologie,
|
||
Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, vol. ii of the first series, pp.
|
||
85-232, and second series, volume on Curiosites Mysterieuses, pp.
|
||
106-164; also J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great
|
||
Britain and Ireland (London, 1887), lecture vi; for an exhaustive
|
||
discussion of the subject, see Das Thierbuch des normannischen
|
||
Dichters Guillaume le Cleic, herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic,
|
||
1890; and, for an Italian example, Goldstaub und Wendriner, Ein
|
||
Tosco- Venezianischer Bestiarius, Halle, 1892, where is given, on
|
||
pp. 369-371, a very pious but very comical tradition regarding the
|
||
beaver, hardly mentionable to ears polite. For Friar Bartholomew,
|
||
see (besides his book itself) Medieval Lore, edited by Robert
|
||
Steele, London, 1893, PP. 118-138.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
Here and there among men who were free from church control we
|
||
have work of a better sort. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
|
||
Abd Allatif made observations upon the natural history of Egypt
|
||
which showed a truly scientific spirit, and the Emperor Frederick
|
||
II attempted to promote a more fruitful study of Nature; but one of
|
||
these men was abhorred as a Mussulman and the other as an infidel.
|
||
Far more in accordance with the spirit of the time was the
|
||
ecclesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on the topography of
|
||
Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals of the island, and
|
||
rarely fails to make each contribute an appropriate moral. For
|
||
example, he says that in Ireland "eagles live for so many ages that
|
||
they seem to contend with eternity itself; so also the saints,
|
||
having put off the old man and put on the new, obtain the blessed
|
||
fruit of everlasting life." Again, he tells us: "Eagles often fly
|
||
so high that their wings are scorched by the sun; so those who in
|
||
the Holy Scriptures strive to unravel the deep and hidden secrets
|
||
of the heavenly mysteries, beyond what is allowed, fall below, as
|
||
if the wings of the presumptuous imaginations on which they are
|
||
borne were scorched."
|
||
|
||
In one of the great men of the following century appeared a
|
||
gleam of healthful criticism: Albert the Great, in his work on the
|
||
animals, dissents from the widespread belief that certain birds
|
||
spring from trees and are nourished by the sap, and also from the
|
||
theory that some are generated in the sea from decaying wood.
|
||
|
||
But it required many generations for such skepticism to
|
||
produce much effect, and we find among the illustrations in an
|
||
edition of Mandeville published just before the Reformation not
|
||
only careful accounts but pictured representations both of birds
|
||
and of beasts produced in the fruit of trees.*
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
33
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn
|
||
Library, London, 1863, p. 30; for Abd Allatif and Frederick II, see
|
||
Hoefer, as above; for Albertus Magnus, see the De Animalibus, lib.
|
||
xxiii; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see the Strasburg
|
||
edition, 1484; for the history of the myth of the tree which
|
||
produces birds, see Max Muller's Lectures on the Science of
|
||
Language, second series, lect. xii.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
This general employment of natural science for pious purposes
|
||
went on after the Reformation. Luther frequently made this use of
|
||
it, and his example controlled his followers. In 1612, Wolfgang
|
||
Franz, Professor of Theology at Luther's university, gave to the
|
||
world his sacred history of animals, which went through many
|
||
editions. It contained a very ingenious classification, describing
|
||
"natural dragons," which have three rows of teeth to each jaw, and
|
||
he piously adds, the principal dragon is the Devil."
|
||
|
||
Near the end of the same century, Father Kircher, the great
|
||
Jesuit professor at Rome, holds back the skeptical current, insists
|
||
upon the orthodox view, and represents among the animals entering
|
||
the ark sirens and griffins.
|
||
|
||
Yet even among theologians we note here and there a skeptical
|
||
spirit in natural science,. Early in the same seventeenth century
|
||
Eugene Roger published his Travels in Palestine. As regards the
|
||
utterances of Scripture he is soundly orthodox: he prefaces his
|
||
work with a map showing, among other important points referred to
|
||
in biblical history, the place where Samson slew a thousand
|
||
Philistines with the jawbone of in ass, the cavern which Adam and
|
||
Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where
|
||
Baalim's ass spoke, the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel,
|
||
the steep place down which the swine possessed of devils plunged
|
||
into the sea, the position of the salt statue which was once Lot's
|
||
wife, the place at sea where Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and
|
||
"the exact spot where St. Peter caught one hundred and fifty-three
|
||
fishes."
|
||
|
||
As to natural history, he describes and discusses with great
|
||
theological acuteness the basilisk. He tells us that the animal is
|
||
about a foot and a half long, is shaped like a crocodile, and kills
|
||
people with a single glance. The one which he saw was dead,
|
||
fortunately for him, since in the time of Pope Leo IV -- as he
|
||
tells us -- one appeared in Rome and killed many people by merely
|
||
looking at them; but the Pope destroyed it with his prayers and the
|
||
sign of the cross. He informs us that Providence has wisely and
|
||
mercifully protected man by requiring the monster to cry aloud two
|
||
or three times whenever it leaves its den, and that the divine
|
||
wisdom in creation is also shown by the fact that the monster is
|
||
obliged to look its victim in the eye, and at a certain fixed
|
||
distance, before its glance can penetrate the victim's brain and so
|
||
pass to his heart. He also gives a reason for supposing that the
|
||
same divine mercy has provided that the crowing of a cock will kill
|
||
the basilisk.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
34
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
Yet even in this good and credulous missionary we see the
|
||
influence of Bacon and the dawn of experimental science; for,
|
||
having been told many stories regarding the salamander, he secured
|
||
one, placed it alive upon the burning coals, and reports to us that
|
||
the legends concerning its power to live in the fire are untrue. He
|
||
also tried experiments with the chameleon, and found that the
|
||
stories told of it were to be received with much allowance: while,
|
||
then, be locks up his judgment whenever he discusses the letter of
|
||
Scripture, he uses his mind in other things much after the modern
|
||
method.
|
||
|
||
In the second half of the same century Hottinger, in his
|
||
Theological Examination of the History of Creation, breaks from the
|
||
belief in the phoenix; but his skepticism is carefully kept within
|
||
the limits imposed by Scripture. He avows his doubts, first,
|
||
"because God created the animals in couples, while the phoenix is
|
||
represented as a single, un-mated creature"; secondly, "because
|
||
Noah, when he entered the ark, brought the animals in by sevens,
|
||
while there were never so many individuals of the phoenix species";
|
||
thirdly, because "no man is known who dares assert that he has ever
|
||
seen this bird"; fourthly, because "those who assert there is a
|
||
phoenix differ among themselves."
|
||
|
||
In view of these attacks on the salamander and the phoenix, we
|
||
are not surprised to find, before the end of the century,
|
||
skepticism regarding the basilisk: the eminent Prof. Kirchmaier, at
|
||
the University of Wittenberg, treats phoenix and basilisk alike as
|
||
old wives' fables. As to the phoenix, he denies its existence, not
|
||
only because Noah took no such bird into the ark, but also because,
|
||
as he pithily remarks, "birds come from eggs, not from ashes." But
|
||
the unicorn he can not resign, nor will he even concede that the
|
||
unicorn is a rhinoceros; he appeals to Job and to Marco Polo to
|
||
prove that this animal, as usually conceived, really exists, and
|
||
says, "Who would not fear to deny the existence of the unicorn,
|
||
since Holy Scripture names him with distinct praises?" As to the
|
||
other great animals mentioned in Scripture, he is so rationalistic
|
||
as to admit that behemoth was an elephant and leviathan a Whale.
|
||
|
||
But these germs of a fruitful skepticism grew, and we soon
|
||
find Dannhauer going a step further and declaring his disbelief
|
||
even in the unicorn, insisting that it was a rhinoceros -- only
|
||
that and nothing more. Still, the main current continued strongly
|
||
theological. In 1712 Samuel Bochart published his great work upon
|
||
the animals of Holy Scripture. As showing its spirit we may take
|
||
the titles of the chapters on the horse:
|
||
|
||
"Chapter VI. Of the Hebrew Name of the Horse"
|
||
|
||
"Chapter VII. Of the Colors of the Six Horses in Zechariah."
|
||
|
||
"Chapter VIII. Of the Horses in Job."
|
||
|
||
"Chapter IX. Of Solomon's Horses, and of the Texts wherein the
|
||
Writers praise the Excellence of Horses."
|
||
|
||
Chapter X. Of the Consecrated Horses of the Sun."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
35
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
Among the other titles of chapters are such as: Of Baalim's
|
||
Ass; Of the Thousand Philistines slain by Samson with the Jawbone
|
||
of an Ass; Of the Golden Calves of Aaron and Jeroboam; Of the
|
||
Bleating, Milk, Wool, External and Internal Parts of Sheep
|
||
mentioned in Scripture; Of Notable Things told regarding Lions in
|
||
Scripture; Of Noah's Dove and of the Dove which appeared at
|
||
Christ's Baptism. Mixed up in the book, with the principal mass
|
||
drawn from Scripture, were many facts and reasonings taken from
|
||
investigations by naturalists; but all were permeated by the
|
||
theological spirit.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For Franz and Kircher, see Perrier, La Philosophie
|
||
Zoologique avant Darwin, Paris, 1884, p. 29; for Roger, see his La
|
||
Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-92, 139, 218, etc.; for
|
||
Hottinger, see his Historie Creationis Examen theologieo-
|
||
fihilologicum, Heidelberg, 1659, lib. vi, quoest. lxxxiii; for
|
||
Kirchmaier, see his Disputationes Zoologies, (published
|
||
collectively after his death), Jena, 1736; for Dannhauer, see his
|
||
Disputationes Theologics', Leipsic, 1707, p.14; for Bochart, see
|
||
his Hierozoikon, sive De Animalibus Sacrae, Scripture, Leyden,
|
||
1712.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two
|
||
thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the
|
||
sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method
|
||
-- the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically -- the method
|
||
which seeks not plausibilities but facts. At that time Edward
|
||
Wotton led the way in England and Conrad Gesner on the Continent,
|
||
by observations widely extended, carefully noted, and thoughtfully
|
||
classified.
|
||
|
||
This better method of interrogating Nature soon led to the
|
||
formation of societies for the same purpose. In 1560 was founded an
|
||
Academy for the Study of Nature at Naples, but theologians,
|
||
becoming alarmed, suppressed it, and for nearly one hundred years
|
||
there was no new combined effort of that sort, until in 1645 began
|
||
the meetings in London of what was afterward the Royal Society.
|
||
Then came the Academy of Sciences in France, and the Accademia del
|
||
Cimento in Italy; others followed in all parts of the world, and a
|
||
great new movement was begun.
|
||
|
||
Theologians soon saw a danger in this movement. In Italy,
|
||
Prince Leopold de' Medici, a protector of the Florentine Academy,
|
||
was bribed with a cardinal's hat to neglect it, and from the days
|
||
of Urban VIII to Pius IX a similar spirit was there shown. In
|
||
France, there were frequent ecclesiastical interferences, of which
|
||
Button's humiliation for stating a simple scientific truth was a
|
||
noted example. In England, Protestantism was at first hardly more
|
||
favorable toward the Royal Society, and the great Dr. South
|
||
denounced it in his sermons as irreligious.
|
||
|
||
Fortunately, one thing prevented an open breach between
|
||
theology and science: while new investigators had mainly given up
|
||
the medieval method so dear to the Church, they had very generally
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
36
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
retained the conception of direct creation and of design throughout
|
||
creation -- a design having as its main purpose the profit,
|
||
instruction, enjoyment, and amusement of man.
|
||
|
||
On this the naturally opposing tendencies of theology and,
|
||
science were compromised. Science, while somewhat freed from its
|
||
old limitations, became the handmaid of theology in illustrating
|
||
the doctrine of creative design, and always with apparent deference
|
||
to the Chaldean and other ancient myths and legends embodied in the
|
||
Hebrew sacred books.
|
||
|
||
About the middle of the seventeenth century came a great
|
||
victory of the scientific over the theologic method. At that time
|
||
Francesco Redi published the results of his inquiries into the
|
||
doctrine of spontaneous generation. For ages a widely accepted
|
||
doctrine had been that water, filth, and carrion had received power
|
||
from the Creator to generate worms, insects, and a multitude of the
|
||
smaller animals; and this doctrine had been especially welcomed by
|
||
St. Augustine and many of the fathers, since it relieved the
|
||
Almighty of making, Adam of naming, and Noah of living in the ark
|
||
with these innumerable despised species. But to this fallacy Redi
|
||
put an end. By researches which could not be gainsaid, he showed
|
||
that every one of these animals came from an egg; each, therefore,
|
||
must be the lineal descendant of an animal created, named, and
|
||
preserved from the beginning."
|
||
|
||
Similar work went on in England, but under more distinctly
|
||
theological limitations. In the same seventeenth century a very
|
||
famous and popular English book was published by the naturalist
|
||
John Ray, a fellow of the Royal Society, who produced a number of
|
||
works on plants, fishes, and birds; but the most widely read of all
|
||
was entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation.
|
||
Between the years 1691 and 1827 it Passed through nearly twenty
|
||
editions.
|
||
|
||
Ray argued the goodness and wisdom of God from the adaptation
|
||
of the animals not only to man's uses but to their own lives and
|
||
surroundings.
|
||
|
||
In the first years of the eighteenth century Dr. Nehemiah
|
||
Grew, of the Royal Society, published his Cosmologia Sacra to
|
||
refute anti-scriptural opinions by producing evidences of creative
|
||
design. Discussing "the ends of Providence," he says, "A crane,
|
||
which is scurvy meat, lays but two eggs in the year, but a pheasant
|
||
and partridge, both excellent meat, lay and hatch fifteen or
|
||
twenty." He points to the fact that "those of value which lay few
|
||
at a time sit the oftener, as the woodcock and the dove." He breaks
|
||
decidedly from the doctrine that noxious things in Nature are
|
||
caused by sin, and shows that they, too, are useful; that, "if
|
||
nettles sting, it is to secure an excellent medicine for children
|
||
and cattle"; that, "if the bramble hurts man, it makes all the
|
||
better hedge"; and that, "if it chances to prick the owner, it
|
||
tears the thief." "Weasels, kites, and other hurtful animals induce
|
||
us to watchfulness; thistles and moles, to good husbandry; lice
|
||
oblige us to cleanliness in our bodies, spiders in our houses, and
|
||
the moth in our clothes." This very optimistic view, triumphing
|
||
over the theological theory of noxious animals and plants as
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
37
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
effects of sin, which prevailed with so much force from St.
|
||
Augustine to Wesley, was developed into nobler form during the
|
||
century by various thinkers, and especially by Archdeacon Paley,
|
||
whose Natural Theology exercised a powerful influence down to
|
||
recent times. The same tendency appeared in other countries, though
|
||
various philosophers showed weak points in the argument, and Goethe
|
||
made sport of it in a noted verse, praising the forethought of the
|
||
Creator in foreordaining the cork tree to furnish stoppers for
|
||
wine-bottles.
|
||
|
||
Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the main
|
||
movement culminated in the Bridgezeatcr Treatises. Pursuant to the
|
||
will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the President of the Royal
|
||
Society selected eight persons, each to receive a thousand pounds
|
||
sterling for writing and publishing a treatise on the "power,
|
||
wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." Of
|
||
these, the leading essays in regard to animated Nature were those
|
||
of Thomas Chalmers, on The Adaption of External Nature to the oral
|
||
and Intellectual Condition of Man; of Sir Charles Bell, on The Hand
|
||
as evincing Design; of Roget, on Animal and Vegetable Physiology
|
||
with reference to Natural Theology; and of Kirby, on The Habits and
|
||
Instincts of Animals with reference to Natural Theology.
|
||
|
||
Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buckland, Kidd,
|
||
and Profit. The work was well done. It was a marked advance on all
|
||
that had appeared before, in matter, method, and spirit. Looking
|
||
back upon it now we can see that it was provisional, but that it
|
||
was none the less fruitful in truth, and we may well remember
|
||
Darwin's remark on the stimulating effect of mistaken theories, as
|
||
compared with the sterilizing effect of mistaken observations:
|
||
mistaken observations lead men astray, mistaken theories suggest
|
||
true theories.
|
||
|
||
An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not deserve
|
||
the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes been lavished upon
|
||
it. Curiously, indeed, one of the most contemptuous of these
|
||
criticisms has been recently made by one of the most strenuous
|
||
defenders of orthodoxy. No less eminent a standard-bearer of the
|
||
faith than the Rev. Prof. Zoeckler says of this movement to
|
||
demonstrate creative purpose and design, and of the men who took
|
||
part in it, "The earth appeared in their representation of it like
|
||
a great clothing shop and soup kitchen, and God as a glorified
|
||
rationalistic professor." Such a statement as this is far from just
|
||
to the conceptions of such men as Butler, Paley, and Chalmers, no
|
||
matter how fully the thinking world has now outlived them.*
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
NOTE:* For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea
|
||
of the generation of insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, On the
|
||
Oxen-born Bees of the Ancients, Heidelberg, 1894; for Ray, see the
|
||
work cited, London, 1827, p. 153; for Grew, see Cosmologia Sacra,
|
||
or a Discourse on the Universe, as it is the Creature and Kingdom
|
||
of God; chiefly written to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of
|
||
the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of
|
||
Physicians and of the Royal Society, London, 1701; for Paley and
|
||
the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions; also Lange,
|
||
History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as follows:
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
38
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig,
|
||
Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand."
|
||
For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol.
|
||
ii, PP. 74, 440.
|
||
<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of
|
||
fact on which they reared it became evidently more and more
|
||
insecure.
|
||
|
||
For as far back as the seventeenth century acute theologians
|
||
had begun to discern difficulties more serious than any that had
|
||
before confronted them. More and more it was seen that the number
|
||
of different species was far greater than the world had hitherto
|
||
imagined. Greater and greater had become the old difficulty in
|
||
conceiving that, of these innumerable species, each had been
|
||
specially created by the Almighty hand; that each had been brought
|
||
before Adam by the Almighty to be named; and that each, in couples
|
||
or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the ark. But the
|
||
difficulties thus suggested were as nothing compared to those
|
||
raised by the distribution of animals.
|
||
|
||
Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious
|
||
thought, and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine. In his
|
||
City of God he had stated the difficulty as follows: But there is
|
||
a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are neither tamed
|
||
by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such as wolves and
|
||
others of that sort, . . . as to how they could find their way to
|
||
the islands after that flood which destroyed every living thing not
|
||
preserved in the ark. . . . Some, indeed, might be thought to reach
|
||
islands by swimming, in case these were very near; but some islands
|
||
are so remote from continental lands that it does not seem possible
|
||
that any creature could reach them by swimming. It is not an
|
||
incredible thing, either, that some animals may have been captured
|
||
by men and taken with them to those lands which they intended to
|
||
inhabit, in order that they might have the pleasure of hunting; and
|
||
it can not be denied that the transfer may have been accomplished
|
||
through the agency of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this
|
||
labor by God."
|
||
|
||
But this difficulty had now assumed a magnitude of which St.
|
||
Augustine never dreamed. Most powerful of all agencies to increase
|
||
it were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Amerigo
|
||
Vespucci, and other navigators of the period of discovery. Still
|
||
more serious did it become as the great islands of the southern
|
||
seas were explored. Every navigator brought home tidings of new
|
||
species of animals and of races of men living in parts of the world
|
||
where the theologians, relying on the statement of St. Paul that
|
||
the gospel had gone into all lands, had for ages declared there
|
||
could be none; until finally it overtaxed even the theological
|
||
imagination to conceive of angels, in obedience to the divine
|
||
command, distributing the various animals over the earth, dropping
|
||
the megatherium in South America, the archeopteryx in Europe, the
|
||
ornithorhynchus in Australia, and the opossum in North America.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
39
|
||
|
||
THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
The first striking evidence of this new difficulty was shown
|
||
by the eminent Jesuit missionary, Joseph Acosta. In his Natural and
|
||
Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590, he proved himself
|
||
honest and lucid. Though entangled in most of the older scriptural
|
||
views, he broke away from many; but the distribution of animals
|
||
gave him great trouble. Having shown the futility of St.
|
||
Augustine's other
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
incomplete.
|
||
|