Elves and Adam

Human Language Revisited · Elves and Adam · Back to Picq · Off the Bat

I was reading an article by Jon Mentxakatorre Odriozola - J. R. R. Tolkien : The Philosophical Basis for Sub-Creative Words - where I noted the difference between elves in Cuivienen and Adam before and in Eden. Author brought up the former, my benefactor Borgehammar the latter : Adam naming the animals.

The elves first saw and first named stars (before sun and moon were there, or even the two trees). Their first naming of a thing was also their first word. And "el" suspiciously resembles a Hebrew word of God, but in proto-eldarin it is supposed to mean "star" and "speak". Because looking up at the stars was the first topic they ever spoke a single word about.

Adam also named things, in the real story. Animals. But before he did that, he had spoken a lot with God, who had told him to do so.

The Silmarillion was published posthumously, and includes material written after the publishing of Lord of the Rings and also after ... Humani Generis. An encyclical of which we know Tolkien's reception was obedient and obedient to an excessively pro-evolutionary interpretation - basically : we are free to believe Adam's body evolved, as long as we believe Adam's soul was a direct and primary creation of God*. In other words, Tolkien was considering himself free to disregard facthood of entire account as it stands in Genesis. A man so interested in languages as he must have asked himself what Adam's acquisition of language may have been like, if it was not a direct gift from God (leaving only animal names to Adam).

Somehow, what he said directly of elves in Cuivienen may have been similar to what he thought of man.

Now, the difference is a bit like the difference between a Catholic and a Liberal Protestant view of the origin of the Church.

In a Catholic view, God founded mankind as well as Church with one clear start to which all the rest is connected, whether it be by sexual propagation of humanity (along with, usually, sin) or sacramental propagation of episcopal succession making the seven sacraments possible. If your valid Communion comes from a valid Mass said by a priest validly ordained by a bishop validly consecrated in a series going back to the Twelve, so does your Y-chromosome (if you are a man) come from Adam and your mitochondriae from Eve, and your ability to speak started with Adam and Eve, just as your ability to get saved started with Christ's work on Calvary and among the twelve.

In a Liberal Protestant view, sacraments were gradually emerging in the Church, the narrative material of the Gospels were added to, and Church unity was also slow before Nicaea. Church didn't "magically" start with God and the Apostles - and mankind didn't "magically" start with God along with Adam and Eve.

Of which one consequence is, speech would not have started as a direct gift from God, it would have been something for which man had a capacity and gradually developed. Perhaps by Adam between being born of irrational parents with himself a rational soul and meeting God and getting Eve - on the kind of conservative reading Tolkien would no doubt have preferred even within the liberties of* Humani Generis. How this may have - if this scenario had been possible - taken place is a study for Cuivienen chapter in Silmarillion.** Adam would have one night been astonished at the beauty of the stars ... like the elves in Cuivienen. This way, the existence of the elven kind, in Tolkien, does not start with a direct and conscious contact with God, their speech is a reaction to surroundings : an unfallen reaction, a very aesthetic reaction, a reaction worthy of saints as well as very talented men, but still a natural reaction : having the God-given capacity to speech, they develop it.

In Adam's case, as the Bible has it, which is the truth, Adam has the God-given capacity for speech and God also provides, for free, Hebrew grammar and a near complete Hebrew*** lexicon, lacking however words for animals, which Adam then provides. After already knowing how to speak.

I believe Tolkien's version of elves in Cuivienen is wrong and inferior to the Bible. But I also believe both theories are superior to Pascal Picq, Bernard Victorri and Jean-Louis Dessalles - against whose book I wrote back seven weeks ago. Pascal Picq got a link to it, via FB. He hasn't answered and if he transmitted the link to the other two, they didn't bother to answer either.

One more, Tolkien's Cuivienen scene as well as the "Narnia awake" scene in The Magician's Nephew leave out the trauma it would have involved if Adam had been born of non-human parents who could not cope with his humanity. Or of him not sharing it with them. Elves are - like Adam in the Bible - created adults. And created rational. Talking beasts are created as non-talking beasts at first, but first generation such. This makes, for those who love these books, the "liberal Humani Generis" take on Adam even more mysterious and ominous. Even Tolkien and Lewis could not deal with that aspect of the theory some have defended "as Catholics" since 1950, and in Paris since 1947.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Margerite Audoux Library
St. Rufinus of Assisi°
30.VII.2019

* Humani Generis actually doesn't state anyone is free to believe that Adam was born of non-human parents or even as a non-human before God changed him into a human, it only states both options can be defended by people who are both "expertes" in exegesis and in natural sciences. In Latin, "expers" does not primarily mean a formal and accredited "expert", it means someone having experience in the matter. However, it does state very definitely that Adam's soul was a direct creation of God, not a development, and this must be believed.

** Of the Coming of the Elves.

*** The Bible doesn't state what language spoke, directly, but certain traits in the naming of things - Adam and Eve, for instance - suggest it was Hebrew or a very closely related language, which could have been considered as Hebrew as well by non-Hebrews who weren't specialists : the second best candidate after Hebrew being Aramaic; Our Lord's primary language.

° Not identic to Ruffino Niccacci, but his patron saint.

Answering Mark Shea

Creation vs. Evolution : Answering Mark Shea · HGL's F.B. writings : Mark Shea's Post and My Comments + Debate · New blog on the kid : Mark Hausam on Infallibility

He's doing a book on the Creed (not sure if Apostolic or Nicene, anyway, it seems to be an extended, beyond Q & A format, catechism on the first part of Christian doctrine, that being the Creed).

He quoted a passage from it on his blog, and I quote this tetrachotomy on the people involved in a certain discussion:

• the Atheist (who imagines that evolution somehow proves there is no God designing anything).
  
  
• the Fundamentalist (who fears exactly the same thing about evolution and therefore tries desperately to make the convincing and converging lines of evidence for it go away by appeals to simplistic readings of the biblical text, as though it demands the universe was made some six thousand years ago in a single week).
  
  
• the Intelligent Design advocate, who seems pretty Catholic, but who in fact seldom enjoys a warm welcome from Catholic theologians, including (particularly) the people who study the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.
  
  
• Thomists and other Catholics, who affirm that there is an Argument from Design, but who deny that “Intelligent Design” arguments really capture it.

A bit of my Creed book
July 22, 2019 by Mark Shea
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2019/07/a-bit-of-my-creed-book.html

Where did he forget the Fundamentalist who is also a Catholic?

That Adam was made 6000 (5779) - 7500 years ago (diverging counts for diverse texts and diverse calculations, not a continuum) is required by Genesis 5 and 11 as well as Luke 3:23-38.

That the universe was made in a single week is required by not just Genesis 1, but also Exodus 20:

[11] For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.

That Moses was not under any illusion due to cultural prejudice, but God Himself said these words, is clear from the New Testament, both Pharisees and Christ:

We know that God spoke to Moses: but as to this man, we know not from whence he is.
[John 9:29]

And as concerning the dead that they rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spoke to him, saying: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?
[Mark 12:26]

If God really spoke to Moses in the bush, and sending him as a prophet*, Moses cannot later on Mount Sinai have taken his own cultural prejudice and inner monologue or inner dialogue as God's voice when it wasn't.

Therefore, there is a clear requirement of continuous creation followed by continuous just upholding of what was already created, and not any "punctuated equilibria".

But there is more, Christ also considered Adam and Eve as contemporaneous with the beginning.** Their creation was according to Roman Martyrology 5199 years before His Birth, and therefore 5129 years before He spoke.

6 days / 1 873 328.7825 days = 0.000 003 202 854 755 7

If their creation was 3 ppm of the then history of the universe after absolute beginning, Christ's words hold.

Now, what is 5129 years to 4.5 billion years?

5129 years / 4.5 billion years = 0.000 001 139 777 777 ...

So, their creation would have been only 1 ppm less recent than his own words compared to a much vaster "history" of the earth. The very reversal of above.

Therefore, yes, the texts do indeed require that creation days were negligible in comparison to the history of man since Adam to when Christ spoke, which is the case for one week, which is also the specification given.

Note also what God did not speak to Moses of, which was not part of a revelation at Sinai, except God giving a general yes to Moses on the whole of it : the history of Genesis 2:4 to 50:25. Unlike the account of 6 days in Genesis 1 (to most of which Adam and Eve were not witnesses), Genesis 3 is known because Adam and Eve recorded it in a short text which was easy to memorise.

For the more than 20 to less than 30 generations between them and Moses (as per Genesis 5 and 11 plus generations from Abraham to Moses), with many overlaps due to long lifespans, so several pre-Flood patriarchs could rehearse under Adam and Eve, and so Noah could rehearse under one having done so (even with LXX?), and similar from Noah to Abraham, and tribal life from Abraham being compatible with logistics of transporting written documents (hence longer chapters from 12 on), Genesis 3 can be fairly well relied on even humanly, and inerrantly so when God's inspiration to Moses as final collector is concerned.

If we had instead lifespans like "dying at 30 to 40" for tens of millennia, the transmission would be less secure (there would for instance have been more language changes) and also Genesis 5 and 11 would be documenting a corruption by omission of the genealogies.

So, yes, the texts do require Adam being created c. 5199 BC (more recently in Vulgate / King James / Masoretic, less recently in Syncellus' view of LXX).

It is funny that Mark Shea then goes on to divorce the Thomist and any other Catholic not just from the Fundy, but also from the kind of ID arguments against atheism that he considers different from a Catholic take on ID (without giving specific examples).

Or, perhaps, tragic. He's known to be a very avid supporter of a "Pope" who in 2014 said "God is not a magician with an omnipotent magic wand". Bergoglio, begone!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
Vigil of St. James
24.VII.2019

PS, I am not afraid evolution would prove atheism. I am not afraid of a non-proven theory that is disproven on several accounts, at least 3 or four, including origin of language, would prove anything./HGL

PPS, in a previous post, Mark Shea engaged in blatant ad hominem:

The first is this: St. Thomas himself never says “We cannot explain a natural phenomenon, so God did it”, and for good reason. The problem with such “God of the Gaps” arguments (“I don’t know how this thing works or originated, so it must be a miracle”) is that we are constantly filling in the gaps. A few hundred years ago, people could have said, “If there’s no God, then explain lightning!” Then somebody explained that lightning was a big static electricity discharge. A little after, they might have said, “If there’s no God, then explain magnetism, or immunity from disease, or where babies come from!” Now we know how these processes work pretty well. People who thought such arguments were bulletproof often lost their faith when those arguments fell apart.

ID also never said “We cannot explain a natural phenomenon, so God did it”. ID consistently says we can explain such and such a thing (like life arising in non-life or human speech taking its first step) only by God.

Also he is wrong on history of sciences, and a Medieval of St Thomas' time would not have said the lightning was most of the time directed by God. Its electric essence does not prove it had to fall exactly then, exactly there, and angels or demons directing that (under God's providence) are therefore still not superfluous, nor were they in his time regarded as sole origin of lightnings.

Mark Shea bungles both quoting ID and narrating history of sciences, a bit as if he was overrelying (I'm tempted to a rude image) on someone else, like a scientist who never read an ID article (with normal understanding of his reading) and has no idea of history of sciences./HGL

* Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich can have been spoken to by God without having this clear discernment always, since she was not sent as a prophet, her revelations are not known by her looking up the bishop's office room to obey God, but because Clement Brentano was curious and wrote them down, hence some could be of her own - undiscerned - invention or recollection of someone else : as I suspect for pre-Babelic language being close to Sanskrit rather than Hebrew, which could reflect discussions among priests or doctors taking care of her, since this was after Bopp.

** Mark 10:6 - read your patron Saint's Gospel, Mr. Shea!

If you Accept Old Earth Creation, Where do you Put Human Long Ages?

Today's article on CMI enters a letter, from which I quote:

But I also loved science, and I had accepted that the earth is billions of years old. I saw no conflict with the Bible, in believing in a 'God of long ages', because I knew He was the Creator. I believed there was a literal Adam and Eve, and a literal Fall, but assumed that the long ages of mankind were after that.

“CMI gave me a faith worth sharing”
https://creation.com/faith-worth-sharing

So, the writer is putting Lascaux and Altamira after Adam, but as long ago as Lascaux and Altamira are dated as.

Fr. Fulcran Vigoroux was only taking prehuman creation into "long days" of creation, contradicting presumably inadvertently Mark 10:6. But some guys now have to deal with Carbon dates. If Lascaux and Altamira are for the first 18 000 to 15 000 BP and for the latter 15 500 to 13 500 BP, in real years, not just putting the numbers in understood quotation marks as a systematically false dating, does that imply Lascaux and Altamira are after Adam, as the writer thought, or before Adam, as some others have thought?

Either way, it is pretty disastrous to Christianity.

Cro-Magnon, the population group associated with these caves, is anatomically modern man.

If they were pre-Adamites, Adam was not first man, and therefore hardly ancestral to all mankind. He theoretically could still have been so, we Christians believe Noah is ancestor to all men who live now on Earth (supposing Henoch hasn't come back yet with Elijah for Apocalypse 11), and Noah was not the first man.

But practically this poses difficulties, since the archaeology associated with Americas and Australia involves carbon dates clearly earlier than the ones for either 4000 or 5200 - 5500 BC, as archaeologists carbon date this.

Now, that would mean, big problem of how Amerindians or Aborigines of Australia could all descend from Adam.

On the other hand, this writer and some others say instead, earliest Aborigines, Amerindians as well as the painters in Lascaux and Altamira were descended from Adam and Eve. Fine, does away with the racist problem.

How, if so, were the stories of their creation day (Genesis 2) or their fall (Genesis 3) transmitted?

On the one hand, we have not found any identified and deciphered writing for those Carbon dated millennia. If they are a carbon mirage, due to initially lower Carbon 14, not too problematic, perhaps. But if they really are millennia rather than a few centuries, it would be equivalent to proof at least some stages lacked writing. And if so, could one trust oral tradition over 10's of 1000's of years? Especially one which would if so also have severely truncated the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11?

One tried to get out of the impass by claiming Moses could have received Genesis 2 and 3 in a vision.

There is a tradition he received the six days of creation, perhaps seventh day of rest, of Genesis 1 (arguably up to Genesis 2:4?) in a vision. There is no tradition he was any different in Genesis 2 to 11 (from 2:5 on) than in Genesis 12 to 50 - the final co-author and redactor of previous partial accounts which he put into coherent shape.

So, I think a real Christian - one who accepts doctrine, not just "values" in a vague way - will have to admit that his position, our position, since it's mine too, involves carbon dates for Lascaux and Altamira, according to current calibration from uniformitarian perspective, being misleading, unless re-interpreted.

As I promoted here:

Creation vs. Evolution : Ultra Brief Summary on Carbon 14 Method
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2018/05/ultra-brief-summary-on-carbon-14-method.html

Same observation is of course even more sharply underligned if we take into account Neanderthals and Denisovans, because:

• both have intermarried with the Cro-Magnon type, and therefore left traces in some modern populations, meaning they should be Adamites, otherwise there would be a culpability of bestiality, of taking advantage of a non-human beast, who had no free will, involved, apart from man being created separately and therefore arguably not being interfertile with any non-human creature;
• Neanderthals have shown clear signs of human - that is rational, also known as "symbolic" behaviour, like art, burials, a gene for the brain and a bone for the throat being adapted to speech.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bagnolet
St. Henry I, Emperor
Sts Joel and Esra
13.VII.2019

Where C. S. Lewis was Wrong (One Item) - Charles Gore Probably was Wrong Before him (part 2)

C. S. Lewis died, one hour later John F Kennedy was shot, Aldous died even later When CSL was wrong, Charles Gore was wrong before him, I think. Pt 1 Where C. S. Lewis was Wrong (One Item) - Charles Gore Probably was Wrong Before him (part 2)

I am implying, on other (in fact not all other) matters he was often (not always) right.

It so happens, the following quote was given in an incomplete version, and then William O'Flaherty gives a link to the complete version, with context:

Before revealing the more complete context, let’s consider where Lewis wrote these words. They come from a letter to Mrs. Johnson on November 8, 1952. They were in response to several questions that she asked of him. As noted in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 3 she had inquired “Is the Bible Infallible?” and what you see below is his complete response (words in bold are what is found above).

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature & purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.”

(CCSLQ-38) – Christ Himself Bible
http://www.essentialcslewis.com/2017/08/05/ccslq-38-christ-himself-bible/

In the following comment, O'Flaherty takes into account that C. S. Lewis (sometimes, and specifically stating so) followed Tolkien in characterising the Gospel as "true myth". However, in the same vein, he also considered full facthood and full mythicalness together as an exception for the Gospels, and he considered for instance Genesis as "still coming into focus".

He also takes into account that this quote is from a private letter. So do I, but for another reason.

He does so, since, if it is from a private letter, why make it public, a very modern, American, businessmanlike point of view which I have with good conscience flouted over and over again, because it has no place in a correspondence between men of letters (including men of learning). If his brother Warren H. had shared the modern idea, he would not have edited his brother's letters for publication, which however he very much did. If he had considered the idea here expressed as a very private opinion of C. S. Lewis of which he was shy to speak, he would not have included this letter.

I do so in another way, he could not reckon on Mrs. Johnson knowing how he used the word myth in the vein of Tolkien's poem Mythopoeia. Therefore, one can consider (barring evidence from other parts of same letter) that C. S. Lewis here meant "myth" precisely in the modern sense of the word (or if not, then he gave explanations in that same letter to Mrs. Johnson which have not been cited).

This is the kind of things he was learning from the Anglican "bishop" Charles Gore. A man who was willing to consider Mohammed had some degree of the gift of prophecy and to conclude that "if so" one could not deny this to Zarathustra as well. (I forget which book of him I had started reading, but can look it up in my "where CSL was wrong, Charles Gore was wrong before him" essay*).

So, the wiki has this to say on Charles Gore:

He was one of the most influential Anglican theologians of the 19th century, helping reconcile the church to some aspects of biblical criticism and scientific discovery, while remaining Catholic in his interpretation of the faith and sacraments.

In other words, Charles Gore was the kind of man who could consider Flood as locally Mesopotamian and Utnapishtim version as older than Biblical version, but who would not consider anything similar about Resurrection or even miracles of lesser dignity of Christ.

So, I think Charles Gore and C. S. Lewis after him were - sadly - involved in considering the Genesis account as "mythical" in one of the modern senses of the word. Only, a myth specially chosen to "carry a spiritual truth" ... or it wouldn't be in the Bible.

What is even sadder is, some Catholics have gone down that road. C. S. Lewis is a good writer, but not an error free guide to theology. A bit like Tertullian, who was also a heretic.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Zeno and 10,203 other martyrs**
9.VII.2019

PS, more than Lewis and Gore, what is wrong with Anglicanism is examplified in the Jesus Seminar followed by Tom Harpur while he apostasised.

The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light is a 2004 non-fiction book by Canadian writer Tom Harpur (1929-2017), a former Anglican priest, journalist and professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto, which supports the Christ myth theory.

The very next sentence ties in with Acharya Sanning:

Harpur claims that the New Testament shares a large number of similarities with ancient Egyptian and other pagan religions, that early Church leaders fabricated a literal and human Jesus based on ancient myths, and that we should return to an inclusive and universal religion where the spirit of Christ or Christos lives within each of us.

Of whom - Acharya that is - I have dealt with here:

somewhere else : Starting a Video with Now Deceased Acharya Sanning
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2019/07/starting-video-with-now-deceased.html

* The Philosophy of the Good Life is a series of 12 Gifford Lectures held by Bishop Charles Gore - as Anglicans style him - in 1929-1930, and modified before print by his personal contact with the lecture hearers, which was one part of the conditions prescribed for lecturers.? ... Lux Mundi? ...

When CSL was wrong, Charles Gore was wrong before him, I think. Pt 1
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2011/11/when-csl-was-wrong-charles-gore-was.html

** Some would claim that "et aliorum decem millium ac ducentorum trium" involves a misreading of M which should be martyrum instead of millium, in which case there were 213 more.