Let's Not Silmarillionise the Genesis, Shan't We?

Or is it "shall we?" Anyway, let's not.

What do I mean by this phrase ...? Well, some good Christians, including good Catholics, I hope, have considered that as The Silmarillion (Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabêth, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age) are not factual history, but do contain spiritual truth, so one could drop the claim Genesis is factually true and stick to its spiritual truth.

Now, the reason they just might not be as good Catholics as all that, after all, is, no, this is not how the Church has viewed Genesis.

Before I converted, I had been a very staunch Young Earth Creationist. I did not reevaluate that during the thought process leading up to my conversion process. Only at Catechesis (in US I think they call it RCIA), I was told that this was not needed. Note, back in 1987-1988, Antipope and then pseudo-Cardinal Ratzinger had not yet signed the Anti-Fundamentalist papers, which very anachronistically described the essence of Fundamentalism as rejection of spiritual senses, notably allegorical sense, but which very clearly actually went after the inerrancy of the literal sense as factual truth, especially factual history. When this happened, I was already "out of there" as adherent to trads like Le Barroux and Fraternity of St. Pius X (in that order) and I felt no need whatsoever to obey those new instructions. They came from "the occupied Church".

But back to when I converted, when I was told that, I did not drop literal belief in Genesis, I had most definitely not been told it was a heresy, and I was wary of new permissions (fasting too), but on the other hand, I had lived under a very constant strain in Sweden, socially, due to my Young Earth Creationism. So, I took time off. Laid the question aside.

A few years later, I was most definitely not buying the standard Evolutionist view, but I was willing to consider things like Cuvier and Hörbiger:

It was also claimed that Earth had had several satellites before it acquired the Moon; they began as planets in orbits of their own, but over long spans of time were captured one by one and slowly spiralled in towards Earth until they disintegrated and their debris became part of Earth's structure. One can supposedly identify the rock strata of several geological eras with the impacts of these satellites. It was believed that the destruction of earlier ice-moons were responsible for The Flood.[1]

The last such impact, of the "Tertiary" or "Cenozoic Moon" and the capture of our present Moon, is supposedly remembered through myths and legends. This was worked out in detail by Hörbiger's English follower Hans Schindler Bellamy; Bellamy recounted how as a child he would often dream about a large moon that would spiral closer and closer in until it burst, making the ground beneath roll and pitch, awakening him and giving him a very sick feeling. When he looked at the Moon's surface through a telescope, he found its surface looking troublingly familiar. When he learned of Hörbiger's idea in 1921, he found it a description of his dream. He explained the mythological support he found in such books as Moons, Myths, and Man, In the Beginning God, and The Book of Revelation is History. It was believed that our current Moon was the sixth since Earth began and that a new collision was inevitable. Believers argued that the great flood described in the Bible and the destruction of Atlantis were caused by the fall of previous moons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre

In such a scenario, whether there was more space between Adam and the Flood of Noah or whether there were once pre-Adamites, and not yet attending the consequences in soteriology or Biblical epistomology (human side, not inspirational), I considered that ages of men not recorded in Genesis could have been confirmed by the findings of Hörbiger, and could have been approximated as to their real histories by things like The Silmarillion or King Kull and Conan the Barbarian. I think if you take into account that Nimrod lived longer than men do today and then put Rahan and Conan the Conqueror together*, you can get a fair approximation of Nimrod's carreer. But back then I was more thinking in terms of getting periods of history that the Bible does not record.

When so many were Silmarillionising the Genesis, I was semi-Genesising (not attributing inerrancy!) The Silmarillion. By now, I'd be more modest : Akallabêth is, like The Last Battle, a good meditation on the Apocalypse, but not that close to real history.

Fortunately for my writing carreer, this mistake was past, after reading De Civitate Dei in Swedish translation, before I took up writing on the internet about a month or a month and a half after 20 years ago. The irony is, back then I thought Cuvier, since French, was a Catholic, now I know that he was a Protestant and all Catholics in his time, up to 1830, would have frowned on his work.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Epiphany Vigil
5.I.2021

* Or Rahan, Ramayana (Nimrod featuring as Hanuman), and then Conan.