Theological Consequences

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

As previously mentioned ... An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated? ... gradual evolution from animal communications to human language is impossible.

This being so, we are now able to answer the debate question (that somehow became presented as a general permission) from Humani Generis 1950.

Let's take two positions taken at some times in the lives of the two main Inklings. I hope for their eternities, that they took a more traditional one later on, before dying.

Clive Staples Lewis, 1940, The Problem of Pain

It's just ten years since this author converted to Christianity from Atheism, and he believes the exact terms of the Genesis 1 to 3 scenario are out of the question. At least as to matters of fact. His solution : Adam and Eve are symbols of a collective. There was a tribe of hominids, and God suddenly gave them His image, with reason, morality, speech. They came to know and love God, completely trusting Him, but at some point wanted to take matters in their own hands ... the fall.

God is not cruel in converting a herd of animals, all of them together, into rational creatures. No one gets left behind. The ones that are already dead are already no more missed, when this happens. All in that tribe can continue enjoying the company of the others, and none of them needs to either feel he doesn't fit in or the others are weird and don't understand things, when he alone becomes a man.

B u t ... with such a collective humanisation, we have no individual Adam and Eve, no First Adam to which Jesus is Second Adam, no one man responsible by one sin of the fall ... and St. Paul is (factually) wrong and so is the Council of Trent Session V, which says Adam immediately lost holiness on one single sin.

And if we have no regards for the Bible, who's to say there even was one time of primeval justice, that man ever was created for eternal bliss? Babylonians thought - also - that man was created as a collective, and that this collective was created to work, on earth, for the gods.

In other words, while the rest of The Problem of Pain is excellent, this chapter or passage undermines the rest. Inacceptable.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1950, in a letter published posthumously in Letters.

He is so grateful for having the papacy. You see, while Protestants are in a jumble over how to take Adam with or without Evolution, we Catholics have the papacy, which has clarified things ...

At least his parish priest told his parish so.

... and if we can believe Adam's body descends from animals, we must believe Adam's soul was a unique and unprecedented creation by God.

I underline "believe" because, unlike what Tolkien heard from his parish priest, the document never actually gave such a general permission. A bit like the document by "Paul VI" later on with hand communion. So many got to hear everyone could take communion in the hand, while the document actually said that laymen could be given permissions in certain cases from their bishops to do so - but the permissions came out as general orders for hand communion in many dioceses. Now, this exact discrepancy between document and encouraged reception is what happened in 1950, between what Humani Generis said and what Tolkien heard from his parish priest.

Now, we have said farewell to Babylon and to collective humanisation. I am now assessing what Tolkien, at least momentarily accepted in 1950. No longer citing. Adam is certainly one ... but somehow, this would mean there was suffering before he sinned. Let's take the cases that are possible if Adam was born of two "near human" beasts. Adam was created rational from conception - or he was recreated rational later on. Adam as already rational met - or didn't meet - the relatives that were still irrational. This gives us the alternatives :

Adam was born rational and met irrational progenitors while growing up - Adam was not born rational, but separated himself from them on becoming rational - Adam was not born rational and lost his own before God remade him into a rational being.

1) Adam was born rational and met irrational progenitors while growing up

This would make Adam a feral child. His language capacity was hurt while he grew up among beings with no language.

There is, for man a period that is made for acquiring a first language, and if you miss it, you cannot do so later.

Obviously, God could have healed Adam when he grew up, or could have talked to him beside the surroundings that could not talk. Neither is satisfactory.

2) Adam was not born rational, but separated himself from them on becoming rational

Such an estrangement would also have been a suffering he had experienced before sinning.

3) Adam was not born rational and lost his own before God remade him into a rational being

Even for an irrational animal, losing all one's surroundings is a suffering, and this also would have been before Adam sinned.

Biblical history from Genesis 2 could still continue as given in the Bible - but the God who had inflicted this on Adam with no demerit of his own would not have been a good God.

But wait ... before Adam was rational, his sufferings or those of his ancestry, don't matter, you might say. Not so. Brute beasts suffer now, with no demerit of their own, to remind man, who has been given dominion over them, that man is fallen. We are punished in their sufferings. Since we are more important than they, God can justly sacrifice them to our needs - not just of food, but of understanding too. But before Adam and Eve were given dominion, there was only one who was lording over animals, and that one is God himself ... and it is said Proverbs 12:10, here:

The just regardeth the lives of his beasts: but the bowels of the wicked are cruel.*

Before Adam was given dominion, all beasts were God's. Therefore, none would have suffered, unless Adam had sinned. And especially not a line of beasts leading up to Adam - but that means, since a line of beasts leading up to Adam involves suffering, that a line of beasts could not lead up to Adam.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Ivry
St. Nicolas of Myra
6.XII.2021

* In the LXX, directly, "has pity", here: 10 A righteous man has pity for the lives of his cattle; but the bowels of the ungodly are unmerciful. / 10 δίκαιος οἰκτείρει ψυχὰς κτηνῶν αὐτοῦ, τὰ δὲ σπλάγχνα τῶν ἀσεβῶν ἀνελεήμονα.