In the sections of the Catholic world which consider "John XXIII" through "Leo XIV" as legitimate Popes (the first has said Muslims and we worship the same God, the last has before his "election" participated in a rite of Pachamama worship with other clergy doing "inculturation"), there was a dispensation given (if so) by Pope (if so) "Paul VI" allowing to take Communion in the naked own hand, when you receive it.
Some have treated this dispensation (if such) as an obligation. Lots of people who are traditionally minded in the ones who accept "Paul VI" will say this was a clear overreach and pastoral abuse. We want to receive communion in the mouth, not in the hand, as we approach the altar rail (on which we want to kneel while receiving).
Where am I going with this?
Well, Paris when Vigouroux was teaching the Seminarians here or Rome 1909. Romans 8:22 is by some seen as concerning only human creation. Here is the passage verses 19 to 23, with the Haydock comment:
For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him, that made it subject in hope: Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth, and is in labour even till now. And not only it, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body.
Romans 8:19—23
Before citing the Haydock comment, I note that verse 23 seems to imply the rest has to be about non-human creatures. Because the restoration of the human nature is given as a parallel to this expected restoration of creation. But here is the Haydock comment, I'm replacing dashes between commenters with spaced lines:
Ver. 19. The expectation[2] of the creature. He speaks of the corporal creation, made for the use and service of man; and, by occasion of his sin made subject to vanity, that is, to a perpetual instability, tending to corruption and other defects; so that by a figure of speech, it is here said to groan and be in labour, and to long for its deliverance, which is then to come, when sin shall reign no more; and God shall raise the bodies, and united them to their souls, never more to separate, and to be in everlasting happiness in heaven. (Challoner)
Waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. That is, for the time after this life, when it shall be made manifest that they are the sons of God, and heirs of the kingdom of his glory. Several interpreters understand all creatures whatsoever, even irrational and inanimate creatures of this world, which are represented as if they had a knowledge and sense of a more happy condition, of a new unchangeable state of perfection, which they are to receive at the end of the world. See 2 Peter i. 13; Apocalypse xxi. 1. Now every insensible creature is figuratively brought in groaning like a woman in labour, waiting, and wishing for that new and happy state; but in the mean time unwillingly made subject to vanity, i.e. to these changeable imperfections of generations and corruptions, which then they shall be delivered from. (Witham)
The creature, &c. The creatures expect with impatience, and hope with confidence, to see a happy change in their condition; they flatter themselves that they will be delivered from the captivity of sin, to which man has reduced them, and enter into the liberty of the glory of the sons of God. Not that the inanimate creation will really participate the happiness and glory of the elect; although in some sense they may be said to have part in it, since they will enter into a pure, incorruptible and perfect state to the end of ages. They will no longer be subject to those changes and vicissitudes which sin has brought upon them; nor will sinful man any longer abuse their beauty and goodness in offending the Creator of all. St. Ambrose and St. Jerome teach that the sun, moon, and stars will be then much more brilliant and beautiful than at present, no longer subject to those changes they at present suffer. Philo and Tertullian teach that the beasts of prey will then lay aside their ferocity, and venomous serpents their poisonous qualities. (Calmet)
Other, by the creature or creatures, understand men only, and Christians, who groan under miseries and temptations in this mortal life, amidst the vanities of this world, under the slavery of corruption; who having already (ver. 23.) received the first-fruits of the Spirit,[3] the grace of God in baptism, have been made the children of God, and now, with expectation and great earnestness, wait and long for a more perfect adoption of the sons of God: for the redemption of their bodies, when the bodies, as well as the souls of the elect, shall rise to an immortal life, and complete happiness in heaven. (Witham)
So, both Challoner and Calmet directly teach that insensible creatures (I could add their angels) and Witham is at least open to insensible creatures being the ones that receive this mutation of what is now vanity. How so "at least open"? Well, his first citation takes it directly into account and his second or last which reduces to man does so on the "others say" mode, not on "I say" or "this is true".
The visible Sun and Moon are presumably insensible creatures, at least this is the view of the Medieval diocese (later archdiocese) of Paris, as expressed in an Anti-Averroist condemnation by Bishop Tempier, 749 years and some ago, this is number 92 of his condemned theses:
Quod corpora celestia mouentur a principio intrinseco, quod est anima ; et quod mouentur per animam et per uirtutem appetitiuam, sicut animal. Sicut enim animal appetens mouetur, ita et celum.*
That the celestial bodies are moved by an intrinsic principle, that is a soul, and that they are moved by the soul and by the power of desire, like an animal. Because like the animal moves by desiring, so also heaven. [my translation]
So, Sun and Moon as we can see them presumably aren't very glorified corporeal living creatures. But they are bodies moved by angels. That wasn't condemned by Tempier. And their angels can and do long to see them celebrate (by greater splendour) the Resurrection of the Just with Glorified Bodies. Cattle don't have individual guardian angels, but they do have angels. See Numbers 22:
And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said: What have I done to thee? why strikest thou me, lo, now this third time?
Numbers 22:28
Here I cite only the beginning:
Ver. 28. Opened the mouth, &c. The angel moved the tongue of the ass, to utter these speeches, to rebuke, by the mouth of a brute beast, the brutal fury and folly of Balaam. (Challoner)
St. Thomas Aquinas (ii. 2. q. 105**) says, an angel spoke by the mouth of the ass, in like manner as the devil did by that of the serpent, Genesis iii. ...
So, we are in a sense allowed to believe the passage concerns only man. But we are absolutely not obliged to. Just as even those who consider "Paul VI" was Pope are not obliged to take Communion in the hand. And just as the dispensation doesn't make it illicit to argue against Communion in the hand, so also the quasi-dispensation mentioned by Witham (a number of scholars holding a position without being condemned is the equivalent of the position being at least allowed, at least by dispensation), absolutely doesn't mean we cannot argue for the passage concerning more than just man, especially as there is Patristic support for it.
I presume Vigouroux was saying that Romans 8:22 only concerns man. I tried to look it up. What I'm certain of is, he believed in beasts before people, ice ages before man, dinosaurs well before Adam, and so logically imagined suffering had been along since before Adam sinned. He was in Paris allowed to teach this.
In Rome, in 1909, he was given a very brief question, as judge, and judged in his own favour. But the question was very limited. It didn't cover a Flood other than fully global. It didn't cover suffering before sin. Not even in animals. It didn't involve saying "the Flood never covered the Pyrenees, not to mention Alps or Andes or Himalaya". It was only the bare question of Day-Age, and he judged, under Pius X, yes, you can discuss it. But that same holy Pope that same year canonised Clemens Maria Hofbauer.
I'm not sure if you've heard how Catholic Heliocentrics, when commenting on the Galileo affair, mention "Cardinal Baronius in this context stated that 'the Bible doesn't teach us how the Heavens go, but how to go to Heaven'" but Cardinal Baronius, while not a canonised saint, was a close disciple of one, namely of St. Philip Neri ("Third Apostle of Rome" after Peter and Paul, according to people who obviously agree that Rome was a Pagan city when Luther came to visit).
This is, even more than the simple fact he was a cardinal, a reason to consider with reverence the position of Baronius. However, we have no credible source whatsoever for Baronius stating this sentiment. Some say Galileo cited him in his letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, but Galileo never stated whom he was citing. It could have been someone very different from Baronius, and if it was Baronius, it was not in the context of the Galileo affair, since he died before it broke out.
Now, these Catholics do very rightly understand that the friend of a saint is probably of a similar mind to the saint himself, and therefore should be put pretty high as a theological authority. As said, this doesn't make Baronius*** a good support for the Heliocentric position, but ...
... in 1909, as I just mentioned, Clemens Maria Hofbauer was canonised. Not by Vigouroux, but by the Pope himself. And Hofbauer had a friend called Veith. And Veith wrote in defense of a recent creation and a global Flood.° We will presume Johannes Veith was faithful to the mind of the saint when he wrote the book.
But the problems don't stop here. Even supposing you accepted suffering before sin for non-human creatures, even supposing you somehow pretended Neanderthals and Denisovans aren't human despite us having genes from them in different populations, even then. Homo sapiens sapiens, the variety of us that has dominated since the Flood, can be traced back to, if you accept Deep Time at all and its dating methods, 100 000 + years ago (300 000 according to one find).
If you suppose Adam lived 300 000 years ago, that doesn't make Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies "genealogies with gaps", but "more gaps than genealogy" ... not a Swiss cheese genealogy, but a genealogy with more holes than cheese. Some have pretended the Genesis 5 genealogy was based on the Sumerian King List. What I find on wikipedia doesn't agree with that, I'm adding a division by a factor of 60 to the original info:
Alulim, 28 800 / 60 = 480
Alalngar, 36 000 / 60 = 600
En-men-lu-ana, 43 200 / 60 = 720
En-men-gal-ana, 28 800 / 60 = 480
Dumuzid, 36 000 / 60 = 600
En-sipad-zid-ana, 28 800 / 60 = 480
En-men-dur-ana, 21 000 / 60 = 350
Ubara-Tutu, 18 600 / 60 = 310
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Rulers_in_the_Sumerian_King_List
So, suppose the genealogies of 300 000 years were so badly preserved as to have only 22 generations, even if they were unusually long ones?
We would not be able to trust Genesis 3 as historic transmission, both because the timespan for oral transmission is too long, too many intermediaries, and because if this were the case, one would need to suppose adaptation of stories to cultural changes (many of them) for Genesis 4 (if Adam lived 300 000 years ago, his two first sons would not have been a pastoralist and a farmer), and also because the transmission would have failed for the genealogies themselves.
If on the other hand Adam was much more recent than the first man, this totally upsets the Catholic world view and is illicit in and of itself.
Some have, in favour of the theory of pre-Adamite Homo sapiens, argued that a human population created in the image of God cannot spend more than 100 000 years without inventing agriculture.
There are three problems with this position.
- It does not follow, unless the dating methods stand firm.°°
- It involves people with not only human anatomy but also certainly speech being soulless, a major blow to normal anthropological metaphysics as seen by St. Thomas Aquinas.
- It leaves the transition from simili-human to real human populations entirely in the dark, especially as many genetic lines now existing separately from each other go back to before settled agriculture.
So, the argument doesn't allow for circumventing the ban on pre-Adamites.
Suppose instead Adam was created 6—7000+ years ago. All men, not just Homo sapiens sapiens come from him and Biblical genealogies hold.
- The overlapping of generations makes the tradition about Genesis 2 and 3 reliable.°°°
- The genealogies themselves are reliable.
- No dating of a man older than this, whether of a pre-Flood man (as I suppose the cannibals of Atapuerca were, like their victim) older than creation, or a post-Flood man older than Flood, can be firmly established, either on documentary or on physical dating methods.
- Cannibalism would have been part of the pre-Flood moral decay, as described in Genesis 6. We start to see a reason for the Flood.
Everything argues that the dispensation even before the Council to believe older times than Biblical chronology should not be used any more, as it has in the meantime shown itself to lead to conclusions harmful to the Faith.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Easter Tuesday
7.IV.2026
* Capitulum XII, Errores de celo et stellis
https://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/capitulum-xii.html
Index in stephani tempier condempnationes
https://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/index-in-stephani-tempier.html
** If the reference is to the Summa Theologiae, it seems muddled, or he had another edition. I looked up both the Prima Secundae and Secunda Secundae for Q 105. After the full stop, the paragraph continues and is credited with Maimonides, but that would concern only the sentence after the Thomasic comparison to Genesis 3.
*** Φιλολoγικά/Philologica: Was it Baronius and Did Galileo Recall His Words Accurately?
Thursday, November 7, 2024 | Posted by Hans Georg Lundahl at 2:56 PM
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2024/11/was-it-baronius-and-did-galileo-recall.html
° J. E. Veith, Die Anfänge der Menschenwelt, Vienna, 1865; enumerated among Catholic predecessors of Henry Morris:
Φιλολoγικά/Philologica: Les Prédécesseurs catholiques de Henry Morris (jusqu'à 1920)
Friday, November 15, 2019 | Posted by Hans Georg Lundahl at 7:26 AM
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2019/11/les-predecesseurs-catholiques-de-henry.html
Why 1920? My source is an encyclopedian article from that year, "Hexaméron", Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, VI-II, Ghezzi - Hizler, 1920, Paris.
°° See these two posts: Neolithic Agrarian to Industrial Revolutions : Uniformitarian vs Creationist · Palaeolithic to Neolithic Era : Uniformitarian vs Creationist
°°° See Haydock on Genesis 3:
Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. (Haydock)
On my LXX based view of the chronology, this is not quite correct, but there are six "minimal overlaps" up to Abraham, and from Genesis 12 we already get more prolix reporting, suggesting that from Abraham's call, things were written down. That would have started with most of Genesis 1—11, and
