HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM
By Andrew Dickson White
Two Volumes Combined
To the Memory of
EZRA CORNELL
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we
Breathe cheaply in the common air.—LOWELL
Dicipulus est prioris posterior dies.—PUBLIUS SYRUS
Truth is the daughter of Time.—BACON
The Truth shall make you free.—ST. JOHN, viii, 32.
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 mujik 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 mediaeval 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 out worn 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.
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 my self, 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 co-operation 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 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 endeavoured 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, interference 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 science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammeled 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 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.
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 Warfare of Science as 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.
It has been my constant endeavour 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 co-operation. 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 honours their proper work more than I; but the above fact is simply noted as proving the continuance of that evolution which I have endeavoured to describe in this series of monographs—an evolution, indeed, in which the warfare of Theology against Science 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. A. D. W.
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N.Y.,
August 15, 1895.
CONTENTS
[ DETAILED CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. ]
[ CHAPTER I. FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. ]
[ II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN. ]
[ III. THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES, OF AN EVOLUTION IN ANIMATED ]
[ IV. THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. ]
[ II. THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH. ]
[ III. THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. ]
[ IV. THE SIZE OF THE EARTH. ]
[ V. THE CHARACTER OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE. ]
[ I. THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE. ]
[ II. THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. ]
[ III. THE WAR UPON GALILEO. ]
[ IV. VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. ]
[ V. RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO. ]
[ VI. THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH AFTER ITS VICTORY OVER GALILEO. ]
[ CHAPTER IV. FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS. ]
[ II. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. ]
[ III. THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM. ]
[ IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.—THE FINAL VICTORY OF SCIENCE. ]
[ CHAPTER V. FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. ]
[ I. GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS. ]
[ II. EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. ]
[ III. THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE, BASED ON THE FLOOD OF NOAH. ]
[ IV. FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.—THE VICTORY OF SCIENCE COMPLETE. ]
[ CHAPTER VI. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN EGYPTOLOGY, AND ASSYRIOLOGY. ]
[ CHAPTER VII. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY ]
[ II. THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. ]
[ CHAPTER VIII. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY ]
[ CHAPTER IX. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. ]
[ CHAPTER X. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. ]
[ CHAPTER XI. FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR" TO METEOROLOGY ]
[ I. GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. ]
[ II. DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. ]
[ III. THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. ]
[ IV. FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. ]
[ CHAPTER XII. FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. ]
[ CHAPTER XIII. FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE. ]
[ I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE. ]
[ II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING. ]
[ III. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE. ]
[ IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE. ]
[ V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES. ]
[ VI. NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE. ]
[ VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE. ]
[ VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.—THE ROYAL TOUCH. ]
[ IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY. ]
[ X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION, AND THE USE OF ]
[ XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE. ]
[ CHAPTER XIV. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE. ]
[ I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION. ]
[ II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION. ]
[ III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE. ]
[ IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION. ]
[ CHAPTER XV. FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY. ]
[ I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT. ]
[ II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM. ]
[ III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.—PINEL AND TUKE. ]
[ CHAPTER XVI. FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA. ]
[ I. THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION." ]
[ II. BEGINNINGS OF HELPFUL SCEPTICISM. ]
[ III. THEOLOGICAL "RESTATEMENTS."—FINAL TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW ]
[ CHAPTER XVII. FROM BABEL TO COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. ]
[ I. THE SACRED THEORY IN ITS FIRST FORM. ]
[ II. THE SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM. ]
[ III. BREAKING DOWN OF THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. ]
[ IV. TRIUMPH OF THE NEW SCIENCE. ]
[ CHAPTER XVIII. FROM THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY ]
[ I. THE GROWTH OF EXPLANATORY TRANSFORMATION MYTHS. ]
[ II. MEDIAEVAL GROWTH OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS. ]
[ III. POST-REFORMATION CULMINATION OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS.—BEGINNINGS ]
[ IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.—TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. ]
[ CHAPTER XIX. FROM LEVITICUS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY ]
[ I. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF HOSTILITY TO LOANS AT INTEREST. ]
[ II. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH, PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC. ]
[ CHAPTER XX. FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM. ]
[ I. THE OLDER INTERPRETATION. ]
[ II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. ]
[ III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. ]
DETAILED CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER I.
FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION.
I. The Visible Universe.
Ancient and medieval views regarding the manner of creation
Regarding the matter of creation
Regarding the time of creation
Regarding the date of creation
Regarding the Creator
Regarding light and darkness
Rise of the conception of an evolution: among the Chaldeans, the
Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans
Its survival through the Middle Ages, despite the disfavour of
the Church
Its development in modern times.—The nebular hypothesis and its
struggle with theology
The idea of evolution at last victorious
Our sacred books themselves an illustration of its truth
The true reconciliation of Science and Theology
II. Theological Teachings regarding the Animals and Man.
Ancient and medieval representations of the creation of man
Literal acceptance of the book of Genesis by the Christian
fathers
By the Reformers
By modern theologians, Catholic and Protestant
Theological reasoning as to the divisions of the animal kingdom
The Physiologus, the Bestiaries, the Exempila
Beginnings of sceptical observation
Development of a scientific method in the study of Nature
Breaking down of the theological theory of creation
III. Theological and Scientific Theories of an Evolution in
Animated Nature.
Ideas of evolution among the ancients
In the early Church
In the medieval Church
Development of these ideas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries
The work of De Maillet
Of Linneus
Of Buffon
Contributions to the theory of evolution at the close of the
eighteenth century
The work of Treviranus and Lamarck
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier
Development of the theory up to the middle of the nineteenth
century
The contributions of Darwin and Wallace
The opposition of Agassiz
IV. The Final Effort of Theology.
Attacks on Darwin and his theories in England
In America
Formation of sacro-scientific organizations to combat the theory
of evolution
The attack in France
In Germany
Conversion of Lyell to the theory of evolution
The attack of Darwin's Descent of Man
Difference between this and the former attack
Hostility to Darwinism in America
Change in the tone of the controversy.—Attempts at compromise
Dying-out of opposition to evolution
Last outbursts of theological hostility
Final victory of evolution
CHAPTER II.
GEOGRAPHY
I. The Form of the Earth.
Primitive conception of the earth as flat
In Chaldea and Egypt
In Persia
Among the Hebrews
Evolution, among the Greeks, of the idea of its sphericity
Opposition of the early Church
Evolution of a sacred theory, drawn from the Bible
Its completion by Cosmas Indicopleustes
Its influence on Christian thought
Survival of the idea of the earth's sphericity—its acceptance by
Isidore and Bede
Its struggle and final victory
II. The Delineation of the Earth.
Belief of every ancient people that its own central place was the
centre of the earth
Hebrew conviction that the earth's centre was at Jerusalem
Acceptance of this view by Christianity
Influence of other Hebrew conceptions—Gog and Magog, the "four
winds," the waters "on an heap"
III. The Inhabitants of the Earth.
The idea of antipodes
Its opposition by the Christian Church—Gregory Nazianzen,
Lactantius, Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, Procopius of Gaza, Cosmas,
Isidore
Virgil of Salzburg's assertion of it in the eighth century
Its revival by William of Conches and Albert the Great in the
thirteenth
Surrender of it by Nicolas d'Oresme
Fate of Peter of Abano and Cecco d' Ascoli
Timidity of Pierre d'Ailly and Tostatus
Theological hindrance of Columbus
Pope Alexander VI's demarcation line
Cautious conservatism of Gregory Reysch
Magellan and the victory of science
IV. The Size of the Earth.
Scientific attempts at measuring the earth
The sacred solution of the problem
Fortunate influence of the blunder upon Columbus
V. The Character of the Earth's Surface.
Servetus and the charge of denying the fertility of Judea
Contrast between the theological and the religious spirit in
their effects on science
CHAPTER III.
ASTRONOMY.
I. The Old Sacred Theory of the Universe.
The early Church's conviction of the uselessness of astronomy
The growth of a sacred theory—Origen, the Gnostics, Philastrius,
Cosmas, Isidore
The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory, its origin, and its
acceptance by the Christian world
Development of the new sacred system of astronomy—the
pseudo-Dionysius, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas
Its popularization by Dante
Its details
Its persistence to modern times
II. The Heliocentric Theory.
Its rise among the Greeks—Pythagoras, Philolaus, Aristarchus
Its suppression by the charge of blasphemy
Its loss from sight for six hundred Years, then for a thousand
Its revival by Nicholas de Cusa and Nicholas Copernicus
Its toleration as a hypothesis
Its prohibition as soon as Galileo teaches it as a truth
Consequent timidity of scholars—Acosta, Apian
Protestantism not less zealous in opposition than
Catholicism—Luther Melanchthon, Calvin, Turretin
This opposition especially persistent in England—Hutchinson,
Pike, Horne, Horsley, Forbes, Owen, Wesley
Resulting interferences with freedom of teaching
Giordano Bruno's boldness and his fate
The truth demonstrated by the telescope of Galileo
III. The War upon Galileo.
Concentration of the war on this new champion
The first attack
Fresh attacks—Elci, Busaeus, Caccini, Lorini, Bellarmin
Use of epithets
Attempts to entrap Galileo
His summons before the Inquisition at Rome
The injunction to silence, and the condemnation of the theory of
the earth's motion
The work of Copernicus placed on the Index
Galileo's seclusion
Renewed attacks upon Galileo—Inchofer, Fromundus
IV. Victory of the Church over Galileo
Publication of his Dialogo
Hostility of Pope Urban VIII
Galileo's second trial by the Inquisition
His abjuration
Later persecution of him
Measures to complete the destruction of the Copernican theory
Persecution of Galileo's memory
Protestant hostility to the new astronomy and its champions
V. Results of the Victory over Galileo.
Rejoicings of churchmen over the victory
The silencing of Descartes
Persecution of Campanella and of Kepler
Persistence and victory of science
Dilemma of the theologians
Vain attempts to postpone the surrender
VI. The Retreat of the Church after its Victory over Galileo.
The easy path for the Protestant theologians
The difficulties of the older Church.—The papal infallibility
fully committed against the Copernican theory
Attempts at evasion—first plea: that Galileo was condemned not
for affirming the earth's motion, but for supporting it from
Scripture
Its easy refutation
Second plea: that he was condemned not for heresy, but for
contumacy
Folly of this assertion
Third plea: that it was all a quarrel between Aristotelian
professors and those favouring the experimental method
Fourth plea: that the condemnation of Galileo was "provisory"
Fifth plea: that he was no more a victim of Catholics than of
Protestants
Efforts to blacken Galileo's character
Efforts to suppress the documents of his trial
Their fruitlessness
Sixth plea: that the popes as popes had never condemned his
theory
Its confutation from their own mouths
Abandonment of the contention by honest Catholics
Two efforts at compromise—Newman, De Bonald
Effect of all this on thinking men
The fault not in Catholicism more than in Protestantism—not in
religion, but in theology
CHAPTER IV.
FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS.
I. The Theological View.
Early beliefs as to comets, meteors, and eclipses
Their inheritance by Jews and Christians
The belief regarding comets especially harmful as a source of
superstitious terror
Its transmission through the Middle Ages
Its culmination under Pope Calixtus III
Beginnings of scepticism—Copernicus, Paracelsus, Scaliger
Firmness of theologians, Catholic and Protestant, in its support
II. Theological Efforts to crush the Scientific View.
The effort through the universities.—The effort through the
pulpits
Heerbrand at Tubingen and Dieterich at Marburg
Maestlin at Heidelberg
Buttner, Vossius, Torreblanca, Fromundus
Father Augustin de Angelis at Rome
Reinzer at Linz
Celichius at Magdeburg
Conrad Dieterich's sermon at Ulm
Erni and others in Switzerland
Comet doggerel
Echoes from New England—Danforth, Morton, Increase Mather
III. The Invasion of Scepticism.
Rationalism of Cotton Mather, and its cause
Blaise de Vigenere
Erastus
Bekker, Lubienitzky, Pierre Petit
Bayle
Fontenelle
The scientific movement beneath all this
IV. Theological Efforts at Compromise.—The Final Victory of
Science.
The admission that some comets are supralunar
Difference between scientific and theological reasoning
Development of the reasoning of Tycho and Kepler—Cassini, Hevel,
Doerfel, Bernouilli, Newton
Completion of the victory by Halley and Clairaut
Survivals of the superstition—Joseph de Maistre, Forster Arago's
statistics
The theories of Whiston and Burnet, and their influence in
Germany
The superstition ended in America by the lectures of Winthrop
Helpful influence of John Wesley
Effects of the victory
CHAPTER V.
FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY.
I. Growth of Theological Explanations
Germs of geological truth among the Greeks and Romans
Attitude of the Church toward science
Geological theories of the early theologians
Attitude of the schoolmen
Contributions of the Arabian schools
Theories of the earlier Protestants
Influence of the revival of learning
II. Efforts to Suppress the Scientific View.
Revival of scientific methods
Buffon and the Sorbonne
Beringer's treatise on fossils
Protestant opposition to the new geology—-the works of Burnet,
Whiston, Wesley, Clark,
Watson, Arnold, Cockburn, and others
III. The First Great Effort of Compromise, based on the Flood of
Noah.
The theory that fossils were produced by the Deluge
Its acceptance by both Catholics and Protestants—Luther, Calmet
Burnet, Whiston, Woodward, Mazurier, Torrubia, Increase Mather
Scheuchzer
Voltaire's theory of fossils
Vain efforts of enlightened churchmen in behalf of the scientific
view
Steady progress of science—the work of Cuvier and Brongniart
Granvile Penn's opposition
The defection of Buckland and Lyell to the scientific side
Surrender of the theologians
Remnants of the old belief
Death-blow given to the traditional theory of the Deluge by the
discovery of the Chaldean accounts
Results of the theological opposition to science
IV. Final Efforts at Compromise—The Victory of Science
complete.
Efforts of Carl von Raumer, Wagner, and others
The new testimony of the caves and beds of drift as to the
antiquity of man
Gosse's effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis
Efforts of Continental theologians
Gladstone's attempt at a compromise
Its demolition by Huxley
By Canon Driver
Dean Stanley on the reconciliation of Science and Scripture
CHAPTER VI.
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN, EGYPTOLOGY, AND ASSYRIOLOGY.
I. The Sacred Chronology.
Two fields in which Science has gained a definite victory over
Theology
Opinions of the Church fathers on the antiquity of man
The chronology of Isidore
Of Bede
Of the medieval Jewish scholars
The views of the Reformers on the antiquity of man
Of the Roman Church
Of Archbishop Usher
Influence of Egyptology on the belief in man's antiquity
La Peyrere's theory of the Pre-Adamites
Opposition in England to the new chronology
II. The New Chronology.
Influence of the new science of Egyptology on biblical chronology
Manetho's history of Egypt and the new chronology derived from it
Evidence of the antiquity of man furnished by the monuments of
Egypt
By her art
By her science
By other elements of civilization
By the remains found in the bed of the Nile
Evidence furnished by the study of Assyriology
CHAPTER VII.
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY.
I. The Thunder-stones.
Early beliefs regarding "thunder-stones"
Theories of Mercati and Tollius regarding them
Their identification with the implements of prehistoric man
Remains of man found in caverns
Unfavourable influence on scientific activity of the political
conditions of the early part of the nineteenth century
Change effected by the French Revolution of to {??}
Rallying of the reactionary clerical influence against science
II. The Flint Weapons and Implements.
Boucher de Perthes's contributions to the knowledge of
prehistoric man
His conclusions confirmed by Lyell and others
Cave explorations of Lartet and Christy
Evidence of man's existence furnished by rude carvings
Cave explorations in the British Islands
Evidence of man's existence in the Drift period
In the early Quaternary and in the Tertiary periods
CHAPTER VIII.
THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY.
The two antagonistic views regarding the life of man on the
earth
The theory of "the Fall" among ancient peoples
Inheritance of this view by the Christian Church
Appearance among the Greeks and Romans of the theory of a rise of
man
Its disappearance during the Middle Ages
Its development since the seventeenth century
The first blow at the doctrine of "the Fall" comes from geology
Influence of anthropology on the belief in this doctrine
The finding of human skulls in Quaternary deposits
Their significance
Results obtained from the comparative study of the remains of
human handiwork
Discovery of human remains in shell-heaps on the shores of the
Baltic Sea
In peat-beds
The lake-dwellers
Indications of the upward direction of man's development
Mr. Southall's attack on the theory of man's antiquity
An answer to it
Discovery of prehistoric human remains in Egypt
Hamard's attack on the new scientific conclusions
The survival of prehistoric implements in religious rites
Strength of the argument against the theory of "the Fall of Man"
CHAPTER IX.
THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY.
The beginnings of the science of Comparative Ethnology
Its testimony to the upward tendency of man from low beginning
Theological efforts to break its force—De Maistre and DeBonald
Whately's attempt
The attempt of the Duke of Argyll
Evidence of man's upward tendency derived from Comparative
Philology
From Comparative Literature and Folklore
From Comparative Ethnography
From Biology
CHAPTER X.
THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY.
Proof of progress given by the history of art
Proofs from general history
Development of civilization even under unfavourable circumstances
Advancement even through catastrophes and the decay of
civilizations
Progress not confined to man's material condition
Theological struggle against the new scientific view
Persecution of Prof. Winchell
Of Dr. Woodrow
Other interferences with freedom of teaching
The great harm thus done to religion
Rise of a better spirit
The service rendered to religion by Anthropology
CHAPTER XI.
FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR" TO METEOROLOGY.
I. Growth of a Theological Theory.
The beliefs of classical antiquity regarding storms, thunder, and
lightning
Development of a sacred science of meteorology by the fathers of
the Church
Theories of Cosmas Indicopleustes
Of Isidore
Of Seville
Of Bede
Of Rabanus Maurus
Rational views of Honorius of Autun
Orthodox theories of John of San Geminiano
Attempt of Albert the Great to reconcile the speculations of
Aristotle with the theological views
The monkish encyclopedists
Theories regarding the rainbow and the causes of storms
Meteorological phenomena attributed to the Almighty
II. Diabolical Agency in Storms.
Meteorological phenomena attributed to the devil—"the prince of
the power of the air"
Propagation of this belief by the medieval theologians
Its transmission to both Catholics and Protestants—Eck, Luther
The great work of Delrio
Guacci's Compendium
The employment of prayer against "the powers of the air"
Of exorcisms
Of fetiches and processions
Of consecrated church bells
III. The Agency of Witches.
The fearful results of the witch superstition
Its growth out of the doctrine of evil agency in atmospheric
phenomena
Archbishop Agobard's futile attempt to dispel it
Its sanction by the popes
Its support by confessions extracted by torture
Part taken in the persecution by Dominicans and Jesuits
Opponents of the witch theory—Pomponatius, Paracelsus, Agrippa
of Nettesheim
Jean Bodin's defence of the superstition
Fate of Cornelius Loos
Of Dietrich Flade
Efforts of Spee to stem the persecution
His posthumous influence
Upholders of the orthodox view—Bishop Binsfeld, Remigius
Vain protests of Wier
Persecution of Bekker for opposing the popular belief
Effect of the Reformation in deepening the superstition
The persecution in Great Britain and America
Development of a scientific view of the heavens
Final efforts to revive the old belief
IV. Franklin's Lightning-Rod.
Franklin's experiments with the kite
Their effect on the old belief
Efforts at compromise between the scientific and theological
theories
Successful use of the lightning-rod
Religious scruples against it in America
In England
In Austria
In Italy
Victory of the scientific theory
This victory exemplified in the case of the church of the
monastery of Lerins
In the case of Dr. Moorhouse
In the case of the Missouri droughts
CHAPTER XII.
FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS.
I. The Supremacy of Magic.
Primitive tendency to belief in magic
The Greek conception of natural laws
Influence of Plato and Aristotle on the growth of science
Effect of the establishment of Christianity on the development of
the physical sciences
The revival of thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Albert the Great
Vincent of Beauvais
Thomas Aquinas
Roger Bacon's beginning of the experimental method brought to
nought
The belief that science is futile gives place to the belief that
it is dangerous
The two kinds of magic
Rarity of persecution for magic before the Christian era
The Christian theory of devils
Constantine's laws against magic
Increasing terror of magic and witchcraft
Papal enactments against them
Persistence of the belief in magic
Its effect on the development of science
Roger Bacon
Opposition of secular rulers to science
John Baptist Porta
The opposition to scientific societies in Italy
In England
The effort to turn all thought from science to religion
The development of mystic theology
Its harmful influence on science
Mixture of theological with scientific speculation
This shown in the case of Melanchthon
In that of Francis Bacon
Theological theory of gases
Growth of a scientific theory
Basil Valentine and his contributions to chemistry
Triumph of the scientific theory
II. The Triumph of Chemistry and Physics.
New epoch in chemistry begun by Boyle
Attitude of the mob toward science
Effect on science of the reaction following the French
Revolution: {?}
Development of chemistry since the middle of the nineteenth
century
Development of physics
Modern opposition to science in Catholic countries
Attack of scientific education in France
In England
In Prussia
Revolt against the subordination of education to science
Effect of the International Exhibition of ii {?} at London
Of the endowment of State colleges in America by the Morrill
Act of 1862
The results to religion
CHAPTER XIII.
FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.
I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE.
Naturalness of the idea of supernatural intervention in causing
and curing disease
Prevalence of this idea in ancient civilizations
Beginnings of a scientific theory of medicine
The twofold influence of Christianity on the healing art
II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.—THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A
TYPICAL EXAMPLE.
Growth of legends of miracles about the lives of great
benefactors of humanity
Sketch of Xavier's career
Absence of miraculous accounts in his writings and those of his
contemporaries
Direct evidence that Xavier wrought no miracles
Growth of legends of miracles as shown in the early biographies
of him
As shown in the canonization proceedings
Naturalness of these legends
III. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE.
Character of the testimony regarding miracles
Connection of mediaeval with pagan miracles
Their basis of fact
Various kinds of miraculous cures
Atmosphere of supernaturalism thrown about all cures
Influence of this atmosphere on medical science
IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE.—"PASTORAL
MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT.
Theological theory as to the cause of disease
Influence of self-interest on "pastoral medicine"
Development of fetichism at Cologne and elsewhere
Other developments of fetich cure
V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES.
Medieval belief in the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies
of the dead
Dissection objected to on the ground that "the Church abhors the
shedding of blood"
The decree of Boniface VIII and its results
VI. NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.
Galen
Scanty development of medical science in the Church
Among Jews and Mohammedans
Promotion of medical science by various Christian laymen of the
Middle Ages
By rare men of science
By various ecclesiastics
VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE.
Opposition to seeking cure from disease by natural means
Requirement of ecclesiastical advice before undertaking medical
treatment
Charge of magic and Mohammedanism against men of science
Effect of ecclesiastical opposition to medicine
The doctrine of signatures
The doctrine of exorcism
Theological opposition to surgery
Development of miracle and fetich cures
Fashion in pious cures
Medicinal properties of sacred places
Theological argument in favour of miraculous cures
Prejudice against Jewish physicians
VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.—THE ROYAL TOUCH.
Luther's theory of disease
The royal touch
Cures wrought by Charles II
By James II
By William III
By Queen Anne
By Louis XIV
Universal acceptance of these miracles
IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY.
Occasional encouragement of medical science in the Middle Ages
New impulse given by the revival of learning and the age of
discovery
Paracelsus and Mundinus
Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy.—His
career and fate
X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION, AND THE
USE OF ANAESTHETICS.
Theological opposition to inoculation in Europe
In America
Theological opposition to vaccination
Recent hostility to vaccination in England
In Canada, during the smallpox epidemic
Theological opposition to the use of cocaine
To the use of quinine
Theological opposition to the use of anesthetics
XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE.
Changes incorporated in the American Book of Common Prayer
Effect on the theological view of the growing knowledge of the
relation between imagination and medicine
Effect of the discoveries in hypnotism
In bacteriology
Relation between ascertained truth and the "ages of faith"
CHAPTER XIV.
FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE.
I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION.
The recurrence of great pestilences
Their early ascription to the wrath or malice of unseen powers
Their real cause want of hygienic precaution
Theological apotheosis of filth
Sanction given to the sacred theory of pestilence by Pope Gregory
the Great
Modes of propitiating the higher powers
Modes of thwarting the powers of evil
Persecution of the Jews as Satan's emissaries
Persecution of witches as Satan's emissaries
Case of the Untori at Milan
New developments of fetichism.—The blood of St. Januarius at
Naples
Appearance of better methods in Italy.—In Spain
II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.
Comparative freedom of England from persecutions for
plague-bringing, in spite of her wretched sanitary condition
Aid sought mainly through church services
Effects of the great fire in London
The jail fever
The work of John Howard
Plagues in the American colonies
In France.—The great plague at Marseilles
Persistence of the old methods in Austria
In Scotland
III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE.
Difficulty of reconciling the theological theory of pestilences
with accumulating facts
Curious approaches to a right theory
The law governing the relation of theology to disease
Recent victories of hygiene in all countries
In England.—-Chadwick and his fellows
In France
IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION.
The process of sanitary science not at the cost of religion
Illustration from the policy of Napoleon III in France
Effect of proper sanitation on epidemics in the United States
Change in the attitude of the Church toward the cause and cure of
pestilence
CHAPTER XV.
FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY.
I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT.
The struggle for the scientific treatment of the insane
The primitive ascription of insanity to evil spirits
Better Greek and Roman theories—madness a disease
The Christian Church accepts the demoniacal theory of insanity
Yet for a time uses mild methods for the insane
Growth of the practice of punishing the indwelling demon
Two sources whence better things might have been hoped.—The
reasons of their futility
The growth of exorcism
Use of whipping and torture
The part of art and literature in making vivid to the common mind
the idea of diabolic activity
The effects of religious processions as a cure for mental disease
Exorcism of animals possessed of demons
Belief in the transformation of human beings into animals
The doctrine of demoniacal possession in the Reformed Church
II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.
Rivalry between Catholics and Protestants in the casting out of
devils
Increased belief in witchcraft during the period following the
Reformation
Increase of insanity during the witch persecutions II {?}
Attitude of physicians toward witchcraft I
Religious hallucinations of the insane I
Theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the possessed
Influence of monastic life on the development of insanity
Protests against the theological view of insanity—Wier,
Montaigue Bekker
Last struggles of the old superstition
III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.—PINEL AND TUKE.
Influence of French philosophy on the belief in demoniacal
possession
Reactionary influence of John Wesley
Progress of scientific ideas in Prussia
In Austria
In America
In South Germany
General indifference toward the sufferings of madmen
The beginnings of a more humane treatment
Jean Baptiste Pinel
Improvement in the treatment of the insane in England.—William
Tuke
The place of Pinel and Tuke in history
CHAPTER XVI.
FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA.
I. THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION."
Survival of the belief in diabolic activity as the cause of such
epidemics
Epidemics of hysteria in classical times
In the Middle Ages
The dancing mania
Inability of science during the fifteenth century to cope with
such diseases
Cases of possession brought within the scope of medical research
during the sixteenth century
Dying-out of this form of mental disease in northern Europe
In Italy
Epidemics of hysteria in the convents
The case of Martha Brossier
Revival in France of belief in diabolic influence
The Ursulines of Loudun and Urbain Grandier
Possession among the Huguenots
In New England.—The Salem witch persecution
At Paris.—Alleged miracles at the grave of Archdeacon Paris
In Germany.—Case of Maria Renata Sanger
More recent outbreaks
II. BEGINNINGS OF HELPFUL SCEPTICISM.
Outbreaks of hysteria in factories and hospitals
In places of religious excitement
The case at Morzine
Similar cases among Protestants and in Africa
III. THEOLOGICAL "RESTATEMENTS."—FINAL TRIUMPH OF THE
SCIENTIFIC VIEW AND METHODS.
Successful dealings of medical science with mental diseases
Attempts to give a scientific turn to the theory of diabolic
agency in disease
Last great demonstration of the old belief in England
Final triumph of science in the latter half of the present
century
Last echoes of the old belief
CHAPTER XVII.
FROM BABEL TO COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY.
I. THE SACRED THEORY IN ITS FIRST FORM.
Difference of the history of Comparative Philology from that of
other sciences as regards the attitude of theologians
Curiosity of early man regarding the origin, the primitive form,
and the diversity of language
The Hebrew answer to these questions
The legend of the Tower of Babel
The real reason for the building of towers by the Chaldeans and
the causes of their ruin
Other legends of a confusion of tongues
Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends
Lucretius's theory of the origin of language
The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject
The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel
points
Attitude of the reformers toward this question
Of Catholic scholars.—Marini Capellus and his adversaries
The treatise of Danzius
II. THE SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM.
Theological theory that Hebrew was the primitive tongue, divinely
revealed
This theory supported by all Christian scholars until the
beginning of the eighteenth century
Dissent of Prideaux and Cotton Mather
Apparent strength of the sacred theory of language
III. BREAKING DOWN OF THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW.
Reason for the Church's ready acceptance of the conclusions of
comparative philology
Beginnings of a scientific theory of language
Hottinger
Leibnitz
The collections of Catharine the Great, of Hervas, and of Adelung
Chaotic period in philology between Leibnitz and the beginning of
the study of Sanskrit
Illustration from the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica
IV. TRIUMPH OF THE NEW SCIENCE.
Effect of the discovery of Sanskrit on the old theory
Attempts to discredit the new learning
General acceptance of the new theory
Destruction of the belief that all created things were first
named by Adam
Of the belief in the divine origin of letters
Attempts in England to support the old theory of language
Progress of philological science in France
In Germany
In Great Britain
Recent absurd attempts to prove Hebrew the primitive tongue
V. SUMMARY.
Gradual disappearance of the old theories regarding the origin of
speech and writing
Full acceptance of the new theories by all Christian scholars
The result to religion, and to the Bible
CHAPTER XVIII.
FROM THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY,
I. THE GROWTH OF EXPLANATORY TRANSFORMATION MYTHS.
Growth of myths to account for remarkable appearances in
Nature—mountains, rocks, curiously marked stones, fossils,
products of volcanic action
Myths of the transformation of living beings into natural objects
Development of the science of Comparative Mythology
II. MEDIAEVAL GROWTH OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS.
Description of the Dead Sea
Impression made by its peculiar features on the early dwellers in
Palestine
Reasons for selecting the Dead Sea myths for study
Naturalness of the growth of legend regarding the salt region of
Usdum
Universal belief in these legends
Concurrent testimony of early and mediaeval writers, Jewish and
Christian, respecting the existence of Lot's wife as a "pillar of
salt," and of the other wonders of the Dead Sea
Discrepancies in the various accounts and theological
explanations of them
Theological arguments respecting the statue of Lot's wife
Growth of the legend in the sixteenth century
III. POST-REFORMATION CULMINATION OF THE DEAD SEA
LEGENDS.—BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.
Popularization of the older legends at the Reformation
Growth of new myths among scholars
Signs of scepticism among travellers near the end of the
sixteenth century
Effort of Quaresmio to check this tendency
Of Eugene Roger
Of Wedelius
Influence of these teachings
Renewed scepticism—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Efforts of Briemle and Masius in support of the old myths
Their influence
The travels of Mariti and of Volney
Influence of scientific thought on the Dead Sea legends during
the eighteenth century
Reactionary efforts of Chateaubriand
Investigations of the naturalist Seetzen
Of Dr. Robinson
The expedition of Lieutenant Lynch
The investigations of De Saulcy
Of the Duc de Luynes.—Lartet's report
Summary of the investigations of the nineteenth
century.—Ritter's verdict
IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.—TRIUMPH OF THE
SCIENTIFIC VIEW.
Attempts to reconcile scientific facts with the Dead Sea legends
Van de Velde's investigations of the Dead Sea region
Canon Tristram's
Mgr. Mislin's protests against the growing rationalism
The work of Schaff and Osborn
Acceptance of the scientific view by leaders in the Church
Dr. Geikie's ascription of the myths to the Arabs
Mgr. Haussmann de Wandelburg and his rejection of the scientific
view
Service of theologians to religion in accepting the conclusions
of silence in this field
CHAPTER XIX.
FROM LEVITICUS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY
I. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF HOSTILITY TO LOANS AT INTEREST.
Universal belief in the sin of loaning money at interest
The taking of interest among the Greeks and Romans
Opposition of leaders of thought, especially Aristotle
Condemnation of the practice by the Old and New Testaments
By the Church fathers
In ecclesiastical and secular legislation
Exception sometimes made in behalf of the Jews
Hostility of the pulpit
Of the canon law
Evil results of the prohibition of loans at interest
Efforts to induce the Church to change her position
Theological evasions of the rule
Attitude of the Reformers toward the taking of interest
Struggle in England for recognition of the right to accept
interest
Invention of a distinction between usury and interest
II. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH, PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC.
Sir Robert Filmer's attack on the old doctrine
Retreat of the Protestant Church in Holland
In Germany and America
Difficulties in the way of compromise in the Catholic Church
Failure of such attempts in France
Theoretical condemnation of usury in Italy
Disregard of all restrictions in practice
Attempts of Escobar and Liguori to reconcile the taking of
interest with the teachings of the Church
Montesquieu's attack on the old theory
Encyclical of Benedict XIV permitting the taking of interest
Similar decision of the Inquisition at Rome
Final retreat of the Catholic Church
Curious dealings of theology with public economy in other fields
CHAPTER XX.
FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM.
I. THE OLDER INTERPRETATION.
Character of the great sacred
books of the world
General laws governing the development and influence of sacred
literature.—The law of its origin
Legends concerning the Septuagint
The law of wills and causes
The law of inerrancy
Hostility to the revision of King James's translation of the
Bible
The law of unity
Working of these laws seen in the great rabbinical schools
The law of allegorical interpretation
Philo
Judaeus
Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria
Occult significance of numbers
Origen
Hilary of Poitiers and Jerome
Augustine
Gregory the Great
Vain attempts to check the flood of allegorical interpretations
Bede.—Savonarola
Methods of modern criticism for the first time employed by
Lorenzo Valla
Erasmus
Influence of the Reformation on the belief in the infallibility
of the sacred books.—Luther and Melanchthon
Development of scholasticism in the Reformed Church
Catholic belief in the inspiration of the Vulgate
Opposition in Russia to the revision of the Slavonic Scriptures
Sir Isaac Newton as a commentator
Scriptural interpretation at the beginning of the eighteenth
century
II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.
Theological beliefs regarding the Pentateuch
The book of Genesis
Doubt thrown on the sacred theory by Aben Ezra
By Carlstadt and Maes
Influence of the discovery that the Isidorian
Decretals were forgeries
That the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite were
serious
Hobbes and La Peyrere
Spinoza
Progress of biblical criticism in France.—Richard Simon
LeClerc
Bishop Lowth
Astruc
Eichhorn's application of the "higher criticism" to biblical
research
Isenbiehl
Herder
Alexander Geddes
Opposition to the higher criticism in Germany
Hupfeld
Vatke and Reuss
Kuenen
Wellhausen
III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.
Progress of the higher criticism in Germany and Holland
Opposition to it in England
At the University of Oxford
Pusey
Bentley
Wolf
Niebuhr and Arnold
Milman
Thirlwall and Grote
The publication of Essays and Reviews, and the storm raised by
book
IV. THE CLOSING STRUGGLE.
Colenso's work on the Pentateuch
The persecution of him
Bishop Wilberforce's part in it
Dean Stanley's
Bishop Thirlwall's
Results of Colenso's work
Sanday's Bampton Lectures
Keble College and Lux
Mundi
Progress of biblical criticism among the dissenters
In France.—Renan
In the Roman Catholic Church
The encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII
In America.—Theodore Parker
Apparent strength of the old theory of inspiration
Real strength of the new movement
V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS.
Confirmation of the conclusions of the higher criticism by
Assyriology and Egyptology
Light thrown upon Hebrew religion by the translation of the
sacred books of the East
The influence of Persian thought.—The work of the Rev. Dr. Mills
The influence of Indian thought.—Light thrown by the study of
Brahmanism and Buddhism
The work of Fathers Huc and Gabet
Discovery that Buddha himself had been canonized as a Christian
saint
Similarity between the ideas and legends of Buddhism and those of
Christianity
The application of the higher criticism to the New Testament
The English "Revised Version" of Studies on the formation of the
canon of Scripture
Recognition of the laws governing its development
Change in the spirit of the controversy over the higher criticism
VI. RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM.
Development of a scientific atmosphere during the last three
centuries
Action of modern science in reconstruction of religious truth
Change wrought by it in the conception of a sacred literature
Of the Divine Power.—Of man.—-Of the world at large
Of our Bible
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-honoured doctrine regarding the origin of the universe.
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 Chaldeo-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 with 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 supplement 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 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.(1)
(1) 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 Capella
Palatina at Palermo. Among peculiarities showing the simplicity of the
earlier conception the representation of the response 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 pictured in the great work of Gravina, and in 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. 35-46; 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. For 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.
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 Caedmon paraphrased the account given in Genesis, bringing out this 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 centred, 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!'"(2)
(2) 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.
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 pre-existing 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 pre-existence 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.(3)
(3) 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.
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; he 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.(4)
(4) For Origen, see his Contra Celsum, cap xxxvi, xxxvii; also his
De Principibus, cap. v; for St. Augustine, see his De Genesi conta
Manichaeos and De Genesi ad Litteram, passim; for Athanasius, see his
Discourses against the Arians, ii, 48,49.
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 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 mediaeval 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 eased 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.(5)
(5) 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 Sententiae, lib. ii,
dist. xv, 5; and for Hugo of St. Victor, see De Sacrementis, lib i, pars
i; also, Annotat, Elucidat in Pentateuchum, cap. v, vi, vii; for St.
Hilary, see De Trinitate, lib. xii; for St. Thomas Aquinas, see his
Summa Theologica, quest lxxxiv, arts. i and ii; the passage in the
Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, is in fol. iii; for Vousset, see his Discours
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 medieaval ideas on the same subject, see Detzel,
Christliche Ikonographie, Frieburg, 1894, pp. 44 and following.
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 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.(6)
(6) 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,
Opera, ed. Bretschneider, 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 the Peter Martyr, see his Commentary
on Genesis, cited by Zockler, vol. i, p. 690; for articles in the
Westminster Confession of Faith, see chap. iv; for Buffon's recantation,
see Lyell, Principles of Geology, chap iii, p. 57. For Lightfoot's
declaration, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822.
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 centred 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 labour, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes within the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
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.(7)
(7) For strange representations of the Creator and of the creation by
one, two, or three persons of the Trinity, see Didron, Iconographie
Chretienne, pp. 35, 178, 224, 483, 567-580, and elsewhere; also Detzel
as already cited. The most naive of all survivals of the mediaeval 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.
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.
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 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 splendour." 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 coloured 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.(8)
(8) For scriptural indications of the independent existence of light and
darkness, compare with the first verses of the 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 Hexameron, 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 Controverted 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 Archeological 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, p. 14 and 16 of the text and Plates I and II. Very naively the
Salerno carver, not wishing to colour the ivory which he wrought, has
inscribed on one disk the word "LUX" and on the other "NOX." See also
Didron, Iconographie, p. 482.
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 monotheistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the neighbours 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, and the latter pressing further the same mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development recognised 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 lands, 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.
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 favour 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 Balaam.
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 reasonings of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that our own solar system and others—suns, 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 clamour, 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 nebula 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 nebula 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 nebula, 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 pitches of mist, some with luminous centres—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 coloured globule of oil, representing 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 simplicitas!
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 endeavoured 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."(9)
(9) 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,
Principles of Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 36; for Kant's
statement, see his Naturgeschichte des Himmels; for his part in the
nebular hypothesis, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i,
p.266; for the value of Plateau's beautiful experiment, very cautiously
estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36; also Elisee 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 seq.; 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 thoughts 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 for February 14 and 25, 1895.
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 honour 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 neighbours"; 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 says: "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 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 honourable 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 pre-existing 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.
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, conforms 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 centre 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?"(10)
(10) 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
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.
II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN.
In one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediaeval 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 armour, 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 had 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.(11)
(11) For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of lumps
of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p. 156; for the
Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals, see ibid., p. 543;
see also George Smith, Chaldean Accounts 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 mediaeval
representations of the creation of man and woman, see Didron,
Iconographie, pp. 35, 178, 224, 537.
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 key-note of this mode of subordinating all other things in the study of creation to the literal text of 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 humo."
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 vigour of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the centuries: "Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas."
Through the mediaeval 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 pre-existence of matter.
At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in favour 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 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 Bossuet threw his vast authority in its favour, and in his Discourse on 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 toymaker. 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."(12)
(12) 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 Philosophica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften,
ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i; 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 OEuvres, 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'smodern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos, London,
1857, passim.
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.
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 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 Bossuet, 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 moulded 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 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.(13)
(13) For St. Augustine, see De Genesis and De Trinitate, passim; for
Bede, see Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42; and
De Sex Dierum Criatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p. 215; for Peter Lombard
on "noxious animals," see his Sententiae, 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 hoereticorum"; for the agency
of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species
into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte der Botanik, Munchen,
1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113.
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.
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 Physio Cogus 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 Physiologus 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 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 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 "constantly 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, 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.(14)
(14) For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey,
Traditions Teratologiques; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiare de
Guillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieaval books of Exempla
as the Lumen Naturae; also Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologie; also
Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise, 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 Curiosities 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
Clerc, herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890; and for an Italian
examlpe, Goldstaub and 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.
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 scepticism 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.(15)
(15) For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn Library,
London, 1863, p. 30; for the 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.
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 sceptical 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 sceptical 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 an ass, the cavern which Adam and Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where Balaam'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.
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, he 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 scepticism 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, unmated 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, scepticism 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 scepticism 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 Colours 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."
Among the other titles of chapters are such as: Of Balaam'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.(16)
(16) For Franz and Kircher, see Perrier, La Philosophie Zoologique avant
Darwin, 1884, p. 29; for Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664,
pp. 89-92, 130, 218, etc.; for Hottinger, see his Historiae
Creatonis Examen theologico-philologicum, Heidelberg, 1659, lib.
vi, quaest lxxxiii; for Kirchmaier, see his Disputationes Zoologicae
(published collectively after his death), Jena, 1736; for Dannhauer, see
his Disputationes Theologicae, Leipsic, 1707, p. 14; for Bochart, see
his Hierozoikon, sive De Animalibus Sacre Scripturae, Leyden, 1712.
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 Buffon's humiliation for stating a simple scientific truth was a noted example. In England, Protestantism was at first hardly more favourable 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 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 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 Bridgewater 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 Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral 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 Prout. 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.(17)
(17) 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 of
London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual
editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as
follows:
"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.
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 labour 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.
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 explanations, he quaintly asks: "Who can imagine that in so long a voyage men woulde take the paines to carrie Foxes to Peru, especially that kinde they call 'Acias,' which is the filthiest I have seene? Who woulde likewise say that they have carried Tygers and Lyons? Truly it were a thing worthy the laughing at to thinke so. It was sufficient, yea, very much, for men driven against their willes by tempest, in so long and unknowne a voyage, to escape with their owne lives, without busying themselves to carrie Woolves and Foxes, and to nourish them at sea."
It was under the impression made by this new array of facts that in 1667 Abraham Milius published at Geneva his book on The Origin of Animals and the Migration of Peoples. This book shows, like that of Acosta, the shock and strain to which the discovery of America subjected the received theological scheme of things. It was issued with the special approbation of the Bishop of Salzburg, and it indicates the possibility that a solution of the whole trouble may be found in the text, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind." Milius goes on to show that the ancient philosophers agree with Moses, and that "the earth and the waters, and especially the heat of the sun and of the genial sky, together with that slimy and putrid quality which seems to be inherent in the soil, may furnish the origin for fishes, terrestrial animals, and birds." On the other hand, he is very severe against those who imagine that man can have had the same origin with animals. But the subject with which Milius especially grapples is the DISTRIBUTION of animals. He is greatly exercised by the many species found in America and in remote islands of the ocean—species entirely unknown in the other continents—and of course he is especially troubled by the fact that these species existing in those exceedingly remote parts of the earth do not exist in the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat. He confesses that to explain the distribution of animals is the most difficult part of the problem. If it be urged that birds could reach America by flying and fishes by swimming, he asks, "What of the beasts which neither fly nor swim?" Yet even as to the birds he asks, "Is there not an infinite variety of winged creatures who fly so slowly and heavily, and have such a horror of the water, that they would not even dare trust themselves to fly over a wide river?" As to fishes, he says, "They are very averse to wandering from their native waters," and he shows that there are now reported many species of American and East Indian fishes entirely unknown on the other continents, whose presence, therefore, can not be explained by any theory of natural dispersion.
Of those who suggest that land animals may have been dispersed over the earth by the direct agency of man for his use or pleasure he asks: "Who would like to get different sorts of lions, bears, tigers, and other ferocious and noxious creatures on board ship? who would trust himself with them? and who would wish to plant colonies of such creatures in new, desirable lands?"
His conclusion is that plants and animals take their origin in the lands wherein they are found; an opinion which he supports by quoting from the two narrations in Genesis passages which imply generative force in earth and water.
But in the eighteenth century matters had become even worse for the theological view. To meet the difficulty the eminent Benedictine, Dom Calmet, in his Commentary, expressed the belief that all the species of a genus had originally formed one species, and he dwelt on this view as one which enabled him to explain the possibility of gathering all animals into the ark. This idea, dangerous as it was to the fabric of orthodoxy, and involving a profound separation from the general doctrine of the Church, seems to have been abroad among thinking men, for we find in the latter half of the same century even Linnaeus inclining to consider it. It was time, indeed, that some new theological theory be evolved; the great Linnaeus himself, in spite of his famous declaration favouring the fixity of species, had dealt a death-blow to the old theory. In his Systema Naturae, published in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had enumerated four thousand species of animals, and the difficulties involved in the naming of each of them by Adam and in bringing them together in the ark appeared to all thinking men more and more insurmountable.
What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species went on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until, as an eminent zoological authority of our own time has declared, "for every one of the species enumerated by Linnaeus, more than fifty kinds are known to the naturalist of to-day, and the number of species still unknown doubtless far exceeds the list of those recorded."
Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon Scripture by requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miraculous interventions of the Creator to produce the hundred and sixty species of land shells found in the little island of Madeira alone, and fourteen hundred distinct interventions to produce the actual number of distinct species of a single well-known shell.
Ever more and more difficult, too, became the question of the geographical distribution of animals. As new explorations were made in various parts of the world, this danger to the theological view went on increasing. The sloths in South America suggested painful questions: How could animals so sluggish have got away from the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat so completely and have travelled so far?
The explorations in Australia and neighbouring islands made matters still worse, for there was found in those regions a whole realm of animals differing widely from those of other parts of the earth.
The problem before the strict theologians became, for example, how to explain the fact that the kangaroo can have been in the ark and be now only found in Australia: his saltatory powers are indeed great, but how could he by any series of leaps have sprung across the intervening mountains, plains, and oceans to that remote continent? and, if the theory were adopted that at some period a causeway extended across the vast chasm separating Australia from the nearest mainland, why did not lions, tigers, camels, and camelopards force or find their way across it?
The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the eighteenth century gone to pieces. The wiser theologians waited; the unwise indulged in exhortations to "root out the wicked heart of unbelief," in denunciation of "science falsely so called," and in frantic declarations that "the Bible is true"—by which they meant that the limited understanding of it which they had happened to inherit is true.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological theory of creation—though still preached everywhere as a matter of form—was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly lost: such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, but all to no purpose. That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted itself in the old strongholds of theological thought, the universities. Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the centre, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man. They had developed a system of a very different sort, and this we shall next consider.(18)
(18) For Acosta, see his Historia Natural y moral de las Indias,
Seville, 1590—the quaint English translation is of London, 1604; for
Abraham Milius, see his De Origine Animalium et Migratione Popularum,
Geneva, 1667; also Kosmos, 1877, H. I, S. 36; for Linnaeus's declaration
regarding species, see the Philosophia Botanica, 99, 157; for Calmet and
Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 237. As to the enormously increasing
numbers of species in zoology and botany, see President D. S. Jordan,
Science Sketches, pp. 176, 177; also for pithy statement, Laing's
Problems of the Future, chap. vi.
III. THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES, OF AN EVOLUTION IN ANIMATED
NATURE.
We have seen, thus far, how there came into the thinking of mankind upon the visible universe and its inhabitants the idea of a creation virtually instantaneous and complete, and of a Creator in human form with human attributes, who spoke matter into existence literally by the exercise of his throat and lips, or shaped and placed it with his hands and fingers.
We have seen that this view came from far; that it existed in the Chaldaeo-Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, and probably in others of the earliest date known to us; that its main features passed thence into the sacred books of the Hebrews and then into the early Christian Church, by whose theologians it was developed through the Middle Ages and maintained during the modern period.
But, while this idea was thus developed by a succession of noble and thoughtful men through thousands of years, another conception, to all appearance equally ancient, was developed, sometimes in antagonism to it, sometimes mingled with it—the conception of all living beings as wholly or in part the result of a growth process—of an evolution.
This idea, in various forms, became a powerful factor in nearly all the greater ancient theologies and philosophies. For very widespread among the early peoples who attained to much thinking power was a conception that, in obedience to the divine fiat, a watery chaos produced the earth, and that the sea and land gave birth to their inhabitants.
This is clearly seen in those records of Chaldaeo-Babylonian thought deciphered in these latter years, to which reference has already been made. In these we have a watery chaos which, under divine action, brings forth the earth and its inhabitants; first the sea animals and then the land animals—the latter being separated into three kinds, substantially as recorded afterward in the Hebrew accounts. At the various stages in the work the Chaldean Creator pronounces it "beautiful," just as the Hebrew Creator in our own later account pronounces it "good."
In both accounts there is placed over the whole creation a solid, concave firmament; in both, light is created first, and the heavenly bodies are afterward placed "for signs and for seasons"; in both, the number seven is especially sacred, giving rise to a sacred division of time and to much else. It may be added that, with many other features in the Hebrew legends evidently drawn from the Chaldean, the account of the creation in each is followed by a legend regarding "the fall of man" and a deluge, many details of which clearly passed in slightly modified form from the Chaldean into the Hebrew accounts.
It would have been a miracle indeed if these primitive conceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigour in that earlier civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed to influence the Hebrews, who during the most plastic periods of their development were under the tutelage of their Chaldean neighbours. Since the researches of Layard, George Smith, Oppert, Schrader, Jensen, Sayce, and their compeers, there is no longer a reasonable doubt that this ancient view of the world, elaborated if not originated in that earlier civilization, came thence as a legacy to the Hebrews, who wrought it in a somewhat disjointed but mainly monotheistic form into the poetic whole which forms one of the most precious treasures of ancient thought preserved in the book of Genesis.
Thus it was that, while the idea of a simple material creation literally by the hands and fingers or voice of the Creator became, as we have seen, the starting-point of a powerful stream of theological thought, and while this stream was swollen from age to age by contributions from the fathers, doctors, and learned divines of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, there was poured into it this lesser current, always discernible and at times clearly separated from it—a current of belief in a process of evolution.
The Rev. Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, than whom no English-speaking scholar carries more weight in a matter of this kind, has recently declared his belief that the Chaldaeo-Babylonian theory was the undoubted source of the similar theory propounded by the Ionic philosopher Anaximander—the Greek thinkers deriving this view from the Babylonians through the Phoenicians; he also allows that from the same source its main features were adopted into both the accounts given in the first of our sacred books, and in this general view the most eminent Christian Assyriologists concur.
It is true that these sacred accounts of ours contradict each other. In that part of the first or Elohistic account given in the first chapter of Genesis the WATERS bring forth fishes, marine animals, and birds (Genesis, i, 20); but in that part of the second or Jehovistic account given in the second chapter of Genesis both the land animals and birds are declared to have been created not out of the water, but "OUT OF THE GROUND" (Genesis, ii, 19).
The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining away this contradiction; but the old current of thought, strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention, and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest men of the Church, influenced theological opinion deeply, if not widely, for ages, in favour of an evolution theory.
But there was still another ancient source of evolution ideas. Thoughtful men of the early civilizations which were developed along the great rivers in the warmer regions of the earth noted how the sun-god as he rose in his fullest might caused the water and the rich soil to teem with the lesser forms of life. In Egypt, especially, men saw how under this divine power the Nile slime brought forth "creeping things innumerable." Hence mainly this ancient belief that the animals and man were produced by lifeless matter at the divine command, "in the beginning," was supplemented by the idea that some of the lesser animals, especially the insects, were produced by a later evolution, being evoked after the original creation from various sources, but chiefly from matter in a state of decay.
This crude, early view aided doubtless in giving germs of a better evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaximander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we have seen, developed them, making their way at times by guesses toward truths since established by observation. Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation, arrived at some results which, had Greek freedom of thought continued, might have brought the world long since to its present plane of biological knowledge; for he reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature.
With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained, and as a typical example of it we may note the opinion of St. Basil the Great in the fourth century. Discussing the work of creation, he declares that, at the command of God, "the waters were gifted with productive power"; "from slime and muddy places frogs, flies, and gnats came into being"; and he finally declares that the same voice which gave this energy and quality of productiveness to earth and water shall be similarly efficacious until the end of the world. St. Gregory of Nyssa held a similar view.
This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church. For St. Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text, broke from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of Scripture and spurned the generally received belief of a creative process like that by which a toymaker brings into existence a box of playthings. In his great treatise on Genesis he says: "To suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very childish.... God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips."
St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose numbers the after-time unfolded."
In his great treatise on the Trinity—the work to which he devoted the best thirty years of his life—we find the full growth of this opinion. He develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings there was something like a growth—that God is the ultimate author, but works through secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of plants and animals.(19)
(19) For the Chaldean view of creation, see George Smith, Chaldean
Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14,15, and 64-86; also Lukas, as
above; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures
for 1887, pp. 371 and elsewhere; as to the fall of man, Tower of Babel,
sacredness of the number seven, etc., see also Delitzsch, appendix to
the German translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq.; as to the almost exact
adoption of the Chaldean legends into the Hebrew sacred account, see
all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte
Testament, Giessen, 1883, early chapters; also article Babylonia in
the Encyclopedia Britannica; as to similar approval of creation by the
Creator in both accounts, see George Smith, p. 73; as to the migration
of the Babylonian legends to the Hebrews, see Schrader, Whitehouse's
translation, pp. 44,45; as to the Chaldaean belief ina solid firmament,
while Schrader in 1883 thought it not proved, Jensen in 1890 has found
it clearly expresses—see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp.9 et seq.,
also pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts
this view of a Chaldean record of a "firmament"—see Kosmologie, pp.
43, etc.; see also Maspero and Sayce, the Dawn of Civilization, and for
crude early ideas of evolution in Egypt, see ibid., pp. 156 et seq.
For the seven-day week among the Chaldeans and rest on the seventh day, and the proof that even the name "Sabbath" is of Chaldean origin, see Delitzsch, Beiga-ben zu Smith's Chald. Genesis, pp. 300 and 306; also Schrader; for St. Basil, see Hexaemeron and Homilies vii-ix; but for the steadfastness of Basil's view in regard to the immutability of species, see a Catholic writer on evolution and Faith in the Dublin Review for July, 1871, p. 13; for citations of St. Augustine on Genesis, see the De Genesi contra Manichoeos, lib. ii, cap. 14, in Migne, xxxiv, 188,—lib. v, cap. 5 and cap. 23,—and lib vii, cap I; for the citations from his work on the Trinity, see his De Trinitate, lib. iii, cap. 8 and 9, in Migne, xlii, 877, 878; for the general subject very fully and adequately presented, see Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, New York, 1894, chaps. ii and iii.
This idea of a development by secondary causes apart from the original creation was helped in its growth by a theological exigency. More and more, as the organic world was observed, the vast multitude of petty animals, winged creatures, and "creeping things" was felt to be a strain upon the sacred narrative. More and more it became difficult to reconcile the dignity of the Almighty with his work in bringing each of these creatures before Adam to be named; or to reconcile the human limitations of Adam with his work in naming "every living creature"; or to reconcile the dimensions of Noah's ark with the space required for preserving all of them, and the food of all sorts necessary for their sustenance, whether they were admitted by twos, as stated in one scriptural account, or by sevens, as stated in the other.
The inadequate size of the ark gave especial trouble. Origen had dealt with it by suggesting that the cubit was six times greater than had been supposed. Bede explained Noah's ability to complete so large a vessel by supposing that he worked upon it during a hundred years; and, as to the provision of food taken into it, he declared that there was no need of a supply for more than one day, since God could throw the animals into a deep sleep or otherwise miraculously make one day's supply sufficient; he also lessened the strain on faith still more by diminishing the number of animals taken into the ark—supporting his view upon Augustine's theory of the later development of insects out of carrion.
Doubtless this theological necessity was among the main reasons which led St. Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, to incorporate this theory, supported by St. Basil and St. Augustine, into his great encyclopedic work which gave materials for thought on God and Nature to so many generations. He familiarized the theological world still further with the doctrine of secondary creation, giving such examples of it as that "bees are generated from decomposed veal, beetles from horseflesh, grasshoppers from mules, scorpions from crabs," and, in order to give still stronger force to the idea of such transformations, he dwells on the biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar, which appears to have taken strong hold upon medieval thought in science, and he declares that other human beings had been changed into animals, especially into swine, wolves, and owls.
This doctrine of after-creations went on gathering strength until, in the twelfth century, Peter Lombard, in his theological summary, The Sentences, so powerful in moulding the thought of the Church, emphasized the distinction between animals which spring from carrion and those which are created from earth and water; the former he holds to have been created "potentially" the latter "actually."
In the century following, this idea was taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas and virtually received from him its final form. In the Summa, which remains the greatest work of medieval thought, he accepts the idea that certain animals spring from the decaying bodies of plants and animals, and declares that they are produced by the creative word of God either actually or virtually. He develops this view by saying, "Nothing was made by God, after the six days of creation, absolutely new, but it was in some sense included in the work of the six days"; and that "even new species, if any appear, have existed before in certain native properties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction."