Part II, Chapter II, Section 1, Article 1: The Origin of Man and the Unity of the Human Race

Pohle, God the Author of Nature and the Supernatural, Part II, Chapter II, §1, Article 1 (pp. 126–136)

God directly created Adam and Eve, from whom all other human beings are descended by way of propagation. Holy Scripture lays particular stress on the truth that the entire human race is descended from a single pair of progenitors, and thus forms but one family.

Thesis I: The body of the first man as well as his soul were created immediately by God.

This thesis may be technically qualified as “sententia satis certa.”

Proof. There is no need of entering upon a refutation of the obsolete heretical contention of the Gnostics and the Manichaeans, that Adam was created by a subordinate Demiurge, or by the author of evil. The modern antithesis of Christian Anthropology is atheistic Darwinism, which teaches that in soul and body alike man is descended from the brute, the human soul being merely a more highly developed form of the brute soul.¹ This teaching is as heretical as it is absurd. The modified Darwinism defended by St. George Mivart, who holds that the body of Adam developed from the animal kingdom, whereas his spiritual soul was infused immediately by the Creator, must likewise be rejected; for while not directly heretical, it is repugnant to the letter of Sacred Scripture and to Christian sentiment.²

a) The creation of man occurred towards the end of the Hexaemeron, immediately prior to the Creator’s day of rest. The Bible contains two separate accounts of it (Gen. I, 26 sqq., and Gen. II, 7), both of which represent Almighty God as personally creating man.

α) The Creator proceeds with great solemnity in this act. Gen. I, 26 sq.: “And he said: let us make man to our image and likeness … and God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.” This text, be it remarked in passing, excludes the Platonic error, which was espoused by certain ancient rabbis, that Adam was a hermaphrodite. The distinction of sexes is immediately from God. As God took a direct hand in the creation of material and irrational beings, there can be no doubt that He personally created Adam, “the crown of creation,” whose material body from the moment of its origin was to be animated by a soul endowed with sanctifying grace. From the irrational brute to man was indeed a farther cry than from inanimate matter to plant, or from plant to brute, and hence if the immediate operation of the Creator was required for the latter, it was even more urgently demanded for the former. That God created the soul of Adam out of nothing and personally fashioned his body, becomes still clearer from Gen. II, 7: “And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” These words, taken in their natural and obvious sense, represent the creative act of God as one, though divided into two momenta, viz.: formation and breathing.

Did the Creator employ the services of the Angels in preparing the “slime of the earth”? The assumption cannot be positively disproved. But even if He did employ the Angels as His agents, God Himself was the sole causa principalis in the formation of the human body.³

β) The creation of Eve furnishes a decisive argument against the evolutionist hypothesis. It is quite inconceivable, and at the same time repugnant to the spirit of divine Revelation, that woman should have had a sublimer origin than man. Eve was fashioned immediately by God from a rib which He had taken from Adam.⁴ Cardinal Cajetan’s allegorical interpretation of this text has been unanimously rejected by theologians as fanciful and unwarranted. St. Paul says: “Non enim vir ex muliere est, sed mulier ex viro. Etenim non est creatus vir propter mulierem, sed mulier propter virum” — For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. For the man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man.⁵ If Eve had not sprung bodily from Adam, he could not have exclaimed: “This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman (virago), because she was taken out of man (quoniam de viro sumpta est).”⁶ If the sumptio de viro was an immediate act of God, so, a fortiori, was the formatio de limo terrae; and hence Adam’s body, like his soul, must have come directly from the hands of the Creator.⁷

b) The Patristic teaching on this subject is quite unanimous. Not a single one of the Fathers can be quoted in favor of Mivart’s hypothesis. We shall confine ourselves to a few specimen quotations.

Gregory of Nyssa writes: “If it were simply written: ‘He created,’ you would be free to think that man was made in the same manner as the brute animals, the monsters, plants and herbs. In order to make you see that you have nothing in common with the beasts of the field, Moses describes God’s artistic procedure in creating man thus: ‘God took dust of the earth.’ Then he relates what God did; then he tells us how God did it. He took dust of the earth and with His own hands formed man.”⁸ John of Damascus, who exalted man’s dignity to the extent of calling him a “little god” (μικρόθεος),⁹ deems it quite natural and proper that the body of the first man should have been immediately created by God. “Thus God created man with His hands: He formed his body out of earth, but gave him the soul by breathing.” To show the propriety of such direct intervention on the part of the Almighty, St. John Chrysostom compares man to a king, whom God Himself wished to induct into the created universe as his palace.¹⁰ Tertullian hails man as “ingenii divini curam, manuum Dei operam, molitionis suae regem, liberalitatis suae heredem.”¹¹ It is one of this author’s favorite sayings that Adam bore a bodily resemblance to the “second Adam,” i.e., Christ, and that the Creator fashioned the body of the first man after the pattern of Jesus.¹² The Fathers and Patristic writers generally love to descant on the great dignity of Eve because she was taken from Adam’s side. Eve, they say, did not spring from the head of Adam, which would have signified that she should rule over him; nor from his feet, that she might be his slave; but from his side, that she might be loved by her husband, thus symbolizing the procession of the Church from the side of Christ.¹³ Such utterances are as incompatible with the views of Mivart¹⁴ as they are with crude Darwinism in its application to man.¹⁵

Thesis II: All mankind is descended from one pair of progenitors, Adam and Eve.

Proof. The unity of the human race, though not yet formally defined, is a Catholic doctrine. The dogmatic commission of the Vatican Council drew up the following canon: “Si quis universum genus humanum ab uno protoparente Adam ortum esse negaverit, anathema sit.”¹⁶ Heresies opposed to this teaching are Pre-Adamism and Co-Adamism. The Pre-Adamites claim that there were men before Adam; the Co-Adamites, that other human beings co-existed with Adam and Eve. Pre-Adamism was reduced to a theological system by the French Calvinist Isaac Peyrère,¹⁷ who later became a Catholic and abjured his error before Pope Alexander VII. It has been revamped in modern times with much scientific acumen by Professor Winchell.¹⁸ The defense of Christian monogenism against the objections of infidel scientists is a task which we must leave to apologetics. The dogmatic argument for our thesis may be formulated as follows:

a) The Bible does not permit us to doubt that all men without exception — including such widely divergent races as the negroes of Australasia, the Chinese, and the aborigines of the South Sea Islands — are descended from the same progenitors. This unity of descent sufficiently guarantees the unity of the human race, which would remain a fact even if the so-called Neandertal race constituted a new zoological species, as is asserted by such eminent authorities as Schwalbe and Klaatsch.¹⁹ Dogmatic theology is not concerned with zoological distinctions. The purpose of the Mosaic narrative is simply to describe the origin of the universe, including man. We have in Gen. I, 26 sqq. and II, 4 sqq., as it were, the original charter of the human race. The very fact that God, when He was about to create man, debated with Himself “Let us make man,” shows that a new and very important link still remained to be inserted in the chain of created beings. Moreover, Gen. II, 5–7 expressly tells us: “There was not a man to till the earth … and the Lord God formed man,” הָאָדָם, i.e., man as a species and as the first individual of that species.

With equal certainty we know from Revelation that Eve was the first woman. Gen. II, 20: “Adae vero non inveniebatur adiutor similis eius” — But for Adam there was not found a helper like himself. Had any other human beings existed at that time (Pre-Adamites or Co-Adamites), Eve would not have been the first woman. Her very name “Eve” is intelligible only on the assumption that she is the proto-mother of mankind: “Vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suae Eva, eo quod mater esset cunctorum viventium” — Adam called the name of his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.²⁰ This is confirmed by various other Scriptural texts. Wisd. X, 1: “[Adamus] primus formatus est a Deo pater orbis terrarum, cum solus esset creatus” — Adam was first formed by God the father of the world, when he was created alone. Christ Himself says, Matth. XIX, 4: “Qui fecit hominem ab initio, masculum et foeminam fecit eos” — He who made man from the beginning, made them male and female. St. Paul repeats the same truth, Acts XVII, 26: “Fecitque [Deus] ex uno omne genus hominum²¹ inhabitare super universam faciem terrae” — He hath made of one all mankind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth.²²

b) Peyrère himself admitted that his theory was opposed to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers and to the many conciliar definitions which assert the universality of original sin and of the Redemption.

“I confess,” he says in a letter to Philotimus, “that I was not unaware of the fact that my hypothesis [asserting the existence of Pre-Adamites] was entirely foreign to the opinion of the holy Fathers and to the teaching of orthodox councils; and that the whole fabric of doctrine concerning the fall and redemption of man was based by the Fathers and councils on the hypothesis [sic!] that Adam was the first man.”²³

The Fathers often make the common descent of all men from one pair of progenitors the text of inspiring reflections. Lactantius, e.g., dwells on the utter wickedness of hatred, which, he says, is repugnant to the blood relationship that binds all human beings together as members of one family.²⁴ St. Ambrose and others demonstrate the unity of humankind from the manner in which our first parents were created.²⁵ Lastly, the dogma of the universality of original sin, and the consequent duty for all men of whatever race to receive Baptism, as well as the dogma of the Redemption of all through Jesus Christ, presuppose common descent from Adam.

c) Pre-Adamism is heretical only when it culminates in Co-Adamism, because the assertion that certain post-Adamic races had a pre-Adamic origin involves a direct denial of the universality of original sin and of the Redemption.

Fabre d’Envieu²⁶ held that human beings existed upon this earth long before the Biblical Adam, but that they were totally extinct when God created our first parents. While this airy hypothesis is not directly repugnant to the dogma of the universality of original sin and the Redemption of all men through Jesus Christ, it is difficult to reconcile with the Mosaic narrative. Nor is there need of any such gratuitous assumption, so long as science has not discovered the “tertiary man” — the “missing link” — which alone could give us the certainty that hundreds of thousands of years ago there lived upon this earth human beings whose traces became entirely obliterated in the later geological strata, only to re-appear in the glacial epoch. Modern man is no doubt genetically related to the diluvial man of the so-called interglacial period. His descent from Adam is Catholic teaching, and it naturally implies that all the different races of men, including the North American Indians and the Esquimos, are members of the Adamitic family.²⁷ The early Christians regarded the assumption of antipodes, i.e., men who live diametrically opposite each other, as repugnant to revealed religion. This hypothesis was in consequence proscribed until it became scientifically established. We know now that the unity of the human race is sufficiently safeguarded by the assumption that the remotest corners of the earth were peopled from one common centre of migration. St. Augustine found this problem a very thorny one. Lactantius brushed it aside with misdirected sarcasm.²⁸

Notes

Readings

H. Lüken, Die Stiftungsurkunde des Menschengeschlechtes oder die mosaische Schöpfungsgeschichte, Freiburg 1876. St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species, London 1871. Rauch, Einheit des Menschengeschlechtes, Augsburg 1873. J. Ranke, Der Mensch, 2 vols., 3rd ed., Leipzig 1911. C. Gutberlet, Der Mensch, sein Ursprung u. seine Entwicklung, 3rd ed., Paderborn 1910. Lepicier, De Prima Hominis Formatione, Romae 1910. Hettinger, Apologie des Christentums, 9th ed., II, 1, 5th lecture, Freiburg 1906. Fr. Kaulen, Die Sprachverwirrung zu Babel, Mainz 1861. A. Giesswein, Die Hauptprobleme der Sprachwissenschaft, Freiburg 1892. J. Thein, Christian Anthropology, New York 1892. E. Wasmann, S.J., The Berlin Discussion of the Problem of Evolution, London 1909. W. Lescher, O.P., The Evolution of the Human Body, 2nd ed., London 1899.

Note on this transcription: three short foreign-script terms — μικρόθεος (“little god,” John of Damascus), the Acts XVII, 26 Greek phrase, and הָאָדָם (“the man,” Gen. II) — were reconstructed from garbled OCR with good confidence. German titles had umlauts restored throughout (Schöpfung, Menschengeschlechtes, Abstammungslehre, Münster, etc.).