Author’s introduction:
This article is a chapter taken from the thesis that I wrote for the Masters of Divinity program at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary under the guidance of Dr. Christopher Veniamin, a spiritual child of the great St. Sophrony of Essex, A Patristic Perspective On a Crucified Mind: Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and the Doctrine of Creation. The thesis is an examination of Fr. Seraphim’s teachings on the Church’s interpretation of the book of Genesis, most of which was presented posthumously in Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, with supplementary research. Though it has been more than 40 years since Fr. Seraphim presented his material, it remains as relevant and as true as ever. Though possessed of a brilliant mind, Fr. Seraphim chose to crucify that mind to the mind of Christ in the Church, thus his teaching is simply that of the Church, harmoniously taught by the saints for 2,000 years. This present article is the second chapter of my thesis.—Jesse Dominick
***
One of, if not the most substantial contribution that Fr. Seraphim has made to twentieth and twenty-first century Orthodoxy is his treatment of the highly-debated Creation/evolution question. Fr. Seraphim addressed this issue in writing, including personal letters, and through public lectures over the course of nine years, until his repose in 1982. Much of his output was posthumously compiled, edited, and published by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood under the title of Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision (2000, 2011),[1] which has received a varied response within the American Orthodox community. Several letters addressing the issue can also be found in Fr. Alexey Young’s (now the aforementioned Hieroschemamonk Ambrose) compilation Letters from Father Seraphim. Additionally, evolution is discussed in his Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, and he also translated several homilies of St. Symeon the New Theologian dealing with the Creation, the Fall, and the awaited restoration of the cosmos, originally published by the St. Herman’s Brotherhood as The Sin of Adam and Our Redemption in 1979, and now published as The First-Created Man.
Fr. Seraphim was initially prompted to address the issue following the publication of an article critiquing evolution in the small journal of his spiritual child Alexey Young, Nikodemos (vol. 2, #2, March–April 1973).[2] He and Fr. Herman were surprised to receive a letter from a priest of the Russian Church Abroad under the spiritual direction of the Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline, MA (which was at that time within the ROCOR jurisdiction), who objected strongly to Alexey’s article. This was later followed by a nationally circulated open letter from monks of the monastery itself. The fathers of the monastery considered evolution to be an unassailable fact and any discussion of the issue to be inappropriate. Of more concern than this objection was the manner in which the fathers of the monastery and those under their spiritual direction objected. Alexey and his journal were slandered and subscriptions were withdrawn.[3] As Fr. Seraphim writes: “They had formed a political party within [the] Church, and those who do not agree with the ‘party line’ are dismissed and regarded as non-existent, and people are even warned about the ‘dangers’ of having contact with such ones.”[4]
Fr. Seraphim was also taken aback by the seeming ignorance of the dangers of evolutionism amongst so many in the Orthodox Church—both clergy and laity. He himself had once believed “entirely” in evolution because it had always been presented as irrefutable fact to which every learned person gives assent, but upon deeper thinking he had begun to distinguish between scientific facts and scientific philosophy, concluding that evolution is actually an example of the latter.[5] In his extensive research for his shelved project The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God, Fr. Seraphim traced the development of the apostasy of the western world from the truth of Orthodox Christianity and found a form of chiliasm to be the undergirding philosophy. For Fr. Seraphim, this term indicates not necessarily the strict meaning of a belief in a literal millennial reign of Christ on earth, but in a broader sense that “history is to reach its culmination in an indefinite state of earthly blessedness, a perfected mankind living in perfect peace and harmony.”[6] Archimandrite Sophrony also takes note of this as a pervading philosophy: “The tragedy of our times lies in our almost complete unawareness, or unmindfulness, that there are two kingdoms, the temporal and eternal. We would build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, rejecting all idea of resurrection or eternity. Resurrection is a myth, God is dead.”[7] In this light, Fr. Seraphim found that the foundations for evolution had been laid by philosophy long before there was any scientific “evidence” in favor of it, and that evolution itself constitutes a philosophy,[8] one that comprises a “rival thought-pattern to Orthodoxy.”[9] The highly-respected traditional Orthodox author Dr. Constantine Cavarnos (1918-2011), who earned his PhD. in philosophy from Harvard, founded the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, and ended his days as a schemamonk of St. Anthony’s Monastery in Florence, AZ, strongly argues the same in his lecture Biological Evolutionism. Having majored in biology and philosophy he found that “the theories of biological evolution are philosophical in nature and should be treated as such.”[10]
Having undertaken in-depth studies of the movement of apostasy, Eugene’s knowledge was later supplemented with the theological truths of Orthodoxy through a three-year course offered by the great wonderworker St. John Maximovitch and those chosen by him, which Fr. Herman believes St. John designed specifically for Eugene. Among several other courses, St. John’s faithful priest Fr. Leonid Upshinsky presented from several Patristic commentaries on the first several chapters of Genesis. Eugene eventually graduated at the top of the class.[11] Following his conversion to Christ, he saw evolution as part of the American intellectual baggage which he was called to leave behind as he submitted his mind to the wisdom of the Church,[12] and so he was genuinely taken aback by Orthodox Christians who either fully and uncritically accepted evolutionism or did not believe it to be an important issue.[13] According to the teaching of 
St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the FathersIndeed, the Church always stresses the permanence of her faith through the ages, from the very beginning. This identity, since the Apostolic times, is the most conspicuous sign and token of right faith-always the same. Yet, ”antiquity” by itself is not an adequate proof of the true faith.
The importance of Fr. Seraphim’s work, the bulk of which was originally presented as a series of lectures at the “New Valaam Theological Academy” pilgrimages at St. Herman’s Monastery in the summers of 1981 and 1982, is that it was the first, and remains the only Orthodox work in English to present an in-depth and detailed look at Genesis specifically in the Creation/evolution context, with the aim of presenting and upholding the Patristic teaching.[16] In looking to the Fathers, Fr. Seraphim was adhering to an essential principle of Orthodox hermeneutics: one must live according to the Scripture in order to understand them. One’s ability to interpret the Scriptures depends on one’s spiritual state, for the Scriptures themselves are the product of Divine inspiration. In his essay “How to Read the Bible and Why” the great Serbian luminary of modern times, St. Justin Popovich (1894-1979), writes: “It is a book that must be read with life—by putting it into practice. One should first live it, and then understand it,”[17] and Fr. Seraphim writes in his own guide to reading the Scriptures: “For our reading of Scripture to be fruitful, to help save our souls, we must ourselves be leading a spiritual life in accordance with the Gospel. The Scripture are addressed precisely to those who are trying to lead a spiritual life.”[18]
One of the major themes of Fr. Seraphim’s work on Genesis is that the first-created world, as it existed before the Fall of man, was radically different from what we know today, and so cannot be investigated through modern science, but rather is only known to man as revealed by the Saints who taught from experience and Divine vision. To Dr. Alexander Kalomiros[19] (1931-1993), a Greek medical doctor and author of the well-known work against ecumenism, Against False Union, and the controversial talk, The River of Fire, he wrote:
The interpretation of the Divinely inspired Scripture is clearly the work of God-bearing theologians, not of natural scientists, who ordinarily do not know the very first principles of such interpretation … The state of Adam and the first-created world has been placed forever beyond the knowledge of science by the barrier of Adam’s transgression, which changed the very nature of Adam and the creation, and indeed the nature of knowledge itself (emphasis in original).[20]
Fr. John Romanides (1927–2001), a prominent priest and theologian of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the Church of Greece, taught the same in his Ancestral Sin:
If we begin with philosophical and scientific observations of the material world, it is logically impossible to arrive at a distinction between the creation of the world and its fall. Quite simply, this is because the reality before our eyes presents nature as it is now, after the fall … it is impossible for natural man to distinguish between the wholly positive creation of the world and the fall of the world. Man cannot know this division except by revelation.[21]
Thus, any attempted scientific investigation into the creation of the world and the time before man’s sin necessitates the assuming away of the once paradisaical world, and the subsequent Fall. Thus, as this work attempts to demonstrate, in order to “harmonize” this “science” with Orthodox Patristic theology, one or the other or both must be seriously compromised.
Fr. Seraphim’s conclusions about obtaining knowledge of the prelapsarian world were not simply his own, but in this he was harmonious with the Fathers of the Church, who spoke quite explicitly. St. Theophilus, a second century (c. 120–190) successor to St. Peter the Apostle at the See of Antioch and early apologist, writes: “Of this six days’ work no man can give a worthy explanation and description of all its parts,” even though he had ten thousand years to speak of it, “not even so could he utter anything worthy of these things, on account of the exceeding greatness and riches of the wisdom of God which there is in the six days’ work,” “but it is a succinct account of it which holy Scripture gives.”[22] St. Ambrose, the fourth century (c. 340-397) bishop of Milan, well known for baptizing St. Augustine of Hippo, in his Paradise cautions us to humility:
we are unable, owing to human weakness, yet to know and understand the reason for the creation of each and every object. Let us, therefore, not criticize in holy Scripture something which we cannot comprehend. There are very many things which must not be subjected to the judgment of our intellect. Rather, these should be surveyed from the lofty heights of Divine Providence and from the intentions of God Himself,[23]
which is accomplished within Christ’s Church through union and communion with Him.
Thus, Orthodox interpretation of Genesis follows that of the Fathers, who experienced visions of Creation, and even greater, a vision of and union with the Risen and glorified Christ. Fr. Seraphim quotes the Ninevite bishop St. Isaac the Syrian (d. c. 700) speaking of such vision: “And from this one is already exalted in his mind to that which preceded the composition of the world, when there was no creature, nor heaven, nor earth, nor angels, nothing of that which was brought into being, and to how God, solely by His good will, suddenly brought everything from non-being into being, and everything stood before Him in perfection.”[24] He also refers to St. Gregory the Sinaite (c. 1265-1346), the hesychastic contemporary of St. Gregory Palamas, who in his On Commandments and Doctrines 130 enumerates eight principal forms of contemplation, the third of which is “the composition of visible things.” Asking why this is included among other purely theological contemplations, Fr. Seraphim answers: “Is it not because there is an aspect and state of creatures beyond the sphere of scientific knowledge …?” (emphasis in original).[25] This theology corresponds to that of the earlier and inestimable giant of Orthodoxy, St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662), who wrote of contemplating the logoi, “the intelligible model (λόγος) according to which things have been made.”[26] He writes that the one who is engaged in this “natural contemplation”
Source link