Fr. Seraphim (Rose’s) Interest in Studying Genesis, and His Interpretive MethodThe importance of Fr. Seraphim’s work 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.
“>Fr. Seraphim (Rose’s) Interest in Studying Genesis, and His Interpretive Method
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 sixth chapter of my thesis.—Jesse Dominick
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While God cares benevolently for all of creation, it is certain that man has a unique role as the king and crown of creation. This is evident from the fact that man alone is made according to the image of God and with God’s own “hands” and “breath,” and that the Logos Himself became incarnate as man. And this is why all of creation awaits the “manifestation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:18–23). Thus, the most important question regarding Genesis, as Fr. Seraphim states, is the nature of man. Fr. Seraphim draws the classic distinction between the “image” and the “likeness” of God and quotes St. Basil teaching that the image is given to man at his creation and cannot be lost, but the likeness is to be attained by the movement of our free will towards seeking perfection in God.[1] He notes that Fathers have pointed to different aspects of the image of God in man, including his dominion over the lower creation, his reason, and his freedom, and he quotes St. Gregory of Nyssa giving a concise explanation of what it means to be made in the image of God:
He creates man for no other reason than that He is good; and being such, and having this as His reason for entering upon the creation of our nature, He would not exhibit the power of His goodness in an imperfect form, giving our nature some one of the things at His disposal, and grudging it a share in another: but the perfect form of goodness is here to be seen by His both bringing man into being from nothing, and fully supplying him with all good gifts: but since the list of individual good gifts is a long one, it is out of the question to apprehend it numerically. The language of Scripture therefore expresses it concisely by a comprehensive phrase, in saying that man was made “in the image of God”: for this is the same as to say that He made human nature participant in all good; for if the Deity is the fulness of good, and this is His image, then the image finds its resemblance to the Archetype in being filled with all good.[2]
St. Gregory continues, “Thus there is in us the principle of all excellence, all virtue and wisdom, and every higher thing that we conceive: but pre-eminent among all is the fact that we are free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural power.”[3] But can the evolutionary understanding of man be reconciled to this Patristic understanding? In responding to this same query, St. Justin PopovicJustin, Popovic, St.
“>St. Justin Popović illuminates the great importance of this question. He writes vigorously: “The New Testament anthropology stands and falls with the Old Testament anthropology. The entire Gospel of the Old Testament: man – the icon of God; the entire Gospel of the New Testament: the God-man—the icon of man. Heavenly, divine, immortal, everlasting, and unchangeably human is the icon of God in man: godlikeness.”[4]
As the entirety of the Scriptures speak to Christians of Christ and thus are intricately linked, it cannot simply be assumed that to introduce a new Creation narrative unknown to the Fathers will have no detrimental impact on the Church’s New Testament vision and theology. The matter must be seriously examined, as Fr. Seraphim does. Science can only interpret the past through remains left behind by corruption and death, and so, as we have seen, it has no ability to investigate the prelapsarian world which knew only life. For scientists, death, the great aberration, is the great source of information, whereas the Saints are granted knowledge, wisdom, and vision by He Who is Life. St. John of Kronstadt, writing in the aftermath of Darwin, made this same observation, chastising those scientists who have forsaken the prophetic vision of Moses:
The Holy Scriptures speak more truly and more clearly of the world than the world itself or the arrangement of the earthly strata; the scriptures of nature within it, being dead and voiceless, cannot express anything definite. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” [Job 38:4] Were you with God when He created the universe? “Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being His counseller, hath taught Him?” [Isaiah 40:13] And yet you geologists boast that you have understood the mind of the Lord, in the arrangement of strata, and maintained it in spite of Holy Writ! You believe more in the dead letters of the earthly strata, in the soulless earth, than in the Divinely-inspired words of the great prophet Moses, who saw God.[5]
Thus, looking to lifeless remains to unravel the past, when scientists place man into the evolutionary line, it is modern, fallen man and not man as he originally existed, because as we have seen, science can know nothing of Adam and his original, pristine nature. But is man’s nature as initially created by God the same as it is now, or did the fall into sin disfigure his nature? Fr. Seraphim’s commentary, drawing widely again upon Patristics, demonstrates that man’s original condition of nature and his fallen condition of nature are in fact radically different.
Evolution is understood to occur not within individuals but within populations.[6] Thus, many theistic evolutionists do not believe in the historicity of Adam and Eve as literally the first human beings, but rather interpret them as symbols for the first human population. Others propose that once the evolutionary forerunners of human beings attained the proper physical state, God called out two of them to receive souls, who became the first humans, Adam and Eve. Fr. Seraphim mentions such ideas in his talks,[7] which had been expressed to him in a letter by Dr. Alexander Kalomiros, who wrote: “Adam is the evolved beast who receives in its innermost being the divine breath … then the evolved beast became a logical creature, being transformed from the inside, and in its depths, not anatomically but spiritually, by the grace of the Holy Spirit” (emphasis in original).[8] Dr. Alexander draws his sole Patristic support for his view from a passage of A Conversation of St. Seraphim of Sarov with N. A. Motovilov in which St. Seraphim seemingly teaches that man was a beast like unto other beasts, later becoming a human at the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. However, in his reply letter, Fr. Seraphim goes to great lengths to demonstrate that St. Seraphim is in fact in harmony with the other Fathers who teach that Adam’s body and soul were created simultaneously, as aforementioned (and which will be addressed further on).[9] As always, Fr. Seraphim prostrated his mind before that of the Church and sought for the Spirit-breathed harmony of the Fathers, rather than seeking the apparent “contradictions” which fuel academic studies, or passages that could be perverted to fit his own theories.
Dr. Kalomiros twice introduces a dualism into the constitution of man. The claim that Adam’s body predates his soul means it thus has its own particular existence apart from the soul and thus divides the integral unity of the hypostasis of man; and the claim that Adam is an evolved beast who received the breath of God necessitates that there would have thus been other animals, from which Adam was taken, that are physically identical to human beings but lacking the spiritual nature of man. Dr. Kalomiros writes: “I would not be surprised if Adam’s body had been in all aspects the body of an ape.”[10] This logically leads to the strange conclusions that either the irrational beasts possessing the same physical body as Adam are half-humans, or that the human body is not truly “human,” as it is possessed also by irrational beasts, and so humanity is found only in the spiritual nature of man. This is little different from the erroneous philosophical notion of the anathematized Alexandrian theologian Origen (184–254) that pre-existent human souls fell into bodies which are not truly part of the human constitution—a belief which compelled the Fathers to write strongly on the simultaneous creation of the human body and soul.
In the case of Vladimir De Beer, a doctoral student dealing with Creationism and evolutionism from an Orthodox perspective,[11] humanity seems to be defined solely by the physical body. Seeking to harmonize the Scriptures with the “scientific evidence” that mankind has existed for 200,000 years, he draws a divide between the two Creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, and sees Genesis 1 as a description of the descent of homo sapiens from hominid ancestors, and Genesis 2 as the granting of a “God-consciousness” to Adam and Eve.[12] This granting of a spiritual nature does not even separate Adam and Eve from the irrational beasts, for he says “By the time of Adam and Eve, the human species had been living on Earth for approximately two thousand centuries”—so the irrational beasts, and Adam and Eve who possess the spiritual awareness of God are of the same human species in his system.[13] For him, the granting of a spiritual nature perhaps brings man into a new mode of existence, but De Beer continues to classify Adam and Eve with the beasts from which they were called. And this “God-consciousness” is spread not only through the offspring of Adam and Eve but also by a “spiritual diffusion” to other parts of the world, already inhabited by human beings.[14] De Beer offers neither Patristic nor scientific support for this hypothesis, for it is not a true harmonization of the two, but is a sacrifice of both Orthodox theology and evolutionism for the sake of an amalgamation that is in the end no more scientifically viable and verifiable than Fr. Seraphim’s Patristic presentation, for if man is truly a product of evolution, then so also is his rationality and tendency towards spirituality.
Precisely what De Beer is attempting to explain by the action of God, evolutionary scientists attempt to explain through purely naturalistic reasonings—that belief in a higher power is evolutionarily advantageous because it leads to behavior modification, social cooperation, and so on.[15] The introduction of God at this point in the evolutionary chain offers nothing that materialism does not also claim to offer. Fr. James Coucouzis (1911-2005), the future Abp. Iakovos, primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America (1959-1996), takes note of this. He states that while Spiritualists reject the body as merely an image or prison of the spirit, “Materialists, on the other hand, try to attribute the spiritualistic qualities in man to the gray matter which is sheltered under our skull,” and thus he concludes: “Needless to say, the Greek Orthodox Church pays little attention to the existing findings and theories of Charles Darwin, which claim that man is not the creation of God, but the final process of a series of metamorphoses and changes, developments and evolutions of the primitive cell of life.”[16] And Fr. Seraphim concludes: “If man ‘evolves’ solely according to the laws of nature, then his rational nature, his soul, the image of God, differs not qualitatively but only quantitatively from the beasts; he is then a creature only of the earth, and there is no room for the Patristic view that he is partly of earth and partly of heaven.”[17] Additionally, St. Nektarios says of Philosphie Zoologique, the 1809 work of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that it degrades man by placing him among the beasts and describing his superior mental capacities as a mere difference of degree.[18]
As Fr. Seraphim demonstrates, none of these theories—that Adam is merely symbolic of