OSV STORY FOR JAN. 12, 1997

How it all began

You've seen the new Bill Moyers PBS series on Genesis. Now here's the Catholic take on the Bible's primordial book

By Mike Aquilina

In the beginning was -- what? A big bang and a primordial soup? A couple of real, live innocents snacking on apples and cozying up to a snake in the grass? Or was it an amoebalike great-granddaddy of the whole human race? How about a sleepy deity snoozing after a hard, six-day workweek?

Even among Christians, thinking about the Book of Genesis is, for the most part, void and without form. Witness the vehemence of reaction to Pope John Paul II's recent statement on evolution.

Though the Pope did little more than repeat the teaching of his predecessors Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XII, his cautious acceptance of the possibility of evolution drew outrage from evangelicals like columnist Cal Thomas, as well as from many Catholics. Biblical literalists accused him of selling out the very truths of the first texts of Scripture.

Witness, too, the two-month scrutiny Genesis is getting on PBS in Bill Moyers' "Genesis: A Living Conversation." God's first act of creation even made the cover of Time magazine late last year, some countless millennia after the event.

Genesis, old as it is, is always news, and often surrounded by hype and hysteria. The Galileo affair of the early 1600s and the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920s were extended arguments over the meaning and place of the Book of Genesis in Western culture.

"In the beginning" is perennially news, because in the beginning, wrapped in mystery, is the purpose of our lives.

Genesis means "beginning," and the book sets out to explain origins -- of the world, humanity, sin and the Chosen People. It is "history," but not in the sense we understand the word today; Genesis is the story of God's people, but it is not, in the Catholic view, a mere cataloging of empirical facts about verifiable events.

"It is, rather," wrote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "the echo of God's history with His people."

The cardinal, who heads the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, preached in 1981 a series of Lenten homilies on the Bible's creation story. Published as "In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall" (Eerdmans, $13), they are at once a spiritual meditation and a catechism lesson.

"The Bible is not a natural-science textbook," he explained, "nor does it intend to be such."

His words might shock American Cath-olics, who are accustomed to watching rationalists and fundamentalists battle publicly over the Genesis text. But the cardinal's argument is as old as the text itself.

St. Augustine laid it out well in the fifth century, when he wrote that the Holy Spirit "did not intend to teach men these things [empirical sciences], things in no way profitable unto salvation."

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus (on the study of Holy Scripture), cited Augustine, adding that the sacred writers "did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time."

Augustine even maintained that when a conclusion of science contradicted the details of Scripture, Christians should "either prove it as well as we can to be entirely false, or at all events we must, without the smallest hesitation, believe it to be so."

The problem came when post-Enlightenment rationalists, especially those espousing theories of evolution, weighed their data against the literal account of Genesis -- and concluded that Genesis was worthless, because its tale of a six-day creation could not be reconciled with the fossil record.

To these naysayers, Pope Pius XII once again gave the lesson of Augustine and Pope Leo. In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis ("The Human Race"), Pope Pius wrote: "The first 11 chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense."

The creation chapters of Genesis, he added, "in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people.

"If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents."

Where those "principal truths" had been compromised in modern scholarship, Pope Pius stepped in.

In the same letter, condemning "polygenism" -- that is, the idea that life originated from several "Adams," he stated clearly that faithful Catholics must believe that the human race descended from a single set of parents, and that original sin was committed by an individual and "through generations is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own."

He also said that Genesis could not be "considered on a par" with other religions' creation stories.

Indeed, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, the Genesis creation account took its final form as a response to, and refutation of, pagan creation myths. The version in chapter one of Genesis was composed during the Babylonian Exile, when the Israelites were alienated from their worship and tempted by foreign mystery cults.

Against the pagans who saw evil as something essential to creation, Genesis portrayed a universe essentially good. And the troublesome pagan serpent-god appears in Genesis as an inferior creature, subject to severe punishment by the one, true, good God.

According to Cardinal Ratzinger, Genesis showed that "the world was not a demonic contest but that it arose from God's reason and reposes on God's Word."

Another way the Genesis account scandalized the pagan world was by its very idea of creation ex nihilo ("out of nothing"). The Greeks, like most of the ancients, believed in the eternity of matter, "an ever-existent cosmos," the cardinal explained, "governed by the unchanging laws of nature, depending on itself alone and needing nothing outside itself."

To the pagan, the cosmos was itself divine. But the Christian, following Genesis, believed that God made the cosmos -- and made it for man's sake, for man to subdue.

Benedictine Father Stanley Jaki, a historian of science, argues that this intuition enabled science to arise and thrive in Christian cultures, when it was stillborn nearly everywhere else.

Genesis also afforded man a unique dignity. Human origin is the culmination of the Genesis creation narrative, attended by God's many gifts and benedictions. Man is made from dust -- thus his humility before God -- but he is made "in the image of God" -- and thus his ineradicable dignity.

Christian tradition has always read the first chapters of Genesis as a "protoevangelium," a pre-Gospel, foretelling the coming redemption from the very moment of the fall.

St. Augustine said, "The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old becomes clear in the New," and this is particularly true of the first chapters of Genesis.

Christian art and literature, from the Book of Revelation to the most common lawn statue, have retold the story of the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel."

Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that the Scriptures actually give several creation accounts, two in Genesis and one in Psalms, and that if these are taken literally they surely contradict one another.

But the definitive account, he explained, comes at the prologue of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and

the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be."

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Genesis continues to proclaim the Gospel today. Pope John Paul II has turned again and again to the primordial texts as he promotes the special dignity of human life, as in Evangelium Vitae, "The Gospel of Life"; the role of human labor in the work of creation, as in the encyclical Laborem Exercens (on human work); and the goodness of sex (see "Catechesis on Genesis," a series of addresses he delivered in 1979 and 1980).

It's all there, at least implicitly, in Genesis: the story of creation, freedom, fall, redemption and the vocation of God's people -- a people, by the way, whose best and brightest were prone to lechery, drunkenness, disobedience and violence.

It is the truth of God's creation we must believe in, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, "for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings."

Aquilina is editor of Our Sunday Visitor's New Covenant magazine

Where to learn more

Here's a brief list of further Catholic conversations on Genesis:

l "Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis," by Pope John Paul II (St. Paul Books and Media, 1981, $4).

l "Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe," by Stanley L. Jaki (University Press of America, 1990, $36).

l "Humani Generis" (Some False Opinions Which Threaten to Undermine Catholic Doctrine), encyclical of Pope Pius XII (St. Paul Books and Media, 1950, 75 cents) -- Mike Aquilina

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor, 1997; from the 1-12-97 edition

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