Summa summae S. Thomae sive compendium theologiae

(St. Thomas, from q. 67 to q. 74)

[Moses relates, cap. 1 Genes., that God created the world in the space of six days. The question is how these days are to be understood: whether really, for the space of twenty-four hours, such as our days are; or for longer and indeterminate spaces of time; or finally figuratively, for the diverse cognitions of the angels.

St. Augustine, in the books de Genesi ad litteram, takes them in the later sense, according to the diverse cognitions of the angels, the diversity being drawn not from the side of the cognition, but from the side of the objects, and the holy Doctor teaches that God created the world in one day, indeed in one instant. Then he divides all created things into six kinds, according to the six days numbered by Moses, of which God impressed the cognition on the angelic mind. Now the angel knew the first kind of things in themselves, and St. Augustine calls this cognition evening; then he knew them in the Word, and calls this cognition morning, because things are known more clearly in the Word than in themselves: and thus, he says, evening and morning were made one day. And so of the rest.

Concerning this interpretation our Angelic Doctor says, hic q. 58, a. 6, o: « What is said about the morning and evening cognition in the angels was introduced by Augustine, who wishes the six days in which God is read to have made all things to be understood, not as these customary ones which are completed by the circuit of the sun, since the sun is read to have been made on the fourth day, but as one day, namely the angelic cognition presented with the six kinds of things. But just as in the customary day morning is the beginning of the day, and evening its end, so the cognition of the primordial being itself of things is called the morning cognition, and this is according as things are in the Word; but the cognition of the very being of the created thing according as it consists in its own nature is called the evening cognition. For the being of things flows from the Word as from a certain primordial principle, and this outflow is terminated at the being of things which they have in their own nature. »

It is commonly admitted that the days of creation were true periods of time, within which the various species of corporeal beings were successively drawn out from the matter created in the beginning. For, if God created all things in one day, indeed in one instant, it follows that light and darkness existed at once, the waters were at once confused and divided, the earth was at once covered and uncovered by the waters, etc. These incongruities prove that the ordering of the universe was necessarily successive, so that the Mosaic text could be verified: although God could have, had it pleased him, produced first matter instantaneously clothed with all the forms which it now has. Whence the Angelic Doctor pronounces, q. 4 de Potentia, a. 2, that the opinion of St. Augustine « is the more subtle, but that of the other saints is the plainer and more conformable to the words of the letter, at least as to the surface; yet neither one is discordant from the words of faith. »

But it has been disputed with great contention concerning the real duration of these periods.

More commonly, up to these most recent times, it was admitted that the six days of the creation of the world were real days of twenty-four hours. And these proofs were brought forward, especially against the opinion of Augustine.

Proof 1° from the context of Holy Scripture. Genes., I, Moses relates that God made heaven and earth, the sun, etc., in six days. But by heaven is understood that which this name properly and commonly signifies, namely the true and real heaven; by earth, the true and real earth; by sun, the true and real sun. Therefore by six diverse days, true and natural days are to be understood.

Confirmation 1°. Sacred Scripture ought to be understood in the proper and literal sense, if no absurdity follows from it. But Holy Scripture expressly numbers six diverse days, and if six natural days are understood, nothing absurd follows. Therefore.

Confirmation 2°. Moses composed the history of the creation of the world principally for the Jewish people. Therefore it is likely that by six days he understood, not angelic cognitions, nor indeterminate durations, which could not be understood by a rude and simple people unless they had been expressed in explicit words, but natural days, which are easily understood, just as by heaven and earth he understood the natural heaven and the natural earth, as has already been said.

Proof 2°. God, in establishing the law concerning the observance of the sabbath, brings forward this reason, Exod., XX, 11: For in six days God made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day; as if he were to say: Just as God worked for six days, and ceased from work on the seventh, so it is permitted to you to work for six days, but on the seventh you must cease from your works. But this reason would be of no weight, if God had created all things not in six natural days, but in one only. For what consequence would that be? Just as God worked on one day, so you will be able to work for six days, and just as he ceased from work on the second natural day, so you must cease from work on the seventh day. This reasoning would be utterly incongruous. Therefore.

Proof 3°. According to the common sense of the Fathers and of the Church, the world began on the Lord's day: whence the Church, in the hymn

sung at Matins of the Lord's day, sings: « On the first day whereon the blessed Trinity founded the world, or whereon the Creator, rising again, delivers us, death having been conquered. » If therefore God created all things in one day, he rested from all his work on Monday, and not on the sabbath or the seventh day, which is against Holy Scripture. Therefore.

From these things it indeed seems certain that the days of creation are to be held as periods through which the diverse kinds of beings were successively produced; but it is not so unshakably demonstrated that each period is equivalent to a natural day of twenty-four hours. Although, as has already been said, God could have established the universe of things as it now is within six real days, and even in one instant, many, from geological observations, have judged that a longer, and even a very long, period was necessary for each order of things to be constituted; whence they were led to conclude that these days were indeterminate and indefinite periods of several days, or even of years. For the patrons of this opinion observe that the word day in the sacred books does not carry a fixed and invariable notion, but sometimes the time of light, as when it is said, Genes., I, 5: And he called the light Day, but sometimes an indeterminate space of time, as ibid., II, 4 and 5: These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, IN THE DAY that the Lord made the heaven and the earth, and every plant of the field before it sprang up in the earth, and every herb of the country before it grew. In the day, that is, in time, as is customary among the Greeks and Latins no less than among the Hebrews, on the testimony of Petavius, lib. I de Opif., c. 14, § 1. They observe, moreover, that the first three days could not have been similar to our days, since the luminaries were not made before the fourth day, that they might preside over the day and the night, and divide the light from the darkness, Genes., I, 18; which must hold much more of the seventh day, on which God is said to have rested from all the work which he had done, ibid., II, 2, which day still endures. « The seventh day, says St. Augustine aptly, is without evening, nor has it a setting, because you have sanctified it unto everlasting permanence, » Confess.,

lib. XIII, c. 36. And indeed, they add, if it was permitted, saving the faith, not only to Philo the Jew, de Opif. mundi, but also to Clement of Alexandria, lib. VI Strom., to Origen, lib. III de Princip., c. 5, and especially to St. Augustine, lib. II de Genesi contra Manich., c. 3, de Genesi ad litt. imperf. lib., c. 2, 9, 15, lib. IV, V, VI de Genesi ad litt., to interpret the six days of creation allegorically, and to assert that the whole work of creation was completed in a moment of time; if St. Eucherius of Lyons, or the learned and catholic author of the Comment. in Genes. which circulates under his name, Tonti, Serry, Macedo, Berti, and others were able, without a mark of rashness, to maintain the same opinion; if Cajetan, in cap. 1 Genes., and Melchior Cano, in Báñez, p. I, q. 71, art. 2, gave, with impunity, a not altogether dissimilar exposition of the first chapter of Genesis: it plainly follows that nothing stands in the way of the exposition concerning the six indeterminate periods being admitted, all the more because St. Augustine teaches that nothing should be rashly pronounced concerning the nature of the days of creation. For he says, lib. IV de Genesi ad litt., c. 1, n. 1: « It is indeed arduous and most difficult, by the powers of our understanding, to penetrate with liveliness of mind the will of the writer in these six days: whether those days passed by, and, a seventh being added, are now repeated through the ages of time, not in reality, but in name, etc. » And lib. XI de Civit., c. 6: « What sort of days these are, it is either very difficult for us, or even impossible, to conceive: how much more to say! » They observe, finally, that the most ancient cosmogonies, both of the Persians and of the Etruscans, favor the same interpretation. For in the Persian cosmogony, as is read in the Zendavesta, Oromazdes, the firstborn of the supreme deity, is said to have created this world in six periods, beginning with light, and after he had completed all things, to have celebrated festivals. In the Etruscan cosmogony, however, as a certain anonymous author has it in Suidas, it is related that God spent six thousand years in establishing all things. From these, moreover, the cosmogonies of the Egyptians and Phoenicians do not greatly differ.

In these and other similar arguments, moreover, in which one must deal either with astronomers, or with physicists, chemists, and geologists, let the theologian never pass over this excellent admonition of St. Thomas, who says, hic q. 68, a. 1, o: « As Augustine teaches, in questions of this kind two things are to be observed: first indeed, that the truth of Scripture be held unshaken; second, since divine Scripture can be expounded in many ways, that no one cling so precisely to any one exposition that, if it should be established by sure reason that what someone believed to be the sense of Scripture is false, he presume to assert it in no way, lest Scripture be derided on this account by unbelievers, and the way of believing be closed to them. » Augustine himself, cited by the Angelic Doctor, treating this question, says, lib. I de Genesi ad litt., c. 18, n. 37: « In obscure matters, and ones very far removed from our eyes, if we should read any writings, even divine ones, on the subject, which can, saving the faith in which we are instructed, yield now one opinion, now another, let us not throw ourselves headlong into any of them by so precipitate an affirmation that, if perchance the truth, more diligently discussed, should rightly overthrow it, we fall along with it: contending thus not for the opinion of the divine Scriptures, but for our own, in such a way that we wish that to be the opinion of the Scriptures which is our own, whereas we ought rather to wish our own opinion to be that of the Scriptures. » And again, lib. II, c. 1, n. 4: « Here it occurs to me to give this warning — the error to be guarded against which I warned in the first book must be guarded against..., lest any of us think that, against those... subtly disputing, one must rely on this testimony of the Scriptures: because they, not being held by the authority of our Letters, and not knowing in what sense it was said, will more easily deride the sacred books than repudiate what they have either perceived by sure reasons, or proved by most manifest experiments. »

If, therefore, evident observations compel us to depart from the common interpretation, the Mosaic cosmogony suffers no detriment, since on this hypothesis it can cohere very well with them. But if such observations are not had, the adversaries wrongly oppose them to the Mosaic cosmogony, which, even granting the more common interpretation, is in no way overthrown.]

[I answer in the negative, and with the most learned J. Perrone¹ I say: Neither from geological or physical, nor from astronomical observations is anything elicited whereby the Mosaic cosmogony could be weakened.

After what was set forth in the preceding article, the stated proposition scarcely needs proof.

For either the things that are put forward from geology, from physics, and from astronomy are such as can be reconciled with the more common exposition, or they are not. If the former, then the Mosaic cosmogony is wrongly represented as contrary to new observations of this kind; if the latter is said, this one thing alone can follow, namely, that one must depart from that more common interpretation, which belongs to private persons, not however to the Church, which has never in any way sanctioned it by a solemn judgment. Moreover it must be observed that there is not even a unanimous consensus of the Fathers concerning this interpretation. The truth of the Mosaic cosmogony, therefore, will always stand firm.

It is useful, however, to note some things here. And 1° nearly all those geological systems that were introduced up to nearly these times have become obsolete, of which more than eighty seemed to be opposed to the Mosaic cosmogony. 2° Many, and these the most learned, physicists and geologists — among them Hensler, de Luc, André, Buckland, and others — contend that the Mosaic cosmogony agrees very well with their own observations (several of which do not depart from the common interpretation), and therefore denounce as dreamers all who had dared to charge the Mosaic history of creation with falsity, whether from the internal structure of the earth, or from its surface. 3° A great affinity between the series of operations that are set forth in the first chapter of Genesis and that

which they believe is deduced from natural observations, the learned geologists Brocchi, Demerson, and Boubée have noted. 4° Certain of the things that are opposed to the common interpretation, the more learned naturalists admit to be of no importance. 5° Some phenomena that seemed to require a great series of centuries are either quite conveniently accounted for by the Noachic cataclysm, to which are probably owed not a few of the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, etc., which are found in many places just beneath the very surface of the earth; or they are sufficiently explained if we grant, with de Luc and other learned men, that the less elevated lands, which are now inhabited, were covered by the waters of the sea up until the time of the flood.

As to astronomy, moreover, after Euler, La Place, La Grange, and other most skilled astronomers, it has been established that the motion of the ecliptic² — from which the difficulty was drawn — is not progressive but oscillatory, and indeed within the narrow space of one degree. The same may likewise be said of the phenomena of the precession of the equinoxes³ and of the nutation of the axis of the earth, of the moon, and of the planets, from which unbelievers boasted that they were drawing so many inescapable arguments against the Mosaic cosmogony.

So certain is it that the progress of the sciences, far from harming the Christian religion, always adds to it new firmness and strength; nor can anything be elicited, whether from geological or physical, or from astronomical observations, whereby the Mosaic cosmogony could be harmed or weakened in the least, as it was our purpose to show.

Another argument against the Mosaic cosmogony unbelievers attempt to draw from the chronology of the same author. But they wander outside the matter; for cosmogony and chronology differ entirely. Cosmogony treats of the creation and shaping of heaven and earth, and also, if one wishes, of the production of plants and animals; the Mosaic chronology, however, takes its beginning from the creation of man, since Moses numbers only the years of Adam and the rest of the Patriarchs, from which the age of the human race is computed. According to the Hebrew truth and the Latin version of the Pentateuch, about six thousand years would have elapsed from the creation of the first man down to us, but seven and more according to the Greek Alexandrian, or Septuagint, version, and the Samaritan codex admits a middle epoch. These matters can be freely discussed, the question of the origin of the world remaining untouched. But when God brought forth matter from nothing, and when He clothed it with the forms which we behold, neither Sacred Scripture nor the Church determines. All, therefore, who beg arguments from chronology against the Mosaic cosmogony wander outside the question, and we rightly and deservedly pass over the objections drawn from it, as foreign to the present question.

It is worthwhile to note only the following things, in order to demonstrate the emptiness of the arguments heaped up by adversaries on this head: 1° It is certain that Moses composed a single chronology, and that all chronologers and copyists, both Jewish and Christian, have always held it as true. If, therefore, the Mosaic codex had not perished, all difficulties would vanish, all errors would be corrected. 2° The differences observed in the computation of years, therefore, arise either from the blameless carelessness or inadvertence

of the copyists, or from the fact that different chronologers computed the Mosaic years differently, some understanding them, relative to our own manner of computing, as longer, others as shorter. 3° — The truth of chronologies is to be sought not so much from fidelity in enumerating the years, months, and days, as from the fact that all the historical events, especially those of great moment, are properly coordinated, are assigned to their own time broadly taken, and are fitted together with other public events and monuments, as well as with scientific observations; otherwise there would be scarcely any chronology that would not be branded with the mark of falsity, no nation whose history would be held as authentic. But all the sacred chronologies, although differing in the reckoning of years, nevertheless report the same events, especially the two most eminent — namely, the creation of man and the flood — and compose and arrange the same generations, and agree in these with the Hebrew truth. Therefore.]