very childish. . . . God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did He breathe upon him with throat and lips."
Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or evolution theory, adding that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," and argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator.
He dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose numbers the aftertime unfolded."
In his great treatise on the Trinity—the work to which he devoted the best thirty years of his life—we find the full growth of this opinion. He develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings there was something like a growth—that God is the ultimate author, but works through secondary causes, and finally argues that certain substances are endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of plants and animals.[1]
This idea of a development apart from the original creation and by secondary causes was helped in its growth by a theological exigency. More and more as the organic world was observed, no matter how imperfectly, the vast multitude of petty animals, winged creatures, and "creeping things" was instinctively felt to be a strain upon the sacred narrative. More and more it became difficult to reconcile the dignity of the Almighty with his work in bringing each of these creatures before Adam to be named; or to reconcile the human limitations of Adam with his work in
- ↑ For the Chaldæan view of creation, see George Smith, Chaldæan Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14, 15, and 64-86; also Lukas, as above; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 371 and elsewhere; as to the fall of man, Tower of Babel, sacredness of the number seven, etc., see also Delitzsch, appendix to the German translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq.; as to the almost exact adoption of the Chaldæan legends into the Hebrew sacred account, see all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, early chapters; also article Babylonia in the Encyclopædia Britannica; as to the similar approval of creation by the Creator in both accounts, see George Smith, p. 73; as to the migration of the Babylonian legends to the Hebrews, see Schrader, Whitehouse's translation, pp. 44, 45; as to the Chaldasan belief in a solid firmament, while Schrader in 1883 thought it not proved, Jensen in 1890 has found it clearly expressed—see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 9 et seq., also pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts this view of a Chaldæan record of a "firmament"; see Kosmologie, pp. 43, etc. For the seven-day week among Chaldæans and rest on the seventh day, and the proof that even the name "Sabbath" is of Chaldæan origin, see Delitzsch, Beigaben zu Smith's Chald. Genesis, pp. 300 and 306; also Schrader; for St. Basil, see Hexaemeron and Homilies vii-ix; but, for the steadfastness of Basil's view in regard to the immutability of species, see a Catholic writer on Evolution and Faith in the Dublin Review for July, 1871, p. 13; for citations of St. Augustine on Genesis, see the De Genesi, lib. ii, cap. 14, in Migne, xxxiv, 188; lib. v, cap. 5 and cap. 23; and lib. vii, cap. 1; for the citations from his work on the Triuity, see his De Trinitate, lib. iii, cap. 8 and 9, in Migne, xlii, 877, 878.
