Jonathan Clarke wrote:
> In his book “Two books on Genesis against the Manichees” (R. J. Teske (trans),
> “Saint Augustine on Genesis”, Catholic University of America Press, Washington
> D.C., p79) Augustine recognised the possibility that animals were potentially
> carnivorous before the fall. In his comments on Genesis 1:28 on page 79 he noted
> that this verse should not be interpreted with naive literalism, for
>
> “We should also be warned not to understand these matters carnally from the fact
> that in Genesis the green plants and fruit bearing trees were given to every kind
> of animal and to the birds and to all the birds and to all the reptiles as food.
> Yet we see that lions, hawks, kites, and eagles feed only on meat and the killing
> of other animals.”
>
> Thus extra-Biblical data suggested to Augustine that this passage should not be
> taken literally in saying that carnivorous animals were originally vegetarian. He
> was careful in his Retractions not to rule out the literal interpretation,
> however. Augustine was able to say that physical death among animals was not
> necessarily the result of the fall, but part of God’s good creation. He wrote
> this without any knowledge of the evidence of a long prehuman history of life.
It also should not be assumed that the Christian tradition has uniformly
taught that physical death for humans came about only through sin. In _On the
Incarnation_ Athanasius seems to say (though he not explicit about it) that the first
humans, if they had not sinned, would have experienced physical but not spiritual
death on their way to their ultimate state of incorruption in heaven. Admittedly he
was helped toward this view by the overly-literal Septuagint of Gen.2:17, which
renders the emphatic Hebrew _moth tamuth_, "you shall surely die", as "dying you shall
die". So he can say, "But by 'dying ye shall die,' what else could be meant than not
dying merely, but also abiding ever in the corruption of death?"
As this suggests, the overriding human problem for the Greek fathers, was
not simply physical death but the "coming apart" involved in corruption. On this see
my article "Time, Thermodynamics, and Theology" (Zygon 26, 359, 1991).
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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