Catholic Apologetics International
St. Augustine’s “Rationis Seminalis” (“Seminal
Principles”):
Does it Offer Catholics a Precedent for Theistic Evolution?
By Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.
The first thing I think we need to understand about Augustine is that, in many of his concepts, a Platonic or Neo-Platonic forms the framework of his thought. According to most modern philosophers, Plato is the beginning of all philosophy. Among other things, Platonism contains the philosophical concept that the material world we experience on earth has, in the spiritual realms, an ideal image of itself. For lack of a better analogy, it is like the image in a mirror, but an image that does not disappear when the material object it is reflecting is removed.
Picture yourself being bit by a mosquito. There is one thing important to know about this mosquito, however. It is the last mosquito alive on planet earth. Nevertheless, because of the pain, you decide to smack the mosquito with your hand. Having been flattened like a pancake, the mosquito is virtually unrecognizable. But you need not lose hope that you have eliminated the mosquito entirely from existence, because according to Plato, in the spiritual realm there is an ideal image of a mosquito preserved for eternity, and thus the universe shall never lose the perfect picture and essence of a mosquito.
Hence, in Platonic philosophy, it was the “ideal image” in the spiritual realm that gave everything of the material world its real meaning and purpose. According to Plato, we know of this ideal world of images because we once existed there, but now we find ourselves on planet Earth living out a somewhat un-idealistic life.
This is where the philosophical phrase “a priori” originates for we, according to Plato, had a “prior” life in another world. From the knowledge we gained in this “prior life,” we possess eternal truths which we obtained from the ideal images – truths that will never change, whether the are stated here, on Mars, Alpha Centauri, or wherever; or whether they were stated in the past, in the present, or in the future. How does a seven year old know that 2 +2 not only equals four, but will always equal four? How does a grown man know it will always be wrong to take his neighbor’s wife? How do Americans know that there will always be death and taxes? Because these are “a priori” eternal truths that can never change.
The search for the origin and nature of eternal truths is behind every philosophy known to man. This has always been the most significant philosophical question: “what do we know; and how do we know it?” (Or as we find in the world of political intrigue: “what did he know and when did he know it?”).
Plato answered the question of the origin of eternal truths by saying they came from “a priori” knowledge. Aristotle answered the question a little differently. He held that eternal truths come from the process of abstraction, not “a priori” knowledge. We see the mosquito on our arm. We smash it. We see a wing here, a proboscis there, and even though it is hardly recognizable as a mosquito, we reason with our “ancient intellect,” as Aristotle called it, that this mosquito, even if it were to be disintegrated into a speck on our arm, came from a long line of mosquitoes, and that which we see on our arm is only its accidens, its outward form, not the real substance of the mosquito. The real substance of the mosquito, or of being a mosquito, is hidden beneath the accidens, and each material object is composed of both accidens and substance. As we might expect, Aristotle’s “substance” corresponds to Plato’s “ideal image,” but Aristotle’s is in the realm of everyday existence on earth, whereas Plato’s is in some ethereal spiritual realm.
This difference between the two philosophies is precisely why in the painting by Raphael titled “The School of Athens,” Plato’s hand is pointing vertical while Aristotle is pointing horizontal. The contrast between the two schools is also one of the main differences between the overall approaches of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, since after the discovery of the Aristotelian library by the Muslims in the Middle East at the turn of the first millennium, the works of Aristotle only then migrated to Europe, the home of Thomas Aquinas.
It is the same reason why almost twelve hundred years after the Last Supper only then did the Catholic Church dogmatically defined the nature of the Eucharist at the Fourth Lateran Council, since by this time the philosophy of Aristotle gave us at least some mental concept of what might be occurring in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, and thus the appearance of bread was understood as the accidens, but the presence of Christ was understood as the substance, which had miraculously replaced the substance of bread.
The truth is that we cannot grasp reality, at least adequately, unless we have a balance between the Platonic universals and the Aristotelian particulars. On the one hand, we cannot look at life as mere ideals without knowing its details and diversity; on the other hand, we cannot get fixated on the details without having universals to keep it all together, so to speak. Where the twain meet no one has quite been able to figure out, and this is why, after Immanuel Kant, philosophy has more or less resigned itself to accepting that it will never find an answer, and thus we see the rise of pessimistic philosophies such as nihilism, existentialism, and the reason why modern art and architecture are so bizarre. Modern man has given up hope of finding a unified field of knowledge.
Although Augustine was influenced by Platonism, he did not believe in Plato’s concept of a “prior life” in some ethereal existence before we came to earth. Being a Christian, Augustine believed we were created by God. Nevertheless, he searched Scripture for a truth that corresponded to Plato’s “a priori” truths. Augustine found his answer in John 1:9 which, speaking of Christ, it says, “This was the true light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.” According to Augustine, it is Christ who gave each man the “a priori” knowledge, the eternal truths, that Plato had ascribed to “a prior life.”
Thirteen hundred years later, Immanuel Kant tried to say the same thing. He held that man’s knowledge of eternal truths were a product of what he called “the categories of the mind,” but the insurmountable obstacle that Kant faced was that he had no way of proving that what we knew in our mind corresponded to the reality of the “thing in itself” that we saw outside of our mind. As a result, our mental knowledge could not be called absolute knowledge, and thus eternal truths were limited to our mind. It was all in our head, so to speak.
Neither Kant nor Plato believed in an intimate and personal God who could give such “a priori” knowledge, and this is the basic difference between the Greeks, modern philosophy and Christianity: divine revelation and miraculous creation.
But being somewhat of a Platonist in his approach to life, Augustine had a tendency, or perhaps a penchant, to assign allegorical or idealistic interpretations to the historical narratives of Scripture, especially when he thought the narrative was too hard to interpret on the mundane and literal level. Sometimes, to answer the difficulty, Augustine would create a hybrid of literal and allegorical interpretation. Often he would insist that the hybrid was also a literal interpretation, but a different “literalness” than what we are accustomed to.
For example, since in Genesis 1 Augustine saw no mention of the creation of the angels, he adopted an interpretation of Genesis 1:3 which asserted that the “light” in the clause “Let there be light” referred to the creation of the angels rather than to light we know as consisting of photons. This self-imposed quest to find room for the angels would inevitably affect both Augustine’s interpretation of the rest of Genesis 1, and set a precedent for biblical interpretation with which exegetes from then to now have not ceased to struggle.
Because of such Augustinian interpretations, many faithful exegetes are torn between their deep admiration for Augustine, since he was probably the greatest exegete and thinker of the first millennium, and the fact that all the other Fathers who addressed Genesis 1 (who were likewise great thinkers and faithful devotees to the Church), understood the light of Genesis 1:3 as plain ordinary light, and felt no compulsion to find a specific place for the angels, having assumed they were already included in the opening verse of Genesis 1: “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” Moreover, since the focus of Genesis 1 is not on angels but on man, the Fathers were not bothered by the apparent lacuna.
In light of this, Augustine does not claim that he has found the final answer to the problems of exegeting Genesis 1. Far from it. He writes:
“This is my explanation, unless someone can propose an interpretation that is clearer and more in keeping with the text” (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 5, 5, 15).
In the same book he writes: “...we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture” (Ibid, 1, 18, 37).
And he states that God purposely inspired Scripture to be difficult in some places, stating that we are left with “interpreting words that have been written obscurely for the purpose of stimulating our thought,” and in that light he adds, “I have not rashly taken my stand on one side against a rival interpretation which might possibly be better” (Ibid, 1, 20, 40).
Nevertheless, having this unyielding focus on the angels leads Augustine to suggest that perhaps the six days of Genesis 1 are not consecutive 24-hour days but “one day” (whereas all the Fathers previous to Augustine held that Genesis 1 was composed of six 24-hour days, the only exception being Origen, who had an extreme penchant for allegorizing that he learned from the Greek philosopher, Philo). Augustine further stipulated that the “one day” of creation was not in reference to time but to causality, that is, an instantaneous creation of everything in heaven and earth.
But because Augustine believes “six” is a special spiritual number (Ibid, 4, 33, 51f; 5, 3, 5f) (and here we see him shifting to his allegorical interpretation), he proposes that the Genesis writer used six days so as to have the angels contemplate the creation in six frames or concepts.
This certainly is a unique interpretation, since not only do the other Fathers not even remotely suggest such an interpretation, but hardly any of the mediaevals adopted it either, although some, like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, paid their respects to it, if not for anything else than the utmost admiration they had for Augustine and his interpretive abilities. Personally, however, Thomas believed the light of Genesis 1:3 was plain ordinary household light.
The “Rationis Seminalis”:
Now we come close to the issue at hand. As any good Catholic realizes, anyone who puts forth ideas in regards to the interpretation of Scripture, must, at the very least, have consulted the Fathers, and unless there is some overwhelming evidence contrary to their consensual teaching, one is required to find precedent in the Fathers for any specific interpretation, especially regarding chapters of holy writ of the highest importance, such as those found between the pages of Genesis chapters 1-3, which are the backbone to all the rest of Scripture.
Today, since many are influenced by the ideas of the evolutionary hypothesis stemming from the ideas of Charles Darwin and his disciples, Catholics who desire to meld the tenets of evolution with the Genesis record must, in order to be faithful to Church protocol, find some patristic precedent for their beliefs. If they find only one Father of significant weight who even remotely suggests that some type of non-literal interpretation of Genesis is possible (that is, viewing the days as something other than 24-hour periods of day and night), then they will garner at least some plausibility to their contentions.
Their case might even be especially convincing if they can bring someone as revered and influential to their side as the great St. Augustine. All they need is to create what in courtroom parlance amounts to “reasonable doubt” that Genesis 1 need not be interpreted literally, and they have created enough room to establish themselves in the Catholic consciousness. We will even find secular evolutionists quoting St. Augustine in order to lend support to their ideas about time and evolution, but they do so usually out of context, since these scientists have no training in patristics or exegesis.
As we have noted above, St. Augustine’s Platonic philosophy moved him to many an allegorical interpretation of Scripture. It was not a rare occurrence to find four or more interpretations to a given verse in Augustine’s writings, since, by the mere nature of the beast, allegorical interpretations can be multiplied without end. But it is also true that Augustine often changed his mind about his literal interpretations of Scripture, especially over the course of his long writing career, which exceeded forty years.
His attempt at a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, which he said was sometimes very difficult for him, often resulted in the very allegorical interpretations he was trying to avoid, or sometimes even stymied him into giving no interpretation at all. For instance, Augustine was one of the only Fathers to think of the problem posed by the fact that Adam and Eve were given all the plants, save the tree in the center of the Garden, to eat for food, yet prior to their sin, there was no threat of death or corruption in them, and thus no real need for food. So why did they eat food? Augustine provides no answer to this problem (De Genesi, Book 3, Ch 21), but just the fact that he raises the issue makes an exegete become very cautious when he interprets Genesis.
Conversely, Augustine suggests that the animals, prior to the Fall of man, died natural deaths, and that the phrase “according to their kinds” refers to the fact that they reproduced their own offspring prior to their parents perishing (De Genesi, Book 3, Ch 13). Augustine brings many of these kinds of questions to the forefront.
In any case, once Augustine suggested that the days of Genesis 1 did not have to be understood as literal 24-hour days but as contemplative guideposts for the angels, it would just be a matter of time before 19th and 20th century Catholic evolutionists such as George Mivart, George Tyrell, Ernest Messenger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would appeal to the great saint as the one Father who anticipated their evolutionary hypothesis. Unfortunately, most of today’s modernist Catholic evolutionists, such as Raymond Brown, John Haught and Stanley Jaki, care very little about what the patristic evidence says, since they have convinced themselves both that the Fathers were scientifically illiterate and that the Bible need not be interpreted to correspond to science. Only the more conservative Catholic theistic evolutionists among us would give any recourse to the patristic testimony, such as George Sim Johnston.
These conservative Catholic evolutionists certainly cannot appeal to the other two dozen or so Fathers who addressed the interpretation of Genesis 1. All the Fathers prior to Augustine, save Origen, interpreted Genesis 1 in strict literal fashion, the most formidable of these being Basil the Great whose work The Hexameron stands as the best patristic work on the subject. Whereas Augustine was tepid about an interpretation, Basil, being from the East and much more inclined to avoid the Platonic philosophy of the West, dove right in and offered interpretations of the most excruciating Aristotelian detail. So stubbornly literal were their interpretations that one Catholic evolutionist, Fr. Stanley Jaki, states his utter dismay in his book Genesis 1 Through the Ages of being able to find any deviation from what he calls “concordist” interpretations, that is, interpretations among the Fathers that made a concord or correspondence between science and Scripture.
But with Augustine’s allegorical leanings, and his admission of having difficulty with a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, these theistic evolutionists obtained from him precisely what they wanted – a patristic precedent to their non-literal views. It didn’t matter to them that Augustine merely spoke of an instantaneous Creation in one timeless day rather than over billions of years, for all that they needed was to find someone of influence in the patristic period that did not interpret the days of Genesis 1 as six literal time periods of 24 hours. Once obtained, the floodgates would now be open to propose alternative non-literal interpretations, such as each day standing for millions of years; or the six days standing for a long and indefinite period of time, or as Stanley Jaki and the rest of the higher biblical critics propose, that there is absolutely no connection at all between Genesis 1 and science.
In fact, Jaki and his fellow biblical critics go so far as to claim that Genesis 1 wasn’t written by Moses or any ancient Jew after him, but was actually a product of an unidentified scribe in the sixth century BC coming back from the Babylonian captivity, who, for the simple reason of invigorating his fellow Jews to a new life in Jerusalem, decided there was no better way to do this than fashion a Creation story that depicted the Jewish God as the mighty creator of the universe. In other words, Genesis 1 was for the most part a piece of fiction whose closest connection with reality was merely the residual fact that God created the world, but its details were mere window dressing that had no counterpart in actual life.
Once a crack had been opened into the patristics by means of appealing to Augustine’s alternative interpretations, these theistic evolutionists tried to find other aspects of Augustine’s writings that would allow them to find patristic precedent for evolutionary theory. One such possibility arose with Augustine’s concept of the “rationis seminalis” or what we know in English as the “seminal principles.” This was Augustine’s concept that living specimens contain the seeds, as it were, which allowed the entity itself to grow either into a fully developed form (and this is where the rub comes) – or give rise to other organisms unlike itself.
There are only three places in his writings where Augustine develops the concept of the “rationis seminalis” in any detail. One appears in De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis), a second in De civitate Dei (The City of God), and the third in De Trinitate (On the Trinity). Other less detailed references appear in his Homilies on St. John and Homilies on the Psalms.
First we shall look at the reference in De Genesi ad litteram. In speaking about very tiny creatures that seem to appear spontaneously on exposed animal flesh, Augustine writes:
But whether, as I have said, we are to believe that these little animals
were also made in the creation of things during the six days of the Scripture
narrative, or afterwards at the decomposition of corruptible bodies, that
is the question.
Surely it can be said that the smallest of these animals that have their origin
in the waters and the earth were made at the first creation. Among these it
is not unreasonable to place those that come forth from the creatures born
with the budding earth. For these creatures [plants and trees] preceded the
creation not only of the animals but also of the luminaries of heaven, and,
being rooted in the earth from which they came forth on the day on which the
dry land appeared, obviously they are rather to be reckoned as an adjunct
of the inhabitable earth than numbered among its inhabitants. (The Literal
Meaning of Genesis, 3, 14, 23).
Here Augustine is suggesting that these small organisms may have been created
along with the trees and plants, perhaps for the purpose of some symbiotic
relationship. He then adds:
As for the other small creatures that come forth from the bodies of animals,
particularly from corpses, it is absurd to say that they were created when
the animals themselves were created, except in the sense that there was present
from the beginning in all living bodies a natural power, and, I might say,
there were interwoven with these bodies the seminal principles of animals
later to appear, which would spring forth from the decomposing bodies, each
according to its kind and with its special properties, by the wonderful power
of the immutable Creator who moves all His creatures. (The Literal Meaning
of Genesis, 3, 14, 23)
Here we see that Augustine is concerned with explaining how previously unseen organisms could appear on the flesh of animal corpses. Apparently, the presence of maggots or other such minute creatures on dead animal flesh was a common sight in Augustine’s day. The question was: from where do these creatures originate? When we look at the corpse one day we don’t see any creatures. When we come back the next day, we see all kinds of little specimens. Augustine begins his analysis by proposing that these tiny creatures could not have been created at the same time as the animals themselves, since they only appear when the animal is dead.
Augustine’s alternative solution is to suggest that the animal carries within itself “seminal principles” – a mysterious force of nature that spontaneously brings forth creatures associated with the host animal, but which is triggered only when the host dies and its body decomposes. It is from this single proposal that various Catholic theistic evolutionists have asserted Augustine was promoting the concept of evolution, even if in a very primitive form.
But here is precisely where we can posit that the reason Augustine often had difficulty with the literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is that he did not know enough science in order to know the precise way to interpret it literally. In fact, there is a common misconception among scientists that the more science one knows the less he will rely on Scripture, and particularly Genesis 1, to furnish answers regarding the origin and makeup of the universe. But exactly the opposite is true. The more science we discover, the more we discover how accurate the biblical record is and precisely how we can correctly interpret it (and I am speaking here of true science, not unproven, hypothetical or theoretical ideas that are often propped up as science today). Everything from archeology, to paleontology, to geology, to cosmology has affirmed the biblical record, if only we would open our eyes to see it and stop accepting as gospel what the biased and agnostic science establishment has been forcing down our collective throats for many years.
That Augustine himself was a concordist is evident all over his writings. One place in particular is Augustine’s treatment of the firmament of Genesis 1:6-9. He writes:
With this reasoning some of our scholars attack the position of those who refuse to believe that there are waters above the heavens...Thus they would compel the disbeliever to admit that water is there not in a vaporous state but in the form of ice. But whatever the nature of that water and whatever the manner of its being there, we must not doubt that it does exist in that place. The authority of Scripture in this matter is greater than all human ingenuity (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Bk 2, Ch. 5, No 9).
We see here a firm resolve to give primary place to the literal and plain meaning of the biblical text, regardless of the controversies that were swirling in the scientific community. When Augustine departs from the literal interpretation it is not because he has found a scientific theory that he regards as true and thus compels him to create a different biblical interpretation, for nowhere in his writings does he ever claim such as his motivation. Rather, Augustine employs a semi-literal or even allegorical interpretation in certain places only when he sees an apparent conflict within the biblical text itself, a conflict that his intellect is not able to answer, at least at that particular time.
By the same token, if Augustine had known the science, he would have been in a much better position to be a strict concordist of all of Genesis 1. For example, Augustine didn’t know that radiation does not need a luminous body to exist, as is proven by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in the 1940s by astronomer Grote Reber and later confirmed by Penzias and Wilson in 1963, and therefore, scientifically speaking, there need not be a contradiction between Day 1 and Day 4 of Genesis 1.
Augustine did not know that, as discovered by physicist Paul Dirac in 1928 and confirmed by Carl Anderson in 1932, that outer space is saturated with a dense concentration of electron-positron pairs. Or, as no less a scientific luminary as Stephen Hawking has admitted, space is filled with infinitesimal particles in the Planck dimensions. According to Scripture’s description of the firmament as a hard and dense yet very penetrable material, we thus have viable candidates for its scientific basis.
And though in many other instances Augustine was a superior exegete of Scripture, he didn’t know Greek well enough to figure out that the sole verse in the Greek Septuagint upon which he based his fundamental conclusion that God made all things instantaneously instead of over six days, was based on an erroneous translation in his Latin Vulgate of Sirach 18:1, and which actually means just the opposite of what he proposed in his concept of an instantaneous creation. Jerome’s Vulgate was certainly a good translation, but it was not infallible, and Jerome never claimed it to be.
And likewise, Augustine didn’t know, and wouldn’t be able to know for at least the next twelve hundred years, that small organisms are not spontaneously generated from inorganic matter, and thus there are no “seminal principles” inherent in dead animal carcasses that automatically produce new life forms. As God told Daniel in Daniel 12:4, “knowledge will increase,” and thus God anticipated that we would plumb the secrets of nature. But the warning given to scientists and exegetes from Pope Leo XIII in 1893 is that we are nevertheless obliged to interpret Scripture literally, in its plain and ordinary meaning, unless since can provide us with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Anyone who knows science will admit that there is very little it knows irrefutably. As biologist and physician Lewis Thomas, who died in 1993, admitted:
Science is founded on uncertainty. …We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally wrong…The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. ...It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect. (Lewis Thomas, “On Science and Certainty,” Discover Magazine, 1980, p. 58. )
Regarding the “rationis seminalis” we can’t really fault St. Augustine, since at least from the time of Aristotle in the 4th century BC science believed that small organisms could indeed come into being by spontaneous generation, that is, that non-living things can produce living things. In fact, it was “common knowledge” among Christians and non-Christians alike that creatures such as worms, beetles, frogs and salamanders could come from dust, mud, or uncovered food, since within hours they would see the aforementioned mediums teeming with life.
For example, every year in the spring, the Nile River flooded areas of Egypt, leaving behind nutrient-rich mud that enabled the people to grow that year’s crop of food. However, along with the muddy soil, large numbers of frogs appeared that were not seen in drier times. Their conclusion? Well, it was perfectly obvious for sane people to realize that muddy soil produced frogs.
Likewise, in many parts of Europe, medieval farmers stored grain in barns with thatched roofs. As a roof aged it usually began leaking. This would lead to spoiled or moldy grain. Since there were lots of mice appearing at around the same time, it was obvious to the farmer that the mice came from moldy grain.
Since there were no refrigerators prior to the late 1800s, people made daily trips to the butcher shop. Carcasses were usually hung by their heels and customers selected which chunk the butcher would carve off for them. But there were always flies around the dead animal carcasses, so the people obviously concluded that rotting meat hanging in the sun all day was the source of the flies.
It wasn’t until the days of the Italian physician Fransicso Redi in the late 1600s, and more firmly rediscovered by Louis Pasteur in the 1800s, that science discovered that organisms do not spontaneously generate from dead animal carcasses.
In fact, so firm was the idea of spontaneous generation in the minds of the populace and scientists that even as late as 1748, John Needham, a Scottish clergyman and naturalist claimed that there was a “life force” present in the molecules of all inorganic matter, including air and the oxygen in it, that causes spontaneous generation to occur, thus accounting for the presence of bacterial growth in his soups. In fact, he tried to prove the case by briefly boiling some of his soup and then pouring it into “clean” flasks which he then sealed with cork lids, but the microorganisms still grew. Little did he know, however, that briefly boiling soup does not kill all the microorganisms; that his flasks were not completely sterile, and that cork lids do not keep out all the air and its attending bacteria from a container.
In any case, Needham’s insistence that the microorganisms were a product of the “life force” present in inorganic matter allows us to see why Augustine’s concept of “seminal principles,” which he in turn had borrowed from the Greeks, existed well into the mid-eighteenth century. It wasn’t until the experiments of Louis Pasteur that the final nail was put into the coffin of spontaneous generation.
Before I leave this subject, I must alert you to another form of “spontaneous generation” that has arisen rather spontaneously, if you will. It occurred when modern evolutionists could not find the fossil evidence they needed to support evolution. Today’s resurrection of spontaneous generation goes by the modern name of “Punctuated equilibrium.” As the Lamarkian theory of evolution posited that the gaps in evolutionary progression were filled spontaneously by the sudden appearance of the appropriate animals, so today, after not finding any fossils which prove the existence of intermediary forms of life (e.g., between fish and reptile; between an amphibian and bird) evolutionists, following the late Harvard professor, Stephen Jay Gould, propose that the intermediate forms appeared suddenly, out of the blue, without cause or explanation. So suddenly did they appear, and so suddenly did they disappear, that we have no fossil evidence of them today. How convenient for them. Perhaps in the belief of spontaneous generation, today’s evolutionists DO indeed have something in common with Augustine...
Be that as it may, can we be sure Augustine’s “seminal principles” do not have any leanings toward the modern evolutionary hypothesis? Well, as they say when buying real estate, the three most important things are: location, location, location. So in interpreting a text of Scripture or patristic prose, the three most important things are: context, context, and context. Suffice it to say, Augustine’s context has nothing to do with the concept we know as Darwinian evolution or any of its offshoots.
We can surmise this first by the fact that in none of his writings does Augustine ever develop anything resembling an evolutionary concept for the origin of living beings. We must remember that Augustine, irrespective of his “seminal principles,” suggested as his best interpretation that God created everything instantaneously. If the concept of evolution had been a major plank of his interpretive framework, we would expect to see it in many and varied places in his writings, especially since Augustine was not at all shy about advancing alternative interpretations. But in all of Augustine’s writings, and he was the most voluminous writer of all the Fathers, he mentions nothing about creatures evolving into higher and different species of life.
If anything, Augustine’s “seminal principles” put the evolutionary hypothesis in reverse, since by spontaneously producing parasites from well-developed and complex animal flesh it results in creatures that would be placed on the lowest rung of the evolutionary scale, not those more complex than its host. This is, of course, beside the fact that modern evolutionary theory makes no claims that fully-formed organisms appeared from “seminal deposits,” rather, they assert that they were the result of the mutated change from slightly less fully-formed organisms, and none of which Augustine gives even a glimmer of hope.
Second, as noted, Augustine is concerned only with corpses of animals, not those living. Because small organisms appear on dead animal flesh, Augustine feels obligated to offer at least some explanation to the scientific inquisitor why and how they appeared. By the same token, however, he never speaks of small creatures progressing to more complicated creatures.
The simple fact is that Augustine had no concept of microorganisms and multi-functioning cells of bacteria. He had no idea that each animal, each human being, carries within its body a dizzying array of multi-cellular bacterial organisms. We know now by looking through a microscope that human and animal skin, for example, harbors thousands of frightening-looking parasites crawling on us this very minute, and this is precisely the same surface area at which Augustine saw the minute creatures multiplying on animal flesh. Augustine had no idea that the flesh of animals, dead or alive, carries bacteria within its very muscular tissue, and given the right environment, that this bacteria will multiply exponentially. The closest Augustine could come to understanding this hidden process was the “rationis seminalis” that he adopted from Aristotle and the Greeks.
That the “rationis seminalis” had nothing at all to do with the concept of modern evolution, and could not even be considered a precursor to it, is noted in Augustine’s treatment of the same in his book The City of God. In discussing whether infants that died will have the same infant body in heaven or a full grown adult body, he writes:
What, then, are we to say of infants, if not that they will not rise in that diminutive body in which they died, but shall receive by the marvelous and rapid operation of God that body which time by a slower process would have given them? For in the Lord's words, where He says, "Not a hair of your head shall perish," it is asserted that nothing which was possessed shall be wanting; but it is not said that nothing which was not possessed shall be given. To the dead infant there was wanting the perfect stature of its body; for even the perfect infant lacks the perfection of bodily size, being capable of further growth. This perfect stature is, in a sense, so possessed by all that they are conceived and born with it, that is, they have it potentially, though not yet in actual bulk; just as all the members of the body are potentially in the seed, though, even after the child is born, some of them, the teeth for example, may be wanting.
In this seminal principle [“rationis seminalis”] of every substance, there seems to be, as it were, the beginning of everything which does not yet exist, or rather does not appear, but which in process of time will come into being, or rather into sight. In this, therefore, the child who is to be tall or short is already tall or short. And in the resurrection of the body, we need, for the same reason, fear no bodily loss; for though all should be of equal size, and reach gigantic proportions, lest the men who were largest here should lose anything of their bulk and it should perish, in contradiction to the words of Christ, who said that not a hair of their head should perish, yet why should there lack the means by which that wonderful Worker should make such additions, seeing that He is the Creator, who Himself created all things out of nothing? (City of God, Book 22, Chapter 14).
So here we see that Augustine’s reference to the “seminal principle” concerns nothing more than the principle of growth inherent to all living organisms, that is, of continuing the process started at their conception. In other words, not knowing about the double-helix of Dexyribonucleic acid that makes up our genes and chromosomes, Augustine can only attribute biological growth to the concepts he has at his disposal, which at this point in history are severely lacking. As an acorn houses an oak tree, and as an egg brings forth a chicken, so in Augustine’s understanding God has placed the same seminal principles in all living organisms, and for him and his colleagues, that is all they need to know for the time being.
As Augustine writes in his Letters:
For myself, and for all who along with me labor to understand the invisible things of God by means of the things which are made, I may say that we are filled not less, perhaps even more, with wonder by the fact, that in one grain of seed, so insignificant, there lies bound up as it were all that we praise in the stately tree, than by the fact that the bosom of this earth, so vast, shall restore entire and perfect to the future resurrection all those elements of human bodies which it is now receiving when they are dissolved. (Letters, CII)
Nowhere, of course, does Augustine entertain the idea that the “seminal principle” of a fish could develop into a reptile, or that of an ape into a man. In his work, The Soul and Its Origin, he writes:
In the instance, too, which the apostle adduces, “God gives it a body as it has pleased Him,” let him deny, if he dares, that corn springs from corn, and grass from grass, from the seed, each after its kind. And if he dares not deny this, how does he know in what sense it is said, “He gives breath to the people”? whether by derivation from parents, or by fresh breathing into each individual? (The Soul and Its Origin, Book 1, Chapter 17)
Augustine’s father in the faith, St. Ambrose, the one who encouraged him to read theology and science, shows us the course of the patristic consensus on this matter as he wrote:
But if the wise men of old believed that a crop of armed men sprang up in the district of Thebes from the sowing of the hydra’s teeth, whereas it is certainly established that seeds of one kind cannot be changed into another kind of plant, nor bring forth produce differing from its own seeds, so that men should spring from serpents and flesh from teeth; how much more, indeed, is it to be believed that whatever has been sown rises again in its own nature, and that crops do not differ from their seed, that soft things do not spring from hard, nor hard from soft, nor is poison changed into blood; but that flesh is restored from flesh, bone from bone, blood from blood, the humors of the body from humors. Can ye then, ye heathen, who are able to assert a change, deny a restoration of the nature? Can you refuse to believe the oracles of God, the Gospel, and the prophets, who believe empty fables? (On the Decease of Satyrus, On Belief in the Resurrection, Book II, 70)
Basil the Great, writing a few decades before Augustine and the greatest of the Greek Fathers on the Creation narratives, finds himself having to silence the speculations of the Greeks who were claiming that various forms of life developed from one seed, a precursor to the modern evolutionary theory. Basil writes:
But why torment ourselves to refute the errors of philosophers, when it is sufficient to produce their mutually contradictory books, and, as quiet spectators, to watch the war? For those thinkers are not less numerous, nor less celebrated, nor more sober in speech in fighting their adversaries, who say that the universe is being consumed by fire, and that from the seeds which remain in the ashes of the burnt world all is being brought to life again. Hence in the world there is destruction and palingenesis to infinity. All, equally far from the truth, find each on their side by -ways which lead them to error. (Hexameron, Homily III, On the Firmament, 8)
In the third and final place where Augustine mentions the “seminalis” he again speaks of “hidden seeds” that God placed in each living thing, seeds that were the cause of their distinction and growth. In De Trinitate he writes:
But, in truth, some hidden seeds of all things that are born corporeally and visibly, are concealed in the corporeal elements of this world. For those seeds that are visible now to our eyes from fruits and living things, are quite distinct from the hidden seeds of those former seeds; from which, at the bidding of the Creator, the water produced the first swimming creatures and fowl, and the earth the first buds after their kind, and the first living creatures after their kind. For neither at that time were those seeds so drawn forth into products of their several kinds, as that the power of production was exhausted in those products; but oftentimes, suitable combinations of circumstances are wanting, whereby they may be enabled to burst forth and complete their species. For, consider, the very least shoot is a seed; for, if fitly consigned to the earth, it produces a tree. But of this shoot there is a yet more subtle seed in some grain of the same species, and this is visible even to us. But of this grain also there is further still a seed, which, although we are unable to see it with our eyes, yet we can conjecture its existence from our reason; because, except there were some such power in those elements, there would not so frequently be produced from the earth things which had not been sown there; nor yet so many animals, without any previous commixture of male and female; whether on the land, or in the water, which yet grow, and by commingling bring forth others, while themselves sprang up without any union of parents. And certainly bees do not conceive the seeds of their young by commixture, but gather them as they lie scattered over the earth with their mouth. For the Creator of these invisible seeds is the Creator of all things Himself; since whatever comes forth to our sight by being born, receives the first beginnings of its course from hidden seeds, and takes the successive increments of its proper size and its distinctive forms from these as it were original rules. As therefore we do not call parents the creators of men, nor farmers the creators of corn, although it is by the outward application of their actions that the power of God operates within for the creating these things... (On the Trinity, Book III, Chapter 8, 13).
Here we see that the operative force of the “hidden seeds” has no connection to the evolution of one organism to a totally different organism, but to what Augustine calls “the successive increments of its proper size and its distinctive forms from these as it were original rules.” His objective is merely to show that a husband and wife, for example, are not the “creators of men” but the real creators are the “hidden seeds” that God has placed in all life forms. We know these seeds today as male spermatoza and a female ovum. We can actually see fertilization occur by means of an endoscope. We assign names to the developing stages such as zygote and blastula, we call the process of growth gestation. And let us never forget that, for all our so-called “scientific advancement,” what we have really developed today is nothing more than the means of sinning much faster than our forefathers, since, unlike Aristotle’s and Augustine’s society, we now put an abrupt end to the gestation process by a process called surgical abortion.
Not knowing, of course, the precise scientific mechanism for his theoretical idea of the “rationis seminalis,” Augustine also had another application. In the same work, De Trinitate, Augustine attempts to explain why the magicians of Egypt could mimic some of the miracles of Moses. Thus he writes:
But lest the somewhat different condition of animals should trouble any one, in that they have the breath of life with the sense of desiring those things that are according to nature, and of avoiding those things that are contrary to it; we must consider also, how many men there are who know from what herbs or flesh, or from what juices or liquids you please, of whatever sort, whether so placed or so buried, or so bruised or so mixed, this or that animal is commonly born; yet who can be so foolish as to dare to call himself the creator of these animals? Is it, therefore, to be wondered at, if just as any, the most worthless of men, can know whence such or such worms and flies are produced; so the evil angels in proportion to the subtlety of their perceptions discern in the more hidden seeds of the elements whence frogs and serpents are produced, and so through certain and known opportune combinations applying these seeds by secret movements, cause them to be created, but do not create them? Only men do not marvel at those things that are usually done by men. But if any one chance to wonder at the quickness of those growths, in that those living beings were so quickly made, let him consider how even this may be brought about by men in proportion to the measure of human capability. For whence is it that the same bodies generate worms more quickly in summer than in winter, or in hotter than in colder places? Only these things are applied by men with so much the more difficulty, in proportion as their earthly and sluggish members are wanting in subtlety of perception, and in rapidity of bodily motion. And hence it arises that in the case of any kind of angels, in proportion as it is easier for them to draw out the proximate causes from the elements, so much the more marvelous is their rapidity in works of this kind. (On the Trinity, Book III, Chapter 9, God the Original Cause of All Things)
In other words, as Augustine clings to the idea obtained from the Greeks that deceased flesh possesses the ability to produce living organisms, he reasons that evil angels are also aware of this inherent ability of created flesh, and using their superior intelligence, will exploit this principle to their own advantage, and thereby produce frogs and serpents from ordinary flesh in order to deceive humans. This shows just how much the concept of spontaneous generation was an integral part of the thinking of Augustine’s day. We in the 20th century chuckle at such notions, but to the men of the first millennium AD, and almost 80% of the second millennium, there were no exceptions to this common belief.
In conclusion, we see that Augustine’s “rationis seminalis” offers no foundation or precedent for theistic evolutionists. The only reasons for Augustine’s advancement of the concept of “seminal principles” was to offer: (a) some explanation for the then widely held but erroneous belief of spontaneous generation; (b) a reason why a living being could develop from infancy to adulthood; and (c) a possible reason why demons, who we know do not possess creative power, can appear to create various things. Today, both theology and science have taught us that only option (b) has any credence.
In any case, the idea of evolution of species is as foreign to Augustine’s thought as it is from the remaining Fathers of the Catholic Church. This resolution, as we saw, was not in a vacuum, but in the face of Greek philosophers and scientists who were positing ideas akin to the modern evolutionary hypothesis, and which were soundly rejected by the Fathers. As it stands, those who attempt to exploit Augustine’s penchant for allegorical or alternate interpretations in order to support their concocted theories of evolution, are doing a grave disservice to the Catholic community. In brief, there is no patristic support for the theory of evolution.
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