They Had Been Images of God: I – Creation

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Two events define the entirety of the first two millennia of the world: the Fall and the Flood. Events of their magnitude and significance would not occur again, in this writer’s opinion, until the Incarnation.

In order to understand the Flood, the world before it must be brought into focus. This can only be done when we begin with the Fall. But the Fall, and its magnitude, can itself only be considered once we try to grasp what human nature was intended to be from the start. So we have to start with the creation of man.

This chapter attempts to provide such an overview, approaching not just abstractly, but wherever possible, some image of the world and of Adam in those earliest hours of existence, before Adam and Eve committed the first sin and found themselves naked of God’s Grace.

In the Beginning, God Made Heaven and Earth

We begin not with Adam himself, but with the reason he was made. Scripture scarcely offers many clues to God’s motivation, though the writings of St. Augustine offer one possibility. There is conjecture that God desired the seats left empty in the heavenly chorus by those angles who rebelled to be filled by the ranks of men. In his Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love, he writes:

Thus it pleased God, Creator and Governor of the universe, that since the whole multitude of the angels had not perished in this desertion of him, those who had perished would remain forever in perdition, but those who had remained loyal through the revolt should go on rejoicing in the certain knowledge of the bliss forever theirs. From the other part of the rational creation – that is, mankind – although it had perished as a whole through sins and punishments, both original and personal, God had determined that a portion of it would be restored and would fill up the loss which that diabolical disaster had caused in the angelic society. For this is the promise to the saints at the resurrection, that they shall be equal to the angels of God.

Here he references St. Luke, 20:36: “Neither can they die any more: for they are equal to the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.”

We will revisit this topic when we get to The Fall, but for now, it’s worth considering that man—and perhaps creation itself, if this belief is correct—was not intended to have a particularly long-lasting existence. And by this I don’t mean necessarily his lifespan, but rather the species of man in its entirety; how many generations would have filled the emptied thrones of heaven had, sans-lapse, Adam taken full advantage of the divine blessing to be fruitful? Although we know not the number of angels that fell, it should be self evident that more generations have been made necessary as a result of the first man’s transgression.

St. Gregory the Great also wrote on the subject, as did numerous theologians throughout the medieval period. The theory generally fell out of favor, however, and isn’t a popular one in modern circles. St. Thomas Aquinas, while not explicitly rejecting the assertion, considered the idea wholly unnecessary. As Vojtech Novotny explains,

This thesis suggests that all elect human beings will be admitted into angelic orders, each according to their own merits: some into the higher orders and others to the lower orders; and the Virgin Mary will be above all. But whether this means that as many people will be admitted as there were angels who fell, or as many as remained, or as many as there were altogether—or more or fewer—this is something that is known only to the one who knows the number of the elect who are to be admitted into heavenly bliss.¹

This does indicate that the elect in heaven share the breathing room of the angelic choirs, but it doesn’t quite go so far as to assert what St. Augustine does—that man’s purpose was, at least in part, to repopulate that host after the fall of angels. On this issue, St. Thomas is actually resistant:

Since rational creatures are unique objects of God’s care and providence, God gave them power over their actions, which implies not only that they are ontologically incommutable (in the sense of the maxim quoted above: unaquaeque creatura est propter suum proprium actum et perfectionem), but also that they do not exist as a function of another creature. Rather, they exist for themselves (propter se), and thus everything else exists for them. Rational nature is thus the only nature that God requires in the universe for itself; everything else is willed only for the sake of rational nature. […]

What Thomas is describing here can be expressed as follows: people are not a medium through which God might fulfill some kind of purpose. Even though God created them as part of the whole—its mutual immanent finalities and its constitutive transcendental finality—their participation in these relationships is personal.²

Whether or not this actually contradicts the general sense of what St. Augustine put forward might be a matter of some debate, but the scholarly consensus tends toward the belief that St. Augustine didn’t have it quite right. Since the Magisterium has not ruled on it one way or the other, it—like so much else of the first chapters of Genesis—remains a matter heavily invested in the conscience of the beholder.

The First Creation Account

And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them. And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. And God said: Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat: And to all beasts of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to all that move upon the earth, and wherein there is life, that they may have to feed upon. And it was so done.³

Genesis contains what at first glance is two accounts of man’s creation. The first, included in the narrative describing the sixth day of creation, recounts God’s words: Let us make man to our image and likeness; additionally, it depicts man created as both male and female at about the same time, and it includes mention of being fruitful as a blessing upon man rather than a divine command.

What sort of man, exactly, was created here? Some speculate, perhaps trying to follow St. Thomas Aquinas on this issue, that it was only man’s soul that was created. For this, emphasis on God’s “image and likeness” is stressed:

God created man to His own image: But man is like to God in his soul. Therefore the soul was created. The image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman. Hence after the words, “To the image of God He created him,” it is added, “Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Moreover it is said “them” in the plural, as Augustine (Gen. ad lit. iii, 22) remarks, lest it should be thought that both sexes were united in one individual.

St. Augustine, in his Literal Meaning, suggests something a little different at face value:

So then, perhaps what was made on the sixth day was their souls, where the image of God is rightly to be understood, in the spiritual reality of their minds, so that their bodies might be formed later on? But this too is something we are not permitted by the same text of scripture to believe; first because of that completion of God’s works, I do not see how these could be understood to be complete if anything was not there established in its causes which would later on be realized visibly; secondly, because the difference of sex between male and female can only be verified in bodies.⁴

These passages are not actually in disagreement, though a first glance might imply so. While St. Thomas’ emphasis is on man’s rational nature, and in particular his soul, he does not preclude the issue that man’s flesh had to have been made at the same time. As St. Augustine notes, the difference between the sexes is a physical difference rather than a supernatural one.

The inclusion of this passage is, like the inclusion of the sixth day’s entire narrative, more a matter of broader Biblical interpretation. Genesis 2 offers what is effectively a rehash of the final creative day of the creation week, with slightly altered explanations for the distribution of animals and of man’s first moments. The standard (and most sensible) interpretation of this discrepancy is that the former account provides a particular expression that is then given more attention or development in the latter. Contemporary scholars John Bergsma and Brant Pitre put it rather succinctly when they explain how these two accounts “should be viewed … as complementary scenes,” comparing it to an establishing shot of a film that precedes a close-up.⁵ It’s a bit more than this, however, as the expressions of this creation are given slightly different emphasis, too; “Whereas the creation of Adam in Genesis 1 emphasized God’s transcendence,” they note, Genesis 2 emphasized “God’s immanence or closeness to humanity.”⁶

What they mean with this is that the first account’s emphasis is on this question of image and likeness; is Genesis 2’s depiction really just a closer examination of this process, or is it an examination from a different angle? The answer is effectively both; the focus of the former account depicts man’s generalized nature and indicates his generalized capacity in the world—a rational creature, ‘like God’ in that he is imbued with agency (which entails a certain creative capacity), bi-gendered and reproductive, and granted dominion over the animals. While these are things that will be revisited in detail with Adam himself, the first creation account is more an abstraction for the purposes of brevity, with special emphasis on the important issues.

With this in mind, it’s possible to suggest that the first account follows the creation of human personhood itself, being, even as this would have occurred concurrently with Adam being fashioned out of the mud. Personhood distinguishes us from the animals and the rest of all corporeal creation, as it is personhood that embodies this ‘likeness’ to God:

Aquinas further points out that the image of God is in man not only by imitation of the divine nature, which is an intellectual and volitional nature, but also by imitation of divine personhood, which is possessed by each of the Three Persons of the Trinity. So man is an image of God as he regards both nature and personhood, which are distinct but closely related.⁷

Rev. Warkulwiz here draws the direct connection between that image of God and the nature of personhood, as we know—through revelation—that God’s triune character is triune in personage. He continues by expounding upon personhood, describing it as first “incommunicable”; since our experience of ourselves is relatable to others only in part and never in the completeness of its authenticity. He continues:

there are other qualifiers that set off personhood. They are the following: uniqueness (there is only one Peter), unrepeatability (there never was and never could be another Peter), indivisibility (there is no half-Peter), and distinctiveness (Peter is not Paul, is not Mary…). Other characteristics associated with a person, but which proceed from the intellectual and volitional nature united with a person, are self-knowledge and freedom of choice.⁸

We can understand that Adam was made only once, and that no man was made before he was. But the emphasis on man being imbued with the image of God in the first creation account indicates the importance and uniqueness of personhood in creation. It is God-like, and it carries with it a certain, albeit lesser, creative capacity, will, agency, and intelligence that are imbued figurements of God’s own. Personhood is what entwines these threads together.

Without straying too much from our subject, it’s worth noting that this understanding of personhood is exactly why the dignity of human beings is tantamount. Issues such as abortion, contraception, modesty, and in fact, all morality are totally sensible only with a proper understanding of what a person actually is. Contemporary moral frameworks that try to preclude this definition, that try to reduce personhood down to a material sum of parts, necessarily miss the mark in having a coherent moral framework. And it isn’t just this uniqueness of personhood that makes the moral framework sustainable, either, but that there are three Divine Persons with whom this human personhood is made relevant. Morality functions not simply to define good and bad behavior; it exists in order assure us that our actions are relevant and that life has a purpose.

And so with this, we come to the second account.

His First Day

I saw Adam created, not in Paradise, but in the region in which Jerusalem was subsequently situated. I saw him come forth glittering and white from a mound of yellow earth, as if out of a mold. The sun was shining and I thought (I was only a child when I saw it) that the sunbeams drew Adam out of the hillock. He was, as it were, born of the virgin earth. God blessed the earth, and it became his mother. He did not instantly step forth from the earth. Some time elapsed before his appearance. He lay in the hillock on his left side, his arm thrown over his head, a light vapor covering him as with a veil. I saw a figure in his right side, and I became conscious that it was Eve, and that she would be drawn from him in Paradise by God. God called him. The hillock opened, and Adam stepped gently forth.⁹

Here, Blessed Anne Emmerich describes the visions she’d received pertaining to the creation of the world. The literal, historical accuracy of her visions are, of course, a matter of complete speculation. As the only rational witnesses to Adam’s creation were God and the hosts of incorporeal beings, we can only take Blessed Emmerich at her word and trust in private revelation.¹⁰ It’s of course extremely unlikely that it’s all just made up, but neither would it be appropriate to treat it as infallible.

In any case, Genesis gets easier to interpret more literally with the second creation account. Absent from its narrative are cosmological ambiguities regarding divisions of waters or seeming hermaphroditic first men¹¹; instead, the straight-forward imagery—albeit still difficult to make sense of—reveals Adam molded from the combination of earth and water. This is not without its figurative sense, however, we can parse from St. Augustine.

Early in his conversion, he had considered this passage in Genesis as almost entirely allegorical. Although at the time he did not altogether refute the notion that the two different creation accounts referred to the distinct creations between man’s interior and exterior natures, he did refute the notion that the two accounts were completely separate. In fact, he disagreed so thoroughly with this that he believed that the two accounts depicted the same exact thing entirely, almost—but not quite—arguing that the second account was exactly just a rehash of the first:

so if, as I am saying, we understand that in this place the man was made of body and soul, it was by no means absurd to give that mixture the name of mud. Just as water, you see, collects earth and sticks and holds it together when mud is made by mixing it in, so too the soul by animating the material of the body shapes it into a harmonious unity, and does not permit it to fall apart into its constituent elements.¹²

At the time, St. Augustine considered the events of the first chapters in Genesis to be predominantly allegorical, or mythical in character. This was in his Refutation of the Manichees, a two-volume work completed very shorty after his entrance into the Church. In the interests of evangelism, he claimed—much later in life—to “not want them to be put off by being faced with reams of obscure discussion,” as the Manichees’ position on Genesis was so erroneous that they “blaspheme by rejecting [it] outright with detestation.”¹³

More interestingly, in that same passage, St. Augustine admits that his own view of Genesis changed afterward anyway; he had walked back his purely allegorical take, as, at the time,

it had not yet dawned on me how everything in [Genesis] could be taken in its proper literal sense; it seemed to me rather that this was scarcely possible, if at all, and anyhow extremely difficult. So in order not to be held back, I explained with what brevity and clarity I could muster what those things, for which I was not able to find a suitable literal meaning, stood for in a figurative sense…¹⁴

So the good saint recognized even at the time that the figurative sense of the passage was not its only sense. St. John Chrysostom connects the same dots, but goes further. The figurative manner of interpretation that St. Augustine warrants early in life is in no way incompatible with a literal molding of man from slime; “it did not simply say ‘earth’ but ‘dust’,” St. Chrysostom says, “something more lowly and substantial even than the earth…” For St. John, the literal formulation of Adam out of the dust or slime of the earth is actually necessary for the figurative significance of Adam’s creation to make any sense. These aren’t mutually exclusive ways for Scripture to make clear its purposes; the latter demands the former. Consider his exegesis on how humble we must be before the majesty of God:

Hence, when Scripture comes back to the point it teaches us also the manner of our composition and the beginning of our creation, and whence the first human being was produced and how it was produced. After all, into what depths of madness would we not have tumbled if, despite this teaching and despite the knowledge that the human being takes the beginning of its composition from the earth as do the plants and the irrational beings (though its formation and the bodiless being of the soul has given it a marked superiority, thanks to God’s loving kindness, (103c) this constituting after all the basis of its rationality and its endowment with control over all creation), if then with this knowledge this creature shaped from the earth had conjured up the notion of its equality with God owing to the serpent’s deceit, and if the blessed author had been content with his first account and had not repeated himself in teaching us everything with precision, into what depths of madness would we not have tumbled?¹⁵

Out of the soil Adam was made, and into him God breathed life. As St. John asks, how be it possible that he could have fallen for the Devil’s tricks? How could Adam believe even for a moment that dust could be like God? We’ll touch on this in greater detail when we get to the Fall.

The important takeaway from all of this is that unlike the first account of Adam’s creation, whose literal interpretation may seem clouded by an abundance of meanings, the second account gives a very clear, concrete explanation, and that this explanation’s historical importance is given more credence by its allegorical and figurative aspects.

Contemporary scholars, for various reasons, would prefer to place Adam’s creation firmly in the realm of mythology. This places Adam, his life, his Fall, and the context of Genesis 1-11 in their entirety, well beyond the reach of practical reason. Rather than learning from the lessons of real people, such as drawing from the examples of previous battles when deciding contemporary mission tactics, the mythologizing of Genesis reduces the history of Adam to a fairy tale. Are we more likely to be leery of strangers because of the witch we recall from Hansel & Gretel, or because of the countless news reports of hardened criminals preying on delusional teenagers?

Once you reach a certain age, fairy tales do little to shape practical morality; while not entirely meaningless, they serve rather as the context for a common culture and tradition. The relegation of Catholicism to background noise in so many instances, although not solely attributable to the modern push to mythologize Genesis, is very much tied up in this phenomenon. If Adam wasn’t real, what else wasn’t real? If the Fall was not an historical event, then what metaphysical significance does Our Lord’s sacrifice on the Cross hold? If there was no single lineage from which all of mankind is derived, then how could Our Lord’s Most Precious Blood have redeemed everyone? These questions could be brushed over with a simple non-sequitur, hand-waving matters of history away with a generalized appeal to God’s mysterious will. God’s capable of anything, of course, but His love for us implies that His miracles are supposed to make at least some sort of sense. Even if we can’t explain the totality of them, or even necessarily why we warranted them, there’s always a poetic sense of justice to be found in how God unfolds history.

The point here is that by mythologizing Adam, the attempt is made to mythologize Christ. The gods of folklore and myth can be afforded a degree of arbitrariness that cannot be attributed to God. Attempting to do so is a blasphemy whose consequences is too dire to speculate on here.

For St. John Chrysostom above, the figurement of Adam’s simultaneous importance (being made in God’s image) and insignificance (his composition of dust) are necessary components of understanding him. Some propose that Adam’s composition of atoms and malleable genetic code corresponds to the dust of the earth, and how these atoms and code came to be in the orientation necessary to comprise Adam did not have to be more or less instantaneous as Scripture implies. While it’s not impossible to square this with Scripture, such flirtations with Darwinism bring back to the forefront an almost purely allegorical interpretation. This gets us back to mythologizing and thus trivializing the prelapsarian world. But as stated earlier, it’s not within the purview of this piece to dwell on arguments from theistic evolution.

Eden

Adam, we must remember, was made outside of Eden. Scripture explains Adam’s formation from out of the mud in Genesis 2:7; immediately afterward is Eden established and man brought to it (Gen 2:8). Bl. Emmerich describes his being “borne up on high to a garden,” following Scripture’s indication that Eden occupied land on top of a raised hill or mountain. As Bergsma and Pitre explain:

Eden is described as a mountain or mountaintop—this can be deduced from the fact that all four primary rivers (from an Israelite perspective) flow out from Eden. That would make Eden the highest point of the known world, and this accords with Ezekiel’s reference to Eden as “the mountain of God” (Ezek 18:14, 16)¹⁶ and a great deal of ancient Near Eastern iconography and textual evidence for the belief in a primordial divine garden on top of the “cosmic mountain” or central mountain of the world.¹⁷

The construction of Eden written in Genesis does describe it to be planted on at a raised elevation, but the degree to which it may or may not have dominated over the antediluvian landscape is never made clear. Ancient Christian tradition, which we’ll look at more closely in sections pertaining to Adam’s life after his expulsion from Paradise, usually grants the mention from Ezekiel as a very literal mountain, towering above the plains and riven with vast cave networks. Bl. Emmerich’s visions are consistent with this belief, although not as emphasized. In any case, descriptions of Eden outside of Scripture, like nearly all of the antediluvian world, are matters of speculation.

Bergsma and Pitre, continuing in their explanation of Eden, remark briefly on its status as the prefigurement of a temple. They draw a comparison with ancient Near Eastern associations of “temples and the primordial cosmic mountain”, in which ancient temple complexes were “built in part to represent the original ‘mountain of God’.” Additionally, the “presence near Eden of gold as well as precious stones, such as ‘onyx’ and ‘bdellium’ (Gen 2:12)” are indications of the construction of a sacred place; these stones were used in the “ornamentation of temples”, “liturgical vessels and vestments”, and were used on the Ark of the Covenant. The cherubim come to guard Eden after the expulsion of the first pair, just as “images of cherubim also protect the later Tabernacle and Temple”. And the garden also faced East, just as the Temple originally did, and just as very early church construction followed.¹⁸

It is no surprise then that future Doctors of the Church would draw rich comparisons between Eden, the Tree of Life, its fruits, and the water of its streams with the Church, the Cross, the Eucharist, and the even the Most Precious Blood. In Eden were prefigurements of things made necessary for man’s salvation by the Fall. As an example, see St. Bonaventure:

Picture in your mind a tree whose roots are watered by an ever-flowing fountain that becomes a great and living river with four channels to water the garden of the entire Church. From the trunk of this tree, imagine that there are growing twelve branches that are adorned with leaves, flowers and fruit. […] Imagine that there are twelve fruits, having every delight and the sweetness of every taste (Wisd. 16:20). This fruit is offered to God’s servants to be tasted so that when they eat it, they may always be satisfied, yet never grow weary of its taste. This is the fruit that took its origin from the Virgin’s womb and reached its savory maturity on the tree of the cross under the midday heat of the Eternal Sun, that is, the love of Christ. In the garden of the heavenly paradise—God’s table—this fruit is served to those who desire it.¹⁹

Although St. Bonaventure is using this image as an allegorical and spiritual illustration, such a demonstration does nothing to invalidate the historical truth of Eden’s trees and the tree of life in particular. The tree of life is not given as much overt emphasis in Genesis as is the tree of knowledge, even though within the Church it is of more importance. The latter’s tree was involved with a single event; the former, however, is revisited again, at the very least on every Sunday by faithful Catholics, if not daily. The Eucharistic language on plain display in St. Bonaventure’s writing here makes this self-evident.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the Eucharist itself was the fruit hanging from the actual tree of life in Eden. Like all things postlapsarian, the tree of life we are familiar with is a remaking of the one in the Garden; it could almost be called a re-fulfillment of its image. Nonetheless, the typological significance is plain.

Bl. Emmerich’s visions depict a large “crystalline rock, formed apparently of precious stones” emerging from the side of a hill next to Adam just after Eve had been made. She doesn’t expand on this, although it’s quite clearly connected to the precious stones of Ezekiel 28; its depiction as a single stone almost implies that it’s there as an altar. It would be fitting given the context of Eden’s temple-like layout.

In any case, Adam, after his creation, is brought to the garden by God. Here, in his first creative act, he names the animals. This is actually a really big deal, as prior to this, things had been given form and matter, but nothing carried the mark of identification yet. The act of naming things should be recognized as a sort of image of creation itself, in much the same way that Adam was a sort of image of God: a lesser but analogous variation. While a moral framework, meaning, and logos was already present in the world, imbued there by God as a consequence of its existence, Adam’s act of naming indicates recognition and participation in these things—a sort of “message received” on the part of the first corporeal free agent. Adam could not have invented the language he was using, but by participating in it and using it to create new words for things—names—he was demonstrating his likeness of God in a creative capacity.

Applying a name to an animal or an object is to place it into a referential framework. It makes a thing knowable. By God’s Word was the world made, by divine commands are things brought into being. As St. John Chrysostom wrote:

In the case of all the other creatures blessed Moses taught us the manner of creation, saying, “God said, Let there be light, and there was light;” [Gen 1:3] “Let the firmament be made;” [Gen 1:6] “Let the water be gathered together; [Gen 1:9] “Let the stars be made;” [Gen 1:14] (106b) “Let the earth put forth a crop of vegetation;” [Gen 1:11] “Let the waters bring forth reptiles with living souls;” [Gen 1:20] and “Let the earth bring forth a living thing.” [24] Do you see how they were all created by a word?²⁰

By divine word are things commanded into being. By man’s word are things ascribed their identities. These identities are not conjured out of nothingness, as their substance and organization was made by God. Man’s participation in this act of creation, however, is to imitate in such a way that he augments it. By naming the animals, Adam participated in the creative exercise by establishing the vocabulary—and therefore, identifying a rational framework—by which creation could be understood. It’s not that he invented this framework, just that he recognized its existence and then attached words to it.

It’s worth noting, before we get to Eve, that the rivers mentioned in the garden are the following: The Phison, the Gehon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Josephus, following in a relatively accepted tradition among the Hebrews, corresponded the Phison to the Nile and the Gehon to the Ganges, and some early Christian writers followed in this vein. It is never considered with any certainty, however, and it’s quite possible that the cataclysm of the Flood forever buried these rivers while also irrevocably changing the latter two into the shape they are today. When considering antediluvian geography, it is always important to keep in mind how alien and unrecognizable the Earth would have seemed to our eyes, even in its flora and fauna, terrain, and topography, but especially in its geography.

Eve

So we arrive finally to the formulation of Eve.

She was formed for Adam, according to Scripture, as to be “a helper like himself”²¹, following the naming of the animals discussed above. The Jerome Biblical Commentary has this to say about Eve and her relationship with Adam:

18. “A helper like himself” expresses two profound ideas: Woman complements man, a social being by nature, but she is not a mere service appendage; she “corresponds to him” i.e., has a similar nature. 19-20. In these verses, J introduces the creation of the animals to emphasize, by contrast, the true role of woman. Animals, named by man, and hence under his control (cf. 1:26b,28b), are not fit companions for his total being; they have no nature corresponding to his (and indirect polemic against bestiality?). 21-23. The “deep sleep” of man suggests the mysterious and highly significant nature of the divine activity (cf Gn 15:12). The description of woman’s formation is, like that of man’s, etiological. All the expressions—the “rib” … “bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” … “woman” and “man”—indicate the unity of nature of man and wife. […] woman, unlike animal, is the “helper like himself.” But woman’s existence, psychologically and in the social order, is dependent on man. 24. The author concludes this first part of this narrative with a general principle—a theological conviction that had prompted and conditioned the story of woman’s formation. The unit of marriage and its monogamous nature are God-willed.²²

While the Commentary carries with it the unfortunate flaws of modern Biblical scholarship, key points of interest stick out: the necessary dependence upon man that woman was made with, her innate social subservience, and her similar nature.

What’s crucial to understand is that woman’s subservience does not imply a metaphysical, theological, or practical inferiority, but rather a complementarity of these aspects that finds its fulfillment alongside her obedience. While today’s social inclination toward egalitarian absolutism has made most of us lose sight of what a properly ordered social hierarchy even looks like, its vestiges can still be found in the ordering of the family. The father remains the head of the household; in cases where this is not obviously present, the family either ceases to be a coherent unit (divorce or separation), or the children grow up imbued with a natural tendency toward disobedience and generally lack discipline. The father remains the leader, even if he doesn’t act ‘fatherly’ or as a leader should; this is what leads to the ruin of the family.

While a father can bring ruin to a family by acting un-fatherly, a mother can likewise bring ruin by acting un-motherly or un-womanly. A woman who is not permitted to fulfill her station in life by her husband is victimized by a man who stretched his authority beyond its limits. Just as the deadbeat who abandons his family, the thug who abuses his wife obviously leads his family to ruin. On the other hand, the woman who acts with impunity, who does not listen to her husband or attend to him as the first mate of a ship does for its captain, leads the family into ruin as well. As St. Hildegard explains:

Woman was created for the sake of man, and man for the sake of woman. As she is from the man, the man is also from her, lest they dissent from each other in the unity of making their children; for they should work as one in one work, as the air and the wind intermingle in their labor. In what way? The air is moved by the wind, and the wind is mingled with the air, so that in their movement all verdant things are subject to their influence. What does this mean? The wife must cooperate with the husband and the husband with the wife in making children. Therefore the greatest crime and wickedest act is to make by fornication a division in the days of creating children, since the husband and wife cut off their own blood from its rightful place, sending it to an alien place.²³

Not only does the union between man and wife constitute a sacred bond, a uniting into a figurative singular flesh, which emphasizes the assignment of complementary responsibilities, it also indicates certain moral imperatives attached to the bond itself. As St. Hildegard points out, fornication attacks marriage even where it is performed between the man and wife. With the formulation of Eve, we can recognize that human sexuality is not intrinsically disordered behavior; God’s blessing to be fruitful and multiply should make that clear. But sexual misbehavior within the marriage union remains gravely sinful and can trace its start back to the Fall. Just as their natures were corrupted in the Fall, so too were the means by which they would multiply.

It is even the assertion of St. Augustine that prior to the Fall, the sexual organs would have obeyed man’s will as easily and readily as any other limb of his body would have:

Man himself, then, could once have received from his lower members an obedience which he lost by his own disobedience. It would not have been difficult for God to make Him in such a way that even what is now set in motion in his flesh only by lust should have been moved by his will alone.²⁴

The propagation of man throughout the land, as Adam had been blessed by God to be fruitful, was foreseen and expected, but it cannot be said that this would imply Adam’s Fall was necessary for this propagation to take place. The saint expresses such in one of his works specifically on Genesis; “if successors could properly be sought for those who were going to die,” he explains, “with much more propriety could companions and community have been sought for those who were going to go on living.”²⁵ As death would not have entered the world without the Fall, it stands to reason that the procreation was doubtlessly expected and intended.

St. John Chrysostom agrees. Eve’s creation was accompanied by the words “For this reason man will leave his father and mother, and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”²⁶ It’s not much of an extrapolation to deduce what that implies; as he explains:

From what source did he gain knowledge of future events and the fact that the race of human beings should grow into a vast number? Whence, after all, did he come to know that there would be intercourse between man and woman? I mean, the consummation of that intercourse occurred after the Fall; up till that time they were living like angels in paradise and so they were not burning with desire, not assaulted by other passions, not subject to the needs of nature, but on the contrary were created incorruptible and immortal, and on that account at any rate they had no need to wear clothes. “They were both naked,” the text says, remember, “and were not ashamed.” [Gen 2:25] You see, while sin and disobedience had not yet come on the scene, they were clad in that glory from above which caused them no shame; but after the breaking of the law, then entered the scene both shame and awareness of their nakedness. ²⁷

St. Augustine also explains how the inversion of human nature (which will be addressed in the following sections in greater detail) corrupted conjugal relations. As the body’s disordered passions exert influence over the will, sometimes to the point of domination, the proper relationship between man and wife becomes harder to maintain. But this does not mean that this relationship was invented as a result of these disordered passions; rather, the relationship pre-existed these passions and they contorted the nature of that relationship. Fundamentally, the union between men and women was intentional from the start, and it was only the Fall that made this relationship so filled with strife and shame. As he explains in City of God:

Now in the order of nature the soul is certainly placed higher than the body; yet the same soul governs the body more easily than it governs itself. Indeed, this lust which we are here discussing is something to be blushed at all the more because, when it arises, the soul neither has command of itself so effectively as to be entirely free from it, nor does it rule the body so completely that the shameful members are moved by the will rather than by lust. Indeed, if they are so ruled they would not be shameful.²⁸

He expresses likewise elsewhere, adding to this sentiment the notion of God’s infinite wisdom and majesty that He can bring good even out of the greatest evils.

Now however, as the just deserts of their transgressing the commandment, they found the movement of that law fighting back against the law of the mind in the members of the body of that death they had contracted, a movement which marriage regulates, continence subdues and curbs, in order that just as the sin was turned into punishment, so the punishment might be turned into merit.²⁹

It is, of course, out of a sort of brokenness that lust pervades in the flesh of men, and a brokenness that Adam would have understood at least in the abstract (certainly not experientially) prior to the Fall. However, even with the catastrophic destruction of human nature that occurred, God’s perfection ensured that the fundamental design of man’s being could survive in spite of death. This is what is meant by “the punishment might be turned into merit”; St. Augustine is commenting on the fact that by properly chaining your passions, guarding them, and sticking closely to those ways by which that is possible—habit, prayer, and selfless devotion to God—we end up proving to ourselves the love that God has for us. God’s love is unceasing, but our engagement with Him is not. Properly and consciously regulating our behavior in order to obey God’s will is not always easy, but it’s an honest engagement with the punishments due to sin. By this is our “punishment might be turned into merit.”

Although this concerns the Fall more than it concerns sexual behavior per se, it’s worth engaging with here because of how immediately the proper ordering of sexuality was corrupted. Its obviousness in the present day shrouds how badly it was corrupted by the Fall, and how different the relationship between the sexes is in its proper ordering. Although efforts were made over the many centuries to mend this, the sexual revolution demolished any sensible understanding of how men and women are supposed to get along with each other.

This does, however, raise the question of whether God could have made Adam’s first companion male instead of female, had procreation not been one of the main reasons for companionship. St. Augustine addresses this too in his writings on Genesis:

If it was to till the earth together with him, there was as yet no hard toil to need such assistance; and if there had been the need, a male would have made a better help. The same can be said about companionship, should he grow tired of solitude. How much more agreeably, after all, for conviviality and conversation would two male friends live together on equal terms than man and wife? While if it was expedient that one should be in charge and the other should comply, to avoid a clash of wills disturbing the peace of the household, such an arrangement would have been ensured by one being made first, the other later, especially if the latter were created from the former, as the female was in fact created. […] For these reasons I cannot work out what help a wife could have been made to provide the man with, if you take away the purpose of childbearing.³⁰

He perhaps unintentionally touches on a deeper truth of creation in this meditation: family, although seemingly a byproduct made to ease Adam’s loneliness, is a worldly implementation of properly-ordered love and a figurement of the Trinity. That said, it is necessary that the components of a familial bond be differentiated in purpose and in execution. What this means is that two men, even when placed in a relationship where the servitude of one is freely acknowledged and accepted, cannot fulfill the uniqueness of the familial bond that we see between man and wife. Again, sexual passion, although an element of matrimony, is obviously not the foundation of the matrimonial relationship, but rather an element of it.

To modern ears, this can be a difficult pill to swallow—after all, the entire foundation of the gay rights narrative rests on the assumption that sexual passion is the foundation of romantic love, which leads first to the conclusion that those with disordered sexual appetites have a right to indulge them, and second that these disordered appetites, by merit of the consenting parties, form legitimate bonds equal to those of man and wife. If it is not true that sexual passion forms the foundation of matrimony, as we can recognize from Genesis and from a simple study of the natural law, then this entire narrative collapses.

Woman was created, then, not just to bear children, as St. Augustine notes, but also be a willing agent in the fulfillment of a kind of love that images the Trinity. The fullness of family as a worldly (if imperfect) image of Godliness is something only possible in the proper union between man and wife.³¹ Man was made such that he requires some complimentary aspect; in the lay religious, this is found in marriage, wherein completion constitutes the marital bond infused by the graces of God, while in the religious life, it is found wholly and totally in the graces of chastity dedicated to God alone. In either case, man was made wanting; his hunger for God exists as a result of the Fall, as the Fall deprived man of a fullness he was made with, but that fullness was predicated on the graces of God in the first place. We may not ever really know where the ‘animal’ aspect of man ended and the image of God began, prior to the Fall, but we can recognize at least that the damage of the Fall affected human nature itself, changing it the way a cannonball changes a man’s body as it passes through him. This will be approached in more detail during an examination of the Fall itself.

This affects the relations between men and women today, of course, as well as the definition of femininity. Feminism, in all of its forms, resists the notion that there is any complementarity between the sexes; its staunch advocacy for independence is predicated on the individualist ideology that forms a cornerstone of modernist thought. As a result, feminism attempts to overturn the real order of both social and sexual relations.

Of specific note here is the push by feminism to, ostensibly, grant equal authority to women as there is for men in every sphere of public and private life. But authority cannot be wielded in equal measure with two faces, which is why by every practical consideration, feminism seeks rather to overturn the hierarchy as it exists by nature and implement its exact inversion. This is why feminism and all of its dressings must be avoided by Catholics, and why it can safely be shunned as a belief system without the slightest polite consideration. Although it is closely tied to modern ideologies like communism and gay rights, feminism carries within it a primordial disorder that has been familiar to humanity since antediluvian times: the replacement of authority. Authority is the sole tempering factor against the prideful indulgences that can lead even the most reasonable people into the void.

So it is with all this in mind that we come to Eve’s creation. Blessed Emmerich describes it in her visions:

Near the tree by the water arose a hill. On it I saw Adam reclining on his left side, his left hand under his cheek. God sent a deep sleep on him and he was rapt in vision. Then from his right side, from the same place in which the side of Jesus was opened by the lance, God drew Eve. I saw her small and delicate. But she quickly increased in size until full grown. She was exquisitely beautiful. Were it not for the Fall, all would be born in the same way, in tranquil slumber.³²

The removal of Adam’s rib prefigures the piercing into the side of Christ and His Heart, and it also prefigures the door in the side of the ark³³. Bl. Emmerich builds off of the tradition of the Church by connecting at least the former two together. She adds onto this further detail a little later on:

I have always thought that by the Wounds of Jesus there were opened anew in the human body portals closed by Adam’s sin. I have been given to understand that Longinus opened in Jesus’ Side the gate of regeneration to eternal life, therefore no one entered Heaven while that gate was closed.³⁴

She describes an endowment of light and visible brilliance bestowed upon Adam, similar to the “Blessing that Abraham received from the angel,” which was “of similar form, but not so luminous.”³⁵ This, as well as their luminosity that her visions depicted, will be examined at greater length with Adam’s nature in the next chapter.

From the side of Adam was drawn the woman who would lead him, albeit by his own volition, into the first sin; this inheritance would be answered by she who would crush the head of the serpent. And she could crush that serpent only through the being of her Son, because it would be from the side of Him—lanced by a man while He slept the sleep of death—that the world be redeemed.

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1Novotny, Vojtech, Cur Homo? A History of the Thesis Concerning Man as a Replacement for Fallen Angels, trans. Pavlina and Tim Morgan (Prague: Charles University, 2014), 133.

2Ibid, 145-146.

3Gen 1:26-30.

4Augustine, On Genesis, 307.

5Bergsma, John, and Grant Pitre, A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018),101.

6Ibid.

7Rev. Warkulwiz, Victor P., The Doctrines of Genesis 1-11: A Compendium and Defense of Traditional Catholic Theology on Origins (Lincoln: Missionary Priests of the Blessed Sacrament, 2007), 226.

8Ibid, 227.

9Emmerich, Anne, The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, Vol 1, trans. ‘an American Nun’: 1917 (Rockford, TAN Books: 2004), 7.

10So as not to brush it aside, there were certain inaccuracies in some of Blessed Emmerich’s many visions over her life, but nonetheless, the compendiums of her visions—in this case, The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, from which this creation account is taken—each carry an imprimatur and a nihil obstat from the Holy See.

11Some of the Jewish Midrashic commentary on this is completely insane.

12Augustine, On Genesis, 77.

13Ibid, 348-349.

14Ibid.

15John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis: Homily 12, trans. John Litteral, 165.

16Proper citation: Ezekiel 28:16, 18.

17Bergsma & Pitre, A Catholic Introduction to the Bible, 102.

18Ibid, 102-103.

19Bonaventure, The Tree of Life, trans. Ewert Cousins, (Mawah: Paulist Press 1978), 120-121.

20Chrysostom, Homilies: Homily 13, 170-171.

21Gen 2:20.

22Brown, Raymond E., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, The Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, Inc.: 1968), 12.

23Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990), 78.

24Augustine, City of God, 626.

25Augustine, On Genesis, 383.

26Gen 2:24.

27Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis: Homily 15, 202-203.

28Augustine, City of God, 634.

29Augustine, On Genesis, 386.

30Augustine, On Genesis, 380.

31The marriage of the religious persons, including priests, to Christ is similar but slightly different and worthy of an entirely separate discussion than is merited here.

32Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 8.

33St. Hippolytus of Rome mentions this, referencing the door to be on the east side (starboard, or right side, same as what is traditionally accepted to be where Christ was pierced and from where Adam’s rib was taken).

34Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 9.

35Ibid.