They Had Been Images of God: Introduction

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For in the disobedient stirring which arose in the flesh of the disobedient soul, by reason of which Adam and Eve covered their shameful parts, one death was indeed experienced: namely, that which occurs when God forsakes the soul. This was signified by the words which God spoke when the man, demented with fear, had hidden himself: ‘Adam, where art thou?’ For God certainly did not ask this in ignorance of Adam’s whereabouts, but to admonish him to reflect upon where he was, now that God was no longer with him.¹

Mankind at first numbered two, then three, and at last they became innumerable. They had been images of God; but after the Fall, they became images of self, which images originated in sin. Sin placed them in communication with the fallen angels. They sought all their good in self and the creatures around them with all of whom the fallen angels had connection; and from that interminable blending, that sinking of his noble faculties in self and in fallen nature, sprang manifold wickedness and misery.²

Who was the first man, Adam? When did he live? What was the world like, not merely before the Flood, but before even the Fall? Is his life relevant to us, who live not merely in a modern world, but in a world whose redemption has already been guaranteed by Our Lord’s Holy Sacrifice at Calvary?

When it comes to Genesis, there is a small but growing body of Catholic study that aims to make more known the relevance of the first eleven chapters of world history. Dismissed as ‘Young Earth Creationists’, whether the description is appropriate or not, by both the secular world and a shamefully large portion of the practicing faithful, those skeptical of modern Scriptural interpretation have been sidelined even by mainline Catholicism.

The reasons for this sidelining vary; doing so helped distinguish Catholicism from various (niche) Protestant Evangelical circles so ridiculed by the mainstream secular press, which has allowed the Church to maintain some mild sense of legitimacy-by-contrast to those outside of her. Catholics also have historically had a better relationship with science as it is properly understood. The contemporary mutation of pop-science into a religious ideology, however, has gone largely unnoticed and unmentioned by both Catholics and, perhaps appropriately, by the secular press.

In any case, extreme skepticism toward scientific claims regarding religious subjects is not something that tends to come naturally to the average Catholic. We’re more than happy to leave the argumentation of what’s actually true in the details to people we presume to be experts. And there’s value to that; as Father Robert Spitzer’s books on creation have demonstrated, framing contemporary scientific research within theistic frameworks certainly helps in evangelist efforts to bring lost souls into communion.

On the other hand, dismissing creationist claims leads to difficulty squaring the first eleven chapters of Genesis—held to be inerrant, as all of Scripture is—with the rest of Genesis, as well as the rest of the Bible. While it cannot be said that the secular scientistic framework is wholly incompatible with certain interpretations of Genesis, such frameworks nonetheless remain stumbling blocks for many Catholics. Too many of us are ill-equipped to deal with how Scripture can be reconciled with evolutionist models that rely on the ideologies of people like Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell.

This means that you’re either approaching Scripture with a Catholic perspective—one informed by and drawing from the rich tradition of the Church and her many Saints, Doctors, and Fathers—or you’re coming at it with the oversimplified dogmas of naturalistic evolution that were supplied to you by your fourth grade science teacher. Either starting point offers a lot of room for leeway; the Church, after all, has never definitively ruled out the possibility of certain tenants of the broadly-evolutionist framework.

We will not know, on this side of death, what prompted God to create what He has. We may not even know on the other side of it, either. The stars and planets above our heads and the world beneath our feet are things each that we can come to understand in their material and formal causes, but never completely in their final causes. Why did God decide to make man? Or even the angels? Why, if He knew ahead of time how great the risk was of rebellion and rejection? We may never know. But He did make them, and He did make us, and He made you reading this unique and distinct from everyone you know. The reality of our existence prompts us to ask what we were born for. The reality of the unpleasantries, hardships, and sufferings to be found in the world prompts us to ask why the world is so unkind and why our beings are so frail. Both questions strike at the heart of our origin: what is the point to living, firstly, and what is the point to suffering, secondly.

The Purpose of This Analysis

This endeavor started because I scratched an itch: “what was Adam like, and who exactly was he?” One thing led to another, and it became clear that attempting to understand Adam required putting him in the context he deserved. As Scripture is appropriately succinct on Adam, his personality, his nature, and the events of his life, I pursued as many avenues I had access to in order to better understand this first man.

The original plan had been to address each of the major Patriarchs in turn: Adam, Seth, Noah, and Abraham, with special one-offs about Enoch, Melchizedek, and Job. Each post would have been somewhat brief and only touched on aspects of their life in order to bring these ancient figures into clearer focus for a contemporary audience. This plan changed as it became clear how gargantuan a task this really is, even for someone who was merely looking to do a cursory, entry-level study.

The antediluvian world is a mysterious place. It’s a period of history that we not only don’t know, it’s one that we can’t know, for reasons that are touched on in part four of this piece. The wickedness of men before the Flood was so great that God willed their destruction by water, going so far as to partially change the shape of the planet. Several theories regarding what the Flood actually was pervade creationist circles, and I avoid going into too much depth on any one of them here, but they all tend to share similar features: the Flood was a global cataclysm, it resulted in the scarring of the Earth, the floodwaters are still visible today, and the world prior to it was so radically different in geography and fauna as to be utterly unrecognizable. This is all, by the way, Scriptural, and not simply things that creationists have agreed on arbitrarily.

In this way, the Flood is an historical brick wall. It’s such a hard reset that secular historians don’t even believe that it happened, satisfying themselves instead with incomplete theories of evolution and inconceivably ancient earths. The evidence for the Flood, which they will insist is beyond the limits of reasonable belief, is in fact right in front of them; accepting it, however, usually entails a moral dimension to accepting creationist claims that the secular mindset is naturally hostile to.

The opaqueness of the antediluvian period thus makes it difficult to ascertain what our earliest patriarchs were like. On one hand, we can rest assured in the understanding that this knowledge is indeed beyond the purview of our curiosity, at least in terms of certainty. On the other, we know they existed as they are recorded in Sacred Scripture, and the mystery that sits between reconciling the incomprehensibility of the antediluvian world with the assurance of its existence is worth speculation.

This project is the first attempt at my own speculation on the subject. It’s an informal study, drawing from a variety of different sources—some admittedly far more credible than others. Despite our earliest Patriarchs being, in a certain sense, utterly mysterious, there is value to be had in attempting an abstract study of their lives. If nothing else, it grants a context to the modern world in a way that a sterile catechesis on the Fall or the Flood may not. My hope here is that others, too, can come to better appreciate both Scripture and practical living by entertaining what I’ve included in this study. The end of all religious study should be, after all, a better development of one’s interior life and more precision in personal prayer.

I offer this with no pretenses as to my status or credentials. I have none. This is the work of a Catholic convert who had access to the internet, to books, and to a word processor, nothing more.

On Reading Genesis

Adam was made, depending on your Biblical chronology, a little over six thousand years ago, at the end of the first week. While there has always been some disagreement between the Church Fathers over the nature of the first week’s chronology—namely how exactly time was measured during that period—several things have always been agreed upon: the events described in the first chapter of Genesis exist to provide both a spiritual account to assist in the development of our own interior lives, and an historic record of the beginning of the world. “All divine scripture is twofold,” St. Augustine reminds us,

in accounts of things done, what one asks is whether they are all to be taken as only having a figurative meaning, or whether they are also to be asserted and defended as a faithful account of what actually happened. No Christian, I mean, will have the nerve to say that they should not be taken in a figurative sense, if he pays attention to what the apostle says: All these things, however, happened among them in figure (1 Cor 10:11), and to his commending what is written in Genesis, And they shall be two in one flesh (Gn 2:24), as a great sacrament in Christ and in the Church (Eph 5:32).³

St. Augustine elucidates a matter of Scriptural interpretation that had been a fundamental part of early Christian and ancient Hebrew tradition since Scriptural writing began. What’s important in his comment here, however, isn’t simply the latter part—that “no Christian … will have the nerve” to suggest that Scripture lacks a “figurative sense”; it’s also that what is literally written is so clearly relevant that it barely warrants mentioning. A ‘literal’ interpretation of Genesis is to be presumed, it’s the default approach, and the saint’s most authoritative work on the subject deals explicitly with this issue.

The USCCB goes a bit further in explaining this:

There are two basic senses of Scripture: the literal sense and the spiritual sense. The literal sense refers to the sense of the words themselves; it is “that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors.”2 It has been variously described as the verbal or grammatical sense, the plain sense, the sense the human author intended, the sense the divine author intended, the historical sense, and even the obvious sense. Underlying these various descriptions is the notion that “the literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture.”3 The literal sense is discovered by careful and attentive study of the biblical text using all interpretive tools available, such as grammatical aids, archaeological evidence, historical and literary analyses, sociological and anthropological studies, and whatever else can be called upon to expand one’s knowledge of the historical and literary context of the text and thereby gain a better understanding of the literal sense of the biblical text.⁴

This same article goes on to explain the other three senses of Scripture, with special emphasis on the spiritual sense—one that’s often called the allegorical sense. It is of tantamount importance, however, to remember that the literal and spiritual senses are completely congruent with one another; something pertaining to a moral lesson cannot be true under a spiritual reading at the expense of what is understood by a literal reading and vice-versa. These are not alternative means of reading Scripture; they are additional means of studying it, like subjecting foreign rock samples to various different and more intensive tests in order to better understand them.

This is, of course, a vast subject all on its own, and not one intended to be covered at any length for the current endeavor. It’s worth touching on just to orient ourselves with relation to what have come to be some of the most controversial parts of the Old Testament: the origin of creation and the making of the first man.

The Church has no standard method of interpreting the first eleven chapters of Genesis, but secular world most certainly does: it’s fundamentally mythological and any truths we can glean from Adam and his progeny are psychological, anthropological, or political in nature. In short, Genesis is about as real or historical as a very popular fairy tale. While no one can both call himself a Catholic and believe this, too many prelates in the public eye hold beliefs that stray dangerously close to such secular nonsense—and too many lay Catholics are in danger of embracing it. Many forget St. Augustine on the matter: “No one, then, forbids us to understand Paradise according to [metaphors], and perhaps other, more appropriate allegorical interpretations, while also believing in the truth of that story as presented to us is a most faithful narrative of events.”⁵

With that said, we will not dwell on the creation of the world here, as rather than the world, our interest is in its first created rational inhabitant: Adam. Nor will we dwell on unsubstantiated hypotheses regarding Adam’s formulation out of some evolutionary line of primates. Although Humani Generis grants Catholics the liberty of believing this theory, it can by no means be used to indicate that it is the official teaching of the Church. It can certainly be said such a belief is very much against the norm of Biblical interpretation, and it can find no support among the commentaries of the Church Fathers—nor indeed, any credible theologian of note all the way up through until about a single century ago. So while it is not within our purposes today to broach the subject of evolution, it’s worth noting that attempts to reconcile Darwin’s belief system with that of Scripture and Tradition creates far more problems than it actually solves.⁶

Sources Used

As far as sources go, this piece will draws primarily from the Church Fathers, with additional input from medieval writers, and excerpts from early-Jewish Midrashic commentary. In particular, I draw heavily from the writings of St. Augustine and the revelations of Blessed Anne Emmerich, and this is for two reasons. In the case of St. Augustine, he wrote the most extensively and in the most detail of all the Church Fathers on the topic of the book of Genesis (while his take on the six day creation cycle is a little controversial, it has little to no bearing on the scope of this piece).

In the case of Blessed Emmerich, her revelations—although not totally authoritative when it comes to history per se—remain a helpful glimpse into a world so distant in time from our own as to be impenetrable even by our imaginations. Where possible, writings from apocrypha—particularly the early-Christian Books of Adam, Book of the Cave of Treasures, and Book of Jubilees—are used to supplement as examples of what the ancient Christian tradition believed around the time of the Incarnation and immediately afterward. It was very often the case that early Christian tradition understandably built off that of the existent Hebrew when it came to stories regarding the ancient past.

It must be made clear, however, and in no uncertain terms, that the apocrypha are not reliable sources of information. They don’t agree with each other, of course, but more importantly, there are occasions where they don’t even agree with Scripture—which, as we know, is inerrant. The reason for including them in this study at all is because they encapsulate some aspect of tradition, elements of which—as will be made clear—survived into the Christian tradition of the Church, despite other errors their texts may have included.

The visions of Blessed Emmerich are generally consistent with these traditions (though not usually the apocryphal texts themselves); however, whether that’s because she was familiar with them herself or because they spoke to particular truths that were revealed to her is beyond my knowledge.

It must not be construed as using apocrypha authoritatively. They do not constitute any aspect of canon within Scripture, and in terms of authority, apocryphal books aren’t in general even worth reading. However, as we know from Enoch, the text of which was (probably) cited briefly in the Epistle of Jude, it can’t be said that all apocrypha is created equal. While the First Book of Enoch is not drawn from here, the aforementioned Books of Adam, Treasures, and Jubilees are used to illustrate what may have been some approximation of the history of the antediluvian patriarchs immediately after the Fall. I default at heart to St. Augustine’s position on apocrypha:

We may, however, leave aside the stories contained in those Scriptures which are called ‘Apocrypha’ because their origin is hidden and was not clear to the fathers from whom the authority of the true Scriptures has come down to by a most certain and known succession. There is, indeed, some truth to be found in these apocryphal Scriptures; but they have no canonical authority because of the many untruths they contain. We cannot, of course, deny that Enoch, the seventh in descent from Adam, wrote a number of things by divine inspiration, since the apostle Jude says so in a canonical epistle. But it was not for nothing that even these were excluded from the canon of the Scriptures which was preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of the priestly succession.⁷

It is in the interest of putting certain specific works of apocrypha into the context of Scripture, the Fathers, and Bl. Emmerich’s private revelation that I have included some of their texts in the scope of this piece. That being said, however, even this is not enough to fully trust any of the apocryphal claims.

Much can be said on this topic that, in the interests of brevity, is not worth going into in this work. The important thing to note is that, where apocrypha is used here, it is by no means used to indicate that apocryphal works are authoritative. They are, at best, possible scenarios of what could have happened, positioned and made sensible with the more authoritative writings of the Church Fathers, approved visionaries, and of course, the inerrant Sacred Scripture.

I have also drawn from contemporary commentary where applicable and necessary, in particular the Jerome Biblical Commentary and the Catholic Introduction to the Old Testament by John Bergsma and Grant Pitre, among others.

A last note: this is not a commentary on Genesis. This project can be considered a look at synthesizing private mystical vision, Church teaching, and ancient mythology, using the works of Bl. Anne Emmerich, St. Augustine, and specific apocrypha as the chief representatives of each component. It’s a broad, informal, and non-specific approach to discerning what is possible to elaborate upon Scripture.

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1Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 556-557.

2Emmerich, Anne, The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, Vol 1, trans. ‘an American Nun’: 1917 (Rockford, TAN Books: 2004), 18.

3Augustine, On Genesis: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2002), 168.

4Viviano, Pauline A., “The Senses of Scripture,” Catechetical Sunday 2008 (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2008), 1.

5Augustine, City of God, 568-569. Emphasis mine.

6Those interested in further reading on the problems with theistic evolution should look into the works of Stephen Meyer, John M. Wynne, and J.P. Moreland, as a start.

7Augustine, City of God, 684.