Jesse Dominick
A few months ago OrthoChristian.com featured an interview on the St. Felix Orthodox Language Courses in Moscow, which offers several levels of language instruction, and an Orthodox Bible Study on the Gospel of John. The group has continued to grow and there arose the demand for a second Bible Study, and thus a study on the book of Genesis is now being offered.
This first introductory lecture attempts to lay some important groundwork before jumping into the actual text of Genesis—what kind of text is it? Why should we study Genesis? How can we study Genesis? How do the Fathers of the Church approach the text? To prepare for this lesson I returned to my class notes and thesis research from St. Tikhon's Seminary, including the copious notes given us by Bp. Michael Dahulich for his "Israel's Origins" class.
Below we offer both the audio and text of the Bible Study:
(MP3 файл. Продолжительность 1:50:26 мин. Размер 63.2 Mb)
It’s a little strange to start Genesis now, because we read Genesis in the services all throughout Great Lent. Lent is over and now we’re starting Genesis, but it's always good to study it because the whole of the Gospel can be found in the book of Genesis in a hidden form. It doesn’t say that Christ died on the Cross and rose again, but everything is there in prophecies and foreshadowings. The book of Genesis is important because it shows us how God intended man to be, it shows us why we’re in the condition we’re in now, and therefore it helps us to understand why we need Christ—what is it that we need to be saved from. The prophecies of Christ begin immediately after the Fall.
Of course God is angry at sin but He doesn’t turn His back on us. He doesn’t cast us aside. As soon as man fell God comes looking for him, and we see that God immediately begins saving us, bringing us back. It helps us to get a picture of the character of God. There’s a common idea among some people in Church history and some people today in other churches, and maybe some Orthodox people, that the God of the Old Testament is just angry and always punishing, and some people even think He’s evil. There were groups called the Gnostics that had elaborate theories with a whole set of gods, and the God of the Old Testament is actually evil, and Jesus is totally different, because He’s so nice. Essentially this heresy is Marcionism. In the early Church there was a heretic named Marcion who wanted to throw out the Old Testament because he couldn’t understand how the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament fit together. So whenever we see this divide between the testaments we call it Marcionism. Yes, God punishes and we see the wrath of God against sin, but also immediately we see that God loves us, even when we fell. God gave usParadise, He gave Adam and Eve communion with Himself, and they chose to throw it away. But He doesn’t throw us away. So we learn about God and ourselves. If you study Genesis and read the Fathers’ commentaries you can basically learn the entirety of the Orthodox faith.
Often you hear people say, especially about the first few chapters of Genesis, that the Church doesn’t have a set understanding—it just tells us that God created us, then we fell, and the Church doesn’t say much else. It’s not so important. But actually, besides the Gospels, Genesis is probably the book that the Church Fathers talked about the most; it seems to me—especially the first chapters. Every Father talks about Paradise and the Fall; it’s the starting point for our spiritual life—it’s the reason for Christ.
Of course there are many different ideas about the book of Genesis. What kind of book is it? What genre does it belong to? Is it poetic? Historical? Mythological? There’s a lot of controversy about these first few chapters that I’m sure you’re aware of, especially concerning Creation and evolution, which hinges on how to interpret the book of Genesis. What kind of book is it? Is it history, is it literal? Is it just figurative? When the Scriptures say God created Adam from the dust and Eve from his rib, is this literal? Did this really happen at some point in history, or do Adam and Eve simply represent all of mankind? Did they borrow from the mythology of the societies around them? Every one of these opinions can be found, even from people within the Church.
I had been a Protestant and I simply always believed that Genesis was literal. I was an Evangelical, and we didn’t believe in evolution or anything like that. But when I was becoming Orthodox I met people who told me that the Church has no hard stance and you don’t have to read it literally. I wanted to be Orthodox and truly think in an Orthodox manner, so I tried to be open to this idea and accept this. But thankfully I came across a book that my friend had—the biography of Fr. Seraphim Rose.[1] Fr. Seraphim himself did a lot of study on the topic of what the Church says about Genesis. He gave lectures and engaged in correspondences about it. In his own lifetime a book never came out, but after his death Fr. Damascene collected all his work into the book Genesis, Creation, and Early Man.[2] In his biography there is a chapter about all of this work, including several quotes from the Church Fathers, and I began to see that actually the Church does have a very precise interpretation of Genesis and actually the Church has said a lot. This is true in a lot of areas of theology nowadays. At least in America this topic is controversial, and about other topics such as what happens to the soul after death, people say, “Oh, the Church doesn’t really have a teaching,” but when you start to read you find out that actually the Church does.[3] God doesn’t leave us clueless.
Genesis as mythology?
One of the main ideas that you will hear about Genesis is that it’s just a Jewish mythology. You can read the Babylonian creation myths, like the book Enuma Elish and supposedly it’s exactly the same. But actually you see elements of these mythologies in Genesis, sometimes in the Psalms, in Isaiah, but it’s because as Moses was writing Genesis God inspired him to write it in such a way that our God, the true God, is shown as greater than these mythologies, that God is not like them. Sometimes in these mythologies you’ll have the idea of sea monsters, and the world being created out of conflict and chaos in the ocean and the gods are fighting with one another. In Genesis we don’t see this—God speaks and it’s created, and the Spirit is over the waters. God creates and there it is. There’s no conflict between gods. Especially the book Enuma Elish had a very political role. The Babylonians used it to justify the role of their empire. They had their god who won out over gods and therefore their empire is the best empire, and therefore there’s a specific way that society is ordered; but again, you don’t see this in the creation story in Genesis. It doesn’t even mention Israel. You can’t say it’s a political book for Israel. There’s nothing about the Temple, there’s nothing about the Law or the sacrifices. None of this is in the creation story. If you read just the creation story and knew nothing about the rest of the Bible you wouldn’t even know it’s a Jewish creation story. You can’t say it has the same role as the mythologies around them.
A scene from the Enuma ElishIt’s also very important that these mythologies often gave a history of the gods, but Genesis is not like that. It just says, In the beginning God created—the presence of God is just assumed. It’s just accepted and doesn’t have to be proved. God did this—of course. He’s there and He created. And He’s shown as all-powerful—He speaks and it comes into being, so He doesn’t have to defeat other gods.
And how do the Scriptures begin? What’s the first sentence? In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. So, in the beginning, God is already there. What does that tell us about God?
Student: He exists always.
Exactly. God has no beginning. When the beginning happens God is already there. He makes the beginning happen, which means He Himself has no beginning. We can’t understand that. He exists outside of time. He never started being. What does that mean? We can’t comprehend it but we just accept it as revelation. Also, there’s an important distinction showing that this is not just mythology—the Hebrew verb saying God created is bara. This verb is only used for God creating. If I took some clay and shaped it into a ball, that’s a different thing. I have formed or fashioned it. But this verb means specifically that God creates, and there was no material already existing that He used. The doctrine that God created out of nothing is called creating ex nihilo, which means out of nothing.
You can contrast this with when God created Adam—He took dirt that already existed and shaped it into Adam, but when God created in the beginning it’s totally different. There was nothing that He used. This is totally radical for the time of the Jews and the Scriptures, and when the Church Fathers come along and reiterated this. These mythologies always have them creating out of something else. In the Enuma Elish, water already existed before earth and man is created from the blood of one of the gods. The Greeks and these myths always have some other thing that exists, and many even believed in eternal matter. There’s God and there’s also this matter that also always existed. In our theology, if something has always existed it’s God. So basically they have made matter into God. But the Scriptures blow this idea out of the water, and the Church Fathers reiterated that, and it seemed totally ridiculous to the societies around them. It shows a completely different God—He’s all-powerful.
But Genesis itself does not say “ex nihilo.” The idea is there—In the beginning God created—and because it’s the beginning you can understand that nothing else was there, so He didn’t form it out of anything else, but it’s not explicitly stated. The first time this is explicitly stated is in the book of Second Maccabees, which is a later Old Testament book, sometimes called inter-Testamental. There was a group of seven Jewish brothers and the king ordered them to eat pork; but they’re Jews, it’s forbidden, and they refuse, so the king starts killing them. And their mother, Solomonia (we commemorate all of them—Solomonia and her seven sons on August 1/14) is watching them die and she’s encouraging them to stand strong in their faith. In 2 Macc. 7:28 she says to them: So I urge you, my child, to look at the sky and the earth. Consider everything you see there, and realize that God made it all from nothing, just as he made the human race. This is the first explicit statement of creation ex nihilo in Scripture. She says this to remind them that we have an all-powerful, omnipotent God; and she continues: Don't be afraid of this butcher. Give up your life willingly and prove yourself worthy of your brothers, so that by God's mercy I may receive you back with them at the resurrection (v. 29). We see here that all of these things are linked together—creation ex nihilo, mercy, and the resurrection.
Student: Was the resurrection already there in the Old Testament?
It’s there prophetically. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection but the Sadducees didn’t. There were different views, but you do see prophecies about it. This verse I just read is from the Old Testament. In the Book of Ezekiel we see the vision of the dry bones, God tells him to command the bones back to life, and he sees muscles and skin come back to the bone and sees the people rise up—and that’s an image of the Resurrection which we read on Holy Saturday. Of course it doesn’t explicitly say that God will become man and die and rise again and therefore at the end of time all of you will be resurrected, but there are hints and foreshadowings, and so the Jews were coming to an idea of it.
Some of these supposedly mythological ideas are there because it shows God triumphing over such gods. In Job you hear about the leviathan and sea monsters, but they’re used as symbols of evil. They’re not other gods. They took imagery from these myths and applied them to Satan, which shows how the Jews were thinking about these other mythologies. As an example, Isaiah 27:1 reads: In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.These are all images of Satan.
Why study Genesis?
No matter how people interpret Genesis, some people say you don’t have to worry about it—just go to Church, say your prayers, and try to be a good person. So why should we study Genesis? Why are we bothering? I’ll read something to you from the book of Fr. Seraphim, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, which I believe is the best book available on this topic. Lots of people like to talk about Genesis and talk about creation and evolution but it soon becomes obvious that they are just giving their opinions, and they don’t really know what they’re talking about. But Fr. Seraphim did the work. He spent years studying this topic and reading the Church Fathers. He was actually the first to translate some of the Patristics in this book into English. He wanted to know what the Church says. And he didn’t just study, but he prayed. It says that through prayer Fr. Seraphim developed a personal relationship with St. Basil the Great, who wrote his own commentary on the six days of creation, which is highly esteemed in the Church.[4] Fr. Seraphim put in the effort to find the true teaching, and so I believe this is the best book you can read on this topic.
On the question of why to study the book of Genesis Fr. Seraphim says: “As we have said, there is a direct relation between how you behave and how you believe about man’s origin.” Where are we going? How should we act? He goes on to quote Fr. George Calciu, who was imprisoned in Romanian gulags and suffered for Orthodoxy for preaching the Orthodox faith to students who came to see him. In one of these talks he said: “You have been told that you descend from the apes, that you are a beast that must be trained.”[5] He’s saying there’s a very powerful idea that science proves that we’re just animals and therefore you can act like an animal. You should train yourself, but really you’re just an animal. In my experience, even if people don’t act this way completely, they really do believe this. I’ve met people who are not Christians specifically because they believe in evolution, because they believe they’re just animals and these two can’t be harmonized. I agree that they can’t be harmonized, but they’ve chosen the wrong side to unite with. They believe man is nothing more than an animal who somehow got lucky and is able to talk, but other than that we’re just animals. St. Barsanuphius of Optina said the same thing—that the English philosopher Charles Darwin created a system in which man is nothing more than a beast. He called it a bestial philosophy, and therefore people who believe it will treat each other like beasts—they will kill, they will torture, they will blow up churches.[6] I don’t know that St. Barsanuphius was making a specific prophecy, but look at the twentieth century. Nazism and Communism were very favorable towards evolution. Here in Russia it was an official state teaching. Some of the New Martyrs were martyred, at least in part, because they refused to teach evolution but rather preached from the Scriptures.[7] These systems killed innumerable people, so St. Barsanuphius was completely right, and Fr. George himself suffered. He knew what he was talking about.
Fr. George Calciu (left) with Elder Justin Parvu (right)
Student: Evolution can be in some way true because even some theologians say that the ideas can be found in the Bible—that creation occurred stage after stage. So the idea is good, but not the message.
Well, the question is—can you really separate the message from the idea?
Student: You said that when people believe in evolution they think that humans are animals, but this idea should be separated from the theory.
Yes, there are many people who believe there are ways to put the Scripture and evolution together and there are various theories about how to do that. For example here in Russia you have Dcn. Andrei Kuraev. We’ll discuss this as we go on. I don’t think they can be harmonized and there is a very important reason. There are many reasons, but one very important and strong one especially, but we’ll get there.
So why study Genesis? Because it tells us who we are. Patriarch Alexey II said if you want to believe that you come from an ape, okay, go ahead and believe that, but don’t push it on other people. We should teach our children that they are the creation of God and that this will only increase their self-understanding—not to make them proud, but they’ll understand how they really are and how they should behave.[8] We’re not just beasts. We are specifically created by God and actually man is the summit of creation. Nothing created is greater than man. Between us and the animals is a huge chasm. Yes, we’re both physical, but man is also spiritual. That’s not a product of evolution. Man has a soul, so you can’t say that man as he is came about by evolution.
On interpreting Genesis
So we’ve talked about why we study it, and what kind of book is it. But Scripture always has many layers to it. We don’t have to ask, “Is Genesis literal or is it figurative?” Scripture is both. The problem comes when you want to choose one or the other. There are many theories out there, but for instance maybe there’s some Protestant Fundamentalists who only read Genesis literally. They say the six days are literal, God created out of the dust, and they don’t’ know how to penetrate to a deeper level because they don’t have Tradition. So when someone else says “No, Genesis is figurative or symbolic,” they get angry. I don’t have specific people in mind, this is just a hypothetical. But the opposite is a problem as well, when we say “No, Genesis is only symbolic and it’s not literal.” There are people like this both within and without the Church. A lot of people say “the Protestants believe Genesis is literal, so we can’t believe Genesis is literal. We’re not Protestants!” but this is just the opposite error. We don’t define ourselves by not being those other people. The Orthodox Church existed before the Protestant churches so we already have our beliefs. We don’t need to form them in reaction to somebody else. To put levels of meaning at odds with each other is not Orthodox, at least generally. Of course Christ told parables and we know they’re stories. We don’t have to believe there’s really a man who sent his servants and his sons to collect the harvest and they killed them. That’s clearly an allegory. But in general we don’t have to pit these levels of interpretation against one another. This is a problem with evolution. It has to reject the literal interpretation of Scripture. You have to say Adam is just a symbol of mankind, the days aren’t days, that there wasn’t ever a Paradise because death always existed in the world. At least all of the theories that I’m aware of have to reject the literal interpretation of Scripture, and the Fathers never did this. I’m not aware of a single Father anywhere in the Church who would reject the literal interpretation or the historical interpretation of Scripture.
This is true no matter where in the Church. There’s a common idea that has some truth to it, that the Fathers from Antioch were more literal and the Fathers from Alexandria preferred allegory and to read symbolically. Sometimes these two schools are pitted against each other, but no matter which Fathers you read—from Antioch, or Alexandria, or even from the Western Church, they all emphasize that the Scriptures are indeed historical.
St. Cyril of Alexandria, from the Alexandrian school where they love allegory, says: “Those who reject the historical meaning in the God-inspired Scriptures as something obsolete are avoiding the ability to apprehend rightly, according to the proper manner, the things written in them.”[9] If you reject the historical meaning of the Scriptures, you are rejecting the proper interpretation. By doing so you give up the ability to know properly what the Scriptures mean. There’s one from the Alexandrian school. In a book on Genesis, St. Augustine in the West says that he who can interpret it wholly literally is the most admirable interpreter of Genesis. If you can do it all literally, you’re wonderful![10] Several other Fathers specifically said it is dangerous to reject history. This is God speaking to you. He’s giving you this history. They went so far as to say it’s dangerous to not talk about the history and to reject it.[11]
Of course we see many layers in Scripture. It’s not only literal. There’s much more to it. Fr. Seraphim gives a very good example of this. When he is giving general principles for understanding Genesis and speaks about not placing different levels of interpretation against each other, he quotes from St. Macarius the Great talking about when Adam and Eve sinned and God kicked them out of the Garden and placed there an angel with a flaming sword. This seems like something that could be maybe hard to believe. Was there really an angel standing there with a flaming sword? Certain passages are more “normal”—Adam and Eve walked in the Garden and ate some fruit. That’s normal enough, but now there’s an angel with a flaming sword! That could easily be interpreted not historically. You could say it has to mean something else. St. Macarius says it means that in the heart of every person we have lost Paradise. In our heart we are blocked from Paradise until baptism. But, he says, that doesn’t mean it didn’t historically happen as well. There really was an angel standing there and he was holding a sword.[12] There really was a Paradise first of all. There really was a gate.
St. Anastasius of SinaiEven though the saints can see these deeper meanings and open them up to us, they never say, “Therefore the common level is not necessary.” St. Anastasius of Sinai, also from this allegorical Alexandrian school, wrote his own hexaemeron, or commentary on the six days of creation, and it’s highly symbolic and allegorical. Sometimes I had trouble following him. But, every few pages he would stop and say “Now remember, by giving you all these symbols, I’m not rejecting the historical meaning.”[13] No matter how deep the Fathers plumb the Scriptures they never discarded the surface level. Adam is a symbol of all of mankind, but in order for him to actually be a symbol of all of mankind, he has to actually exist. There has to be something that the symbol is grounded in.[14]Why is Adam the symbol of all mankind? Because he’s the first man. The symbol is grounded; it’s not just made up. They didn’t just decide to invent a character named Adam and say, “He means this, and he means that.” No, God actually works in history in such a way that history itself has meaning. This is God actually acting in history. He’s not just telling us nice stories.
The Fathers and science
A good thing to keep in mind about reading the Scriptures and the Fathers on Genesis, who lived 1500, 1600 years ago, is that we know more about science than they did, so we don’t have to accept every single word that the Fathers said. Sometimes they used examples from the science of their day to explain something in Scripture, but we understand that those are simply examples meant to illumine the people. The images that they’re using are not the dogma that they’re teaching. For example, St. Clement of Rome in the first century was trying to explain the Resurrection to people and he called to mind the phoenix—this fiery bird that habitually dies and rises from the ashes—as an example of resurrection.[15] It doesn’t matter that the phoenix is not real, because he’s not teaching us the phoenix. He’s just using a well-known image to teach the Resurrection. It’s important that these finer points of science are not what the Fathers are trying to teach but it’s what they’re using to help the people understand. Christ Himself uses the example of a mustard seed and says it’s the smallest seed in the world. But nowadays we know there is a seed that’s smaller than the mustard seed, but it doesn’t matter, because the people of that time didn’t know about that seed. It would have been meaningless, so Christ used what they knew. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t completely factually true because it accomplished His task.
St. Anastasius of Sinai and St. Basil and St. Augustine all state that the revolutions of the planets, the weight of the planets, and all these things that astronomers, for example, love to get into are not the teachings of the Church. The Church does not care about these things.[16] They can be used as a tool but it’s not what the Church teaches. This is an important point because people love to say that the Fathers were just interpreting Scripture according to the science of their day, and because we know that the science of their day was not correct, we don’t have to listen to the Fathers when they talk about cosmology and when they talk about creation. They were primitive and going off of a primitive science. But the Fathers themselves are saying, “No, we’re not talking about science here. We’re giving you what the Church teaches. We’re giving you theology. It’s not science. We’re just using the science as a tool to help explain it to you.” It’s the same with philosophy. The saints are not philosophers; they just use it as a tool. They used certain terms and ideas from philosophy, because that’s what people knew, but they made them Christian. We could say they baptized these elements. The Fathers were some of the most educated people of their time. They knew science, but because their science was more primitive doesn’t mean we can disregard them.
Fr. Zacharias from Essex—the monastery that Fr. Sophrony founded—talks about science. He says that a lot of scientific progress was made by medieval western monks. A lot of the progress that was made was a result of the despondency of monks. He says the work of a monk is not to be doing science. It’s not bad to do science, but it’s not the work of a monk. His work is to pray and repent and attract the grace of God to share it with others. The reason they were able to progress so much in science is because they weren’t doing the real work of a monk.[17] This is not to say that science is bad, but it’s interesting that so much progress was made by religious people doing science instead of theology.
So when the Fathers are teaching about Genesis they’re not teaching from the science of their day. And actually the science of their day contradicts what they say. As we said, a lot of the Greeks believed that matter was eternal but the Fathers don’t say that. They say there’s a specific point at which God created, and time is linear. The Greeks believed in a cycle of time. Things would always come back around on themselves. We’ll see that what the Fathers were teaching is not what the philosophers were teaching. St. Basil wrote his Hexaemeron, and he’s the most respected interpreter of creation in the Church, and in it he talks about what others teach, but he says, “Let’s forget all that, and come back to the teaching of the Church.” He’s emphasizing that this isn’t his opinion. This isn’t from secular society. This is what the Church says. As a saint he’s not going to make stuff up. Especially as a bishop his job is to teach the faith; and that’s what he did.
You can see this in the book of Exodus. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible written by Moses, was given to him on Mt. Sinai when he spoke to God. And it says that God spoke to Moses in a certain way—face-to-face as a man speaks to a friend. As I’m speaking to you, God spoke to Moses. He spoke to Moses plainly, not in dark riddles.[18] Based on these verses, the Fathers say, “Then, when it says a garden was planted, it means a garden was planted. And when it says four rivers, it means there were four rivers.” In the early Church, especially with the Gnostics and some other groups, people were always looking for deeper spiritual meanings to everything, but only spiritual meanings, which as we have said is a problem. But the Fathers said that God spoke to Moses face-to-face, so understand the words as they are written, as St. Basil says.[19] When it says the animals were brought to Adam so he could name them, it means the animals were brought to Adam so he could name them, and just accept it. St. John Chrysostom says if anyone tries to tell you some other interpretation, some other lofty grand allegorical interpretation, plug up your ears and don’t listen to them.[20] Basically they’re trying to make themselves wiser than Scripture as St. Basil says.[21] Just stop listening to them.
God speaking to Moses from the Burning Bush
Origen was a great teacher in the early Church, but when it comes to creation he had a lot of whacky ideas. He brought in too much paganism. He believed that man being created with physical bodies is a result of pre-eternal souls ceasing to contemplate God and so they fell into a material existence. We don’t believe that of course. Origen had many good things to say, but on Genesis he had a lot of weird things to say. St. John of Damascus talks about the same thing as St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, and says don’t get too crazy with these allegorical theories as did Origen with his mad “ravings.”[22] Origen was actually anathematized by the Church, which is beyond excommunication, meaning you are out of the Church for good. Origen was anathematized because his ideas on creation were too crazy. Allegory and symbolism are good, but keep it within the bounds of the Church.
Scientific theories can go into great detail, whereas the Scriptural accounts of creation don’t seem to have that much detail. God spoke and there was Adam and not much more detail is given. Therefore people say you can’t take this literally because God spoke to them in simple, primitive terms they could understand. One of the common things you always hear is that God said that He created in six days because the Jews could not have understood longer periods of time. They had a cycle of six days and a day of rest and that’s what they understood, so if God had spoken about billions of years they simply would not have comprehended. But this idea that ancient people couldn’t understand anything just seems ridiculous. In the book The City of God by St. Augustine he talks about how the early Christians didn’t just believe anything you told them. They would actually research and verify it. These were people nearly 2000 years ago. Just because they lived before us doesn’t mean they were stupid and gullible, or they’re all just superstitious and they’ll believe anything. They wanted to know truth, and I think we can say the same thing about the Jews of the Old Testament. And also, you can read the verse Gen. 24:60: And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. “From you will come thousands of millions of people.” Obviously the Jews can understand big numbers. They’re not stupid, as if big numbers confuse them, so God had to pretend He did it all in six days.
Theology and Science
There’s also the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, which means you have theology here, and you have science there, and they don’t communicate with each other. It doesn’t matter what you believe about science, it doesn’t have to affect your theology, and vice versa. Just keep them separate. A lot of people believe this. I was very disappointed to find a video on YouTube where even Met. Kallistos Ware espouses this view.[23] He doesn’t specifically say “non-overlapping magisteria,” but he basically gives the idea. In our Scriptures we talk about the creation of the earth, the creation of man, what man’s nature is like—he was created, he fell, there was a change—what is his body like, what is the purpose of his body? Obviously all of these overlap with science. We believe that God Himself entered physical creation and took on a body. That obviously has implications for the physical world. Man himself in his soul, and also in his body, is meant to contain grace. The purpose of man’s body is to possess grace, so scientists cannot fully comprehend even the body of man, because they don’t understand grace. Of course they can if they’re also faithful Orthodox.
St. Maximus the Confessor, reknowned for his theological cosmologyEverything that exists in creation pre-existed in the mind of God. Many Fathers teach this but especially St. Maximus the Confessor[24] is known for this. There are logoi of creation. The Logos, or Word, is Jesus Christ. In the Gospel of John when it says In the beginning was the Word, it says In the beginning was the Logos, which means “word,” “rationality,” “reason.” It’s the thing that gives purpose and shape and meaning to creation. And every individual thing has its logos which defines it. For instance, there’s a logos of humanity—that is, the idea of what it means to be man existed in the mind of God from before all time, and every physical thing has its pattern or idea in the mind of God. To say that theology and science shouldn’t overlap is not an Orthodox idea. It’s impossible, because everything that science studies has its original idea in the mind of God. This is also different from philosophy in that they had the idea of the Forms or Ideas. There are many tables here, but somewhere there is a realm of the Ideas and there is the ultimate Table that defines what it means to be table. You could say the philosophers had a bit of a good idea, but the Church says there is no realm of Ideas where there’s some original Table—the ideas of all these things were all existing in the mind of God. Of course, animals, for instance, did not exist until God actually created them, but the idea was there.
Genesis says that God brought all the animals before Adam and he named them. He didn’t just pick nice names that he liked. He understood these logoi-ideas in the mind of God because he had not sinned yet, because he was full of grace, because he was still living according to what God intended for him. He could look at them and have some understanding of the idea that God had of them, and he named them according to that.
So the idea that science and theology don’t overlap is ridiculous. Death is biological, but also the Church obviously teaches us why things die, so clearly these things overlap.
Student: Maybe I missed this topic, but do you agree that the creation of the world was in a literal week? Some priests believe that these days were not twenty-four hours, but maybe a million years or something like that.
We did talk a little bit about that, but we’ll talk more about it when we come to the verses about the evenings and the mornings making up a day, but the principle that the Fathers use here is that God spoke plainly to Moses. So when He said “days,” He meant days. The only Father that I’m aware of who said that they were not literal days is St. Augustine, and he actually thought the whole creation week was just one instantaneous moment.[25] So that’s also not compatible with evolution.
Student: These priests want to reconcile science and theology and that the world is billions of years old, and there are other priests that don’t believe that he world is so old. But maybe there were stages.
There are lots of people who say that the days are symbolic of stages. We’ll talk about that. The desire to harmonize science and theology is a good desire. Of course science is not bad—it just depends on how you use it. If something in theology is true, then it has to harmonize with something in science that is true. Truth can’t contradict truth. All truth is a reflection of Christ. If something in theology and science do contradict then either theology is wrong, or science is wrong, or they’re both wrong, and we have to figure out which. And the question is which do you trust more? If the Fathers say a day means this, and every scientists says a day means that, who are you going to trust? I guess it’s a personal decision, but really it’s not. If you’re Orthodox you don’t really have a choice. Being Orthodox means accepting what the Church says. The question is discerning if the Church really says something about it. As we said, a lot of people think the Church doesn’t say much about Genesis, but it actually says a lot.
How to "investigate" Creation
Here is an important question, that to study Genesis you have to understand: how can we know about the creation of the world and the time when Adam was first created and about their lives in the Garden before the Fall? Obviously we’re not living in Paradise and it’s something we’ve never experienced. So how can we know about it?
Student: Spiritual people can achieve a state when they can see God’s will and that’s why they can know about it.
Exactly. You’re completely right. When God spoke to Moses, He didn’t just speak to Moses. God actually showed him in a prophetic vision. St. John Chrysostom says that Moses is unique in the Scriptures in that all of the prophets speak of what’s to come, or with a message of repentance. In the book of Revelation St. John is seeing the future. But only Moses sees the past. He’s a prophet of the past.[26] I saw one icon from an old Bible manuscript with Moses sitting in the Garden of Eden writing the book of Genesis. I’m not necessarily saying Moses was actually transported to the Garden and wrote there, but he actually saw it and was there in spiritual experience. This is a completely different thing than philosophy or scientific research looking at the surface of things and trying to understand. This is just God saying, “Here’s what I did.” Several Fathers specifically say that Moses actually saw it. And how do they know that Moses saw it?
Student: After the forty days of talking to God Moses was surrounded by light.
Well, you could say he had the light because he was in the presence of God, but nowhere in the Scripture, as far as I’m aware, does Moses say God showed him the creation of the world. But the Fathers say Moses saw it. How do they know he saw it?
Student: I agree with she said earlier. They achieved a stage of spiritual communication with God and so they understand much more and so they somehow knew.
You’re right that it’s because they attained a certain spiritual stage, but we can say even further, that they knew that Moses saw creation because they also saw creation. It wasn’t just that they became holy and God told them that He showed creation to Moses. It’s that He showed them too, and they saw the same thing that Moses had written. St. Isaac the Syrian in the seventh century has a bookThe Ascetical Homilies which basically every monastic loves, such as St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain. In it he talks about those who have attained spiritual heights, and he says “And from this one is already exalted in his mind to that which preceded the (making) of the world, where there was no creature, no heaven, no earth, no angels, nothing of that which was brought into being, and to how God, solely by His good will, suddenly brought everything from non-being into being, and everything stood before Him in perfection.”[27] So he’s saying that holy people reach a point where God shows them creation. St. Anastasius of Sinai also says it.[28] St. Gregory of Sinai talks about the eight visions of ascetics and one of them is the composition of visible things.[29] The former abbot ofVatopaidi on Mt. Athos reposed in 2009—seven years ago, and I’ve heard from various people that have been to Vatopaidi that this Elder Joseph also saw creation, so this is something that’s still happening. And they say he saw it precisely as Moses had written it.[30] There was no difference. This is why the saints know that Moses had a vision—they had the same vision and it was corroborated.
The reason that this is the way we know about Genesis is because of the Fall. The Fall is a barrier that stops science and philosophy. They can go back that far, but they can’t go to the other side. The Church teaches us that the world was a paradise—there was no death, no corruption, no sin, and no pain. This is a totally different experience than we can understand, and we can’t investigate this with our own minds. It has to come from revelation. Fr. John Romanides says this: philosophers and scientists confuse themselves. They think that the Fall of the world is actually the creation of the world, because that’s as far back as they can go. They don’t know it’s the Fall because they don’t have Tradition, so they think it’s the beginning.[31] So to talk about the acts of God and especially the creation of the world we have to look to Divine revelation.
Countless Church Fathers say this. St. Barsanuphius of Optina was standing on a balcony with some disciples and he points to the moon and says look how glorious the moon is, this wonderful creation of God. But even the glory that it has now is nothing compared to the glory it had before the Fall. Even something like the moon is totally different now. We don’t know what it was like.[32]Only God can show us. This is a fundamental point—when we want to know about creation and the time before the Fall we have to go to revelation. As I can understand it, any scientific theory that tries to tell you about the time before man is denying this whole idea. It’s assuming that the world has always been as it is now. To date a rock you do so by measuring the corruption of elements within that rock. But there was no corruption. These things didn’t happen before the Fall. So in order to do this and talk about the time before the Fall you’re already saying there is no such thing as the Fall. There’s no other way to even begin to pretend to study this time, scientifically or philosophically. Earlier we talked about when the two seemingly contradict which do you trust? The Church teaches us that you have to listen to the saints—there is no other option.[33] Science can’t do it.
Genesis Chapter 1
Let’s now begin reading some Genesis. Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
We’ve already talked about a good bit of this, but there’s a lot just in this one verse. We hear this verse all the time so it probably seems commonplace to us. But when St. Basil was preaching to his people about these first chapters of Genesis he says this, and I think this is a good attitude for us to have: “What ear is worthy to hear such a tale? How earnestly the soul should prepare itself to receive such high lessons! How pure it should be from carnal affections, how unclouded by worldly disquietudes, how active and ardent in its researches, how eager to find in its surroundings an idea of God which may be worthy of Him!”[34] For someone like a great saint like St. Basil this verse was mind-blowing. He stood in awe before God just from this one verse. He says the soul must be pure from carnal affections, or at least we should be trying for that. This is another reason why we have to read the saints—because they were pure from carnal affections. To see spiritual realities you have to remove yourself from sinful, worldly realities. The Scriptures were written under the inspiration of God and for us to understand them we also have to be under the inspiration of God. We have to try to be on the same level as the saints to have the same understanding as them. And if we’re not on the same level of the saints we should at least trust them. St. Gregory Palamas talks about three kinds of theologians. There are the saints who spoke to God face-to-face like Moses. That’s the height of theology—seeing God and understanding. The second level is someone who hasn’t seen God but trusts those who have. I haven’t seen God, but I trust St. Basil because he has seen God. And the third level is those who have had no vision for themselves and they don’t trust those who have had such visions.[35]
Student: They are not theologians.
Exactly! They are theologians in the sense that they write about theology, but they’re not theologians. We have such people in the Church. I’m not saying they are bad people or they’re trying to go against the saints, but nevertheless some people are.
Student: So they don’t believe what the saints say?
A lot of people like to dismiss what the Fathers said about Genesis because they weren’t scientists and they lived two thousand years ago so their science was primitive. So they’re dismissing the idea that he saints were speaking spiritually; they’re dismissing the idea that they were writing what God showed them. I don’t think they’re malicious people; they just, for whatever reason, don’t have this idea.
We talked about before what kind of text Genesis is and people often say it’s not a science textbook, so I don’t have to read it as science! And yes, it’s not a science textbook. As I said before the Fathers said the Church didn’t care about these kinds of things. But it’s funny to me—the people who often say Genesis is not a science textbook then interpret Genesis according to what the scientists tell them. If it’s not as science textbook why are you asking scientists what it means? It doesn’t make sense! It’s completely contradictory. When people say that I say, “Yes, therefore let the saints tell you what it means.” Of course it has science in it, but that’s not the purpose. So we all agree it’s not a science book—so therefore don’t ask a scientists what it means!
Time and eternity
In the beginning: We talked about this a little, but this means the beginning of time itself. It begins then and there. Time itself is not eternal but rather is created by God. The philosophers of their day and some Christians today can’t hold this. It’s impossible to comprehend that God is time-less. We don’t like things that we can’t comprehend so we try to change them so that we can comprehend them. It doesn’t even mean unending time. It’s completely different from that. We just have to accept it. What does it mean to be outside of time? Who knows? Time itself has a beginning and God is already there, so He’s before all time, and is the Master of time. He’s totally different than the pagan and mythological gods, and He’s not just a local god. He is the God of everything. He created the heaven and the earth, not just part of it, and He used no pre-existing matter, because this is the beginning. So people ask then, “What was happening before this?” Of course God always existed, but even to say He exists is not totally right—we “exist” and God just is. People ask, “What was He doing?” but even asking what He was doing implies a succession of time.
Student: Time exists only with material. When there is life there is beginning and end. When there is no beginning and no end there is no time. Time and death are attributes of the material world after the Fall. This is how I see it.
I think your basic idea of time is right. People like St. Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Maximus the Confessor, some of the deepest theologians we have, say that time is the measurement of sensible visible creation.[36] Time is the measurement of change. Everything came into existence via a change. There was nothing and now there’s something—that’s already a change. But God is changeless.Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever; and in Him is no shadow of turning.[37]
Student: So eternity is not about time—there is no beginning and no ending. It’s different.
The term “eternity” is something to talk about as well, as it can have different meanings. We can say that God exists in eternity, or I think a better term is that God is pre-eternal, or that He is everlasting. “Eternity” can sometimes mean the timelessness of God, or it can mean the “time” that the angels live in, which is not God’s time and is not our time. Obviously God created the angelic world as well. If you apply the term “eternity” to the angels, then we also have to say that eternity is something created, and so God is pre-eternal. I’ll use “eternity” as the angel’s time, so angels are eternal, and God is pre-eternal, so as not to be confused. But understand that in this sense eternity is also created.
We see that God created the heaven and the earth, and here the heaven basically means the sky, the atmosphere. It’s not heaven as in “Our Father Who art in Heaven.” The creation account says nothing about the creation of the angels, so the question is when? St. John says there are different ideas about this. He notes that St. Gregory the Theologian says that even before this day one the angels were already created. So the beginning is the beginning of our time but the angels are already existing. But St. John says that others say the angels were created at some point during the six days. It doesn’t really matter, but he says all saints agree that the angels were created before man. Obviously on the day that man is created the serpent is there in the Garden, who is a fallen angel. So at some point before man the angels were created.
St. Maximus talks about how time keeps going on in succession but for the angels there isn’t succession, but there’s some sense of time—they made their choice to follow God or not, but for some reason after that their will is set. It’s hard to comprehend, but St. Maximus says: “for eternity is time when it stops moving, and time is eternity when it is measured as it is borne by movement, so that I arrive at the all-embracing definition of eternity as being time deprived of movement, and time as eternity measured by movement.”[38] It’s clear that eternity itself is a creation and is somehow different from our time. The angels exist differently. They had the ability to change but now they can’t anymore—that is, they can’t repent. Change for them is done. I guess they can grow closer to or farther from God but they can’t change direction. The fallen angels can’t repent and the angels can’t sin now, whereas we always have this opportunity. Man falls and gets up, falls and gets up, falls and gets up. The angels fell once and that’s it. There’s some kind of difference.
There’s a lot here that just this first verse leads us to talk about. St. John says that he agrees with the idea of St. Gregory of the Theologian that the angels were created before everything else.
There are many commentaries of the Fathers that you should read. I just read this verse, and I move onto the next verse, but the Fathers find so much meaning. You should read St. Basil’sHexaemeron which means commentary on the six days, St. Ambrose of Milan’s Hexaemeron, and St. Ephraim the Syrian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, the Venerable Bede, and many others, all have commentaries on creation that are very useful.
So, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. He speaks and it’s done. The Fathers say here God creates instantaneously.[39] This reveals to them the omnipotence of God. There is no delay. And it’s interesting that some of the Fathers seem to even be arguing against a primitive idea of evolution. St. Ambrose of Milan says that this creation of earth didn’t come about through a slow concourse of atoms.[40] Stuff swirling around didn’t slowly come together over billions of years. God said it and it happened and that was it. So the idea that creation happened slowly already existed and the saints rejected it. St. Gregory of Nyssa said the idea that God created slowly is denying His power.[41] Why do you think He created slowly? He’s God! Stuff doesn’t respond to His word? He said it and it happens. This is important. It’s not just this first day. God speaks on six days, and each one is instantaneous. God says “Let there be plants,” and the Fathers says He didn’t create a seed that eventually became a tree, but rather, He created a tree. “Let there be trees,” and there’s a tree. So that tree is one second old but has the appearance of what we would call a mature tree. Everything happened instantaneously already in maturity. Adam and Eve were walking, talking, adults. He didn’t’ create fetuses. Everything God creates is instantaneous and mature and He can call it good. He’s not waiting for it to become good, to fulfill His purpose.
On the days of creation
Student: It’s not about time as we know it, I think.
This has brought up several times, so we’ll jump ahead a few verses. Verse 5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. This is from the Hebrew. In the Greek it says and the evening and the morning were one day. St. Basil and many others, such as St. Hippolytus of Rome before him, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory Palamas, and others ask why it says evening and morning were one day, and then after that it says second day, third day … They ask why it doesn’t say first day, but rather one day?[42] St. Basil says that God was specifically defining what a day is. Evening and morning make one day. Evening is first and then morning. What does that remind you of?
Student: It’s like the Church services.
The liturgical day begins at Vespers, in the evening. The Jews worshiped this way. The Church does it this way because God created this way.
So why does it say one day? St. Basil: “Why does Scripture say ‘one day the first day’? Before speaking to us of the second, the third, and the fourth days, would it not have been more natural to call that one the first which began the series? If it therefore says ‘one day,’ it is from a wish to determine the measure of day and night, and to combine the time that they contain. Now twenty-four hours fill up the space of one day—we mean of a day and of a night … It is as though it said: twenty-four hours measure the space of a day, or that, in reality a day is the time that the heavens starting from one point take to return there … But must we believe in a mysterious reason for this? God who made the nature of time measured it out and determined it by intervals of days; and, wishing to give it a week as a measure, he ordered the week to revolve from period to period upon itself,”[43] This is how we order our days—week after week. St. Basil says it’s just as if Genesis is saying that twenty-four hours measure the space of a day. According to St. Basil and many before and after him, then entire purpose of why it says one day is to say that this day is the model for all other days, if time itself is a measurement of visible realities that change, that began from the moment of creation. Change itself didn’t’ begin at the Fall, but rather change towards corruption began at the Fall. But even before that Adam and Eve could have grown even closer to God. The animals coming up out of the sea is succession—movement of time.
St. Basil the GreatThere was a man named Eunomius in the fourth century who espoused a later version of Arianism which taught that Jesus is not God, but rather is a creation. Arianism was defeated at the First Council. Eunomius came around fifty years later with a slightly different version, but he’s still an Arian. But he had the idea that time is the measurement of the movement of heavenly bodies. We measure by the sun. Eunomius says therefore that’s what time is. But St. Basil in a work called Against Eunomius mocks him. It’s fun when the Fathers talk about heretics and sometimes they make fun of them. He said basically, “Ok, you master of time! You understand so well. So what will you say about the first three days?” The sun is created on the fourth day. “Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants, what will you say about the first three days? Are you going to say they’re not time?!”[44] So he’s basically saying that the idea that for time to exist it’s necessary to have the sun is not true. Time existed already. A lot of people say the days can’t be literal because there was no sun. Origen says this, but St. Basil says “No.” The sun is our tool to measure but it’s not the origin of time. God is the origin of time. St. Leo the Great, the Pope of Rome also says this.[45] St. Ephraim the Syrian even says it’s impermissible—impermissible to interpret the days as anything other than twenty-four hours.[46]He says the dark lasted for twelve hours, then the light lasted for twelve hours, then the next day came. So this span of time of twenty-four hours is the model that God has given us from this first day. St. Basil specifically said twenty-four hours, and he’s not the only one.
St. Basil talks about the importance of this first day. Some people get confused by what he says, because “day” can mean many things. “Day” doesn’t only mean twenty-four hours of course. You could say that in the days of the Tsars Russians lived differently. They drank from samovars. Here it means the period of the Tsars. Scriptures often talk about the day of the Lord which can be when Christ came to earth and died—He speaks of that as His time. But the Day of the Lord is eschatological, when Christ will return and usher in eternity. That’s the Day of the Lord. St. Basil talks about these different meanings of the word “day.” I’ve seen people on forums online say that St. Basil is saying “day” means age or long span of time, an eon. But then I went and read that passage and it’s clear that St. Basil is given this meaning of “day” specifically as an example of what Genesis is not saying. But he does say that because this first day becomes the model for all other days, it therefore is a symbol of eternity, as eternity is time without movement, however we can understand that. Perhaps if we were forever in that first day that would be eternity. Basically this first day becomes the model and so it has a place of prominence and the symbolic value of representing eternity. It can be a symbol of the Lord’s Day at the end of time, but it’s not literally an eon. But again, these levels of interpretation don’t have to contradict. But in order to say it represents an age, you can’t say therefore it’s not a day. It’s symbolic value in grounded in its real value as a day. St. Basil talked about this in his second homily on the Hexaemeron. St. Symeon the New Theologian also talks about it.[47]
We’ll see this about the other days as well. The Fathers are measuring time from the beginning, not from the Fall. The Church has its own calendar called the Byzantine Creation Era. The Church developed it in the seventh century and it was the calendar of the Church and of the empire, and in Russia. Actually it was Peter the Great who changed this. Now we say it’s the year 2016. Before Peter the Great we would have said it’s the year 7524 from the creation of the world. Not from the Fall, but from the creation. You can still find this calendar in use; I’ve seen it in various places. Fr. Seraphim’s monastery puts out a calendar every year and it always has this date from the creation of the world. Time in the Church has always been measured from the creation of the world.
As I said, you should read Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, and also there is an organization here in Moscow called Shestodnev,[48] meaning six days, started by Fr. Konstantin Bufeev. Basically he had a parishioner who was in an Orthodox school and wrote a paper about creation according to the Church Fathers and the teacher failed her. Fr. Konstantin thought that if even in an Orthodox school you fail for following the Fathers then this is a problem. He’s also a doctor of geology and mineralogy. So he’s a scientist and a priest and he started this foundation which is dedicated to teaching the Church’s teaching on creation and one of his main inspirations is Fr. Seraphim. Before his martyrdom Fr. Daniel Sysoev was the secretary for this organization, and it was created with the blessing of Patriarch Alexei II. Not everyone agrees with them, but it has the blessing of the patriarch, Fr. Daniel—in my mind these are good credentials. If you want to know more, look up his organization.
Fr. Seraphim’s book was first published in 2000, and this is a new edition in 2011. I don’t think the new edition has been printed in Russian. But the new edition has a great appendix that gives quotes from other modern saints and elders of the twentieth century and what they say about evolution. Especially in America there are a good number of people who think that Fr. Seraphim is crazy. He’s a Creationist so he must be a Protestant! So this appendix has people like St. Nicholai Velimirovich, St. John of Kronstadt, St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain—everybody loves these people. No one thinks they’re crazy. But it shows that Fr. Seraphim actually taught the same thing as them.
[1] Fr. Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works by Igumen Damascene (Christensen), available from St. Herman Press.
[3] St. Ignatius Brianchanninov himself discovered the very precise teachings of the Church when researching on Heaven and Hell, angels, and the life of the soul after death.
[5] p. 107.
[7] For instance, a witness testified about the “anti-Soviet” views of the Hieromartyr St. Paul Andreyev: “The priest Andreyev … said that the Soviet authorities preach the teaching of Darwin, that man proceeded from apes, but that this is a blasphemy and lie,” Martyrs, Confessors, and Ascetics of piety of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 20th Century: Biographies and Material on Them, Book 7 (2002) (by Abbot Damascene Orlovsky), p. 162, qtd. in Genesis, Creation, and Early Man p. 804.
[8] “A polarity of worldviews poses the task today of introducing students to a wide range of views on fundamental questions. Such questions traditionally refer to the problems of the origin of life, the origin of the universe, and the appearance of man. And no harm will be done to a schoolboy if he knows the Biblical theory of the origin of the world. Man’s realization that he is the crown of God’s creation will only elevate him; if someone wants to think that he has descended from apes, let him think that way, but let him not thrust it on someone else,” editor’s preface to Pravoslavnoye osmysleniye tvoreniya mira I sovremennaya nauka, vol. 4 (2008), p. 3.
[9] Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah 1.4, PG 70.192AB.
[10] On Genesis: The Refutation of the Manichees 2.3: “One should not look with a jaundiced eye, to be sure, on anyone who wants to take everything that is said here absolutely literally, and who can avoid blasphemy in doing so, and present everything as in accordance with Catholic faith; on the contrary one should hold up such a person as an outstanding and holy admirable understander of the text.”
[11] St. Methodios of Olympus, Concerning Chastity 3.2: “For it is a dangerous thing wholly to despise the literal meaning, as has been said, and especially of Genesis, where the unchangeable decrees of God for the constitution of the universe are set forth.”
[12] On Patient Endurance and Discrimination 5 (Seven Homilies 4.5), as qtd. in Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, pp. 119-120.
[13] For example, see his Hexaemeron 1.5.2, 1.11.3, 3.2.1, 4.1.1.
[14] Writing of St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ commentaries, Hieromonk Irenei Steenberg writes: “The symbolic value of the creation account is, for Irenaeus, bound up in its very historicity – a notion evidenced in Irenaeus’ tireless charges of Gnostic modifications or alteration of that very history … There is symbolism to be had in the histories, but the symbolism is lost if the history did not in actuality take place as history,” in Children in Paradise: Adam and Eve as "Infants" in Irenaeus of Lyons, Journal of Early Christian Studies - Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2004.
[15] 1 Clement, chapter 25.
[16] St. Basil, Hexaemeron 4.1; St. Anastasius, Hexaemeron 1.1.4; St. Augustine, City of God 29.46.
[18] Exodus 33:11, Numbers 12:8.
[19] “Those who do not admit the common meaning of the Scriptures say that water is not water, but some other nature, and they explain a plant and a fish according to their own opinion. They describe also the production of reptiles and wild animals, changing it according to their own notions … But theirs is the attitude of one who considers himself wiser than the revelations of the Spirit and introduces his own ideas in pretense of an explanation. Therefore, let it be understood as it has been written,” Hexaemeron 9.1. See also 1.1, 6.1; St. Ambrose, Hexaemeron 1.6, 1.7; St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Genesis 2.2, 2.5, 7.3.
[20] Homilies on Genesis 13.4.
[21] Hexaemeron 9.1.
[22] Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Church 2.12.
[24] See Albert Rossi’s article “Clash of Paradigms: The Doctrine of Evolution in the Light of the Cosmological Vision of St. Maximos the Confessor.”
[25] The Literal Meaning of Genesis 4.22-35. Interestingly, St. Augustine tenuously put forth this teaching because of his reading of The Wisdom of Sirach 18:1 in a faulty Latin translation. Whereas the verse should read He Who lives forever created the whole universe, St. Augustine’s translation led him to believe that God created all things in one moment. Whereas his conclusion was wrong, in fact his methodology was Patristic and correct in that he knew that Scripture cannot contradict itself, and thus he sought a harmonization of these two passages.
[26] St. John Chrysostom, Homily on Genesis 2.2. See also the article “The God-Seer Moses as a Prophet of the Past.”
[27] Homily 21 in the Russian edition, Homily 85 in the Greek.
[28] Hexaemeron 1.2.1.
[29] On Commandments and Doctrines 130.
[30] See, for instance, the comment posted by Fr Patrick (Priest-monk Patrick), who has been a long-term visitor to Vatopaidi, on February 29, 2012 at 12:38 pm at the article “Cosmological/Geological Age, Evolution, Physical laws and Biblical time lines,” on Perry C. Robinson’s Energetic Procession blog.
[31] “When philosophical systems try to explain the phenomena of things and the presence of evil in them on the basis of what is known about nature, it is absolutely natural for them to confuse the idea of the creation of matter with its fall. If we begin with philosophical and scientific observations of the material world, it is logically impossible to arrive at a distinction between the creation of the world and its fall. Quite simply, this is because the reality before our eyes presents nature as it is now, after the fall … Philosophy is unable to bridge [its] dualism between matter and reality because it is impossible for natural man to distinguish between the wholly positive creation of the world and the fall of the world. Man cannot know this division except by revelation,” The Ancestral Sin pp. 41-42.
[32] Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, p. 280. See also p. 468: “The beautiful things of this world are only hints of that beauty with which the first-created world was filled, as Adam and Eve saw it. That beauty was destroyed by the sin of the first people.”
[33] St. Ambrose of Milan, Paradise 7; St. Augustine, City of God 12.24; St. Basil, Hexaemeron 1.1; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6.9; St. Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian the Apostate 2.27; St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 28.5; St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, Homily on Man; St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.18; St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Genesis, Homily 2.5; Homily 3.10; St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ pp. 41-42; St. Justin Martyr, Hortatory Address to the Greeks, chapter 8; Lactantius, Divine Institutes 7.14; St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua col. 1353, c. as quoted in Fr. John Meyendorff’s Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, p. 138; St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Homilies 11 for Meatfast Sunday, p. 116; St. Silouan, St. Silouan the Athonite p. 90; Fr. Sophrony, “Principles of Orthodox Asceticism,” in The Orthodox Ethos, pp. 273-274; St. Symeon the New Theologian, quoted in Kontoglou, Pege Zoes, “Fount of Life,” 1951, p. 82; Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, chapter 1; St. Theophan the Recluse, Instructions in the Spiritual Life; St. Theophan, Contemplation and Mediation; St. Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.12, 2.18.
[34] Hexaemeron 1.1.
[35] The Triads, Paulist Press (1983), E.3.1.32, p. 87.
[36] St. Dionysius, On the Divine Names 5.8, PG 4, 336AB; St. Maximus Various Texts 5.47, PG 90, 1368B, both as referenced in Mantzaridis’ Time and Man p. 9.
[37] Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17.
[38] De Ambiguis, PG 91,114BC, as found in Mantzaridis, Time and Man, p. 9 n. 39.
[39] See for example, St. Athanasius, Against the Arians 2.19.48; Venerable Bede, On Genesis p. 89; St. Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian the Apostate 2.27-28; St. Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science 1.21-22; St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 7.3.
[40] Hexaemeron 1.7.
[41] St. Gregory is commenting specifically on the notion that God created the body and soul of man at separate times, On the Making of Man 29.2.
[42] St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 2.8; St. Hippolytus, On Genesis; St. Ambrose of Milan, Hexaemeron 1.37; St. John Chrysostom Homily 3.10-11; St. Gregory Palamas Homily 17.
[43] Hexaemeron 2.8.
[44] Against Eunomius 1.21.
[45] Sermon 27: On Nativity, chapter 5: “For as it is now day time and now night time, so the Creator has constituted divers kinds of luminaries, although even before they were made there had been days without the sun and nights without the moon.”
[46] Commentary on Genesis 1.
"In the Beginning:" A Study on the Book of Genesis
This second Bible Study on the book of Genesis begins with some brief review and some words on St. Basil the Great as the Church's pre-eminent interpreter of the days of Creation, and a discussion of the question "Why did Moses write Genesis?" From there we discuss the first day of Creation, when God created the heavens and the earth.
Why did God create the earth? What does it mean to say that God created "in the beginning?" Why was the earth void and invisible? What is the light of the first day? What spiritual lessons can we take from the Creation of the world? These and many more questions are herein discussed.
Below we present both the audio and the text of the Bible Study:
(MP3 файл. Продолжительность 1:58:19 мин. Размер 67.3 Mb)
—What do you remember from last class?
—Student: We spent some time discussing time, and the question of whether the Scriptures are literal or allegorical.
—And what did we say?
—Student: Both are acceptable.
—Exactly.
—Student: You also told us about Fr. Seraphim and his book on Genesis which you recommended.
—Fr. Seraphim Rose has a book Genesis, Creation and Early Man which is completely based on what the Church Fathers taught about Genesis, which he looks at in light of Creation and evolution. He lived in the 70s and 80s, and just as today it was a very controversial topic then. One of his spiritual children was a school teacher and so he was involved because of what he had to teach, so Fr. Seraphim spent years investigating this issue.
As Dimitrii said, we talked about layers of meaning and interpretation of Scripture—literal or figurative? And as he said, we concluded that it’s both. You don’t have to say that it’s only literal or only symbolic. The Church Fathers didn’t read Genesis this way. They accepted it as the history of the world, but as saints they also saw deeper levels to the Scriptures. We gave the example of St. Macarius the Great who says that when Adam and Eve sinned and God cast them out of the Garden and placed a cherubim with a flaming sword at the gate, that was literal. At that time there really was an angel standing there with a sword, but it also reveals that every person in his heart has lost paradise.[1] We should have God within our hearts but we’ve been kicked out of Paradise, andBaptism is our way back in.
Another example is the four rivers flowing out of Paradise. The Fathers say there were four rivers, but they also love to find significance in numbers, so the four rivers are a foreshadowing that we would have four Gospels. Water is a symbol of grace and the Gospels give us the living word of God. These rivers flowing from Paradise are like the Gospels flowing from Christ. But there really were four rivers.
In praise of St. Basil the Great
A few times I mentioned that many Church Fathers have written about Genesis but St. Basil’s work the Hexaemeron is considered the classic work on the topic in the Church. To encourage you to read especially St. Basil’s commentary along with the Scriptures I want to share with you what some other saints have said about St. Basil. St. Anastasius of Sinai who also wrote a Hexaemeron said that St. “Basil had Divine thoughts and spoke sublimely.”[2] He had Divine thoughts—he tapped into the mind of God. St. Gregory the Theologian, the Patriarch of Constantinople and a personal friend of St. Basil, preached about him at his funeral, and this is what he said:
I will only say this of him. Whenever I handle his Hexaemeron, and take its words on my lips, I am brought into the presence of the Creator, and understand the words of creation, and admire the Creator more than before, using my teacher as my only means of sight.[3]
When he reads the words of St. Basil he senses the presence of God. Because these words of St. Basil are Divine he is brought into the Divine presence. Many saints have spoken about how great St. Basil is, but I’ll read one more to you: his own brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who also wrote a commentary on the days of creation. He says:
Before I begin, let me testify that there is nothing contradictory in what the saintly Basil wrote about the creation of the world since no further explanation is needed. They should suffice and alone take second place to the divinely inspired Testament.[4]
St. Basil’s brother says that we have the actual Scriptures of Moses and in the second place is the work of St. Basil, so the best thing that you can read on the days of creation is the work of St. Basil, which is completely in harmony with the Scriptures themselves.
St. Ambrose of Milan also has a Hexaemeron which is based on St. Basil, although expanded.
We also talked about why we study the book of Genesis and we said it’s good to know where you came from because it tells you where you’re going and how you should behave and live. When we see that God created man specifically with His own hands, breathed His Spirit into him, placed him into Paradise, we see that man is called to something much higher. We’re certainly not living in Paradise now.
Why did Moses write Genesis?
A couple of Fathers say that Moses wrote the book of Genesis because in the early days of mankind with Adam and Eve and their descendants until the time that the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob went down into Egypt and were enslaved there, God spoke to man as He spoke to Moses—as a friend. God comes to Adam after He sins and says “Where are you, Adam?” and He talks to him as a friend, as He later speaks to Moses. St. Ephraim says that the reason Moses has written Genesis is because God is no longer speaking to people that way. God hasn’t changed, but people have changed. As we grow farther from God we can’t hear from God that way, although there are still people like Moses who could. By the time of their wanderings in the desert the people have forgotten God and they’ve forgotten the traditions. All people used to know the creation story as passed down from Adam and Eve. Worshipping God, calling upon His name, offering sacrifice, and so on were all forgotten. As we see, paganism arose and people were worshiping idols—the heavenly bodies and animals. They’d begun to worship creations as the Creator. God sees this and gives to Moses the book of Genesis to fix this. St. John Chrysostom says the same thing.
The structure of Genesis
As per the structure of Genesis, first there is the prologue about creation with the first day, second day, and so on. After that the book is divided into ten sections called toledoths. Each section begins with “And this is the generation of …” such as the generations of the heaven and earth or the generations of Abraham. The words “these are the generations” in Hebrew is wa eleh toledoth, and thus each section is called a toledoth. The first five sections are the history of the ancient world, and the second five, Gen. 12-50, are the foundations of the history of Israel with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. First it’s the history of everyone and then it gets focused down onto God’s chosen people.
Time
Let’s read about the first day of creation in Genesis:
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth: What does this mean?
—Student: It means the beginning of time. It’s the first act of creation. It’s a specific moment.
—So you’re saying time itself is a creation?
—Student: Yes
—You’re definitely right. Time is a creation with a beginning point. It’s not eternal, which is different form paganism and philosophy where they said time is eternal and that something always existed with God. Here we just see that in the beginning God created everything.
—Student: It’s strange that it’s not mentioned in Genesis that time is created. It’s evident that He created it, but it’s not stated.
—We talked about how in some of the pagan mythologies the creation stories give a history of the gods and the history of how the world came about, with gods battling one another and using pre-existing matter to create, but here none of that is happening. The text just immediately says that God created. You’re right, it’s not explicitly stated, but because it’s so different from what other peoples believed it would probably compel them to think about all the ways in which it was different, I would think. The Bible isn’t necessarily giving us an interpretation of itself, but the meaning is there, and the Fathers later do explicitly state it for us.
—Student: Time itself doesn’t exist without an act of creation.
—Definitely. As we said, time is a measurement of change and that begins with Creation. Created things change. They do not have life in and of themselves. I get sick and old and I die. I change. That’s different from God. Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He does not change because He’s not created.
—Student: But God Himself doesn’t need time?
—He doesn’t need time. He has no need of anything. But He wanted to create man, and creation and time have to go hand-in-hand, because anything that is not God will necessarily be of a mutable nature, capable of changing.
In the beginning God created, and that says about God that He exists in a state of timelessness, which we can’t comprehend. We think in past, present, and future but these don’t exist for God. God sees all of it at one moment. There’s just now for God. We see this when He reveals Himself to Moses. Moses asks who he should say sent him and God answers that He is the Existing One, or I Am Who I Am. He doesn’t say, “I’m the One Who always has been and always will be,” but rather simply I Am. He’s always in the present, but even “present” is not correct because even “present” is about time. It’s enough for us to realize that God is totally different. Other theories have created gods that change, that get drunk and impregnate women and behave like men. This God is totally different and can’t be comprehended like that. Of course there’s some sense of understanding. God is good and we have some sense of what goodness is. God is love and we have some sense of what love is, but we’re also being shown that He is completely different.
In Christ
The Fathers also ask what or Who is the beginning? In the book of Revelation it says that Christ is the Alpha and the Omega—the Beginning and the End.[5] So the Fathers say that In the beginningalso means in Christ, because Christ is the Beginning. This has obvious parallels to the Gospel of John, where the prologue is clearly based on the prologue of Genesis, in which it says that nothing was created without the Word. In our icons of creation we show Christ creating. In the beginning the Fathers are already seeing Christ. The Jews don’t have a Trinity, but the Fathers see the Persons of the Trinity in the Old Testament although it’s not until the New Testament that the Trinity is manifest.
Everything that exists has a pre-existing idea in the mind of God. These are the logoi or rationalities. Christ is the Logos—Word or Reason, Who ties the whole universe together. Because everything, as the Fathers say, was created in Him, it leads us to the idea that these ideas were always in the mind of God. St. Gregory the Theologian says: “The Reason,” that is the Logos—Christ Himself, “begat all things within Itself,”—In the beginning means in Christ, “and the outward begetting subsequently took place in a timely manner, when it revealed the great Word.”[6] St. Maximus says these many logoi, or many definitions of everything, make up the one Logos.[7] The logoi are actually energies of God, so they themselves are Divine. The idea of everything is Divine, but the actual manifestation of everything is not. Creations are not Divine. But the ideas of everything have always been in the mind of God, so everything is created in Christ.
—Student: Does it mean that the ideas existed in God the Father and He transferred them to God the Son and God the Son made everything?
—I wouldn’t say the ideas are transferred from the Father to the Son. They share one will. There’s nothing that the Father knows that the Son doesn’t know. He didn’t need to pass on the knowledge because He always had it. The logoi are energies of God. St. Gregory Palamas especially taught this. The essence of God is what makes Him what He is, and we’ll never know that. But we also know God and so we have the theology of the energies of God—His grace, mercy, and love are how He relates to creation and are on the level of the energies of God, and so have always been shared between all three Persons.
To emphasize the Patristic idea that it’s not historical vs. allegory, in speaking of this first verse the Venerable Bede, a seventh century English saint, says that it’s alright to talk about these deeper meanings, but he warns: “But it must be carefully observed, as each one devotes his attention to the allegorical senses, how far he may have forsaken the manifest truth of history by allegorical interpretation.”[8] So be careful and pay attention to what you’re doing, and don’t forget that this is also history. And what Father doesn’t say that?
Instantaneous Creation
Scripture tells us that God simply creates, and it’s instantaneous. When there’s a movement of His will, it is manifested immediately.
—Student: A glimpse of a moment.
—Even less than a glimpse of a moment! The movement of His will and the manifestation of it are completely together, with no difference in time. It doesn’t say “In the beginning God thought it’d be cool to have an earth so He created some stuff that swirled around and eventually over billions of years formed together into an earth.” It just says He created the heavens and the earth and there it was. There was no delay. Certain Fathers specifically say this, which tells us that such ideas of a much older earth and universe existed in their times, and they already rejected them because it wasn’t harmonious with Scripture.[9] St. Ambrose specifically says that Moses is not talking about atoms coming together in formation slowly over time.[10] It’s instantaneous. That’s a very important thing to keep in mind. God acts six different times and every day it’s instantaneous, and many Fathers says this. As I said last time, when God created plants He didn’t put a seed into the ground that eventually became a tree, but He just created trees. God is creating a mature planet as a kingdom for man.
As Bede says, don’t forget about the history.
Some Fathers say the angels were already created before the beginning, which therefore means the material beginning, or some say the heavens on day one means the realm of the angels. It’s hard to say exactly when but we know at least they existed by the time of the Fall of man because there was a fallen angel in the Garden who tempted Adam and Eve. The Venerable Bede says the heaven of the first day is the realm of angels, so then day one is the beginning of time and angelic time, which as we said last time, can be called “eternity.”
Why God created the world
Why did God create this physical world? We’ve already said He didn’t need to, so why did He?
—Student: I think He wanted to share His love and happiness with us, so it was necessary to create the world.
—You’re exactly right. That’s precisely what St. John of Damascus says in his The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. He says:
Since, then, God, Who is good and more than good, did not find satisfaction in self-contemplation, but in His exceeding goodness wished certain things to come into existence which would enjoy His benefits and share in His goodness, He brought all things out of nothing into being and created them, both what is invisible and what is visible. Yea, even man, who is a compound of the visible and the invisible.[11]
God simply wanted to share Himself with us. He created things that could start to experience the life that God experiences—not to the fullest extent, but He wants us to experience it. St. Basil also says that first was the angelic world but then it was necessary to add this material world as a school and training place for souls of men to be taught.[12] God wants to experience His love and Himself and He gives us this world in which we can do that. It’s our creation as physical beings that lets us change and move towards God.
The Trinity
Although the Trinity is not explicitly stated in the Old Testament, there are hints of it. In Hebrew the word for God here is “Elohim,” which some say has some sense of being plural. The verb is singular, but “Elohim” can be plural. The singular form is simply “El,” but here we have “Elohim,” so the Fathers are already seeing the Trinity here. Some say this is not true because the plural can just be used to mean the superlative—the most or best. I read that sometimes even Moses can be called in this way. In the book of Job this term is used when speaking of man standing before God and realizing how great God is, so there it’s the greatness of God, so it’s both superlative and plural. “Elohim” comes from the root word “Eloahk” which is a superlative, so it’s the superlative of a superlative. This is debated, but we know in light of Christ that God is plural in the sense that there are three Persons.
The Omnipotence of God
Moses tells us that God single-handedly created the world, without any pre-existing matter, which is the doctrine of “creation ex nihilo,” as we said last time. He spoke and there it was, and St. Basil says of God as Creator: “It is He, beneficent Nature, Goodness without measure, a worthy object of love for all beings endowed with reason, the beauty the most to be desired, the origin of all that exists, the source of life, intellectual light, impenetrable wisdom, it is He who ‘in the beginning created heaven and earth.’”[13] God should be the object of man’s desire in that He is the supreme example of all these things that man desires. St. Basil is standing in awe of God in this reflection.
The doctrine of “creation ex nihilo” is first specifically stated in the book of 2 Maccabees. It emphasizes for us how completely different is God. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth—we see here no sense that there was a struggle for God. Genesis is specifically not mythological. A lot of more liberal scholars who don’t want to read Genesis as being historical, or maybe they don’t think it’s a very serious book, will say it’s very similar to mythology, but actually Moses is specifically de-mythologizing creation. There are elements that seem mythological but we are seeing that the true God of Moses, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and our God is reigning supreme over these other gods, because they’re actually not even gods but they’re demons who are fooling the people. Creation out of nothing is showing us that God is All-Powerful. There’s nothing He can’t do, whereas the gods of the nations always had their weaknesses, and could even be tempted into sin. They were weak creations, but God can do anything.
Humility
This is the entire story of the Bible. God Himself is humble and gives Himself completely to us in His love, even to the Cross. God is humble, so what does that mean for us?
—Student: God is our example.
—Right. God is humble so we should be humble, and you can read the Scriptures as being entirely this story—God can do anything, and without Him we can do nothing. If God can create out of nothing He is infinitely greater than us. We can invent new things, such as cars and printing books, but we always use materials that already existed. The Scriptures are immediately showing us this huge chasm between us and God. He is Uncreated and we are created. This is the fundamental distinction in Orthodoxy. Sometimes in the West they focus more on physical vs. spiritual—emphasizing the distinction between body and soul, but Orthodoxy emphasizes the distinction between created and Uncreated—God and everything else. Even when man is given Paradise and an existence full of virtue and a relationship with God he’s not able to maintain it. He could have, but he was tempted and fell. Even when we have that much we fall—we have Baptism, Chrismation, Confession, andCommunion and we still fall. The Scriptures are the story of God coming to save us.
It’s essential for us to find in every verse and in every moment of life ways to become humble. We hear these verses all the time and it’s so easy to read one verse and pass onto the next, but if we can stop and think about what it’s really saying about God and ourselves in comparison to God, it will help us to find our humility which is an essential beginning point to the spiritual life. Fr. Seraphim says that the beginning point of the spiritual life is to see yourself as worse than all other men—this is necessary to have a spiritual life. St. Paul says I am the chief of all sinners,[14] and we pray this every time before Communion when the priest brings the chalice out. Our task is to actually believe it—that we are the chief of all sinners. I should think that I’m worse than you, but that’s hard. We love our pride and it’s not easy to let it go. Repentance is the renewing of our minds, and we need to train ourselves through our repentance and the Sacraments and the life in the Church to see in everything how I can be led into humility. Every verse in the Scriptures probably could be read in a way to increase your humility. God can create out of nothing, He can do all things. We can do nothing.
St. John Chrysostom has some strong words for us. He says, for those who believe in some pre-existing matter repeat to them the words of Scripture. You think matter always existed, but the Scriptures say In the beginning God created … Then he says “But what if the person does not believe in the Scriptures? Leave him to his own devices.”[15] Of course every situation requires discernment for how to deal with someone, but he basically says if they won’t listen to Scripture then leave them to their own devices.
—Student 1: How can we prove that the Scriptures are true?
—Student 2: It’s not possible. It’s a question of faith.
—Student 1: But there are a lot of proofs for our faith, such as archaeological proofs.
—I would say evidence, rather than proofs. Many people can look around and see all the wonderful things in the world and it helps them to realize that something great created all this, but that doesn’t work for everyone, so in that sense you can’t say we have proofs for God. Some people can be brought to faith through such arguments. I came into Orthodoxy more through intellectual arguments. Someone showed me the history of the Church, explained various verses to me and told me I was interpreting incorrectly, but others require something more than this, or something different than this. We need to be Christians. Some people need to see Christians acting like Christ, on the path to becoming saints, so that they can see there’s something to our faith. In that sense I think it’s becoming more like proof. If we make grand claims that as an Orthodox Christian I can become like Christ, and they see someone who is becoming like Christ, that’s harder to deny. It’s hard to deny that someone like St. Seraphim of Sarov was different, although of course someone could still deny it. Today we have Elder Iliy.[16] In America we have Elder Ephraim who came from Mt. Athos. These people are holy. It’s hard to deny, although you still can.
Elder Ephraim (left), Elder Iliy (right)
—Student: What if the difference between us and them frightens them?
—Everyone has had their own experiences that have shaped their heart and how they think and look at God. There’s no one answer we can give to bring someone to Christ. Some people’s hearts will be so hardened that the presence of a saint or just Christians around them will make them hate Christ. What can you do for that person other than just pray for him and continue to show him Christ? Beyond that sometimes you have to leave it to Christ. If someone has a hard heart you won’t argue them into faith. Every person is unique, so we need to work to acquire the gift of discernment. The best thing for us to do is become holy, and then we’ll understand what to do in these situations. Discernment is not easy. It’s a gift of God—we talk about saints being so holy that they acquired the gift of discernment from God and understanding what to do in a situation. Be humble, love them, pray for them.
This is what St. John is saying here. What if the person doesn’t believe in the Scriptures? Leave him to his own devices. Sometimes it’s what you have to do, and if you keep talking to him he might just move farther from the Church. “Leave him to his own devices, like an utter madman.” Don’t tell that guy he’s a madman but we can say amongst ourselves that it’s crazy to not believe in Scriptures. “But for what allowance can you make for a person who does not believe the creator of all things, who treats the truth as falsehood?” Christ speaks about pearls before swine. We give people Divine truths and they toss them aside. “Towards God the Lord of all they wage open warfare and do not perceive that they are running from salvation. Let us, on the other hand, cling to the unshakeable rock and keep coming back to the beginning, In the beginning God made heaven and earth.[17] When someone refuses, just keep on trusting in Christ, and focus our life on the beginning, which is Christ.
Christian theology takes us deeper. The beginning of Genesis and the beginning of John are paralleled—In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and In the beginning was the Word. Christian theology and Christ Himself always takes us deeper into the mystery and shows us that the Logos is the root of all things. Revelation 1:8 says that Christ is the Alpha and Omega. Of course this isn’t just the theology of St. John. We believe that the Scriptures are one harmonious whole, and that they don’t contradict themselves although sometimes people say that they do. St. John Chrysostom specifically says they never contradict,[18] and not just him. St. John is not the only one who has Christ as Creator, but he most eloquently states it in Scripture. St. Paul also says Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints—he’s being humble again—is this grace given, that I should preach among the gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world has been hid in God, Who created all things by Jesus Christ (Eph. 3:7-9). The whole New Testament is harmonious in that Christ is the Creator, and later we’ll see the Third Person of the Trinity. St. Paul also says, By Him were all things created, that are in Heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him and for Him (Col. 1:16). All things are created by Christ, manifesting the ideas in His mind, and all things are also for Him. The purpose of our existence is to find our way to Christ. And not just us—man has the task of saving not only himself, but the entire cosmos. The entire creation is meant to be transfigured by man. Man’s soul communicates grace to his body and from there we are meant to communicate grace to all of creation. This is why saints can be peaceful with wild animals. St. Seraphim had a bear for a friend, because he communicated grace to all of creation.[19] We bring all of creation back to Christ, so all things are also made for Him, as the Logos which gives shape to all things.
St. Paul here mentioned thrones, principalities, dominions, and powers. What are they?
—Student: Where is the evidence of this division of angels?
—St. Dionysius the Areopagite has a book called The Celestial Hierarchy in which he talks about the nine ranks of angels, divided into three groups of three. There are different jobs, such as guardian angels, and some angels are constantly around the throne of God. There are angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, principalities, virtues, dominions, thrones, and powers.
—Student: I think only he talked about angels this way, so it’s not a big or important part of our theology.
—I wouldn’t say only him. We see various types of angels in Scriptures. St. Dionysius might be the first to go more deeply into it, but my understanding is that this is what the Church teaches.
The “considerateness” of God
There’s a common idea that Moses wrote with simple language because the Israelites had primitive science and were superstitious and couldn’t handle the real truth, so God said He created in six days, “and on this day I made some plants, and on this day animals,” and He put everything in really simple terms so that they could understand. Last time we said that this isn’t true. Specifically people say this about time, as I’ve seen. The story says six days, but some people say billions of years wouldn’t have made sense to the Israelites because they lived in a cycle of six days and a rest, so God spoke to them this way. But then I read a verse from Genesis that says there would be thousands of millions of Jews.[20] Big numbers don’t confuse them. People say that God created in six days and rested on the seventh because that’s how they were living, but that leaves the question of why they were living that way. Where did they get this cycle from? Scripture says at least twice in Exodus the exact opposite: they live that way because God created that way. God said He created in six days and rested on the seventh, so you should work for six days and rest on the seventh.[21] If each day is millions of years are we supposed to work for six million years? It becomes nonsense.
—Student: Adam probably lived in this way in Paradise, although it’s not mentioned.
—These things aren’t specifically stated: “For Adam lived in a cycle of seven days,” but we see that from the beginning God laid it down this way. St. Basil talks about the first day of creation being the model for every subsequent day.[22] On the first day God defines a day and then time continues like that. St. Symeon the New Theologian says God created in a week, and then it continues like that. The first week is a model of a week.[23] Adam was living this way too.
—Student: God could have created in one period of twenty-four hours, or even in one moment.
—We’ll see this as we go on, but as we said God speaks and it’s instantaneous. The act of creation of each day is instantaneous but then God waits twenty-four hours, and He does it again, according to St. Ephraim.[24] Man needs regularity so God is specifically creating this way for us. Of course He could have created in an instant but it gives us no plan to live by.[25]
So there’s this idea that Moses wrote in a certain way so that the Jews could understand, and we said this isn’t true, but actually there is a sense in which it’s true. St. John Chrysostom talks about the “considerateness” of God, but the examples he gives are never about earthly things. It’s not about big numbers. God speaks about theology, about Himself in ways they can understand, because that requires a level of spiritual knowledge that the Jews didn’t have. Saints can speak to us about God and we won’t understand if we haven’t experienced God. It’s never about scientific things, but about God Himself that He speaks down to our level. St. John gives the example that Genesis simply says God created, without diving into the mystery of God. It doesn’t tell us it’s the Trinity or the Logos.[26] They didn’t have the spiritual knowledge to grasp that, but through the millennia God was preparing the world. We had to await His Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost when He sends the Holy Spirit, and the Sacraments in the Church in order to understand and go deeper into the mystery. So He spoke down when He said simply “God,” and then with Christ the mystery is opened to some degree and we see that it’s a Trinity and that the Second Person is the Logos Who created everything. He speaks down because they can’t grasp theological things yet.
Speaking to our modern times
The Fathers spoke about some stuff that might seem unnecessary to us, but they addressed them because of the societies around them. For instance, they sometimes talk about the question of what is the earth resting on. The Scriptures talk about the pillars of the earth—is it actually on pillars? Is it floating in water? Is there a cloud underneath it? The Fathers talk about this because they always want to communicate theology to the people around them. We can’t simply repeat everything that came before us. We have to keep the same ideas but find ways to communicate them to our world, so the Fathers were finding ways to do this. St. Basil talks about various options for on what the earth rests—pillars, water, air, another body underneath, but ultimately he says to forget about it—it’s not what we talk about in the Church. Some of the Fathers specifically say these scientific questions are not questions of theology, for the Church. The Church has no teaching on these things because they don’t impact our spiritual life.
—Student: There are those in the Church who deny UFOs, but what if life on other planets really exists?
—It’s a fact of our theology that man is the center and king of creation, because he is both material and spiritual—one foot in both worlds. It’s man that is meant to make the cosmos holy. So if there are aliens, they need salvation through Christ by the holiness of man. St. Paul says the creation is groaning and waiting for its redemption when the saints of God are revealed.[27] If there are UFOs and aliens it doesn’t really matter. They need salvation through Christ with man as the intermediary. But, Fr. Seraphim Rose has a book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in which he investigates UFOs because they were popular in his time. He examines how UFOs act in the witness accounts and he examines what the Church Fathers say about how demons act and he concludes, and I agree with him although not everyone does, that UFOs act just like demons. It’s just another way to distract us from Christ. Demons will do anything to distract us from Christ. If that means appearing as aliens in a spaceship, they’ll do it.
Of course Christ didn’t teach the Apostles that in two thousand years there’ll be UFOs and they’re demons, so you don’t have to say it’s solidly Orthodox Tradition that UFOs are demons, but I think using the wisdom of our Tradition we can conclude that they are demons. This is an example of what I’m talking about. Using the Tradition, Fr. Seraphim responded to questions of his time. He didn’t just repeat St. John of Damascus, but asked how to apply it to his times.
So there are some questions that ultimately are not important to the Church. St. Basil says it’s enough to know that the pillars of the earth of which the Scriptures speak are the power of God. He sustains all things.[28] St. Ambrose also says that the nature and position of the earth are not important. It doesn’t matter if the earth is in the very center of the universe because measurements don’t matter. What the Scripture are showing us is measurement of God’s power which ultimately is immeasurable. All of these things should be compelling us to look beyond the created world to God.
There’s a verse that gets quoted a lot from the book of Job in which God mentions Creation. Job’s friends are telling him he must have sinned and he says, “No, I didn’t sin,” and God says to himWhere wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding (Job 38:4). Be humble. You weren’t here when I created everything. If you know about the foundations of the earth, then go ahead and tell me. Of course He knows that Job doesn’t know. One of the purposes of the creation story is for our humility. Don’t go into all these questions; we weren’t there. Often the Fathers say that the things not specifically laid out in Scripture we should not bother with.[29] Science isn’t bad but sometimes goes into questions that seem to have no purpose and easily become distractions.
Some of the Fathers say the heavens were not solid. Sometimes you see drawings of supposed Jewish cosmology that shows the world in some crystal dome with the stars affixed to the glass of the dome, but St. Ambrose says the heavens are more like smoke. He refers to Isaiah 51:6 which says in his translation God hath fixed the heavens like smoke[30]. This is another way in which common scholarly claims about what Jews were believing are not always correct.
The invisible earth
And the earth was without form and void in the Hebrew. The Greeks says the world was invisible and unfinished. Why was it invisible?
—Student: Because there was no light.
—There are several options given, and you’re right—one of them is simply that there was no light. Although, in the beginning God created the heavens and some of the Fathers says this realm has its own light, and the light that is then created is in our own atmosphere. But it’s invisible because there is no light. Also, there’s nobody to see it. Later we’ll see that God separates the waters, so the Fathers also say it’s invisible because it was totally covered by water so the land wasn’t seen. It was also invisible in the sense of being unfinished. God didn’t want just a rock floating in space, but it’s point is as a home for man. All of the things that God goes on to create are the adornment for earth, but they don’t exist yet so it’s unfinished. St. Basil’s says earth’s adornment and finishing is the plants, but this hasn’t happened yet. He also says the heavens aren’t finished either because there is no sun, moon, stars.[31] It’s emphasizing that this is the beginning of the work. St. Ephraim the Syrian is very insistent about everything being done in six days, so although it doesn’t tell us when clouds were created he says they must have been on the first day, so the earth was invisible because the clouds were covering the earth and so the light from the heavens wasn’t shining through.[32] This is the beginning, but God has more work to be doing. There’s always more adornment, and man is the same way. Even Adam and Eve weren’t in a finished state. As a Protestant I thought that Adam and Eve in the Garden were perfect and finished and had only to maintain the state they were in, but God’s work is always continuing. If we’re meant to become like Christ, that can never end. There’s always more Christ and we can always draw closer to Christ, so God’s work is always continuing.
And the darkness was upon the face of the deep. Again, there was darkness simply because there was no light, but there must have been some people in the Church who saw something more in this darkness—that it was a spiritual darkness. It was the demons. St. Basil specifically says this darkness is not a personification of evil powers.[33] They weren’t covering God’s creation. Darkness is simply an absence of light. Darkness is a symbol of demons but here it’s not literally demons. God did not create darkness—it’s just that He hasn’t yet created the light. This darkness is not the evil powers because there’s no such thing as evil co-existing with God. Evil is not created by God. Evil and darkness have no essence of their own. Evil is when the good is not there. Evil is simply when good people choose to do evil, but there’s no essence to it. Everything that exists pre-existed in the mind of God. There was no idea of evil in the mind of God. He doesn’t say “and on the third day I created evil.” Lots of religions, such as Zoroastrian, have a good god and an evil god. We have Satan but he’s a creation. He’s God’s enemy but he’s certainly not his equal.
—Student: Was Plato right about his idea of the ideal world where the images of all things exist?
—He’s partly correct. The ideal forms don’t actually exist out there in some realm, but all these things existed in the mind of God, although not manifested until this week of creation.
“The deep” in Hebrew is “tehom,” and it’s from the same root as the name of the god Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, who is the female god of saltwater, represented by a ferocious sea monster. Again, this doesn’t mean that Genesis is mythology. In other myths the deep is used as a god, but we see that our God created it. In the next verse we even see that the Spirit is hovering over it.
The Spirit of God was borne upon the face of the waters. This could be “spirit” or “wind” as far as translation goes. Most Fathers says it’s the Holy Spirit, such as St. Basil, who takes it deeper. He says the Spirit is not just floating above the water, but is nesting like a mother hen, warming the waters, imparting a vital life-giving force.[34] We see in later days that God calls forth life out of the waters. So the Spirit is not simply floating here. St. John Chrysostom also talks about this, saying that it’s very important to pay attention to the sequence of the events here and not change it. He says there are those who say that matter came first, but we know matter came later.[35] Modern-day people can do the same. As I said last time, as a Protestant I always believed Genesis was literal, but when I was becoming Orthodox I met some people who said that’s not necessarily true, and one person even said to me that the sequence of the events doesn’t even have to be taken literally. Specifically, the sun is created on the fourth day, and that makes no sense for modern scientific proposals. So I was told that even the sequence is not meant to be understood as is, but St. John Chrysostom is saying “No, that is what heretics and pagans and people who don’t have the light of Christ do. Just accept it.”
“Spirit” in Hebrew is ruakh, which is the power of God, the force of God, the wind and breath. It is again showing that the Spirit is not just hovering but there is action going on. And as we’ve been saying, the action of the Spirit is to transfigure man and the whole cosmos, and we already see Him here imparting life.
Water and the Spirit—what does that call to mind?
—Student: Baptism.
—Right. Immediately, even before man falls, God is giving us foreshadowings of what’s to come—Baptism into the life of Christ. There are many watery symbols of Baptism in the Old Testament—the Flood, the Red Sea, the Jordan River. We’re already seeing that the Spirit of God is involved. We’re already seeing hints of the Trinity.
The light
God said let there be light. As we said, God did not create darkness. Light is an image of God but light itself is a creation. Light has its idea in the mind of God because it reflects Him in some way. Darkness was not a creation, but now there’s light and it disperses the darkness. As soon as He says let there be light, there’s light. There’s no delay. He speaks and it’s immediate. It’s here that St. Ambrose talks about His word and the fulfillment of His word going hand-in-hand. Some people sometimes think this light is the Uncreated Light—that Light of Mt. Tabor, but it’s a created light, although it’s not contained anywhere.
What does it mean that God spoke? The Fathers say that when the Scriptures speak about God we should understand them in a manner befitting of God. God was not yet incarnate and had no body. He did not literally move a mouth. As Christians we know that God speaking can lead us to Christ as the Word of God through Whom God created. But Scriptures are speaking of God in a way we can understand. We talked about how the Fathers don’t reject the literal interpretation, but we see here that not every word in Scripture must be taken completely literally, because God speaking is not literal. The proper method of interpretation is to stick with the Fathers. Don’t say everything is literal. Don’t say everything is symbolic. Say it as the Fathers say it.
—Student 1: What if they say different things?
—For the most part, when the Fathers seem to say different things, probably the problem is with us. The saints are up here spiritually and we’re down here.
—Student 2: The Fathers complement one another.
—But sometimes they really do seem to contradict one another, but the problem is we’re not spiritual like they are, and it’s hard for us to see how they harmonize. Some Fathers say man is naturally mortal, some Father say man is naturally immortal, and some Fathers say he is naturally neither—he is in-between. It seems like a contradiction, but when you look into it more you see that they all believe the same thing about man; they’re just expressing it differently. When there’s a seeming contradiction don’t assert that there’s a contradiction. First tell yourself to be humble and that you need to admit that it’s at least possible that they agree and you just don’t see it.
God speaks, and man is created in the image of God, and man is the only creation that speaks. The Logos is the Rationality and man has this rational gift. Scripture comes back to this. Psalm 32:6 reads By the word of the Lord the heavens were established and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth. So the Word and the Spirit are both there.
The goodness of creation
And God saw that light, that it was good. Of course it’s not as if God had wait until He created the light to find out that it would be good. Of course He knew. He’s speaking about the future advantage for man. Every time God creates something He says it’s good, so the material world is good. As I said before we don’t divide between material and spiritual. Some people say that the spiritual world is good, but you can forget about the material world. Some say man is really just a soul, and he simply has a body. God says that material creation itself is good. It’s not paganism.
—Student: Ancient philosophers taught that our bodies are a prison for the soul, as punishment.
—We talked a little last time about Origen, who was even in the Church, but had the idea of pre-existent souls that contemplated God, and when their love for God cooled they fell into bodies, so we’re trying to get away from bodies. This is not Christian at all, but people still believe this. I was speaking with one Protestant friend who said, “When I die you can cremate me. I won’t need that body anymore.” But the body is you! You can’t say you don’t need it—it is you. I don’t know how prevalent this idea is, but at least among some this understanding is lost. Creation is good, but we also take the middle path and say it is fallen. It’s not as it should be and it can be misused. Some people say that God created plants, so smoking marijuana is good, but marijuana is fallen like everything else. You can’t do anything you want. Orthodoxy is the middle path. So don’t smoke weed (laughter).
And God divided the light from the darkness. The nature of light cannot mix with darkness. God also divides them spatially—when it’s daytime in this part of the world it’s night over there.
And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. This primitive light was spread abroad, God draws it back and that’s night. The Venerable Bede asks an interesting question that I hadn’t thought of—in what language did God call them “day” and “night?” Was it Hebrew? Greek? Of course, I’m sure Russian was the first and they were speaking Russian in the Garden (laughter). But, he says, with God intellection is simple. God’s speaking doesn’t actually have noise; there isn’t any language. [36]
—Student: So Adam and Eve didn’t need language? They could just look at each other and understand maybe?
—Maybe they could to some degree. It wouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes the saints can meet one another in prayer. But God doesn’t need language, of course.
—Student: Adam used language to name the animals. God called the night “night.”
—Yes, but the Venerable Bede says more precisely that it means that God created in such a way that these things would later be known as “night” and “day.”[37] He caused them to be named this way.
One day
And the evening and the morning were the first day/one day. In the Hebrew it says the first day but in the Greek it says one day but then it says the second day, third day, so the Fathers ask why it says one day rather than first day. Many Fathers talk about this, the earliest that I’m aware of being St. Hippolytus of Rome, a pope in the second century, and then St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory Palamas.[38] They say that the Scriptures specifically say one day because God is therefore defining what a day is. The cycle of night and day is a day. Many Fathers specifically go on to answer how long was the day. St. Basil in his Hexaemeron specifically says that it’s just as if the Scriptures and God were saying twenty-four hours.[39]
—Student 1: How can we compare or harmonize this with science?
—If these days are twenty-four hours then the earth is much younger than modern science says. A lot of people try to harmonize prevalent scientific theories and these days and so they say they are just symbolic of ages.
—Student 2: But, do we need a harmonization, or just to see how it was in reality?
—To seek harmony between religion and science is of course not bad. Science is given to us by God, and if something scientific is true and something theological is true, they have to harmonize. But the question is, as we discussed last time, can science talk about this period? The Fall of man and the world came about and everything changed. Everything begins falling into corruption. Death and natural disasters and all these things that shape the world as we know it entered at the Fall, and even the way that man now thinks and reasons, and all of these things have been changed as a result of the Fall. So how can we use our fallen world to tell us about the unfallen world? A lot of Fathers talk about this and say that the Fall is a barrier through which no human research can pass. It’s impossible. We can only know about it by God revealing things, for instance God revealing to Moses. Other saints later had spiritual experiences of revelation as well. If you believe that the world was once a Paradise where there was no death and corruption, then our world filled with death and corruption can’t tell us about it. Our world is a reminder of what we lost. We all know that death is wrong and we’re sad when people die. This tells us that we weren’t meant to die and leads our minds to Paradise, but it doesn’t tell us what it’s like to live without death and these conditions.
—Student: Maybe time is changing in speed.
—Time is a measurement. I’ve heard people suggest before that time speeds up or slows down but I personally don’t understand what that’s supposed to mean. If you measure consistently then what does it mean that time changed? Your means of measuring might change. Is time a thing that has velocity?
There’s a verse from the Psalms that St. Peter quotes that a lot of people point to in regards to this topic: A day is as a thousand years to the Lord (Ps. 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8), so people say “Ah! A day is not literal!” A day is as a thousand years to the Lord—does that mean that literally a thousand years passed for God? Of course not. As we’ve said God is timeless and that’s what this verse means. There’s no necessary link between a day and a thousand years. A day is also as a second to God. It’s also as a billion years to God because time does not affect God. But some people want to apply this verse to the days of Creation and think therefore they’re not literal days, but a thousand years, although this is still not enough time for what modern science says. Modern science needs billions of years so I don’t know what the point is of applying these verses to Creation. Where else do you apply it? Christ was in the grave for three days. Was it really three thousand years? Why would it only be Genesis where a day is not a day?
—Student: I tell people who say that the days of Creation are really a thousand years to open another book of Moses where it says to work six days and rest on the seventh. If you believe it you cannot fulfill the fourth commandment.
—You have to work for six thousand years and then rest for a thousand years.
—Student: Yes. If you die without rest you have broken the commandment, because you had to work for six thousand years before you rested.
—Another point here is that when the Fathers say twenty-four hours they’re not saying “We think so,” or “We just don’t know how else it could have been”—they’re specifically teaching it as a certainty. The Venerable Bede says “without a doubt” this is a day of twenty-four hours.[40] St. Ephraim the Syrian says it’s impermissible to say that the days were shorter or longer than twenty-four hours.[41] St. Ambrose says “Scripture established a law that twenty-four hours, including both day and night, should be given the name of day only, as if one were to say the length of one day is twenty-four hours in extent.”[42] They’re saying they know how long the days were.
Some Fathers even go so far as to say that God created on Sunday. They give a specific day, and Sunday is clearly not a long age. How do they know it was Sunday? Because the seventh day was the day of rest—Saturday. Many saints say this, such as St. Anastasius of Sinai and St. Dimitrii of Rostov.[43] St. Gregory the Theologian says, “Just as the first creation begins with Sunday (and this is evident from the fact that the seventh day after it is Saturday, because it is the day of repose from works), so also the second creation begins again with the same day [i.e., the day of Resurrection].[44] Why did God rise on Sunday? Because He’s fulfilling the beginning of creation and finishing it. St. Justin Martyr says we gather on Sunday not only because Christ resurrected but also because it’s the day of Creation.[45] Some Fathers even say that God created in the spring. Spring is full of life so it’s an appropriate time for creation. St. Ephraim the Syrian says this, as does Archimandrite Naum from the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra.[46]
I’ll finish with words of Fr. Daniel Sysoev:
The first day of the universe, according to the teaching of the fathers of the Church, was a Sunday in the first month of spring. That God made this particular day the first in history of the world is no accident. He knew that five and a half thousand years later, on this same spring Sunday, He would renew all creation by rising from the dead and manifesting to mankind the brilliance of eternal life. To this day on the night of Pascha we recall those first days of creation. It is no accident, as Saint Basil says, that this day symbolized that remarkable state that will come to be after the end of the universe. Then there will be eternal day for the blessed, and for the damned—eternal night.[47]
The first day was a Sunday in spring which is an image to us of the coming eternity, but it doesn’t mean it’s not literally a day. It has to be a day to represent something more.
On this first day God lays the foundation for what will become the building of creation as a kingdom for man and a temple for man to offer sacrifice to God.
[1] On Patient Endurance and Discrimination 5
[2] Hexaemeron 1.4.3
[3] Oration 43, Funeral Oration for St. Basil, chapter 67
[4] An English translation of this work is available at Scribd, an online digital library. For more information on how the Church views St. Basil and his Hexaemeron see the article St. Basil, the Great Visionary of Creation.
[5] Revelation 1:8
[6] Poem 5: On the World
[7] Ambiguum 7
[8] On Genesis p. 69.
[9] For instance, St. Augustine in The City of God 18.40: “In vain, then, do some babble with most empty presumption, saying that Egypt has understood the reckoning of the stars for more than a hundred thousand years. For in what books have they collected that number who learned letters from Isis their mistress, not much more than two thousand years ago? Varro, who has declared this, is no small authority in history, and it does not disagree with the truth of the divine books. For as it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth? For what historian of the past should we credit more than him who has also predicted things to come which we now see fulfilled?”
See also St. Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 3.16, and Julius Africanus, Chronology Fragment 1.
[10] Hexaemeron 1.7
[11] Exact Exposition 2.2.
[12] Hexaemeron 1.5
[13] Ibid. 1.2
[14] 1 Tim. 1:15
[15] Homilies on Genesis 2.10
[16] A Russian elder who has lived both on Mt. Athos and in Optina Monastery and currently serves as the spiritual father of the patriarch.
[17] Homilies on Genesis 2.10
[18] Ibid. 4.8: “Don't worry, dearly beloved, don't think Sacred Scripture ever contradicts itself, learn instead the truth of what it says, hold fast what it teaches in truth, and close your ears to those who speak against it.”
[19] In his Homilies on Genesis 25.5, St. John Chrysostom says this is why Noah was able to live peacefully on the Ark with the wild animals. When saints regain what was lost in Adam they begin to live in harmony with nature as did Adam. St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain speaks to us about the connection of nature with man: “As long as Adam loved God and observed His commandments, he dwelt in the Paradise of God and God abode in the paradisiacal heart of Adam. Naked Adam was clothed with the grace of God and surrounded by all the animals, he held and caressed them lovingly, and they, in turn, licked him devoutly, as their master. When Adam violated God’s commandment, he was stripped of the grace of God, clothed with a garment of skin and exiled from Paradise. Grace-filled Adam became wild, and many animals, because of Adam, were also made savage, and instead of approaching him with devoutness and licking him with love, they lashed out at him with rage in order to tear at or bite him,” Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos: Epistles, pp. 203-204
[20] Gen. 24:60
[21] Ex. 20:11, 31:17,
[22] Hexaemeron 2.8
[23] Homily 45.1
[24] Commentary on Genesis 1.8.2
[25] Victorinus, On the Creation of the World: “In the beginning God made the light, and divided it in the exact measure of twelve hours by day and by night, for this reason, doubtless, that day might bring over the night as an occasion of rest for men's labours; that, again, day might overcome, and thus that labour might be refreshed with this alternate change of rest, and that repose again might be tempered by the exercise of day. ‘On the fourth day He made two lights in the heaven, the greater and the lesser, that the one might rule over the day, the other over the night,’ - the lights of the sun and moon and He placed the rest of the stars in heaven, that they might shine upon the earth, and by their positions distinguish the seasons, and years, and months, and days, and hours.”
St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ p. 529: “Why did not the Almighty create the world at once, but in six days? In order to teach man by deeds to perform his work gradually, not hurriedly, but with consideration. If you pray, pray without hurrying; if you read the Gospel, or, in general, any religious or worldly books, do not read them hurriedly, but read with consideration and with a true view of the material. If you are learning a lesson, do not hurry to finish it quickly, but penetrate into the subject deeply and consider it well. If you are doing work, do it without hurrying, with consideration quietly. Even the world was not created instantaneously but in six days. The Lord shows us an example in everything; let us follow His steps.”
[26] Homilies on Genesis 3.6-7
[27] Rom. 18:19-22
[28] Hexaemeron 1.9-10
[29] See St. Ambrose, Hexaemeron 3.3; St. Basil, Hexaemeron 9.1
[30] Hexaemeron 1.21
[31] Hexaemeron 2
[32] Commentary on Genesis 1.5
[33] Hexaemeron 2.4
[34] Hexaemeron 2.7
[35] Homilies on Genesis 3.5
[36] On Genesis p. 74
[37] Ibid.
[38] St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 2.8; St. Hippolytus, On Genesis; St. Ambrose of Milan, Hexaemeron 1.37; St. John Chrysostom Homily 3.10-11; St. Gregory Palamas Homily 17
[39] Hexaemeron 2.8
[40] On Genesis p. 75
[41] Commentary on Genesis 1
[42] Hexaemeron 1.37
[43] St. Anastasius, Hexaemeron 3.1.1; St. Dimitrii, Chronicle (Moscow, 1998), pp. 11-12
[44] Oration 44, On New Week, Spring, and the Commemoration of the Martyr Mamas 5
[45] 1st Apology 67
[46] St. Ephraim, Commentary on Genesis 1.8.1; Archimandrite Naum, About Paschalia, at http://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/2248514/2315938.html.
[47] The Law of God p. 178
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