Regarding the creation story -- from what I've heard, Augustine supported a non-literal interpretation of the first couple of chapters of Genesis. Is that true? How prevalent was that view early on, and did the other church fathers agree? Was there a consensus during the Middle Ages? It's my impression that a militaristic insistence on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2 is a largely American, Protestant, and nineteenth and twentieth-century phenomenon, but please correct me if I'm off base.
Augustine believed that the creation story of Genesis 1 must be interpreted non-literally, since Sirach 18:1 states that God created the world in one go. That means that the sequential creation of Genesis 1 cannot refer to a literally temporal sequence, but to a logical sequence. However, as far as I know Augustine regarded the story of Adam and Eve as literally true, and as you can see
here, he believed that the world was under 6,000 years old.
On the broader question, these topics were not, as far as I can tell, much discussed among the church fathers or the medieval theologians. This is because they had no particular reason to doubt the biblical narrative. Origen, of course, thought that the whole creation and Fall story was allegorical, and had a quite different conception not merely of the beginning of history but of the nature of history itself, which he thought was cyclical rather than linear. But he was unusual. In the thirteenth century an important element to the Averroist controversy was the question of the eternity of the world, since Aristotle had thought that the world has no beginning. However, the main disagreement here was not over whether Aristotle was wrong (pretty much everyone agreed that he was) but over whether he could be proven to be wrong without recourse to revelation (Aquinas, for example, thought he could not, while Bonaventure, Henry of Ghent, and many others thought he could). Here again, though, the issue did not focus on the literal truth, or otherwise, of the creation accounts in Genesis.
I think you are right in saying that an
insistence on the literal truth of Genesis is a modern phenomenon, although it's certainly not limited to America or even Protestantism. It is widespread in Africa and also in eastern European Orthodox Christianity. However, it is very much a post-scientific phenomenon. Creationists insist upon the literal truth of Genesis because there are people who deny it. Before the early nineteenth century, which is when it became pretty clear that the world was an awful lot older than the Bible would seem to imply, it just wasn't much of an issue. This is why modern creationists cannot really appeal to ancient authors to support the claim that their views are traditional and orthodox, and those who accept modern science are heretical and wrong. Just because some ancient or medieval theologian talks about Genesis as being literally true doesn't mean that that theologian would have done so in the light of modern scientific knowledge. To maintain the literal truth of Genesis in the face of what we know now is a very different thing from maintaining it when no-one had any better explanation, and that is one of the things that differentiates modern fundamentalism from traditional orthodox Christianity.
The lack of clarity was my fault, I keep forgetting most people dont believe other people were around before the Garden story. Why doesn't it make sense? Adam's lineage survived the Flood thru Noah and thats why they're considered our parents, but that doesn't necessarily mean other people from the 6th day weren't alive at their time (would explain Cain's fear of being killed). I agree the two stories seem to jam multiple traditions together but the 6th day people - male and female - were made the same day, at the same time, not from one another. Adam and Eve were not, the Adam was made somewhere else and taken to the Garden where he is then given the rules, told to work, names the animals in the Garden, etc... After no "helpmate" was found among the animals, only then does God decide to make Eve.
Right, so these are different stories. They are not different parts of a single story. If you look at Genesis 2:4, it reads like the start of a new story, not a continuation of one that is already being told. "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, on the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens." (Note the singular "day", which is inconsistent with the multiple days of the previous account.) Why on earth would a starting sentence like that appear in the middle of a story? Why tell the reader that we are about to hear how the heavens and earth were created, if we had just been told already?
The next verse makes it clear that, when God created the man, there was no vegetation. It is not created until verse 8. That makes no sense if this is part of the same story as Genesis 1, where plants are created before human beings.
Finally, of course, if this is supposed to be the creation of new human beings in addition to the ones who have already been created in 1:27, it is baffling that the text doesn't make any acknowledgement whatsoever of the previous creation. Why doesn't it say that God wasn't content with the previous human beings, or wanted to supplement them, or whatever? Why is no mention made of them at all? It doesn't make sense. Surely what we have here are two rival accounts of the creation of the world and of human beings, not a single account that talks about the creation of two distinct categories of human beings.
Quite apart from these incongruities between the stories, there are other indications that they come from distinct sources. As you probably know, it is generally accepted by scholars that the Pentateuch is a combination of a number of sources, although the traditional "four source" hypothesis of Wellhausen has come under a lot of attack, which means the details of what these sources are, which parts of the text should be attributed to which, and how they came to be combined are very uncertain. Nevertheless, Gen. 1:1-2:4a is usually thought to be by the source known as P (the Priestly source), and the next section all the way to the end of chapter 4 is assigned to J (the Jahwehist source). The different uses of language and different ideas in these and other sections of the Pentateuch are what indicate different original authors. As I say, the details of these ascriptions may be questionable, but it seems to me that the blatant inconsistency between the two creation accounts makes it very clear that these, at least, are genuinely different and competing stories, not two parts of a single consistent narrative.
I believe ancient peoples have passed along to us "myths" that go deep into our pre-history, including stories about other people who lived long ago. And this is one of them... A story about a pre-diluvial people who didn't survive the Flood. Maybe Neandertals, they lived in Israel and the Middle East too. Or some other archaic sapien that we evolved from, or didn't. The Zulu have a myth about their ancestors (the artificial ones) at war with the "apemen". The Sumerians had one claiming the gods bound their image upon a creature found roaming the abzu to create primitive workers and that the process eventually resulted in more advanced people.
Anything is possible, but it's a question of what the evidence suggests. You say that this "a story about a pre-diluvial people who didn't survive the Flood". But I don't see any such story in the early chapters of Genesis. Certainly I see the claim that most people did not survive the Flood. But I don't see any suggestion that these people were genetically distinct from the descendants of Adam and Eve. If the early chapters of Genesis were really about how God created two distinct races of humanity, we would surely expect to find some reference to this distinction in the subsequent text, but we don't. We do, of course, find the famous text about the Nephilim in Gen. 6:1-4, but this has nothing to do with any supposed original creation of a distinct kind of human being. Rather, the Nephilim are the result of "the sons of God" mating with human beings, an event that occurs long after the original creation of humans. This, incidentally, is another example of two rival stories appearing in Genesis: the Nephilim story is a story about the origins of evil. It attempts to explain evil by blaming it upon these ill-advised unions between human beings and "the sons of God", which is why it is immediately followed by God wishing he hadn't started the whole thing and resolving to destroy the lot. This purpose of the story is clear if you look at the much longer version of it that appears in 1 Enoch, where "the sons of God" are identified with angelic beings known as the Watchers. But of course Genesis also contains another story explaining the origins of evil, namely the story of the garden of Eden in chapter 3. Here again we see two quite different myths seeking to explain the same thing shoe-horned into the single text.
Anyway, the point is that the difference between Noah and his family, and everyone else, is merely the difference between a good man and all the bad men. There is no indication in the text that Noah was of a different race from everyone else or that he alone was descended from Adam and Eve. So I would say that trying to make the story of the Flood into a story of how one race was killed and the other race survived is simply not borne out by the text. There is no concept in the text of two races to start with.
Consider the biblical terminology, Adam and Eve knew not good and evil. Whats that mean? They weren't human yet, not intellectually anyway. They were more like the animals, but still not animals themselves (no helpmate was found for Adam). Doesn't the Garden story sound like a description of man's evolution from one state to "ours" aided of course by the serpent?
Certainly, but then one of the things that ancient myths seek to explain is how human beings became moral and civilised. Look at the story of Enkidu in the Myth of Gilgamesh for an obvious example. Does that mean that the story of Enkidu preserves any genuine historical elements? Perhaps it does, but the existence of the story can be explained quite adequately without any such supposition. The same is true of the story of Adam and Eve.
How do modern theologians incorporate what anthropologists have discovered the last couple centuries into the works of older theologians? I read of a Jewish scholar ~80 years ago who went thru Sumerian literature and discovered some of their words may have influenced the Bible, eg the Garden story. Eve was made from Adam's rib, but in Sumerian the word for rib also means life force or spirit. Another example came from the story of Sodom, Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt but the Sumerian word for salt also means vapor. Abraham was a Sumerian, he was certainly aware of their traditions and language.
I'm sure there are lots of such connections between biblical stories and language and other stories in other Middle Eastern cultures. But I don't know about them, because I'm really not interested in the Old Testament. The pertinent point here is that it's hard to see what any of this has to do with any idea of historicity in the text. It may well be the case that a biblical story makes more sense when one understands that the words may originally have meant something else, or when one realises that it is an adaptation of an earlier story that may originally have had a different meaning, as may well be the case with the story of Eden. But does that make it any more likely to be true?
I realize that this is a very very broad question, so don't feel like you need to give an extraordinarily large answer.
I started reading an English translation of City of God about a week ago. The only contact I've had with anything about Augustine is what Russell had to say about him and his work in his philosophy survey. If I've learned anything, it's to roundly ignore what Russell thinks about other philosophers, aside from the historiographical. So, I'm asking you! What are your thoughts on this massive tome? On Augustine? Is there any other reading I should have done before (like Origen or Plotinus?), or should follow up with after?
One of the good things about Augustine is that he's generally pretty readable without needing to immerse yourself in other things first - apart from the polemical works, of course. This is especially so with
The City of God, which is relatively non-technical by Augustine's standards. Although Origen and Plotinus are both relevant to Augustine, more relevant authors would be either more recent ones (from Augustine's point of view) such as Basil of Caesarea or Gregory of Nyssa, or - better still - Latin theologians, such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Hilary of Poitiers, and especially Ambrose of Milan. All the same, I don't think that you'd really need to read them to appreciate Augustine. For
The City of God in particular it would be helpful read the pagan attacks on Christianity such as Porphyry's, but of course they don't exist other than as fragments.
I'm reading this as a sort of precursor to Summa Theologae, since I understand that Thomas builds upon Augustine a lot (but also departs from him), and I'm already somewhat versed in his other major source, Aristotle. Of this I have a shorter version (it advertises itself as the "shorter Summa," abridged by Thomas himself at the request of the Pope), so I'm not worried about tackling such a massive tome such as it reputably is.
This sounds a pretty hefty enterprise. If it's Augustine as precursor of Thomas that you're interested in, you might be better advised to read Augustine's
On the Trinity rather than
The City of God, as it is more philosophical and closer in spirit to Aquinas, not to mention a tremendous influence upon him.
I would also say that if you want precursors of Aquinas, you'd be well advised at least to look at Boethius (not the
Consolation of Philosophy but the theological
opuscula) and John of Damascus. Both of these were extremely important sources for not just Aquinas but medieval theological philosophy in general. If you have time, it would make sense to have a look at William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus too, but this might be getting a bit too much!
What in your view is the difference between philosophy and theology? Is it accurate to say that the methodology is the same, but theology is focused on 'the supernatural'? Is there in fact any such subject as 'the supernatural' - is it a useful category?
I'm not talking about historical differences but about how you see the contemporary disciplines (for example, it may once have been true to say that theologians assumed that God existed, but that clearly isn't true in your case). I'm also not talking about 'historical theology' ie what Gregory of Nisa may or may not have thought about some doctrinal point.
I'm groping towards answering my point in a rather backwards and literal way - theology is simply the study of God. Can you answer the question in a more enlightening way?
The difference between philosophy and theology is not in subject matter but in methodology. I don't think that there's any subject that's off-limits to philosophy, including the supernatural. What's distinctive about philosophy is that it uses the techniques of rational analysis and argument to try to determine what is true. Theology, by contrast, generally assumes certain truths (about God or related things) and seeks to explicate, describe, proclaim, or understand them.
Now the distinction is somewhat hazier than this might suggest, and this is for two reasons. The first is that when the methods of philosophy are used on theological subjects, it's not entirely clear whether the result is a kind of philosophy or a kind of theology. It might be philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, or something called "analytic theology" which as far as I can tell is the same thing as philosophical theology. At any rate, someone like Aquinas might be classed as either a philosopher or a theologian, even when considering the same texts, depending on how one looks at him. The same thing with contemporary figures such as Alvin Plantinga or Richard Swinburne. So there is a hazy middle ground between philosophy and theology. However, normally they're fairly distinct. It's pretty clear, for example, that someone like Karl Barth is a theologian, not a philosopher, and Bertrand Russell is a philosopher, not a theologian.
The second reason for the haziness is that philosophy itself doesn't always conform to the description I gave of it. Continental philosophy is often characterised as less concerned with analysis and arguments and more with explaining broad and general theories. It tends to focus on subjects of meaning, interpretation, society, politics, and language rather than the traditional concerns of English-speaking analytic philosophy such as epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and so on. It overlaps with anthropology and sociology in a way that analytic philosophy tends not to. (I say all this very much as an analytic philosopher!) As such, continental philosophy has a great deal in common with theology, which often reads much like continental philosophy about God. No doubt this is largely due to the fact that most of the important and interesting developments in theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took place in German-speaking countries, and it's hardly surprising that German theologians should be similar in outlook and methods to German philosophers. Moreover, certain movements in continental philosophy - notably existentialism - have had great direct influence on modern theology. And this has had an effect on western theology in general, which has resulted in a significant disconnect between philosophy and theology in the English-speaking world. To read a modern book of theology, even one written in English, you'd think that the main philosophers of note in the past couple of hundred years were Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and no-one else. So to that extent there is a great overlap between mainstream theology today and philosophy, but only a certain kind of philosophy.
By the way, when I talk about "theology" here I'm talking about people who try to explain and describe what they see as religious truth in its own right, not people like me who study them.
