In 1869, Andrew Dickson White, then president of newly founded Cornell University, gave a lecture entitled “The Battle-Fields Of Science” in the great hall of New York’s Cooper Union  He argued that science had been constantly engaged in a great war with religion, particularly Christianity, and that the progress of scientific truths was constantly and invariably impeded by the interests of Christian clerics. Many years later after a long career as an academic and a diplomat, his History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (1896) expanded the argument into a popular indictment of Christianity as a force of scientific ignorance and intellectual repression. Together with the accomplished physician and chemist John William Draper’s The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), the “conflict thesis” of religion at war with science was born. Though thoroughly dismissed by historians of science in the last century, the thesis remains alive and well today in popular culture (Numbers 2009, 1–7); the mere mention of Darwin or Galileo often elicits some articulation of the conflict thesis.

But the historical contexts of great works in the history of science generally show a decidedly different relationship between the scientific investigations of nature and religious thought. While there has been conflict between certain theories of nature and Christian orthodoxies, it is often a complex and nuanced conflict, even mixed with approvals and endorsements. The reception of Darwinian evolution in Christian churches of the nineteenth century is a case in point: naturalists and clerics were found all over the spectrum of opinion about On the Origin of Species, including many prominent American evangelicals who argued that natural selection was the mode through which God created the abundance of life on earth. Yet the history of science is also replete with works in which the complementarity of theological and natural investigations are shown. In these texts, the investigation of the theological meaning of creation is explored in a way that legitimizes the study of nature, recognizes its limits, and illuminates the possible meanings within the biblical account of creation.

Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis exemplifies this complementarity. In fact, it is such a rich work of theological and natural reflection, it could well serve as a piece of primary evidence against the “conflict thesis” and a primary witness for the longstanding Christian medieval engagement with natural science.¹ The work demonstrates this in four distinct yet interrelated ways. First, Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis offers a critical interpretation on what “literal” means to biblical reading, and in so doing allows for biblical creation to serve as a foundation for knowledge of nature. In this way, Augustine’s text becomes the preeminent example of hexameral (six-day) literature in medieval natural science. Second, Augustine’s commentary shows how biblical theology ought to work with natural science in order to know creation, while maintaining a needed critical distance from some of the assumptions and established theories of natural science. Third, Augustine’s commentary shows how the moral or tropological meaning of creation in Genesis was also intimately connected with the medieval study of natural science, which for Augustine, was not morally neutral. Last, Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis serves as an introduction to a specifically Christian natural science and thereby demonstrates a successful marriage of Christian theology to a general inquiry about nature without compromising the standards of natural explanation that were derived from pagan knowledge.

The Literal Meaning of Creation in Genesis

Augustine’s commentary on Genesis seeks to find the “literal” meaning of creation found in the first two chapters of scripture. What Augustine means by literal, however, is a far departure from the common contemporary meaning: while he insists from the very beginning of the first book that his literal approach differs wholly from a figurative one, it is certainly not what would today be called naïvely literal. Augustine seeks to find a “faithful account of what actually happened” in the creation of the world (2002, 168). This account, however, is not simply communicated by the plain words of the text—the length of the commentary alone demonstrates this fact—but with a careful probing of the words given in Genesis and with a clear method of interpretation. Augustine gives a synopsis of his method at the conclusion of the first book. In the effort to uncover “what actually happened,” Augustine writes that general knowledge of nature has to be considered when determining what the passages mean. A proper interpretation of creation in Genesis involves weighing it not only against the tenets of the faith but also against the knowledge of what the wider world shows to be true about nature. Hence a commentary on Genesis, if it is to be “literal” for Augustine, must engage in natural science, and must also be open to a plethora of possible meanings. Augustine thereby seeks to find all possible meanings by asking questions. At the point of this synopsis in Book I, readers will have already become familiar with this method, for hitherto he has treated, for instance, the many possible meanings of time and light, as they appear in the first few verses of Genesis.

By defining the “literal” meaning in such a way, Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis can be seen as a pre-eminent example of hexameral commentary in medieval natural science and how such knowledge can be advanced by the biblical account. Rather than confining the treatment of nature to a naïve reading of six days for the whole of natural origins, Augustine asks what the six-day creation could possibly mean if all of theology and natural science is brought into consideration. For instance, in Book II, Augustine specifically asks what these “days” could signify if time and the luminous heavenly bodies by which it is measured were not created until the fourth “day” (205–6)? For Augustine, such a probing question of the hexameron becomes an entry into natural science in general: the “impenetrable mystery” (as he calls it) of the six-day creation launches the careful thinker into serious investigations of nature and the cosmos.

Eventually, Augustine’s hexameral commentary becomes a model for natural science in the medieval age. The flourishing of a hexameral tradition is perhaps best seen in works from major figures of the twelfth century “renaissance,” such as Thierry of Chartres (d. 1150?) and William of Conches (c. 1090–1154?). Thierry of Chartres’s Hexaemeron interpreted the creation in view of Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s philosophy of causation and logic. William of Conches’s Dragmaticon Philosophiae was ­written as a work suitable to introduce students to the branches of natural science in the form of a hexameron. The dialogue between the Duke and the philosopher takes place over six days, during which the subjects of discussion broadly coincide with the chronology of creation in Genesis.

Taking the Standards of Science Seriously

The Literal Meaning of Genesis embraces contemporary natural science and takes the standards of natural explanation seriously. These appropriations of the current state of knowledge are perhaps best defended by Augustine’s repeated warning that in ignoring this knowledge, scripture would be laughed at by those pagans who know (186–87). Certainly, Augustine is concerned with the apologetic strength of the church, but there is more to Augustine’s argument: pagan natural science also comes to know truth, and as such its truths must inform the best understanding of scripture, particularly when one aims to understand the natural order. Augustine held that truths about creation and truths about God cannot contradict; this would be absurd for a divinely ordered cosmos. Hence the commentary is filled with allusions, references, and detailed discussions of scientific truths and theories of his day.

Yet at the same time, Augustine’s interpretation of natural science in The Literal Meaning of Genesis is not uncritical. His theological commitment to divine order and truth means that he is also skeptical with regard to natural science when currently accepted theory is far from certainly demonstrated. Hence Augustine treats subjects such as astrology (212–14), the four elements and their natural place (191)—particularly alongside the vexed question of heavenly “waters” in Genesis—and the movement of the heavens (203) as matters far from satisfactorily explained by current theories. For Augustine, these branches of natural science were highly speculative, and thus open for questioning, subject to human error, and susceptible to prideful overestimations of our power to know.

The Moral Meaning of Science

Since for Augustine the pursuit of natural scientific knowledge is susceptible to these ubiquitous foibles of human nature, it is little surprise that The Literal Meaning of Genesis cannot avoid dealing with the moral or tropological meaning of natural science. For example, Augustine’s treatment of the creation of the wild harmful beasts (Genesis 1:24–25) nevertheless has a moral message for human beings even as we study them in the created order, for the order of creation says something about our own orders and disorders. These creatures, Augustine argues, “provide us human beings with plenty of salutary admonitions” over how we ought to take better care over our spiritual and eternal health just as the “biggest elephants down to the smallest little worms, doing whatever they are capable of, whether by resisting or by taking precautions, to safeguard their bodily, time-bound health and welfare, such as been allotted to them according to their place on the lower scale of creation” (231). Therefore, for Augustine, natural science is not only a knowledge of nature as such, but of how it relates to us and what its proper order can tell us about the ordering of our own souls and bodies.

At first blush, Augustine’s insistence on the moral significance of natural science may seem to blur the line of demarcation between what is properly religion and what is science. But in fact much of today’s natural science is infused with moral considerations, or even broad moral imperatives: ecological sciences, for instance, are seldom separated from moral demands and reprimands over various individual, social, or industrial practices. Augustine’s commentary on Genesis shows us that this is not a new trend in the study of nature, but is an inextricable part of learning about the natural order. Ancient sources of natural science are filled with moral reflection. Consider Plato’s Timaeus or Pliny the Elder’s (23–79 AD) Natural History. In the eighth book of his magnum opus, for example, Pliny’s account of elephants highlights their moral significance: they possessed qualities, he writes, “rarely apparent even in man, namely honesty, good sense, justice, and respect for the stars, sun, and moon” (1991, 108).

The Coherence of Theology and Natural Science

Augustine’s commentary on Genesis shows how a robust Christian theology ought to be reconciled to natural science. The purpose of this lesson is not to defend Augustine’s particular expression of faith or to return uncritically to the prevailing theories of medieval natural science, but rather to show that rigorous theology can cohere with careful investigations of nature. Many important natural scientific thinkers of the Middle Ages were also theologians. To the modern reader, this fact may seem like a hopelessly compromised position for anyone to promote progress in natural science, but for them, and Augustine, it was demonstrably clear that theology cohered with natural science. The Literal Meaning of Genesis reconciles theology and natural science because for Augustine these branches of knowing are in pursuit of the same truth that makes the entire universe at all, or in any way, knowable.

In his commentary, Augustine never resorts to the miraculous when prevailing natural scientific explanation suffices; rather, for him, God’s governance over nature is known innately through natural things and their natural processes. The most striking instance of this general principle of God’s work in nature was Augustine’s emphasis in Books IV and V on how God created the cosmos instantaneously (and not in six standard days); the creation, he argued, like the seed of a tree (2002, 299–300), developed over time to keep creating anew. For Augustine, this
continual creating anew could be witnessed all through creation; thus to understand scripture’s account of creation, these natural processes have to be known. A true theology of creation has to know the order of creation. To be sure, for Augustine, a sound biblical commentary on Genesis has to conform to the Catholic faith, but it also has to be philosophically rational, consistent to itself, and conform to the current state of natural scientific explanation. “We ought to always observe moderation required of serious devotion to the truth and not commit ourselves rashly to any one opinion on such an obscure subject,” he writes, “in case perchance the truth may later on lay bare some other answer which can in no way be contrary to the sacred books” (214–15).

Galileo and Augustine

In his famous “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” written in the spring and summer of 1615, Galileo Galilei quotes this same passage from The Literal Meaning of Genesis. The letter squares his Copernican cosmology with the Joshua passage (10:12–13) that appeared to affirm the contrary worldview and argues a thoroughly Augustinian view of scriptural interpretation in view of natural science (Numbers 2008, 110). On October 31, 1992, in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II—once again quoting the same passage from Augustine’s commentary—concluded that Galileo’s theology of scriptural interpretation and natural science had in fact been orthodox. Oddly, in a complete inversion of the “conflict thesis” put forth by White, it was Galileo’s science that had been wanting: he had argued for heliocentrism as a reality without the conclusive proof to demonstrate it. For example, the novel discoveries he had made with the “spyglass” (what Galileo called the telescope) could well have been explained by alternate cosmological systems to the Copernican (such as the system of Danish astronomer Tyco Brahe). His famous Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632) argued that the tides were caused by the rotation and revolution of the earth and hence proved heliocentrism. Though he had brilliantly argued for a now verified effect of the earth’s movement upon the seas, Galileo’s proof of heliocentrism was in fact erroneous. The founder of classical physics and the pioneer of experimental method had correctly adopted Augustine’s theology of scripture, but had failed to heed his warning about treating speculations of natural science as undeniable truth.

Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis challenges the facile modern prejudices against ancient and medieval natural science and the falsely assumed conflict between science and religion. In pursuit of a good biblical interpretation, Augustine’s “literal” account of “what actually happened” in first two chapters of Genesis demanded engagement with the best natural science of his day; for Augustine, all the high accomplishments of the human mind are needed to probe the depths of holy writ.

Jarrett A. Carty is Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University Montreal.

Endnote

1. For the purposes of simplicity and to avoid confusion, I use the modern “natural science” in place of the ancient and medieval tradition of “natural philosophy.” Though not precisely equivalent, in broad contexts of the ancient and medieval past and the modern period, these both signify the study and accumulation of knowledge of natural phenomena.

Works Cited

Augustine. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. In Edmund Hill, O. P., trans., and John E. Rotelle, O. S. A, ed., On Genesis. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002.

Galilei, Galileo. “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, trans. and ed., The Essential Galileo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008.

Numbers, Ronald L., ed. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Pliny the Elder. Natural History. John F. Healy, trans. New York: Penguin. 1991.