As the highest of all the sciences, all other sciences depend upon theology for first principles in one form or another.  This is why the Church can never tire in proclaiming the truths of Divine Revelation.  We have spoken a number of times previously on using Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy, both of which supply natural science with foundational precepts, as governing paths of inquiry into the origins of man.  In this post we seek to provide some further theological guiderails; specifically into the origins of woman.

Among the temptations ever before the Church, especially in the wake of the fallout from the “Galileo affair”, is the seduction of capitulating to the Darwinian Zeitgeist in order to accommodate, not so much a scientific theory, but a worldview.  This knuckling under stems from both a lack of faith and a lack of charity.  A lack of faith because it does not take God’s word as more reliable than the inductive reasoning of science.  A lack of charity because the Church, as the “pillar and foundation of the truth” can protect natural science from wasting its time.  “Truth cannot contradict truth” so that if the Church knows something has been revealed, and thus true, she has an obligation to proclaim it.  She can thus serve natural science by guiding it to areas of explanation that more closely accord with what we already know.  This is not an apology for fideism, but an offer to supply the data from which human reason may find the truth.

Monogenism and the First Woman

That being said, theories abound within evolutionary biology as to the necessity of a single first woman from which all of mankind then proceeds.  Not a few of them posit that at some point within the evolutionary process a first man and first woman evolved.  There are many variations on it, but the monogenistic ones involve two members of some species of Hominids having undergone some change that led to their being the first humans.  Widely accepted by many Christians, these versions suppose that from some group of Hominids the bodies of Adam and Eve were supplied while God infused a rational soul.

There are good philosophical reasons to suppose that this explanation of Adam is false because form ontologically precedes matter.  The form of the living creature, that is its soul, organizes the matter of the body, not the other way around.  But that is a discussion for another time because Revelation tells us that this explanation for the origin of Eve is necessarily false. Eve was specially created by God from the rib of Adam when “the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam” (Gn 2:22).

The Creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 contain both mythical and symbolic language for the prehistoric account of Creation.  But this does not mean that everything that is written there is merely symbolic.  Some of it, perhaps even most of it, can and should be read in a literal manner.  Specifically, we should read the special creation of Eve as taken from the side of Adam as literally true.

Why It Matters

It might not seem like it matters how we read it, until we begin to reflect on its meaning.  There is first the point that St. John Paul II made regarding the fact that the origin of Eve makes it a matter of faith that man and woman have equal dignity and were made for each other.  The Woman is taken, not from his head or his feet, making her either higher of lower than him, but instead is taken from beside his heart.

Secondly, and more importantly, Eve being brought forth from the side of Adam is a type of the Church being brought forth from the side of Jesus while He slept on the Cross.  As the Council of Vienna put it in 1312,

“And that in this assumed nature the Word of God willed the salvation of all not only to be nailed to the Cross and to die on it, but also, having already breated forth His spirit, to permit His side to be pierced by a lance so that from the outflowing of water and blood there might be formed the one, immaculate and holy virginal Mother Church, the Bride of Christ ,as from the side of the first man in his sleep Eve was fashioned as his wife so that to the specific figure of the first and old Adam, who according to the Apostle, ‘is a type of the one who was to come’ (Rom. 5: 14), the truth might correspond in our last Adam, that is to say in Christ.”

To read the creation of Eve as somehow symbolic or metaphorical opens the path to a symbolic reading of Christ’s relation to the Church.  But if Eve was literally drawn from the side of Adam, then the Church must literally be drawn from the side of Christ.  For the type can never exceed the archetype.  The sign can never be more than the thing signified.  This, as an aside, is why the Church has always read Jonah as a historical book, because Christ said his time in the belly of the whale was meant to be a sign of His time in the tomb.

Avoiding the Galileo Pitfall

But aren’t we just opening the door to another Galileo problem of so wedding ourselves to a literal interpretation that any scientific challenge to it clears the way for scandal?  In this case, no.  The analogy of faith, that is, the principle that Scripture interprets itself, paves the way for a literal interpretation.

In defending Church discipline in his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul comments that “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man…For just as woman came from man, so man is born of woman; but all things are from God” (1 Cor 11:8,12).  The first woman came from man just as all succeeding men are born of a woman.  This is why the Apostle to the Gentiles can later claim to the Athenians without contradiction that : “from one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26).  All of mankind, Eve included, comes from Adam.

The direct and unique creation of Eve is part of the Deposit of Faith and has been taught as part of the Ordinary Magisterium since at least the 6^th Century when Pope Pelagius I declared “I confess … that all men from Adam onward who have been born and have died up to the end of the world will then rise again and stand ‘before the judgment-seat of Christ,’ together with Adam himself and his wife, who were not born of other parents, but were created: one from the earth and the other from the side of the man.”  It was reaffirmed in the previously quoted Council of Vienna in the 14^th Century and then given a clear affirmation by Pope Leo XIII. 

Writing shortly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Leo XIII solemnly declared that

“For although the revilers of the Christian faith shrink from acknowledging the Church’s permanent doctrine on this matter, and persist in their long-standing efforts to erase the history of all nations and all ages, they have nonetheless been unable to extinguish, or even to weaken, the strength and light of the truth. We call to mind facts well-known to all and doubtful to no-one: after He formed man from the slime of the earth on the sixth day of creation, and breathed into his face the breath of life, God willed to give him a female companion, whom He drew forth wondrously from the man’s side as he slept.”

Acta Sanctae Sedis, English translation provided here

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the Pontifical Biblical Commission addressed our question head on when it stated in its Response of June 30, 1909 that:

Question 3: Is it possible, in particular, to call into question the literal and historical meaning where there is question of facts narrated in these same chapters that touch the foundation of the Christian religion, such as, among others, the creation of all things that was accomplished by God at the beginning of time, the special creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the first man, the unity of human race…the fall of the first parents from that primitive state of innocence, and the promise of a future Redeemer?

Response: No.

For those looking for a fuller treatment that traces the path of the Magisterium on this issue and why it should be seen as coming from the Ordinary Magisterium, I recommend this paper.

The issue of reconciling the findings of natural science and the truths of Divine Revelation is always an important work.  Nevertheless it is a work that must be governed by principles so ably laid out by St. Augustine in the 4^th Century: “Whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures; and whatever they assert in their treatises which is contrary to these Scriptures of ours, that is to Catholic faith, we must either prove it as well as we can to be entirely false, or at all events we must, without the smallest hesitation, believe it to be so.”  This is especially true for evolution and the origins of Eve.