Some Southrons
make these kinds of statements
from time to time:
We’re told their
demonstrable lack of civilizational capacity is the result of all sorts of
terms for racism, white supremacy, not given enough resources, and the legacy
of slavery, but really, it’s rather simple. Sub-Saharan Africans have DNA from
a pre-hominid ancestor not shared by any other race.
As a whole, this
is probably what imbues them with a set of definitive traits such as poor
intelligence, a lack of impulse control, an inability to think with a
significant degree of abstraction or internal monologue, and a very short time
horizon. These traits don’t result in a civilization. Without contact by other
races, it constrains them to a hunter-gatherer existence. They’re programmed to
be fine with that, which is the same reason that white people assume blacks are
stressed out from all the shootings. In reality, they’re not, which is why they
shoot so much. This existence would stress (product of a longer time horizon)
us out for the same reason we don’t shoot each other for no good reason.
This wide genetic
disparity also gives them some distinct physical features which is why AI can
confuse them with apes because it’s just doing math on facial points.
They are
worth a close examination, mainly because they rest on the assumption that
mankind is the product of an evolutionary process of some kind. But is that compatible with the Christianity
that traditional Southerners say we want to govern all aspects of our
society? The answer would seem to be No.
To begin
with, evolution conflicts with the idea of man made in the image and likeness
of God, with the teaching that man is specially created by God. Jesse Dominick, in his Master’s thesis on the
teachings about creation of the ever-memorable St. Seraphim Rose (+1982) writes,
Evolution
is understood to occur not within individuals but within populations.[6] Thus, many theistic evolutionists do not
believe in the historicity of Adam and Eve as literally the first human beings,
but rather interpret them as symbols for the first human population. Others propose that
once the evolutionary forerunners of human beings attained the proper physical
state, God called out two of them to receive souls, who became the first
humans, Adam and Eve. Fr. Seraphim mentions such ideas in his talks,[7] which had been expressed to him in a
letter by Dr. Alexander Kalomiros, who wrote: “Adam is the evolved beast who
receives in its innermost being the divine breath … then the evolved beast
became a logical creature, being transformed from the inside, and in its
depths, not anatomically but
spiritually, by the grace of the Holy Spirit” (emphasis in
original).[8] Dr. Alexander draws his sole Patristic
support for his view from a passage of A
Conversation of St. Seraphim of Sarov with N. A. Motovilov in which
St. Seraphim seemingly
teaches that man was a beast like unto other beasts, later becoming a human at
the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. However, in his reply letter, Fr. Seraphim
goes to great lengths to demonstrate that St. Seraphim is in fact in harmony
with the other Fathers who teach that Adam’s body and soul were created
simultaneously, as aforementioned (and which will be addressed further on).[9] As always, Fr. Seraphim prostrated his
mind before that of the Church and sought for the Spirit-breathed harmony of the Fathers, rather
than seeking the apparent “contradictions” which fuel academic studies, or
passages that could be perverted to fit his own theories.
Dr.
Kalomiros twice introduces a dualism into the constitution of man. The claim
that Adam’s body predates his soul means it thus has its own particular
existence apart from the soul and thus divides the integral unity of the
hypostasis of man; and the claim that Adam is an evolved beast who received the
breath of God necessitates that there would have thus been other animals, from
which Adam was taken, that are physically identical to human beings but lacking
the spiritual nature of man. Dr. Kalomiros writes: “I would not be surprised if
Adam’s body had been in all aspects the body of an ape.”[10] This logically leads to the strange
conclusions that either the irrational beasts possessing the same physical body
as Adam are half-humans, or that the human body is not truly “human,” as it is
possessed also by irrational beasts, and so humanity is found only in the
spiritual nature of man. This is little different from the erroneous
philosophical notion of the anathematized Alexandrian theologian Origen
(184–254) that pre-existent human souls fell into bodies which are not truly
part of the human constitution—a belief which compelled the Fathers to write strongly
on the simultaneous creation of the human body and soul.
. .
.
As Fr. Seraphim demonstrates, none of these
theories—that Adam is merely symbolic of all humanity or that Adam and Eve are
the first humans called out from a population of lower beasts, or that they are
simply the first humans to receive a “God-consciousness”—are compatible with
Patristic Orthodoxy. St.
Nikolai Velimirović writes precisely of those who take pleasure “in
shamelessly calling monkeys their ancestors,” that they engage in “the drowning
of anthropology in zoology.”[19] The Tradition of the Church is quite
consistent that Adam and Eve were literal people, that they were the only human
beings until they had children, and that they were created uniquely from the
rest of creation, and thus were not merely descendants of lower creatures. M.
C. (now Bishop Irenei) Steenberg argues in his aforementioned article that for
St. Irenaeus, in contrast to the allegorizing whims of the Gnostics, for Adam
and Eve to have any symbolic value, such as some evolutionists would ascribe to
them, they must be literal,
historical persons whom we read of in an historical narrative.[20] Many other Fathers who write of the
Creation accounts, with their strict adherence to the historicity of Genesis,
attest to the same.[21] In writing of Adam and Eve the Fathers
are not offering apologetics for their literal existence, but rather seem to
take it for granted and simply speak of Adam and Eve as actual people, as any
Christian would have believed. . . .
Second,
evolutionary theories place death in the world before the Fall. They make death a necessity for the progress
of creatures to higher forms of life.
But death came only after the Fall, as a result of the sin of Adam and
Eve; it could not have existed prior to that terrible event. St. Seraphim Rose, writing in reply to an
evolutionist on these subjects, says,
And St. John
Damascene, whose theology gives concisely the teaching of all the early Fathers
writes:
The earliest
formation (of man) is called creation and not generation. For creation is the
original formation at God's hands, while generation is the succession from each
other made necessary by the sentence of death imposed on us on account of the
transgression. (On the Orthodox
Faith, II, 30)
And what of Eve?
Do you not believe that, as the Scripture and holy Fathers teach, she was made
from Adam's rib and was not born of some other creature? But St. Cyril writes:
Eve was begotten
of Adam, and not conceived of a mother, but as it were brought forth of man
alone. (Catechetical Lectures, XII, 29)
. .
.
Now I come to a
very important point. You ask: "How is it that the fall of Adam brought
corruption and the law of the jungle to the animals, since animals have been
created before Adam? We know that animals died, killed and devoured one another
since their first appearance on earth and not only after the appearance of
man."
How do you know
this? Are you sure that this is what the holy Fathers teach? You explain your
point, not by quoting any holy Fathers, but by giving a philosophy of
"time." I certainly agree with you that God is outside of time; to
Him everything is present. But this fact is not a proof that animals, who died
because of Adam, died before he fell. What do the holy Fathers say?
It is true, of
course, that most holy Fathers speak about animals as already corruptible and
mortal; but they are speaking about their fallen state. What about their state
before the transgression of Adam?
There is a very
significant hint about this in the commentary in Genesis of St. Ephraim the
Syrian. When speaking of the "skins" which God made for Adam and Eve
after their transgression, St. Ephraim writes:
One may suppose
that the first parents, touching their waists with their hands found that they
were clothed with garments made of animal skins-killed, it may be, before their
very eyes, so that they might eat their meat, cover their nakedness with the
skins, and in their very death might see the death of their own body. (Commentary on Genesis, ch.3)
I will discuss
below the patristic teaching of the immortality of Adam before his
transgression, but here I am only interested in the question of whether animals
died before the fall. Why should St. Ephraim suggest that Adam would learn
about death by seeing the death of animals-if he had already seen the death of
animals before his transgression (which he certainly had according to the
evolutionary view)? But this is only a suggestion; there are other holy Fathers
who speak quite definitely on this subject, as I will show in a moment.
But first I must
ask you: if it is true as you say that animals died and the creation was
corrupted before the transgression of Adam, then how can it be that God looked
at His creation after every one of the Days of Creation and "saw that it
was good," and after creating the animals on the Fifth and Sixth Days He
"saw that they were good," and at the end of the Six Days, after the
creation of man, "God saw all the things that He had made, and behold,
they were very good." How could they be "good" if they were
already mortal and corruptible, contrary to God's plan for them? The Divine
services of the Orthodox Church contain many moving passages of lamentation
about the "corrupted creation," as well as expressions of joy that
Christ by His Resurrection has "recalled the corrupted creation." How
could God see this lamentable condition of the creation and say that it was
"very good"? And again, we read in the sacred text of Genesis:
"And God said, Behold I have given to you every seed-bearing herb sowing
seed which is upon all the earth, and every tree which has in itself the fruit
of seed that is sown, to you it shall be for food. And to all the wild beasts
of the earth, and to all the flying creatures of heaven, and to every reptile
creeping on the earth, which has in itself the breath of life, even every green
plant for food; and it was so." (Gn. 1:29-30) Why, if the animals devoured
each other before the fall, as you say, did God give them, even "all the
wild beasts and every reptile" (many of which are now strictly
carnivorous) only "green plants for food"? Only long after the
transgression of Adam did God say to Noah: "And every reptile which is
living shall be to you for meat; I have given all things to you as the green
herbs." (Gn. 9:3) Do you not sense here the presence of a mystery which so
far has escaped you because you insist on interpreting the sacred text of
Genesis by means of modern evolutionary philosophy, which will not admit that
animals could ever have been of a nature different from that which they now
possess?
Third, the
acceptance of the theory of evolution is driving Southerners and other peoples
away from Christianity and towards scientific atheism and other infidel
religions, thus undermining the foundations of Christian culture here and abroad. The excellent spiritual writer St.
Theophan the Recluse (+1894) makes this point well:
People have suddenly had a thought and have
started to write about preserving faith.
But they don’t want to block the source of unbelief. This source is the spread of the teaching
that the world formed by itself, according to which there is no need for God
and the soul does not exist—it’s all atoms and chemistry, nothing more. This is being preached at [university]
rostrums and in literature. He who
breathes these fumes is inescapably stupefied, and loses his sense and faith. .
. . Until these books are destroyed;
until professors and literary men are forced not only not to hold to
this theory, but even to demolish it—until then—faithlessness will grow and
grow, and with it, self-will and the destruction of the present
government. That’s the way the French
Revolution went (Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision, 2nd
edn., Hieromonk Damascene, edr., St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina,
Cal., 2011, p. 792).
For Dixie to
be faithful to Christ, she must reject evolution. If she rejects evolution, there can be no
more speculation about sub-Saharan Africans being some kind of less-evolved
form of humanity or some kind of stunted evolutionary cousin. They are just as human as Asians or
Europeans, just as much the children of Adam and Eve as the rest of mankind.
If the
actions of some of the African folk in the South and other places is less than
ideal, we must remember that it took several hundreds of years for Europeans to
be transformed by the Grace of God into the relatively virtuous beings we have
become. Let us not, therefore, judge
prematurely this population of Africans.
Let them have 500 or 1,000 continuous years of nurturing from the Holy
Ghost, as most European countries have had; then let us see how fares their
civilization.
Each of us
has a role to play in the salvation and sanctification of the black folks
amongst us here in Dixie, be it small or large.
Are we faithfully discharging that duty?
Do we pray that the Lord would free them from bondage to the devil and
his demons? Do we share the Gospel with
them? Do we befriend and counsel
them? Most tellingly, are we willing to
be mistreated and martyred for the sake of uniting them to Christ, as St. Paul
and most of the other Holy Apostles, St. Denis, St. Boniface, and scores of others
were for the sake of saving the lost heathens to whom they preached? ‘If I have not love . . .’ (I
Corinthians 13).
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
