Here is a compilation of various resources for Catholics and other Christians to begin digging into the perennial beliefs regarding the historicity of the creation story laid out in the First Book of Moses. A lot of this was originally sourced by Gideon Lazar but I have tweaked some things and added imbedded links to all of the works cited. This is not a finished product and will continue to be a work in progress. I hope that people find this interesting and helpful.
Fathers and Doctors of the Church
Saint Theophilus of Antioch
Letter to Autocylus, Book II Chapters 10-32 (x)
Saint Irenaeus of Lyons
Adversus Haereses (specifically Book V Chapter 23)
Origen of Alexandria
Homilies on Genesis
Saint Victorinus
On the Creation of the World
Saint Ephraim the Syrian
Commentary on Genesis
Saint Basil the Great
Homilies on the Hexaemeron
Saint Gregory of Nyssa
On the Making of Man
Saint Ambrose of Milan
Hexaemeron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel
Saint John Chrysostomos
Homilies on Genesis
Saint Augustine
Confessions, Books XI and XII
On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis
City of God, Books XI-XVI
Selpicius Severus
Sacred History
Venerable Bede
The Reckoning of Time, Chapter 66
Saint John of Damascus
Exposition on the Orthodox Faith, Book II (x)
Saint Bonaventure
Breviloquium, Parts II and III
Collations in Hexaemeron
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars Questions 44-46, 65-74, 90-92, and 102
Conciliar Magisterium
Council of Carthage (AD 419)
Canon 109
Fourth Lateran Council (AD 1215)
Confession of Faith
Council of Trent (AD 1545-1563)
Session IV, Decree concerning the use of the Sacred Books
Session V, On Original Sin
Professio Fidei
Catechism of Trent, On the Production of Man (pg 42)
Second Vatican Council (AD 1965)
Dei Verbum, Chapter III
Roman Martyrology
December 25th
Papal Magisterium
Pope Leo XIII
Arcanum Divinae, Paragraph 5
Providentissimus Deus
Pope Benedict XV
Spiritus Paraclitus
Pope Ven. Pius XII
Divino Afflante Spiritu
Humani Generis
Pope Saint John Paul II
Laborum Exercens, Chapter IV
Evangelium Vitae, Chapter 34-36
Pope Francis
Laudato Si, Paragraph 65-67
Pontifical Biblical Commission
The commission was granted explicit papal approval as authoritatively binding by Pope Saint Pius X in 1907 (Praestantia Scripturae) until that authority was rescinded by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1971 (Sedula Cura). The rescinding does not retroactively make the previous issued decrees non-binding but merely removes that prerogative from further decrees by the commission. Much of the decrees are only available in Latin and Italian but the first 50 years are in English here.
Miscellaneous
Fr. Chad Ripperger
The Metaphysical Impossibility of Human Evolution
Dr. Henry Morris
The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution
Fr. Seraphim Rose
Genesis, Creation, and Early Man
Fr. Victor Warkulwiz
The Doctrines of Genesis
Drs. John Bergsma and Brant Pitre
A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (I don’t have a PDF)
i cannot help but notice a shocking parallel between the modern secular conservative “what is a woman” campaign and this excerpt from Alice Schwarzer:
The childbearing capacity…[is] the sole remaining difference between men and women. Everything else is artificially acquired, a matter of how one’s personal identity is formed.
To be honest, I have a lot of empathy/sympathy for the radfem-adjacent criticisms of gender ideology, owing to having followed many who are adjacent to that crowd (perhaps you may find it ironic that I find secular conservatism extremely obnoxious and retarded). The radfem-adjacent "gender critical" tradition I think is very useful for Catholics to draw on, in that it can expose false conceptions of masculinity and femininity and is also very effective at rendering gender ideology "rhetorically impotent" as it were. The emphasis that the gender critical tradition puts on "GNC" men or women as being fully valid biological men or women, and not some "other" entity is important to me as well. A meek, physically weak, chaste man is not "gay", or "femme", or any other kind of "subversion" of masculinity, that's just how he is.
I generally agree with the perception that we can't and ought not to describe as essential to manhood or womanhood any trait that we can't prove as being purely biological in origin; but unlike the radfems I think that behavioural inclinations are not purely socially constructed. Whereas the radfems deny that there is any connection between behaviour and biology, I think that there necessarily must be several such connections, but that doesn't mean we can empirically verify any given trait to be purely biological in origin, any more than we can verify it to be purely societal in origin.
Hence I think that one should be cautious about trying to tie manhood or womanhood of necessity to specific behavioural inclinations, because one could easily counter-argue that said inclination is a result of social influences. Better to keep definitions simple. I like to use a variant of Trent Horn's definitions: the male is the sex oriented towards spermatization/insemination/fatherhood and the female is the sex oriented towards ovulation/gestation/motherhood.
The issue is that the essence of both manhood and womanhood are not biological but primarily spiritual. That is the metaphysical issue that we are currently dealing with and this is a perfect illustration of my point.
To make the primary battlefield of this sort of issue one of science and biology is to give away the plot from the start and it is directly why the opinion expressed in my original post exists in the first place. It’s wrong. We can use natural scientific argumentation to aid us but, as Catholics, it cannot be our primary tool. Far from it.
i wonder if people know that the way in which phone cameras started implementing automatic up scaling can cause various “ai face” syndrome on a variety of images, especially when they’re too zoomed out
Basically, feminist theology must be understood as calling into question the male cast of both the image of God and the office of priest, and this will be critically evaluated, within a systemic framework of inquiry, in what follows: ‘…test everything; hold fast what is good.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:21)
Manfred Hauke, Women in the Priesthood? : A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption
the human nature is made up of two distinct parts, the spirit and the body, which are constantly struggling against one another for primacy; in turn, Man has two options: to allow the spirit to conform to the whims of the body or to allow the spirit to subjugate the body, only one of these is good and there is no third option
i cannot help but notice a shocking parallel between the modern secular conservative “what is a woman” campaign and this excerpt from Alice Schwarzer:
The childbearing capacity…[is] the sole remaining difference between men and women. Everything else is artificially acquired, a matter of how one’s personal identity is formed.
What would you say are some symbols of Lent? I'm trying to design a flag to represent the lang I started making during Lent, but I'm having difficulties deciding what to have on it lol
Skulls of course, other bones to a lesser degree, host and chalice, cross, fish
Being against the sexual degradation of women in terms of pornography/prostitution and just everyday life, used to be a very normal and valid opinion in feminism 30-40+ years ago.
But in the present day merely complaining about the hyper-sexualization of women, will get you called an ‘internalized misogynist’ ‘prude’ ‘frigid’ ‘anti-feminist’ ‘facist’ and the upsetting thing about it, is that it’s women saying it to each other.
This post is very confused since the earliest configurations of feminism explicitly wanted women to be able to sexualize themselves and break free from the ‘oppressive’ structure of modest dress
you can disagree with it all you want, and you should, but the interlocutors mentioned in the second half are more consistent and the True Heirs to the feminist movement
Catholicapothecary, I admire and respect you (and I'm not just saying that to butter you up), but while modern feminism arguably was all about jettisoning 'those oppressive rules' (which makes it more of a 20th-century phenomenon than a purely female one), the earliest configurations of feminism, to be pedantic, were all those late-18-to-early-19th century movements about women as rational creatures and moral equals with the rest of mankind. Early feminists like, say, the Bronte sisters, were appalled no end about things like adultery and women who spent too much time adorning themselves.
I do appreciate the kind words. I would admit that I am not at all read with regards to early proto-feminist works. However, I would say that the sort of moral equality in all of these movements (at least in their mainstream form) is not a real moral equality (as we would conceive of it as Catholic Christians) but a perversion of the concept. The different configurations find their concept of equality from one of 3 distinct sources: Marxism proper, revisionist marxism (western socialist or social democratic parties), or French Revolutionary liberalism (cf. Hauke). All of which have as their logical conclusion the sexual revolution and the continuous fallout we’ve seen since.
All of this is to say that even if they were against immodesty and sexual degeneracy, their ideas of emancipation and equality were always going to lead to it. That’s the consequence of destroying existing social order. One can argue that it was necessary for whatever end, even in the hopes that one could stop the downstream effects from occuring, but one cannot really argue that it wasn’t the logical outcome.
As a related aside, this has been the principle behind my entire project wrt modern political thought in the US. Inasmuch as any alternative to or replacement of the current regime or system must be legitimately rooted in Catholic principles and administrated by Catholics or else it is doomed to turn to horrible atrocity once it “wins.”
the battlefield today is more metaphysical than it has been since the first century; we aren’t engaged in a fight over policy or even principles, in a generic sense, but the very basis by which the entire cosmos is structured
