Chapter II: The literal interpretation of the days of Genesis conforms to the rules of Sacred Hermeneutics

FIRST RULE

The words of Scripture must be taken in their literal and natural sense, unless the letter offers a meaning evidently false and contrary either to other passages of Scripture whose meaning cannot be disputed, or to the teaching of tradition, or to the decisions of the Church. Such is the doctrine of the whole School. But theologians and interpreters are careful to observe two things: 1. That the literal sense of Scripture is its principal sense, which one must seek to know before the spiritual sense and the anagogical sense, and that one must concern oneself with the latter only after having established the former, which is as it were the foundation of the others; 2. That the literal sense must not

be rejected as contrary to reason merely because it contains a mystery or presents something incomprehensible. Now: 1. The Mosaic account, taken literally, presents nothing absurd, nothing contrary to reason; the difficulties raised by the adversaries of the literal sense are far from implying an evident contradiction; 2. It is not contrary to other passages of Scripture whose meaning is clearly established; the texts of the Bible which are cited in favor of the allegorical sense, and notably that of Genesis where it is said: Istæ sunt generationes cæli et terræ, quando creata sunt in die quo fecit Dominus Deus cælum et terram [These are the generations of heaven and earth, when they were created, in the day when the Lord God made heaven and earth], and that of Ecclesiasticus: Creavit omnia simul [He created all things together], prove nothing against the literal interpretation of the days, as we shall soon establish; 3. Finally, Christian tradition, instead of militating against the literal sense, approves and confirms it, as we shall see in the third part of this work.

This rule therefore does not permit departure from the literal sense of the Mosaic narrative.

SECOND RULE

To grasp the sense of any passage of Scripture, one must carefully examine the sacred text and its context, that is to say, pay attention not only to the words of the text which one wishes to explain,

but also to what follows and what precedes this text, having recourse when necessary both to the preceding chapters and to the following chapters. According to this rule, it is certain that the words of Moses must be taken according to their literal sense. The sacred author designates therein the various works which God performed on each of the days. Now, just as the names of heaven, earth, the sun, plants, animals, man, etc., are always taken in their natural sense, so by the name of day one must understand a true day, since no context indicates that it must be interpreted metaphorically.

THIRD RULE

To determine in what sense one must take a particular passage or a particular expression, one must further consider the aim which the author proposed to himself and the reasons which led him to write. This twofold consideration further confirms the literal sense of the Genesis account. What does Moses propose to himself? To inculcate in the Israelites the dogma of a creator God, the first foundation of the true religion. In the second place, to turn them away from the errors of polytheism, which accorded worship to the heavenly bodies, to animals, and to plants, and adored them as gods. Finally, to consecrate the celebration of the Sabbath by the very example of God. Now, to attain this threefold aim, is it not

evident that Moses neither ought nor could speak an allegorical language to a coarse and ignorant people without giving them any explanation of it? Instead of giving them clear, precise ideas concerning the great religious truths—the creation of heaven and earth, that of Adam and Eve, the history of their innocence, their fall, their punishment, the account of the generations from Adam to Noah, etc.—he would have surrendered his word to the most disparate, the most bizarre interpretations, and would have cast the Israelites into uncertainty and doubt concerning all things.

Moreover, as Christians, we must believe that Moses is a sacred historian and that he wrote the first chapters of Genesis, like all the others, under divine inspiration. The words of Genesis, says Saint Irenaeus, were written by Moses and dictated by the Word.¹

But if Moses was divinely inspired in composing the cosmogony, the truth of all the details of his account becomes unassailable, whatever may otherwise be the source from which he was able to draw this information, and consequently one cannot depart from the sense which presents itself naturally to the mind.

From these principal rules of sacred criticism, to which we could add that of the comparison of parallel passages, that is to say, of the other

passages of the same historian which, without being connected to these, may nevertheless relate to them, since they express the same thought—from these rules, we say, it follows manifestly that there is no plausible reason to abandon the literal interpretation of the Mosaic account, and that it is not even permissible, in sound logic, to give it another sense.