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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Drawing the lesson from two millenia of exegesis,
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This review is from: Genesis 1: Through the Ages (Paperback)
Stanley L. Jaki is a Hungarian-born Benedictine priest with doctorates in theology and physics, and the author of about forty volumes or so dealing mostly with the relationship of science and theology.*Genesis 1 Through the Ages* is one of his more exegetical studies, along with *The Keys of the Kingdom: A Tool's Witness to Truth* and *And on This Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants*. His aim here is to survey two millenia of commentaries of Genesis 1 and offer his own interpretation in the last thirty pages or so. Potential readers of the book should be reminded that chapter 1 of Genesis, also known as the Hexaemeron, is only concerned with what is known as «the work of the six days». Fr. Jaki's work, therefore, has nothing to say about the creation of Eve from Adam's side, the Fall or the Flood, all of which are dealt with in the subsequent chapters of Genesis. The survey itself is divided into eight chapters, beginning with the «Jewish sages» (from Philo and the Talmud to Maimonides, the Cabala, Spinoza and Umberto Cassuto) and concluding with the latest efforts of 20th century Christian scholarship, on which Jaki delivers a rather skeptical verdict : «On the one hand they claim that Moses, or whoever else, wanted to say something all-important about the totality of the physical realm, including himself, and in such a way as to be within the reach of simple fools. On the other hand, they portray Moses as one lost in myths and incredibly complicated schemes» (p256.) Sandwiched between these two more or less chronological termini are chapters on the Patristic Age (which saw such a genius as Saint Augustine exclaim after years of work : «I collapsed under the weight of a burden I could not bear»), the Middle Ages, the Age of Reformers (where protestant exegetes like Luther and Calvin had to pay the price for «replacing the infallibility of the Church (and of the papacy in particular) with the infallibility of the Bible»), the New Age of Science (in which Descartes, Leibnitz, Buffon and Kant- a joke as a scientist, as Jaki is fond of showing- broke their teeth on the Six Days) and the Age of Cosmogenesis, when increasingly atheistic physicists failed to pay attention to James Clerk Maxwell's dictate that «one of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of the scientific method.» After teasing the reader for 260 pages or so, Fr. Jaki delivers his own interpretation of the Hexaemeron, trying to put it «at safe remove from ... the merciless grip of science» by rejecting the root error that thwarted its correct interpretation for two millenia: concordism, i.e. the projection onto the biblical text of «cosmogonies taken for the last word in science » (p42.) As he states bluntly, «there is no world-making whatsoever in Genesis 1 in the sense of a scientific cosmogenesis, however inchoate» (p260), thereby echoing the teaching given by Leo XIII in his 1893 Encyclical *Providentissimus Deus* that «the inspired authors did not mean to teach about the workings of nature» (p216, in Jaki's paraphrase.) Serenely accepting that Genesis 1 is predicated on an obsolete vision of the world as a flat disk covered by the solid dome of the heavens and surrounded by the upper and lower waters, Jaki nonetheless manages to offer a non-mythical interpretation he considers «valid for all ages», based on exegetical clues found in such books as Jeremiah and the Psalms. *Genesis 1 Through the Ages* follows the same kind of method as Jaki's excellent *God and the Sun at Fatima* (which convinced me that something truly miraculous did happen there on October 13, 1917- and that it did not involve the sun itself): a painstaking crawl through dozens upon dozens of documents to finally reach a clear and simple truth which nobody seems to have grasped before. My only reservation is that Jaki may be a little uncharitable in making dozens of history's greatest minds play Watson to his own Sherlock, leaving the reader with the impression that nothing worth reading on Genesis 1 was ever written between the 13th century BC and the present book. But this, in my opinion, is a minor flaw when compared to the immense benefit one derives from understanding that the «six days» need not be interpreted in any of the several dubious ways concocted by the literalists, be it the traditional six-day view, the gap theory, the day-age theory, «progressive creation» or the days of proclamation theory (to use the classification proposed by Glenn R. Morton- himself a defender of the latter and by far the most innocuous- in *Foundation, Fall and Flood*.) My mind at least is at rest, free to tackle the much thornier issues of monogenism, original sin and the Flood.
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