Good questions! A good place to start is Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Arcanum" (www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_10021880_arcanum.html ) and G.K. Chesterton's book, "What's Wrong with the World."
That last point (at the end of the video) made me struggle so much with Genesis when I was a teenager, and to be honest it really frustrates the problem of evil for me even today. Here’s how I see it: 1.If Genesis is a literal account of the events transpiring before “history” started, then Adam and Eve supposedly saw God as he was- their intellects were fixed on God in the same way described at the end of the video (basically by necessity). Yet they somehow disobeyed God’s commandment… so that’s a problem related to the last point of the video, but there’s actually another riddle/impossibility in the narrative: Eve sins before she has the capacity to sin! Taking and eating the fruit (which was disobedience to God) was a sin- but she did this BEFORE eating the fruit. If the fruit conferred anything at all, we must say whatever it confers has a kind of logical posteriority to one who makes use of what it grants. If I say you can have invincibility after you are shot with a “killer” bullet (a bullet that will kill anything except that which is invincible), and you accept, then you will never get invincibility, because you need invincibility to fulfill the condition for getting invincibility! Anyway… 2. If the above analysis forced us to say Genesis is “myth” (symbols pointing toward truth), then what stops us from saying Christ is a myth as well? If we do not, why not? If myth is enough to get the whole story going, and Christ is that which redeems us from sin (which is what we inherit from Genesis), then what he saves us from is a mythologized condition. We may have a condition called sin, but it has nothing to do with Genesis. And it may be obvious- though perhaps not- the last point of the video makes the “free will” defense for evil complete nonsense. It’s nonsense for many reasons, but this one is an interesting one. I often wonder why God can’t just give all of us a vision of himself and grant us all perfect happiness NOW. Why go through life as we do, hoping and wanting and suffering for some meager form of happiness when God can just give it to us for free and without effort by him? I’d gladly hand over my “free will” to be in the presence of God. Free will hasn’t done me any good anyway.
These are great questions, but they illustrate the saying that a small error in the beginning leads to great errors later on. Adam and Eve did not have the beatific vision. They did not see God as he is before they sinned. Thus, they were not in the same situation as those in heaven who cannot sin. Rather, Adam and Eve were promised such a vision in the future once they had lived out their lives on earth in a morally upright way. They had more knowledge than humans today have and they were much more intelligent since their intellect was not yet weakened by a fallen nature. Nevertheless, they did not see God's essence or know everything. Still having some degree of ignorance and a mutable intellect, they were capable of ignoring what they habitually knew and, thereby, sinning. Now, the story of Adam and Eve is not a myth (cf. Pius XII, Humani generis), but that is a more complicated discussion than I should get into here. Let's just ahead to your conclusion that Christ is a myth. Regardless of what you think of Genesis, this is not true. Merely as a matter of history, it is demonstrable that Jesus of Nazareth had a ministry in early 1st century Palestine in which his disciples identified him with the messiah, was crucified as a revolutionary by Pilate, and shortly thereafter his tomb was empty with his disciples claiming that he was raised from the dead and his enemies claiming his disciples stole the body. The genre of the four Gospel narratives is not at all one of myth, but rather of biography along the lines of Porphyry's biography of Plotinus. They are not histories according to the modern genre of academic history, but they are not myths. They are biographies, intended to be historically accurate according to the standards of the time, written by authors who were either eyewitnesses to the events or who interviewed those who were such eyewitnesses. For an excellent scholarly defense of these claims, see R. Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
@@ElliotPolskyPhilosophy That’s all well and good, but what do you think of the logical problem of Adam and Eve eating the fruit? It cannot be literally true if there is some form of logical impossibility in the story, right? If it is not a kind of logical error, why not? Also, I was not making the claim that the story of Christ is written in the literary genre of “myth” as understood by people in those times. I was just making a note that, if Genesis is a myth, and the condition of sin is a myth, I see no real reason why Christ, too, cannot be a myth. That Christ is not a myth is a mystery to me if we maintain that Genesis is myth (and modern science would certainly force us to say it is myth, unless there is some other way of understanding this).
@@whoami8434 There is no impossibility in the book of Genesis since Adam and Eve were both capable of sin prior to eating the fruit. Their will's were not perfectly fixed on God as is the case of those who have the beatific vision. For a good, short description of the three states: (1) prior to the fall in Adam/Eve; (2) after the fall in normal humans; and (3) in Christ or those who have the beatific vision, see St. Bernard of Clairvaux, "On Grace and Free Choice," (Cistercian Publications, 1977). In short, Bernard explains that in (1), there is the power not to sin, but sin is also possible. In (2), there is no power not to sin. In any given situation, those without grace can avoid the particular sin in question, but they cannot avoid sin in general. In (3), there is both the power not to sin and sin itself is impossible. On your last point, there will need to be some clarification. You'll have to define what you mean by myth. Something told in a figurative way or with figurative elements is not necessarily a myth. The Church has always recognized figurative elements in the Genesis 1 story though there has also always been some dispute about which elements precisely are figurative and which should be taken according to their proper meaning. For instance, Augustine took the 7 days to signify not a temporal sequence, but an order of natural priority. Moreover, he took the darkness and light to signify the angels in a veiled way. Aquinas too said that Moses spoke of the angels using physical metaphors so that the uneducated among the Israelites would not start worshipping angels, like their pagan neighbors. Finally, I would like to hear a justification for your inference that if Genesis 1 is a myth, Jesus is a myth. I don't see how that follows. Literary genre is not irrelevant here. Genesis 1 is clearly written in a different genres (akin to a theogony) than the Gospels, which present concrete historical events, testified to by living or recently deceased eyewitnesses. Even if you don't believe the testimony in the Gospels, I don't see how you can get to the conclusion it is a myth. A lie in a biography is not a myth.
@@ElliotPolskyPhilosophy With respect to the first point of your short summary (of Bernard talking about the different modes sin has taken in the progression of the Christian story), how is it that sin is possible? My understanding is that eating the fruit is what gave Adam and Eve the capacity to sin. If this is not true, then exactly what is the fruit there for? And why was God afraid that man would eat of the tree of eternal life if such fruit DIDN’T confer what God said they would? Perhaps the source you cited clears this up, but I’ll need to see. In the first point of your summary is anything to go by, I’d say it doesn’t, but I’d need to really understand the position first. Also, by “myth” I mean any story that points toward some truth using symbols that CAN be literally historically accurate (or at least based in history), but do not have to be and usually are not. Genesis in my mind is a myth, but Christ is not. My problem is just in reconciling myth with a literal historical Christ. Was Christ saving us from a mythological condition? If sin is a mythologized condition, then does it not seem as though we could have a mythological savior from it? In essence, if genesis is myth and does not literally describe some metaphysical reality, then what Christ saves us from is nothing more than our own human psychology. Again, this is why I see a strange asymmetry between Genesis and Christ. Why can the one be myth but the other one cannot? Also, maybe this isn’t the place, but it might be helpful to know in what sense you say Genesis is not myth. By myth, I really mean anything which conveys some truth but that is not intended to be literally historically accurate. Plato’s cave, for example, would be myth to me. Is Genesis like Plato’s cave? PS: I really appreciate the responses by the way. And everything you say will become food for thought on this topic for me. Edit: I changed what I said about what I meant by myth. I really never could understand the differences between theogony, analogy, anagogy (or whatever it’s called). They all seem the same to me.
@@whoami8434 That is correct. Eating the fruit did not give the power to sin. To explain this, I'll spell out a little more fully how our present state of fallen nature contrasts with that of Adam before original sin. Our current state of fallen nature: All of our knowledge (or errors) and virtues (or vices) must be acquired through actions, experiences, and education. But since we start out knowing nothing, we don't have anything inclining us specifically to good actions from the start. Thus, we will develop habits of doing bad actions and of doing good actions, as it were, by chance, the proportion of the good one over the bad ones depending largely on how good our education is in our childhood. No one survives this process without at least some bad habits according to which they are inclined to sin. Making matters worse, our body is not perfectly obedient to the command of reason. We randomly experience passions for objects which are sinful, and some people have bodily disorders inclining them to have excessively strong or weak passions. The result of all this is that the vast majority of people with a fallen nature never acquire any virtue and are constantly sinning. Each individual sin can be avoided, but sin as a whole cannot because, in our fallen nature with its intellect weakened by passion, we cannot constantly focus on what is good in every case so as to always will the good. Adam, by contrast, was created with a supernatural gift, called "original justice." By this gift, he had virtues and special knowledge infused in him without any effort on his part. Moreover, his body was perfectly obedient to his reason so that he did not experience any passions inclining him to sin. Just as it is very hard for a man accustomed to evil actions to do good actions contrary to his vices, so too, it is very difficult for a virtuous person to do evil actions contrary to virtue. In other words, Adam was strongly inclined not to sin. Nevertheless, sin was not impossible for him. The reason is that his knowledge was still through habits. For instance, you know that a trapezoid has four sides, but you may not be currently thinking about it. You know this habitually, not actively. This is the kind of knowledge that Adam had of what was good for him. Thus, he was capable of ignoring what he habitually knew what was good for him and of, thereby, choosing something bad for himself. For Christ and those in heaven with the beatific vision, knowledge of God (who is the Good) is not by means of habits, but is immediate. Thus, those in this state cannot ignore what they know to be what is good for them. Thus, they cannot choose what is bad for themselves. If original justice in the first man and the loss of this original justice through a first sin were a myth, then that certainly would undermine the story of Jesus in the Gospels and make it either a mistake or a myth. But that doesn't mean that, if Genesis 1-3 are a myth (in the sense you defined), that the Gospels are a myth. What is important is that the purpose of the myth (if it is a myth) is to communicate the literal truth about original justice in the first man. The mythic element may come from the fact that the first man was not called "Adam" and the first sin was not literally eating fruit from a tree, but these mythic elements (if they are such) can still be intended to point out a literal historical fact-namely, that there was first man, endowed with original justice, who sinned and, thereby, lost this gift for all of his descendants. So, saying that Genesis is a myth does not have to undermine the historicity of a first man, of original justice, of original sin, and, ultimately, of the Incarnation and redemption. I hope that helps. For more reading on the effects of original sin, I would look at De malo, qq. 4-5 and the middle books of Augustine's City of God, lib. 14 onward.
I am happy ... thnkx... again.
Fantastic channel
It is really enlightening class.. Pls upload
Can u upload st. Thomas Aquinas further part from summa theologia
6:24 bookmark
What's my purpose in life ? Be a saint? How? and how that relates to role of husband and father, and my goals? How I order my goals?
Good questions! A good place to start is Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Arcanum" (www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_10021880_arcanum.html ) and G.K. Chesterton's book, "What's Wrong with the World."
@@ElliotPolskyPhilosophy Thank you! Good content!
That last point (at the end of the video) made me struggle so much with Genesis when I was a teenager, and to be honest it really frustrates the problem of evil for me even today. Here’s how I see it:
1.If Genesis is a literal account of the events transpiring before “history” started, then Adam and Eve supposedly saw God as he was- their intellects were fixed on God in the same way described at the end of the video (basically by necessity). Yet they somehow disobeyed God’s commandment… so that’s a problem related to the last point of the video, but there’s actually another riddle/impossibility in the narrative: Eve sins before she has the capacity to sin! Taking and eating the fruit (which was disobedience to God) was a sin- but she did this BEFORE eating the fruit. If the fruit conferred anything at all, we must say whatever it confers has a kind of logical posteriority to one who makes use of what it grants. If I say you can have invincibility after you are shot with a “killer” bullet (a bullet that will kill anything except that which is invincible), and you accept, then you will never get invincibility, because you need invincibility to fulfill the condition for getting invincibility! Anyway…
2. If the above analysis forced us to say Genesis is “myth” (symbols pointing toward truth), then what stops us from saying Christ is a myth as well? If we do not, why not? If myth is enough to get the whole story going, and Christ is that which redeems us from sin (which is what we inherit from Genesis), then what he saves us from is a mythologized condition. We may have a condition called sin, but it has nothing to do with Genesis.
And it may be obvious- though perhaps not- the last point of the video makes the “free will” defense for evil complete nonsense. It’s nonsense for many reasons, but this one is an interesting one. I often wonder why God can’t just give all of us a vision of himself and grant us all perfect happiness NOW. Why go through life as we do, hoping and wanting and suffering for some meager form of happiness when God can just give it to us for free and without effort by him? I’d gladly hand over my “free will” to be in the presence of God. Free will hasn’t done me any good anyway.
These are great questions, but they illustrate the saying that a small error in the beginning leads to great errors later on. Adam and Eve did not have the beatific vision. They did not see God as he is before they sinned. Thus, they were not in the same situation as those in heaven who cannot sin. Rather, Adam and Eve were promised such a vision in the future once they had lived out their lives on earth in a morally upright way. They had more knowledge than humans today have and they were much more intelligent since their intellect was not yet weakened by a fallen nature. Nevertheless, they did not see God's essence or know everything. Still having some degree of ignorance and a mutable intellect, they were capable of ignoring what they habitually knew and, thereby, sinning.
Now, the story of Adam and Eve is not a myth (cf. Pius XII, Humani generis), but that is a more complicated discussion than I should get into here. Let's just ahead to your conclusion that Christ is a myth. Regardless of what you think of Genesis, this is not true. Merely as a matter of history, it is demonstrable that Jesus of Nazareth had a ministry in early 1st century Palestine in which his disciples identified him with the messiah, was crucified as a revolutionary by Pilate, and shortly thereafter his tomb was empty with his disciples claiming that he was raised from the dead and his enemies claiming his disciples stole the body. The genre of the four Gospel narratives is not at all one of myth, but rather of biography along the lines of Porphyry's biography of Plotinus. They are not histories according to the modern genre of academic history, but they are not myths. They are biographies, intended to be historically accurate according to the standards of the time, written by authors who were either eyewitnesses to the events or who interviewed those who were such eyewitnesses. For an excellent scholarly defense of these claims, see R. Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
@@ElliotPolskyPhilosophy
That’s all well and good, but what do you think of the logical problem of Adam and Eve eating the fruit? It cannot be literally true if there is some form of logical impossibility in the story, right? If it is not a kind of logical error, why not?
Also, I was not making the claim that the story of Christ is written in the literary genre of “myth” as understood by people in those times. I was just making a note that, if Genesis is a myth, and the condition of sin is a myth, I see no real reason why Christ, too, cannot be a myth. That Christ is not a myth is a mystery to me if we maintain that Genesis is myth (and modern science would certainly force us to say it is myth, unless there is some other way of understanding this).
@@whoami8434 There is no impossibility in the book of Genesis since Adam and Eve were both capable of sin prior to eating the fruit. Their will's were not perfectly fixed on God as is the case of those who have the beatific vision.
For a good, short description of the three states: (1) prior to the fall in Adam/Eve; (2) after the fall in normal humans; and (3) in Christ or those who have the beatific vision, see St. Bernard of Clairvaux, "On Grace and Free Choice," (Cistercian Publications, 1977). In short, Bernard explains that in (1), there is the power not to sin, but sin is also possible. In (2), there is no power not to sin. In any given situation, those without grace can avoid the particular sin in question, but they cannot avoid sin in general. In (3), there is both the power not to sin and sin itself is impossible.
On your last point, there will need to be some clarification. You'll have to define what you mean by myth. Something told in a figurative way or with figurative elements is not necessarily a myth. The Church has always recognized figurative elements in the Genesis 1 story though there has also always been some dispute about which elements precisely are figurative and which should be taken according to their proper meaning. For instance, Augustine took the 7 days to signify not a temporal sequence, but an order of natural priority. Moreover, he took the darkness and light to signify the angels in a veiled way. Aquinas too said that Moses spoke of the angels using physical metaphors so that the uneducated among the Israelites would not start worshipping angels, like their pagan neighbors.
Finally, I would like to hear a justification for your inference that if Genesis 1 is a myth, Jesus is a myth. I don't see how that follows. Literary genre is not irrelevant here. Genesis 1 is clearly written in a different genres (akin to a theogony) than the Gospels, which present concrete historical events, testified to by living or recently deceased eyewitnesses. Even if you don't believe the testimony in the Gospels, I don't see how you can get to the conclusion it is a myth. A lie in a biography is not a myth.
@@ElliotPolskyPhilosophy
With respect to the first point of your short summary (of Bernard talking about the different modes sin has taken in the progression of the Christian story), how is it that sin is possible? My understanding is that eating the fruit is what gave Adam and Eve the capacity to sin. If this is not true, then exactly what is the fruit there for? And why was God afraid that man would eat of the tree of eternal life if such fruit DIDN’T confer what God said they would? Perhaps the source you cited clears this up, but I’ll need to see. In the first point of your summary is anything to go by, I’d say it doesn’t, but I’d need to really understand the position first.
Also, by “myth” I mean any story that points toward some truth using symbols that CAN be literally historically accurate (or at least based in history), but do not have to be and usually are not. Genesis in my mind is a myth, but Christ is not. My problem is just in reconciling myth with a literal historical Christ. Was Christ saving us from a mythological condition? If sin is a mythologized condition, then does it not seem as though we could have a mythological savior from it? In essence, if genesis is myth and does not literally describe some metaphysical reality, then what Christ saves us from is nothing more than our own human psychology. Again, this is why I see a strange asymmetry between Genesis and Christ. Why can the one be myth but the other one cannot?
Also, maybe this isn’t the place, but it might be helpful to know in what sense you say Genesis is not myth. By myth, I really mean anything which conveys some truth but that is not intended to be literally historically accurate. Plato’s cave, for example, would be myth to me. Is Genesis like Plato’s cave?
PS: I really appreciate the responses by the way. And everything you say will become food for thought on this topic for me.
Edit: I changed what I said about what I meant by myth. I really never could understand the differences between theogony, analogy, anagogy (or whatever it’s called). They all seem the same to me.
@@whoami8434 That is correct. Eating the fruit did not give the power to sin. To explain this, I'll spell out a little more fully how our present state of fallen nature contrasts with that of Adam before original sin.
Our current state of fallen nature: All of our knowledge (or errors) and virtues (or vices) must be acquired through actions, experiences, and education. But since we start out knowing nothing, we don't have anything inclining us specifically to good actions from the start. Thus, we will develop habits of doing bad actions and of doing good actions, as it were, by chance, the proportion of the good one over the bad ones depending largely on how good our education is in our childhood. No one survives this process without at least some bad habits according to which they are inclined to sin. Making matters worse, our body is not perfectly obedient to the command of reason. We randomly experience passions for objects which are sinful, and some people have bodily disorders inclining them to have excessively strong or weak passions. The result of all this is that the vast majority of people with a fallen nature never acquire any virtue and are constantly sinning. Each individual sin can be avoided, but sin as a whole cannot because, in our fallen nature with its intellect weakened by passion, we cannot constantly focus on what is good in every case so as to always will the good.
Adam, by contrast, was created with a supernatural gift, called "original justice." By this gift, he had virtues and special knowledge infused in him without any effort on his part. Moreover, his body was perfectly obedient to his reason so that he did not experience any passions inclining him to sin. Just as it is very hard for a man accustomed to evil actions to do good actions contrary to his vices, so too, it is very difficult for a virtuous person to do evil actions contrary to virtue. In other words, Adam was strongly inclined not to sin. Nevertheless, sin was not impossible for him. The reason is that his knowledge was still through habits. For instance, you know that a trapezoid has four sides, but you may not be currently thinking about it. You know this habitually, not actively. This is the kind of knowledge that Adam had of what was good for him. Thus, he was capable of ignoring what he habitually knew what was good for him and of, thereby, choosing something bad for himself.
For Christ and those in heaven with the beatific vision, knowledge of God (who is the Good) is not by means of habits, but is immediate. Thus, those in this state cannot ignore what they know to be what is good for them. Thus, they cannot choose what is bad for themselves.
If original justice in the first man and the loss of this original justice through a first sin were a myth, then that certainly would undermine the story of Jesus in the Gospels and make it either a mistake or a myth. But that doesn't mean that, if Genesis 1-3 are a myth (in the sense you defined), that the Gospels are a myth. What is important is that the purpose of the myth (if it is a myth) is to communicate the literal truth about original justice in the first man. The mythic element may come from the fact that the first man was not called "Adam" and the first sin was not literally eating fruit from a tree, but these mythic elements (if they are such) can still be intended to point out a literal historical fact-namely, that there was first man, endowed with original justice, who sinned and, thereby, lost this gift for all of his descendants. So, saying that Genesis is a myth does not have to undermine the historicity of a first man, of original justice, of original sin, and, ultimately, of the Incarnation and redemption.
I hope that helps. For more reading on the effects of original sin, I would look at De malo, qq. 4-5 and the middle books of Augustine's City of God, lib. 14 onward.
Haha, "the cloistered monk or nun has the highest degree of happiness." What a self-reductio ad absurdum!
You should perhaps get to know some nuns!
Are you roman catholic
Yes
@@ElliotPolskyPhilosophy yay I'm catholic too 🥰🥰🥰