What an incredible story! I've never heard it before. Hard to believe it actually happened (without very strong and solid docuмentation for same) assuming the saint was a very disciplined and discerning one. (I've never heard anything to indicate otherwise.) You would think he would check with others (at least a spiritual adviser) before he took such a drastic and immediate action and an action of such grave magnitude.
Neil, would you be able to provide some docuмentation for the story?
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Sorry, no source, going on memory. So don't quote me. I did a quick check and found some vaguely similar stories saying he had had a vision while saying Mass and then told his assistant that all his writings were as so much straw. That isn't a directive to burn them, but what do you do with straw but use it to start a fire? Ironically, that's the same kind of reasoning he used to say that "there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals," and the nature of animals was not changed by the sin of Adam. He has no reference for those, if you didn't notice. Perhaps because there isn't any. But footnotes and sources were not his strong points. Anyway, St. Thomas is entitled to his theological opinions, but he doesn't have the authority to demand that everyone agrees with him is the point. There is nothing in Scripture or Tradition that says we are to believe that animals of today known to be carnivorous animals were in the Garden of Eden as carnivorous as well. When Adam and Eve were cast out, what happened to the animals -- were they cast out too? Not a word of that. Were they all destroyed? Don't know. Do they still exist? Don't know that either. Did they all perish in the Flood? Was the still-existing Garden of Eden in any way unprotected from the Flood waters? Lots of unanswered questions.
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From our present point of view the Garden of Eden couldn't have been much fun without a weekend barbecue of pork, beef or perhaps chicken. But it's not all about our present point of view, because theology is not an exercise in subjective reality.
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Saints and mystics have said that no snake or scorpion could have harmed Adam in his state of perfection. St. Thomas has no mention of that topic. Nor does he weigh in on whether the animals in the Garden of Eden were subject to disease. He mentions the feeding of a falcon with what would seem to be raw meat (today falconers feed their birds little slices of raw rats or mice -- not the most fun part of the whole gig), but curiously has no way of being sure whether Adam was a falconer. Who knows, maybe he was. It is a great example of man's superiority over exotic animals! Falcons are extremely cool birds. But one would think that to become a falconer, Adam would have needed a lot more than
one day, because it generally takes about 2 years for someone to train for that, and that's WITH supervision, which Adam did not have. It could easily have taken the whole first day just to catch a falcon so he could get started.