Thanks Incred.  A really terrific presentation!

Dr. Robert Sungenis is the author of The First Four Days of Creation. 

I have it and have found it to be truly magnificent in doing what it sets out to do.  It is very logical and precise. It presents a crystal clear view of the traditional Catholic position for the 1st 4 days of Creation.

The book is a concise 50-page work with superb full color illustrations.  It explains how the first four days of Genesis 1 can be read in literal and chronological order and coincide with the known facts of modern science. There is no book like this on the market today. The images alone of how God put the universe together, piece by piece, are worth more than the price of the book.

Dr. Sungenis explains in simple straight forward language the scientific and historical details along the way. Hugh Owen, director of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, wrote to Robert and said: "You have written the best book on the first four days of creation week that I have read."

And thanks klasG4e for the book reference, The First Four Days of Creation.

I'm going to buy that book, since it's so unique, even within traditional Catholicism.

I sort of doubt you can find it in a neo-SSPX chapel bookstore,
but I see where Dr. Sungenis is selling the PDF version online and Amazon has it too: Sungenis Link

You may also wish to consider Sungenis' superb book, The Geocentric Universe: According to the Visions of St. Hildegard of Bingen. 
Hildegard was way ahead of her time.  Her cosmolology is spot on and in perfect accord with a traditional reading of Genesis.

How about understand the six days of creation according to Mary of Agreda in Her three volume work is entitled; ‘The Mystical City of God’ or ‘The Divine History and Life of the Virgin Mother of God.’

29. ‘I learnt also to understand the quality of these perfections of the highest Lord: that He is beautiful without a blemish, great without quantity, good without need of qualification, eternal without the duration of time, strong without any weakness, living without touch of decay, true without deceit, present in all places, filling them without occupying them, existing in all things without occupying any space….      

Although, this divine knowledge is one, most simple and indivisible, nevertheless since the things which I see are many, and since there is a certain order, by which some are first and some come after, it is necessary to divide the knowledge of God’s intelligence and the knowledge of his will into many instants, or into many different acts, according as they correspond to the diverse orders of created things. For as some of the creatures hold their existence because of others, there is a dependence of one upon the other. Accordingly we say that God intended and decreed this before that, the one on account of the other; and that if He had not desired or included in the science of vision the one He would not have desired the other. But by this way of speaking, we must not try to convey the meaning that God placed many acts of intelligence, or of the will; rather we must intend merely to indicate, that the creatures are dependent on each other and that they succeed one another. In order to be able to comprehend the manner of creation more easily, we apply the order of things as we see them objectively, to the acts of the divine intelligence and will in creating them…. [Genesis: creation of heaven, Earth, sun, stars, flora, fauna and mankind.]

I understood that this order comprises the following instants. The first instant is: God recognizing his infinite attributes and perfections together with the propensity and the ineffable inclination to communicate Himself outwardly… The second instant was to confirm and determine the object and intention of this communication of the Divinity ad extra, namely… to set in motion his Omnipotence in order that He might be known, praised and glorified….. The third instant consisted in selecting and determining the order and arrangement, or the mode of this communication, so as to realize in an adequate manner the most exalted ends…. The fourth instant was to determine the gifts and graces, which were to be conferred upon the humanity of Christ, our Lord, in union with the Divinity…. In this fifth decree the creation of the angelic nature which is more excellent and more like unto the spiritual being of the Divinity was determined upon, and at the same time the division or arrangement of the angelic hosts into nine choirs and three hierarchies was provided and decreed.… To this instant also belong the predestination of the good, and the reprobation of the bad angels. God saw in it, by means of his infinite science, all the works of the former and of the latter and the propriety of predestination by his free will and by his merciful liberality, those that would obey and give honour, and of reprobating by his justice those who would rise up against his Majesty in pride and disobedience on account of their disordered self-love. In the same instant also was decreed the creation of the empyrean heaven, for the manifestation of his glory and the reward of the good; also the Earth and the heavenly bodies for the other creatures; also in the centre or depth of the Earth, hell, for the punishment of the bad angels….
    
In the sixth instant was decreed the creation of a people and the congregation of men for Christ, who was already formed in the divine mind and will, and according to his image and likeness man was to be made, in order, that the incarnate Word might find brethren, similar but inferior to Himself and a people of his own nature, of whom He might be the Head. In this instant was determined the order of creation of the whole human race, which was to begin from one man and woman and propagate itself, until the Virgin and her Son should be born in the predestined order….    
  
In the same instant, and as it were in the third and last place, God determined to create a locality and an abode, where the incarnate Word and his Mother should converse and dwell. For them primarily did He create the heaven and Earth with its stars and elements and all that is contained in them. Secondarily the intention and decree included the creation of the members, of which Jesus was to be the Head, and of whom He would be the King; in order that with kingly providence, all the necessary and befitting arrangements might be made beforehand….
    
Of the first day Moses says that “In the beginning God created heaven and Earth.” And before creating intellectual and rational creatures, desiring also the order of executing these works to be most perfect, He created heaven for angels and men; and the Earth as a place of pilgrimage for mortals. These places are so adapted to their end and so perfect that as David says of them, the heavens publish the glory of the Lord, the firmament and the Earth announce the glory of the work of his hands (Ps.18, 2). The heavens in their beauty manifest His magnificence and glory, because in them is deposited the predestined reward of the just. And the Earthly firmament announced that there would be creatures and man to inhabit the Earth and that man should journey upon it to their Creator. Of the Earth Moses says that it was void, which he does not say of the heavens, for God had created the angels at the instant indicated by the word of Moses: “God said: Let there be light, and light was made.” He speaks here not only of material light, but also of the intellectual or angelic lights…. God created the Earth co-jointly with the heavens in order to call into existence hell in its centre; for, at the instant of its creation, there were left in the interior of that globe, spacious and wide cavities, suitable for hell, purgatory and limbo. And in hell was created at the same time material fire and other requisites, which now serve for the punishment of the damned. The Lord was presently to divide the light from the darkness and to call the light day and the darkness night. And this did happen not only in regard to the natural night and day, but in regard to the good and bad angels; for to the good, He gave the eternal light of his vision and called it day, the eternal day, and to the bad, the night of sin, casting them into the eternal darkness of hell.

The angels were created in the empyrean heavens and in the state of grace by which they might be first to merit the reward of glory. For although they were in the midst of glory, the Divinity itself was not to be made manifest to them face to face and unveiled, until they should have merited such a favour by obeying the divine will. The holy angels, as well as the bad ones, remained only a very short time in the state of probation; for their creation and probation with its result were three distinct instants or moments, separated by short intermissions. In the first instant they were all created and endowed with graces and gifts, coming into existence as most beautiful and perfect creatures. Then followed a short pause, during which the will of the Creator was propounded and intimated, and the law and command was given to them, to acknowledge Him as their Maker and supreme Lord, and to fulfil the end for which they have been created. During this pause, instant or interval, Saint Michael and his angels fought that great battle with the dragon and his followers, which is described by the apostle Saint John in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse. The good angels, persevering in grace, merited eternal happiness. The disobedient angels, rebelling against God, merited the punishment, which they now suffer….

During the whole first week of the creation of the world and its contents Lucifer and the demons were occupied in machinations and projects of wickedness against the Word, who was to become incarnate, and against the Woman [who was to crush his head (Gen. 3,15)] of whom He was to be born and made man. On the first day, which corresponds to Sunday, were created the angels. Laws and precepts were given to them, for the guidance of their actions. The bad ones disobeyed and transgressed the mandates of the Lord. By divine providence and disposition then succeeded all the other events, which have been recorded above, up to the morning of the second day, corresponding to Monday, on which Lucifer and his hosts were driven and hurdled into hell. The duration of these days corresponds in the small periods, or delays, which intervened between their creation, activity, conquest and fall or glorification…. ‘The most High looked upon His Son, and upon His most holy Mother as models, produced in the culmination of his wisdom and power, in order that They serve as prototypes according to which He was to copy the whole human race. He created also the necessary material beings required for human life, but with such wisdom that some of them act as symbols, to represent, in a certain way these two Beings. On this account He made the luminaries of heaven, the sun and the moon (Gen. 1,16) so that in dividing the day and the night, they might symbolise the Sun of Justice, Christ, and His holy mother, who is beautiful as the moon (Cant: 6, 9) for these two divide the day of grace and the night of sin.

‘The sun illuminates the moon; and both, together with the stars of the firmament, illume all other creatures within the confines of the universe…. He created the rest of the beings and added to their perfection, because they were to be submissive to Christ and the most holy Mary and through them to the rest of men. Before the universe proceeded from its nothingness, He set it as a banquet abundant and unfailing, for he was to create man for his delight and to draw him to the enjoyment of his knowledge and love. Like a most courteous and bounteous Lord He did not wish that the invited guests should wait, but that both the creation and the invitation to the banquet and love by one and the same act. Man was not to lose any time in that which concerned him so much; namely, to know and to praise his almighty Maker….‘On the sixth day he formed and created Adam, as it were of the age of thirty-three years. This was the age in which Christ was to suffer death and Adam with regard to his body was so like unto Christ, that scarcely any difference existed. Also according to the soul Adam was similar to Christ. From Adam God formed Eve so similar to the Blessed Virgin that she was like unto her in personal appearance and in figure. God looked upon these two images of the great Originals with the highest pleasure and benevolence, and on account of the Originals He heaped many blessings upon them, as if He wanted to entertain Himself with them and their descendants until the time should arrive for forming Christ and Mary. But the happy state in which God had created the parents of the human race lasted only a very short while. The envy of the serpent was immediately aroused against them, for Satan was patiently awaiting their creation, and no sooner were they created, than his hatred became active against them. However, he was not permitted to witness the formation of Adam and Eve, as he had witnessed the creation of all other things: for the Lord did not choose to manifest to him the creation of man, nor the formation of Eve from a rib; all these things were concealed from him for a space of time until both of them were joined. But when the demon saw the admirable composition of the human nature, perfect beyond that of any creature, the beauty of the souls and also of the bodies of Adam and Eve; when he saw the paternal love with which the Lord regarded them, and how He made them the lords of all creation, and that He gave them hope of eternal life: the wrath of the dragon was lashed to fury, and no tongue can describe the rage with which that beast was filled, nor how great was his envy and his desire to take the life of these two beings. Like an enraged lion he certainly would have done so, if he had not known that a superior force would prevent him. Nevertheless he studied and plotted out some means, which would suffice to deprive them of the grace of the Most High and make them God’s enemies….’ ---- ‘The Mystical City of God

Magnificent!  Presumably, this Venerable will be beatified and then canonized at some point following the Consecration of Russia.  Under the reign of Vatican II forget it.  Her body remains beautifully incorrupt over 400 years after her death.

http://kolbecenter.org/the-sad-legacy-of-father-jakis-writings-on-evolution/

The Sad Legacy of Father Jaki’s Writings on Evolution
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by Hugh Owen
For all their differences, Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., agreed on one fundamental point:  contemporary natural scientists are much more reliable than the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils of the past in explaining the origins of man and the universe.  In Genesis 1 through the Ages, Fr. Jaki recognized that bringing Genesis 1 into harmony with the views of mainstream natural science required a radical departure from traditional exegesis.  Calling Genesis 1 “a marvelous story”, Fr. Jaki confessed that:

As I reviewed one after another the great commentaries on Genesis 1, I could not help feeling how close their authors were time and again to an interpretation which is strictly literal and yet at the same time puts that marvellous story at safe remove from any comparison with science, old and new.[1]

Determined to reconcile Genesis with the majority view in the natural sciences, including its acceptance of biological evolution, Fr. Jaki argued that Genesis 1 was a “post-exilic” work whose sole purpose was to show that God is the creator of all things, without conveying any information as to when or how He created the world.  Since this view contradicts the constant teaching of the Church Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils, it is not surprising that Fr. Jaki’s argument for his thesis breaks down quickly under scrutiny.  And since an exhaustive critique of Fr. Jaki’s exegesis of Genesis 1 is beyond the scope of this article, it will suffice to show that the two pillars of his interpretation have no foundation whatsoever.  These pillars are 1) the impossibility of light before the sun, and 2) the use of the word bara in Genesis 1.


Like all theistic evolutionists, Fr. Jaki discounted the notion of correspondence between the “days” of Genesis and actual solar days.  As Robert Sungenis explains:

[The Theistic evolutionist argues] that there can be no day/night sequence on the so-called first day of Creation, since the sun was created afterward, on the fourth day. He will reason that, since it is obvious today that the sun is what causes the day/night sequence on earth, there could have been no day/night sequence before the sun was created, and therefore, the days of Genesis are neither literal nor chronological.
On the surface, this sounds like a cogent argument. Fr. Stanley Jaki . . . considers it his strongest argument to deny a chronological, 24-hour period, creation sequence. For him, if the sun is missing from the first day, then there can be no darkness and light, and thus the days of Genesis are symbolic of long periods of time. Either that, or the sun existed on the first day and is recapitulated on the fourth day.[2]
We will answer this objection from two perspectives, the first from science, the second from Scripture.

Scientifically speaking, any honest physicist will admit that light is an absolute enigma. My physics professor in college told me that on Monday, Wednesday and Friday he calls light a wave. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday he says it is made up of particles. On Sunday he gives up and takes a rest from trying to figure it out . . . [M]an’s puzzlement over the very nature of light . . . should give anyone pause in making hasty conclusions about its form and origin.  Indeed the Christian should seriously consider that, because the Bible says so, light does not necessarily need the emanating bodies of the sun or stars to exist, nor does the absence of the sun or stars mean darkness will result.

At the least, in respect of Scripture’s veracity, we should accept that the sun merely took over the duties of the light on the first day.[3] For example, being consistent with his literal hermeneutic, Thomas Aquinas postulated that the effusive light on the first day was created as the sun and stars on the fourth day,[4] perhaps similar to God fashioning man on the sixth day from the dirt He created on the first day.[5]

In reality many of the Church Fathers had anticipated Fr. Jaki’s objection to the creation of light before the sun and had answered it with profound wisdom.  For example, St. John Chrysostom held that God had created the light before the sun so that men to whom the creation account was revealed would never in future times succuмb to the temptation to deify the sun.


Ultimately Fr. Jaki rested his case for jettisoning the constant teaching of the Fathers and Doctors on creation on his interpretation of the word bara in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1.  Fr. Jaki argues that:

of the forty or so cases when bara occurs in the Old Testament, it is used to denote in five cases a purely human action. . .  Of the three other cases the ones in the book of Joshua (17: 15, 18) refer in the tense Piel to the cutting down of trees . . . In Ez 23: 47 we see the prophet use bara to denote a gruesomely human action, prompted as it could be by Yahweh’s utter displeasure with idolatry . . .  n all these cases the taking of bara for an exclusively divine action, let alone taking it for creation out of nothing, can only be done if one deliberately ignores those three uses of it that span more than half a millennium. . .  The verb bara means basically “to split” and “to slash” or an action which conveys that something is divided and that the action is done swiftly.[6]

As convincing as this might sound at first blush, Robert Sungenis shows that Fr. Jaki’s examples cannot bear the weight of his argument:
Jaki is suggesting that since bara means “to split”, such a process implies evolution, apparently because matter is “splitting” from matter and undergoing some kind of subsequent development, as opposed to being created whole out of nothing. Ironically, in the same vicinity Jaki recognizes that the majority opinion holds bara as meaning creation “out of nothing”, even citing P. Heinisch’s cataloguing of bara in the Qal and Nifil stems as evidence.[7] So what, then, leads Jaki to the conclusion that bara “means basically ‘to split’ and ‘to slash’” if it only occurs in three instances out of forty? A hint to Jaki’s reasoning is found in the beginning of the paragraph:

It should seem significant that both in the book of Ezechiel, certainly a post-exilic product, and in the book of Joshua, a product quite possibly some seven hundred years older, one is confronted with a very human connotation of bara. . . uses of it that span more than half a millennium.

So Jaki’s main argument, it seems, is that we should accept the meaning of bara as “to split” or “to slash” simply because three uses of the Piel stem are separated by 700 years. As an aside, we will alert the reader to our previous critique of Jaki’s dating of Ezekiel, which pointed out that Jaki’s view would make the prophecies of Ezekiel regarding the Babylonian captivity mere reminisces of the past rather than predictions of the future. This becomes a handy little polemic for Jaki, since he also claims that Genesis is a “post-exilic” writing just like Ezekiel. Thus, if someone were to counter Jaki’s thesis by claiming that the same amount, or more, years separate the use of bara in Genesis, meaning created “out of nothing”, from, say, the use of bara in Isaiah 40: 26, Jeremiah 31: 22 where it also means created “out of nothing”, we might be told that the comparison has no merit because Genesis is “post-exilic” just like Isaiah, Jeremiah. In other words, to Jaki, the meaning “created out of nothing” for bara is a late development of vocabulary in Israel, at least compared to the supposed indigenous meaning of bara as “to split” appearing during the conquest of Canaan. This is so because, to Jaki, Joshua was written long before Genesis was written. All this, of course, is at best mere speculation and at worst another indication of the overly-enthusiastic exploits of historical criticism to which Jaki and many of his colleagues have fallen victim.[8]

Fr. Jaki’s sweeping dismissal of all of the Fathers and Doctors on the strength of such poor exegesis becomes even more embarrassing when one considers that his re-interpretation of Genesis 1 in relation to bara had already been evaluated and found wanting by the great Jesuit scholar Cornelius a Lapide in the seventeenth century.  In his commentary on Genesis 1, Cornelius evaluates the very interpretation put forward by Fr. Jaki three centuries later and calls it a “fantasy”, “rejected by all of the Fathers and the Doctors”.  He writes:

Hieronymus ab Oleastro translates the Hebrew word ברא, bārā, as “He divided”, and so he renders the verse “in the beginning God divided the heaven and earth.”  In fact, he thinks that God first of all created the waters with the land, and they were very large and vast; from them He then brought forth the heavens (something this verse does not speak about, and which Scripture presupposes).  Finally, He divided them from the earth and the waters, and the event was represented solely in this verse.  But this fantasy is rejected by all the Fathers and the Doctors, who translate bārā as He created.  This is what the word properly means, for it never means He divided, as those who are competent in Hebrew know.  For in this verse Moses describes the first work and production, and, what is more, by means of the work of Genesis (that is, the birthday of the world), he initiates history.  The passages from Joshua and Ezechiel that Hieronymus ab Oleastro cites for his argument prove nothing.  For in those passages bārā does not mean to divide but to cut down and to destroy.[9] Indeed, this is one of his wrong definitions (emphasis added).[10]

In short, Fr. Jaki’s rejection of almost two thousand years of exegesis of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church turns out to be based on flights of exegetical fancy without any solid foundation.  Yet his dismissal of the traditional exegesis of Genesis continues to contribute greatly to the erosion of faith in the reliability of Scripture as understood by the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils from the foundation of the Church.



Fr. Jaki’s rash and unwarranted dismissal of the constant teaching of the Fathers and Doctors on Genesis 1 was compounded by his public endorsements of the evolutionary hypothesis right up to the time of his death.  In a talk entitled “Evolution as Science and Ideology” he argued that
Darwin’s theory is the only scientific approach to the vast sequence of living beings because its two pillars, the difference between parents and offspring, can be measured as well as the impact of the environment on that difference.[11]

In a recent article in the Social Justice Review,[12] Mr. Mark Cole argued that Fr. Jaki is a theologian in the Thomistic tradition, whose great strength lay in the knowledge of metaphysics that he brought to bear on his reflections on creation and evolution.  But the statement cited above lays bare the fact that Fr. Jaki’s approach to origins differed drastically from that of St. Thomas and the Church Fathers.  It was St. Thomas who summed up the patristic teaching on the distinction between creation and providence by arguing that natural processes and operations are not themselves instances of God’s creative activity; rather, they show his Providence at work in maintaining his prior work of creation, which is presupposed by the way these processes and operations now take place.[13]

Like all of the Fathers and Doctors who wrote on this question, St. Thomas recognized that the creation of the different kinds of creatures in the beginning could not be explained by the “works of nature” that we observe in the present order of providence.  Like them, St. Thomas taught that
the corporeal forms that bodies had when first produced came immediately from God, whose bidding alone matter obeys, as its own proper cause.  To signify this, Moses prefaces each work with the words, “God said, ‘Let this thing be’, or ‘that’, to denote the formation of all things by the Word of God.[14]

Like them, St. Thomas taught that only “divine power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man.”[15] But Fr. Jaki, like Teilhard, denied all of this.

Ironically, Fr. Jaki wrote extensively about the importance of the Catholic dogma of creation ex nihilo and about the distinction between the initial work of creation and the subsequent autonomous operation of nature in the order of providence.  He even pointed out that this distinction made possible the development of the natural sciences within Christian civilization.  But Fr. Jaki divided the work of creation “in the beginning” from the order of providence, not according to the data given by God in Divine Revelation, but according to the speculations of Lyell, Darwin and their disciples.  Rather than accept what all of the Fathers and Doctors had accepted unquestioningly on God’s say-so—that He had brought all of the different kinds of creatures into existence by His Word for man—Fr. Jaki relegated the creative action of God to the remote beginning of time and accepted evolutionary theory’s unproved premise that material processes could explain the origins of all of the different kinds of living things over long ages without the direct creative action of God.

Fr. Jaki claimed to find support for this aberrant view in the psalm which speaks of God passing through the waters and no one finding his footprints—as if the slow and gradual production of the variety of living things through material processes somehow redounded more to the glory of God than direct creation.  But here again Fr. Jaki joined Teilhard in renouncing the constant teaching of all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church who held that all of the different kinds of creatures were the product of a divine creative action, and that, as such, they evidenced divine design and reflected some aspect of the divine nature.  One can see how far the view of Fr. Jaki and of Teilhard deviated from that of the Fathers by reflecting on the words of St. Basil the Great, a man quite familiar with evolutionary thought, and effective in its refutation.

Let us glorify the Master Craftsman for all that has been done wisely and skilfully; and from the beauty of the visible things let us form an idea of Him who is more than beautiful; and from the greatness of these perceptible and circuмscribed bodies let us conceive of Him who is infinite and immense and who surpasses all understanding in the plenitude of His power.[16]

Contrary to Fr. Jaki’s opinion, the presumption of function and design in nature on the part of Christian natural scientists like Leonardo de Vinci and William Harvey led them to discover and describe the workings of the human body as no one in recorded history had done before them.  When asked how he had discovered the working of the circulatory system, for example, Harvey explained that he had studied the system of veins and arteries in the confidence that it had been intelligently designed—and so made the discovery! 



By embracing Darwinian evolution as the “only scientific” explanation for the origin of the different kinds of living things, Fr. Jaki not only jettisoned the constant teaching of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils; he also unintentionally impugned the goodness and wisdom of God.  This is because, unlike St. Thomas and the Fathers and Doctors who taught that God created all of the different kinds of creatures, perfect according to their natures, for man, in a perfectly harmonious cosmos, Fr. Jaki joined Teilhard in teaching that God deliberately produced—through evolutionary processes—many different kinds of creatures only to destroy them so that something more highly evolved could take their place.  Moreover, this evolutionary god used a process of mutation and natural selection that littered the earth with diseased and deformed creatures in the process of producing the alleged “beneficial mutations” that transformed reptiles into birds and chimpanzees into men.  Whatever one wants to call this evolutionary god, it is not the God of the Bible, of the Fathers, and of the Doctors of the Church, of whom St. Thomas says again and again that “all his works are perfect”.[17]  Rather, Fr. Jaki agrees with Teilhard that the “only scientific” explanation for the origin of species requires that God be made responsible for filling the earth with genetic mutations, disease, and deformity, rather than holding with St. Augustine that in the original creation, had no one sinned, the world would have been filled and beautified with natures good without exception.[18]

Had this misguided Darwinian faith in biological evolution contributed anything to scientific progress, there might be something to weigh in the scales with its affront to the goodness and wisdom of God.  But, far from contributing anything to scientific progress, Darwinian evolution has retarded and often crippled the advancement of natural science, channeling enormous human and material resources into blind alleys, all in deference to Darwinian dogma.  How many millions of dollars and lifetimes of scientific research have been wasted trying to produce beneficial mutations in the laboratory through mutagenesis, all because Darwinian dogma anathematizes the very thought that the genetic information that specifies the development of specific organisms can only have been created by the Divine Programmer, God, and cannot have arisen through the neo-Darwinian process of genetic mutation?  How many decades of fruitful research have been delayed because of the Darwinian adherence to now-totally discredited articles of faith such as embryonic recapitulation, vestigial organs, and “junk DNA”? [19]  Sadly, Fr. Jaki’s (and Teilhard’s) “only scientific” account of the origin of species has turned out to be a complete chimaera, casting God in the rôle of a blundering monster while crippling the progress of the natural sciences.
This article was originally published in the Social Justice Review. 

[1]  Stanley Jaki, O.S.B.:  Genesis 1 Through the Ages (London:  Thomas More Press, 1992), p. xii.
[2]  S. Jaki, op. cit., p. 144.  Fr. Jaki claims that by 1520 “. . .it was no longer possible not to take the sun for the source of light in Gen.1: 3”.  He writes:  “Where is the biblical suggestion that light crystallizes into sparkling celestial bodies” (p. 62).  He lays the blame on the “concordist exegesis of many of the Church Fathers” (p. 169), seemingly unfazed at his dismissal of this Tradition, at the same time that he dismisses those Protestants who,  “waving their Bibles” (p. 168), hold similar views.  Earlier views like Jaki’s occur in such exegetes as Eustathius, who objects to Basil’s idea of “light and heat coming on the fourth day” with the words “How can this be if there is no evidence for such a distinction, since we neither see light distinct from fire, nor fire distinct from light” (PG 18, 718); yet quite a few agree with Basil that the light of the first day condensed into the heavenly bodies on the fourth day.
[3]  In other words, on the fourth day the sun merely took over the duties that the “light” had discharged since the first day.
[4]  Summa Theologica I, q. 67, a. 4, re. 2.  Agreeing with St. Thomas here are:  Gregory of Nyssa (Hexameron, PG 44, 66-118); Ephraim the Syrian (Genesim et in Exodum commentarii, in CSCO, v. 152, p. 9; John Chrysostom (Homilies on Genesis (PG 53, 57-8); Honorius of Autun (Hexameron, PL 172, 257); Peter Lombard (Lombardi opera omnia, PL 192, 651); Egidio Colonna (Ægidius Romanus) (Opus Hexaemeron); Nicholas of Lyra (Postillae perpetuae); Thomas Cajetan (Commentarii de Genesis 1); as well as Moses Mendelssohn (Commentary on Genesis); Zwingli (Werke); Luther (Commentary on Genesis); Calvin (Commentary on Genesis); Petavius (Dogmata Theologica) et al.
[5]  Robert Sungenis, “The Fathers of the Church on Genesis 1-11”, First International Catholic Symposium on Creation, Rome, Italy (Kolbe Centre, 2002), pp. 253-5.
[6]  Jaki, op. cit., pp. 4-5.  The passage in Joshua says: “Go up to the forest and cut down; that in Ezechiel “And the company will stone them . . . and cut them down”.
[7]  Jaki, op. cit., p. 3.
[8]  The Hebrew perfect tense, in this “Qal” form (used 38 times in the OT:  Dt 32: 4; Ps 51: 10; Is 40: 26, 65: 18; Jer 31: 22), always refers to God’s creative acts, and not to matter evolving by divine force.
[9]  The editors of Cornelius’s Latin text append a lengthy footnote on the meaning of bara in Hebrew.  Suffice it to say that modern scholarship confirms the view of Cornelius.  Brown, Driver and Briggs’s Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament gives the basic meanings as “shape, create, form, fashion by cutting, shape out, etc.”  The meanings “shape, fashion, create” are “always of divine activity”, and the signification applies to Gen 1: 1.  In Js 17: 15, 18 and Ez 23: 47 it means “to cut down” (viz. a forest and “the sisters Oholah [Samaria] and Oholibah [Jerusalem]).
[10]  Cornelius a Lapide (trans. Craig Toth), Commentary on Genesis:  Genesis 1: 1.
[11]  Fr. Stanley Jaki, “Three More Years”.
[12]  Cf. Mark Cole, “The Purpose of Species:  The Evolutionary Thought of Fr. Jaki”,  Social Justice Review, Vol. 101, No. 7-8 (Jul.-Aug. 2010), pp. 108-10.
[13]  “In the works of nature, creation does not enter, but is presupposed to the work of nature.” (ST, I q. 45, a. 8.)
[14]  ST, I q. 65, a. 4.
[15]  ST, I q. 92, a. 2 ad 2.
[16]  Quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, Calif.:  St. Herman Brotherhood, 2000), p. 140.
[17]  St. Thomas cites this verse (Dt 32: 4) fifteen times in the Summa Theologica.  In ST, I q. 91, a. 3, he explains what he means by “perfect”:  “God gave to each natural being the best disposition; not absolutely so, but in the view of its proper end.”
[18]  St. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Bk XI, Ch. 23.
[19]  Cf. Hugh Owen, “The Negative Impact of the Evolutionary Hypothesis on Scientific Progress:  A Retrospective Assessment”, www.kolbecenter.org.