The Hexaemeron 1

A Lecture Presented

Fr. Alexander Men

(of Blessed Memory)

Now 'Hexaemeron' is probably not a word you run into a lot. You may not even know what it means. Indeed you might even call it an ancient and curious concept that appeared some 1,500 years ago. The word describes the portion of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament that recounts the creation of the world. At this point I'm sure you recall hearing about the Six Days of Creation.

You may have seen depictions of these days in famous frescos and icons, or in copies of them. The Six Days of Creation are part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo shows the Creator as a powerful old man moving across creation, dividing darkness from light, making the dry land, and creating living creatures and stars.

You have also no doubt heard and read disparaging, sarcastic and skeptical comments about shoehorning such a formidable task as creating the universe into the scant space of one brief work week. Many of you, perhaps almost all of you, have heard it said that this account, this Shestodnev, or Hexaemeron, is completely at odds with what science tells us about these events.

The Hexaemeron has long been an ideological battleground. This story, this creation narrative, has come under attack from many directions. So today we are considering this fundamental Biblical account from the viewpoint of cultural history, looking at what role it has played and what is its ultimate significance.

(At this point the sounds of some upbeat folk song rang out in the auditorium. Those present try to turn off the speakers, but it becomes clear that someone has decided to disrupt Fr. Alexander's lecture�Editor).

I think those on duty at the door should try to figure out where those pleasant but inappropriate sounds are coming from. Please try to find out where it's coming from and turn it off. I think they'll be able to track down this intrusion of such 'highbrow culture' into our barbarous discussion of obscurantist problems... (Laughter in the auditorium�Editor)2.

We'll have to consider these sounds to be an element not directly mentioned in the biblical account, but somehow present by inference.. .Not the best background music, but not all the Six Days of Creation were accompanied by gentle accords. Instead there was the rumbling of volcanoes, the crash of surf, the roaring of animals�the birth of the Universe, the sounds of our planet being born.

For many centuries the arts presented this mystery of creation just as it was described in the Bible. But what of science? Early medieval science tried to find some kind of precise facts about geogenesis (the formation of the Earth) in the biblical story; thus equating geogenesis with cosmogenesis�the process of creating the Cosmos.

The first efforts in this direction were modest. The natural science of the period was making its first timid steps. For example the famous Christian theologian Basil the Great, a 4th century Church Father, combined the biblical account with the science of his time, drawing on the works of Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Theophrastus and other natural scientists from the Greco-Roman world. But by the Renaissance it was becoming increasingly clear that natural science was not reflected in the biblical account.

So what was the matter? Where was the error? In natural science? In the words of the Hexaemeron's author? Perhaps another alternative?.. This was where the question stopped, left poised in mid-air. This simplified 'either/or' approach is still quite popular today. What I would like to demonstrate is that this is not the proper approach to solving this problem. There is no clear scientific formula here.

The ancient and holy author of these first lines of the Bible was not trying to give people some kind of manual of cosmology and paleontology. He was a teacher of life, a teacher of faith. He was the embodiment of a particular world view. But for him that view was completely unique, and that is what I would like to discuss.

We should not compare this biblical account with 19th or 20th century science, the systems of Copernicus and Ptolemy, or the modern cosmology that was developed employing the Theory of Relativity and the concept of evolving star systems. Instead we should compare this account with other ancient Creation accounts. All of these accounts arise from what humans have observed constantly.

People observed the changing of winter to summer, the rising and setting of the Sun. Everywhere they looked, people saw constancy. To them the concept of nature was inseparable from that of Transcendent Reality. In other words, for the pagan, nature and the divine were one, and not separate entities. Thus for the pagan world view natural processes themselves were Divine.

Nature and her phenomena were born from the depths of Eternal Divine Power, as if from the lap of some Mother Nature figure in which the spiritual and physical were mixed together. Sometimes this would take the form of a battle myth: a fight between Light and Darkness, or between Chaos and Order.

In ancient Babylon Chaos is represented by a gigantic and monstrous dragon called Moloch. Marduk, the god of light and the Sun and king of the Babylonian gods, defeats this monster, tripping him up with a net and cleaving his massive body into sections. From these sections he builds dwellings for himself and the other gods. It is these dwellings that constitute the Universe. Into this Universe comes man, made from clay and the god's blood; created in order to feed the gods and work for them, a minor vignette in the creation story, created only to serve.

In other versions of cosmogenesis the Universe is born from the depths of the Primordial Divinity or Primordial Ocean as a child is born from the womb or (as it appears in an ancient Indian metaphor) it flows like the silk from a spider. Thus Nature and the Supreme Power producing it are one and the same. That is to say they are one in substance. The universe is not created, but born...

In Indian accounts and various ancient Egyptian myths again and again we see battles between Light and Darkness, Chaos and Order. There too is to be found the birth of an Eternal Being in an Eternal Divine Ocean (usually a bottomless abyss) where Life forms an island. It is born in perfection, never to change, but somehow in the end it is always destroyed. Thus ends the Sumer, and the day draws to a close with the last rays of the sun. So too ends the life of a plant, an animal, a person. The Universe itself is doomed to end, only to start again in the next phase of its cycle. And so, in the midst of a limitless pool of Time and Space, lacking any goal, bereft of purpose, the universe spins aimlessly on. This forms the foundation of pagan impressions of the universe.

�I have already spoken to you of how this world view is suggested by communing with nature and forming a deep connection between people and natural cycles. All is as immutable as the phases of the Moon and tides of the sea, and all in the end comes to naught, giving way to the next phase of its cycle.

We find long periods of time, thousands and millions of years, such as the Kalpas and Yugas of Indian mythology, or a Great Year3 which we find in Babylonian thinking. To the Greeks this Great Year represented a giant wheel, itself unchanged by time, which would turn, always returning in the end to its initial position.

It was this horrifying vision that obsessed Friedrich Nietzsche, that great thinker and great madman. He thought he had found the ultimate truth here, since everything does repeat in this futilely spinning world. It seemed that nature was indeed cyclic, and in that repeating cycle, essentially static. Humanity never witnessed the development of inferior into superior on a wide scale. Instead, everything seemed to merely whirl in place.

It is against this drab background that the Biblical account bursts onto the scene. It is a thing apart, wholly, fundamentally and comprehensively different from the pagan world view. The pagan cosmogonies were created in the context of the great civilizations of the world� China, India, Ancient Greece, Babylon, Egypt and Iran. In contrast, the biblical account, and with it the biblical world view, arose from a civilization so small in its scale that it can hardly be distinguished as a separate entity on the maps of antiquity. It appeared in a country whose historic role fell far short of the pomp and grandeur of the ancient and classical East.

We do not know whose hand penned the Hebrew words of the first lines of the Bible, words that sound out like a great eternal poem:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Notice that there is no concept of an abyss here, no preceding god of material. None of the usual elements are found: no battle among the gods, no monsters, no titans, just the Creator and the creation by His Word.

"And God said: Let there be light."

He doesn't 'do' this. Nothing here is built up, nothing installed. He only speaks. Naturally, those who wrote these lines understood that God does not speak as does man. But for our anthropomorphic understanding, the description of God as speaking is the closest we can come to a human understanding of how the Divine Reason acts upon existence.

Tradition attributes these lines to Moses. We don't know to what degree that is true. Although the words were written down long after the time Moses lived, the unmistakable stamp of the ancient pastoral life is still on them. Take for instance the counting of time from evening: "And the evening and the morning were the first day." For whom does the evening come first? It comes for the shepherd, tending his flock in the cool of the night, and for the pilgrim and the traveler, who wait out the heat of the day in the shade.

And so we have a tradition that traces back to the ancient Prophet Moses who lived some 13 centuries before our era. It was passed along for many years as a well-honed oral account, and finally written down, probably sometime between the 6th and 8th centuries ��. But that is not the essential point. The essential point is that this text is a precise account of the Biblical world view. There is a single First Cause of existence, and that is the subject of the Hexaemeron.

This First Cause is cosmic Reason and Personal Consciousness. We see this in the words: "And God saw was that it was good." Only a person can see and evaluate. I repeat, the one who wrote these words knew perfectly well that the Divine Origin does not have physical eyes which He uses to see. But such an anthropomorphic image is used to stress the personal character of the Divine Origin.

The world is set in motion not by an Absolute, a Preexisting Abyss, or a cold First Principle, but by a Personal Origin to Whom humanity speaks and by Whom we are answered.

Moving further, the thought arises that if this Origin is so all-powerful that it brings forth existence from nothingness, and then perhaps for Him the mystical Word suffices, producing the entire world ready-made in an instant? But we see nothing of the sort. Instead we find a world Creation carried out in phases.

The course of this week of creation, this Hexaemeron, can be followed along from simple to complex, ending in the day of completion, the Sabbath day. However the phases are three, not six. This text is adorned with a literary device. Unfortunately, I cannot adequately illustrate it here, but for each day of Creation there is a set of refrains: "and God said", "and God saw ", "and it was so ", and so on.

When we look at these refrains over the entire course of the six days, a very subtle correspondence is revealed between the elements. If I had a board here, I could draw the visual pattern of it for you. Why was this needed? It was to show the reader or listener that this was not a functional, scientific and scrupulously descriptive text. Instead this text is a Sacred Poem which conveys the very essence of phenomena without their specific details. This teaching is as much about the meaning of the world as it is about its beginning.

Moving further, the Creator approves the World which He has created, finding it to be good. This 'tov' means "beautiful", "good". At the end we find 'tov neod', that is, 'very good', 'most beautiful' and 'perfect'.

But this is not said of darkness. God divides the light and the dark and we find the first hint of shadow cast by objects in the Universe. Naturally, the scriptural author did not intend by this the kind of shadow I, for instance, cast on this wall, but a shadow in the mystical or internal sense, or if you prefer the term, an ethical shadow. A false note sounded in the Universe which the Creator cannot pronounce as 'tov', that is, 'good.'

Thus even in the Hexaemeron we already find a hint of something catastrophic and foreboding developing in the Universe. But the catastrophic element does not hinder the greater objective. The world moves along toward its goal.

The Three Stages�Day one: Light. Days Two and Three: Dry land and plants. In parallel to this, as imagery: light-the luminaries, the Fourth Day: water-watery creatures, the Fifth Day�plants and animals on the dry land, and finally man on the dry land-on Day Six. Here we see the poetic symmetry of the East. The three elements are inanimate material, living things and man. This is the progression that concludes with a remarkable being that stands at once in two realms, at the dividing line between the material and spiritual.

Every previous dimension, each stage of being, is created directly by the Word of God. But here, at the creation of man, we read: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea..." and so on. Thus a new being appears in the Universe who is similar to the Creator; and that God-like nature is primarily seen in power over the world. But this power is not crude and violent. It is the power of wisdom and the authority of reason.

Many of the Church Fathers interpreted the power described in this passage as it applied to an individual person, since each person contains a whole menagerie of passions: predators, reptiles, etc. - and all of these must be subject to human authority.

Finally, man is created on the same day as the animals. He is connected with them. He is their brother. Man is given dominion over the earth, and thus begins a new theme in the biblical story.

The images of the second chapter of the Six Days of Creation differ from the first. They are more archaic, more iconic and more direct images: the earth is barren and empty, and it is from the dust of the earth that God creates man. Thus God creates him not from some neutral material, but from lowly dirt. Man thereby participates and shares in his body with nature and the earth itself. "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul". One is reminded of Derzhavin's poem God, and the lines about mankind:

"A fraction of the cosmic whole,

It seems I find my place in nature's

Hallowed core, starting from

The fleshy beasts' creation,

And stretching to the spirits celestial

I am the link that binds life's chain."

The 8th Psalm speaks of the greatness of Universe and the beauty of the heavens. Man, gazing up at the stars arrayed above him says: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? "Even then man felt his physical insignificance in the scale of the Universe, though at that time the Earth was thought of as a flat circle of limited size, a place not nearly as spacious as we now conceive it. The Universe too, was considered small compared to today. But he already understood that man, as a biological, physical being, was small and insignificant. And suddenly we find this: "For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels�"

Blaise Pascal said that man is but a fragile reed that silent, unfeeling nature could kill at any moment. But having drawn this picture of our helplessness and showing how easy it is to kill our biological selves, he adds: "But he is a thinking reed", and all the forces of the Universe which fall upon him to destroy him are not his equal because they do not know what they are doing. He alone knows, he alone faces death as a spirit.4

Yes, even then man understood that he was close to the plants and animals. In Ecclesiastes it says that the lot of man and the lot of the beasts is the same7. And we know that this is true. This makes it all the more remarkable of a contrast that within this imperfect creature dwells the Spirit of Eternity.

We can of course analyze this "dust of the earth" man is made from. It's the periodic table of Mendeleyev. The entire table is arrayed in us. The very same physiological processes take place both in plants and in our organs, moving and growing without our conscious involvement. The very same processes are found in any living being that breathes and walks and sleeps, reproduces and eats.

In a word, all of nature is in man and there is not one of us who has himself composed this wholeness of his nature by himself, this image and likeness of the Universe. It is something we receive from the Creator because we are part of nature.

Of course at this point you are thinking: 'But what of scientific hypotheses?' I have a clear answer for that. Scientific concepts are the products of analytical reasoning. If in the Revealed Word man had received such materials as Ohm's law and Einstein's theory we wouldn't have to think at all. It would all be laid out for us. We would cease to be a creative, inquiring being and become the very caricature of humanity. I can find no better way to describe it than the character in Gogol who would just open his mouth and a dumpling would fly, ready-made, into it. Why do we need to think? Why are we given a brain at all?

God gave us thinking so we could come to scientific truths by ourselves, through searching, arguing and improvement. This is a blessed process. Everyone who is involved in science to any degree knows of the great happiness and creative ordeals the pursuit of knowledge entails. I would not want to live in a world where God just packed everything I need into my head ready-made.

There are some things in this world, though, that are beyond our common experience. They come as a gift and a revelation. And this is how it came to be. This is how the biblical account was revealed against the backdrop of all the great pagan cosmogonies.

This Revelation is couched in simple, pictorial and poetic terms. Its literary form is strict, purged of superfluous literary decorations. It speaks of the most important things of all. This key theme is repeated throughout the Bible, we often hear it in the Psalms. The Orthodox Ail-Night Vigil Service starts with Psalm 1036, which sings of the beauty and magnificence of a Universe originating in a Rational Cause, a Rational Origin.

So man must ever think and seek. Disaster theory, in which the world is periodically ravaged by cataclysmic floods and life, begins anew each time, evolution by adaptation, Darwinian evolution by natural selection, theories based on contemporary genetics, holism, finalism, and many, many different theories. And I think I will be pleased if they continue to appear, these many theories, arising one after another, displacing one another and revealing layer after layer of knowledge. And from time to time mankind will have to set aside many of the conclusions his reason had previously reached in the light of new knowledge.

But the eternal words remain: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. " And it all stops: the myths and guesses and legends disappear, and the Word speaks; this Word that can be understood by a child or a savage or even a civilized human being. This Word that came from a spaceship when an American astronaut saw the Earth and said into his microphone: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." These words rang out in space.

I would like to conclude this brief synopsis with some advice, a recommendation. For all people, those who believe and those who do not, those who know the Bible and those who do not: Don't look to the Revealed Word for science. It isn't speaking of scientific data; it's speaking of something more important.

This reminds me of the words of the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler: "It is a great abuse to seek scientific truths in Holy Scripture, for they are not to be found "7

A hundred years later Mikhail Lomonosov would write that it's a poor chemist who uses a Psalter to study chemistry, and that is true.

Revelations and symbols, the essence of life, it's goal and the specific paths of human genetic development, the body's evolution from miniscule creatures in the primordial ocean to the modern human form, possessing the gift of reason in perpetuity� spirit, self-awareness�these are indeed gifts, but not gifts of nature.

Search out the Earth and its environs! How wonderful that the cosmonauts reported that they saw no angels! Because if the Spirit truly lived somewhere, in the mouth of a volcano or at the bottom of the sea, we would say that man got that Spirit from the volcano's lava or the sea's water. We are given the Spirit from another dimension. When someone says they performed an autopsy and found no soul, this is a given, for the eye cannot see that which is invisible.

All we can see is the brain, the nervous system, physical objects, objects that are accessible to our six senses and to various sensors. But the self.. .there is no sensing device that can measure that. There is no machine that can show us the color of love, hate and sadness, nor one that can show us a person's self-awareness, that which makes us human and establishes our freedom. This is the key to the image and likeness of Eternity in a mortal man, a mortal being.

The lecture was presented at the "October" House of Culture, January 19, 1989

Translation by Christopher Gait

NOTES

1 Russian: Shestodnev (��).

2 The lecture was read in a public hall at the beginning of Perestroika, and Soviet sentiments were still very powerful. Although they could not stop the lecture, Fr. Alexander's ideological foes did what they could to interfere. Fr. Alexander died a martyr death at the hands of unknown killers less than two years after this lecture � Translator.

3 Also known as a Platonic year � Translator

4 "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this." Pascal, Pensees, 347.

5 Ecc 3:19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all vanity.

6 Psalm 104 in the King James translation. The Orthodox Psalter is based on the Greek Septuagint version and differs in the number of psalms and some of their content � Translator

7 I cannot find this quote from Kepler, though Galileo wrote something similar in a Letter to Elia Diodati, January 15, 1633: "Many years ago when the stir about Copernicus was beginning, 1 wrote a letter [to the Grand-Duchess Cristina], in which, supported by the authority of numerous Fathers of the Church, I showed what an abuse it was to appeal so much to Holy Scripture in questions of natural science. As soon as I am in less trouble I will send you a copy. I say in less trouble, because I am just now going to Rome, whither I have been summoned by the Holy Office, which has already prohibited the circulation of my Dialogues. I hear from well-informed persons that the Jesuit Fathers have insinuated in the highest quarters that my book is more execrable and injurious to the Church than the writings of Luther and Calvin ..."� Translator