When faced with the question of why there is so much suffering in the world, the default Christian answer is because of Adam’s sin. This belief is certainly not without warrant. Indeed, a number of biblical texts appear to support it, like Genesis 3:17-18 where the ground is cursed and thistles and thorns begin to plague man thanks to the Fall. Among other passages, we could also point to Romans 8:19-21. In this classic text, St. Paul says that creation “was subjected to futility” and yet eagerly awaits that Day when it will be “set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
As I’ve previously discussed in this column, however, modern scientific discoveries have made it clear that creatures have been dying for as long as they have inhabited this planet. This has been going on for more than three and a half billion years—long before Homo sapiens entered the scene of history a few hundred thousand years ago. Notably, a figure no less than St. Thomas Aquinas himself recognized that death attended the lives of animals before the Fall, even as he held that man was initially exempt from this dynamic.
Yet, if this is true, then what in the created order actually changed as a result of Adam’s sin?
Giving God credit for his troublesome creatures
To answer this question, it might be easiest to start by reflecting a little on why Adam’s sin did not inflict fundamental changes within the structure of the created order. On this front, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church can lend us valuable insight into why the Lord made creatures that cause us pain and suffering.
For his part, the Angelic Doctor stressed that many good things about our world would be absent if we were to eliminate what from our limited perspective appear to be flaws in creation. For instance, Aquinas observed that “[f]ire would not be generated if air was not corrupted, nor would the life of a lion be preserved unless the ass were killed.” This recognition is crucial, for even as the opening chapters of Genesis present us with an idyllic archetypal state where neither man nor animal suffers any harm, St. Thomas held the natural order in such esteem that he considered it an ineluctable fact that the sustenance of one organism requires the demise of others.
Having said that, Christianity from its inception has always maintained that human sin is fraught with cosmic consequences. How, then, are we to understand the effects of the Fall with respect to creation writ large?
A number of factors make answering this question a daunting task, but one of the key reasons was underscored by St. Augustine. Human sin, the Doctor of Grace explains, clouds our ability to behold God’s wisdom manifest in this created order. It causes us to be repulsed by features of creation that are good for us in the same way that sickness causes an afflicted individual to find healthy bread distasteful and sore eyes to perceive light as repugnant. In this light, Augustine maintains that animals like the poisonous viper and the worm that causes rot were created as such by God, even if they exhibit traits that humans tend to experience as problematic.
As some readers will know even better than I, it can be hard to accept this when we find ourselves afflicted by one of these creatures. My dad almost lost his finger to a brown recluse spider. Just last week, we narrowly escaped disaster when my three-year-old son almost stepped on a Diamondback blocking the trail we were hiking. I myself have had a few disconcertingly close calls over the years. And, yet, the fact that these organisms kill and cause decay is not a result of human sin altering their nature but rather a deliberate feature of the world’s design. In The City of God, Augustine explains that our inability to perceive this is self-inflicted:
It is, in fact, the very law of transitory things that, here on earth where such things are at home, some should be born while others die, the weak should give way to the strong and the victims should nourish the life of the victors. If the beauty of this order fails to delight us, it is because we ourselves, by reason of our mortality, are so enmeshed in this corner of the cosmos that we fail to perceive the beauty of a total pattern in which the particular parts, which seem ugly to us, blend in so harmonious and beautiful a way…It is not by our comfort or inconvenience, but by nature considered in itself, that glory is given to its Creator.
Elaborating in more detail on creatures that strike us as inconvenient or pointless, Augustine notes that they are not only good in their own right but also good for us. Indeed, this doctor maintains that the very act of wrestling with the enigma of their hidden goodness holds great value in our pursuit of holiness:
The heretics mention, for example, fire, cold, wild beasts, and things like that, without considering how wonderful such things are in themselves and in their proper place and how beautifully they fit into the total pattern of the universe making, as it were, their particular contributions to the commonweal of cosmic beauty. Nor have they observed how valuable they are even to us if only we use them well and wisely. Consider, for instance, poison. It is deadly when improperly used, but when properly applied it turns out to be a health-giving medicine…
Thus does Divine Providence teach us not to be foolish in finding fault with things but, rather, to be diligent in finding out their usefulness or, if our mind and will should fail us in the search, then to believe that there is some hidden use still to be discovered, as in so many other cases, only with great difficulty. This effort needed to discover hidden usefulness either helps our humility or hits our pride, since absolutely no natural reality is evil.
Notably, the Doctor of Grace held this same view with respect to both of God’s “books.” Just as ambiguities in the book of Sacred Scripture serve to temper our pride, so too seemingly futile features in the book of creation serve to help us cultivate humility. In this, Augustine’s approach closely resembles that of St. John Chrysostom. Offering advice on what to do when the purpose of a particular creature eludes us, this saint exhorted, “From the creation, learn to admire the Lord! And if any of the things which you see exceed your comprehension, and you are not able to find the reason for its existence, then for this reason, glorify the Creator that the wisdom of His works surpasses your own understanding.”
Without denying that other creatures can be a source of real pain in our lives, Stanley Rosenberg ably captures the heart of the Church’s ancient approach when he adds: “[I]t is because of something wrong in humans that we find such creatures to be a problem. Vipers, in other words, did not change…Rather what changed was humans’ relationship to them.” Rather than dreading inconveniences like summer pests and winter freezes, the Fathers would have us rejoice at all creaturely features and the coming of life made possible by the passing of the seasons.
More recently, this same point has also been captured by noted Christian environmentalist Wendell Berry. Commenting on St. John’s teaching that all things were made by the Logos (John 1:3), Berry writes:
And so we must credit God with the making of biting and stinging insects, poisonous serpents, weeds, poisonous weeds, dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error, or that the creator ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding — that is, we are “fallen.”
Like Augustine, Berry emphasizes that the fundamental structure of creation was not altered by fallen humanity in such a way that it gave rise to noxious pests that irritate us, weeds that infest our fields, or the sweat by which we labor in them. Instead, it was our species’ relationship with creation that was transformed due to the Fall. What sin did—and continues to do—is to incite us to rebel against these circumstances instead of welcoming them as gifts by which to deepen our participation in the paschal fabric of the cosmos—and thereby in the Trinitarian life itself.
False dominion and the rebellion of creation
Speaking of man’s rebellion, Pope Benedict XVI was especially concerned with how the Fall vitiated man’s exercise of dominion over the earth. Allowing himself to be “mastered by selfishness,” the pontiff taught, man misinterpreted the divine command to till and keep the earth. Adam—the first man and all of us—disregarded the “inbuilt order” of nature entrusted to him and “exploited creation out of a desire to exercise absolute domination over it.” Because our first parents refused to acknowledge their status as creatures, the pontiff elaborated, our vocation of exercising loving dominion over the earth was “disrupted, and conflict arose within and between mankind and the rest of creation.” In other words, the sin of our first parents wound up “provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.”
This distorted posture toward creation stands in stark contrast with the “true meaning of God’s original command”, which according to Ratzinger “was not a simple conferral of authority, but rather a summons to responsibility” as God’s “co-worker.” Furthermore, it is an invitation to align ourselves with the divine order manifested in creation as opposed to manipulating creation to our own liking— an approach that Ratzinger identifies as the path by which we “destroy the world and ourselves with it.”
Yet, if the universe has always had a paschal structure and its fundamental laws were not altered after the Fall, then what does it mean for conflict to arise between man and creation and for the latter to engage in a destructive “rebellion”?
It is noteworthy that recent pontiffs do not view this uprising as an instantaneous cataclysm that transpired in remote history. On the contrary, they consider it a timeless phenomenon that applies as much today as it did at the dawn of mankind. Thus, when John Paul II spoke of creation’s rebellion, he did not suggest that it entailed an alteration of its fundamental rhythms. Rather, what he has in mind is how the Fall causes us to imagine ourselves as overlords rather than kin and covenantal partners with other creatures. In this postlapsarian state, we tend to envision ourselves as entirely separate from nature, standing above it with the authority to exploit lower beings according to our own whims. In this light, John Paul bemoaned that the excessive, disorderly, and destructive pattern of behavior in contemporary society results in widespread environmental devastation, which is good for no one. To this, the Polish pontiff added that “creation is a good for man so long as man is ‘good’ for the creatures around him.”
This line of interpretation did not originate with modern popes. The Old Testament draws a direct line between Israel’s rebellion against Yahweh and the rebellion of the land against the people. Writing during the Babylonian Exile, the prophet Jeremiah lamented that the nation’s forgetfulness of God led to Israel’s enemies “making their land a horror, a thing to be hissed at forever” (Jer 18:1–16). In more vivid detail, Isaiah envisioned the earth lying cursed and polluted, withering, mourning, and languishing because Israel had violated the Lord’s everlasting covenant (Is 24:3–7). As Leviticus has it, the land itself rebels against us and refuses to yield its bounty when we violate the covenant (Lv 26:3–6, 18–20).
Looking to the wider Catholic tradition, it is significant that not one but two medieval doctors of the Church seized upon this point in their own cultural context. For example, Franciscan master St. Bonaventure exhorted the faithful to “open your eyes” and “apply your heart” so as to perceive God in his handiwork, warning that it is crucial to honor God in creation “lest the whole world rise against you.” In the same vein, Benedictine abbess St. Hildegard of Bingen mourned that in her native land “the earth’s fruitfulness has failed, because the very elements, violated by human sin, have been stripped of all their proper function.” In language reminiscent of St. Paul’s depiction of creation “groaning” in Romans 8:22, she described the cosmos as crying out in protest at being “caught up by human sins.” This entanglement, she continued, has led creatures to “transgress the proper mode that they received from their Creator, with movements and courses that are foreign to them.” In recent times, the abbess’s message reverberates in the words of a pope from that same land who grieved that “we hear today the groaning of creation as no one has ever heard it.”
Concluding thoughts
It is significant that, like Benedict XVI and many other theological giants, St. Hildegard did not conceive of creation’s rebellion as a calamity in distant time whereby nature suddenly began to deviate from its rhythms. Indeed, this medieval Doctor of the Church understood creation a way that is remarkably consistent with the discoveries of modern science regarding the pivotal role that death has played in the evolution of life over the past three and a half billion years.
What is more, her manner of envisioning the connection between human sin and environmental devastation was prescient, anticipating by nearly a millennium what recent popes have stressed in our present-day context. As we are increasingly witnessing in today’s world, human actions can indeed obstruct creatures from attaining the ends ordained for them by their Creator, leading to the extinction of entire species and the disruption of vast ecosystems.
From the perspective of Pope Benedict, our present ecological troubles stem from a relationship failure, which is to say when we see creatures as things to be dominated rather than recognizing them as covenantal partners to be treated with respect according to their proper natures. In this connection, the late pontiff stressed that the rupture of this relationship has dire repercussions not only for other creatures but also for mankind, leading to “irreversibly degrading situations.”
Inspired by God’s injunction to Noah, the “Green Pope” therefore left us with the following message: “If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation…Before it is too late, it is necessary to make courageous decisions that can recreate a strong covenant between mankind and the earth.”
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Yes, folks, its still happening, and we are doing it. And, contra to those who apparently obtain their environmental views from the talking heads of FoxNews, and who disdain every word which comes from the mouth of Pope Francis, the climate really is warming because of man, and there will be much suffering because of it. It is probably unstoppable now, and what policies to try and adopt and enforce is problematic, but the first step towards dealing gracefully with any situation or trial is to admit the realities of it and to accept our particular responsibilities.
Sounds to me like a religion you’re preaching. The world’s been around a few years and likely will last a few more. Fearmongering isn’t the way to advocate for proper respect of the world. But since this is a discussion about the environment, the greatest environmental threat is the one that exists within the womb of mothers. Let’s adress that threat first before we tackle any others.
You are partially missing the point, and turning political what is not a political position. Commentary like yours doesn’t help those who need to see the truth. Rethink before you post.
My point is that there is a subset of “Catholic conservatives” who seem unwilling to recognize the damage we have and are inflicting upon creation by how we have used the goods of nature. Consider, for instance, the stances of “conservative” federal legislators, some of them Catholic, from Oklahoma and Texas and the mountain states, towards even the slightest attempt to decrease the use of oil and gas. Is that about the truth, or is it about money? Consider also that Pope Francis, in Laudatio Si, said things very similar to statements of Benedict and JP2 concerning the environment, and yet he was and is hissed at for them. How we human beings make communal decisions is of its very nature “political” and my point, which I will re-iterate, is that there are some who form their views not on the truth, but on what holds sway in their political or church gang.
I have yet to hear a single global warming activist explain the multiple eras of global warming and freezing which our planet has experienced ( and geologists and paleontologists have confirmed) during the dinosaur ages.( Mammoth remains and that if grasses have been found at the poles.) And those at a time when there were NO ( or later, few) humans around and certainly no combustion engines.While our use of gas,or coal, or oil etc may be hastening another era of warming, at this time no REALISTIC alternatives exist. And having a crazed liberal president MANDATE the end of fossil fuel use is both impractical and far too expensive for the average citizens here in the US. It will make survival much more difficult in poor countries. Electric cars are too expensive and set themselves on fire and cannot travel long distances. Most of us do not want to wear snow jackets inside unheated homes. Or have plane travel terminated, and our lives confined to distances we can only walk to, like some latter-day neanderthals.I have yet to see any element of reality or practicality in any green proposals. I have no doubt things like solar energy can be introduced and their VOLUNTARY USE might make helpful incremental inroads to the economy. However, I am totally opposed to treating our population like slaves and having such choices dictated by govt. A restriction on gas cars and gas stoves is already in play in the Peoples Republic of California. It would appear that many of their citizens have already voted with their feet and left. What a shock. NOT. Would not live there if you paid me money.Lets hope their current “leader” who also supports homeless street folk,squatters and and illegal immigration, never sees the inside of the oval office.
If Pope Francis is to carry on the work of his predecessors to build an integral ecology, he needs to join them in offering an integral morality. Promulgating pastoral heresies harms all of creation. Think only of unnatural relations like abortion, transgenderism, contraception, IVF, etc. We cannot offer a Christian alternative to our throw away culture, if we offer “blessings” that throw away the sixth commandment. Think of St. Francis. He first repented and accepted a relationship with God. We must begin by accepting God’s grace for right relationships with each other before we can hope to relate in a blessed way with all of God’s creation.
God’s Fool: excellent rejoinder to the madness of environmental doctrine.
We know a priori that the Pope cannot err in his teaching on matters of faith and morals.
Indeed, the Lord said: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31-32). He also said: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:18-19).
“Pastoral heresies” have not been pronounced by Pope Francis. Rather, they stem from arbitrary and incorrect interpretations of some of his teachings. Indeed, the teaching of the Pope must be read in continuity with what the Church has always believed. The deposit of faith itself, namely the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, is one thing, and the manner in which they are enunciated is another, maintaining however the same meaning and significance (Veritatis Splendor, note 100).
Pope Francis himself emphasizes that “while the doctrine must be expressed clearly, judgments that do not take into account the complexity of different situations must be avoided, and it is necessary to be attentive to the way people live and suffer because of their condition” (Amoris Laetitia 79). This has always been taught by the Church, which asserts that to subjectively commit a grave sin requires grave matter, full awareness of the mind, and deliberate consent of the will. And that is why under the pontificate of Paul VI, the Congregation for the Clergy issued a declaration reminding that “the particular circumstances that accompany an objectively evil human act, while they cannot transform it into an objectively virtuous act, can render it blameless or less blameworthy or subjectively justifiable” (April 26, 1971). This is the perennial doctrine.
Therefore, I will not allow myself to be misled by those who want to instill in your heart feelings contrary to charity, especially towards the Pope.
An observation. The Pope, even at Easter, renews calls for peace and dialogue between Moscow and Kyiv. The Russian Synod convened in recent days under the presidency of Patriarch Kirill, however, goes in a completely different direction. On March 27, the decree of the XXV World Council of the Russian People was approved, which was held last November. The document allows no room for negotiation or reconsideration of the reasons that led the Kremlin to invade Ukraine. Yet, all the traditionalists, ready to criticize the Pope on every occasion, have been and remain silent on this satanic document, which seeks to destroy Christianity and the Church of Rome. Why?
“We know a priori that the Pope cannot err in his teaching on matters of faith and morals.” What a minute, now! Your statement is much too vague to accept. The pope cannot err when and only when he issues an ex cathedra document addressed to all the faithful, and invokes his authority as successor of St. Peter to solemnly define a certain proposition of faith and/or morals to be absolutely binding upon the faithful, thereby settling any and all uncertainty about the subject. By this very specification, such occasions are rare. Many popes have never issued such a document, and I’m not aware that Francis ever has. Apart from ex cathedra documents, it is heresy to claim that the pope is incapable of error whenever he utters an assertion regarding faith or morals or what he perceives to be a point of faith or morals. Popes can and have erred in the past, and this pope has erred many times.
In what manner of world do those live who suddenly decide that they are blind, and cannot and will not see anything but darkness and twisted shadows hinting of horrors on every side, and this goes on for uncounted generations?
Meanwhile, those who live in the light see an entirely different world of beauty, order, purpose and perfection.
This is only a simile, and a weak one, at that. Words are always weak, ask the saint of Aquinas who saw his words as only so much straw after one of his transports. Paul also speaks of this.
Four continued meditations:
FIRST, before the Fall, came the Creation ex nihilo or from nothing, that is, not merely the reshaping of a primordial chaos, but radically more—the difference between an such chaos and absolute zero—why is there anything at all (!) rather than nothing?
SECOND, the Fall, then, entails a rupture even in the human intellect. Such that we become fixated more on, say, food chains (as with Darwin), at the expense of the individual creature….To see with the eyes of the poet, the philosopher, and the theologian). With Aquinas, to see the “is”-ness of a single flower, a single star in the sky, a single bird. And, each single preborn child whose entire future, after the Fall, is abruptly and permanently terminated: https://www.life.com/lifestyle/drama-of-life-before-birth-landmark-work-five-decades-later/
THIRD, about the further mystery of each spiritual human soul, planted in a physical universe. This, from the convert to Christianity, Whittaker Chambers: his guidance to his son about nature’s stars and viruses, both:
“I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them, and that the problem of good and evil is not more simple than the immensity of worlds. I want him to understand that evil is not something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away, for it is not merely an uninvited guest, but lies coiled in foro interno [that is] at home with good within ourselves. Evil can only be fought. . . .I want him to know that it is his soul, and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns” (“Witness,” 1952, pp. 797-8).
FOURTH, with our eyes restored to see fully: “If there were only one star in the firmament…one flower forever in white bloom, and one tree arising from the plain; and if the snow should fall but once in every hundred years…Then we would know the generosity of the Infinite” (Kahlil Gibran).
St. Thomas Aquinas denied the Immaculate Conception and St. Augustine found it necessary to write “retractationes” to walk back some of his earlier thinking. As regards their chiding humans’ failure to see “beauty” in animals preying on one another, stinging insects, poisonous snakes, etc. I would simply observe that God, too, sees such things as repugnant, even if He did create them as such. Consider Isaiah chapter 11’s eschatological vision: ” 6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain.” At the regeneration there will be a change, then, not only in the relationship man has with creation, but that which God AND man find hurtful & destructive will be transformed (cf. v. 9 above).
The concept that there was death before The Fall – not surprising and not contradicting biblical truth – had assumed otherwise earlier . The biblical narrative – how the enemy is thrown down / comes to earth after their rebellion , The Spirit moving over waters bringing forth order and creation – the enemy likely was also trying to destroy same too, thus reality of death …The Garden , likely a special place , where Adam was created in glory , clothed in light ( not just naked ) hairs like beams of light , meant to have brought forth children in a glorious noncarnal pure holy love with power of spoken word too – which is to an extent how Bl. Mother is said to have been concieved . The responsibility to have been tilling and guarding The Garden , reciprocating the love in creation to have likely brought forth order all through same , defeating the enemy power ,defeating death – lost in The Fall !
https://www.queenofthedivinewill.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Little-Catechism-of-the-Divine-Will-1.pdf
The role of distortions brought on by presence of fallen powers causing fossil distortions etc : to be taken into consideration too, esp. in making assumptions that seem to contradict biblical truth .
As we await The Feast of Mercy , may our hearts be open to love God and others with the Love with which He loves us in our Mother – for Putin to be able to say in the depth of his heart – ‘ Lord , I love Zelensky and all the Ukranian people with the love with which You love them ‘ to bring forth the Reign of the Divine Will, the grace and comfort of The Spirit – in and through the Easter Papal blessing too !
I’ve never found it entirely credible that causality REALLY AND ALWAYS flows from past to future. To back this up, consider the Immaculate Conception. The Blessed Virgin was redeemed at the instant of Her creation by Her Son’s crucifixion, which took place decades afterwards.
In a similar way, the Fall might have had consequences in the world billions of years before it happened.
Exactly. For God past and future are always present to Him, as present to Him as “now” is to us. In other words, God is outside of time.
I think He took into consideration the fall of Adam and Eve from the beginning of the Universe. So we don’t have to worry about death and suffering existing before the fall. It wasn’t “before” the fall from God’s perspective, for Whom past and future are always “now.”
I know you probably will not see this Matthew, but I think you would find the Northern Paiute story of the origin of coyote(who in the story is the first man to suffer damnation) and their story of the fall. From there, if I remember correctly, all the living things before the fall would give a free gift of themselves to one another, i.e. the wolf needs food so the rabbit would offer itself up, the snake needs shelter so the rocks would offer themselves up to be that shelter, etcetera. Man’s job is to help all the living things live fully to their vocation, mainly by how the purpose of all these things is to help man live life fully, and because of the fall, to help all the living things return to how they were before the fall. Take care and God bless