Hear over a dozen modern Orthodox Holy Fathers teach about the beginnings of God’s creation and the theory of evolution. This collection of teachings is specifically from Orthodox Holy Fathers of the 19th and 20th centuries. By no means is this meant to deemphasize the earlier Holy Fathers in any way; it is simply meant to highlight Fathers of our times who were familiar with the “enlightenment” of modern man, bound up with atheism and evolutionary theory. While their focus was on a true and authentic understanding of the origins of man and creation, and this apart from and beyond humanist theories like evolution, they nonetheless offered an Orthodox appraisal of evolution and other modern theories in order to guard the Faithful against soul-destroying heresy.
I encourage you to read the early Fathers and gain their understanding of Genesis and creation, which stands firmly on its own and which was not ignorant of the truth about creation. Just as Moses was a prophet not only of the future, but of the past, the early Patristic writers were also inspired by the same Spirit to perceive reality as Moses did.
Lastly, this recording is not meant to stir up further debates between “creation vs evolution” and “science vs religion.” These binary discussions are often fruitless and miss the point. What this recording aims to show is that not only do Orthodox Saints regard the theory of evolution as false and incompatible with Orthodoxy, as well as notions of theistic evolution (since “by man came death” -1 Cor 15, verse 21), but that their vision of Creation is not a reaction to the theory of evolution, rather it is enlightened by the Holy Spirit and retains fundamental presuppositions that allow for a truly God-inspired understanding.
Wrestle with these words. They are spoken by men illumined by God, and can help lead a humble man to the Kingdom of Heaven.
00:00 – Introduction
00:38 – Fr. Seraphim Rose, Hieromonk of Platina, California (+1982) – Basic presuppositions for knowledge of creation and early man.
04:33 – St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol (+1867) – The state of creation before the Fall of Adam.
06:55 – St. Hilarion (Troitsky), Hieromartyr and Archbishop of Verey (+1929) – The Church’s view leads to humility, the secular view leads to pride.
10:38 – St. Nikolai (Velimirovic), Bishop of Zica (+1956) – “Death is Unnatural”
13:32 – St. Justin (Popovic) of Celije (+1979) – How man and the rest of creation are inseparable. When man fell, all of creation fell.
15:22 – St. Ambrose of Optina (+1891) – “Don’t believe at face value all kinds of nonsense…”
15:46 – St. John of Kronstadt (+1908) – True knowledge and the over-educated.
16:49 – St. Vladimir, Hieromartyr and Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich (+1918) – Do not listen to teachings of unbelief for they “promise you nothing but despair and an inconsolable life.”
18:44 – St. Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov (+1894) – Evolution is anathema, along with other secular Western philosophies, and only a pure nous can accurately contemplate divine reality.
29:19 – St. Barsanuphius of Optina (+1913) – The moral ramifications of evolutionist philosophy.
30:05 – St. Nectarios, Metropolitan of Pentapolis and Wonderworker of Aegina (+1920) – “Without the acceptance of revealed truth, man will remain an insoluble problem.”
31:42 – Fr. Seraphim Rose (+1982) – Knowledge of creation and early man can only be obtained by divine illumination. (Note: This essentially repeats his teaching from the beginning, but it is kept here since it is so key to our understanding.)
34:26 – St. Luke the Surgeon, Archbishop of Simferopol (+1961) – Evolutionary theory is not only contradictory to the Scripture, but to nature itself.
35:54 – St. Sophrony (Sakharov) the Athonite (+1993) – The absurdity of evolutionary theory.
36:57 – St. Paisios of Mount Athos (+1994) – Monkeys are far from humans; evolutionary theory is blasphemy.
41:31 – St. Justin (Popovic) of Celije (+1979) – His letter to a theology student asking about evolution in which he focuses on the impact of evolution on the Orthodoxy doctrine of salvation.
46:35 – Fr. Seraphim Rose (+1982) – Brief overview of the keys to the Patristic understanding.
52:44 – Hymns from Vigil of the Sunday of Forgiveness, The Casting Out of Adam from Paradise
54:33 – Hymn from the Feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross
The majority of these texts can be found in “Genesis, Creation, and Early Man” by Fr. Seraphim Rose, published by St. Herman’s Press.
This channel is dedicated to sharing the prayers, hymns, teachings, and service texts of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Glory to Jesus Christ!
<3 thankyou, this topic has been on the mind recently
Thank You For This video.
Very good
St Theophan the relcuse is so close to us of our times with a understanding of the Early Church Fathers , St Theophan pray to God for us !
Genesis 1 is literal. If you don’t believe that you are siding with Satan’s falsehood on creation
what about the flat earth? Saint Paisios says here that the earth revolves around the Sun but the Saints could not tell that to the people from their time.
Evolution destroyed by the Fathers. If some modern Orthodox teach textual criticism about how you can believe in this garbage and reconcile Orthodox teaching who are you going to believe? You cannot reconcile evolution with genesis, did Christ’s nature come from a monkey? God forbid. We were made in his image not some beast.
"ONLY TRUST THIS HOLY FATHER…" SOUNDS LIKE OCCULT.
Don't mix truth with lies.
This is blind heresy.
Thank you. Bless you.
There is science and scientism as taught and wanted about in the book of Timothy. The lies of cosmology, evolution and the big bang lies. We are on a realm set on four pillars with a firmament separating the waters above from the waters below. Fixed and immovable not a ball careening through "the universe" at millions of miles an hour. The lies perpetuated from masons and Jesuit teachings have infected our minds and worship of God almighty the great I AM.
I have to listen to this one of these days!
It's scary how much the Satanic lie that is evolution has infiltrated the Church. I attend a very liberal Orthodox church in the heart of a modern Sodom and it's sickening.
Job 38:14 says of the Earth – "It takes on form like clay under a seal,
And stands out like a garment." Interesting that the Earth has no measurable curvature – nor can any movement be measured.
Are you a Luddite? Just anti-science? I am an Orthodox Christian, I don't believe in evolutionary theory as offered (inconsistent), and "hold fast the truths" imparted in the Church. But facts are facts: matter decays at measurable rates, and scientific study has determined our world is far more than 7500 years old. In matters of faith and the omnipresence of Jesus Christ in all things & at all times, the Fathers are spot on. As a bulwark against the nihilism & atheism of today, they are Christ's army on earth. But empirical evidence from chemistry, geology, and physics has different answers about the age of the planet at least.
We must become comfortable with not knowing how it all happened.
But we cannot (!) resort to explaining Creation with the same simplistic answers as our vacuous fundamentalist Protestant friends, that the entire universe was created in 144 clock hours!!!
Can you read The Patristic Doctrine of Creation by Father Seraphim Rose?
Thank you
I am inquiring into Orthodoxy and I have some questions
1: Does Orthodoxy teach a literal 6 day creation, or can a “day” mean a different amount of time?
2: If the universe was created in 6 days, what is the explanation for fossils and ancient bones.
Ah yes, i was trying to purchase the book "Genesis, Creation, and Early Man by Fr. Seraphim Rose." To my dismay it was priced above a $1,000! This will be a much welcomed resource.
Here is a online free place to read:http://www.creatio.orthodoxy.ru/english/rose_genesis/chapter1.html
This is an excellent compendium. Thank you.
God can’t explain himself to man. Lay men and even God fearing saints cannot understand beyond over simplistic stories of creation. Therefore scientists and academics were given the competency to explore creation. A Saint or a theologian’s work is anchored in belief not academia. Evolution is not a thumb suck and the earth been round is not guess. It’s time to wake up and not try oversimplify God’s creation. Science is proving God more real than a theologian or a Saint ever could. It’s not an either or situation but rather a dealer understanding of how beautiful creation is.
15:46
The subject of the revealed knowledge in Scripture about the creation, and the subsequent writings of the Church based on it, and thier need to account for the existence of the fossil record and other empirical evidence of natural history is a topic to which I have devoted considerable thought and research. One of the greatest failings of the Church in modern times had been its rigid insistence on a creation account in which the earth is only 6000 or so years old and rejecting the obvious evidence to the contrary. This has caused many people to then doubt the veracity of Scriptural accounts of God's appearances in history and revelations of truth to mankind. By playing this game of chicken, as it were, with the facts, the Church has erred. Furthermore, the way in which some elders and Church fathers interpret the book of Genisis is in obvious conflict with a literal reading of it. They justify this by using a type of reasoning which is clearly fallacious, and relies on using later developed dogmas as the only lens through which to view Moses' writings. In attempting to understand the Church's dogmatic teachings on the subject, I read St. Basil's classic book on the subject, The Hexameron (The Six Days). One peculiarity of this book is that it only concerns the first five days of creation, and is silent on the most crucial to this topic, the sixth day – in which Man was created! I would go on to find out that St. Basil died before he could write it, and that a vision of the Theotokos has revealed to him that this would be the case. For some reason, the most authoritative doctor of the faith was kept from making dogmatic teachings about the subject of human origins. However, in the chapters about the first day, St. Basil makes a very telling statement which applies to these origins: he writes that when Moses says, "God created," he does not write that, "God formed or God worked," because creation means specifically to have called into existence from nothing, as opposed to having fashioned it from some primordial matter already existing. This is so significant because in Genesis 1:26, we read that God 'created' man and woman. And later in chapter 2, we see that Moses writes the God 'formed' Adam from some dust. So right here St. Basil is giving us a big clue that Moses is discussing something different in each separate case. In chapter 1 we have the account of the creation of the earth and everything in it, including man and woman, and that they are going forth to multiply and subdue the earth, and this is good (hence not yet fallen). Then God rests on the seventh day and the epic of creation is over. We also notice about the 'days' of which Moses wrote, that it is not until after the passing of a 'day', that day is divided from night. Hence it cannot be logically inferred that the six 'days' are days in the ordinary literal sense, but must refer to something more akin to the meaning of, 'back in the day.' Like a time, an age or an era. Not only does this not contradict the literal meaning of the text, it is more logical than the dogma which insists that they were 24 hour days, which cannot be inferred where it is so obviously contradicted. We notice that for the most part, these 'days' seem to correspond with what we know about natural history from the scientific study of fossils.
Plants emerged first, then animals and finally Man. This is of great benefit if we want to prove that Scripture is accurate with regards to reality. Unfortunately, the dogma that death did not exist before the fall of Adam 5,500 years ago appears to be incompatible with the evidence from natural history. However, Moses makes no declaration that the creation of the first six days existed in a state of deathlessness. He does say that God had created all the living things by the end of the sixth day, and that must include predators, carnivores and scavengers. So in the absence of any statement in Scripture by Moses to the contrary, we do not need to assume that death did not exist in the first creation. In fact, death must have been inherent within it if the Son of God was, 'slain from the foundation of the world.' Which is to say that death was a known consideration from the time of creation. Furthermore, it is evident that Man already existed before Adam was formed not just by the literal statement in chapter 1 to that effect, but further on we read of the offspring of Adam marrying some inhabitants of the 'land of Nod.' Again the dogmatists make weak and illogical arguments to support their understanding of this verse. This brings us to chapter 2 and Adam. Moses writes that God formed Adam in the, 'day the earth was made'. Was it made in one day? Or six days? Or does 'day' here mean 'era' or 'age' ? Now, in chapter 1 God 'created' man and woman at the same time and told them to go and multiply and to eat seeds and nuts from grass and trees. But in chapter 2, God 'formed' Adam alone, placing him in the garden of Paradise. God needed to make Adam because there was, 'no man to till the soil,' and 'it had not rained, but a mist rose up from the earth and watered the face of it' each day. This seems to imply that Adam's role as a tiller of the soil was connected to some changes in the earth's climate. And here Genesis alludes to something we can see in the natural record: that for the longest time the earth was a warmer, misty place in which giant trees, plants and animals lived alongside Man. And then at some point relatively recently, the general climate aridified and became much colder. It is from St. Paul that we get most of the dogmatic theology about Adam. However, we are warned by St. Peter in his epistle, that some people misinterpret Paul's rather difficult language, as they do all Scripture. We know that St. Paul is not infallible, he was after all a sinful man, as he would tell you. So we are in a situation where certain passages of the Pauline epistles have grown into ersatz dogmatic schools of theology, something which it is doubtful that St. Paul intended. So how are we to understand things? Literally, in the historic context, is typically the place to strive for. St. Paul gives a theology about Adam as the first Man, and also the first type of Christ. The Christ who fell and brought death into the world. How can he say that Adam was a type of Christ? The similarities are that his body was formed supernaturally by the direct action of God's breath (Pnevma or Holy Spirit) upon matter. And that he was formed for an historic mission to do a task for God involving eternal life.
Amazing collection of quotes! And thank you for including the hymns at the end!
Is there a place to download a pdf with all these quotes in one document?
Based