THE MEDIAEVAL ATTITUDE 



God, who may establish law, but who may and does 

 set it aside, and who depends on the miraculous 

 rather than on law when transmitting His will to 

 men. 



The date of the Book of Genesis is not known, but 

 it is believed that the earliest portion goes back to 

 the ninth or tenth century before Christ, and that 

 there is mixed with it the narrative of a somewhat 

 later chronicler. The story of the creation, as we have 

 it, is the work of a compiler who drew his material 

 from both of these earlier sources and is supposed to 

 have been written about 700 b.c. The earliest ideas 

 in the text are thus fairly contemporaneous with the 

 Homeric poems. One cannot but be amazed at the 

 difference between the two conceptions. The Greeks 

 were still in the period of pure mythological animism, 

 but in the mind of the prophet of Judah the world is 

 the act of a single creative spirit. Inorganic phenom- 

 ena are not personified and living forms are brought 

 into existence according to a pre-ordained classifica- 

 tion in species. The final and crowning act of the 

 creation was man, fashioned from the dust and en- 

 dued with a portion of the divine spirit in order that 

 he might comprehend the work of God and govern 

 all other living forms which had been created for his 

 use and for the glory of the Creator. While there is 

 an undoubted denial of the transmutation of species, 

 there is a quite remarkable sequence in the order of 

 creation of the various types of forms which, by a 



