---
title: "History of evolutionary thought"
chunk: 3/14
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:38.552937+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Gregory of Nyssa ====
Gregory of Nyssa wrote:Scripture informs us that the Deity proceeded by a sort of graduated and ordered advance to the creation of man. After the foundations of the universe were laid, as the history records, man did not appear on the earth at once, but the creation of the brutes preceded him, and the plants preceded them. Thereby Scripture shows that the vital forces blended with the world of matter according to a gradation; first it infused itself into insensate nature; and in continuation of this advanced into the sentient world; and then ascended to intelligent and rational beings (emphasis added).Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in his work on the history of evolutionary thought, From the Greeks to Darwin (1894):

Among the Christian Fathers the movement towards a partly naturalistic interpretation of the order of Creation was made by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, and was completed by Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries. ...[Gregory of Nyssa] taught that Creation was potential. God imparted to matter its fundamental properties and laws. The objects and completed forms of the Universe developed gradually out of chaotic material.

==== Augustine of Hippo ====

In the fourth century AD, the bishop and theologian Augustine of Hippo followed Origen in arguing that Christians should read the Genesis creation story allegorically. In his book De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis), he prefaces his account with the following:

In all sacred books, we should consider the eternal truths that are taught, the facts that are narrated, the future events that are predicted, and the precepts or counsels that are given. In the case of a narrative of events, the question arises whether everything must be taken according to the figurative sense only, or whether it must be expounded and defended also as a faithful record of what happened. No Christian would dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense. For St. Paul says: Now all these things that happened to them were symbolic [1 Cor 10:11]. And he explains the statement in Genesis, And they shall be two in one flesh [Eph 5:32], as a great mystery in reference to Christ and to the Church.
Later he differentiates between the days of the Genesis 1 creation narrative and 24 hour days that humans experience (arguing that "we know [the days of creation] are different from the ordinary day of which we are familiar") before describing what could be called an early form of theistic evolution:

The things [God] had potentially created... [came] forth in the course of time on different days according to their different kinds... [and] the rest of the earth [was] filled with its various kinds of creatures, [which] produced their appropriate forms in due time.
Augustine deployed the concept of rationes seminales to blend the idea of divine creation with subsequent development.
This idea "that forms of life had been transformed 'slowly over time'" prompted Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the  Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, to claim that Augustine had suggested a form of evolution.
Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in From the Greeks to Darwin (1894):

If the orthodoxy of Augustine had remained the teaching of the Church, the final establishment of Evolution would have come far earlier than it did, certainly during the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, and the bitter controversy over this truth of Nature would never have arisen. ... Plainly as the direct or instantaneous Creation of animals and plants appeared to be taught in Genesis, Augustine read this in the light of primary causation and the gradual development from the imperfect to the perfect of Aristotle. This most influential teacher thus handed down to his followers opinions which closely conform to the progressive views of those theologians of the present day who have accepted the Evolution theory.
In A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), Andrew Dickson White wrote about Augustine's attempts to preserve the ancient evolutionary approach to the creation as follows:

For ages a widely accepted doctrine had been that water, filth, and carrion had received power from the Creator to generate worms, insects, and a multitude of the smaller animals; and this doctrine had been especially welcomed by St. Augustine and many of the fathers, since it relieved the Almighty of making, Adam of naming, and Noah of living in the ark with these innumerable despised species.
In Augustine's De Genesi contra Manichæos, on Genesis he says: "To suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very childish. ... God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips." Augustine suggests in other work his theory of the later development of insects out of carrion, and the adoption of the old emanation or evolution theory, showing that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter." Concerning Augustine's De Trinitate (On the Trinity), White wrote that Augustine "develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings there was something like a growth—that God is the ultimate author, but works through secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of plants and animals."
Augustine implies that whatever science shows, the Bible must teach: