Monogenism

MONOGENISM. - By m. is meant the unity of the human race, inasmuch as it originates from a first man, Adam.

I. THEOLOGY

Holy Scripture, taken in its literal and most obvious sense, everywhere affirms the unity of origin of the human race. Gen. 2:5-7: "There was no man to till the earth... and man became a living soul"; ibid. 2:18: "And the Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a helper like unto himself"; ibid. 2:22: "Yahweh God formed a woman and brought her to Adam"; ibid. 3:20: "Adam gave his wife the name of Eve, because she was the mother of all the living"; Wis. 10:10: "It was Wisdom who preserved the first man formed by God to be the father of the human race, the only one created; she drew him out of his sin and gave him power to govern all creatures." In Acts 17:26-27 St. Paul, speaking at the Areopagus, affirmed: "From one man God made all the human race to populate the surface of the whole earth." 1 Cor. 15:45: "The first man, Adam, was made a living soul." In the Bible, therefore, Adam is taken as an individual name and not a collective one.

But above all in Rom. 5:12-19 St. Paul sets out this doctrine at length in relation to original sin and to the saving work of Jesus Christ: "As by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, so also death spread to all men, because all have sinned... And therefore, as by the sin of one condemnation came upon all men, so by the righteousness of one justification unto life comes to all men."

Now, there can be no error in what is taught by Holy Scripture, of which God is the author. Where, therefore, Holy Scripture is interpreted according to the rules of Catholic exegesis, every conclusion in favor of polygenism and against monogenism remains without foundation and must accordingly be excluded.

The same must be said of the teaching of the Church, and particularly of the Council of Trent, on the first man, on his state of original justice, his privileges (particularly that of immortality) and on original sin transmitted to all men, insofar as they descend from Adam (Denz-U, 101, 133, 174, 176, 789, 791). The original unity of the human race is inseparable from the revealed doctrine of original sin. In the preparatory sessions of the Vatican Council (1st schema, 15; Collectio Lacensis, VII, col. 516) the following canon had in fact been formulated with a view to a definition: "Si quis universum genus humanum ab uno protoparente Adam ortum esse negaverit, anathema sit." Many theologians consider this proposition as "certain and proximate to faith." A decree of the Biblical Commission of June 30, 1909 (Denz-U, 2121-23) places the unity of the human race among the points of doctrine that touch "the foundations of the Christian religion." Pius XII, in the encyclical Humani generis (Aug. 12, 1950: AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 561-78) gives explicit confirmation of this, declaring the polygenist opinion inadmissible for a Catholic, since it cannot be reconciled with the sources of Revelation.

For the polygenist theory and its refutation, v. POLIGENISMO.

Reginaldo Garrigou-Lagrange

II. THE MONOGENISM ACCORDING TO SCIENCE

Scholars who deal with the origin of living beings are divided into monogenists and polygenists, according to whether they hold that all organisms derive from a single original stock, or that life appeared from the very beginning in a certain number of distinct forms, from which all other organisms, extinct or still living, would then have derived.

As regards the origin of organisms in general, opinions in the scientific field are very divided. In fact there are good arguments in favor of both monogenism (the uniformity of the fundamental biochemical and structural characters of all cells, whether animal or vegetable) and polygenism (the lack of transitional forms between the major types of organization, that is, between the systematic types). For the most part, paleontologists currently limit their studies to reconstructing the individual phyla or lines of descent for the various groups of organisms (polyphyletic evolution), without investigating whether these phyla, going back in time, converge or not upon a single common stock; and in the present state of science this is impossible to establish.

As regards in particular the origin of man, opinions are likewise divided. It may be said that by now the majority of scholars agree in considering demonstrated the unitary origin of all present human races (homo sapiens), but the question is not equally clear with regard to extinct races, whose anatomical characters sometimes differ appreciably from those of living races, so much so that they can be referred to distinct systematic species or even genera (sinanthropus, pithecanthropus, africanthropus, javanthropus, palaeanthropus, etc.). In fact, already in the Lower Pleistocene, that is, at the dawn of humanity, human types that were quite differentiated are found existing and spread over a large part of the earth's surface, which led some paleoanthropologists to consider possible the independent origin of individual human stocks. Indeed the hologenists maintained that humanity would have appeared simultaneously with many individuals in various zones of the earth's surface, in conformity with what according to this theory would have occurred for the origin of all living beings.

Now, however, even in the field of paleoanthropology there is a leaning toward monogenism. In fact the contemporaneity of the human races of the early Pleistocene is to be regarded as more apparent than real, if one takes into account that this period comprises several hundred thousand years and that it is very difficult to synchronize deposits situated in regions very far from one another and subject to quite different climatic phenomena. For example, it is very difficult to demonstrate the perfect contemporaneity of the man of Mauer in Europe, of the sinanthropus in China and of the pithecanthropus in Indonesia. Moreover, what matters more, human skeletal remains have recently been discovered which present characters intermediate between those of the Neanderthalers (that is, of one of the most important groups of men with pithecoid characters) and those of human races of the present type (homo sapiens). Mentioned as examples are the man of Steinheim and the curious group of skeletons from Palestine (Tabun, Sukhul, etc.), whose mixed characters demonstrate direct or indirect genealogical relationships between the two stocks. Similar observations can be made concerning the relationships between the archaic sinanthropus-pithecanthropus group and the Neanderthalers.

It follows from all this that while there is a lack of truly probative arguments in favor of human polygenism, the most recent discoveries turn decisively to the advantage of monogenism, and consequently the latter finds ever greater favor also in the scientific community.

Pietro Leonardi