Robert Farrar Capon on the historical Adam

I came across this passage in Fr. Capon’s An Offering of Uncles (my copy is from the collection The Romance of the Word) and thought it was worth pondering:

In the interest of making a hasty accomodation between a stale biblical chronology and a half-baked theory of universal evolution, all kinds of things were said by all kinds of people. On the one hand, biblical obscurantists made a frantic attempt to salvage the chronology by sweeping scientific knowledge under the rug. On the other, modernist theologians retreated so hurriedly before the specter of evolutionary supersession that they abandoned wholesale the theology and horse sense of the Scriptures. The first have, mercifully, met the fate they deserved; but the second are still with us. They have such a fear of sounding like Genesis that they end up sounding like gibberish. They are so afraid of making Adam and Eve particular human beings that they forget that, if history is real, some particular people will have to turn out to have been Adam and Eve. In the day of judgment we may find out that they called each other Oscar and Enid and that they lived on a Norwegian fjord; but those will be only details. They themselves will have existed. And the essential historical fact about them will be not simply that our biological inheritance came from them but that all the threads of the web began with them. It is precisely the rest of history that you lose if you unload Adam and Eve.

[…]

Under the influence of what they conceived to be the demands of evolution, they took to expounding both the creation story and the narrative of the Fall as myths. And by myth they meant something quite specific: a fundamentally nonhistorical truth, presented under the guise of fictitious history. (There is, admittedly, a historical way of using myth–it can also mean an imaginative, but not unlikely, reconstruction of an event that really happened but went unrecorded at the time–but that is not what they had in mind.) The story in Genesis became, in their hands, only a diagram of the spiritual state of Everyman; they lived in mortal terror of ever allowing Adam to be anyone’s grandfather.

And yet, that is the critical point. Adam has got to be somebody’s grandfather–and Eve, somebody’s grandmother–or history is nonsense. The human race is precisely a web: times without number, good science has done nothing but confirm that. If I got my flat-footed walk or my love of caviare from my own grandfather, the case is closed. History is by that fact real; and all real things have beginnings. My grandfather himself had a grandfather. And if you rummage around long enough, somewhere in the web you are going to run into a fellow who had no human grandfather at all and who, therefore, is the real granddaddy of history. That gentleman is Adam. (pp. 85-87)