Dear Editor: The concept of evolution sits well with St. Augustine’s interpretation of creation but he would have treated the proposition of ‘natural selection as an impersonal force reacting only to physical circumstance of random mutations, merely to perpetuate biological life in whatever form it happens to take’ as a heresy.

Based on his repeated expositions on ‘the one teacher, the Christ’ (Matt 23:10), and ‘my Father is working still as I am working’ (Jn 5.17) he would have supposed that what scientists have termed ‘selection’ is the Son mediating between an individual’s free will and the constancy of the Father which gave a fixed order to all of creation. If mankind evolved, it was by his own free will, according to the order emanating from the Father, as mediated by the Son.

We speak of God as truth and beauty and love so why aren’t Catholic scientists investigating the possibility that man evolved out of animal forms because of the will’s predilection for truth and beauty?

Only man is aware of harmonic order and has the unique physiology and cerebral organization to fully realize it. But we are not born with the ability to utilize harmonic order to communicate or move. It is a slowly learned ability which science is also at a failure to understand.

The process, however, is familiar enough. An infant is seemingly captivated by the beauty of certain sounds and motion which ‘just happen’ to adhere to harmonic order. When they are able to speak and walk it is because they have learned the truth of the fixed order.

Truth proceeds from beauty, just as the Son proceeds from the Father; and the joyous satisfaction they feel from the enacted movement or sound proceeds from the coincidence of beauty and truth, just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Since the forms of music and dance taught in conservatories are in essence a deeper study of the identical truth and beauty to which man evolved and every individual was formed, why aren’t programs being developed to bring these disciplines into Catholic schools?

If we want our children to be aware that Christ dwells within them, there is hardly a better way than pairing the theology of the Trinity and the one teacher, the Christ within, with the experience of the love they feel for the coincident truth and beauty of harmonic sound and movement.

RALPH KAROW

Bayside