Biblista F. E. Gigot (1859−1920), Augustin z Hippo a evoluční vznik člověka

This paper is part of a larger scholar project focused on Catholic theologians and scholars between 1871 and 1910 who accepted the evolutionary origin of the human body in accordance with the so called Mivart theory, or rejected it. The author presents the life and writings of the French theologian and biblical scholar F. E. Gigot, who was active mainly in the USA. He then analysed the relevant parts of the first section of his special introduction to the Old Testament (1901), where he interprets the first and second chapter of the book of Genesis and demonstrates a more or less open attitude to the theory of the evolutionary origin of man. The name of this biblical scholar, internationally recognized in his day, is not recalled in contemporary literature in connection with the reception of the evolutionary origin of humankind in Catholic theology at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The discoveries help to correct the rooted conviction that the Catholic theologians of this period had an exclusively negative attitude towards the fact of evolution and the evolutionary origin of the human body. The study also includes an analysis of one passage of Augustine’s writing De Genesi ad litteram, where the author finds formulations which look like an offered hand across the ages to those who in 1871−1910, and also later, sought to theologically adopt the theory of the evolutionary origin – creation of man.