the natural unfolding of the rational principles of creation

In the ancient or mediaeval worlds, the idea of the evolution of species would not necessarily have posed a very great intellectual challenge for the educated classes, at least ot on religious grounds. Aristotelian orthodoxy maintained the fixity of species, true, but one often finds a remarkably undogmatical approach to the questions of natural history in classical, patristic, and mediaeval sources, and (as I have noted) no dominantly great interest in a literalist reading of the creation narratives of scripture. It would not have been drastically difficult for philosophers or theologians to come to see such evolution as the natural unfolding of the rational principles of creation into forms primordially enfolded within the indwelling rational order of things.

The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart