Where are you?
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks Job out of the whirlwind. Where are we is equally an important question in the opening chapters of Genesis. Where do we fit in the order of things? In Genesis One we are there, I have suggested, first in our thinking after God in his creative acts and, then, explicitly in our being made in the image of God. Nothing speaks more completely to the truth of human dignity. The point is that we are connected to everything in the created order and have a special relation to God as made in the image of the one who calls everything into being. Made in the image of God means that we are emphatically not God. To be made in the image of God bestows a certain dignity that should shape our relationships with everything else in the created order, including one another.
Genesis Two provides another account. Rather than locating our humanity within the grand pageant of creation as an orderly affair, the focus turns, in a more intimate and unabashedly anthropomorphic way, to our humanity itself. But it must come as a bit of a surprise since it seems to offer a complete contrast. We go, it seems, from dignity to dust. “Remember, O man, that thou art dust.” It marks an important spiritual act of remembrance. But from dignity to dust!? How are we to think this?
These two chapters of Genesis have existed side by side for more than two millennia. Rather than seeing them in contrast or even in contradiction with one another, we can see them as complementary. To be reminded that man is formed from the dust of the ground – the word adam comes from adamah meaning the ground – not only humbles us but grounds us, connecting us with everything that belongs to the material and physical world. We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Such is the dignified dust of our common humanity. This serves as a check perhaps upon our hubris and arrogance and the misuse of our God-given domination of the world which can really only properly mean our acting in the image of the Dominus, the Lord, who calls creation into being and sustains and cares for it. We are in his image as the dust into which God breathes his spirit.
The passage also signals our vocation – to till the ground; in short to care for the world in which we are placed. Wonderfully and profoundly, this chapter tells us that God “planted a garden in Eden” and there he put the man (adam – meaning our humanity) “to till it and to keep it.” Creation here is imaged as a garden, even a garden of delight; in short, paradise.
Paradise is actually an ancient Persian word from Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrian scriptures. It occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures only three times. But the mid-third to second century (BCE) Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, known as the Septuagint, uses the word paradise over thirty times, including here in Genesis. Thus it has entered into the imaginary of the mediterranean world and into the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds that have shaped our modern world. Jerome, in the fourth century CE, followed the Septuagint in using the phrase paradisum voluptatis, a paradise of delights. Though the English translations of the Scriptures in the sixteenth and seventeenth century looked back to the original Hebrew, the term and concept of paradise had become fixed in the imaginary of the European world; think for example of Milton’s great classic, Paradise Lost.
The image of Paradise has influenced a great number of literary works. It is worth noting here that the world is seen as a garden, a paradisal park, in which our humanity is placed and charged to till and to keep. We are to take care of the creation of which we are a part. We may wonder about how well we have done on that score. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” (Joni Mitchell) doesn’t even begin to capture the sense in which we have made a mess of paradise. So what went wrong?
Genesis Three answers that question by way of questions. Where are you? God asks Adam and Eve. It is the story of the Fall. “And all was for an apple, an apple that he took, as clerekes finden written in their book,” as a medieval carol puts it. The story is about our awakening to self-consciousness through separation and loss occasioned by discobience. “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” as Milton puts it. Genesis says nothing about an apple; only ‘fruit’. But the Latin tradition would find it hard to ignore both the Greek story retold by Ovid about ‘the apple of discord’ and the etymological congruence in Latin of malum, meaning apple, and malum, meaning evil. The story is profound and challenging. Evil arises in us through our denial of what we have been given to know. Creation as a whole and in its parts is good, indeed, very good. Thus the command not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is in principle good as well. Sin and evil here belong to our thinking. But what kind of thinking? Towards truth or away from it? The serpent asks questions. To ask questions is an aspect or feature of our rationality but what kind of questions? Those that seek to know more full or those that insinuate doubt and deny truth? “Did God say?” the serpent asks. We know full well what God said; we so easily beguile ourselves.
But it is God’s questions that call us to account and mark, paradoxically, what we might call the fall upward, a fall into reason but with the accompanying reality of experiencing pain and suffering and death. It means learning through suffering and sacrifice, through loss and death. And so begins the long, long journey of the soul back to God from whom we have turned away. Metanoia literally as repentance. It is about learning the conditions and the truth of creation, our life-long vocation.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy