Beguiled
Thanksgiving, we suggested, is a kind of thoughtfulness about God and the goodness of creation and thus a reminder to us about our place within that God-created order. But where then does evil arise? Unde malum? From whence evil? The Chapel readings from Genesis 3 this week speak directly to this question. It is the famous (or infamous) story of the Fall. Sadly, these reflections also follow upon the ugly spectacle of war in Israel that broke out this weekend, and in the extreme form of the rejection of the two-state solution by the militant organization ‘Hamas’ for whom the existence of the Jewish state is anathema, and even worse, the existence of all Jews. These are all part of the confusions and divisions within our global world. They have to do, in one way or another, with the idea of evil.
What kind of evil? “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine … Good Lord, deliver us.” The Litany was the first service to be translated (and modified) into English from Latin by Thomas Cranmer in 1544. It reminds us of another dimension of thanksgiving: our thanksgiving from the threats of the natural world, what later thinkers in the Enlightenment, like Voltaire and Leibniz, called “physical or material evil”. We have experienced some of these things this spring and summer. But added to that phrase is the prayer for deliverance “from battle and murder, and from sudden death.” Such things belong to the disorders and disarray of human hearts in the various forms of “moral evil”. And they are very destructive, cruel and deadly.
That we come to the question about evil after the pageant of creation and the creation of our humanity within that order is most significant. The concept of the Good is absolutely prior and thus counters from the outset the pathological dualism of seeing things in absolute contraries. The story, moreover, seeks to show how we come to self-consciousness through an awareness of ourselves as selves. It happens through our separation from the goodness of the created order and, especially, in relation to the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At issue is how we come to the knowledge of good and evil. Will it be through separation by way of disobedience or in some other way? We choose the former with all of its fatal consequences. The Law and Mary’s fiat – her “be it unto me according to thy Word” (Grace) – suggest the other ways that belongs to human redemption.
In knowing the good, God knows its denial, evil, but he knows this intellectually and spiritually. We, too, come to the knowledge of good and evil but only through the experience of suffering and death that results from our denial of the divine commandment, thus separating ourselves from nature and God. It means acting as if there is no God, no principle of accountability; acting as if everything exists for each of us individually. This pits us against one another, a world of “the war of everyone against everyone else” as Thomas Hobbes puts it, having observed the horrors of the seventeenth century English Civil War.
In Genesis, our humanity begins in the Garden of Eden, placed in creation as paradise. But that is not how we experience the world now. It has become a wilderness. How? Through the separation of ourselves from the given conditions of our being. This is instructive. In other early creation stories, humanity begins in the wilderness, in an unknowing of an intellectual and social order. Enkidu, for instance in the Epic of Gilgamesh is placed in the wilderness where he is “innocent,” read unaware, “of mankind” and “knew nothing of the cultivated land.” How he comes to the discovery of himself as a human being is an essential feature of that ancient, ancient story which western culture only rediscovered in the 19th century.
Here in Genesis the story of our separation begins with the serpent who is said to be “the most subtle of all creatures,” insinuating doubt in the minds of Adam and Eve about what God said. “Did God say?” This is the invitation to think about things in a way that is independent and away from what God actually did say. The question is not about seeking understanding but about undermining truth by suggesting a counter-explanation. It results in the half-truth of being like God, knowing both good and evil, but overlooks the point that our knowing good and evil is not like God’s knowing. Yet the point of the story is that God’s questions to us bring us to reason albeit in the form of separation and its consequences of suffering and death. We know but we suffer. Yet this is equally the beginning of the way back to the truth of being in God. O felix culpa, O blessed fall or fault. We fall upward, we might say, into reason albeit in the forms of division and confusion and limitation.
In Christian theology, paradise or the garden of Eden is a beginning but not our end. Heaven is something more, paradise plus, as it were. What makes it more is what is learned through suffering and sacrifice about our life in Christ. It does not negate the world but neither does it reduce us to the world. The journey to God will signal the redemption of the world; the world, that is to say, as known in God’s truth and mercy. This is always and necessarily far greater than the follies and wickedness of human pride and violence. It means being awakened to ourselves through the questions of God which seek for us to know. The serpent is the image of human reason in the denial of its own principle of knowing. The four questions of God awaken us to ourselves and thus to the beginning of a new journey: “Where are you?”, “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”, “Hast thou eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”, ”What hast thou done?” Eve responds: “The serpent beguiled me and I did eat.” But it is our own reason in contradiction with itself which betrays us. Eve’s statement externalizes our duplicity. In seeking to blame the serpent Eve really blames herself and all of us. We are beguiled in the misuse of our reason. Such are the temptations to power.
We find ourselves in the wilderness. It is the wilderness of our own devising. “I awoke to find myself in a dark wood,” selva selvaggio, Dante, the great poet-theologian of the High Middle Ages puts it in the beginning of the Divine Comedy. Yet it was there, he says, that he discovered “a great good.” Our awareness of sin and evil is predicated on prior presupposition of the good. That changes the nature of our journey and gives us hope in a dark world of fear and anxiety.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy