Into the Horrifying Reaches

A recent post by John San Nicolas on Patheos' Faithful Politics blog contains a summary of the--unfortunately mistaken--mainstream Christian view of humanity's original predicament regarding Adam being "alone."

Nicholas writes:

“God remarks that it is not good that Adam is all by himself. Animals of various sorts are brought to Adam to be named. But no animal was like Adam. So God puts Adam to sleep, and from his rib, creates Eve. It is when Adam wakes up and sees Eve that we get the very first poem of the Bible.”

Already Nicholas is "working" the ancient text (though, to be fair, this is all standard stuff.)  God does not bring to Adam animals "of various sorts."  God brings to Adam all the creatures that could be reasonably presented to him, in a process by which Adam names them, and they are presented with the intention of finding an "help meet" for Adam--the emphasis on an animal candidate being "like Adam" is Nicholas jumping the text.  The naked mole rat--to whom Adam assigns the Middle Eastern name for "naked mole rat"--is presented soberly as a possible "help" for Adam, not as his doppelganger.

Nicholas then presents Adam's ensuing statement about Eve ("the very first poem of the Bible") as her being "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."  Adam has taken his turn at jumping, leaping over Nicholas' insistence that Eve was suitable for Adam merely because she was like Adam.  Adam emphasizes identification rather than similarity, a quintessentially greater step that foreshadows all of the ills affecting humanity regarding our persistent inability to see our fellow humans as individuals, rather than as extensions of our own expectations.

And there is more to this looming conundrum.  The Eve that was "taken out of Man" is not described in terms of individual ensoulment.  To this day--and throughout all of humanity's existence--the notion of a part of oneself being incorporated into another (and the concomitant possibility of individual wills existing in internalized alienation rather than mere mood conflict or thought-process conflict in an identified "person") has never been resolved.  To venture that we are all part of a larger humanity, or to venture that our bodies or our minds can house separate wills rather than antagonistic tendencies, is not the stuff of mere poetry, at least as far as the Bible (especially in light of Jesus' teaching) is concerned.

However, Nicholas is presenting a set-up for the notion of humans as properly social animals, a notion that, unsurprisingly, Christianity would like to find in the very start of the Bible.  In proceeding through the standard narrative of how Genesis is thought to bear that out, Nicholas at least recognizes the inherent logical difficulty of the "eating of the tree" punishment for persons who could not know of the evil of eating of the tree before they ate of the tree:

“Eve and then Adam, taking the advice of a walking, talking snake, took the forbidden fruit. Maybe they wanted to become like God. Perhaps they felt rebellious. Or maybe they were innocently curious. But it happened. And their choice had cosmological consequences.”

When the notion of "innocently curious" is admitted to the analysis, then the Forbidden Fruit episode becomes more of a "Just So" story than a moral lesson.  Of course, if the "lesson" aspect of the Eden story is emphasized, it is certainly more logical to assign the "innocently curious" motivation than to assign a motivation of rebellion to persons who could not yet have known of the evil of rebellion--at which point the lesson falls apart.  On the other hand, a "Just So" story--with its function of the introduction of a state of affairs rather than a justification of a state of affairs--has at least a minimum of moral integrity.

But if there is not really a logical substratum of causation to the "Fall" story (and there IS NOT really a logical substratum to the "Fall" story) then the "Fall" events need not possess the pivotal significance they are conventionally assigned.  Sin is progressing throughout the Genesis story, and the cataclysm of the Fall is of importance in that is describes ("Just So") how humanity came to a sordid state in a dismal physical environment--the Fall is not, however, as it is usually described: When Sin Entered the World.

Nicholas even touches on this point a few sentences earlier:

“And let us remember that Adam was in paradise. He lived in a garden planted by God Himself. But he was alone. There was no animal like the Adam animal.”

There was, however, a Being (somewhat) like Adam close at hand.  Adam was made in the image of God.  God's remark that "It is not good for the man to be alone" can be--with every bit of equal logical salience--taken to mean that Adam was sinful in not being satisfied with God's proximity, as the "Fall" can be taken to mean that the First Couple were sinful in not being satisfied with every tree but one.

Conventional Christianity, which Nicholas seems to be representing quite gamely, has never been able to describe its actual justification in Genesis.  Nicholas describes the state of Adam and Eve under the "Fall" curses, and then writes:

“But it does not seem that God was prescribing these inequalities and sufferings to Adam and Eve. Rather, God was describing the consequences of life under sin.”

 If "sin" itself--with its signal importance as an affront to God--is to be addressed forthrightly, then it is inescapable that Genesis from its first descriptions of humanity is "describing the consequences of life under sin."  Humanity is never described in an other-than-sinful state.  Sinful beings we are, and the grave nature of sin--despite the denominations' insistence on that gravity--is something that can never be described other than as ever-present, even as the denominations want sin--and the plethora of offered remedies for sin--to be packageable as commodities.

This is, of course, only the beginning of our understanding of ourselves, and the wrenching paradox is that we can only further our understanding of ourselves by probing ever backward, into the horrifying reaches of the primordial darkness against which the Creation mediated by Jesus arises.  This is what the Gospels speak of, not the laying-out of lessons that can be stacked one upon another.  Jesus is always challenging us with the basics, and always defying us to claim to understand who and what we are.

This is in the starkest distinction to the best of the denominations' intentions, as reflected in Nicholas' concluding sentence:

"And now that we know who we are, who shall we become?"