Declined from Why to How

Our claims to know the who, what, where, and when of our existence are presumptuous.  That some persons might be relatively well-grounded in such things detracts only relatively from the succeeding calculus that affects us all.  That is, our sense of the existential "why's" and of the purpose-directing "how's" of our lives is dependent on the "who's, what's, where's, and when's"--yet our "why's" and our "how's" are more fundamental than the rest of those things.  A person might be possessed of no religion, and might therefore possess no creedal formulation of ostensible underlying, guiding "truths," but that is not the same as to allow that any personality might consist of a simple collection of facts upon which is borne an animating philosophy.  We are beings of basal, internalized, dispositions--the latter, "fact-based" personality I described would not be recognizably human.

And so we are left with our exasperating "why's" and "how's."  The "why's" are grappled with first by the theologians of Christianity, desperate as they are to stipulate terms upon which might be based "salvation economies"--the "how's" of the Christian religions.  The favorite of these stipulations is "the Fall"--the cataclysmic fruition of humanity's inclination to sin.

Of course, the mere inclination to sin, and the necessary incubation of that inclination in the First Couple (who dallied for moments or millennia--it matters not which--before eating) was sin itself.  This consideration, of course, renders uncertain the careful calculations of the commentators.  A neat "Fall" invites a neat Redemption or Propitiation (or any other substantively blasphemous, over-worked formulation one chooses.)  But as we have seen, Adam and then Eve were falling all along--and there is an obscene presumption in reading the Genesis account of God's gracious, gentle provision for Adam, noting what happens, and then describing as God's intended gift the progressively-worked-out accommodation for the man in terms of sex.  Was the serially unsatisfied Adam really created with an optimal, divine plan that he heave his naked rearview skyward as he and his partner made sweaty godlings of each other?  We are capable of great things, but from our very start as a kind our base nature was enough to make us look to heaven and ask, "Why?"

We will be left, then, with a grim yet unsurprising conclusion.  We know least of all the "why" of our creation, and not even the word "knowledge" can address our confrontation with the "how" question, that is, how can we be saved?