Dimensions of Wickedness Part Three

There are a few things that must be taken "as read" if we are to continue.  I know it would be nice to always have every aspect of every matter settled definitively, but as to this condition I will assert that this blog differs not substantially from any other attempt at understanding.  Therefore, with my apologies, I will make the following assertions.

First, in the scriptural tradition and in the thought scheme espoused by Jesus, to "die" is to pass from one state to another, with the expectation that a sense of loss will apply to the removal from the first state, while yet the aspects of the second state are inchoate to the person undergoing the experience.

Second, the embracing of the new state (or of the prospect of the new state) is to be effected by the pursuit of hope, trust, and joy rather than despair, suspicion, and sadness.  That "hope, trust, and joy" might seem unwarranted premises to the exacting philosopher, I will admit, but I will say as well that my short listing here of those "virtues" comprises the mindset I have needed to employ to square myself to anything--even to my most ardent materialist musings.

Third, we are presented in the scriptures with statements that are not comprehensive or explicitly defined--all the more so when the case is one of a described participant.  When Eve says of the birth of Cain, "I have gotten a man from the Lord," we will never know precisely what she meant--nor what she understood about the process. Of course, in nearly the same reader's-moment we come to understand what tragedy that birth portends for her.

On the other hand, we come to understand that Abel's death, after his manner of life, places him in paradise--while yet his murderer Cain is afforded the opportunity for repentance.  While yet on Earth, Cain is punished most horribly--or is he?  Cain marrying, building a city, becoming a father--all the while protected from retribution by the hand of God?  If indeed Cain died unrepentant and unreformed, might it not be said that the wrathful Old Testament God punished him too little rather than too much?

Indeed, a pattern seems to present itself.  Just what kind of "punishments" are these handed out by God?  Cain, sentenced to be a vagabond upon the earth, becomes nothing of the sort.  Eve, of the greater pains in childbirth, exclaims how God has aided her through it.  Adam, sentenced to hard and bitterly unfruitful labor, finds sustenance for centuries, and if the ancient patriarchy pattern held for him, he spent more of his life sweating over his bed than over his crops.  And weren't they supposed to die, who ate of the tree?

Jesus provides an explanation for this, and it is inherent in Jesus' casual use of the concept "death."  Within this framework, as I described it above, both the First Couple and their murderous first son died.  They were each thrust from the moral scenario they knew into an apparently--and therefore emotionally--more challenging one.  This is the punishment, but the lively and individualized nature of it does not sit well with Christianity, which is why the denominations have a morally pornographic view of the pre-Flood generations, when Jesus sees just . . . people.

The pre-Flood people, the widow with few coins of Jesus' telling, the Herod of John's murder--all of these exist within a moral landscape, and all of them might be confronted by the prospect or the reality of a still more forbidding landscape.  All of them might be expected to resist demoralization as they experience death after death--loss after loss of the things to which they have attached themselves.

This at last is the landscape of the kingdom of God.  Reality (whatever that might ultimately be) is (for want of a better expression) suspended upon dimensions that will ever escape us.  Within this dimension-less and proportion-free realm, we can exert hope, trust, and joy in examining unsparingly whatever is before us--little we might know of it, this is the kingdom of God, where we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Alternatively, there are the horror-shadows toward which we stumble when we exude despair, suspicion, and sadness.  We may think of ourselves as being bravely critical, but we never knew motivation at all except in lighter moments, and if we do not determine that hope will abide while despair diminishes, then we will ever drag into those shadows with us the corpses of our myriad necessary deaths.

In the more mundane stretches between those two alternatives, we live.  Mixtures of hope and despair,  trust and suspicion, joy and sadness, our lives--our-self created worlds--are collages of sensation and impression embedded in useful fantasies, just as our hopelessly overburdened nervous systems crudely fill in the edges of our visual fields, and our brains detect patterns that aren't there.

Eden wasn't perfect.  Outside were an infinitude of other Edens, and we wander through them still.  The kingdom of God, however, is always at hand.

Dimensions of Wickedness Part Two

In the last post I described the standard Christian notion of fallen Adam as a glorious, slightly-tarnished creature, the near-pinnacle of God's artistry.  I also described the pre-Flood generations as being, in Christian conceits, corrupted progressively so as to deserve--infants and all--to be wiped from the face of the earth.  Of course, if the "boundlessness" I described as intrinsic to theological musings were applied broadly, one would conclude that all generations ever deserved such wiping-out.  As we will see, the portrayals of moral scenarios in Jesus' teachings are meant to have emotive import regardless of dimension or proportionality.  In the gospels, the widow with her pittance to donate confronts a moral landscape as sweeping as that which engulfs the contemporary Herod with his wealth, his might, and his marital dramas.

So also must Adam be viewed as a mere mortal among others.  Innumerable are the Christian fantasies of burgeoning evils spawned over the centuries since "sin entered the world" at the Fall--as though Satan, Eve, and Adam are not identifiable from the very first as ignoble creatures--but such fever-dreams rely on the unwarranted assumption that Adam possessed after the fruit-eating an essentially undisturbed set of faculties, mental and otherwise.  Yet we are confronted by the tragi-comedy of the crown of creation (being as well the first patriarch) reduced to a cowering imbecile, imagining that he could hide his physique from his maker.

Indeed, Adam presents in full flower the consistent evil twins of humanity's un-progressing progress--preoccupation with the flesh and a lack of occupation with proper care for the young who spring from that flesh.  (In these dual tendencies one might find the most potent arguments that this is truly a man's world--if such arguments are worth making.)  Adam fell to the temptations of the fruit in Eve's presumably exquisite hands, joining in transgression with that perennially-youthful and perennially-enjoyable assemblage of flesh and bone that entranced him so.  Only then do we begin to read of the advent of Adam's offspring--innocents born to become eternally-damned souls (or, that is, most of them, though the tragedy would be no more or less if all but one were damned or all but one were saved. Such is the nature of anything boundless.)

In the nearer view to the storied Fall, Adam's parenting--of course--disturbs from the outset the theologians' musings about progressively decaying generations.  Adam sires himself a murderer.  Cain betrays the brother toward whom he should show more-or-less fatherly care, and then Cain goes off to thrust himself upon some kinswoman.  Much is made in folk theology of the evil offspring of Cain (such as the two-wived Lamech who kills a male described unsurprisingly as a youth), but we cannot know but that the line of Cain's youngest brother Seth merely benefitted from Seth's exposure to his elder's examples.  And at last the condemnation of humanity pre-Flood is decidedly general--though not before we must suffer through the theologically-indecipherable story of lustful "sons of God" appropriating desirable "daughters of men" and producing lusty "men of renown."  If only out of nausea, we might indeed welcome the account of the Deluge.

And so the scriptures would seem to present the respite of admirable Noah, "perfect in his generations."  Then we read of Noah getting naked drunk and cursing innumerable generations of Ham's son because Ham told his two brothers that their father had gotten naked drunk.  Why it was wrong for Ham to go to his two brothers, and why the matter could not be kept among the three of them, the account does not say--one might as well try to figure out why Canaan was cursed, not his father Ham.  Yet here we are again, with the snares of the flesh entrapping generations from the very start, and effectively cursing younger generations--it has ever been so.

One might with nausea trace these themes through the biblical eons--Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the sons of Jacob called Israel--the grim story never ends.  Nothing is more important to the preachers (nor was more important to the authorities of Jesus' day) than the notion of a righteous past to which the present might be compared unfavorably--and nothing is less true.  The very origin story of Judea in Jesus' day was remembrance of the Exodus and Conquest--when a mythical righteous generation could exult in dispossessing the unrighteous and inheriting what once belonged to others--a veritable rhapsody of houses and fields and vines and fig trees and rent, bloodied crotches of orphaned twelve-year old virgins.  Such things might be too much to recount, were they not in their glossing-over the means by which so much happens still under color of religion.

Of course, Christianity has its own particular brand of self-delusional ancestor-worship.  It is not surprising that the Gospels cannot escape entirely unnecessary claims that Jesus was a descendant of David (nor escape the critics' jibe that Jesus was not even a son of Joseph.  Throw in female or male-female lines and virtually every Jew was a "son of David.")  I say "unnecessary" because Jesus himself had little patience for prating about the Messiah as the Son of David (and, given the accounts of David as an adulterer, a murderer, and a lousy father, we might join H. G. Wells in wondering who indeed would want to claim David as an ancestor.)

In the teachings of Jesus, however, are to be found elements of analysis that can throw an important light on just how humanity can fall into condemnation.  The untaught and un-catechized infant is a resident of the kingdom of God.  The pre-Flood generation, so often taken as embodiments of entire evil, are humanized like us, and are like us in "being evil."  The long-dead of Nineveh and of Sodom and Gomorrah have testimonies yet to give.

We must revisit Adam and Eve on the wrong side of the flaming sword.

Dimensions of Wickedness Part One

There is a certain striking element that seems particular to theological argument, with its explorations into omnipotence and therefore into the idiosyncratic implications of the effulgences of omnipotence.  This is the element of boundlessness.  I have referred to this before, with my musings about how Jesus' disciples--imbued on their missions with the power to raise the dead--might have resurrected every person beginning with Adam so all could hear Jesus in person.  This type of musing is not original with me.  Luther, as I recall, asserted that Mary and all the saints--supplied with their boundless, fungible merit and attuned to the pleadings of mercy--would redeem immediately all of the debts of the purgatory-held heaven-bound souls, rendering purgatory moot.

When the unfettered quality of God and of all his doings is entertained, then questions of dimension and of proportionality are scattered away from any of our grasping.  It might seem cruel, for instance, for God to allow the incubation of the sins of the Canaanites for four hundred years (foreclosing even, it would seem, any thought of missionary forays from Jacob's people during their palmier days in Egypt), but is it not equally perplexing that God's angel would grant the hours or even just the minutes for repentance to the man who was upbraided with, "You fool!  This very night your life will be required of you"?

And if dimension and proportionality are in play at God's discretion, then what sense are we to make of Jesus' assertion that, had God not "shortened" the coming time of troubles, then no one would survive?  "Shortened" it from what?  Are we as the gospel audience to imagine we have gained admittance to God's chronological counting-house?  If God wanted a remnant to survive, could he not simply have arranged for people to die less readily?  Surely it is the emotive impetus imparted by talk of dimension and proportionality that matters, not the quantification at play in the verbiage.

This question of emotive impetus must be revisited continually.  If we look, for example, at the four hundred years of fermenting wickedness among the Canaanites, it is undeniable that each ensuing generation was brought up by a progressively more wicked cohort of elders.  What was dissolving might have been the social structure itself, while yet the villainy-versus-victimhood calculus pertaining to individuals remained relatively stable.  One might be reminded of the modern complaint that "kids" are so depraved that they have no concept of right and wrong--as though that very conceptual lack were not a mitigating factor.

This understanding of dissolving social structure must be applied to the generations of Noah's time--those generations described in Genesis as being quintessentially preoccupied with evil, while yet they are described by Jesus as being indistinguishable from normal folk in the days and hours before the flood.  The standard Christian conceptualization discards the emotive (and more illuminating) aspects of the story in favor of fretful moralizing.

To the denominations, Adam after the Fall is still a glorious creature, the slightly tarnished crown of creation, and the expanding Family of Man accumulates progressively more defects.  (This conceptualization has the added allure to the literalists of softening objections to the inaugural incests, though unsurprisingly there do not seem to be conjectures abroad about the possible widowerhood of Adam through his many chromosomally-admirable and presumably fertile centuries.)  Humanity in this paradigm becomes more and more wicked (though the precocious Cain rather spoils the neat slope), and from this paradigm springs any manner of condemnatory racial and ethnic conceptualizations.

Next we will see where this goes, and where it ought to go.

Worlds of Lies and Accusations

One thing that needs to be gotten by, in the study of Jesus' ministry and of the scriptures to which he draws our attention, is the role of Satan.  I say, "gotten by," because that physically-metaphorical description is appropriate about a striking number of references to Satan.  Satan is introduced in a story and he features in its conceptual set-up, and then he slinks away or disappears altogether.

Satan is given (as it is related) no chance to respond at the Fall, and apparently slithers away legless.  Of course, Satan's literal snake descendants don't actually feed on dust, and the quintessentially mobile Satan of Job scarcely draws up the image of a literal snake.  One is tempted to conclude that the Creation Stories are meant to be taken as stories.

In regard to Job itself, it cannot be missed that what starts out as a disputation between God and Satan turns out eventually to be a confrontation between God and Job's three friends, and then still further to be an amazing interaction between God and Job.

Satan makes a cameo appearance at the start of the census story of First Chronicles, and then disappears.

Satan appears, of course, in beginnings of the gospel stories, and then--bested by a Jesus who cites repeatedly scriptural references highlighting the irrelevance of Satan--withdraws his satanic presence until some unspecified opportune moment.  That this "opportune moment" appears to be the seducing of the traitor Judas Iscariot--when Satan had an existential interest in no one ever betraying Jesus--is beyond parody.

Indeed, the most menacing appearance of Satan in the Gospels is Jesus' "Get thee behind me, Satan" retort to Peter, who is trying to argue Jesus out of the Crucifixion.  Peter comes across as a better Satan than Satan himself, who is little more than a hapless literary device.  Even Jesus' exclamation of Satan's fall "like lightning" from heaven--divorced, like many of Jesus' conceptualizations, from time-and-space particulars--deigns not to specify if Satan's displacement, humiliation, or damnation is thereby described.

It remains to the non-Gospel New Testament, and especially the Book of Revelation, to make of Satan the arch-nemesis of Jesus and the "Church."  The most strident recitation of the role of Satan, as described by the popular denominations, is as the Accuser of humanity who will be frustrated in securing judgments against believers (even some hair-raisingly devilish believers) who have been "washed in the blood of the Lamb" or some such.

And it is true that Satan as "the Accuser" has had a role in the proto-Jewish heritage of the historical Jesus from time immemorial.  What has become prevalent among the followers of Jesus since his death, however, has been a sundering of the ancient attributes of Satan from the tapestry of that heritage.  As for the modern fixation on Satan the Accuser?  It is generally overblown.  One might be reminded of Einstein's storied response when told of a book titled something like One Hundred German Scientists Refute Einstein.  As it is told, Einstein responded that one such scientist would be sufficient.  One accuser of humanity is sufficient, and it is he who asked, "Where is Abel thy brother?"

God does not need to be told of what humanity might be accused.  Moreover, if any of humanity have been absolved of certain misdeeds, then Satan--who seems to have insight to the human heart--ought to know this, making such accusations effectual lies.  What we have in Satan, according to the Gospels, is the Father of Lies, and the Father of Accusations, and the Father of Temptations, and the Father of Murders.  I refer to our understanding of this horrid list as overblown because we mistakenly credit Satan as the architect of such things, when in function he is the mere catalyst--the evils are in ourselves, and always have been.

Satan tempted sin-tainted Eve, who was linked with sin-tainted Adam, as I have written before.  Eve was no different than we are.  At Satan's instigation, Eve entertained lies, and lies are effectual accusations that reality is not what its attributes and its inhabitants purport it to be, and accusations are temptations to assuming the role of enforcer of creaturely judgments, and the enforcing--even the voicing--of creaturely judgments is a violation, as Jesus tells us, of "Thou shall not murder."

Satan introduced Eve--and all of us--to the tangled messes we make of our worlds.  Lies are accusations are temptations are violent assaults.  We know this to be true.  Humanity has always known this to be true.  The way to go where we should be--the way to get to the kingdom of God--is not to idealize some state, but to see reality as it is, to have ears and hear, eyes and see.  As I have written before, Satan and Eve made a world together, a wretched realm in which God is a liar and in which a person can "see" that the fruit of a tree can give wisdom.  Such is the sort of world in which we all live, even as Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is at hand.

Time as an Uncertain Element

There is an interesting corollary to the notion that God lied when he said that Adam and Eve would die upon eating of the forbidden tree.  Later in Genesis, God says to the petulantly (to put it mildly) downcast Cain, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?"  Of course, either of those statements from God can be explained into any desired shape by the commentators, but the peddling of balderdash is not what concerns us here.  Unquestionably, Adam and Eve did not die that day, and--in the plainest rendering of Jesus' teachings--neither Cain nor any of us can "do what is right" so as to be accepted.

Saying, as many Protestants will, that what we must "do" is the non-"work" of accepting unmerited grace is just Balderdash 101, and there is no hint other than that Cain is being told to do right or be damned--or suffer whatever unbearable fate Cain might imagine.  And the Catholic approach is a melding of the unmerited grace of natural revelation with the asymmetric and grace-mediated believer-participation in the sacraments.  In the Christianity of the denominations, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?" would--if attributed to any other than the divine speaking--might just as well come from the most execrable heretic.

Adam and Eve deserved to die--and did not.  To be fair, faced with an eternity in Eden and with the fruit just hanging there, all of us must be thought bound to transgress.  Similarly, all of us will fail--like Cain--to do what is right.  That God in either type of instance might be said to have "lied" is a jibe ever-available to the critic, though it cannot be forgotten that mechanisms of divine mercy are in play here--even as the Scriptures describe God as sometimes regretting his actions.

As I began with above, the corollary (in the scope of Jesus' teachings) to the First Couple surviving The Fall is Cain (and all of us) being provided the mercy required to make acceptable things out of our lamentable efforts.  In the first instance, the continued existence of humanity brought with it innumerable (and Fall-exacerbated) sufferings of Jesus' Creation endured by Jesus.  In the second instance, the suspension of judgment (accompanied by perpetual mercy-opportunities such as that seized by the murderer Cain) is in contrast to the agony of waiting endured by Jesus as his crucifixion loomed.

Adam and Eve could know moments of joy and comfort as Jesus bore a ceaseless universe of suffering for his Creation.  Cain and all of us can know salvation and reassurance in any moment, even as Jesus waited millennia--and, for the final fruition, waits still--to do his unfathomable work of salvation.  This is the divine Jesus who famously told his followers that he did not know the time of the end.  As I have written before, the multiple temple-cleansings that so exercise the harmonizers might indeed have happened just so--with Jesus never knowing which year's festivities would feature his torture and death.

The question of time as an uncertain element must be a major part of examination of the Gospel narratives.

Who is Dead and Who Lives

Christianity cannot sort out the content and the progression of how humans came to be.  Christianity's difficulty lies in an overweening desire to possess an "historical" revelation.  In such a vein, the "in the beginning" theme of "Genesis" is overworked, as though the beginning of anything in a God-tended universe could be shorn of mystery.  When humanity came to reside upon the earth, the world itself had been plucked out of a primordium of unrepresented duration--the "beginning" is the province of God, not of humans.

And even the "came to reside upon the earth" part is less definite than it seems.  There are, of course, two different and conflicting accounts in Genesis of the creation of human beings.  The literalist must contend that the second--the "Adam-and-Eve"--account is a "focusing-in" (or some such) on the particulars of a single, apparently clumsy story--the clumsiness shown not merely in the forced presaging (in the first account) of the "mastery" (creature-naming and assessing) and "male and female" developments of Adam's story, but more straightforwardly in inconsistencies of place and progression.

What is described in the first, more general, account is a humanity of latent potential--a humanity tending to assert mastery, to exhibit carnal desires, to seek to reproduce, to seek the satiation of hunger.  All of this describes humans quite fairly, and Jesus provides us later with an additional description.  Jesus says that the God of Abraham (and, in Jesus' application, all persons) is the God of the living, not the dead.  A God who knew Abraham, and will know Abraham, through all time (as we might conceive of time) is a God to whom Abraham is ever-living (as might be said of us all.)  The general Genesis account of humanity's creation need have little to do with our earth-bound notions of "life."

Indeed, Jesus toys (as it seems) with nothing more persistently than the ideas of life and death.  On learning of the demise of Lazarus, the disciples resolve to accompany Jesus to the home of Lazarus' kin, though it might mean the disciples' death.  An of course there is the recounting of Jesus' great sorrow--after he has wrung his disciples about over whether Lazarus is really dead or not.

The God who gives life and death also decides who is dead, and who lives.