Being Evil in Inclination

Enoch walked with God, and then God took him.  Enoch was not perfect, yet obviously, in the final analysis, God accounted him worthy of his favor.  Noah was a descendant of Enoch, though Noah was born after the lifetime of his estimable ancestor.  Noah's father Lamech, on the other hand, had lived for decades while Enoch remained yet on the earth, and it is this Lamech who prophesied that Noah would bring humanity comfort from the soil.  (Or some such construction of the prophecy--such is the character of our contentions that we "read" the ancient languages--but the "wine" episode, with its warm beginnings and its sour end, must be in some form foreshadowed.)

Though the pre-Flood generations are labeled with the idea that "every inclination of the thoughts of their heart were only evil all the time," this seems at first blush to account neither for Noah's character nor the admitted fact that some semblance of pre-deluge social order was maintained.  Jesus wanted those around him to find reference to the generations of Noah's day in their observations of their own time--hardly a helpful comparison, if the wicked pre-Flood generations are to be accounted wicked beyond compare.

Indeed, a second look at the narrative about Noah's origins can bring an intriguing imagery.  The description of Noah as "perfect in his generations"--or some such, there's that niggling "as we read the ancient languages" caveat--has lead some observers to conjecture that Noah's constitution was qualitatively different from his peers.  This has lead even to some cute contentions that Noah was a peerless genetic specimen--if not to some further musings along the lines of "ancient astronauts" and the like.

I contend that a more grounded sort of contention is in order for Noah.  Noah was the first of his line not to have been blessed potentially by the company, or at the least by the living example, of the renowned Enoch.  We might wonder if this exposure to a waning line, expressed in the conceptuality of Noah being of superior proclivity to his peers, is what is in play in the narrative, rather than some superhuman-though-not-quite-superhuman undefined internal quality of Noah's.  This Noah is, after all, in the same all-too-human mold of those depraved generations, and the narrative provides us no notion that his progeny-bearing wife and three daughters-in-law were other than depraved--making any "fresh start for humanity" idea rather vapid.

Indeed, all we might credit to Noah is a willingness to obey a superior command--perhaps just a reflection of a fortuitous upbringing in a relatively orderly family.  Place Noah in a scene in which he holds command himself, and you get a man who cannot govern himself, let alone others.  Before the rain starts, God says to Noah, "thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation" (scarcely a glowing appraisal), though the notion that there was an abiding esteem in God's "seen righteous," externally-conceptualized estimation of Noah is in question.  And Noah turns out to be quite a sordid man.  One is reminded, unavoidably, of the murderous and adulterous David being described as "after God's own heart."

To delve into the possible mindsets of humans, mindsets that merely approximate the behaviors of humans, is to challenge any first-blush impressions we might have of a generation described as having inclinations of the heart toward evil all the time.  If this inclination toward evil were expressed without inhibition all the time, it is hard to see how any generation might raise another.  We are left with the imagery--scarcely surprising if we reflect on what we see in us an around us--that there is very little of morality that cannot be understood as goodness in the service of evil.  In times of social upheaval or of deep-seated communal grievances, for example, it is all too common for parents of either sex to throw their nurturing and supportive inclinations into rearing children treasured first and foremost as warriors against some perceived enemy.

There must be examples aplenty of ostensible goodness working out from origins of wicked motivation.  I am reminded of the now-somewhat-quaint idea of "compassionate conservatism" in American politics.  I refer particularly to an interview I recall reading from some such conservative in the 1990's.  The gentleman maintained that it was compassionate to both Americans and to would-be, possibly imperiled immigrants to enforce border laws strictly; compassionate to innocent civilians worldwide for America to have a strong defense; compassionate to hardworking Americans to have a colorblind economic policy; compassionate to the unborn to have a prohibition on abortion.

I could not help but notice that the Americans and the civilians and the workers and the unborn ostensibly benefitted thereby need have been nothing more than numeric abstractions, while yet the "compassionate conservative" would have the opportunity--either directly or indirectly--to shove a finger in the face of a desperate immigrant; of a bombed-out civilian; of a disadvantaged minority person; of a pregnant woman in straitened circumstances, and to say, "No!"

Indeed, there is no type of person who might not be cherished in conceptuality as being the deserving recipient of moral largesse--as long as that person is distanced and unbothersome.  The Middle Ages in Europe had the oppressed pilgrims and Christian inhabitants of the Levant to worry about--persons, largely unpossessed of power and influence, who would have been given short shrift as ordinary inhabitants of Europe.  Our own era has the romanticized unborn to worry about--"babies" whose anticipated arrival (if they survive the inexcusable infant and maternal mortality of our pre-modern health system) is screamed for most loudly by political parties who would apportion the least to support struggling families--political parties as well that reign most typically where the afore-mentioned mortalities are most rampant.

What is most important to this argument is the realization that being evil in inclination, with all of the possible eternal implications, is of only approximate relation to actual behaviors.  If indeed humanity became more and more depraved as the Flood approached--and we must remember that the first really overt and unquestionable sin in the Bible is Cain's act of murder--then this must have involved merely more and more intricate and deep-seated levels of depravity.  Surely the pre-deluge world must have had parallels to the slave-owning Southern gentleman, possessed of honor in the eyes of society and scrupulously guarded of his behavior toward--and faithfulness to--the wife he took proudly to church on Sunday morning--after having slaked himself on some terrified, unaccounted slave girl the night before.

If indeed evil has this manner of amorphous and insidious existence--working its poison on people in greater or lesser (and often duplicitous) degree to externally-defined actions--then evil loses its conventional qualifications.  Now Cain's slaughter of Abel, no less a murder than ever, can be seen as part of a seamless whole with all other evils.  Cain's sulking indulgence of his disappointment, when he might have been engaged in wholesome interaction with others, including the younger brother who could have benefitted from his sibling's attentions, was a form of murder.  Cain, in focusing his attentions where he ought not, was murdering himself.

Now we can begin to see Jesus' attentions to the ideas of life and death--at least in a more comprehensive view than as physical life and death, on the one hand, and eternal life and death on the other.  Jesus accused his antagonists of trying to kill him, and many of such persons would have had more than sufficient grounds--in the mindset common to our age and theirs--to say that Jesus was speaking like a madman.  There is no cause to decide that most of his antagonists were lying, and that indeed they had contemplated Jesus' physical death--they simply did not understand the way Jesus spoke.

In the teaching of Jesus, the life-and-death binary is not of particular application.  Rather, it is the framework of all of our existence.  If life was not what it should have been for Adam and Eve, it was death.  Adam and Eve in their deathly horror were provided with life by God.  When we buoy others up, we give them life.  When we drag them down, we give them death.