Design on Our Existences

On May 9, I wrote:

"The tragedy of Genesis is not foremost a tragedy of sin, but a tragedy of design practiced by humanity.  Or call it a tragedy of conceit.  Or call it--if the language serves best--a tragedy of the sin (for the man is never understood in Genesis to be sinless) actualized in humanity attempting to recapitulate the creation process--the conjuring from the recesses of humanity's murky selves satisfying designs of the world we conceptualize around us.

"In reality, the shame of limitation spawns the shameful creation on our part of inherently limited conceptions of reality--or what we like to think of as reality.  Indeed, the very act of conceptualizing something--gathering the available parts of what we have decided is 'something' into an analyzable and communicable conceit--is inherently limiting."

And for some aspect of ourselves to be inherently limiting is a two-fold assessment.  First, by definition, is the fact that our entire selves are limited (and therefore of a shameful quality before a God who exists supremely above every good quality) and, second, is the fact that an actualization--particularly a conscious actualization--of any one of our qualities is an affront to God.

To put it bluntly, an embracing by us of any conceptuality is an affront to God--as I quoted myself above, "a tragedy of design practiced by humanity."  We do not know the universe in which we sin, and when we ascribe to ourselves any knowledge of that universe we sin yet again.

Of course, we must pursue "knowing," but our collecting of instances of experience with individual things (which experience-processings by us are less than perfect at any rate) into masses of observations from which we extract concepts is at least a thrice-doomed prospect.  We experience imperfectly, we collect experiences imperfectly, and we order experiences imperfectly into concepts.

Much of the difficulty in Christianity on this score springs from Christianity's admixed heritage in classical thought.  The Hellenistic fascination with the "idea" of (for example) "the horse" is a similarly-deformed cousin of some more overtly pagan worship of a horse-god.

Any creation of God is first and foremost a thing in itself--and on this score I must insist on revisiting the Prologue-to-John description of a Creation indescribable other than as mediated by Jesus in every intimacy.  As the "tragedy of design practiced by humanity" begins, Adam is set by God to ordering, in part, the growth of the Garden.  Every bough that Adam twisted to accommodate some design was a living thing disordered thereby from its own inclinations--and every wrenching away from such inclinations was felt by Jesus.

Scarcely could any poet describe a more infinitesimal manifestation of sin's burgeoning--though of course burgeon it did.  In a universe of infinite scale--or, more properly, a prospect of infinite universes that might comprise the Creation of Jesus--there can be reckoning neither that Adam's bough-twistings were little things nor that Adam's bough-twistings were big things.  They simply happened, and in some measure they were not of God.

And the most important realization is the fact that such "happenings"--entwined as they were with Adam's developing capacity to render for himself conceits about existence's designs--were not enough for Adam.  The first man's skein of conceits was growing, and it was growing toward the ordering not merely of the foliage at his fingertips, but the ordering of perceivable existence into a proximity of like beings, of creatures like Adam at least insofar as they might participate with him as agents within a larger perceived milieu.

And so Genesis says that God made out of the earth the animals and the birds.  Notably, this is the same text that makes so much later of Noah's thronging menagerie consisting of animals according to their kinds.  This earlier presentation of animals and birds to Adam in the Garden makes no mention of "kinds" (though presumably there were at least two of every species), yet centuries of commentators have assumed that Adam's process of naming every creature (which is the described functionality wherein their respective "helper" unsuitabilities is revealed) is unquestionably associated with the assessment of "kinds."  Of this assumption there is no scriptural warrant--Adam might have been naming each creature individually, and such a process would have been the more suitable, the more that the original reality of Jesus' mediation of every intricacy of Creation was respected.

Every creature is different, every conceivable existing thing is different--because the ineffable ministration of Jesus to his Creation is ever-present and (at least simple prudence would so dictate to us) every such ministration of Jesus to his Creation has manifold potentialities of which we cannot even guess.  To collect impressions of such creatures and things into "concepts," regardless of the utility therein, is inherently sinful.  And to proclaim, in the frothing theologians' determination to pronounce upon the things of God, that concepts and dogmas and doctrines distill the things of God into "Gospel Truths" is a mountain of sin.  Of course, we all live within a scheme of concepts usually somewhere between the most minute parsings-out of conceits being perhaps overstated, on the one hand, and the propagating of vast, convenient, and oppressive overstatements, on the other.

What is important here is to see the grip that the human propensity for design obtains over people in Genesis.  Adam wakes up and calls Eve "woman" ("taken out of man") not because she is an inimitable, unique creation of God, but because Adam, delighted with her because the she is "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh," references her according to the organizing principle of his own conceits.

Eve has a set of experiences of her own that bears upon this same reality of conceits.  In a moment of inexplicable wonder (following an ordeal of unimaginable torment), Eve exclaims, "I have gotten a man from the Lord."  How might history have been different if Adam had shown such wonder--rather than fascination with relationship-design--upon being presented with Eve.

Yet it is Eve, in the earlier Tree episode, who sets herself upon a course of design that changes history.  What is most fascinating about the conventional approach to "The Fall" is the realization (as the sceptics never tire of rehearsing) that the devil tells the truth, and that God--if one is to fault God for showing mercy--supposedly does not.  Indeed, as the devil goads Eve into conceptualizing, "the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise," and of course, the tree does make Adam and Eve "like God" in a way.

That a fruit tempting to the eye would be good for food is in line with a certain conceit about reality.  That a store of knowledge would be of value is another conceit about reality.  What was going on with Eve as she reached for the fruit was not so much overt sin (and on this score the sceptics have at the ready the old "how could she know right from wrong before she ate from that tree?" line.)  What was going on with Eve was that sin--or, as I would say, that shameful-created-nature-proto-sin--of effectively lying to herself.  Concepts are intrinsically (and no matter how infinitesimally) sinful.

The shame that goes with being created rather than being God.  The shame that goes with being rebuffed as a child before being mature enough to understand having committed an offense.  The shame that goes with every moment of generalization--that type of convenience of thought upon which we rely even as we detest the notion that our thought-lives are things of convenience.  This is what explains human nature from the very first, and it makes mock of that convention that sin came from the Fall--or that sin can be compartmentalized or understood in discrete terms.

As we trace the development of humanity backward, sin gives way to proto-sin which gives way to shame--and we stumble over the idea that the reverse, that shame-morphing-into-sin, is a smooth spectrum because we seek always to organize and categorize things.  We fall from the bloom of original innocence--from those shocking and design-defying initial experiences we can scarcely remember--and we can never puzzle our way back again.  Like Eve, we can know an initial trauma and blurt out such as her delight in Cain "gotten from the Lord," while yet later we can impose design on our existences, like Eve rationalizing the birth of the precious, unique Seth as "another seed instead of Abel."