Thread of the Eden Story

Every story begins somewhere, at some time.  The primal “story” of the Bible--that of the original Creation--begins somewhere, at some time.  It is a perennial curiosity, that the “In the Beginning” story does not really begin at the “beginning” (before anything was created), but begins rather in a pre-existing chaos of indisputably existing elements.

It is of some salience to metaphysicians, to say that God equals existence, but even that stab at timelessness and indefinable location is of limited application to a story of “Creation” as a verb.  If something is to be described to us limited beings as “coming into existence,” then that something itself must be seen as intruding into some pre-existing though perhaps indescribable context.  There is no humanly-conceivable connection between “God as existence” and “this or that finite thing ‘came into’ existence.”

A chief element of my blog-writing hangs on the notion that the starting-point of a wholesome interpretation of the Bible is found in locating the proper starting-point of the moral tension between humans and God.  The chief element of humanity’s moral quandary, as reflected in this blog’s title “Shame Appears,” is shame.  Shame, not sin.  I maintain—if we are to reckon in prudence that the Creation story presumes a context, and must arise therefore in some collection of described elements (whether those elements be the void and the roiling waters, or the pre-Fall jostling of Adam’s will against that of his Creator)—that the story of humanity before The Great Sin of the Forbidden Fruit is really the collecting of the primordial elements from which can emerge the redemption narrative culminating in the Christ.  The great humanly-neglected element of the creation of our species is the effectual yet theologically-ignored starting-point notion of humanity as shameful creatures.

As I wrote in my previous post,

It is from the seed-beds of shame that we obtain the true values of faith.  The seed-beds are sown with our presumptions thrust at God, and what we reap is a bounty so great that we are--in lesser turn--knocked back with amazement at our undeserved fortune, and--in greater turn--liable to ignore the blessings of God, or to not even realize that we have received them.  This is the story of humanity, and the story is shown to us in the Scriptures in terms of the staggering arrogance with which we make great demands of God, and also in terms of the unaccountable gentleness and accommodation with which God responds.

And so it is incumbent upon me to perform the less-than-noble task of describing our first ancestor’s relationship with God as being tinged from the very (humanly-conceivable) start with strife between Adam and his Creator.  We cannot look upon the story with the eyes of God, and so we are left with two options.  Either we can contemplate the Eden story as incorporating some humanly-relatable described events involving Adam and then Adam-and-Eve, or we can reckon that the chaos of the void is no more daunting to interpretation than the chaos of a garden unlike any we can ever know in this life (or do we, who dare not presume upon the perfections of God, ascribe to ourselves the ability to understand anything perfect?)

This latter reckoning—that of a “Boom! Here it is!” appreciation of the “Fall” moment as being as logically-defensible as a “Boom! Here it is!” appreciation of Creation “starting” from a convulsing void—would permit the notion that Adam and Eve and all of us were “created” as the cowering, shamed wretches of the culturally-ensconced Expulsion from the Garden.  Perhaps we ought to consider that our prudent self-conception as shameful and sinful is as far back as we should go regarding interpretation, and this tack might serve at least to deflate our culture’s shameful thoroughly-un-Jesus-like fixation on the particulars of sin.

There is, however, probably more utility in considering the former reckoning above—the reckoning that there are humanly-relatable described events involving Adam and then Adam-and-Eve.  This involves the less-than-noble task I referred to above—the task of describing Adam’s relationship with God pre-Fall as being tinged with strife.  And, of course, “strife” between God and humanity must be understood in its most unyielding sense, with the very slightest of ungodly acts, thoughts, or motivations understood as nothing but grave.

For me, this is best illuminated by my unexpected realization that there is actually a question I would like to ask C. S. Lewis—though it would serve me right if Lewis had addressed this before.  Given the emphasis among Lewis and his crowd on friendship and gentlemanly behavior, I would if I could ask Lewis if he thought he would like Adam pre-Fall.

I, for my part, would have to consider the moral quality of Adam pre-Fall as an open question.  This is of no small concern to me, as I contend that (as I maintained above) the seed-beds of our shame are that into which we thrust our ungodly presumptions.  To be “ungodly,” such presumptions can be the most minute, yet surely they exist.  Did not Adam presume to disdain the other amazing creatures as being unsuitable as “help-meets” to him, and did not Adam presume to pronounce upon some particular (“bone of my bones” rather than bones-of-her-unique-own) as a source of his satisfaction with Eve—with Adam’s complete satisfaction being an arguable question?

The preachers never tire of proclaiming that the individual, mortal soul of Eve is as valuable and unique to God as that of Adam, and so we hear endlessly how she is more than Adam’s “help,” but rather how they are to be “helps” to each other.  Do we understand Adam to have practiced or offered any “help” to any creature in those perhaps-momentary trial periods?  We labor through life understanding that life requires (on pain of divine disapproval) positive contributions to all around us.  Yet do we have even a glimmer of a notion that Adam gave of himself in any way?  Is not the story of the Garden pre-Fall straightforwardly a story of God giving to Adam more, more, more, while Adam produces nothing in return.  It would be fatuous to imagine that the Garden really needed “dressing,” and it is apparent that the “design” aspect of Adam imposing himself thus upon Creation was merely the start of Adam attempting to work his existence into a burgeoning design of his own conceit.

Most importantly, if Eden pre-Fall is really a story of the origin of humanity, rather than a just a collection of elements that support a story that starts with the launching at the Fall of a bewildered, freshly-minted couple equipped from the start with sinfulness and shamefulness, then Adam and Eve were real people throughout.  It is of no value to describe Adam and Eve as “sinless,” when they were perfectly capable of telling themselves they could have scurrilous dalliances with the devil (for the “eating” did not have to happen necessarily, unless they were non-human humans.)  Or perhaps it would be more valuable—as I contend—to maintain that the concept merely of discrete “sin” was embedded in the fruit, while yet the first couple had known from their first and initially imperfect thoughts the shamefulness of all humanity.

Notions aside of Adam and Eve eventually transgressing some boundary of “sin,” it is plain that, from the start and throughout, our first ancestors shared with us our (as I said above) “staggering arrogance with which we make great demands of God”—and of course the least of such demands would be shameful.  It would seem impossible to arrive at a wholesome appreciation of the state of humanity without understanding shame as being the background of all of our earthly existence.  The path to obtaining that appreciation, however, must make its way through a wilderness of distractions strewn about us by our cultural fascination with the Fall.

An illustrative example would be found in a post from “Philosophical Journal” by Gary Lovan.  Among some very thoughtful observations, Lovan deals with the Eden story under rather standard presumptions about the Fall.  He refers to Benedict XVI in Einführung in das Christentum, by describing Benedict’s thesis so:

He argues that sin is not merely an individual act but a condition into which we are born. We enter a world already marked by what he sometimes calls a "network" or "web" of distorted relationships. Thus nobody begins from a morally neutral position. We are beneficiaries and victims of injustices we did not create and participants in systems we did not design.

One wonders, however, whether the initial reference to “sin” (and the implicit Fall) is necessarily connected intrinsically with the substance of the passage.  The Adam who was, by God’s observation, in a state of debilitation by being “alone,” was a creature in potential communion with his Creator.  Should not God have been enough?  Was not Adam in a state of moral alienation from his God when first we understand anything about Adam as a person?  Considering the moral burden upon Adam (and all of us) to translate the inestimable blessings of God into blessings we shed abroad, what can we conclude other than that the needy Adam was from the first in a state of “disordered relationships,” disordered in regard to God, to the world, to fellow creatures, to the mate whose value he reckoned according to his human and fallible sense of design?

Lovan offers also the notion that,

The Fall is not really about breaking a rule, I think. It is about a rupture in the relation between humanity, God, nature, other persons, and oneself. After the Fall, every good becomes mixed with domination, anxiety, exploitation, pride, and necessity.

Assuming that such admixture is less than godly even in its least extent, the ruptures in question need not wait until after “the Fall.”  Adam’s designs and pronouncements bespeak domination, his needy character and his apparent familiarity with fear indicate anxiety, his attitude to other creatures is tinged with exploitation, his looming assumptions about the role of Eve indicate pride, and he is from the very start a creature whose relationship with his Creator is characterized by the arising of necessity.  None of that needs a tree or a snake or a fall.

The writers to whom I referred have much of value to say about how our culture must deal with the quandaries in our lives illustrated by, among other things, the Eden story in Christianity.  This conventional story is about sin.  I maintain that the chief thing we need to deal with is the matter of shame, and I maintain that this is the first and most prevalent thread of the Eden story in Genesis.