3: A Tale of Two Trees
The most authoritative biblical commentary on the events described in chapter 3 of Genesis is that delivered by the Lord God at the end of the chapter (Gen. 3: 22–24). The reason given there for the expulsion of the human couple from Eden is not their transgression, their act of disobedience, but God's fear that they will go even further, go beyond eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and eat from the tree of life itself. It is this second step, which he seems to consider a natural sequel to eating from the tree of knowledge, that God deliberately prevents. That Man has become more like him by eating from the first tree is clearly acknowledged: “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” Although the common theological term for the incident in the garden is the “Fall of Man,” the evidence in Genesis is that Man's violation of the boundary separating him from God results in his becoming greater than he was before. What is more, God's expulsion of the man and woman from the garden is to prevent them becoming even more like him by gaining eternal life, the life of Yahweh himself.
By introducing together the two trees growing in the middle of the garden, and by extending the divine prohibition to both, the authors of Genesis have created a strong association between them. In the story, as soon as the human couple have eaten from the tree of knowledge, God takes action to block their access to the tree of life. We are not even told that the man and the woman intend to approach the tree of life but there is a presumption by God that they will do so – that having tasted of the tree of knowledge, the couple will naturally gravitate to the tree of life. The tree of life is seen to complement the tree of knowledge.
This relationship between the two trees is accomplished very skilfully by the Yahwist author. At no point does he explain the relationship between the two trees, but through his description of the action taken by the Lord God the reader is made aware of the nature of this relationship. This is similar to the artistry by which the author indicates the powers of the first tree. Again the author does not explain these powers but rather, upon hearing that the human couple are in hiding because they are naked, God asks the question, “Who told you that you were naked?”– and then, without waiting for an answer, he goes on to ask, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Once more, the powers of the tree are not explained but they are clearly implied by the fact that God moves on to ask his second question without waiting for an answer to his first question. The scolding manner of God's interrogation of the human couple is reminiscent of a parent who has caught their child doing something beyond the behavioural boundaries long established in the household.
This is story telling of a high order. The dynamic relationship between the two trees is beautifully revealed: by eating from the tree of knowledge, the couple have become like God through their acquisition of the divine attribute of knowledge; but this step is presented as leading inexorably to the human couple's desire to eat also from the tree of life. It is this further step that God deliberately and ruthlessly prevents. Not only are the couple expelled from Eden but the tree of life is guarded by a revolving flaming sword. It would be hard to miss the meaning of this divine action: there is no way back for Man. Eden has gone. Human history is about to start, beginning with the birth of Eve's children. (Genesis 4:1)
With hindsight it is possible to see that the divine command that Man should refrain from eating from the tree of knowledge and, along with it, the tree of life is motivated by more than God's wish to inculcate “wholesome obedience”, as Augustine would have it, but reflects the fact that these trees are “reserved” or set apart because they are divine; they denote properties or attributes that are God's and not his creatures'. Man has to transgress the boundary between himself and God in order to acquire reason and free will but God steps in quickly to prevent him acquiring the fullness of divinity: Man's acquisition of the freedom and status of a rational person is on his own terms but the attainment of eternal life and union with God will be strictly on God's terms. Man is quickly reminded of his mortality and finitude: thus far and no further. Again, God's manner is not unlike that of a parent who makes a concession to their child who is beginning to act in a sanctioned ‘adult’ way: this will be allowed but not that! The lines separating the childish from the adult world are being probed and crossed and the parent takes action to set out what is and what is not allowed “from now on.” The household rules may have been re-affirmed but they have also been re-drawn. From now on Man is a self-determining, rational creature, however much he may still depend on divine guidance and direction.
Man's incompleteness
Man's eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil signals the transformation of humankind from its hominid status to the status of ‘homo sapiens’– as the ascent by Man into full human consciousness. Rather than the Augustinian fall from a previous elevated spiritual state, with a consequent deterioration of intellect and will, an ascent to rational consciousness takes place. But it falls short of its natural completion since Man is prevented from eating from the tree of life. Man is prevented from attaining the union with God that his eating from the first tree has caused him to desire and this act of prevention defines his new state, the human way of being in the world. Man becomes a creature manqué, someone incomplete, unfinished, deprived of the very thing his new human status yearns for. If the eating from the tree of knowledge made the animal human, the failure to eat from the second tree caused the human animal to be incomplete, in need of God to complete its humanity. So Genesis 3 reveals the tragedy of the human condition as defined by the tension between the two trees in the Garden of Eden, when Man succeeds in eating from one but is debarred by God from eating from the other which would be its natural completion and fulfilment. Man has achieved the power to reason and to act freely, divine attributes, but he has been debarred from achieving full union with God and hence from achieving immortality. Man has been left wanting.
The human species remains incomplete, only half finished; humans are still in process, en route, seeking, searching, aching, striving for completeness, but the main prize of life – the very name Yahweh is etymologically associated with life – has still to be attained. The story in Genesis 3 defines and explains human existence in the existentialist sense. Man is always becoming, always waiting, always hoping, always reaching out for what is to come. The literary critic, George Steiner, asks how it is that Man, who is “bio-socially …a short-lived mammal made for extinction” nevertheless remains on the whole hopeful and oriented to the future:
What, then, is the well-spring of our ineradicable hopes, our intimations of futurity, of our forward-dreams and utopias, public and private? Whence the radiant scandal of our investments in tomorrow, in after-tomorrow? Which is the source of the ‘life-lie’, the gamble on improbability which makes most individuals and societies, despite recurrent exceptions, reject the logic of despair and of suicide? In short: from where rises the high tide of desire, of expectation, of an obsession with sheer being defiant of the pain, of the treadmill of enslavement and injustice, of the massacres that are history?Footnote 1
Steiner suggests as answer to his questions the phenomenon of language, claiming that our hope stems from the “subjunctives, optatives, counter-factual conditionals and…futurities of the verb”,Footnote 2 but this is surely rather a safe and shallow option. In the final analysis, it is much more likely that language reflects rather than forms or shapes reality. And the phenomenon reflected in language is, I would suggest, that humans are incomplete beings yearning for completion, creatures manqué looking for God. Such a theological explanation penetrates more deeply than Steiner's reference to language. It explains our basic restlessness and rootlessness, those qualities that have fascinated European and American artists for most of the past two centuries: at the base of our psyche, in the very core of our personality, we are unfinished, broken off, forever seeking that which will make us whole again. We experience the need for wholeness, which is just another way of saying that we experience the need for the holiness that is Yahweh's quintessential attribute.
The bible gives widespread testimony to the unfinished state that men and women find themselves in. It sees a void in the human heart. Made for God, women and men spend their lives longing and pining for the fulfilment that only God can provide. As we read in the Psalms:
St Augustine himself gives eloquent testimony to the same central human characteristic in his much quoted comment at the beginning of his Confessions: “You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”Footnote 4
A Thomistic commentary
That God is not simply an object of longing alongside other objects, but the object of longing because man and woman are utterly incomplete, utterly deprived and in their inmost being quite derelict without union with God stems directly from Man's graduation to the status of a rational being, from the human acquisition of mind. Modern Thomism helps us to understand why this is so.Footnote 5 For Thomism sees human consciousness as oriented in various ways. Consciousness is not simply amorphously “there”, but is structured, shaped and pointed. First, it points to the truth: we are all of us oriented to the truth, we aspire to know the truth and we cannot not seek to know the truth. Any denial of such an orientation of human consciousness ends up in contradiction: for such a denial is presumably intended to be taken as true and hence creates a contradiction between the denial and the performance of the denier. Human beings continually ask questions, and behind every question lies the search for truth. Just as some military weapons are heat-seeking weapons, so the human animal is a truth-seeking animal. Evolutionary biologists who wish to understand the phenomenon of religion should dwell on this remarkable characteristic of humankind, which remarkably is rarely remarked upon.
Furthermore, human consciousness points to the morally right; we are not consciously neutral between right and wrong but are spontaneously oriented to what is morally right. This orientation of consciousness actually precedes our orientation to the truth since to seek the truth is simply the cognitional sub-division of the search for what is right. So it is that we are not only required to provide proof or evidence to support our truth claims but we are also expected to give reasons to justify our actions. Among adult human beings, actions that cannot be justified or supported by reasons are considered either stupid or irresponsible. There is in fact a close link between the truth and right action: in South Africa a ‘truth commission’ was set up to find out what happened under apartheid on the understanding that without the truth being known justice could not be achieved. The same point is established by the fact that dictators and tyrants tell the most egregious lies in order to cover up their abuse of human rights. In fact, human beings have to lie to themselves before they can do wrong: they have to pretend that what they are doing is for this or that reason perfectly right; my wrongdoing is preceded by my lying to myself.
So it is not just the case that some human beings seek the truth and pursue justice, sometimes heroically, but rather that all of us as human beings are constitutionally oriented to the truth and the right: our very consciousness is inherently pointed at or striving for these goals. This does not mean, of course, that we cannot deny or frustrate what we are by nature – we all too easily find reasons to obscure or falsify the truth and to overlook the claims of justice. But such actions do not leave us unaffected. Because of the nature of human consciousness, when we plan and act in ways that frustrate the quest for truth and justice we do harm to our natures, our personalities suffer. The reason lie detectors work is because of this basic, irresistible orientation of human consciousness to telling and living the truth.
But human consciousness does not stop at this orientation to the truth and the right: it is, by virtue of the same orientation, also pointed to God. God on this reckoning is not a first order explanation of things in the world, in the way that the passing of the moon between the sun and the earth is an explanation of an eclipse of the sun. God is not a thing among other things in the universe, a cause among other causes. Rather, as the source of the universe's intelligibility and goodness, God is the explanation of explanation; God explains why explanation is possible, why there is any explanation at all. God is the source of the possibility of explanation and hence of verification, the source of the possibility of justification, in human reasoning and acting. Without God there would in the final analysis be no intelligibility and no moral order in the universe and hence there could be no explanation of human explanation and no possibility of justifying human attempts at justification. According to Thomism, God is the necessary pre-condition for explanation being successful and moral judgment valid.
While this account of the Thomist understanding of reason's orientation to the divine is doubtless excessively condensed, it may be enough to suggest why it is that there is a void in the human heart. As the precondition for true knowledge and valid moral judgment, God is later, in terms of what we come to know, than either knowledge of this world or judgment about the rightness or wrongness of particular human actions. But as the precondition for such knowledge God is, in ontological terms, prior to such knowledge. Hence we are, ontologically, oriented to God before we are oriented to the world around us and the people around us – it is just that we catch on to this fact later. But at the very root of our being, in the core of our personality, we are pointed to God, we are God-directed. God is an essential part of the full definition of what it is to be human. Our tragedy, however, is that we cannot by ourselves achieve union with God, even if we can know about him; left to ourselves, we cannot live the life of God himself; union with God is entirely dependent on the action of God himself. It is in this way that Thomism helps to explain how the entry by Man into fully rational human consciousness gives rise to the longing for God in the human heart.
God is every bit as much a human imperative as are the truth and the morally right. We can, of course, attempt to escape or evade the spontaneous summons of our human nature to know the truth and to do what is right. But we cannot avoid the demand to make ourselves whole, the call to completeness, the summons to fulfilment. What we can do is attempt to make ourselves whole while evading the summons to divine holiness. There are many well tried stratagems for doing this; they usually involve the substitution of an idol for God. We choose to worship something other than God – just as the ancient Israelites did. First, there are the “usual suspects”: we worship fame or power or money or pleasure or social status. We seek the fulfilment that only God can bring to the human personality in drink, in drugs, in fine food or sex. There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of these in themselves. The biblical notion of blessing finds it natural for Man to enjoy the good things of life. It is when these other things take the place of God in our lives that they become harmful to us. There is no shortage of the substitutes for God that human beings can come up with: it might be the American People, or the German People, or the British Empire, or the Church, or the Party, or the Cause. It might be our profession or ambition to succeed, our race or our religious creed, a skill or an achievement, or some group with whom we identify, and so forth. So long as these take the place of God in our lives, so long as they become the over-riding norms that determine our behaviour or our treatment of others or the opinions of others, then we are worshipping idols. It is when we attempt through some extension of ourselves to achieve the completion of ourselves that our natures crave that we come a cropper, that we find ourselves dissatisfied, unhappy, miserable; that we become conscious of the void in our heart. This is no happy-clappy, sanctimonious claptrap. For example, it is the hard-headed truth at the heart of the Alcoholics Anonymous programme of recovery, the most successful recovery programme available in our society, one that has rescued innumerable people from the degradation of alcoholism and to which many former alcoholics attribute their return to happiness and even their lives. As the late Cardinal Basil Hume was fond of saying, there is a God-shaped space in the human heart.
The human failure to reach the tree of life represents the continuing emptiness that it is the human destiny to attempt to fill. It is this void or blank that makes it easy to become decentred from the one, true God and to put some other good in his place. As William Temple puts it: “As consciousness advances to self-consciousness, so that the self, distinguishing itself from its environment, not only chooses what appetites is shall satisfy but even what ends it shall pursue, self-centredness becomes self-assertion.”Footnote 6 This is the original sin, or perhaps more accurately the original sinfulness of human beings. We are decentred from God and centre our lives on a false god of our own making; and from this situation sin flows.
Big Bang or Steady State?
The traditional understanding of original sin as an act of disobedience of God's commandment is the Big Bang interpretation of sin – a single cataclysmic event brought about Man's corruption and introduced moral evil into the world. What I am proposing is more akin to the Steady State theory – the basic human situation causes Man to become decentred, uncoupled from God and sin follows from this situation. You might say that it is an inherited situation, but in saying so you would not be required, as Augustine felt himself to be, to explain how humans came to inherit it. The reason is quite simple: it is the basic human situation. We have not achieved perfect unity with God and we cannot claim that we deserve such unity; it is not something that is ours by right. It is a gift that is beyond our capacity to merit. But until we achieve this gift we are incomplete, broken off, unfinished and prone to complete ourselves through the manufacture of idols. It is this tendency that constitutes the source of moral evil and sin in the world. (See Romans 1: 22–23). The words of Simone Weil can deepen our understanding of this point, for she believed that “sin was not a matter of individual acts, but of a state, the original state of mankind.” She says, “Sin and virtue are not acts, but states. Acts are only the automatic consequences of the state. But we can only understand them in the shape of acts. Hence the symbol of sin prior to any act.”Footnote 7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer expresses the same point in his own way, by arguing in a lecture given in 1933 that if one's Gestalt is centred on a false idol, then the consequences are evil. If, however, Christ has become the point of reference of the human being, then the voice of conscience becomes the voice of Christ.Footnote 8
This explanation of moral evil and sin places a strong emphasis on interiority, on what goes on in the human heart. It sees commitment to God's will as the source of righteous behaviour and its opposite, the absence of genuine commitment, as the source of sinful action. The Old Testament word for the heart – leb – is a powerful word pointing to what the Hebrews believed was not only the centre of the emotions but also the centre of all thought and intellectual activity. In much of the Old Testament, the call of the prophets is for a change of heart, for interior conversion to Yahweh. Burnt sacrifices were not enough – Yahweh preferred a sincere heart. (1 Samuel 15:22; Ps 51:16–17; Isaiah 1:11; Hosea 6:6)
Genesis 4
The same emphasis on interiority is to be found in the account of the very first sin in the Bible – the first sin to be recounted as an event in history, albeit the history is mythological history. When Cain kills his brother Abel, it is hard to divine his motive. We are simply told that Cain, who was a tiller of the ground, brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground while Abel, who kept sheep, “brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.” To all outward appearance, there is no difference between the offerings of the two brothers. But we read, “And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” (Gen. 4: 3–5) It is this response from the Lord that angers Cain and we are told that “his countenance fell.” So the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” This is the first mention of “sin” in Genesis and it is described as lying in wait for Cain. It is at this point in the story that Cain leads his brother out into a field and murders him. If commentators have found it difficult to explain Cain's motivation adequately, this is surely because the author wishes to direct attention to Cain's inward disposition – the description of sin “couching at the door” and of it being a “desire” that Cain should master points to an internal struggle. Cain's offering was slighted by the Lord because his inward disposition was wrong and it was this same inward disposition that led him to commit sin. It was, significantly, a sin of violence, the type of sin, James Barr tells us, most repugnant to God in the Old Testament.Footnote 9
So it is that Cain commits the first sin out of envy because his brother Abel appears to be more favoured by God than he is. His motivation is as we would expect of someone who sought to complete his nature by finding favour with God only to find that God was displeased with what lurked in his heart. The fact that the first sin is committed out of a frustrated desire for God's approval is surely consistent with the explanation for moral evil I have suggested above. For when he fails to find favour with God, who is the object of his soul's yearning, Cain's impulse is to wipe out what he sees as the obstacle to his achievement of this favour, his rival for God's affection, and so he kills his brother. It is the classic case of murder based on envy. And it is entirely consistent with the human search for completeness and wholeness – which when frustrated can lead to envy and violent, sinful action.
Genesis 3
If this is the first sin recorded in the bible, what are we to make of Genesis 3 and the action described there? I have already described Genesis 3 as a short story that in some ways stands apart from the surrounding text. There is almost a suggestion in the text that this powerful story was inserted later in order to achieve a particular effect. For the beginning of what is now Chapter 4 seems to run on logically from the ending of Chapter 2, where we are told that “the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” The opening line of Chapter 4 is continuous with this: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain…” Genesis 3 comes almost as an interruption to this picture of marital bliss and to the account of conceiving and begetting which occupies a large part of Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 3 begins with the introduction of the snake as the most cunning of all the animals. There is almost a fairytale quality about the introduction of a talking animal at this point; and this literary device should surely intimate to the reader that this is not an historical account but a product of the human imagination. Commentators have wondered about the choice of the snake as a representative of cunning, and at least one has observed that snakes are no more cunning than other animals. But the snake is not so much a personification of cunning as a personification of temptation. This is on account of its movement: silent and stealthy and sinuous, it epitomises the nature of temptation – and Genesis 3 is as much about temptation to sin as about sin itself.
The tale's account of how we are tempted to do what we know is wrong is typological: it presents a pattern into which we can place other instances of temptation to wrongdoing in the historical accounts we shall meet later in the bible. For example, the woman does not think of doing wrong until the idea suddenly pops into her head. She initially resists what she knows to be wrong, to be forbidden by God. But then the voice in her head (the snake) provides apparently convincing reasons for believing that the action she contemplates is really not wrong but right, and in the end she does wrong because she has convinced herself that this is the right thing to do. We read: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.” (Genesis 3: 6) This is typical of the nature of temptation to sin: we never do wrong because it is wrong but because we have first told or convinced ourselves, often by sinuous and tortuous reasoning, that the action is somehow right. This is the “cunning” pattern of temptation to sin and it is clearly illustrated in Genesis 3.
In so far as the tale is about sin itself, it is again typological rather than historical. It sets out a prototypical action that illustrates the nature of sin with almost textbook-like detachment. The language is muted and morally neutral throughout and there is none of the graphic imagery we encounter in the tale of the sin of violence told in the following chapter. In describing with such detachment human disobedience to God's command, it reveals the essential nature of sin so that we shall recognise it clearly when we encounter it in the historical accounts of human actions that are to follow in abundance in the bible. Sin is disobedience of God's commands. Also prototypical are the reactions of the various protagonists when their wrong-doing is discovered: Adam blames the woman and the woman blames the serpent. Human beings do not find it easy to accept responsibility for wrongdoing and are all too ready to let someone else take the blame.
So the incident that Augustine believed was the ‘original sin’ responsible for the introduction of moral evil into the world should be seen rather as a prototypical action. ‘Sin’ suggests an actual event or deed, impure motivation or intention and personal responsibility and culpability for the deed. On the other hand, ‘prototypical action’ is a literary device whereby an author describes an action that comes to be seen as typical of the people the story is telling us about. It is less concerned with the human protagonists than with the type of action it is describing in narrative form; the lack of detail, the rather bare references to the human protagonists as “the man” and “the woman”, indicate the generic nature of the tale. It serves as a prototype of the actions that the reader will come across in the story that follows. The actions of the people we encounter later in the story may be sinful and wrong but the prototypical action is better understood as serving a literary function, as a generic concept or signifier, rather than as a specific action that occurred at some point in time. The prototype of a car or plane need not be an actual car or plane and to stress its individuality is to miss the point: rather it is a type that is used as a model or plan for all the individual cars or planes that are manufactured in accordance with it. The ‘proto’ of ‘prototypical’ suggests that it is the first of its kind; the ‘typical’ suggests that we are dealing with kinds or types and not with individuals; and the noun ‘action’ indicates that we are dealing with a deed: we are dealing with a type or kind of deed. The usefulness of this notion for the discussion being conducted in this chapter is that it depersonalises the action that is being described; it also removes from the action any causative function, any suggestion that the action caused or brought about the actions later described in the narrative. The function of a prototypical action is not causative but illustrative. A prototypical action is simply a generic model, image or sketch of the kind of action the story will be dealing with. As such it plays a role within the more general typological role performed in Genesis by chapters 1–11, the role of acting as an ‘overture’ to the later sections of Genesis and, indeed, of the whole of the ‘historical’ bible.
The bible is mainly a historical account of the actions of a people. For the Hebrews, God spoke to them through their history. One of the salient features of the Hebrew people was their obedience to the will of their God, Yahweh. Another outstanding feature was their disobedience. The obedience and disobedience of the people are presented in the bible as provoking two reactions from Yahweh: judgment and salvation; threat and promise; punishment and deliverance. The basic biblical theme is faith, fidelity, in the relationship of Yahweh with his people – of Yahweh's continuing fidelity to his people and the people's fidelity and infidelity to Yahweh. To speak like this in highly general terms might appear to be robbing the bible of local colour, actuality and interest. Now the bible has plenty of colour and a great deal of incident but there is also within it an ongoing current of reflective, theological thought that deals in the somewhat generic terms I have just used: relationship (or covenant) alongside fidelity or infidelity to the terms of the covenant; threat and promise, punishment and deliverance, judgment and salvation. And it is this current of thought, I am suggesting, that is being anticipated in the prototypical action of Adam and Eve disobeying God's explicit command and eating from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden.
The concept of ‘prototypical action’ helps us to keep in mind that we are dealing first and foremost with a narrative that uses the devices and conventions of imaginative literature and not with an historical account of an event that took place at a particular time and place. In addition to this concept, there is needed a reminder that the story is an aetiological myth; that it is attempting to set out certain enduring realities in the species it is telling us about and how those realities came to be as they are. In other words, it is revealing to human beings certain basic realities about human nature using the form of story, the literary form that human beings find most agreeable and readily accessible. Between them ‘aetiological myth’ and ‘prototypical action’– or rather prototypical action within the context of an aetiological myth – tell us how we should interpret Genesis 3.
While it is vitally important that we should attend to the language and the imagery employed by the authors of Genesis 3 if we are to gain an insight into the intended meaning, it is also vitally important to grasp the point that the narrative in Genesis 3 is deadly serious and is not just an entertaining product of the human imagination. It is dealing in basic realities of human life. As in all parables, the question to ask is not “Did this happen?” but rather “What does it mean?” And, to sum up, the meaning of the story is that two things happen together. First, Man achieves human reason, becoming self-directing and self-determining, capable of merit and demerit (sin); as such he embarks upon history, the story of Man's making of the human world – civilisation, art, artefacts etc. – and with it of Man's making of Man, within the covenantal arrangement provided by God (unity with God through obedience, or sin and separation from God). Second, the basic event, the momentous incident, is that Man crossed the boundary between the created realm and the divine. That is the fact that is reinforced by the only commentary on the event we have in Genesis 3 itself – the powerful concluding passage of that chapter, “Behold, he has become like one of us.” It is not a situation created ab initio by God but is an evolved situation that creates the conditions needed for the drama of salvation, salvation history, to begin. With the dawning of human freedom – basic or radical freedom to determine his own actions – Man also becomes inclined to fall into the slavery of sin, of self-sufficiency and alienation from God. This interpretation is spared the problem of explaining how it was possible for two innocents to sin, since the conditions for sin to take place were put in place as soon as Man crossed the boundary between the created realm and the divine, and it also avoids the problem of implicating God in human sinning. The only thing that the human protagonists are denied is union with God himself and that is not something that human beings could possibly be entitled to. In terms of the relationship that exists between God and human beings, union with God could only take place as God's gratuitous gift to his creatures. With the dawning of human intelligence and freedom, the conditions were created that made sin not only possible but probable. Genesis 3 is an analysis of the psychology of sin: the temptation to human self-sufficiency, the human tendency to make excuses, and along with that estrangement from God, as Man tries to go it alone. That is the radical nature of sin. It is a form of idolatry and it is idolatry or self-worship that lies at the root of all sin.
This explanation of the moral evil in the world in no way attempts to underplay the depth or pervasiveness of evil in the world. It goes along with the words of the Psalmist:
Development of the Hebrew notion of sin
The notion of original sinfulness corresponds closely to what primitive people understood by taboo, which for the ancient Israelites was much more a religious state of affairs than a moral misdeed. Primitive consciousness does not conform to modern notions of “morality.” Those described by anthropologists as “primitive” do not think in the same moral categories as people who live in what they also describe as “more advanced” cultures. That is why it has taken anthropologists many years and many different approaches to understand the way that primitive people think.Footnote 10 The point made by Mary Douglas and other anthropologists is that primitive people have distinctive ways of classifying objects in the world and that this classification determines what is appropriate and what is inappropriate action for human beings. That is why the confusion of categories, crossing some forbidden line, results in the transgressor being deemed unclean, polluted, defiled. What is more, the transgressor becomes a source of pollution for the rest of society. In Greek mythology, Oedipus, who unwittingly breaks the taboos of killing his father and marrying his mother, is himself unclean and the source of the pollution that afflicts the city of Thebes. Primitive societies are not lacking in norms of behaviour but the norms are puzzling to those brought up in a tradition where actions are thought of as the responsibility of individual human agents and blame is attached to people on grounds of personal culpability. Such a way of thinking, based on the development of “interior” concepts such as “responsibility” and “accountability”, took some time to develop; these concepts were also dependent for their development on the notion of the “person”, the individual who carries responsibility. This also took time to develop. For in primitive cultures social stability is uppermost, the individual self is not strongly differentiated from society but rather “the self is seen as a passive arena in which external forces play out their conflicts.”Footnote 11
The covenant made between God and the Hebrew people helped to develop their sense of responsibility. But at first and for a long stretch of their history, the Hebrews understood the covenant as a corporate agreement – an agreement between God and the whole people of Israel. Moral defect or defilement was conceived not as a violation of a cosmic order imposed by a rigid system of classification, as in primitive society, but as violation of the terms of the agreement between Israel and Yahweh. Moral defect was personalised in being conceived of as an offence against God but was not yet something that was conceived of as the result of an individual's action unless that individual was the king whose actions always implicated the whole community. When the Hebrew prophets urged repentance it was at first and for the most part the community of Israel that they addressed. Hosea's command is typical: “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God.” (Hosea 14: 1) Amos warns: “Prepare to meet your God, O Israel!” (Amos 4: 12) It was the community of Israel that transgressed, worshipping idols and breaking the terms of the covenant, and hence it was the community that was addressed.Footnote 12 The notion of individual repentance and conversion to Yahweh emerges in the writings of Jeremiah, in the last days of the Kingdom of Judah just before the Babylonian exile. The return of the whole people to the ways of Yahweh was a lost cause by that stage and so Jeremiah urges each good Israelite to turn again to Yahweh whose ancient covenant of Sinai will be crowned with a new covenant to come.Footnote 13 (Jeremiah 18:11; 25:5; 36:3) In the Psalms too conversion to Yahweh is almost always a personal matter. (See, for example, Psalm 51). The experience of exile in Babylon reinforced the notion of individual responsibility since in that period it was individuals who had remained faithful, and after the exile the emphasis on individual conversion is associated with the need for purity of heart. (See Ezra 9: 6–15; Nehemiah 9: 6–37; Baruch 1: 15–38).Footnote 14 Through the experience of exile when access to Temple worship and sacrifice was not possible, there was a good deal of soul searching and revisionist thinking among the Jews and a shift took place away from a system of penitential sacrificial rituals to a deeper concept of what is involved in returning to Yahweh with one's whole heart. A more interior and personal understanding of sin and conversion developed in this way.Footnote 15 It was by these means that the notion of sin as personal guilt before God emerged and this is the notion that we find being developed in the wisdom tradition and which is current by the time of Jesus and the emergence of the Christian era. It is important to grasp that the association between sin and the notion of pollution entertained in primitive cultures is not completely lost. In the bible sin is never merely a matter of morality and always remains a religious concept. It is not primarily a transgression of the moral law or the breaking of one of the commandments; it is much more personal than that. As Jaroslav Pelikan observes,
“Forgiveness of sin…was not the act of God by which He forgot a given number of deeds against the Ten Commandments, but the act of God by which I was made worthy of His fellowship. The root of moralism has been the assumption that the sense of sin was moral rather than religious in its derivation, and that therefore the religious sense of profaneness was based upon the moral sense of transgression. Such a definition of sin has been the obverse side of the identification of the Holy and the Good.”Footnote 16
Pelikan goes on to add that God is primarily concerned with making us holy, making us capable of union with him, preparing us for fellowship with him; sin is our refusal to let God rule over us, holding him off and thereby making ourselves profane before him.Footnote 17
The Christian understanding of sin
This biblical notion of sin is well reflected in Jesus's parable of the prodigal son, who wishes to go it alone, leave his father and spend his inheritance somewhere else. Having left his father's house, he soon dissipates what he has inherited (all of which is a gift from the father) and finds himself an exile in a foreign land, standing in pigswill (highly offensive to Jewish sensibility) and thoroughly miserable. This image of sin as exile from the father, as alienation from God, conveys much more accurately than do Augustine's moralistic reflections on a lapsation of the will, just what the bible means by sin. And what the bible refers to is a religious situation, the state of the nation's or, later, the individual's, relationship with God. Sin in the bible is not a one-off disaster, a tragic mistake with untold consequences; it is a religious state of affairs. And reparation of sin is equally a religious state of affairs, something I shall dwell on in my next article.
Moral evil is a primordial fact of human life because Man is born decentred from God, his true end. But because my interpretation of Genesis does not accept a first, originating sin, it avoids seeing humanity as a massa damnata while continuing to see it as a massa salvanda – Man still stands in need of the completion that only God can give but the default setting for humanity is vehemently not damnation, as Augustine's interpretation would have it. The interpretation presented here goes along with the notion that God wills all human beings to be saved, in accordance with 1 Timothy 2: 3–4, where we read how God our Saviour “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” In the parable of the prodigal, the father does not spend his time condemning his exiled son but rather he daily scans the horizon, hoping for his son's return.
