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Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3:4

In the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola has this to say about today’s first reading (Genesis 3:1-24):

Recall to mind how Adam and Eve did such long penance for
their sin and what corruption fell upon the whole human race,
causing many to go to hell.  I say to recall to mind the sin of
our first parents.  Recall that after Adam had been created in
the Plain of Damascus and placed in the earthly paradise and
Eve had been formed from his rib, they were forbidden to eat
the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and eating it they committed
sin.  After their sin, clothed in garments of skin and cast out
of paradise, without the original justice which they had lost,
they lived all their lives in such travail and great penance.

There are points in the Biblical narrative which resist this interpretation as a straight forward story of crime and punishment, of disobedience to God’s command, followed by exile from the Garden of Eden. 
            For one thing, God’s threat (2:17: “In the day that you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall die”) is never carried out, so the serpent was right, when he assured the couple, “You will not die” (3:4). 
            Moreover, the reader has to wonder: Why does God want to deprive Adam and Eve of the knowledge of good and evil?  After all, this ability to discriminate, to make moral judgments, is precisely what makes us human, what distinguishes us from the animals, whose actions are prompted by blind instinct.
            The serpent promises the couple, “You will be like God” (v. 3), and divinization is, in fact, the goal of the spiritual life.  Since the gift of knowledge is obtained through the serpent’s suggestion, Gnostic interpretation views the serpent in a positive light, unlike the Book of Wisdom, which affirms, “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (2:24). 
            This famous passage has been called an etiological myth, a “Just So” story, like Rudyard Kipling’s “How the camel got its hump.”  It is a fanciful explanation for why things are the way they are in the world: why the snake crawls on its belly (v. 14); why women suffer pain in childbirth (v. 16); why men have to toil in the earth for food, instead of just plucking it from trees, as Adam did (vv. 17-19a); and, finally, why we all have to die (v. 19b). 
            The story of Adam and Eve is the story of the loss of innocence.  The wisdom which came through eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge (v. 6) was accompanied by self-consciousness: the couple realized they were naked (v. 7).  Children feel no shame when they walk around naked, but for adults nakedness is associated with sexual desire.
            In Ignatius’ reading of the story we have a coherent world of discourse, with an unequivocal moral message.  The loss of a sense of being contained within the Biblical narrative has portentous consequences, but it marks a stage in the development of human consciousness which cannot be reversed.

February 11, 2007

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