Apart from what this says about God’s character, it also tells us that human beings weren’t created as robots; their reverence and obedience towards God wasn’t somehow pre-programmed and automatic. God made them so that they had to choose voluntarily to co-operate and share responsibility with him in the care and maintenance of his Creation.
The French spiritual writer René Voillaume puts it this way: ‘God willed that man should be free. And because man is free, he can choose, he can commit himself, he can give. Because he is free, he can love and he can refuse to love’ (my emphasis).*
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil can be seen as a symbol of this basic freedom on the part of human beings, to choose either to find fulfilment in a loving communion with the God who created them, trusting God and obeying his commandments, or to seek happiness elsewhere, rejecting God in a spirit of defiance and self-assertion.
The way the authors of Genesis tell the story, the temptation to turn their freedom against God in this way came to Adam and Eve by way of the serpent, ‘more subtle,’ we’re told - more crafty - ‘than any other wild creature that the LORD GOD had made’ (Gen 3:1).
The serpent reveals himself from the outset as opposed to God and eager to destroy the original holiness and justice enjoyed by the first human beings. He goes about this by making a series of deceitful suggestions.
First, he tells Eve: ‘You will not die’ if you eat the fruit of the tree. He contradicts God, leading Eve to believe that God has lied to them (Gen 3:4).
Second, he says that when they eat the fruit of the tree, ‘your eyes will be opened’. He insinuates that God has been depriving them of something, some knowledge or wisdom which they would find enlightening and beneficial (Gen 3:5).
Third, the serpent says: ‘...you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (Gen 3:5). He suggests that God has unfairly hoarded his divine being to himself, when he could have shared it, and tempts Adam and Eve with the prospect of rising above the limitations of creaturehood to become equal with God.
In the later tradition of the Old Testament, and in the Christian interpretation, the serpent in Genesis came to be identified with the devil. This almost certainly wasn’t what the original authors had in mind. In the story of the Fall the serpent is more of a literary device, personifying the kind of temptation which arose from the depths of Adam’s and Eve’s own hearts - the temptation, already mentioned, to express their freedom in a refusal to love and obey God as creatures, and to try to seize a higher, God-like status for themselves.
The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Domenico Zampieri ('Domenichino'), 1581-1641)
But on the other hand, temptations come to us from outside ourselves as well, from the devil. The later Jewish and Christian understanding of the serpent’s personality reinforces the truth of Paul’s spiritual advice in his letter to the Ephesians, where he says that in Christian spiritual life, in our battle against sin, we have to fight not only against our own inner weaknesses (‘flesh and blood’) but also against the influence of invisible, spiritual ‘principalities and powers’ opposed to God, which impinge on us from outside ourselves (Eph 6:12).
Either way, we can summarise the ‘formation process’ of Adam and Eve’s sinful action as follows:
1. A doubt, a lack of faith and trust in God’s love and benevolent, protective care;
2. A suspicion against God that he is withholding some benefit from them which would enhance or improve their lives or provide something ‘extra’ which they don’t possess at present;
3. A kind of envy of God’s divinity and superiority, and a resentment towards, or refusal to accept, the limitations, the finiteness, of being mere creatures, made in God’s image but not equal with God;
4. A desire for moral autonomy or self-determination. The serpent planted the thought, and raised the possibility, of rejecting God’s authority to determine the moral law that guides human behaviour. He stirred a desire in Adam and Eve to decide for themselves what is good and evil, without reference to God.
This overturns God’s order of creation, by which we human beings don’t invent morality according to our own ideas and preferences, but receive our whole life purpose, including our vocation to follow ethical norms bequeathed to us by God, as something written into the essence of our being. We can’t refuse to follow these norms without separating ourselves radically from our maker.
And so the essence of the first sin, in the Christian tradition, is a mysterious impulse of human pride, or self-assertion, which took shape interiorly and then expressed itself outwardly in disobedience and rebellion against God.
(Part III, The consequences of the first sin, to follow soon)
Either way, we can summarise the ‘formation process’ of Adam and Eve’s sinful action as follows:
1. A doubt, a lack of faith and trust in God’s love and benevolent, protective care;
2. A suspicion against God that he is withholding some benefit from them which would enhance or improve their lives or provide something ‘extra’ which they don’t possess at present;
3. A kind of envy of God’s divinity and superiority, and a resentment towards, or refusal to accept, the limitations, the finiteness, of being mere creatures, made in God’s image but not equal with God;
4. A desire for moral autonomy or self-determination. The serpent planted the thought, and raised the possibility, of rejecting God’s authority to determine the moral law that guides human behaviour. He stirred a desire in Adam and Eve to decide for themselves what is good and evil, without reference to God.
This overturns God’s order of creation, by which we human beings don’t invent morality according to our own ideas and preferences, but receive our whole life purpose, including our vocation to follow ethical norms bequeathed to us by God, as something written into the essence of our being. We can’t refuse to follow these norms without separating ourselves radically from our maker.
And so the essence of the first sin, in the Christian tradition, is a mysterious impulse of human pride, or self-assertion, which took shape interiorly and then expressed itself outwardly in disobedience and rebellion against God.
* René Voillaume, The Need for Contemplation, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972, p. 30.
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