On the
Fall of Man, recounted in but a few verses in the third chapter of Genesis, one
might well fill many shelves full of books, so rich is the mythic presentation
of what Newman called the aboriginal calamity, a disastrous turning away from
God wherein we are all involved.
All I hope
to do here is to point out one feature wherein the nature of sin is seen as it
were in the evil kernel, and therefore also the contradictions inherent in the
unredeemed human condition.
The sacred
author is careful to tell us that Adam and Eve were naked, and were not
ashamed. Here we would do well to recall the Greek myths of the so-called
Golden Age, when Cronus (Saturn) ruled, before his son Zeus seized his empire.
During that
time, human beings lived in peace, but also in rustic barbarity – a
not-quite-human innocence, or rather innocuousness, a life of gathering acorns
and drinking from the streams. They were not holy, godlike, or naked.
But Adam
and Eve are, in the beginning, all these things. They have been made in the
image and likeness of God; Adam has exercised the divine power of the intellect
in naming the beasts; and he has burst into praise upon seeing the goodness and
the rightness of his wife Eve, brought to him by God.
Eve is not
a Pandora visited upon mankind by a malevolent Zeus. Adam and Eve are naked,
implying that they belong to one another frankly and freely, with nothing to
hide from one another or from God, because as Adam says, “a man shall leave
father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one
flesh.”
God is the
first in Scripture to command: He spoke, and they were made, as the Psalmist
says. But Adam is the first to prophesy, and that too is a godlike act.
So the
nakedness is not a symbol of foolishness. A remarkable pun in the original
Hebrew text is of tremendous consequence. Adam and Eve were naked, ’erom,
but the serpent was the subtlest beast of all the field, ’erom,
pronounced with a glottal opening before the initial vowel.
Milton
seems to have caught the pun and made it one of the central dramatic motifs in Paradise
Lost. So Satan, on the fateful morning of the temptation, appears in the
body of that subtlest beast, “in whose mazy folds / To hide me, and the dark
intent I bring.”
Satan is
always hiding, from God, the loyal angels, his fellow demons, Adam and Eve, and
himself; even his initial plan of rebellion against the Son is couched in terms
of secrecy and duplicity, as he whispers to his bed-mate Beelzebub: “More
in this place / To utter is not safe.”
And Adam
and Eve, after they have eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, and made love
in the fury of first licentiousness, find themselves not clad “in naked
majesty,” as before, but cloaked in confusion and shame:
Up they
rose
As from unrest, and each the other viewing,
Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds
How darkened; innocence, that as a veil
Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone,
Just confidence, and native righteousness,
And honor from about them, naked left
To guilty shame; he covered, but his robe
Uncovered more.
As from unrest, and each the other viewing,
Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds
How darkened; innocence, that as a veil
Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone,
Just confidence, and native righteousness,
And honor from about them, naked left
To guilty shame; he covered, but his robe
Uncovered more.
Those last
words ending in the broken line, with their astonishing reversal of images, are
among the saddest in all of literature.
Sad because
true, as the sacred author means to show us. We are compelled by the pun to set
the cunning against the nakedness. The telltale of sin is the need to hide, or,
to put it another way, to present a false front, to cloak nothingness in a
pretended glory.
Adam and
Eve in their nakedness are for one another and are free to speak with
God as friend with friend. It is not subhuman but perfectly human and therefore
divine. But the cunning, the subtle cloaking of the serpent is meant to spoil
that nakedness.
His lie
about the forbidden fruit is a lie about God and about the love that God has
showered upon the human couple – the lords of Paradise. “God doth know,” he
says, “that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be
opened: and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
He is
calling God a liar and a concealer: as if Adam and Eve do not already
enjoy the knowledge of good as such. That includes the goodness of marriage
itself. For, after all, if Adam and Eve are to fulfill the command, “Be
fruitful, and multiply,” and if they are to cleave to one another, bone of bone
and flesh of flesh, then they must know one another in the powerful
sense of the Hebrew verb, so often and so stupidly obscured by bad modern
translations.
After the
sin, Adam and Eve require the pathetic fig leaves to hide their nakedness, and
when God approaches them in the garden, they are still in hiding. In other
words, they are no longer ’erom, naked, but ’erom, cunning,
subtle – and foolish.
For who can
hide from God? God probes the inmost heart, and sheds light upon those dark
corners of the heart where we huddle, trying to hide our eyes from Him and from
our own selves.
Adam and
Eve hide “from the face of the Lord,” another verse now stupidly translated so
as to remove the Hebrew word for face: because to face someone is to look
upon him openly. So the Psalmist cries out: “When shall I come and appear
before the face of God?” And Saint Paul looks forward to that time when we will
know, even as we are known, because we will see God “face to face.”
Then will
the original lie be undone forever.
