Who told you that you were naked?
The effect of eating the forbidden fruit was
self-consciousness. Before humanity ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we
were in what Tillich called a state of “dreaming innocence.” I suppose what
that means is the unselfconscious innocence of an infant or toddler. A
condition of undifferentiated unity with everything. Part of us will always
want to get back to that state. But that’s a mistake. We can’t, and we are
better off that we can’t. O Felix Culpa
- O happy fault! As Augustine exclaimed.
Adam and Eve suddenly knew that we were naked. That is, they became conscious of themselves as individuals. They knew that They were lacking something. They knew good
and evil. I used to think that this was a reference to the ability to tell
right from wrong. Maybe that's part of it, but maybe there’s something even deeper in
the myth: something related to the sense of the word knowledge as intimate relationship. By knowing good and evil, we
became participants, partakers of everything in the world. Devouring the fruit
is a perfect symbol for that — an ante-type of Holy Communion — humanity joined
itself to good and evil, became a participant in the conflict between them, just
as we, who devour the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ,
become participants in His Resurrection.
But first, we knew that we were naked. We knew that we lacked something — something very important. And we were ashamed. Our sense of lack,
deprivation, is our consciousness of separation from all others — separation
from all that is not “I.” We moderns are
inclined to call this sense of separation Ego.
We knew that we were naked. Ego is that knowledge. And we were ashamed. We felt
that we were lacking something really important.
The first thing that happens is that we begin to alienate
everything else — to regard everything else as other, and not at all in a positive way:. “The Woman, whom You gave me, is to blame.” “The Serpent
beguiled me, and I did eat.” Everybody starts blaming some other — even to the extreme of blaming God — not just recognizing their otherness, but regarding it negatively, as the cause of all their problems.
So how can this be a “Happy Fault?” Augustine says it’s
because it made necessary the Divine Redeemer. Let’s unpack that. The Knowledge
of Good and Evil is, after all the knowledge of good. When humanity becomes
self-conscious, it is conscious of the great and wonderful and indescribable
and infinite goodness of all that God has made. When we become conscious as all animals are conscious, we experience God’s goodness, but in a very limited sense: we
feel it, we sense it, but we don’t know it.
The forbidden fruit takes our consciousness further by making us conscious of Goodness — and of ourselves as
imperfect. That is the dark side of the fruit's effects. “Who told you that you
were naked?”
Augustine, and following him all Western theologians, regard
evil as a nullity — nothing, in itself, but only a privation or diminution of
the real. Evil is a kind of parasite, that ceases to exist when its host dies. By analogy, let us think of an apple that is
blemished and beginning to rot. The fact that it is there at all, as an apple, is good. [Everything that God made was very good.] The mar, the blemish, the incipient process of rotting is what
we call evil. In this view, the rot itself has no being: it is a process, a
process of dying, of tending toward non-being. When complete, there is nothing left at all, not even the
rot. Stated theologically, “evil has no substance.”
So, evil is not the opposite of good, nor is evil necessary
— as some would say — for us to recognize good, but evil is the privation of good. When humanity became
individually self-conscious, we knew goodness in a new way a higher way. That
is why it was a “happy fault.” But along with it came the consciousness of our
own imperfection: we became aware that we were naked. And we were ashamed.
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