Genesis 2 and 3: Thoughts on Eden and Serpents

Anyone that I ever want to meet in a dark alley believes that evil is a problem. In particular it is a problem that demands two solutions, both one of origins and one of antidote. Here God gave the ancients a story to understand the first of these two solutions. Here historicity first rears its head, or I should even say modernity rears its head. I do agree with Lewis that the fall is one of those undeniables of history, but I can't help but feel that if we were given, or if the Israelites were given a modern historical account of the fall we would both resound even as one: "what? Really? That was the Fall. Surely that is...what?" What I mean by this is that the actual Fall would be so removed from us culturally that it might even be incomprehensible to us. And so the Israelites were given something they would understand (I have no idea when this story was actually written, though I do lean towards the Exile, so I am being purposefully ambiguous in this regard), namely Eden. The land of two trees, of two covenants, of my way or the highway deuterocanonical theology.

This time reading through the text I couldn't help but feel drawn to this image of Eden. I about Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, where "I" ends his pilgrimage in the Watermill Village, a people who have returned to harmony with nature, a people who have revived Eden. In Watermill Village they don't need electricity because night is supposed to be dark, and no trees are felled because enough trees fall down on their own, and death is something to celebrate because people are supposed to die. This made me wonder if in the fall death did not come, but that the problem of death did. This would explain the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Iliad and why all the ancients were obsessed with death almost as much as modern man is obsessed with forgetting death (our little way of undoing the Fall). It is truly shocking how universal the idea of Eden is. Whether in the Golden Ages of cyclical time, or in the Chinese concept of dynasty, or even today in the American Evangelical view of the time before the sexual revolution, and in our own psychology of lost childhood. The Genesis story seems to roll all these ideas together, Adam and Eve created as children (naked and not ashamed) and the fall is a kind of growing up, where Adam shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to Eve and become one flesh, leaving the garden, the immediate presence of the Father and then having children with Eve, East of Eden.

I was just reading Jaques Ellul's book The Meaning of the City, and in it he makes a good point: contrary to images like Watermill Village, the bible fails to end of in the clearly obvious way, in returning to Eden. Christ does not usher us back into the garden, rather he brings to us a city-temple, the New Jerusalem. Eden like childhood, is left to be itself, and even the knowledge of Good and Evil is redeemed. This sounds very Irenean, the fall as "growing up to soon", and I'm not sure if I'm totally comfortable with that idea, though it does seem to be an important element to the story. I'm not sure I have ever seen in film, or in art, a representation of the New Jerusalem, and I wonder why.

In continuation with what I wrote in the last post, I found myself strangely fascinated by the character of the serpent. I tried to unburden my reading slightly, seeing the snake as just that, a snake and not some personification or image of Satan. Reading in this way, the Fall looks much more like a loss of humanity, a return to beasthood. The snake does what chaos does: they question, man's fall is decreation, devolution. I feel almost that I need to think more about this before I write any more, so I'll just put the idea out there as is.

Genesis 1 - The Illegible Stone

(Rothko)

Am I going to be a man of faith or a man of science? I would rather be a hedonist and that is the truth. Of course this is one of those "background radiation" questions that emanate from this text, and the truth that the question points to un-nerves me to the very core of my modernity. This isn't your grandma's universe, nor your great-grandma's universe for that matter. The cosmology of the text is wild -- not the measured rationality of glasses and after-dinner drinking -- but a primordial screech from a lost antediluvian throat. Here there are no galaxies, no stars, no solar systems, no planets, no moons, no earth (and the modern reader can't help but imagine them there). Instead man stands on earth and breaths in the sky, with the water chaos below and beside and above, and beyond the water chaos -- God. What did Eliot write?

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We start with an illegible stone and an epitaph to a dead Man. Every text is an text in time, and this is a text weathered by time and almost lost to the beating of the modern wind of mind, almost completely worn down, almost. But look carefully. I just thought of that poem by Thomas Merton:

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

Can this text be opened for us like the breaking of the sealed scroll? I think the only thing less open, more "other" than the silence of stones is the reptilian eye. Just remember the first shot in Malick's Thin Red Line, a crocodile swimming through the chaos waters of the chaos jungle, an image of nature at war with itself, the nature that is a destroying power bent on bringing humanity into its own chaos. It is this animal that brings Adam and Eve into itself, into it's own questions. Is the chaos of serpents and water the chaos of questions, as in the romantic sea-foam? Am I asking the questions of serpents even now? Scroll down, scroll down.

I am yet drawn to this story be cause it speaks truth. Surely only a sacrament of the true cosmos, far more good and beautiful than even the freshly cut runes of man can devise (because words are only the sacraments on man's imagination, and the cosmos the sacrament of God's Imagination). But it answers. It says: this is what you believe, ancient man, and I am going to tell you why. The Why and the "what it is really," beyond the stuff. This is the problem for modern man, and the joy of the ancient. I am of course referencing the Cosmic Temple reading but I am trying to get to something deeper. I feel a problem in my own exegesis where two-thousand years into church history and I think I am deciphering the stone. I feel that the text is getting between me and the world, and is it supposed to?

Our universe began in light, pure light, theirs begins in darkness, pure darkness. I feel as if the word should bring be into deeper communion with creation, and not be a wall between me and the truth. I fear that modern exegesis can fall into the same trap as the young-earth modernists, of treating the word as the "thing itself" and not as sacrament.

(I didn't write an apologetic for the use of this ANE cosmology even though there is a perfectly good one to be had by anyone, because I didn't feel like stealing the good ideas of others to that extent today, i.e. John Walton, Rick Watts etc. (that was a very lazy etcetera indeed))