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GENESIS A Commentary (cont.)
The Loss of Paradise.
That part of the judgment of God upon the serpent which prescribes the enmity between the two species is called traditionally the Protoevangelium, as it were the prototype or first draft of the Gospel. The Lord then proceeds to prescribe the penalties for the woman and finally the man. It is important to realise that these penalties are not vindictive. They are meant to remedy the evils which had brought about the fall, the evils namely of pride and hubris. St Augustine himself poses the objection that even animals, who have not sinned, experience pain in parturition, and he argues from this that a moral truth is being inculcated. He says that the pain of giving birth is a symbol of the downside of all earthly pleasures. But the good result is that this disappointment can cause the woman to “desire her husband,” which is a symbol of the desire to return to reason and wisdom. This would explain why some people who have sinned grievously in the flesh have repented nobly and become saints. According to this reasoning the punishment that henceforth he dominates her can be understood in a moral sense as the painful return of the soul by penance to reason and wisdom. This is one example of how the consequences of the Fall are such as to remedy and contain the evil.
Man is punished as breadwinner. Instead of being in the privileged position of God’s Lord High Steward he now has to struggle for a bare living. From having been a lord he becomes a peasant, a wage-slave. The earth is cursed. Some of the Fathers note that it was from the thorns which now cumber the earth that a crown was later made for the Son of God. Other Fathers deal with the objection that in fact not everyone lives the hard life of a peasant. Some people never harden or soil their hands with ungrateful toil! Yet even the rich have sorrows derived indeed from wealth itself, such as fear of the taxman, recession, the revolutionary and the thief. The persepective of evolution suggests another thought. For millennia after the arrival of Homo Sapiens, humans were hunters and gatherers, not toilers but benefit-scroungers. It was thousands of years before they began to till the soil and cultivate crops. Clearly this text was written in the agricultural, not the hunter-gatherer era. Then it was only a relatively short step before they advanced to the further stage of social and civilised life, but even now after industrialisation the majority of the human race barely survives above subsistence level.
It is at this point, in judging man, that death first comes on the scene in the Bible. True, it has been threatened already in chapter 2 v.17 –in the day that you shall eat of it you shall die. But that reference was in a legal context, indicating that eating of the forbidden tree was a capital offence, almost, you could say, in the small print of Adam’s contract. But now it becomes a physical reality and stares him in the face. Death is a bitter reminder of what we are made of – dust. But even death is not thought of by God as purely penal but rather as a remedy. As Job says – There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest . . . the small and great are there and the slave is free from his master. It brings to an end the life of unremitting toil and battle with implacable nature. The thought of death also compels even the most successful person to a certain humility. There must be millions of souls in Purgatory, even in Heaven, now who would never have been saved if they had been allowed to live without fear or experience of death.
In ch 3. v.20 we are recalled to the theme of Adam’s naming of the animals, when he failed to discover among them a fitting helper and companion for himself. Evidently he experiences now that his wife is also mother. The verse is a little matriarchal touch, referring to Eve as mother of the living, rather than to Adam our patriarch, and reminding us of the special position in the royal court of Jerusalem of the GIBBORAH, the Queen-mother. In the next verse I wonder if it is fanciful to see the first religious habits? Adam and Eve had made their first clothes out of fig-leaves, mere make-shift contrivances. Now God himself becomes tailor for them, tailor such as not even Jermyn Street or Gamarelli’s in Rome can boast. However, some of the Fathers wondered where the animal skins came from, being rather shocked by the thought that the Lord may have killed some animals in the presence of the first humans.
The chapter ends with the formal Expulsion, often depicted by artists. It is another example of God’s continuing concern to limit the damage from the Fall. Scholars see in this text overtones of a mythical struggle between man and God, such that God has to drive man from Paradise by force, man who, having become a rebel, would, if he ate from the other tree live for ever in that state in possession of Paradise. The sacred writer, knowing that approach to the mysteries of religion is always dangerous for sinners and the guilty, maybe as it were exorcises any unorthodoxy about this idea by giving it a moral dimension. The sacred writer may have used the familiar images of the monsters guarding the portals of Babylonian palaces to describe the cherubim. The sword really seems to be a thunderbolt or lightning drawn in zig-zag, used in myths as a weapon to prevent access, a No Admisssion sign. A king of Assyria used such an image in decreeing that a city he had destroyed should not be rebuilt. The meaning is that there is absolutely no way in which Homo Sapiens can put the clock back and regain Paradise except through Christ who alone turns aside the flaming sword of the cherubim. Notice that in all these arrangements God continues to look after man and provide what is necessary. C.D. |