A more charitable reading of the Adam and Eve story?

[edwest]

This is not a viable explanation. Jesus Christ is literally alive right now and will return to judge the living and the dead. To use the mind of man as the source ignores the way God made us and taught us. Adam and Eve were given one command and they freely broke it. They were not obedient robots. We can’t force another human being to love us - truly care for us. God will not force us to love Him.

 

[OneSheep]

This is not a viable explanation. Jesus Christ is literally alive right now and will return to judge the living and the dead. To use the mind of man as the source ignores the way God made us and taught us. Adam and Eve were given one command and they freely broke it. They were not obedient robots. We can’t force another human being to love us - truly care for us. God will not force us to love Him.

Hi Ed,

Not sure what you are addressing. Are you responding to the OP?

Thanks

 

[Learner1969]

I read last night that when Jesus died and went to Hell he took Adam to Heaven when he rose again, is this a Catholic belief?

 

[sevenswords]

“the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’”
God meant Death, they had not become Immortal as Jesus the tree of Life was denied to them .
They Gained knowledge in a sense that they now were no longer innocent children happy to walk around naked and with no shame, as God had not given them any burdens other than to look after the place and be fruitful with each other.
When Satan seduced eve he took her innocents away,and like all sin it is sweet at first but bitter afterwards, Eve allowed herself to be seduced and got her husband to taste the fruit of sin and both released that they were naked first and tried to cover themselves as a child would when it becomes conscious of it’s self image. Then they still in a child like state hid from God when they heard him.
you hear the manner of God is like the manner of a knowing parent talking to a child, what have you done? have you eaten of that tree? as if he didn’t know what they did.
etc
I think this narrates the awakening of mankind, they got a taste of what it’s like to Live with and to know God before they where sent off to school.
God has made them aware that there is danger outside and they need to obey him if they want to make it back.
So to this day we are children in a school learning Good from Evil and once that the lesson is learned God will wrap it all up and we will go on home and this time we will have knowledge of Good and Evil and will know not to go there ever again.
This is all we need to take from this passage of our beginnings. We are all one from one parents and will one day become one again in Christ and Mary our new parents

 

[OneSheep]

Check out CCC635 and 637.

 

[Learner1969]

Thanks

 

[agnimusca]

Sounds right, @edwest! Do you think that’s in conflict with @OneSheep’s interpretation-proposal? As far as I can tell, all of it might be compatible with reading Genesis 3 fully literally – it’s just an attempt to dig into how the literal truth relates to the nature of sin and suffering as they are understood by the church. Are you saying that it tries to understand Genesis 3 too thoroughly, or at least in more psychologically understandable terms, and we shouldn’t do that?

 

[Vico]

…

The definition of evil you gave is the illusion that there is some part of of our life, that is to be held unacceptable, and that holding causes suffering.

What is assumes is that holding something to be unacceptable is an illusion. This is fundamentally in opposition to Christianity where moral evil is “the deviation of human volition from the prescriptions of the moral order and the action which results from that deviation.”

Sharpe, A. (1909). Evil. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05649a.htm

 

[agnimusca]

Hi, @Vico! I’m not sure @OneSheep meant it that way, but it seems optional for the interpretation in any case. The version of the proposal that I kind of like, at least, would have it that there is a kind of illusion in holding that something is unacceptable, but just when by “unacceptable” we mean “worthy of rejecting in a way that adds more (‘unredeemed’) suffering than the thing at issue already involves”.

A related proposal is that the things that are in fact (e.g. morally) unacceptable (but not in that ‘adding more unredeemed suffering’ way) are all things that themselves involve rejecting or finding unacceptable – this time in the ‘adding-more-suffering’ way – things that are in fact gifts of God’s creation.

People sin, goes the thought, because they reject some bit of God’s creation as unworthy of acceptance. (That even sounds a bit like “deviation of human volition from the prescriptions of the moral order and the action which results from that deviation”, in some ways.) They might, for instance, reject the (perfectly fine) fact that they aren’t having much luck making more money than their peers and respond, out of fear of the unacceptability of having just an average amount of wealth, by embezzling funds or stealing or undercutting people.

Probably there are lots of problems with the proposal, still, but does that make sense, in terms of the compatibility with doctrine?

 

[Vico]

Hi, @Vico! I’m not sure @OneSheep meant it that way, but it seems optional for the interpretation in any case. The version of the proposal that I kind of like, at least, would have it that there is a kind of illusion in holding that something is unacceptable, but just when by “unacceptable” we mean “worthy of rejecting in a way that adds more (‘unredeemed’) suffering than the thing at issue already involves”.

A related proposal is that the things that are in fact (e.g. morally) unacceptable (but not in that ‘adding more unredeemed suffering’ way) are all things that themselves involve rejecting or finding unacceptable – this time in the ‘adding-more-suffering’ way – things that are in fact gifts of God’s creation.

People sin, goes the thought, because they reject some bit of God’s creation as unworthy of acceptance. (That even sounds a bit like “deviation of human volition from the prescriptions of the moral order and the action which results from that deviation”, in some ways.) They might, for instance, reject the (perfectly fine) fact that they aren’t having much luck making more money than their peers and respond, out of fear of the unacceptability of having just an average amount of wealth, by embezzling funds or stealing or undercutting people.

Probably there are lots of problems with the proposal, still, but does that make sense, in terms of the compatibility with doctrine?

There are mortally sinful acts and these are unacceptable for salvation and deification. It it necessary for proper formation of conscience to understand this. Adam and Eve had a state of original justice and infused knowledge even before their choice to sin mortally. Catechism

400 The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination.282 Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man.283 Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”.284 Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”,285 for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history .286
282 Cf. Gen 3:7-16.
283 Cf. Gen 3:17,19.
284 Rom 8:21.
285 Gen 3:19; cf. 2:17.
286 Cf. Rom 5:12.

 

[agnimusca]

That all sounds good, @Vico – something can be unacceptable for salvation and deification in the simple sense that it makes salvation and deification impossible.

In contrast, @OneSheep’s proposal, as I’m understanding it, is that our capacity to ‘find things unacceptable’ in a different sense is itself what underlies sin and our separation from God. In particular, it’s the kind of ‘finding things unacceptable’ that involves emotionally rejecting what God has given – that is, rejecting in a way that endorses further suffering when the thing we reject doesn’t go away.

As @OneSheep suggested above at some point, the interpretation is in line with the idea that when we or other people sin, we’re not called to hate ourselves or others or reject them in any way that involves feeling ill-will towards them – that’s just further sin, further deployment of the capacity underlying original sin, by adding more suffering to something that is only bad in the first place because it causes the suffering of separating ourselves and others from God and His creation.

That doesn’t mean that sin isn’t a barrier to salvation and deification, of course, and therefore (again, in a very different sense) unacceptable. Part of what I like about the proposal is that it even promises some clarification of why sin is a barrier to salvation and of the nature of salvation as such, as a state of whole peace and acceptance of God in all his creation. So it also promises some clarification of why Adam and Eve’s sin made it so that

Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile

– and in a way that explains more tightly and fully why they were the cause of that alienness and disharmony, namely because they came to find parts of God’s creation unacceptable in the way at issue.

Does that make sense? To me it seems like there is space for this distinction in ‘ways of finding unacceptable’ and that the point is still substantive without going against doctrine, but I may be wrong.

 

[Roguish]

I’m open to correction, but this sounds semi-Buddhist.

Well, I’ll correct you then, if you don’t mind. The “charitable interpretation” of Genesis that was put forth by the OP is indeed wrong, but it isn’t Buddhist or even semi-Buddhist. To claim that it is, is a bit of an insult to Buddhism. Authentic Buddhism isn’t a wishy-washy religion that holds that we should all “accept everything as part of the whole”. Like Christianity, it is a religion that requires man to eliminate sin and cultivate virtue in order that he may thus work his salvation. But I understand where you got the wrong impression: most books on Buddhism available in the West are modern re-interpretations of Buddhism and do indeed give the impression that it’s about being “at peace with the cosmos”. Well, it isn’t.

Anyway, I’m totally off-topic. I’m just a little tired of all the misinterpretations of Buddhism.

 

[Vico]

emotionally rejecting what God has given – that is, rejecting in a way that endorses further suffering when the thing we reject doesn’t go away.

Sin is a matter of will not feeling. So do you mean by rejecting an act of will, but done in an emotionally way? I do not see how being done emotionally would be a necessary condition.

 

[agnimusca]

Sin is a matter of will not feeling. So do you mean by rejecting an act of will, but done in an emotionally way? I do not see how being done emotionally would be a necessary condition.

This seems like a really good question for the proposal!

As I see it, the thought is that sin – which as you say has got to be a matter of will – is driven by rejecting God’s creation in an emotional way. I find that pretty plausible, to be honest, insofar as our emotions seem to come packaged with evaluative commitments – anger and anxiety say something like ‘this is bad!’, for instance – and the will basically involves either consenting or not consenting to those implicit values.

So I think the claim is that this kind of emotional rejection is a necessary condition (but not at all a sufficient condition, of course!) for sin, if only a necessary condition in the causal sense that we wouldn’t be motivated to sin if we didn’t see God’s creation as worthy of rejection in this emotional way.

That does sound like an extremely hard-to-defend claim. But it has some striking connections to the catechism’s take on sin:

Sin is […] a failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods […]. Sin sets itself against God’s love for us and turns our hearts away from it. Like the first sin, it [results from] the will to become ‘like gods,’ knowing and determining good and evil. (1849-1850)

The root of all sins lies in man’s heart. (1873)

Sin involves ‘turning our hearts’ away from God, and is caused by a ‘perverse attachment’, both of which sound emotional and involve a kind of rejection. More directly, given that sin involves knowing on some level that we’re going against God, we would need some countervailing evaluative pressure away from the natural appreciation of the things God wills. And ‘rejection in an emotional way’ would seem to fit the bill. Maybe it’s even uniquely suited to play that role.
Because without that knowledge, anything we did that looked sinful wouldn’t be (right?), and with that knowledge we would need to decide what that knowledge represents as valuable is in fact not.

 

[Vico]

Vico:

Sin is a matter of will not feeling. So do you mean by rejecting an act of will, but done in an emotionally way? I do not see how being done emotionally would be a necessary condition.

This seems like a really good question for the proposal!

As I see it, the thought is that sin – which as you say has got to be a matter of will – is driven by rejecting God’s creation in an emotional way. I find that pretty plausible, to be honest, insofar as our emotions seem to come packaged with evaluative commitments – anger and anxiety say something like ‘this is bad!’, for instance – and the will basically involves either consenting or not consenting to those implicit values.

So I think the claim is that this kind of emotional rejection is a necessary condition (but not at all a sufficient condition, of course!) for sin, if only a necessary condition in the causal sense that we wouldn’t be motivated to sin if we didn’t see God’s creation as worthy of rejection in this emotional way.

That does sound like an extremely hard-to-defend claim. But it has some striking connections to the catechism’s take on sin:

Sin is […] a failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods […]. Sin sets itself against God’s love for us and turns our hearts away from it. Like the first sin, it [results from] the will to become ‘like gods,’ knowing and determining good and evil. (1849-1850)

The root of all sins lies in man’s heart. (1873)

Sin involves ‘turning our hearts’ away from God, and is caused by a ‘perverse attachment’, both of which sound emotional and involve a kind of rejection. More directly, given that sin involves knowing on some level that we’re going against God, we would need some countervailing evaluative pressure away from the natural appreciation of the things God wills. And ‘rejection in an emotional way’ would seem to fit the bill. Maybe it’s even uniquely suited to play that role.
Because without that knowledge, anything we did that looked sinful wouldn’t be (right?), and with that knowledge we would need to decide what that knowledge represents as valuable is in fact not.

However by heart it does not mean emotion but core. The original sin is not one of passion but willful pride – I will decide for myself what is good not what God has given me, I will not trust God.

 

[agnimusca]

Interesting, @Roguish! I agree about the prevalence of misinterpretations of Buddhism, especially as wishy-washy (or especially as relativistic!).

That said, I’m finding it hard to deny that @OneSheep’s proposal has something important in common with Buddhism, insofar as they both attribute the ills of humankind to something like attachment. The Buddha claimed that suffering is caused by clinging and craving, which involve rejecting what is ‘given’ – and Buddhism’s answer to that problem is to drop your attachments – all of them – by eliminating sin and cultivating virtue through the eight-fold noble path. So that – and salvation, which is just the cessation of suffering – does seem to involve, in a way, accepting everything that is given. Because the reason we suffer (rather than just having pain) is that we resist or reject what is given, and the ultimate goal of virtue and so on, with respect to suffering, is to experience things ‘as though joined with them’. (I’m getting much of this from the Sallatha Sutta.)

Another common worry (though a pretty subtle one, so probably not as common as the wishy-washiness misconception) – explicitly acknowledged in Buddhism – is not to take that idea – the idea that accepting what arises is the answer to suffering – as meaning that ‘everything is fine’ and there is nothing we need to do and no sin or sin-like behavior to eliminate. (Maybe that’s related to your concerns with the idea of there being nothing more to it than being ‘at peace with the cosmos’?) Because for the Buddha at least, suffering and thus attachment are huge problems, and they are the cause of our bad actions and thoughts, which are also problems. But not, it’s worth noting, ones warranting rejection in the way that comes from and adds more craving and attachment and suffering.

 

[agnimusca]

However by heart it does not mean emotion but core. The original sin is not one of passion but willful pride – I will decide for myself what is good not what God has given me, I will not trust God.

You may be right, @Vico, though the catechism doesn’t obviously favor a dichotomy between emotion and ‘core’. But more importantly I completely agree that sin is not about passion, full stop – as you say, it’s definitely about the will and the ‘core’. I’m just suggesting that the will (‘core’) is precisely a free endorsement of some desires (which philosophy and neuroscience strongly suggest are inherently affective, if not overtly ‘emotional’ all the time) over others, which means it has, as seeds, these desire-like and at least evaluative mental states. And (if what I was saying in the previous post was right), those might well be necessary (but not sufficient) for the will to decide on sin.

I also totally agree that original sin involves ‘deciding for ourselves what is good’. And I actually think @OneSheep’s proposal is promising partly because it might help explain what that means – maybe the difference between Adam and Eve before and after the fall is that before, they accepted what was given and were in harmony with creation, and afterwards (and constitutively as part of the fall) they came to see God’s creation as unacceptable, in an emotional way, and willfully rejected it, leading to suffering and disharmony with God and His creation (including each other).

 

[agnimusca]

I also agree that the proposal in the OP seems a bit problematic in this light and also unlike Buddhism, insofar as it suggests that knowledge of evil – of something that is to be held unacceptable – is not really knowledge but an illusion:

“knowledge” of evil, which in itself is the illusion that there is some[thing] […] that is to be held unacceptable.

But it’s not clear to me that we need to read the OP as saying that nothing is in fact evil or (more charitably) that evil is identical to an illusion, which I have a hard time wrapping my head around at all. The close-by thing that I find a bit more plausible is that there’s an illusion constitutively involved in evil and sin: namely the illusion that something that is good and from God (which includes all of God’s creation) is in fact bad, not worthy of acceptance, etc.

And then, to tie it all together, the sin enabled by that illusion is in fact unacceptable. But (like the Buddha!) the OP can be read as suggesting that finding sin unacceptable in the way revealed to us through revelation and the church (and nature) is a wholly different kind of ‘finding unacceptable’ than the kind – related to Buddhist craving, clinging, and attachment – that enables sin and leads to suffering in the first place. (And if we find sin unacceptable in that way, we’re doing something in excess of recognizing the gravity of sin, and might even be falling into the same mindset that leads to sin.)

Sorry for throwing all that at you – I think the proposal is really interesting, and I’m still trying to see if it can be made (probably, as noted, with some relatively significant modification/precisification) coherent and consistent with doctrine. Also, please correct me on the Buddhist stuff if I’m misrepresenting it or falling into some of the same misinterpretations!

 

[edwest]

That doesn’t follow Catholic teaching. God gave both one command and they freely broke it. This led to a spiritual and physical condition called Original Sin. Prior to that, God had given them gifts, including bodily immortality. That ended, and Jesus Christ had to be born.

 

[Vico]

…

St. Thomas Aquinas expressed the idea of general benefit to be obtained and he called it the irascible appetite. Sensitive appetites are specific and can be related to attractions or repulsions. So the sensitive appetites were under control in Adam and Eve through a preternatural gift. The irascible were not controlled through preternatural gift but through supernatural gift that they were constituted with.

“those passions which regard good or bad as arduous, through being difficult to obtain or avoid, belong to the irascible faculty; such are daring, fear, hope and the like.”

Consider what St. Basil wrote that evil has no living animated essence but is rather a condition of the soul, Hexaemeron (Homily 2):

It is equally impious to say that evil has its origin from God; because the contrary cannot proceed from its contrary. Life does not engender death; darkness is not the origin of light; sickness is not the maker of health. In the changes of conditions there are transitions from one condition to the contrary; but in genesis each being proceeds from its like, and not from its contrary. If then evil is neither uncreate nor created by God, from whence comes its nature? Certainly that evil exists, no one living in the world will deny. What shall we say then? Evil is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed in the careless on account of their falling away from good.

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32012.htm