NOTE: This is a work in progress. I wrote this a couple months ago, but I'm not sure if I ever finished it; there may be incomplete paragraphs and poor thought-continuity. I apologize in advance. Nonetheless, I'm going to publish it. Rest assured I will review and update, accordingly. For the time being, I hope this helps inspire something in someone, out there. :-)
The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. Genesis II and III. I used to hate this story when I was younger. It turns out, in my older years, it’s become one of my favorites.
Most everyone in the western world is familiar with the story: God creates Adam and, from his side, Eve, then plops them in the Garden of Eden. The Latin scriptures relate it as “paradisum voluptatis,” or “paradise of pleasures.” The Greek uses the term παράδεισος — paradeisos — which is a borrowed term but suits the purpose well enough. Adam and Eve (“man” and “life” respectively, by the way; the Greek retains the name Adam, but Eve becomes Zoe) are given the Garden to steward and enjoy, and the primary instruction is simple: don’t eat from one specific tree in the middle of the Garden.
This, of course, foreshadows their initial transgression. God tells the first couple that eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil will result in their death: “thou shalt die the death” (Genesis 2:17). This is an explicit doubling, present in both the Greek and the Latin — “die the death.” Interesting. It’s not, as a lot of popular theology recounts, the Tree of Good and Evil — the tree doesn’t imbue the consumer with appetites or inclinations to do good and evil; it imbues the knowledge of good and evil. This is important.
This whole narrative is often treated as a magical fantasy about the origins of “badness” in people. This is particularly popular among Protestants. They read the story as if it is purely historical narrative, or — on the other end — an entirely allegorical expression of the loss of innocence (sometimes injecting an explicitly sexual element in this latter interpretation, a belief which some scholars, like Elaine Pagels, have also speculated the early Gnostic cults held). Both of these are problematic in their own way, but we’re not going to tangle with disassembling theology.
Instead, I’m going to reference the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 388-390, which establishes a few basic truths about the Christian understanding of this doctrine. First and foremost is that the account is written using allegorical language, but describes an actual event. This is kind of like when we say “I died” to express laughing; we’re talking about something real, but the language is figurative. More importantly, it establishes the essential dichotomy: the Fall narrative is the antagonist of the Gospel; it’s what necessitates Christ’s salvation in the first place. This is also important.
We need to remember that the Fall doesn’t happen first. God creates everything in Genesis 1, last of all humans in Genesis 2, and calls it all good and blesses His creation. At this point, there’s no need for the Word to become flesh and deliver the Gospel, because there’s no sin to bring redemption from: everything is good and blessed. When the primordial parents eat the fruit, it imbues in them the knowledge of good and evil, and “their eyes are opened” (Genesis 3:7); it is this single act by which sin enters into the human race (see Romans 5:12-14, where Paul spells it out for us, plainly).
The Meaning of “Sin”
This is a fun topic because the term “sin” is, I think, greatly misunderstood. Again – popular theology creates a misconception, and many people judge faith on this wrong perception, rather than making the effort to understand first and then apply that understanding.
The Greek term that is translated as “sin” is ἁμαρτία; its Latin counterpart is “peccatum.” In both cases, the inference is simply of an error or misjudgment, which results in guilt. When I went through confirmation preparation in The Episcopal Church, the priest leading the class described it as “missing the mark,” and while this isn’t wrong from a philosophical perspective, it fails to deliver on providing the understanding as to why rectifying this problem required the body and blood of Christ. The Catechism adds a little more context to this, and begins by framing it in the context of the Fall. Notably, the Catechism, at 386 declares:
To try to understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in its true identity as humanity’s rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weight heavy on human life and history.
Then, in the very next paragraph (CCC 387), this gets expanded further:
Only in the knowledge of God’s plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving each other.
So, I have to ask, why was the only opportunity (at least as far as we know) for Adam and Eve to sin expressed as the acquisition of knowledge about good and evil? My inner philosopher treats this as an epistemological and an ontological question: what is the real nature of knowledge, and what is the relationship of knowledge to sin? Then, I have to ask, how does this impede our ability to love God and each other, and how did Jesus teach us to overcome it?
This is not about questioning theology; it’s about upholding it in practice.
I feel like I should clarify, here, that this isn’t an attempt to definitively explain the concept of sin. Instead, I want to share a personal revelation: my own greatest transgression in life — and one I see in almost everyone else — is exactly what the Fall narrative is using to exemplify the principle of sin. Perhaps that’s because, for all of us, it’s our first mistake ever, or the root from which all future mistakes flow. Regardless, seeing this clearly in myself — that is, the relationship of the acquisition of forbidden knowledge to the erroneous application of the same — was instrumental in convicting me in the Catholic faith, and I hope it helps someone else, somewhere, too.
What does it mean to know something?
Let’s start with the ontology of knowledge. This, itself, is difficult, because philosophers can only agree on one thing: that we can’t agree on what determines whether we know something. However, I’m going to spare you the long explanations of what that means and reduce it to a relatable context.
Suffice it to say, we have two modes of knowing — subjective and objective. The former is relative, the latter is absolute, and both are necessary and essential for understanding our relationship to the world around us. We aren’t really privy to an objective understanding of much; Descartes came to the conclusion that there is only one thing we can know with any certainty — cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” We can only really know, objectively, that we have being, that we exist. The reason being primarily because we cannot know for certain whether our perceptions are complete, or if we are lacking a crucial (if not subtle) piece of information that could change the perception entirely, and since we cannot know anything about what we don’t know exists, we cannot rule out the fact that other circumstances exist which might alter our perception were we to know about them.
Take science, for example. Science claims objective knowledge — but only within the domain of materialism. It is not scientific to say “there is no spiritual dimension because we cannot see, feel, or measure the spirit,” because the spirit is beyond the material world and cannot be defined by it. This would be a logical fallacy, manipulating the conclusion by defining something based on the properties of something irrelevant to it; it becomes a metaphysical question at that point, which science itself acknowledges is a limit it cannot proceed beyond, and so must refrain from making any claims about what is not material. Furthermore, this means it cannot rule out the possibility of domains beyond the physical, which may directly impact and alter our perception of the physical — such as the presence of God. Since science cannot empirically measure the spiritual dimension in any meaningful way, it cannot discount the possibility that it has properties that affect physical world. In that respect, even science has a subjective element that makes it difficult to claim any real, tangible objective knowledge; what science can claim is pragmatic knowledge of the physical, material world.
But pragmatic knowledge is not objective, absolute truth. We still don’t really know. The “brain in a vat” thought experiment is popular for introducing philosophy students to this principle. If you consent that your perceptions are real and true, you still cannot guarantee the conclusions you draw from them are absolute truth because you’re limited to what you can perceive. You think you have a body because you perceive it, but what if you’re really just a brain, connected to an advanced simulation platform, that has created the illusion of your being by sending the correct electrical impulses to your brain? How would you know since your brain can only perceive the stimulus it’s being given?
We can, on the other hand, claim to have some certainty of subjective knowledge. If I look out my window, right now, the sky is dark and the moon is a bright silver disc overhead. If I asked everyone in my apartment complex to do the same, they would likely confirm they see the same thing. Subjectively, we are sharing the same perception, so we can establish a subjective, pragmatic truth: the sky is dark, the moon is full, and this probably means it’s nighttime. But if I call my coworkers in the Beijing office and tell them it’s nighttime, they’re going to look outside and see a blue sky lit up by a golden sun, and they can establish, among themselves, that we are wrong an it is, in fact, day.
Are any of us wrong? No. But our subjective perceptions, assuming we did not know how day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth, might lead to disagreements about what is true and draw into question whether or not any of us knows what time it really is, or if we’re just discussing a subjective truth.
We could use thought experiments like this ad nauseam but I think this is sufficient to explain the difficulties of actually knowing something. No matter how much evidence we have, if even one piece of evidence does not confirm what we know, it violates the nature of absolute knowing, and we cannot claim to have objective knowledge without further subjective context.
Yet we make this error all day, every day when we interact with each other. And most important, when we make claims about morality. What may seem right and just for one person almost always has another party who may view that perspective as immoral or wrong. If this weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have so many theories about morality.
Aristotle postulated virtue ethics; Kant postulated deontology; Mill expounded on utilitarianism. Even when we thought we had covered all the bases, Hannah Arendt uncovered the principle she called “the banality of evil,” and Nel Noddings explored the implications of care on ethical judgment. Mill identified the issue of discrepancy between “legal” and “just” and much more recently, T. M. Scanlon introduced contractual deontology. Yet, in spite of all of this, we are no closer to have a definitive definition of morality.
We cannot, with any certainty, say we know what constitutes what is right or wrong — what is good and what is evil. Every postulation has fallen short in some way, and it’s almost absurd and insane that we still try. Whenever we think we “finally got it,” something else pops up to challenge that presumption, and we find we don’t, in fact, “get it.”
In short, we lack the omniscience to guarantee that our perceptions are complete and, therefore, we cannot say with certainty in any situation that something is right or wrong.
The Genesis 3 narrative is a beautiful mythopoesis of this phenomena. We have acquired, by eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the understanding to recognize, in the scope of our perceptions, whether something is good or bad subjectively in relation to ourselves, but we lack the omniscience to make these claims objectively. That is entirely God’s prerogative: only with omniscience does subjective perception become one and the same with objectivity.
The relationship of knowing to the concept of sin
In our day-to-day, we tend to disregard these considerations. We are driven not by objectivity (and certainly not by the omniscience necessary to make our subjective perceptions synonymous with objectivity) but by our emotions, our desires, and — most of all — our pride. These things collectively form the ego. God knew that, were we to partake of the ability to reason about morality, our egos would win out. Take the Cain and Abel example: Cain’s pride causes him to be jealous and he kills his brother. God warned him: do good and you will be rewarded; otherwise the wages of sin lie at the door. (There is some intriguing exposition on that story, as well, but we’ll save that for another time).
So we create laws, driven by our ego’s certainty that it knows, that are applied objectively but this is also insufficient, because it unfairly disregards a subjective element. This is why, when the temple priests kick up a fuss about healing on the Sabbath, Jesus draws their attention to David and his men eating the temple bread when they are starving. They technically did something “unlawful” but it is given subjective leniency — there is an extension of grace because the act is unquestionably justified and approved by God.
Our problem is that we demand proof of that approval before we are willing to extend that grace and, to make matters worse, we can’t agree on what qualifies as “proof of approval.” We all want to think, driven by our ego, that we are “right” because we see what makes sense to us — our subjective perceptions. But without the omniscience to see the “big picture” and claim objective knowing, and without an objective measure of what is moral (which moral philosophy will likely never be able to produce because of the dynamics between these different elements), every claim we make about what is “good” and “bad” will have a situation where it creates a misjudgment, either on the part of the person who thinks it is okay to do what it is not okay, or on that of the person who judges something wrong that could be just; in either case, there is sure to be guilt for some and elitism for others. This is where the Catechism‘s remarks about the importance of understanding our relationship to God start to make sense.
Paul says “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” and this is where we come full circle to relationship between the Fall and the Incarnation of the Word. Because even when Moses gave the law, people didn’t always try to use it for righteousness. Sometimes they did. But sometimes they tried to exploit it. In fact, due to our ego — our pride and vanity, and our determination to shake our guilt while pursuing our desires — we tend to jump the gun and try to exploit or manipulate it before we try to understand the context of a given situation. This finds expression throughout all four of the Gospels, when the priests and scribes of the Jewish temples consistently try to use the Mosaic law to condemn Jesus.
Making this connection is what broke my heart, recently; it’s why this site exists, and a large part of why I have to return to the Church.
Where this is really going…
I became an activist because I wanted to help people and make the world a better place. Unlike most others, I resisted dumping my eggs in a particular basket of ideological allegiance. The anarchist community at large was divided between the individualists, like Goldman, and the collectivists, like Kropotkin. By the present day, this had become a huge point of contention and prevented cooperative action. On top of that, there were those that had completely missed the point of helping to heal the problems caused by capitalism and failures of the the state to prioritize the good of people over the interest in power. Ironically, I found what I thought to be the solution by tracing the movement back to its origins in Proudhon’s work.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, Proudhon advocated a very localized, voluntary association where local communities could set their own priorities and principles and figure out among themselves what worked. This addressed all the issues of present day activism, and provided a cooperative, cohesive framework that I thought Dorothy Day, herself, would have been proud of. So I started writing about it, trying to hold people accountable when they advocated for one-size-fits-all solutions to large-scale society (whether they were socialist or market based, democratic state or direct-participatory stateless democracy) for the inability of such a solution to provide for each individual, or the needs of specific groups that were concentrated in one area.
Then it happened: I saw it clear as day when I started applying my own philosophical expositions to myself. I had done exactly what I was telling everyone else not to do: I established a false objective truth where there couldn’t be one. I thought I knew something that I could not, in my limited perception, really know.
I had sinned. And that didn’t even get into the theological ground of it. I was just being arrogant because I thought I had found a solution that seemed obvious. All people had to do was be willing to acknowledge their own limitations… while I failed to acknowledge mine.
Ouch.
After considering this for a few weeks, it dawned on me. That’s our problem, and first of all, mine. We want to believe that we have the ability to discern good from evil so that we can always rely on ourselves to know what to do (or not do, as the case may be); but we can’t have that ability because it cannot exist. God gave us free will and the opportunity for unique and individual personalities. That wasn’t a punishment — it was a gift that has enabled the beautiful diversity of humanity, art, and culture around the world.
My guilt is for thinking I ever knew better than I do, and I confess this every day. I’m careful to judge myself before I judge others, and I know what to guard myself against, now.