The lives of Adam and Eve were sustained in virtuous conduct by God who granted them a share of his divine life. This share was sanctifying grace, the procession of a two-fold gift from God, an “original holiness” and a participation in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. [CCC 375]
The Genesis account relates that Adam and Eve possessed the fullness of intellect and reason. Both enjoyed free will and the liberty to act rightly or wrongly. They accepted God’s friendship and trusted his divine commands from the start—Do this, don’t do that. As a consequence, they had no experience of suffering or disappointment.
Adam, searching for a help-mate, rightly rejected all birds, beasts and fishes as unsuitable. By saying yes to intimacy with Eve, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” [Gen 2:23], he cooperated with God’s plan for human well-being. By saying no to the primary companionship of non-human creatures, he pleased God and magnified him in whose image and likeness he was created.
Eve who enjoyed good things to eat knew well what God commanded her and Adam: “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” [Gen 3:3] Tempted by the serpent (devil), she touched and ate fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Obsessed by self-interest, Eve convinced Adam to make her strikingly outrageous act of apostasy against God complete. As a consequence, the age of innocence vanished, and their idolatrous hearts convulsed with anguish and dread.
Eve rejected the God of creation and gravely wounded her relationship with Adam. The wretched Adam validated his companion’s sin and failed in his priestly duty as well. He neither corrected Eve nor interceded prayerfully on her behalf in God’s presence. One may speculate as to the narrative’s outcome if Adam had refused to conspire with Eve, seeking instead divine pardon for her and healing for the wounded creation. Would that he had. They would not recover from their joint self-mutilation.
Or one simply may dismiss the Genesis story as an primitive artifact of human neurosis. The gimlet eye of this prideful generation, to be sure, feasts on controversy as amaranth on a battle-field. Though certainly not the last word in human anthropology, the Genesis story rings with a dreadful truth, and rational men and women of good will should deal with it.
To understand the immense significance of Adam’s priestly failure to plead pardon before God on behalf of Eve and all creation, one must comprehend the magnitude of Eve’s sin, taking care to stipulate that if Eve were a simpleton, the story would never have been written.
Aggravated by the serpent’s temptations, Eve contemplated the idea of grasping equality with God. Again, stipulating Eve’s competence, she knew full well what she intended to do irrespective of the devil’s sinister persuasions. God’s commandment was clear: “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” [Gen 3:3]
Eve was fully aware of the commandment’s meaning having discussed the matter at length with the tempter who assured her, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” [Gen 3:4-5] Her multiple reasons for committing evil -- good food, delight to the eyes, powerful knowledge -- provide ample evidence that her actions were freely taken. Eve was not coerced in any way. To attain perfection, she intended to embrace evil.
To become God’s equal obliged her to repudiate the integral role God had given her. To this end she traded stewardship of the beauty and mysteries of paradise for the ka-ching of proprietorship. Eve appropriated ownership of the Garden of Eden to herself by simply willing it. Once the matter of possession was settled in her mind, her next move was to annul the sacredness of the Tree of Knowledge. Then she looted the fruit of the tree.
Her audacity came full circle in the shadow of the tree where she munched her way through good and evil. Celebrating her arrival at self-divinization, only one thing remained to be accomplished: Adam must renounce his role as steward of God’s creation and submit to her. With this achieved, God’s withdrawal and self-extinction was inevitable.
Saying yes to lust and greed presupposes a corresponding no to personhood and the primacy of truth. There are two ways to subdue an opponent. A person is bigger than his foe or he knocks him down to a convenient size. It was all too easy. Everything that constitutes reality is perceptual.
Who could stop her from empowering one thought over another? No idea could be true or real unless she said so. If a concept interested her, she could give it life. If a concept bored or offended her, she could just as easily kill it. (1) Hence Eve, who could not admit her nothingness before God, made God into a nothing in her mind.
With jaw-dropping sophistry, she blew the candle out on her perception of God and glorified herself as goddess. This is no small thing if you celebrate fifty percent of humanity simultaneously converging with divinity at the moment Eve consciously evolved by the power of her creative imagination.
Unless of course, mental legerdemain is the other and more plausible explanation for human beings who, awash in self-deception, invent whopping doppelgangers (Germ “double-goer”) that fabricate meaning where none exists and merely simulate God’s authentic power to create heaven and earth out of nothing and separate light from darkness. [cf. Gen 1:1-4]
The problem of immortality posed a threat to the newly-minted goddess. Though Eve’s perceptions were grossly distorted, she was not unhinged. She had to think fast. Her newly acquired knowledge of evil revealed the fearful prospect of her own death and oblivion. She had to overcome death or lose all. If deathlessness was merely a concept, anyone could kill it along with its imaginative practitioners just as she had strangled stewardship, commandment, sacredness and communion with God. To be real, immortality must be inclusive of soul and body.
She was not yet safe. But there was another way. Incapable of self-generating the immortality she craved, Eve proposed to plunder the other tree in the midst of the garden. Given that the Tree of Knowledge conferred illumination, the Tree of Life promised eternal autonomy from God.
So what’s the big problem with a few more bites of good fruit? At the instant she held the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in her hands, Eve claimed for herself the thrilling power to name what is good and what is evil. But why the sudden vulnerability, this bone-chilling cold wrapping itself around her? Not to worry, the last phase of her plan was within arm’s reach. She would pluck the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam as a gift. Passive and grateful, he would eat it to please her. Then seizing the fruit of the Tree of Life, they would rule earth and heaven together. Eve chalked up her shivering to excitement. Everything would be just fine. (To be continued . . . )
(1) Consider the unborn perceived by their mothers and fathers as an “unwelcome idea” and then killed.
