Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Sündenfall (Akt d. Stolzes), Erbsünde, Baum der Erkenntnis von gut und böse; gut u. böse in Relation zu Adam und Eva; Selbstermächtigung, -bestimmung, was gut für den Menschen sei; Veritatis Splendor

Kurzinhalt: ... only God knows how his own nature and inner life can be rendered visible. Therefore, only God knows man and what man is supposed to do. Man cannot define this for himself and at the same time be faithful to his purpose ...

Textausschnitt: THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

69c All of this may seem quite beautiful, leaving one to wonder how any human being could possibly take exception to such an understanding of man, male and female. But there is a catch here. In the Genesis text, it comes in the form of a command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What relationship, if any, does this command have to the creation of Adam and Eve as the sacrament of God?

69d Many people view God's command in Genesis as nothing more than a way of establishing his authority as Creator over Adam and Eve as his creatures, and their disobedience as nothing more than a refusal to accept his authority. But much more than this is involved in the text itself. We know this if only because of the form the command takes, a form often overlooked by careless readers, as exemplified by the fact that so many people advert to the "apple" Eve ate. Eve did not eat an apple. The tree is not an apple tree, and that alone should tell us that God's command is not simply an assertion of his authority. If it were, an apple tree would serve his purpose as well as any other. But when the text avoids something simple like "apple tree" and goes out of its way to provide us with something as cumbersome as "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", it does not take, as they say, the brains of a rocket scientist to grasp that something more than a mere assertion of authority is at stake. (Fs)

70a Let us, for a moment, try to put ourselves in the position of Adam and Eve, and see what implications flow from the situation in which they find themselves. God has created us in his image and likeness. This defines us. As the Pope points out, "There is no adequate definition of man but this one."1 It also defines our end or purpose in creation. We are supposed to make visible both in and to the world the invisible reality of our Creator. Now just what, concretely, are we supposed to do under these circumstances? There is only one answer to this question, and it is so obvious it hardly bears mentioning: namely, we do not have the remotest notion what we are supposed to do, because we do not have the remotest notion what it is we are supposed to be rendering visible. Only God knows God; only God knows how his own nature and inner life can be rendered visible. Therefore, only God knows man and what man is supposed to do. Man cannot define this for himself and at the same time be faithful to his purpose, to his vocation, if you will, of imaging God to the rest of the world. And so we arrive at the command. (Fs)

70b Much ink has been spilt over the meaning of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Most people are tripped up by the word "knowledge". We think of knowledge primarily in the sense of information acquired about already-existing realities. However, this meaning of knowledge cannot possibly apply to the text, since there are no already-existing evils to be known. Everything God has created is very good (Gen 1:31). In the Old Testament, however, knowledge can also mean the ability to name something. This form of knowledge, naming, does presuppose knowledge in the ordinary sense that one knows enough about something to be able to name it. (Fs)

71a We see knowledge in this sense being exercised by Adam when he names the animals. His naming of the animals presupposes that, as they parade by him, he is able to understand them well enough to give them names. And that does indeed seem, from within the text, to be the case, because first, God accepts the names Adam gives the animals, and second, Adam certainly does understand the animals well enough to recognize that a suitable helpmate for him is not to be found among them. (Fs)

71b The knowledge of good and evil might therefore be rendered as the ability to name things good and evil, an ability which presupposes a sufficient understanding of reality to make such naming possible. It must also refer to good and evil not in some general sense, because in a general sense there is nothing evil in existence. It must refer to good and evil in a relative sense, i.e., good and evil in relation to Adam and Eve themselves. In other words, the command God gives them can be translated thus: Do not claim the ability to name or to define what is good and evil for yourselves, because you do not know enough about me to know what you are supposed to do to be my image in the world. Only I know how I can properly be imaged, and therefore only I can tell you what is good and evil for you. (Fs) (notabene)

71c Man is given dominion over the world. The world does not image God, and therefore man does not have to understand God in order to have dominion over it. In fact, as the Pope points out, the world is created as gift for man. Therefore, the world is properly the sphere of man's governance. But man is not given dominion over himself, because only God knows what it means to image God. In fact, we see God use the capacity to name good and evil three times in the Genesis text, first, when he names everything he has created as "very good"; second, when he says that it is "not good" for man to be alone, and third, when he names, for Adam and Eve, the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as evil for them. As the Pope recently observed, in Veritatis Splendor, regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
With this imagery, Revelation teaches that the power to decide what is good and what is evil does not belong to man, but to God alone. The man is certainly free, inasmuch as he can understand and accept God's commands. And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom, since he can eat "of every tree of the garden." But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law. God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of his very love proposes this good to man in the commandments (35). (Fs)

Quer: Veritatis Splendor JP2VS_35

72a The Fall comes about because of an act of pride, because of an act of disobedience, to be sure. But it also comes about because Eve does exactly what God forbids not just in the literal but also in the symbolic sense. In the literal sense, she eats the fruit she has been commanded not to eat. In the symbolic sense, she names good and evil for herself, the very thing the eating of the fruit symbolizes as the forbidden act: "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate" (Gen 3:6—italics added). God had named the eating of this fruit evil for Adam and Eve. Eve, on the other hand, looked at the fruit and came to the conclusion that it would be good for her, a source of wisdom in fact. And so what God had named evil she renamed good. (Fs) (notabene)

72b God acknowledges this usurpation of his authority by saying, "See, the man has become like us, knowing good and evil." Adam and Eve claimed for themselves the right to moral autonomy, the right to decide for themselves what they would regard as good and evil and not to accept good and evil as God defined it for them. In so doing, they rejected the sacramentality of the good creation, because they rejected the vocation God had written into their very being, the call to image him rather than to assert themselves. Furthermore, their sin set the pattern for every other sin which would be committed by their descendants. To cite Veritatis Splendor again,
His [man's] history of sin begins when he no longer acknowledges the Lord as his Creator and himself wishes to be the one who determines, with complete independence, what is good and what is evil. "You will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen 3:5): this was the first temptation, and it is echoed in all the other temptations to which man is more easily inclined to yield as a result of the original Fall (102). (Fs)