Another View 2-3

As I write this, the suggestion was (from our eldest son) that this article on “Original Sin” be subtitled “Original Sin: Not So Original.” I then thought, “Original Sin: Something We ‘Fell’ Into.” So much for the playfulness of words. Now, to the ideas.

While attending the first of my seminarys, I came upon a Russian mystic, a theologian of the Bolshevik Revolution who escaped to Paris to become a part of a Theological School of fellow Russian theologians. Collectively they became one of the greatest reservoirs ever of “Orthodoxy in a new key.”

One of those theologians, Nikolai Berdiaev, shouldered some of the most powerful groundbreaking work ever in the realm of what today we would call Moral Theology, or more practically, ethics. He sought to understand how human consciousness evolved, and its relationship to “sin” and the “Fall.” He asks a profound question: “Paradise was a life of bliss, but was it the fullness of life?” He then proceeds to amass the argument that Paradise was not “fullness,” but rather only the beginning of the great adventure called “freedom” of self-awareness.

His idea is a “corrective,” actually, recalling that eating from the Tree of Knowledge was not “itself” Original Sin, but rather represented the coming of self-consciousness. This very same self-consciousness caused one to awaken to the reality that one is finite and mortal: not so much a “fall” as simply experiencing what must happen in order for human “fullness” and growth to fecund. It was “experienced” however, as a Fall, because it carried within it a sense of guilt (something new here) a sense of their own vulnerability (they simply before could not differentiate themselves from plant or animal), and therefore comes knowledge of their mortality—they were different from plants, animals, and so on. Image and likeness become their awareness, and not simply God’s declaration that they were so made. They began to live into that image, cherish that likeness. Goodbye to “bliss,” and hello to a reflexive self that is now a “knowing” self.

So it begs Berdiaev’s insight: here is ignorance, not bliss; here is finiteness that can never know its fullness without eating of the Tree. Perhaps in the very command, “Do not eat of this Tree,” is the invitation into the “Freedom to Become.” Otherwise, Adam and Eve would have remained only pre-personal and in a very deep spiritual state of sleep.

What if Adam and Eve (our forever Archetypes) were awakening to their “Original Alienation” that simply “had to be”? That is, in order for their “likeness” to grow into God’s intended fullness, their “apple-hunger” was but the hunger of eros/-longing, and even that eros is God’s longing for them to receive the blessing of their full human/divine aliveness.

The word “Paradise” is seductive, isn’t it. We think of paradise as the “state of perfection” -- when in fact, it is opposite this reality. Berdiaev again: “The Bible story has an exoteric character. It expresses in symbols events in the spiritual world, but a deeper interpretation of those symbols is essential (italics mine). Berdiaev pushes on. “Not everything was revealed to man in paradise, and ignorance was the condition of life in it. It was the realm of the unconscious” (italics mine).

So, to have fed on the fruit of the tree of life, and all its sustenance would mean that humans would forever have lived in a relatively vegetative state of awareness, of unconscious bliss. Is that life? Is that fullness? True, there is no conflict there, no sense of our alienation from self or “other.” But is that the “greatness” of the divine image and likeness? Could we, in fact, have ever been able to grow into this “image and likeness” in total un-self-awareness? Would we even have been able to “know” of this “image and likeness” if we had remained in Paradise? Would not the sin be to remain in an unrealized and vegetative state of consciousness?

Oops! The implication is that sin was necessary—and how could that be so? Or is it rather this: to not have self-awareness is to never accept the reflexive quality that responds to the eros/longing of God? It would be a “no” to participate in that very quality of divine life and full humanity. It appears that there is, in truth, “no true humanity” for Adam and Eve, as of yet, while in this vegetative state. What is there is “image,” but as of yet, no sense of “likeness.” Eating of the Tree becomes not the Original Sin, but the avenue to the awareness of our Original Alienation through which humans realize their mortal and finite state, and this very realization becomes the grace of growing into the “likeness” and “image” imagined by God as our birthright.

So, what do the words “you may eat of any tree in the garden but this one Tree” mean? Again, I do not exactly know. Perhaps encoded in this injunction is a greater invitation: You are a self. Pain and suffering arise out of this self-awareness, and Adam and Eve broke the code, and sided with separation—the only Way to a greater Self, and a way to return to God. By eating, they step fully into self and Self, a separate-self though it will become. Since when did we get the idea sin is something that the self does. Obviously, when God said “do not eat” they already had a growing sense of their separate-self sense. Hence, the very structure of the separate-self is sin. The action simply follows the “awareness.” Eat! Herein is the broken code, and the opening of Another View into their very fullness of Life.