Antonio Molinari
A word to the reader/ Al lector:
El post que sigue es largo. Sin embargo, la paciencia y la disposición de desenredar la madeja serán, creo, bien recompensados. En algún tiempo más, quizás, haya una traducción al castellano.
The following post is long. Patience, however, and willingness to unravel the skein, I believe, shall be rewarded well. Maybe, in some time, a spanish translation shall be available.
The myth of the Garden of Eden, alike all myths, is strange. It is a well that can never be exhausted . Many questions come together to puzzle the eye trained for paradox and whose inclination lies with the problem and not with the solution. It poses questions that touch the fabric of existence and of our nature and condition. It calls forth the meaning of freedom and the meaning of the law. A skeletal review of the facts:
God creates man and woman in a paradise devoid of any of the traits marking our life that we call evils -death, pain, old age, toil, disease, uncertainty... He places Adam and Eve in this land and they are free to do whatever they want. They are at leisure to wander in their naked inocence without any command except one, which we know all too well: "Thou shall not eat from the tree of knowledge...". We also know the outcome well enough. Eve is tempted by the snake and this is the fall of mankind. Mankind is condemned to toil, death, mortality and pain. Man's existence is thereafter his burden, as he is capable of evil: with the influx of disobedience, he now "knows" good and evil and becomes accountable for himself - intoxicated with "sin", man being capable of evil, he is forever stained.
But, if man was there in pure uncorrupted essence, clean from sin and doubt, why place the tree there? Why such a commandment? This question concerns the origin and the nature of the law, first of all; second, it calls to question the nature of man; finally, it concerns the intention of the creator as to this, the crown of his creation.
Mankind was to be in the Garden as an inmortal being. Incapable of dying, everything that could be done should eventually be done, as probabilities command. Therefore, the tree having being placed in the Garden, it was foreseeable that mankind should eventually sink their teeth into the apple. This explains the commandment: god did not wish man to eat from the apple, as the legislator does not wish man to kill or steal.
Man in paradise however, was pure, innocent. Innocence implies not knowing the nature of inclination nor of its fulfillment -desire and gratification go hand in hand, unquestioned. A child is said to be innocent as they cannot concieve of their inclination as "good" or "evil". In this sense, a child is not capable of being tried, as they do not know the meaning of their actions -they cannot place any evil to their inclination, neither can they calculate the consequences attached to them in such terms. Legislators place commandments and laws on people capable of such discriminations. People are conceived as capable of evil, and of inclining towards evil knowingly. Thus the law presuposes the crime and also the understanding that the crime is a crime. It furthermore implies the previous commision of the crime: why should there have been any legislation on traffic before there were cars and crashes and all the problems that come from many cars coming and going along the streets of cities? The legislator can foresee the crime, as it has happened before. However, in the case under our consideration, the legislator being god, and the law being the first law set upon an innocent creature, this law does not presupose a crime that has already been commited before and shall therefore be commited again. The law set by God decrees the crime: a negative commandment always calls forth the action it forbids -in this case, sin... Odd....
The paradox is that, in the Garden of Eden, man and woman have no previous crime hanging over their heads, no knowledge do they possess to discriminate their inclinations into good and bad. Yet God, legislator supreme, has placed the tree and the snake. God supreme has laid down the law. Therefore, the fall was within the provisions of God. We have said that the legislator can only pass a law because he knows that the crime will occur: man has to commit it at one moment or the other.
Quaestiones: Prima: why the commandment?; Secunda: why the snake?
Responso ad prima quaestio: This question concerns the decree of the fall: the law was laid down as a crime was foreseeable. Only upon a creature capable of such an action can a law be passed. No legislator oversees the behavior of lions or maggots. The answer hereby given is abstruse, but -I believe, sound.
What lies behind the mystery of love? Love lies in the nature of its object. The object of love is loved for two reasons: first of all, a resemblance of oneself. One recognizes something of oneself in what one loves. But also an absolute difference and independence of oneself. God has created this flower to crown his creation, mankind. Mankind must be what gives all the rest its meaning (after all, all the rest of creation has to come to man to recieve its name, thus at least says the myth). But this creation must be something he can pour his love upon. A being merely capable of good is not complete, as it is not independent of its creator. Robots cannot be loved because they are devoid of any independence, and can act only upon the set of commands they have previously been built for: their esence is set and is totally predictable. They share the nature of a tool: a knife answers to the movements of the hand that handles it. A child coming from the bossom of a woman can be loved because it has its own will. The children we beget are finally destined to rebel and leave us, to seek their own path and to become something we could not foresee. What diferentiates man from a robot is the exercise of will, freedom. Man is able to choose in the face of any commandment: obedience or rebelion, good or evil. If God is only good in nature, then, if he creates something that he can love, it must be something capable of escaping his commandment, of attaining differentiation. What differentiates from the good path? Evil, rebelion, disobedience. Mankind must be capable of choice if he is not to be merely a tool. Therefore, the answer to the first question has been provided: man must fall, if he is to fulfill his nature as it is set to be. Only something whose nature is unpredictable (and therefore independent of the lovers will) can be loved; only something that can, out of free will, join with us and share with us can be loved. Nevetheless, love can be dissapointed: the loved one can choose a path that strays from us, and can leave us. What is loved can also become despisable, or even the object of hatred. Man must fall, in order to be able to return to the creator who loves him yet lets him fall, as if not, no love could be possible. The parable of the prodigal son explains this thoroughly. The loving father also presupposes the legislator and guardian of the law. The loving father is the one that overturns the punishment of the legislator -true love forgives, but forgiveness needs straying and fault and falling: the prodigal son is dear to the father and the father can forgive him. The older brother embodies the legislator: one that can only see guilt and spit out sentence, as he presupposes evil in the nature of man - the law and the legislator discern man as evil, it is what their job calls for.
The commandment was an order not to do something. It needed an instance: something that was forbidden but could be done. It could have been anything. The tree of knowledge embodies the conciousness of transgression. Only eating the forbidden fruit can mankind rise to the possibility, the true esence. concealed within. The apple could have been anything -a fig it is also said. What lies in the knowledge is this conciousness that one can go against what is set, face the consequences and be legible for punishment or forgiveness. Mankind can become an object of love, and the father can appear.
("Said the straight man to the late man: -'where have you been?' -'I´ve been here and I've been there and I've been in between' " -King Crimson, "I Talk to the Wind")
Responso ad secunda quaestio: For man to fall, there had to be a law that was set. This can be deduced from the preceding reasonings. The transgression of the law set the fall: man now knew, as he had done evil.
Yet, this transgression was meant to happen. Provided, as was said, a non-ending life span in a place that, however big, was not infinite, man or woman were supposed at some point to stand before the forbidden tree. What would have been lacking was the instance to precipitate the fall. Man's innocent disobedience (as it comes out of ignorance of the meaning of disobedience) needed a catalyst, and the serpent that wrapped itself around the tree was this instrument. The serpent embodies the realization that what is there that is forbidden is a possibility that is being denied. It calls for the questioning of the commandment, and of its meaning. No wonder doubt and curiosity were regarded as sin in Christian belief. Eve, brought to the consideration of why such a commandment was set, accessed a latency that lay within her. The snake sets into motion something already present in potence, and this Augustine saw clearly. However, passing from potency to act is the natural course of all that must develop, and natural development is good (Aristotle). What is Good is in one way understood as the end or final destination of natural movement. Again, man must fall. But the thought is no transgression until it is enacted: people can dream of fornicating the neighbor's spouse, sending all criminals to the gas chambers or robbing a bank. Only enacting these thoughts constitutes a crime and therefore makes the doer liable of recieving the punishment accorded by the magistrate; and only in this instance can the loving father appear, as he can bestow forgiveness. Nothing can move itself into action (Aristotle, again), and there always has to be an efficient cause, and this efficient cause is always external to what is moved. An efficient cause being needed in the equation, the serpent was included amongst the dwellers in the garden.
Final Considerations.
Regarding love and forgiveness in the face of the law and punishment: God creates man capable of falling, and in so doing, decrees the fall, as all that is possible must at some point happen, otherwise, it is impossible, for a possibility that can never be actualized will never be so, and is therefore no possibility. Conferred with inmortality, Adam and Eve had time, and the sufficient reason for a possibility in potency to express as act is time. Mortal men do not express all the possibilities that lay in them for this very reason: mortality sets a limit for the expression of possibilities. If Borges is right, an inmortal man shall at one point or another exhaust all the possibilities that lie dormant for him.
Ergo, man had to fall. Freedom was his nature, this terrible freedom understood as the capacity and the possibility of willing what is good or what is evil, obedience or rebellion, fidelity or treason. But if man never enacted the possibility of wrongdoing, his nature would never become act, and therefore, freedom would be an impossibility. The fall was therefore necessary, and rebellion was the natural end of the first man and woman created, as they were incomplete, undeveloped, children that had to become adults. Never sinning, never disobeying, they would have been devoid of choice, and therefore, not free, and therefore, not complete, and therefore, not loveable.
Kant somehow implies that freedom has to do more with dignity than with happiness. Freedom gives man his dignity and his position amongst all creatures. The crown of God's creation was meant to rebel, and therefore suffer, die, sweat, suffer hunger, kill one another, beget children, love and hate. This gives him his dignity as he has to stand before reality and decide in the face of it. Building his own path, a path for which he himself is responsible and accountable for, before other men, before the creator, before the mirror every morning, he must endure the burden of being forever the object of legislation, law, punishment. The law regulates things because of the potency of evil that freedom carries. The law sees the evil in man and wishes to prevent it. This is why happiness is never possible in the public sphere. This is Ceasar's realm, terrible Ceasar., the sword, blind justice, inequality, power, strife. However, the very capability of falling and sinning and rebelling and wrongdoing, the existence of punishment, also calls for another side: love as forgiveness is not possible without the enactment of evil. However, forgiveness is the inversion of the equation: seeing men act bad, it recognizes the good in them, in potency or intermingled in their flaws and faults, as it is an offspring off the bossom of love. Christians have never understood this simple yet complex message, the only one Christ every said (someone once said that the life of men and their meaning are reduced to one decisive act, one decisive thought). It is not mere coincidence that the church, aspiring to a grip on men, overburdened them with sin and became a judge and legislator. Jewish religion was entangled with power and politics. Islam the same. The Church, since it became the institutionalized Church, had to follow suit.
Power and Politics and the public sphere is the realm where a supposed good is to be imposed over men. It is not the admonishing advice, the moral imperative that here speaks. It is the sword that commands obedience of men in esence free, therefore, always liable and accountable for the possibility they have of wrongdoing, of disobeying, of rebelling. Power always speaks sound reasons of what is good and desirable. However, it stresses every stop, coma, colon, exclamation and conclusion with a flash of the blade it carries: it is a force that is speaking to men it percieves bad, potential enemies, traitors, renegades, disobeyers. Hence, it is armed. As in the garden, within the world called and demonstrated as "good", evil lies dormant. That is why legislation and the sword exist. Power sees obedient men as potential wrongdoers, disrupters of order, enemies. The good man is simply a bad man that has not shown himself. This is the equation that regulates the world of Ceasar. Institutionalized religion, as it also aspires to a sway over men, to lay down over them what is good and desirable, and therefore, what they should aspire to and what the order of their volitions should be, arms its tongue (when it cannot show the blade) with sin, damnation and fear. Every reason is stressed with those admonishons of flames and suffering, of the judgement that lies beyond the grave... This, of course when it does not wield the sword. Empowered religion is a double torment: not only the real threat of the blade, but also the torture of the mind and the soul. The culprit not only is punished in this world, but also cursed in the next: absolutely damned, ici et la. No other force acts with such hatred, disregard and mercilessness than the force that establishes its truth with the certitude of dogma. Revolutionaries, fanatics, reaccionaries, orthodoxies of all manners and types, moralists: all belong in this bag. Woe to men when the virtuous cease power! Be it the virute of humbleness and forgiveness, the virtue of the citizen, the virtue of the superman and biological superiority, of right wing order and peace, or of the comarade in the socialist society.
Christ equates love with forgiveness -the latter flows naturally from the former. We have said that love presupposes freedom. Freedom is the fact that the loved one is independent, as we cannot control their will. Freedom is always the possibility of fault and wrongdoing. Yet, without this possibility, no love is possible, just enjoyment of possession (as we "love" a car or a "pet"). Qu' est ce que se tire de ceci? When love is the one that considers, under and beyond all the faults and petiness, it can fathom the good. The focus of Ceasar is evil even in the obdient subject; love regards good, even in the wrongdoer.
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