Original Selfishness

Oh, the things that come out in middle-of-the-night conversations when you spend your night with someone like Courtney Dydek. “Sweet nothings,” you might think; well, let’s see what you think by the end of this story.

We were talking about Adam and Eve and the Fall (Genesis 3), and of course we got onto the topic of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – who wouldn’t? I mentioned to her what a professor told me: that within the phrases “they were naked and not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25) and “their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7) we can deduce one possibility that Adam and Eve were self-unaware – they weren’t ashamed of their nakedness because they weren’t aware, really, of their own personal nakedness.

But wait, she said: if they knew eating from the tree was bad, didn’t they already have knowledge of good and evil? Eating from the tree: evil. Not eating from the tree: good.

Okay, sort of. But we realized that the idea that the tree was bad, and then the thought that it was good, were external – Eve did not of herself decide the tree should be bad or good. To her, the “fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen. 3:6, emphasis mine). The first moments are probably how she viewed much of the fruit and food in the Garden; but the final moment of that line is set apart – appended, as it were, to her own, quite innocent, thoughts.

Enter God: “Who told you that you were naked?” (vs. 11).

See, what they knew or didn’t know was external – including what was good (everything) and what was bad (eating from that one tree). The ”wisdom” they received was self-awareness; from self-awareness comes the possibility of a self-made moral code – the “knowledge of good and evil.”

And we’ve been making our own moral codes for millennia. Really, the original sin is the ability to make our own moral code separately from God – the unavoidable tendency to do so is what makes us fall again and again.

Reconciliation is a return to self-unawareness, a return to only and all God- and neighbor-awareness. “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor” was the only law in the Garden; it was the law before any and all other law. Jesus said it was that upon which all the Mosaic Law and the prophets hung, and I believe that is why. The only reason not to do as God commands is because of selfishness – all other sins find their root in the desires for ourselves, which cannot exist without our awareness of ourselves.

“I think; therefore I am.” That’s wisdom. “God said; therefore all is.” That’s sanctification. Let’s remember where we really came from.