The Shadow and the Fall

Last time, we looked at some of the ways our creation stories can help and hinder a Christian journey towards wholeness. The second of the two creation narratives in Genesis, of course, ends in the famous story Adam and Eve being cast out of Paradise after being tempted into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. An undue focus on this story often leads to an overly pessimistic worldview. But, as we saw last Summer, the ways this story have been interpreted in significant swaths of Christianity (though certainly not all of it), have taken on a life of their own, going far beyond what the story itself — and indeed more traditional interpretations of it — say. So today, I’d like to revisit this story from Genesis 3, and examine our ideas of the Fall, evil, and the devil.

Genesis 3, the Fall, and Original Sin

I did a huge deep-dive on this text this past summer (parts 1 and 2 on Genesis 3; plus parts 1, 2, and 3 on Original Sin), but to summarize:

• On its own, Genesis 2-3 teaches that a) we were created for life together with God in Paradise; b) the primordial humans broke faith with God and each other; 3) life as we know it is much harsher and more painful for us because of this; and 4) God remains faithful and provides for our well-being despite our sin.
• Far from the central text many Christians have assumed it to be, Genesis 3 has always been a marginal text in Judaism. The idea that we are inherently incapable of faithfulness is completely absent from Jewish thought, ancient, rabbinic, or contemporary. There’s also been an ancient line of thought that wondered whether eating of the three could actually be an essential part of human development: a necessary loss of innocence required for mature ethical decision-making.
• While it took on a more important role in early Christian theology, its interpretation did not come close to approaching the ‘classic’ Western doctrine of Original Sin (that we are all from birth guilty before God apart from any sins of our own doing by virtue of our inheriting Adam’s sin) until St. Augustine in the late fourth century. (If this still seems early, remember that four hundred years ago from now was the era of Louis XIV and Galileo — Make no mistake: four centuries is a long time!), and such a perspective was never popular in the Christian East.

So again, we are presented with a choice in how we tell the story. Has disobedience broken the world and humanity beyond repair? Is the world as we know it a gift, a punishment for sin, or sin’s natural consequences? Are we capable of living faithfully? Is childlike innocence a preferred state over mature wisdom? Is death natural, a punishment, or an act of mercy? These are questions we unwittingly answer by how we tell this story. If we minimize the Fall and emphasize ‘original blessing’ over ‘original sin’, we become hard-pressed to explain why life is so hard and filled with suffering. If we read the aftermath of the story as God’s punishment, we end up with a rather childish way of looking at the world that privileges naivete in a way that can easily push adult maturity into shadow — to say nothing of this perspective’s inherent authoritarianism. The point is simply that, no matter which telling of the story we may prefer, we need to be aware of the bathwater that may be coming along with the baby.

Christianity and the Question of Evil

All of these stories circle around the question of evil. And this is an odd thing about the Genesis 3 story: while it’s an origin story for why the world as we experience it is so messed up, it’s not really an origin story for evil. This was one of Jung’s major concerns with Christianity: not only does it have no room for much of human experience in its conception of God, but it has no room for them at all. Through the doctrine of privatio boni, which posits that evil has no existence on its own, but is simply an absence of goodness and love, Jung maintains, Christianity even denies evil itself.

One thing that Jung did seem to get right is his intuition that when things are lacking, our minds compensate for them in other ways. And indeed, the absence of an origin story for evil in the Bible has been compensated for in large swaths of the tradition by the near-canonization of extra-Biblical stories such as the primordial defiance of the fallen angel Lucifer, who becomes the prince of demons, the Devil. This story actually has its origin in Canaanite mythology, and seems to have entered into Judaism during the Second Temple period in such apocryphal apocalyptic works as 2 Enoch and the Life of Adam and Eve. The Devil doesn’t really take on the almost god-like characteristics of the ‘King of Hell’ and worthy opponent of God until the Early Modern Period. By contrast, in the Scriptures, Church Fathers, and throughout the Medieval period, the figure of the devil is at best a trickster figure and at worst something like a cartoon villain, who is always hatching schemes that are destined to fail before the forces of good. (Remember that upon reflecting on her visions, Julian of Norwich determined that the devil is nothing more than a laughingstock (Showings of Divine Love, ch. 13).) This is a far cry from the ideas one gets in Christian literature from the Early Modern witch hunts (often repeated during the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s and ‘90s), where not only is the Devil at war with God, but generally seems to be winning the war. And in an environment where, in many churches, the idea of God and holiness excludes things that are necessary for success and survival, such as self-assertion, questioning of authority, and charm, it’s no wonder that in some circles, Satan has become championed as an anti-hero undermining an authoritarian Ruler through his boldness, charisma, and wit.

What are we to make of this? I’ve read the arguments against the concept privatio boni and to be honest, I just don’t buy them. While I certainly understand the desire to see evil as having real existence, I cannot think of a single example where evil would not be undermined or undone if the perpetrator simply had goodness, empathy, and love. If you see someone as human, created in the image and likeness of God just like you, it’s impossible to want them to suffer, be in pain, or poverty. The metaphor of evil, the devil, and the ‘principalities and powers’ that act as social contagions impelling us to retreat into selfishness and apathy, is still very useful, and certainly reflects human existence as we know it. But is it a thing with active existence on its own? I’m not convinced. Ultimately it seems just to be a hardness of heart that can be softened with love. As they say, hurt people hurt people — more often than not, those who advocate cruelty toward others have simply not experienced love; their formative experiences left their hearts arid, parched, and hard as rock.

But it remains that even if evil and sin are “no thing” (to use another Julian turn of phrase), they are very real and must be treated seriously. As such, it makes sense to me that figures like the Devil or principalities and powers are helpful conceptually. But we need to restore the biblical balance that insists that these are not equal to their challenging of God. Christianity is not a dualist faith, with good and evil equally matched! Our conception of God and creation as essentially good and loving must have room in them for the existence of evil, but never be overwhelmed by it. And, we also have to be careful not to take away Christ’s humanity. Christ himself was an anti-authoritarian hero filled with boldness, charisma, and wit, and so these characteristics belong in our conceptions of God.