Category: exegesis

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THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”

Let us take a look first at this passage, from Alain Badiou discussing Jacques Lacan in “The Other,” which is the first part of I Know There Are So Many of You (2019):

“We are making progress here on a very important point, which is that the question of the individual, from the point of view of otherness, is clearly a question of identity, except that this identity contains the Other within it.  In other words, no identity can do without otherness.  The very important lesson we learn from this is that it is always a fantasy, and sometimes a criminal one, to think that there can be identity without otherness.  The thesis of the elimination of otherness may lead, and has historically led, to bloodshed, from the moment that, instead of understanding that since all desire is the desire of the Other, the Other is internal to my own desire, I instead assume the Other to be external, to be a border at which my desire is forever rejected, and so I attempt to destroy them.”  (20-21)

(Elsewhere in this chapter, Badiou explains that “desire of the Other” seems to mean not simply “desire for the Other” but also “desire to be desired by the Other.”)

Let us make a bit of a leap here and assert that from observations such as this one, one might conclude that good and evil are complementary, that the one cannot exist without the other.  Evil, therefor, in some fundamental sense is not so much evil as necessary.  But another way of looking at things is that in theory, at least, evil could be eliminated, leaving only good.

Here is where the tree comes in.  The eating of the fruit is called a “loss of innocence,” (a cringeworthy and patronizing phrase if ever there was one).  “Loss of innocence” implies not simply a plunge into moral guilt (or a feeling of guilt) but a loss of ignorance.  That is, the gaining of knowledge: in this case, one learns about good and evil that already existed, but it would have been best not to know the difference between them.

This would imply that paradise was not paradise, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities.

But this is false from a Christian point of view, which does not see evil as an inherently necessary element in what would amount to a cosmic dualism.  Even though it indeed seems the case that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so, we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise.  The “knowledge” that evil is necessary is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect.  The fact is, we post-lapsarians cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall.  So we must see all tales of this unfallen world as tales of a foreign country whose language is so incomprehensible to us the story must be told in our own language, and therefor falsified.  The “loss of innocence” is perhaps some acquisition of knowledge to the fallen world, but in absolute, that is, true terms, this loss of innocence is the gaining of ignorance.  The “knowledge of good and evil” is a lie.  It is a lie we cannot see beyond to the truth it obfuscates.  We cannot even imagine this truth.  We can know only that the “knowledge” is a lie.

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ON SLAVERY, THE LIMITS OF THE BIBLE, AND HOW TO READ IT

Good Christians created that [slave] trade and sustained it for three centuries—Catholic and Protestant alike.  And they were happy to do so because, whether Catholic or Protestant, they heard the Bible telling them that they could.  Up to the late seventeenth century, no Christians challenged the existence of slavery as an institution.  If you had taken a straw poll in any Christian gathering before that date, such as from the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in my own home city of Oxford, and asked whether slavery was evil, not a single Christian hand would have gone up to say yes, it was evil.  That is because the predominant voices in the books of the Bible accept slavery as part of the God-given fabric of the world.  Now it is entirely the other way round: not a single Christian alive, I think, would defend slavery, and so in this respect, all Christianity is now out of alignment with the Bible.    

Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and its Legacy (Oxford UP) 2016, page 9

Now one might argue that those Christians who turned against the slave trade and eventually helped abolish it were also being Biblical: that is, perhaps they argued that given that we are all made in the image of God, and that Christ died for all us humans (according to scripture) it must be nonsense to think one person has the right to treat another person as property.  To “love thy neighbor as thyself” would seem to demand the abolition of slavery.  But the significant point to make here is that even if anti-slavery Christians were not out of alignment with the Bible, it must be true that in order to make this turn from Biblically based slavery to Biblically based abolition these Christians would have to have been reading the Bible in a certain way—a way which saw sacred scripture as not constituting a comprehensive and explicit list of do’s and don’t’s, a way which saw scripture as giving the raw material for people to draw conclusions not explicitly supported by that same scripture.  And here we find, therefor, a cautionary tale for those who challenge every moral or doctrinal statement they do not like with with the challenge, “does the Bible say that?”

Consider how jarring it must have been, after all, in the late seventeenth century, to consider on the one hand Biblical principles that were counter to slavery, but at the same time a Bible that had no explicit denunciation of such a terrible and very widespread practice in the ancient world.  Surely this constitutes some kind of cognitive dissonance in scripture.  But whether or not we accept the doctrine of Biblical infallibility, might we attempt some kind of dialectical reading with acceptance of slavery as the thesis, the salvation offered by Christ to all as the antithesis, and the resulting explicit denunciation of slavery as the necessary synthesis presaged by the Bible, even if not explicitly?