“The Lord God made trees spring from the ground, all trees pleasant to look at and good for food; and in the middle of the garden he set the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Genesis 2:9
What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”
The eating of the fruit is often 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, Adam and Eve learn about good and evil that already existed, apparently, but the idea is it would have been best to remain ignorant.
This would imply that paradise as Adam and Eve experienced it was not paradise, even before they ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, (a la Milton) a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities. (Thus, we hear sometimes the idea of the “fortunate fall.”)
But this perception of a diminished paradise 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. Everything God has made, according to Genesis, is “good.” Of course, there is the serpent who gets the ball of evil rolling, and there is no implication he is self-created or extant before God’s creation. Still, it seems odd that he comes as if out of nowhere, “more crafty than any wild creature that the Lord God had made” (Genesis 3:1) unexplained. If he represents some Principle of Evil essential to the ordering of God’s creation, you’d think he would have been explicitly mentioned in the creation narrative.
Even at this point, therefor, evil is a mystery: such an important thing seems not to be created by God, but by the same token, not in competition with him, as of some equal power.
It indeed seems the case in our day-to-day lives that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so. Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a fascinating short story about this, showing that even to imagine a perfect world is thwarted by the necessity of bringing in problems of one sort or another. Also, attempts even to imagine a perfect paradise end inevitably in visions of eternal boredom.
But we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise. The “knowledge” of good and evil may well be the “knowledge” that evil is necessary; but this knowledge is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect. How does the post-lapsarian mind begin to understand the pre-lapsarian world? The fact is, we cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall. This is because all of us are so inevitably far from perfection we cannot imagine it. We cannot put ourselves in the position of Adam and Eve, because our decisions for good or evil come in the struggle between the two. A bad decision outside this context (i.e. one made in perfect innocence) is simply a mistake. But a bad decision after the inner conflict of good and evil is sin. We post-lapsarian people already know the difference between good and evil: that is how we are capable of choosing evil, or sin. Adam and Eve apparently chose to sin before knowing what it was. They sinned innocently. This, to us, is absurd.
Which is exactly what it should be. How can evil “make sense” except in a world where it is already well established, where its propaganda is so wired into the human heart and mind that even the best of us cannot construct even in imagination a world without it? In paradise evil cannot “make sense,” if paradise is to exist at all as such.
Again, this strikes us as absurd too. But that is because we are living in a world of evil, and therefore absurdity.
So we must see all tales of the 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. What must be translated but cannot be translated must be a “stab at truth, and a lie” (to use a phrase from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49). 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” was not just a bad thing to choose, it 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.
The story of the fall from the Garden of Eden is therefor absurd. Exactly. The story itself is telling us this quite deliberately. In so far as the story must “explain” the fall of humanity into sin and death it must be absurd, or it turns Judaism and Christianity into a dualism where God needs evil, and evil is therefor not evil, but simply a cosmic necessity.
The tale therefor carves out a space in our consciousness for God’s holiness, absolute sovereignty, and absolute perfection, proclaiming this to be the case, creating the idea of God in our minds as he created the universe, and making no claim that we can make sense of this. This might be seen as where faith comes in.
Of the two entities, of the world and religion, one of them is mad, therefore–the Abrahamic religions are mad in their assertion of God’s perfect goodness and sovereignty, or the world itself is mad in an airtight reason that makes evil essential. The Abrahamic project can be seen as a fantastic bid for idealism in the popular sense of that word. Does one have the faith for it? And will this faith pull absurdity into theology? I think it does, and I think it should.
After all, theology is about God, of whom theologians say he cannot be understood. Should we therefor be surprised?
And what are the implications of pulling absurdity into theology? A good question. Another good question is this: what is the alternative?