The serpent’s mouth
Photo by Nico Iseli on Unsplash
It is often those stories first heard in the nursery which most shape the course of the imagination. For those of us molded in the lingering light of Christianity, the Genesis account of creation and man, of sin and death, must invariably form part of that imaginative patrimony which for us is not entirely unlike the tales Telemachus must have heard of his father. We feel the hand of God in all the world, as the hand of Odysseus remained at work in the palace at Ithaca, and yet something is deeply wrong. Where is our Father? What does he look like? When will he return and set all right?
These stories are likewise often the ones which most retain the capacity to surprise us. No doubt this is a function of their familiarity. Having heard a tale from the earliest moments of youth, and having heard in that limited way which youth allows, we often build mental corrals of meaning which can only be escaped through renewed attention or the hand of a guide. We may never have recognized, for instance, the omission of God’s acknowledgment of goodness on the second day of Creation. Or, hearing a colleague mention that description of Adam as the husband who was there with Eve after her acceptance of the fruit, we may flip frantically to Genesis to see at last those words, “who was with her” (Gen. 3:6), which we have read dozens of times.
The mind especially of a child throws up rapid yet adamantine edifices of meaning. I recall, for instance, the foyer of my parents’ home in New Orleans as it was prior to Hurricane Katrina. On one wall were three framed baptismal certificates. I used to read them in passing, many times daily. One bore my name and a date in 1991. The other gave my brother’s and a date in 1992. This squared with reality. The third, I assumed, must have belonged to my father. By the time I was six I began to recognize signs that this could not be the case. The name was not my father’s, and the date, in 1990, was much too recent. Nonetheless, there being no third brother, I persisted in my construction, at least until I was eight. One evening I stood before the documents, studied them, and after many minutes approached my father, my mother being out of the house, and asked as he washed the dishes who this Joseph was. Thus I learned that I was in fact my parents’ second child and that my elder brother had been stillborn.
Such has been the pattern of most of my education: structures erected of initial impressions and innocent sophistry have slowly been dismantled through study and, ultimately, legitimate authority. The latter has often proven most decisive in those matters which should perhaps have been simplest.
We find something of all this interplay of story and interpretation in Eve’s encounter with the serpent. Asked by the latter whether God has truly said that she and Adam shall not eat of the trees of the garden, Eve replies, “‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die’” (Gen. 3:2-3).
It is easy enough to pass over Eve’s lines without comment. There is no sudden forceful denouncement of God, no fit of passion. On the whole, the tone of the interaction, at least in English, is that of fairly calm, rational discourse. Then, too, we know already the issue of the discussion, and the eye hastens along to the Fall which itself hastens ineluctably on. As has been frequently pointed out, however, Eve’s response involves not simply a report of God’s word but also, it appears, an interpretation of that word. God does not in his reported words of prohibition tell Adam and Eve not even to touch the fruit. He merely forbids them to eat it: “‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’” (Gen. 2:16-17).
We do not know for certain, of course, that God did not at some point tell Adam and Eve not to touch the fruit. It may be that in some evening walk, the Lord, reiterating his warning, reinforced it with the command not even to touch the fruit. All we know with certainty is that we have no report, other than Eve’s, of a prohibition against touching the fruit, meaning there is a distinct possibility that this constitutes an interpretive act on Eve’s part. From the prohibition against eating she derives a further one against touching. Practically speaking, this is probably wise. What is best not eaten is usually best not touched either.
All the same, what does Eve’s interpretive report reveal about her interior life? Evidently she has begun to wonder at God’s word. What precisely did God mean in prohibiting the taste of this fruit? How far does this prohibition extend? What does it mean to die? What is it to be like God? That distinctly human stance of wonder, which may by various impulses flow into practical curiosities which call for the exercise of the various scientific and moral virtues, has begun to shape Eve’s consciousness.
It takes but a question from the serpent to draw Eve out into what amounts to a kind of exegesis. The serpent is cunning. No doubt his initial question is not asked from ignorance but from a thorough, perhaps stolen, knowledge of what the Lord has said. And in turn the serpent, having detected in Eve’s addition to the law a kind of half-truth, spies an opening for the deployment of his own partial truth. He assures Eve that she shall not die and that God, that ontological miser, has only forbidden the fruit to deny Adam and Eve their likeness to him. He is not entirely wrong on either score. While death does enter the world with sin, it is not that immediate death God’s initial covenantal commandment seemed to indicate. Likewise God himself seals the truth of the serpent’s pronouncement that Adam and Eve would be like gods: “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). Of course man has from the moment of creation been like God, formed after his image, according to his likeness. Yet the likeness now takes on that ghastly burden of knowledge of good and evil. Just as God’s knowledge accords things their ontological goodness, so man’s knowledge comes, through sin, to bear a new moral weight. Discerning the good, man is bound to follow it, and in discerning evil he has often oriented himself to that evil already.
Eve’s fall is predicated in part on the fact of her bringing her exegetical questioning not to God but rather to the serpent. Her theological probing informs her interaction with the hostile encampment about her, and her dialogue with malice then redefines her relationship to God so that she concludes by grasping prematurely at that which would be hers in the fullness of time. In this she and Adam anticipate all of us in the sinful demand that God not be God, in the prodigal call for the death of the Father and the immediate disposal of the inheritance.
The serpent anticipates in some way the outcome. As he darkly foretells, death is delayed and Adam and Eve become like gods. It is tempting to speculate as to what Satan glimpsed in his momentary intuition and rejection of God’s glory. Did he see something of the Son’s incarnation, just as the Father, Tertullian surmises, saw something of his Son in that dust he molded into Adam? Did Satan, hating the notion of subordination to the God-man, come in that single instant to hate both the human and the divine? Did he glimpse the Crucifixion, such that his assault upon Adam and Eve was a gambit intended to bring about God’s death? In saying, “you shall not die,” did he know that it was God himself who would bear the death?
In any event, Adam and Eve, through an act of mercy, do not die on the very day in which they eat of the fruit. As Bergsma and Pitre point out, however, the immediate death falls upon another, namely that animal whose skin supplies Adam and Eve’s new clothing. We easily overlook this death, and indeed we easily overlook that violence which so often swirls at the heart of our childhood stories. We will return to this idea shortly.
Eve’s exchange with the serpent may provide guidance in our own dialogue with the culture around us. The Church has always worked to engage the cultures into which it bears the Gospel, sloughing away what is dead and elevating what may be preserved within the kingdom of Christ. Especially in our age, when separation of state and religion has become a civic sine qua non, the Church has sought to advance the Gospel through the influence of culture. In Communist Poland, such efforts, taking their direction from the Magisterium, proved deeply successful under the episcopacy of Karol Wojtyla. The liberation theology movement, on the other hand, taking its impulse from culture and then applying that impulse to the Gospel, has seen more dubious gains. Engagement with culture can only bear fruit when the Gospel informs the mission.
The heretic, distorting the hierarchy of being, places his alleged insight above ecclesial reasoning. A subordinate or downright deleterious principle becomes a measure for God. Thus Arius puts the Logos at the mercy of human logic. Thus Hegel makes the Trinity a dialectical rather than a charitable and revelatory principle. Thus Eve sets the serpent’s shrewdness against the Lord’s benevolent dictate.
Such thinking does violence to being. It distorts that justice which permits all parts of the genus of what is to exercise their proper authority and thus to guide each element to its end. Just as unrestrained passion prevents the will and intellect from exercising their authority, a spiritual mutiny which often has devastating effects on the body, so the false interpretation which clings to its own novelty or to the self-righteous indignation it instigates sets the soul at odds with the Bridegroom and his beloved Church.
The death set in motion by Eve’s exegetical dialectic calls, we have mentioned, not only for the eventual death of Eve herself and the final death of Christ, but also for the immediate death of an animal. This immediate death, clothed in the dignity of its end, often escapes our notice. So powerful has the typological and figurative impulse in interpretation become for us that the immediate drama of Genesis may drown in its eventual meaning.
Here again the nursery tale renders us so many children of Odysseus. The violence of the Trojan War has called our father away. The war ended, its violence yet prolongs his wandering so that its presence is felt in every moment of his absence. His wandering confirms us in our static impotence even as his usurpers settle in to a quotidian violence against our home, against our substance. It takes a god to shake us as from slumber, and it takes a father’s bloody return to awaken us, the ones who have never seen war, to the drama of the waiting we have endured.
This notion of violence proves critical with respect to the development of heterodox interpretation when we consider the intimacy of the violent and the dramatic in religion. From Plato and Augustine to Nietzsche and Rene Girard, the matter has been so adroitly handled that there can be little need to delve into it at length. Within both the Hellenistic and Hebrew milieus, violence is bound up with the dramatic and the sacred. The Ancient Greek dramatic festivals, which passed on from the performance of cathartic tragedies to the frenzied dismemberment of the pharmakoi, find analogs in, for instance, the Passover sacrifice of the lamb and the sprinkling of the blood on the doorposts. Who can ignore the fixative horror of the Greek victim torn apart my maddened women, his remains burnt and scattered upon the Aegean? Who can recall the Passover without a thrill of terror at the passage of the angel of death?
The drama of the Fall and the stroke of death that falls upon the animal is fulfilled in the drama of the Cross and that most salutary death which is then made present daily throughout time in the sacrifice of the Mass. The endurance of the Mass through the ages testifies to the violent intensity of its re-presentation, mediated by the womb of the Church. The drama of the religious event is preserved by the Eucharistic reality of Christ. The like of such drama, though it may be analogously felt for a season or a century, cannot ever be truly found on the stages of the world. However great Hamlet and King Lear may be, there are none who perform them every day of the year in every nation of the world.
For all this, the intensity of the Mass, the drama of Christ’s sacrifice made present on the altars of every church in the world, so often eludes us. Our faltering imaginations, our faltering hearts, turn to idols of their own construction, to theories of religion which seek to fabricate a drama which is always already before us. This readiness to hand is both a merciful balm to our temporal, wandering minds and an effect of an event which once and for all responds to every act of human sinfulness. In the Cross is the irruption of eternity into time whereby Christ, fulfilling the role of the animal which gave its skin for clothing, dies so that we might put him on. He is the true pharmakos, the one we in our madness have torn apart, the one whose flesh we have been given for true food, that our madness might be healed.
We forget the violence, the drama of the Cross, as Eve forgot the drama of her communion with God. The one who walked with her in the Garden had become somehow familiar. That terrible God who had supplied all needs and wants had become as normal a thing as the sun. And how amazing that sun once had been—what horror when it first went down in the West, and what astonishment when it again appeared in the East.
The drama of being fades from our eyes, and we begin with Eve to spin a drama of the heart. We wonder at what the Lord has said. We infer, we extrapolate, we surmise, and when a cunning stranger speaks we respond to the thrill which awakens within us. Here now is a creature, a creed, a word which reflects what I have stored up in the shadowy regions of my mind. We call in our inebriation for the death of God, and somehow we still do not die. Somehow the sun continues to rise and we continue to breathe and the God we asked to die lays himself upon the altar, commending us to our Mother, asking us to conform our minds to hers, beckoning us to taste the new fruit which opens our eyes to a reality which continues to stun the serpent who crawls on, gnawing the dust, head bruised.
