From Terryl and Fiona Givens and their book ‘The God Who Weeps’, under the above title:. . . . 56
. . . . another poet doubted the loss of paradise was either desirable or fair. In Lord Byron’s play about the aftermath of Adam’s and Eve’s exile from Eden, an angry Cain finds himself in a world of pain and death. “I was unborn: I sought not to be born,” he complains.
Thus, two different scenarios offer themselves to our choosing. In one version, . . . . we are—like Cain—helpless victims of decisions made by someone else. The Fall was a catastrophe—a catastrophe that Christ would mitigate, but a catastrophe none the less. For centuries, the Adamic decision to defy the gentle command of a generous God was viewed as such an infinite betrayal that the universe itself could not contain it; the repercussions of Eve’s primeval gesture overflows into generations millennia removed, children and children’s children unborn. The Original Sin has seemed to millions to be a choice of such unforgivable pride in the face of such infinite goodness that the penalty should descend not just upon the original couple, but on their descendants forever.
That is why Byron’s Cain rebels against paying for a choice he had no part in making, deprived of paradise through no fault of his own. To Cain, we are all pawns in a game of the gods and now all human history unfolds as a bleak aftermath of a cosmic catastrophe. True enough, this version of life’s meaning assigns the role of savior to the Son of God, and all may yet end in consoling splendor. But in the story of Original Sin, redemption and salvation emphasize our “lostness.” Our damnation and alienation is a natural, default condition from which we need rescue. The implications of this scenario are immense. Western culture has been largely shaped by this narrative that depicts our mythic ancestors as cosmic failures and betrayers of our race, and ourselves as inmates of an earthly prison to which we are sentenced before we are born.
Or, we might conceive a narrative more like Frost’s—one in which we willingly gave up paradise for what the poet called a greater “good discerned.” The question is, what greater good can life entail? Why leave heaven for a vale of tears? The text of Genesis gives us some clues. Eve’s and Adam’s decision to eat the fruit of the tree, and thus forsake their paradise, may be an allegory for—or perhaps a counterpart to—our own decision to accept the conditions of mortality, in exchange for a heavenly paradise.
We should notice that in the story of the Garden, Adam and Eve are presented with options that are more complex than the simple Right and Wrong of Sunday sermons. Certainly a prohibition is violated, and in that sense there is a transgression. But as the philosopher Hegel argued forcefully, the most tragic predicaments in which we find ourselves are those that require a choice between Goods, not Good and Evil. The author of Genesis frames Eve’s choice as just such a dilemma, a choice between safety and security of the Garden, and the goodness, beauty, and wisdom that come at the price—and only the price—of painful lived experience. Her decision is more worthy of admiration for its courage and initiative, than reproach for its rebellion. This is apparent for a number of reasons.
First, the tree was, according to the author, good for food and a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise. And those motives, not rebelliousness and perverseness, are what the author of Genesis specifically attributes to Eve as she makes her choice. She is not tempted by frivolous curiosity or hunger for power. She is not facilely manipulated or co-opted to a nefarious scheme. She is depicted as a woman in pursuit of the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Second. . . . ~Terryl and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps (R.R. Donnelley, Crawfordsville, IN, 2012), 56-57 (continued)
