Lain Aside Their Conceits

In my last post I wrote:

“Even a notion that we are pitiful parts of nature with pitifully inadequate naturally-derived intellectual capacities is a notion that places its holder metaphorically above, looking down.”

We must reckon always that our limitations are not confined to our inabilities to attain some goal that we visualize, nor even confined to our inabilities to frame our goals with certitude.  Our intellectual limitations extend to our inability to remain ever-mindful (for who could?) of the fact that our merest thoughts are constructions of our own making, constructions that are revealed—in moments of unsparing introspection—to arise in unplumbed recesses of that which we blithely call our “selves.”

I will not feign concern over how the preceding might play out in natural philosophy, but I am concerned about the prospect of how a concerted awareness of our limitations will play out in an attempt to grasp Jesus’ teachings.  In a world festooned with schemes of overarching philosophy, Jesus’ teaching seems to be focused unflinchingly on the momentary and on the experientially immediate.  As I have written before, a logical analysis of Jesus’ teachings and of his references to the Scriptures will lead us to examine carefully the state of humanity from the very beginning.

Is it not the case that humanity, viewed in light of the beginning of Genesis, has always struggled with an inability to grasp the momentary and the experientially immediate?  Adam was presented with such a state—a state that we as humans would prize presumably above all others—in his initial opportunity of fellowship with God.  The man for whom it turned out it was “not good” for him to be alone was of course merely “alone” in terms of his own “kind”—Adam was ever in proximity with the Perfect Other who had created him.

When Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree, their response was one of trying to manage time and place and circumstances—to writhe away from “the momentary and the experientially immediate”—and to maneuver thereby toward some perceived better state.  Responses of immediacy (either fleeing directly to God seek forgiveness or waiting submissively for God to deliver judgement) would have been infinitely preferable to hiding, and we are not surprised to find in the teachings of Jesus an emphasis on one or the other preferable approach, or on a combination of both.

The story of humanity from creation on down through Noah is often understood in terms of declining morality, and is often taken in gravest terms as a cautionary tale, but two major elements of conventional analysis are inherently problematic.  One element—which plays havoc with the operation of an “origin story”—is the tendency to imagine that logical analysis of the stories can be based on an understanding of “human nature.”  One example of this is found in attempts to criticize Adam on how or whether he—in the run-up to “The Fall”—exercised properly his role as family head.  A simple reading of Genesis without such predisposition will reveal that the male role of family head was in that very process being formulated (which throws a sour note over the conventional notion that the traditional family is “God’s design.”)  What we call “human nature” was forged in an interplay between God and his creation.

The second problematic element of the conventional analysis is to describe the decline of human morality as being reflected in a more and more bestial (with apologies to the animals) state of the human heart—as though “right thinking” could serve as something of a remedy.  Here the notion of humans understanding their predicament (we don’t) begins to assert its fatal influence.  Our hearts are to blame for making us have horrid thoughts in our heads, but if we will truly use our heads we will understand that—as was evident all the way back in darkened Eden—it is visceral yearning for reunion with God or addled submission to the approach of God’s righteous judgment (or a combination of the two) that can lead to salvation.  Theories of salvation (and the attendant and even more horrid prospect of human theories about God’s nature) cannot lead to salvation.

How then does evil proceed through the beginning of Genesis?  Already, before the Flood, it is said that every imagination of the thoughts of humanity was evil, but (as I have written before) that evocative statement would scarcely account for the manifest ability of humans to still raise children and to still maintain a civil society.  Jesus describes a quite normal, though admittedly coarse, society carrying on unawares before the Flood.

God’s choice of Noah as an exemplary person would seem to be in tune with an attempt to refine fallen humanity, though it might scarcely be thought that God had forgotten that he might save Noah alone and make for him a wife out of a rib.  Instead God dilutes Noah’s essential nature (if indeed humanity is becoming generationally debased) by making his genetic influence a minor fraction of that of post-Flood humanity.  And it is no secret what then happened to Noah’s family.

Clearly, the notion that people in themselves are simply “getting worse” does not stand as a description of the sorry state of civilization depicted in Adam (and Cain the murderer) and Noah and the Tower of Babel.  There are, however, whispers and utterances and shouts in the Genesis account of the true, developing, and insidious element that proceeds to dominate “human nature.”  Humans are beginning to conceptualize, and visualize, and theorize about their state.  The immediacy of moral empathy (the sense that we live in a universe of right and wrong) is being supplanted by the distanced conjecture that we apply to moral philosophy (a universe of thoughts about right and wrong hoisted up Babel-like on other, more-or-less substantial, ostensibly-foundational thoughts about right and wrong.)

In short, the stage is being set for such scenarios as flush-faced upright citizens squirming about in a crowd, hoisting stones around a quavering adulteress (curiously unaccompanied by an adulterer), and then a more sober citizen catches the attention of one of them and asks, “Seriously?”  (Or some such scenario.)  Or, “Are you really going to leave that poor sheep in the gutter?  Seriously?”

As I wrote in a previous post:

“Adam and Eve were not thrown into a world of despair because they were given the ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  They were thrown into a world of despair because they were thrust into the realm of the challenge that Jesus has for us—our eyes were opened, the eyes of our race were opened, to know good and evil, not to know WHAT is good or WHAT is evil.”

And as I wrote just above, there are whispers and utterances and shouts in the Genesis account of the true, developing, and insidious element that proceeds to dominate “human nature.”  Humans are beginning to conceptualize, and visualize, and theorize about their state.  That “state” includes necessarily anything people can think about, and that includes God.

Human beings went from a state of offered communion with God (Adam’s initial state), to a state of natural communion with God (Adam offered God’s garden and God’s creatures), to a state of human companionship in communion with God (Adam and Eve before the “Fall”.)  Clearly, “falling” was going on all along, and at every stage humanity demanded the actualization of their growing conceptualization-system.  The episode with the forbidden fruit was a dismal and unsurprising development, and it stands out most starkly in the explicit references to humanity aiming to understand their condition—an understanding to which, in the final analysis, only God can lay claim.

Men began to call upon the name of the Lord.  There was a time when the “name” of the Lord would have been inseparable from an unspoken renown of a practical inability to exist from moment to moment (as fair a guess as might be made of the newly-created Adam’s state) without God.  To “name” the humanly un-nameable, to speak of the Great “I Am,” is never doable for a mortal without a tinge of presumption.  To say that men began to call upon the name of the Lord is potentially to describe a moral slippage, not a healthy development, and it is of a piece with the general trend of people to concoct a conceptualization-system.

Humans began to create frameworks of thought that consisted of the things of the imagining, not of the things of God.  If there was but an iota of justice in the notion that Cain deserved to be avenged seven times (though we really ought to leave Cain’s “deserving” this or that between him and God), then Lamech in the reasoning of mortals might claim a more manly and courageous stance in declaring that he would exact revenge of seventy-seven.  There is something in what Lamech says, but to object that this “something” might not stand the scrutiny of God’s perfect judgment is no more than it would be to say that all human moral postulations are to some degree suspect.

And at last, the evil humanity before the Flood is supplanted by the evil humanity after the Flood.  Of course, it might always be said that the blanket condemnation of every inclination of the pre-Flood generations was unique (though uniquely unimaginable), although one wonders if such a condemnation of a people was merely supplanted in the popular imagination by more lurid references to this or that people being as bad (or worse) than post-Flood Sodom and Gomorrah.

It would seem, however, that the most revealing insight about Noah and his dysfunctional family is in just such a notion as “a condemnation of a people.”  The pre-Flood generations were bad enough, and violence seems to have filled the days in which—as Jesus reminds us—they carried on much as people in a “civil” state ever have.  There does not seem, however, to have been a system of conceptualized violence against people unborn or unconceived.  Noah’s generation took care of that.  Noah awoke from his stupor and condemned the progeny of Canaan to (presumably) unending and abject slavery.

Cain killed a relative he was unhappy with (though Abel could scarcely have been thought to have wronged his brother.)  Noah refrained from violence against Ham, though Ham had—in Noah’s conceptualization-system—wronged his father Noah.  In the immediacy, Cain (with malice aforethought) plotted his innocent brother’s death.  It would be difficult to contend that “evil” as overtaking people’s hearts was in greater measure reflected elsewhere than in Cain’s case—yet is it really the case that the sad Genesis narrative is describing the dismal progression of urges worsening, rather than something else worsening?

In fact, what is worsening in Genesis is not evil in itself, but rather the enshrinement of evil in human conceits.  Jesus can call people “evil” without batting an eye, and he can expect people—at least people of wholesome orientation—to accept the characterization as “evil” in stride, while working to understand some greater point.  (We, being evil, know how to give good things to our children.)  The enshrinement of evil in human conceits, however, is what is really reflected in the tragedy of Genesis.

Noah would have done a thing of (comparative) mercy to have struck Ham down on the spot.  Instead, Noah condemns Canaan (good luck with that, theologians) and his progeny to innumerable generations and innumerable tortures and innumerable murders (as befitting “the lowest of slaves.”)

This is what really separates us from the will of God, at least in the teachings of Jesus: the perpetual tendency toward rationalizations, a tendency that—in moral scenarios as elsewhere—leads us to ignore our own beams and emphasize others’ motes.  We are always looking to frame our existences, when in reality our existences are framed for us, in manners that we will never understand and that will always seem alien to us.  We can read Scriptures that tell us that we can never see God, and in a moment’s time we will opine on the nature of God.  What is that, but looking at a caricature of God?  In the realm of our experiences, what is that but presuming to see God?

And when we are not presuming to look at God, we are presuming upon the character of God’s universe.  Such conceptualizations are not evil in themselves, but they lay out before us and before each other table upon table of intellectual weapons and poisons.  What, in the midst of these horrid tensions, does Jesus require of us?  Are we not to be rewarded, are we not to find understanding of the means to salvation, in our attempts to understand our situation?

We are not.  In our attempts to understand our situation, we are no different from Adam clutching fig leaves to himself.  Fig leaves have their purposes, and clothing has its purposes, and seeking and asking and knocking have their purposes, but they do not have the purposes we imagine when we are trying to do the will of God.  The only ultimate purpose of all of our strivings is to remind us of the bittersweet futility of our striving—we ask, seek, and knock so that we will know that we already possess that for which we ask, seek, and knock.  We grasp for the kingdom so that we will know we already possess it.

And when we are seized by the futility of our strivings, we are cast—fortunate beings!—into that scene in the dim Garden, offered the chance to run in search of forgiveness or to quiver mutely in anticipation of judgment.  And when we are seized by immediacies of moral import—twice fortunate beings!—we can respond as God would have us, resolving ourselves to the endless, enveloping Otherness of God’s perfection as we see all experiential existence in a cup of water handed to the thirsty.

This, at least, has resolved for me part of the puzzle of Jesus describing at the Judgment how the saved helped him without knowing they were helping him—when Jesus in the gospel testimony had given away the ending of the story.  The saved who helped Jesus without knowing they were helping Jesus were the persons who had lain aside their conceits in the moment, in the immediacy.