A Spark of the Divine

In Genesis 1, God creates the world with the divine, truthful

Word, generating habitable, paradisal order from the
precosmogonic chaos. He then creates Man and Woman in
His Image, imbuing them with the capacity to do the same—
to create order from chaos, and continue His work. At each
stage of creation, including that involving the formation of the
first couple, God reflects upon what has come to be, and
pronounces it Good.
The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter
two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot
is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a
narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The
moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence
through true speech is Good. This is true even of man himself,
prior to his separation from God. This goodness is terribly
disrupted by the events of the fall (and of Cain and Abel and
the Flood and the Tower of Babel), but we retain an
intimation of the prelapsarian state. We remember, so to
speak. We remain eternally nostalgic for the innocence of
childhood, the divine, unconscious Being of the animal, and
the untouched cathedral-like old-growth forest. We find
respite in such things. We worship them, even if we are self-
proclaimed atheistic environmentalists of the most anti-human
sort. The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is
paradisal. But we are no longer one with God and Nature, and
there is no simple turning back.
The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity
with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not
self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their
perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall
counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather
than deserved or earned. They exercised no choice. God
knows, that’s easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for
example, goodness genuinely earned. Maybe, even in some
cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a
phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters.
Who can speak with certainty about such things? I am
unwilling to take these questions off the table, however,
merely because they are difficult. So, here’s a proposition:
perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness
and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that
besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is
instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed
hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and
propensity for evil.
The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the
Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of
Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of
evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state
and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of
great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in
the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt,
God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean?