The following is the third in a five-part series.
By Dan Valenti
In the Garden of Eden account, trees play a prominent role. This is not by accident. My ancestors in the Austrian Alps would beg a tree's pardon before chopping it down or even pruning it. Woodsmen the world-over know about the sentience of trees. Likewise, there is an almost universal cultural archetype of tree spirits. Examples include the Hebrew Tree of Knowledge, the bo tree under which Buddah became enlightened; the Scandinavian myth of Yggdrasil, or World Tree; and the Norse fable of Odin's sacred ash tree, big as the universe, whose ancestors are with us today in the form of a Christmas tree.
Naturalist and author Guy Murchie calls a tree the best symbol to connect earth and heaven. Trees absorb the sun and rain from the sky and feed nutrients into the ground. They take sustenance from the earth and give it back, transformed, to the air. A tree is a closed-looped system of synergy.
Through their leaves, trees evaporate what they don't use of rain and sun, helping to maintain terrestrial circulation. They preserve the atmosphere by inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. They hold the soil together by stemming erosion. They direct the course of rivers and brooks, and they literally leash "stationary clouds to wooded slopes with invisible thongs of humid wind," as Murchie writes. Like icebergs, trees exist 90 percent hidden beneath the surface. Could there be a more appropriate spiritual symbol than a tree?
Truth or Consequences
The talking serpent tells Adam and Eve about the tree of knowledge. The First Parents succumb to temptation, eat the fruit, become aware of their nakedness, and hide from God. As it turns out, the serpent did not lie when he told Adam and Eve "that on the day you eat [the fruit] your eyes will be opened" and they would know "good and evil" (Gn 3:5-6). This is exactly what happened. After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, God says, "See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil" (Gn 3:22). The serpent told the truth!
The serpent deceived, though, when he promised the First Parents they would not die after eating the proscribed fruit and that they would become "like gods." That's not what happened, and Adam and Eve were incapable of handling their new awareness. God may easily deal with evil, but Adam and Eve had no chance. In eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were children playing with matches in a gasoline tank.
Think what it must have been like for Adam and Eve at the moment of realization. They were suddenly slugged with the shocking comprehension that, by their own choice, there was now far more with which to deal than the bliss of Paradise. They woke up to evil. They had just played the first game of "Truth of Consequences" - and lost.
Why did God create man with free will and a capacity for awareness? We would do better to ask: Why would He create man any other way? Why would God want to make an automaton that could only produce mechanized responses to programmable situations? Where is the need for love and mercy in such a robotic creation? Do we have mercy for a machine that breaks down? Do we love a lawn mover for cutting the grass? Does a car company throw a retirement party for an assembly-line robot after its replacement by newer technology?
Since God is Love, isn't it logical that the apex of His creation would have love's full capacities? Isn't it reasonable that mankind would, in God's "image and likeness," have the ability to choose and possess the potential for self-awareness? Wouldn't God have infused man so that He could activate this self-awareness in its proper time? But like kids prematurely sneaking downstairs to raid the presents instead of waiting for Christmas day, Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation and forced the hidden knowledge before its time.
'No! You Will Not Die'
From the moment of their creation to their encounter with the serpent, Adam and Eve faced the intrigue of choice. God had told them about the tree of knowledge almost from the beginning, and apparently, from what Eve tells the serpent, they had chosen to obey God and stay away from the tree.
Then Eve gets into a dialogue with the serpent, "the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made" (Gn 3:1). It's interesting that the serpent is described as "subtle" - and not "evil." This involves more than semantics. The "subtlety" that introduced Adam and Eve to their downfall by choice was so nuanced and delicate that it would have been difficult to analyze or perceive. That's the definition of "subtle." Adam and Eve probably would have had the sense to resist blatant evil, but subtlety? They likely didn't have a chance.
SERPENT: Did God really say you were not able to eat from any of the trees in the garden?
EVE: We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, "You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death."
SERPENT: No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil (Gn. 3:2-6).
This is an enlightening exchange. Besides being told by God not to eat the tree's fruit, Adam and Eve were also warned not to touch it. This tells of the immense potency, the fissionable power, of the knowledge God, out of love, wants to keep from the First Parents until they are ready for it. Genesis tells us that when Eve sees the fruit, it looks as pleasing as it tasted and was "desirable for the knowledge it could give." She is like a kid gazing at a pretty beaker of translucent, amber nitroglycerin. She picks up the beaker. It looks like honey. How can the child possibly be expected to handle the consequences when the liquid ignites?
A 'This' in Terms of 'That'
Prior to their fall, Adam and Eve did not have a worry about evil. They probably weren't even aware of good, since they had no awareness of even being naked and since the forbidden tree also holds the knowledge of good. Their awareness of good comes about through a comparison/contrast made possible by sin, a "this" in terms of "that."
Genesis 1:26-31 makes clear that God made man good (again, in His "image and likeness"). This goodness is inherent in mankind. Original sin didn't change that.
Good is the norm intended for us, evil our abnormality. Goodness is our inherent right, willed by God from the moment of creation. Evil is our inherited condition achieved through our fall from Eden and rushed into our awareness as a consequence of sin. We are built for happiness, co-joined to morality, attracted to ethics, and prepared for righteousness. At its core, human nature leans to dignity. Our default setting is goodness.
Mankind, therefore, is redeemable.
To become good again, to rebound from sin, we need to recover our true nature. We re-discover our goodness and "god-ness" after a process of reconciliation suggested by the phrase "born again." In a sinful state, we are like a great statue that becomes again entombed in a block of marble. God's mercy is the chisel He uses to chip away the unwanted stone, so that the beauty of the frozen figure emerges from its rock prison.
Pt. 4 of this series looks as "the second tree" of Paradise, the Tree of Life. By eating the fruit of the forbidden first tree, Adam and Eve never get near the second. It is the tree whose fruit will enable them to "live forever" (Gn 3:22).
Dan Valenti writes for numerous publications of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, both in print and online.
