Another Way of Looking at Things
There are quite a few movies out there that are almost unbearably artsy. They aren’t very popular with general audiences, but some niche bands of film students will list them as among their favorites. They are held up as examples of true cinema, as opposed to all those popular movies—that is, pretty much any title that more than a handful of people could name. What most of these movies have in common is that they are really open to interpretation. This is often because they appear to be very ambiguous. You may get to the end and have a lot of questions. Did the main character die or were they somehow healed? What did the ending actually mean? What was up with that strange music? What did the director want me to get out of this? While some directors have a very specific message they want people to carry away, many of these movies exist to be meaningful on many different levels to a wide variety of people. Like some of the greatest works of art, these films can have a conversation with you. What you walk away with depends on what you bring.
The same may not be true for movies in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe and other popular properties, in which ambiguity seems to be rare and relatively unimportant. Much of the entertainment we see in popular culture today is meant specifically to entertain. They are more concerned with getting people into theaters or subscribing to their streaming service than making a piece of art that really has a conversation with the audience. The truth is, interpretation, participating in a dialogue with a piece of art, is hard work. It requires creative thinking and attention to detail. When people simply want to relax, turn their brains off, and enjoy something after a day of hard work, thinking critically about art might not be interesting to them. Maybe we are overworked and overtired as a society, maybe creative thinking with regard to art is too hard for us, or maybe we have simply grown comfortable with not thinking deeply about the stories we tell and share. Whatever the case, allowing for ambiguity and multiple interpretations is not something we often do.
Of course, this isn’t new. People have been lazily reducing stories to a single, fixed interpretation for years. The longer a story has been around, and the more we believe it is simple, the more we reduce it to a single interpretation. That is perhaps why we all think we know the story of the fall in Genesis chapter three and exactly what it means. However, part of the reason this story has survived so long and has been so important to history is precisely because, as much as it may appear simple, it resists a fixed interpretation. I want to share an interpretation of Genesis three that is probably different from what you are familiar with. I want to be clear, this is not the only interpretation. It doesn’t negate other reasonable views, but it does provide another way to look at a classic story.
Traditionally, there has been a problem in interpreting this story. If Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, shouldn’t that be a good thing? Why is it a problem for them to gain knowledge? This certainly doesn't seem like something a loving God would punish them for. It appears that they gain knowledge, and God is upset by their possession of knowledge, then God curses them.
However, there are parallel stories in the ancient near east that cast this in a different light. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the titular king’s friend Enkidu has an interesting origin story. He begins as essentially a wild beast, sent by the gods to fight against Gilgamesh for his oppression of the people. Enkidu is essentially an animal, at home with the beasts of the forest, and content with his life. Gilgamesh sends a sacred prostitute to seduce and civilize him and he learns to be a man. To be clear, his species doesn't change. He doesn’t take on a remarkably different form. The difference between man and beast is civilization. The sacred prostitute gives him knowledge of civilization, human boundaries, right and wrong, and as a result, he becomes a true human. But this isn’t without its drawbacks. After fighting Gilgamesh to a draw, they become friends, and Enkidu tells the king that he misses his old life as a wild beast. After some adventures together, eventually the time comes for Enkidu to die, and this too takes on a different meaning now that he is no longer a wild beast.
Animals may fear death in the sense that they don’t want to die, but most don’t seem to be concerned with the abstract concepts of life and death, meaning, and legacy. For the most part, animals eat, drink, sleep, and reproduce. They don’t fear death in the same way humans do. Death isn’t the same for an animal and a human. You may argue that this isn’t true of all animals. Consider the elephant. However, this was certainly the view of people in the ancient near east. The emergence of story-telling, self-understanding, and a sense for a greater meaning elevated humans above the beasts, but it also left them aware of and fixating upon death. Knowledge leads to death in the sense that knowledge makes us keenly aware of our mortality.
Going back to the fall, and God’s curse of Adam and Eve, maybe this isn’t so much a punishment as a revelation of reality. “If you want knowledge so much, here you go. Know this: you will die.” Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve are first aware of the nudity. They make clothing to hide themselves. They can no longer be animals, beasts of the earth, they are taking their first steps into being civilized and with that comes toil. They can’t simply wander around and eat what they want. They will have to work at farming. They cannot simply be free, equal, and share in mutual love, they will establish hierarchy that will control the nature of their social order. They will no longer live simply and happily. They will fixate upon their pain and their impending deaths, constantly anxious about their legacy and their finality.
Humanity’s rise also correlates with its fall. Becoming human as we understand it requires them to leave behind the simplicity of the animal world and become brutally aware of the hardship in the human world.
I have heard people argue that the more you know, the more miserable you are, and there is some truth to that. Knowing all the trouble in the world and understanding how much of it we have caused can make you feel bad for being human and frightened for the future. If you need an example of just how much trouble we have caused, look up the Holocene extinction. Contrary to what people might think, many of the mass extinction events throughout history have occurred on a very long timeline, decades, even centuries, not a few cataclysmic hours. In that spirit, some biologists have pointed to the history of human civilization as being an extinction event of its own. Due to habitat destruction and extreme hunting, humans have caused enough extinctions for our geological period to be considered a mass extinction event. We are the meteor or supervolcano of our time.
Naturally, thinking about this can make one feel a bit guilty. Our comfortable lives, at least in part, have been the result of massive destruction of various species. Knowing that, along with understanding all the suffering that humans have caused for ourselves and others, we can see how knowledge relates to suffering. Again this doesn’t mean that this is the only valid interpretation, but it does at least give us an explanation to why it seems like God is punishing us for gaining knowledge. Maybe the truth is that we punished ourselves with knowledge, a two-edged sword. Becoming human is itself a sacrifice, and sometimes I think we all wonder what it would have been like, if we could have simply remained wild. And on this first Sunday in Lent, that is exactly where we find Jesus, in the wilderness. We can see Jesus being tempted in the wilderness and returning to civilization as a reflection of the emergent humanity that the Genesis story describes. Jesus understands his future. Jesus fully takes on the suffering that comes with knowledge. And despite this, Jesus goes to the cross for us.
