Who Are You? (III)

We must do our best to try to find out why. Merton proposes that we follow a little the thoughts in Sermons 81 and 82 of St Bernard's Cantica in which he expressed the idea that "The act which was the source of all man's spiritual deordination was an act by which Adam cut himself off from God, from himself and from the reality around him....By an act of pure pride, untainted by the slightest sensuality, passion, weakness, fleshiness, or fear, Adam put an abyss between between himself and God and other men. He became a little universe enclosed within himself, communicating feebly, hesitantly and fearfully the other universes around him. The young worlds that came forth from him and Eve were wild, unpredictable and destructive worlds--beings like Cain that would have to be specially marked by God lest they be killed."

Merton asks,"What was this sin?" That sin was first of all, "an attitude of mind". Before he committed the act  of eating the forbidden fruit, the attitude was already there" "a way of looking at reality that condemned man, by its very nature, to become unreal...Adam who possessed an existential, an experimental knowledge of all that was good and all that was real, and who was mystically united with God, the infinite source of all actual and possible reality, wanted to improve on this by knowing something else, which he thought, would be something more.": the knowledge of evil. He wanted "an experience, an existential knowledge of evil, "not only to know evil by theoretical inference from good (which he could well have done without sin) but he wanted to know evil in a way in which it was not even known by God: i.e. by experience". The result according to Merton is that in wishing for something more, he reached out for what in fact was "disastrously less": "in finding "two" he has less, not more, than the original 'one'. And he lost his inheritance, which was the free possession of all good, as a son of God. He tasted and saw that evil was terrible. And he hated himself for it." To me, Adam did what Faustus did: he wanted an intimate knowledge of good and evil. It was a sin of greed, of avarice, of immoderation, a false hope for more intellectual, metaphysical and existential knowledge than is good for him. He says, "I think something of a Prometheus exploit was secretly implicit in the outlook that led Adam to eat of the one bad tree in the garden...that he was induced to 'steal' the experience of evil  by an act of disobedience clearly indicates, it seems to me, that he felt that all the good that had come to him could, if were lost, be stolen back." ie. he wanted to steal something which he knew in advance does not properly belongs to him.

What was the kind of "theft" involved? And why does he say it was a "theft"?  Adam failed to understand "the true nature of love...that the gifts which had been given to him could only be possessed as long as they were received as gifts. They were not and never could be won by right of conquest for that was impossible. To think otherwise was, in fact, completely to misunderstand the true nature of God." To return to the Promethean analogy, Merton says, "thinking that the fire could be stolen, and not knowing that it would be freely given, he unavoidably knew only false gods, not the living God. These false gods were beings only a little more than strong than man, only a little more spiritual, only a little more wise. They needed fire, in the end, as much as man. They would resent the theft of fire. They would defend themselves jealously against any invasion of their Olympus. They did not want man to have what was theirs, for they could not afford to see themselves weakened and man strengthened. All these concepts imply a narrow, jealous, weak, fearful kind of god.

Merton thinks that in reaching out his hand for the forbidden fruit, Adam "implied that the taste of evil was something God also might possibly be wanting...perhaps, something God feared to let him have, lest man be made too strong and become his equal.( And yet Adam was already the equal of God in the fullest sense possible to mere man short of union with Him in the eternal beatific vision which was to be the reward of his probation)". To him, "such a thought was only possible in one who had already ceased to know the true God."

Whilst one may agree with Merton that Adam's sin may consist in his pride, but one may well question whether it could be said that Adam was the equal of God "in the fullest sense" before the ate the forbidden fruit. But there is little doubt that Adam wanted to know and taste what it felt like to be God. To me, this desire is quite natural. Man is born with an insatiable desire to find out that which is unknown to him. That has been the motive force behind all our discoveries in science and the driving force of our technology. Man has a natural curiosity. Some of us possess more of it than others. We prefer if possible not only to be, but to know why we are what we are, what is good and what is bad for us and for others. It is a mystery to me why God does not desire man to know the difference between good and evil. Perhaps such a knowledge may not always add to our happiness. But it certainly adds to our awareness as man. And what kind of life is one which is lived without awareness and consciousness or self-consciousness? Hasn't Socrates taught us to "Know thyself" and said that the unreflected/unexamined life is not worth living? Why did God forbid it? For our good? Or is that just an arbitrary command, given for no reason other than that it was He who gave it or given purely to show us that he is our lord and master and as an act asserting his authority over us (which amounts to the same thing)? And if he has given us reason, with the foreknowledge that we shall use it, willy nilly, why does he still forbid us from using it to learn about the difference between good and evil? Why does he wish to keep us ignorant of such knowledge and punish us for doing so? Is knowledge of good and evil the exclusive prerogative of God? And what about people in countries like China which has developed its morality free from any reference to the Christian God? If Chinese people know about good and evil, does that trespass upon God's prerogative, (assuming that it is God's exclusive prerogative)? I am afraid I don't understand it at all.

Whatever the true reason (if any) why God gave Adam and Eve that mysterious injunction against knowledge of good and evil may be, Merton says he agrees with St Bernard's understanding of the issue. He says that to St. Bernard, this "sapor mortis" (taste for death) is at the heart of original sin and that sapor mortis is the "exact opposite" of "sapida scientia"(existential tasting or knowledge of the divine good). I wonder if that sapor mortis is in some sense the "death instinct" [ thanatos as the polar opposite or instinct for eros (or life or love)]  spoken of by Freud. Anyway, to them, "the existential knowledge of the goodness of God is only possible when we experience the goodness of God in himself, ie. as He Himself 'experiences' it". To Merton, our experience of the goodness of God is "an experience of infinite freedom, of infinite giving, infinite selflessness" but whilst the love that is in God is "experienced as given with infinite freedom", in us, that love is "experienced as received into the arms of our own finite and contingent freedom". To him, "There is no full and total experience of God that is not at the same time an exercise of man's fundamental freedom (of spontaneity) and of God's mercy. It is a free consent in an act of mutual giving and receiving that takes place between two wills, two 'persons', finite and infinite. Merton thinks that the only way in which we can receive "the fullness of divine love" is to "imitate His act of giving by surrendering ourselves completely to His love". This makes sense of to me. Experience has taught us that we feel happiest and most satisfied when we completely abandon ourselves into loving someone else or some activity or other, whether it be our mate, our children, our work, our vocation or our hobby with no thought for our "self". If we substitute for the word "God" the word "Tao" (as did Bishop John Wu of Hong Kong deceased), we will get an inkling of what it means to merge our finite and contingent "self" into something far greater than that limited "self".

Merton thinks that as a result of that primal pride and his false desire of "improving" his wisdom and knowledge through acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, Adam lost not only "the full experience of good that was freely given to him by God,...he lost his immortality, his contemplation, his power over himself and over irrational creation and finally even his status as a son of God...his immunity from disordered passion, his freedom from ignorance, his incapacity to suffer". But to Merton, "These deprivations were not merely the revenge of an irate God--they were inherent in the very attitude and act which constituted Adam's sin." He lost his immortality because he broke his soul's contact with God, its source of life and was thus left to his own contingency. He lost not his freedom of choice, but his freedom from sin, the freedom to attain without obstacle to that love for which he had  been created: "He exchanged the spontaneity of a perfectly ordered nature elevated by the highest gifts of mystical grace, for the compulsions and anxieties and weaknesses of a will left to itself, a will which does not want to, hates what it ought to love and avoids what it ought to seek with its whole being."Since he had decided to depend upon himself. without contact with God, Adam has to become his own little god: everything had now to serve him, since he no longer served the Creator...But, precisely sinne he no longer fitted perfectly into the order in which they had all been established, all creatures rebelled against Adam, and he found himself surrounded not with supports but with so many reasons for anxiety, insecurity and fear. He was no longer to control even his own body, which became to some extent the master of his soul. His mind, now, since it no longer served God, toiled in the service of the body, wearing itself out in schemes to clothe and feed and gratify the flesh and protect its frail existence against the constant menace of death"  Per St. Bernard: "the desire of earthy things, which are all destined for death, surrounded hims with thicker and thicker shadows, and the soul that thus lived could see nothing around about itself but the pale face of death appearing like a spectre everywhere....By enjoying perishable things as though they were its last ends, the soul has put on mortality like a garment. The garment of immortality remains underneath, not cast off, but discolored by the overcast garment of death" (Sermon 82 in Cantica #3) St. Bernard sees the fall not as a descent from the supernatural to the natural, but as a collapse into ambivalence in which the historical "nature" in which man was actually created for supernatural union with God is turned upside own and inside out and yet still retains its innate capacity and "need" for divine union.". The inner recesses of our conscience, where the image of God is branded in the very depth of our being, ceaselessly reminds us that we are born for a far higher freedom and for a far more spiritual fulfillment...the concrete situation in which man finds himself, as a nature created for a supernatural end, makes anguish inevitable. He cannot rest until he rests in God; not merely the God of Nature, but the living God, not the God that can be objectified in a few abstract notions, but the God who is above all concept. Not the God of a mere notional or moral union, but the God Who become Our Spirit with our own soul. This alone is the reality for which we are made. Here alone do we finally "find ourselves'--not in our natural selves but out of ourselves in God."

(To be cont'd)