They Had Been Images of God: Conclusion – The Answer to Adam

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“Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies.”

So said Kyoami, a character from Akira Kurosawa’s film Ran: pagan, and perhaps unrepentant. And yet, as tends to be the case with pagans, he picked up on an obvious thread of truth.

Man is born impassioned, clung deliberately to his flesh and circumscribed to his pain. It is by pain that man recognizes his reality, understands the world. Pain, be it spiritual or physical—often both at once, for the modern soul—is the only means by which man can adequately communicate. Absent the circumcision of the heart, man’s understanding begins and ends with the flesh and the shocks it is the heir to.

What is the circumcision of the heart? St. Paul speaks of it in Romans 2:28-29:

For it is not he is a Jew, who is so outwardly; nor is that circumcision which is outwardly in the flesh:

But he is a Jew, that is one inwardly; and the circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men but of God.

Circumcision, remember, an outward mark of the Abrahamic Covenant: a mark of obedience. It is only an outward mark, however, and as St. Paul explains, it is not of use to those who do not keep the law already. Keeping the law inwardly, observing it and obeying it even if one hasn’t access to its external trappings, should always be the priority.

But the practice can also be taken to carry a sacrificial aspect, although not in the formalized sense, as it is was not performed in the manner of the Holy Sacrifice was. Rather, like forms of asceticism and fasting, the pain of circumcision serves a higher purpose, and this is true whether for those who willingly undertook it as well as for those who had it inflicted upon them eight days after birth. Like baptism, it wasn’t something they always had control over, but it served them in life in ways they may not always have been aware of.¹

St. Paul’s mention of “the circumcision of the heart” evokes imagery that renders this covenant and sacrifice personal. It brings it into focus as something one must actively and willfully partake in; the law written upon our hearts is not just one that we have to accept, it’s one we should gladly be fulfilling and carrying out interiorly and exteriorly.

So circumcision, when shifted away from the flesh and applied to the heart, takes on a greater role. It is the extrication of the soul from the impassioned fallen nature of the flesh. As the will looks toward God, the flesh must be rendered a divorce; yet, this divorce is not an ignorance of what had come before, but a rebuke and a return to what the flesh was intended to have been at the beginning of things: subservient. The passions of the flesh are not to be the guiding principles of our beings. The flesh must be bent to the spirit. And should you need a catalogue of the passions of the flesh, a quick perusal of the cardinal sins should be enough.

This is important when we consider Adam with relation to ourselves. We can be free to blame Adam for the Fall, at least in the literal sense of attributing to him wrongdoing. But can we blame him in the more practical sense of the term? Can we judge him, as though we’d have been any better? Adam, we must remember, was made smarter, stronger, and more vigilant than any one of us. The full reckoning of his first sin, in the sense that he would have understood it, is beyond our grasp. Were our places reversed, were it you or I in his place, there is no doubt that we would have done the same. It’s tempting to believe otherwise, as obeying God in a prelapsarian world seems such a simple enough thing; and yet a better man than we Fell first.

Adam let into the world sin and death, and rejected God’s grace—if only briefly—that he merited eternal separation from God. This separation, as it stemmed from the contortion of human nature that the Fall inflicted, was passed onto all of his progeny. And yet, hope was promised as a redeemer even at that very moment. God was merciful. He did not abandon His creations at their hour of need. And if we consider God’s ultimate love for the world, then we can infer that ejecting them from Paradise was both a consequence of their transgression and an act of mercy in light of their contorted natures. Staying in Paradise as creatures who so gravely mutilated themselves would have caused even greater suffering than being sent out into the world.

It is not my intention to cast Adam as a scapegoat. He should not be treated as such, for a multitude of reasons—not the least of which being that he was our foremost progenitor and the eldest of our race, formed by God Himself from the slime. That alone is enough to warrant our respect.

Recapitulation of Our Themes

Before approaching a conclusion, we should review what we’ve covered in this work so far.

In the first part, we briefly saw how the modern framework of cosmology is an explicit inversion of the previously-accepted Catholic tradition. We saw how inverting the beginnings of our history, of elongating it, and of suggesting hypotheses of human genesis contrary to what has been revealed to us by Scripture can lead to a distortion of morality. We saw how misrepresenting history contorts our understanding of human behavior and moral agency. We saw how Scripture has several senses to it, that these senses are complementary, and that attempts to square contemporary scientistic narratives with those of Genesis require us to dispense with certain senses of interpretation. We saw that doing so invalidates the interpretation and renders the narrative of Genesis incomprehensible. And we saw laid out a general method of our approach.

In the first chapter, we briefly saw man created as a twofold being comprised of matter and soul, and that these were intermingled similar to how water and earth form mud. We saw that man was made to fill thrones in Heaven, though whether this was to replace the Host that rebelled or simply to better exalt the Glory of God remains hidden. We saw that being made in the image of God entailed a creative aspect to agency that other corporeal creatures lacked, that this manifested as our freedom of will and as our ability to use language, and that it existed before the Fall contorted human nature. We saw that Eden was made as a prefigurement of a temple or a church, that it was a physical place, and that it existed on Earth until the time of the Deluge. And we saw that Eve was necessary to the fulfillment of the human race, that the love that binds together the family images the love found in the Trinity, and that the propagation of men was a blessing upon Adam prior to the Fall.

In the second chapter, we briefly saw what Adam’s initial nature was probably like based on the flaws introduced to creation by the Fall. We saw how the Fall itself was simultaneously a lawful violation of God’s will and a metaphysical alteration to man’s nature, which implies a direct connection between the justice of God and nature of creation. We saw how Adam’s position of authority in the world prompted all creatures to fall with him when he transgressed. We saw how the Fall deprived Adam of the good, of grace, as a result of his gaze ‘turning inward’, and how this darkened his intellect. We saw that the ejection from Eden was as much a lawful reprimand for having transgressed God’s command as it was a real consequence of their Fallen natures being utterly incompatible with Paradise. And we saw that religious sacrifice, although presumably something that would have occurred without the Fall, took on penitential elements in addition to its innate thanksgivings.

In the third chapter, we briefly saw the effects of the Fall on the family. We saw how the Cain’s conflict with Abel originated in the same self-obsession that started with the first transgression. We saw how Cain’s sacrifice was not pleasing to God, and that Cain’s envy prompted him to commit fratricide. We saw God’s mercy manifest even here, as God protected Cain from death in response to Cain’s repentance. And we saw how the lines of Cain and Seth prefigured the cities of man and God as St. Augustine illustrated.

In the fourth chapter, we briefly saw the incompatibility between these two lineages and their customs with relation to virtue and piety. We saw that unchecked vice cannot be underestimated by the virtuous, as it led even the pious men of Seth’s offspring into sin. We saw the world get so corrupted by the iniquities of men—Cainite and Sethite alike—that only Noah’s family warranted delivery from the cataclysm. We saw that giants probably did walk the earth in those days, that men’s lives were exceptionally long, and that the shortening of our lives is a result not just of the Fall—which introduced death—but of the Flood. We saw the truncation of lifespans down to the familiar seventy or eight years happen within three to four centuries of the waters receding. And we saw that the beginning of recognizable written history occurs very soon after the sundering of languages at Babel.

Over the course of this work, we have seen the indications of a great decline. It can be found in our lifespans, our physical stature, our ability to retain knowledge, our understanding of nature, our relationship with God. The last of these, however, is a more complicated subject, as Our Lord’s implementation of the Sacraments have made available a bond with Him closer than what could be accessed by nearly everyone living prior to His Incarnation.

We saw the agents of sin and their influence traversing creation like hungry wolves, seemingly unimpeded, preying upon a civilization of men who have given themselves over to abandon so thoroughly that they even managed to ensare the promised line of Seth. We saw the culmination of a world so wicked that no chronicle or stone from it can be presently be found. We saw the establishment of a civilization by the man who committed the first murder, which spread throughout the world in fifteen hundred years, which held dominion over the whole world, and which is now left as little more than a few lines in the annals of Sacred Scripture.

“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,” says Shelley’s Ozymandias; yet even he had what was left of his own statue. Of the civilization before the Flood, so great was its evil that not even one stone was left unturned.

The Coming of Christ

God did not abandon Adam after he Fell. He did not abandon Cain after he killed his brother. He did not abandon the pious among the first man’s descendants, as he took Enoch and foretold to Noah the impending cataclysm. And he did not abandon the impious, either, who forsook the goodness of the world found all around them for the debaucheries of the flesh and the fraudulent comforts of the corrupted death culture. They, on the contrary, abandoned him.

What was promised to Adam and Eve, and therefore to all of mankind, was the coming of the Redeemer. The history of the Old Testament records the preparation of the world specifically for that time; it is a chronicle of the relationship God had with the people whose blood was chosen to run through that Redeemer’s veins, down the sides of His Cross, and into the chalice of His Holy Sacrifice. It is fitting that so many of the prophets speak of abusive and unfaithful wives when analogizing Israel’s relationship with God, as even that nation succumbed to the same temptations that plagued antediluvian man. Yet their iniquities, too, were used to fulfill the providential end of God’s promise to the first man.

The parallels between the first eleven chapters of Genesis and Christ himself are too numerous to list in this short work. Typological correlations can be found between the Garden, the Ark, even the family tree of the Patriarchs, and with Christ. This is, in fact, the very purpose of the Old Testament for Christians: the histories and prophecies could be read like blueprints in considering the construction of a building. Each prophecy was a strut, each event was a brick, all laid in the preparation for the coming of the Messiah. The building that was erected was that of our salvation: the human body of God, His Blood, the events of His Sacrifice, and the foundation of His Church.

With this in mind, it’s worth briefly dwelling on the cycles present in the Fall and how they were replayed or re-imaged in the life of Christ. The Fathers of the Church have published libraries on such subjects, but, as always, we haven’t the space or time to get into any detail here. A simple approach suffices.

The cycle of the Fall is repeated with Our Lord’s Incarnation, but it is repeated the way a solution reviews a problem in order to solve it. The Devil, under the guise of the serpent, tempted Eve, the woman, who took fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, gave it to Adam, and from this action, death entered the world. Five and a half thousand years later, God, by His angel, spoke to Our Lady, who received Christ from Heaven and gave Him to the world, and from this action, eventually, death was overcome. The Devil and the serpent are repaired by God and His angel. Eve, who took fruit, the instrument of the Fall, is repaired by the Blessed Virgin, who was given fruit—God the Son—which was the vessel of salvation. This is a rudimentary parallel, but it suffices to introduce an even more interesting cycle: the actions of Our Lord’s Passion follow the same pattern of the Fall except they’re backwards, inverted. The Fall marked a descent into sin, while the Passion marked an ascent back into grace.

Where the fruit was given to Adam which prompts the Fall, instead it is Our Lady, a woman, who is given Christ to bring into the world. Adam received the object of his condemnation, and he consumed it; the Blessed Virgin is given the vessel of all redemption, and she in turn gives it to man.

Where the first sin is committed in an act of disobedience, in the removal of fruit from a tree, Christ willingly ascends to the Cross and is united to it. The Tree of Knowledge has its fruit removed; the Tree of Life is remade when God’s Body is nailed to the Cross. Obedience and total submission to the divine will heals the rift carved into human nature by that first disobedient action.

Where Eve was tempted, she became the vessel that deprived all men of glory; yet the Blessed Mother serves God unambiguously as the Queen of Heaven, through whom man returns to the glory promised at creation. The serpent tempted the first woman; the foremost of women grinds the head of that serpent with her heel.

Where God cast out our first parents from Eden and shut its gates because they had brought death into the world, Christ entered the world as the true man, opened the gates of Heaven, and embraced death so that he would conquer it. Because of the Fall did the Most Precious Blood be spilled, but because it was spilled, the Fall is overcome.

And where our first parents descended from the Holy Mount after their transgression, Christ ascended Golgotha to redeem them.

These are not the empty flourishes of pleasant prose, or the empty symbolism of amusing fiction. They aren’t mere literary devices present in the written word of Sacred Scripture. These are the manifestations of providential history, a working in of meaning and cycles and types that build upon each other, crafted and implemented by a divine mind. To think of God as the author of history is no empty allegory; it’s a near-literal understanding of how the turning of history builds to fruition His ultimate plan.

The ancients believed that there was a telos to the world, that actions can be read to have meanings in the same way stories do. We could understand stories to be, in fact, creative imitations of this idea to the extent that our inferior intellects are capable of imitating providence. Modern man has forgotten how to view reality this way, seeing either the mere immediate consequences of actions, or otherwise magnifying, often superstitiously, chains of causality into the realm of hyperbole. The exercises of the former are a simplistic means of getting by in the world, while the latter tend to be exercises in abstraction that serve narratives of social conditioning. Neither gets at what it means to recognize that history is reflected as meaning, that the events of our daily lives are present within the same historical tide as those that shaped mankind.

There are many reasons that Christ undertook a public ministry, and that his death was a violent, humiliating, and excruciatingly public one. We are called to observe it so that we can not only know it, but that we can relate to it, and to know Him. We are called to imitate Him, to go to Him, to rely on Him—to commune, in fact, which is possible only by befriending Him.

So when we see a parallel between elements of our lives and that of Christ’s, this is not mere coincidence. Likewise is it not coincidence that the life Christ was a fulfillment of those prefigurements chronicled in the histories of the Old Testament. History is relevant, immediate; to the extent that it is knowable, we are able to see it as a great work of God’s authorship that exists for us to better come to know Him.

The Immediateness of History

Graham Hancock, popular alternative-history crank and psychedelics proponent, has famously remarked that ours is a civilization with amnesia. There’s truth to that, albeit not quite in the manner which he probably intends. Rather than forgetting how very ancient we are as an intelligent race, as his hypothesis goes, we have forgotten instead how very young we are, comparatively speaking.

It is comforting to buy into the belief of an unimaginably ancient world. There is comfort to be found among the million-year-old rocks that geologists have told us preexisted even some of the heavenly bodies. There is comfort there because we can brush them with our hands and console ourselves: these have existed before even our imaginations can fathom, and they will continue to exist long afterward. Extrapolating further: our life is but an immeasurable micron in the vast timeline of a universe whose boundaries and distances cannot be fathomed. Our life, in effect, is hardly worth notice; it exists to be observed only by ourselves, and even should the Almighty find it amid the countless others, it is as insignificant as a single grain of sand is to our attention.

We can entertain, abstractly of course, notions of God’s infinitude. We can recognize that the endlessness of His intellect means that our lives remain every bit as important to Him whether they’re thrown into a context of trillions of years or whether it’s simply a few thousand. But we should also remember that God works in ways that will be knowable to those seeking him—who, as the First Vatican Council teaches, is everyone, at least at some point in their lives.

The world was created specifically as part of a divine plan, and man was positioned to play a vital, integral part of this plan as a sort of lord of the Earth. This would imply that the world should be knowable by man, at least in the sense of how it was supposed to be his kingdom. It has context, and that context isn’t a some unreachable skybox that exists as some aesthetical design feature. The context is concrete, sensible, defined. History is immediate, relevant, providential. There’s no room for arbitrariness in such a world. Things don’t just simply happen; they’re either allowed to happen by God’s permissive will, or He actively intends for such things to come to pass. There’s nothing else.

The comfort found in unimaginably ancient Earths and multiple timelines is a false comfort that preys upon a strain of irresponsibility. Again, abstractly reasoning about these as philosophical exercises isn’t the point; their proliferation as social narratives, default modes of thinking, presumed facts of life according to secular models: this is where such thinking is dangrous. It’s a comfort that suggests that nothing really matters, that nothing really changes, and that nothing makes a difference. This comfort is slothful by its nature; it inspires no sense of responsibility and fosters instead a moral apathy. If there is a god, it suggests, that god is so remote, and the cosmos so infinite, and history so long, that there’s no significance to anything that I do. The common understanding of morality between people, rather than being the binding fabric that holds us together and better completes the divine intention for the world, becomes instead a pragmatic attempt to prevent us from killing each other. This understanding, as we know from the last century, when the civilization once guided by the Church embraced various alternatives instead, has demonstrated itself to be an overwhelmingly obvious failure.

Shorten history, and the story changes. Shorten history, and it gets increasingly hard to believe that nothing matters. Shorten history enough, in fact, and it becomes impossible to argue that anything at all could be unimportant to the eye of God. Let’s keep things straight here, however: I’m not making a philosophical argument. This has to do with pragmatics. Man must contextualize himself within the world, as he was created in it, and he will eventually die in it.

If he believes the world to be so massive in size and scope as to be beyond measure, as the proposed age of the Earth is by secular standards, then the size and scope cease mattering in any meaningful sense. The average mind can’t attach a value to the number 4.6 billion; it can grasp that it’s a number magnitudes removed from 4.6 million, but that again is a value that exists only in the abstract. Even if we were to count out all the grains of sand on a beach, eventually the number would cease making sense. The boundary between sensible and incomprehensible might be a little different for everyone, but there always comes a point at which the human calculator switches mode from knowable values to values that can’t be related to.

Yet Christ pierces through this ambiguity like a nail. History is rendered knowable because it has a beginning, and since we can know that, we can believe that it most certainly has an ending. And when we recognize that, we have two points of reference by which to calculate our own moral agency. There is someplace we have come from, and there is a point to which we are going; once the material dimension is made sensible, the moral dimension becomes possible to interpret. If there is no discernible place that we have come from, then where we go remains just as ambiguous; a stunted moral development, withered and lukewarm, naturally reflects such an ambiguous understanding of reality.

We should trust Scripture when it refers to the lives of our most ancient patriarchs. The genealogy of Christ, traced by St. Luke back to Adam, is not to be taken as somehow mythological in character. The antediluvian world, distant as it may be to our imagination, is not to be considered a fairy tale. It is partly a warning and partly a guide stone; it warns against the behavior that led to the cataclysm in the first place, and it reminds us in an historical sense that God holds real, discernible interests in creation.

And we should take comfort in that.

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1It’s worth pointing out that the circumcision of the ancient Hebrews differed greatly from the practice that we recognize today. There’s a lot of literature on this, but for a brief look, see here. It changed into what resembles its current form sometime in the third or fourth century AD.