In an article included in On the Bible, Martin Buber states that a knowledge of the language and culture of ancient Hebrews tells us that the meaning of the “good and evil” related to the tree of knowledge in Eden is “adequate awareness of the opposites latent in creation.” Apparently, the phrase “good and evil” is a way of speaking about all of those opposites. In my way of speaking, the ancient Hebrews tended to speak of abstract classes in concrete terms, using examples rather than speaking of species or classes or sets as Western man learned to do from the Greeks. “Good and evil” is one easily perceivable example of that class of ‘opposites’.
Continuing with Buber’s words:
This knowledge as the primordial possession of God and same knowledge as the magical attainment of man are worlds apart in their nature. God knows the opposites of being, which stem from His own act of creation; He encompasses them, untouched by them; He is as absolutely familiar with them as He is absolutely superior to them; He has direct intercourse with them (this is obviously the original meaning of the Hebrew verb “know”: be in direct contact with), and this in their function as the opposite poles of the world’s beings. For as such He created them — we may impute this late biblical doctrine (Isa. 45:7) to our narrator, in its elementary form. Thus He who is above all opposites has intercourse with the opposites of good and evil that are of His own making; and something of His primordial familiarity with them He appears, as can be gathered from the words “one of us” (Gen. 3:22), to have bestowed upon the “sons of God” ([Gen.] 6:2) by virture of their share in the work of creation.
This is good stuff, what I agree with and what I disagree with.
I certainly agree with Buber that the “good and evil” isn’t related to any tale of a primeval fall from a time when Adam and Eve lived in some sort of transparent communion with God. In scientific terms, the ancestors of all human beings were ape-like creatures with the brain structures which could be developed to handle abstractions, perceptual and conceptual, but those capabilities can’t be developed without the proper nurturing and without the individual responding properly to his environment or environments. Once the human brain had evolved to an adequate level, it took additional millenia for human beings to develop minds capable of a more profound appreciation of ‘good-and-evil’.
As Buber says in a restatement of his general position:
“Good-and-evil” is the “yes-and-no” to creation.
I’m inclined to go with Buber on this issue, partly because of his deep knowledge of the language of Biblical texts and languages and the underlying history and partly because his answer has a good feel to it, as if it synchronizes well with God’s thoughts as I can detect them by way of my responses to Creation, including scripture. My prior thoughts were along lines that Buber says are not supported by the sense of the language: the great event was an awakening of moral self-awareness on the part of Adam and Eve, or more prosaically, an awakening of moral self-awareness on the part of the ancestors of modern human beings, perhaps an awakening which occurred over a number of generations.
I’m not ready to renounce that theory that Adam and Eve experienced an awakening of moral self-awareness, but I’m ready to demote it to a secondary meaning — I tend to think that the Bible has multiple meanings, in particular over larger sections and in still larger groupings of sections or entire books, and those meanings might emerge over time — even if they can’t be strictly supported by the language and culture which might have held in the time of the events or the time of the narrator. We must start with the primary meanings, those intended by those narrators, But we must go beyond that in order to let Biblical revelation play its proper role in shaping our minds which are our best understanding, or image, of God’s Creation.
We must develop a proper worldview as I call it, dangerously I guess because of strange uses of the term ‘worldview’ by recent scholars or commentators in theology and maybe other fields. My worldview is an effort to see a world, unified and coherent and complete (in its own nature), where we modern human beings see realms only loosely connected to each other — if connected at all. See The Only Sane Christian in the Modern World for a discussion of the need for such a worldview, at least for those who believe in an all-powerful Creator.
After verifying that our knowledge is consistent with empirical reality, we can apply a test to our understanding of that knowledge, whether a theory of gravity or an understanding of the meaning of an important story in the Bible:
Does it conduce to a narrative which helps us to see our world in its necessary unity and coherence and completeness?
So, was the ‘fall’ of Adam and Eve actually a discovery that God alone knows being and non-being, that: “He who is above all opposites has intercourse with the opposites of good and evil that are of His own making” and that “something of His primordial familiarity with [such primordial opposites] He appears, as can be gathered from the words ‘one of us’ (Gen. 3:22), to have bestowed upon the ‘sons of God’ ([Gen.] 6:2) by viture of their share in the work of creation.” A mouthful, but it rings true. It rings true to this world as we meet it and try to respond to it faithfully and courageously.
There are opposites which only God can truly know, ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ provides an obvious example. But I have a Thomistic optimism when it comes to the human mind. In principle, the human being can respond to Creation, shaping his mind to encapsulate it so fully that his mind is an image of Creation, that is, an image of the thoughts God manifested as this particular Creation which includes this still more particular world. In principle, we can know the ‘good-and-evil’ which is a fundamental part of this world.
We can’t know ‘being-and-nonbeing’ nor can we know what God might have created but didn’t. He shaped us to be capable of being the image of the Creator, His own divine Self in a freely-chosen and self-limited role. It was the very act of God in freely choosing such a role that is the act of Creation, the act-of-being which is this Creation, including this particular world He shaped from some rawer stuff. For further discussions of this idea of God in a self-limted role as Creator, see See Proving the Existence of Zeus, The Christian in Einstein’s Universe: Extraterrestrial Life, and Evolutionary Thomists Don’t Do Ontology.
I claim we can — in principle — know those opposites which stem from God’s act of creation though we can’t know all that lies on the ‘other side’ of that act, God Himself in His transcendence including all the thoughts He didn’t manifest in Creation.