Conscience and the Tree of Knowledge

If good would have come from eating of the Tree of Knowledge, God would not have forbidden it. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


My full quote for this reflection is quite a bit longer, but I find I must stop after just this much of it and observe how our inner rejection of this one statement reflects our deepest beliefs about God and about ourselves.  Don't even the most spiritual of us tend to think this is only mostly true?  At best, don't we often tend to really think that some of what God has forbidden is arbitrary, or rooted in the culture of those through whom the scriptures and sacred tradition have been delivered to us?  This attitude allows us to take another determined bite of that forbidden fruit.

There is value in considering the sociocultural circumstances under which the various books of scripture were written, but not for the purpose of rejecting its teaching.

Nor, contrary to popular myth, is the fatal knowledge the knowledge of sexuality, although God knows how large is the part of sexuality in glorifying our shame.  Yet the fall was not a fall into sexuality.  Adam and Eve were created as sexual beings, and the Genesis account leaves no doubt that from the beginning they knew what this meant. - ibid.

If it weren't for our wanting to justify our sexual decisions, we might be less inclined to define good and evil for ourselves.  Of course, people do the same thing in all sorts of other areas of life.  We think that God is a spoilsport, and our minds regard holiness as the opposite of fun.  As a result, our wishes to pursue our own desires without restriction, outside of the ways God lovingly provides for our needs, are an incredibly strong motivation to  rebel against our restrictive perception of God, or even to deny God's existence.

The shame came later, when they reached, when they overreached, for a different kind of knowledge.  The Hebrew verb "to know," yada, is rich in meanings.  In connection with what we call the fall, to know good and evil is to reach for a universal knowledge, to be unbounded by truth as it is presented to us, to aspire to create our own truth.  I say we were there in the garden when humanity aspired to "be like gods" by knowing good and evil, by reaching to know the power to define what is good and what is evil.  
This page of Genesis is rewritten every day in the living out of the human story.  Each of us has been there when we, godlike, decided that we would determine what is good and what is evil-at least for our own lives. - ibid.

Contrary to popular understanding of the role of our conscience, its purpose is not for us to define for ourselves what is good and what is evil.  I've written about this in great detail before, though not as well as Fr. Neuhaus.  Yes, when it comes right down to it, our conscience determines the decisions we make, and we ourselves are accountable for those decisions.  But that inner sense of the morality of our actions is always formed by something.  We can either accept what God has revealed through Scripture and the Church, or we will look to some other source - one we think more authoritative, or one more aligned with the way we already think or what we want.

Fr. Neuhaus will soon move on to the idea that our unwillingness to determine good and evil for others - a trend trumpeted as "tolerance" in present times - is an easy escape for us.  It's worth recognizing that the payout for that attitude is that we can reject those who would tell us what is right and wrong for us.  And it is true that we must exercise caution with regard to whom we heed in this area.  Our relativistic society would tell us that the chief sin of the day is to insist on such a thing as absolute good and evil.  Yet in our hearts we know there is such a thing.  There is - and should be - a difference between tolerance and endorsement.

For all that we may long for more power over our lives, to be more than infinitesimal, ever-so-briefly conscious specks of matter in the vastness of the universe, we reject the one thing that makes us matter most.  We'd rather this universe had no creator than accept any stricture upon our own free will.  We'd rather scoff at those who are so weak as to need such a construct to overcome their fear of insignificance.

Finally (for this post), this idea that we were (are!  All the time, we are!)  there in the garden is consistent with the idea that we are at the last supper, at the cross, at the resurrection, and mainly, at the eternal heavenly banquet.  I find myself most aware of this when celebrating the Eucharist, but I believe we will find that the eternity for which we are destined will be a celebration of everything at once that we cannot fully fathom while trapped in the flow of time.