Catholic Home Study Service
Man, As He Is
Sponsored by the Vincentian Community
(Congregation of the Mission) and the Missouri Knights of Columbus.
Reprinted with permission.
THE TEACHINGS of revelation on original sin is the key to many of the puzzles of human existence. If you will remember, we saw that revelation had a great deal to tell us about man's nature, part of which is readily confirmed by human experience. Man was created in God's "image and likeness," distinct from the rest of creation. He was destined by God to rule over the visible universe, to dominate and use it for the good purposes for which God had brought the world into existence; and so forth. All of this is in accordance with man's nature as we know him.
But certain things are told us, especially in the second creation story (Gen. 2), that do not accord with man as we know him. We read, for example, that "The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame" (Gen. 2:25). We do not find nakedness a condition in which men and women can habitually associate together, for quite obvious reasons. While it is quite true that the standards of modesty may differ from generation to generation and from place to place, and while we may at times find exaggerations of it as well as laxity, still all reasonable persons are agreed on the fact that modesty itself is a necessity if there is to be any civilized society at all. The sexual appetite is one of the strongest of man's drives, and its proper control and exercise is the duty not only of individual men and women but also of society. Civilized society has always found clothing to be a necessity in exercising this control.
THE TREE OF LIFE
We also read of some other conditions in which man lived that are not those of our experience. One of them is signified by the "tree of life" which was available to man in the garden in which God placed him (Gen. 2:9). Even if we had no further information to go on, we would doubtless surmise that by this the author meant to say that man was not subject to death, that he had natural immortality at his fingertips. We know, as a matter of fact, that the theme of a "tree of life" or "plant of life" was fairly widespread in the popular stories of the world in which the author of Genesis lived, just as similar themes have lived in later legend recall the "fountain of youth" that is supposed to have brought Ponce de Leon to America.
But is the inspired author telling us that man was created immortal? Here we would seem to have something said that really contradicts our experience of man. If there is one thing we are all fairly sure of, though we do not like to think of it often, it is of our death. Man's body is in a progressive state of deterioration, and the older we grow the more conscious we are of this. Quite literally, "We begin to die from birth."
And of course God also says to man in this story, "Dust you are and to dust you shall return" (Gen. 3:19). But that is at the end of the story, when He is on the point of removing him from the garden. Is this story of a garden of Eden just the author's primitive way of locating the beginning of creation somewhere in Mesopotamia?
No, there is more to it than this. It is symbolic, true, but its purpose was not to locate any place literally on this earth. In the first place, the "geography" of the passage is impossible even by the loose standards of antiquity; in Genesis 2:10-14, the author is not describing a place in Mesopotamia or elsewhere, even though some of the names are Mesopotamian. He is rather drawing on some symbolisms that were then in common use in order to signify, first of all, that the man whom God had created was from the beginning given some prerogatives over and above what was due him by nature and, secondly, that man forfeited these privileges by his wilful sin of disobedience.
THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE
Are we to understand from this that there would have been no death and suffering, and no use of our sexual faculties, had there been no original sin? Would this not put the institution of marriage into rather strange company?
Revelation does not say there would have been no marriage. Marriage as the natural condition of man is mentioned by the second creation story before the question of sin arises (Gen. 2:23-24), and it has already been shown as blessed by God in the first creation story (Gen. 1:28). Marriage is not a consequence of sin, but the good estate which God intended both for the perpetuation of the human race and to establish the family relationship which is a reflection of the intimacy in which He has wished to live with mankind.
So good is it, in fact, that it has been made a sacrament of the Church, and St. Paul can compare Christian marriage to the common life shared by Christ and His Church (Eph. 5:3032). What would not have taken place without original sin is the abuse or misuse not only of the sexual appetite but also of other desires of our nature which, though good in themselves, if allowed to go unchecked by our reason can lead to our conducting ourselves less as human beings than as animals. Drunkenness, gluttony, avarice, and so forth, are also the results of giving in to what we call our concupiscence.
Disorders of this kind, as well as death and its accompanying pains and physical suffering, are what sin has introduced into the world. They also presuppose that man does not find it as easy to use his reason rightly and to exercise properly his freedom of will as would have been the case had there been no original sin. Sin, after all, is not just the violation of some arbitrary rule that has nothing to do with man's make-up.
Sin cannot be committed without doing violence to one's own nature, withdrawing it from its proper course and sending it into byways. We know this, to our sorrow, when we ourselves commit sin. What is true of sin now was true then. Man sinned, and as a result man is different now from what he was. He remains man in all his essentials both revelation and reason tell us this. Nevertheless, he has lost the gifts which God in His goodness had bestowed on his nature.
Precisely how man would have continued to fare had there been no original sin we cannot know in every detail. About the gift of grace, however, the gift of God's intimate friendship of which I spoke before, we have considerably more information. For this is a gift which, through God's mercy, man can and does receive again, a gift that He has made possible through the work of redemption or the reconciliation of man with God.
THE DESTINY OF MAN
This supernatural destiny itself is God not merely as the goal of man's natural existence but as He is in Himself. Just what this means fully, even now we cannot know, since it lies beyond the grasp of man's experience and understanding. "Eye has not seen or ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what things God has prepared for those who love him" (I Cor. 2:9).
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