In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was a vast waste, darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. God said, Let there be light,’ and there was light; and God saw the light was good, and [God] separated light from darkness. [God] called the light day, and the darkness night. So evening came, and morning came, it was the first day.
God said “Let there be a vault between the waters, to separate water from water. So God made the vault, and separated the water under the vault from the water above it; and so it was; and God called the vault the heavens. Evening came, and morning came, the second say.
God said, “Let the water under the heavens be gathered into one place, so that dry land may appear”; and so it was. God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the water [God] called sea,; and God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth produce growing things; let there be on the earth plants that bear seed, and trees bearing fruit each with its own kind of seed.” So it was; the earth produced growing things: plants bearing their own kind of seed and trees bearing fruit, each with its own kind of seed; and God saw that it was good. Evening came, and morning came, the third day.
God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs both for festivals and for seasons and years. Let them also shine in the heavens to give light on earth.” So it was; God made two great lights, the greater the govern the day and the lesser to govern the night; [God] also made the stars. God put these lights in the vault of the heavens to give light on earth, to govern day and night, and to separate light from darkness; and God saw that it was good. Evening came, and morning came, the fourth day.
God said, “Let the water teems with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the heavens.” God then created the great sea-beasts and all living creatures that move and swarm in the water, according to their various kinds, and every kind of bird; and God saw that it was good. He blessed them and said “Be fruitful and increase; fill the water of the sea, and let the birds increase on the land.” Evening came, and morning came, the fifth day.
God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures, according to their various kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, all according to their various kinds.” So it was; God made wild animals, cattle, and every creeping thing, all according to their various kinds; and [God] saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, all wild animals on land, and everything that creeps on the earth.”
God created human beings in [God’s] own image;
in the image of God [God] created them;
male and female [God] created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase, and fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the first in the sea, the birds of the air, and every living thing that moves on the earth.” God also said, “Throughout the earth I give you all plants that bear seed, and every tree that bears fruit with seed; they shall be yours for food. All green plants I give for food to the wild animals, to all the birds of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, every living creature.” So it was; and God saw all that [God] had made, and it was very good. Evening came, and morning came, the sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. On the sixth day God brought to an end all the work [God] had been doing; on the seventh day, having finished all [God’s] work, God blessed the day and made it holy, because it was the day [God] finished all [God’s] work of creation.
Genesis 1-2:3, REB
Until you type those words out I don’t think you appreciate them one by one. Oh, scholars do, and avid students of the word; but the rest of us know them, or run them into sentences and paragraphs, and otherwise lump them together to “find meaning,” and miss the plain import of so much of what is there. Especially the repetition, which probably bugs us, accustomed as we are since the 20th century (blame Hemingway, blame newspapers, blame TV and Twitter and “short attention spans” all you want; the truth is we know stories so well now, they are so formalized and formularized, that we don’t need all the words of mid-19th century novel to follow the tale and enjoy the “world building.” Even by Stoker’s Dracula in the late 19th century some of that flourish and elaboration is wearing away.) writing which says something once and considers it said enough. Reading this slowly as I type it word by word, I was struck by the similarity to the opening of John’s gospel.
John’s gospel opens with what scholars call the “Hymn to the Logos.” In the original Greek (which I won’t essay here; too hard to create the Greek letters, and you probably couldn’t read it anyway), the rhythm of lyrics is obvious, with the key term “logos” being repeated strategically. It is clear the opening verses (1:1-5) could easily have been a song known to the Johannine community. That same repetition (no doubt very different in the original Hebrew, but captured here) is present in Genesis 1, which could be called (more loosely) a “hymn to the Creator.”
“God said” is the first and obvious example. We’ll get back to God “saying” in a moment. “So it was” is another phrase (I am freely assuming this translation is at least that faithful to the Masoretic text). The third is “Evening came, and morning, the [.....] day.” We also have to note the Hebrew day began at evening, logical since it was the time everyone was awake to see it and agree on the “time of day.” How we ever came to decide darkest midnight made the most reasonable dividing line between one day and the next has always been a mystery to me, and a proof of our dependence on technology long before “technology” came to mean “driven by silicon chips.” But there is the repetition of these phrases, along with the repetitions (which seem to increase in complexity) of the phrases around what is created by God’s speech. These repetitions solidify that what God says directly becomes. In a sense we are describing ritual behavior: things done for a specific purpose, and repeated in exactly the same form to produce a reproduction of the original end. Hang onto that, I’m going to connect it (“I can connect nothing with nothing”) to The Magicians trilogy in a moment, because that’s really the trigger for this rumination. But first, let’s divert from ritual to something a bit more modern: speech act theory.
We are attuned in everyday conversation not primarily to the sentences we utter to one another, but to the speech acts that those utterances are used to perform: requests, warnings, invitations, promises, apologies, predictions, and the like. Such acts are staples of communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the twentieth century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has become influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory, and feminist thought among other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the significance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare a normative structure implicit in linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.
I quote that to indicate I’m not applying speech act theory here specifically; but I am using the underlying idea, or language creating action, to look at Genesis 1 (hardly a novel approach, by the way). The basic idea of speech act is that someone tells you do to something, and you do it: my wife tells me to take out the trash, or turn the TV volume down; a police officer tells me to pull my car over; my boss tells me to do a specific task. The speech act is a command, which we turn into action without even considering the ramifications of that power of language. (Or, in my favorite example, when Charles Nelson Reilly’s character tells Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully that hypnotism creates an altered state of consciousness in people simply through words. Which is really weird, when you think about it. Especially the fact that it only works orally; you can’t read yourself into an hypnotic state.) All of which to say the “Fiat lux” of Genesis is the ultimate speech act. (In the movie “Dogma” they have great fun with this. The notoriously talkative Alan’s Morisette plays God, who cannot speak because God’s speech is literally creative, and being fundamentally creative, is actually destructive if uttered within Creation where, of course, the story of the movie takes place.) God speaks, things are as a result: light, separated from darkness; land, separated from waters (notice, too, some of this is present before the “Fiat lux.”), animals in the sea, plants on land, birds of the air. The pattern deliberately repeats itself until the sixth day:
Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, all wild animals on land, and everything that creeps on the earth.”
God created human beings in [God’s] own image;
in the image of God [God] created them;
male and female [God] created them.
God doesn’t say “Let there be human beings.” God says “Let us (the “royal we”?) make human beings.” This carries on in Genesis 2, where God fashions Adam (“earth”) from the earth, and Eve from Adam’s rib. We may get back to an exegesis of Genesis 2-3 at some point, of only because of MTG’s rather stupid statements. But that’s another topic for another day.
Humans are made “in the image of God,” which no, doesn’t mean God looks like white Europeans, or like human beings of any race or gender or age or condition. It means, as the Psalmist says, that we are a little lower than the angels; and that we have responsibilities. “Husbandry,” it’s called when we speak of caring for animals. The choice of word is not some kind of reference to a marital relationship, but of responsibility. Authority comes with responsibility, but responsibility comes first and foremost. The authority comes from the responsibility, not the other way around. If you diminish the former and inflate the latter, you prove yourself unworthy of either. “Husband” doesn’t just mean the male part of a male-female marriage; it means the one responsible for guiding and taking care of, i.e., responsibility for, the family. Yeah, that turns harshly patriarchal rather quickly; but it is “good,” in the sense of the word used in Genesis 1, when it is applied appropriately. Of this we can have much discussion, and should.
The other repeated formula in Genesis 1 (and the first verses of 2), is the one I haven’t mentioned yet: that God sees the Creation is good. It starts with the light, which is good. Then follows the creation of land and sea; of plants on the land; the creation of the stars, sun, and moon; animals in the sea, and then on land; all of this, each and several, God sees is good. The last act of creation is human beings, who are good not in themselves (although as I said their creation is a special act), but in the context of the whole. Having made human beings, both male and female, God reflects: “So it was; and God saw all that [God] had made, and it was very good. Evening came, and morning came, the sixth day.”
It’s that issue of “good” I really want to bear down on. I mentioned The Magicians trilogy earlier; here’s where that fits in. I’ve been spending my free time on less than pedagogical (i.e., virtuous) pursuits. I’ve been reading fiction again, after decades away (most of my reading being either technical (philosophy, theology) or of necessity (so I can teach it; or grading papers). One thing I caught up with was The Magicians trilogy. I’d read the first two, and finally decided to read all three, which I did. And what struck me, aside from the adolescent whining of the main character, Quentin Coldwater (was I ever that young? Oh, yeah, I was.), was the sheer crushing pessimism, almost nihilism, of the work.
I know it started out (because I read the first novel when it came out years ago, when I was working in the bookstore, and read the Advanced Reader’s copy) as a response to Harry Potter, trying to put the magic of Hogwarts and the wizarding world into a more adult (no, not porn) context. Well, points for trying is all I can say now. One way to be “adult,” the one adolescents think of when they aren’t obsessed with sexual intercourse, is to be “serious” and “grown up,” Of course, “Grown up” can mean “he who dies with the most toys wins,” and in all of popular culture of a certain level, it means remaining childless (and thus childish) for as long as possible, It’s notable two of the most mature characters in the trilogy are minor ones who marry and get pregnant (but don’t give birth before the story ends). Children make you either grow up and “husband” (see what I did there?) another being through the world (something that never ends. My 30 year old daughter just spent two weeks with us (with her husband, and her dog). I am and will alway be her father, even if I give her free rein to be responsible for her decisions.). None of the characters in the trilogy marry, or have children, or want to. I could write a long essay on that alone. The books are really an extended examination of extended adolescence, with magic the metaphor for the privilege and wealth of upper middle class modern America. The focus is surprisingly Romantic, and tied rather tightly to the other Creation story, the one Milton used to create, inadvertently, the great Romantic anti-hero of Satan. Like Wordsworth who all but made a fetish of his childhood and its supposed “purity,” Quentin Goldwater never stops pursuing a return to the world he imagined awaited him in childhood: the world of wonders and splendors and adventures. It’s a selfish vision, of course: wars involve the deaths of others (Putin today is an exemplar of this selfishness), adventures mean someone pays a price. In the novels Coldwater finds out the hero isn’t the conqueror but the conquered; the hero is not the victor who wins the prize, but the one who pays the price. But he also considers a world that includes magic and a fantasy land based on Lewis’ Narnia, to still be an empty and sad and ultimately failed place.
Which is a sad and futile philosophy, if by philosophy you mean a weltanschaaung, a world-view that puts everything into an ultimate explanation. The world is bad, Quentin realizes; and its badness is unrelieved by power (magic) or even love (well, human relationships). And it’s bad because it doesn’t afford Quentin all the comforts and conveniences and satisfactions to which he thinks (even at the end) he is entitled. I can’t keep from reducing it to selfish adolescence, but I mean something more than that. It’s a view grounded in modern (i.e., post-Enlightenment, at least) thinking that finds itself superior to “religion” because it is, well, “adult.” Yeah, that pseudo-anthropological/very 19th century European view is still present in this very 21st century book:
A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them or helping or not according to his or her divine mood. There would be nobody to praise them and nobody to condemn them. They would have to do it all themselves.
Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land, Penguin Books 2014, p. 394.
Fillory is Narnia of these books; a Narnia without the Christ figure of Aslan. The trilogy is also a magician’s world without the Christ-figure of Harry Potter’s sacrifice/resurrection, or Rowling’s subtle but explicit Christianity. These rejections are intentional, which is neither here nor there to me. I don’t care much for Lewis’ version of Christianity in Narnia, and I’m not trying to set up a competition between Rowling and Grossman and declare a winner. But if you catch echoes of the last scene of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in that quoted passage, I think that’s unintentional but unavoidable. I think the theology of the sentiment in that passage is sound, too, although Grossman obviously intends it to be powerfully anti-theological (Theology is vast, it contains multitudes). The distinction I would draw is not between a god who is a meddling parent engaged or withdraw and whim takes them, but between the obviously Greek foundation of Grossman’s fictional universe, and the foundation laid (revealed?) by Genesis 1.
To the Greeks “good” came from the action of reason, the logos. It struggled mightily against the fundamental force of chaos, but chaos would win in the end; logos would fail, and be conquered. It would never be the conqueror. Thus did the Greeks explain the state of the universe.
Genesis declares something radically (as in, “at the root”) different. Creation is the result of the act of a Creator, and that creation itself a result of logos (God’s speech acts) the result of which is always good. We come along at the end of the sixth day and ask “Well, how can it be so good if it doesn’t give us everything we want right when we want it? Or even give us just what we want and nothing we don’t?” And I can’t help but take God’s side, and ask: “What is the source of the problem, now?”
If atheism and the rejection of religion is the first sign of humankind coming out of its adolescence, if it is as Arthur Clarke claimed in the title of one of his novels that the scientific age is indeed “childhood’s end,” why are we still acting like selfish children? If adulthood rests on the principle that “everything sucks, and all that matters is how you cope wit it,” then I want no part of it. It’s certainly not an improvement; it’s not really even a change.
Is my reading of Genesis 1 not comforting? Is this not an answer? Good. It’s not meant to be. I came across this in my archives, looking for something else entirely (isn’t that always the way?). I’ll just repeat it here; there was nothing more than this in the original post:
My thesis is twofold. 1. In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the "Kingdom of God" are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called that "world," resulting in what I call a "sacred anarchy." Consider but a sampling of its more salient features. In the Kingdom, the last are first and first are last, a strategically perverted system or privileging, so that the advantage is given not to beautiful Athenian bodies that house a love of wisdom, but to lepers, deaf mutes, the blind, epileptics, and the paralyzed. The favor of the Kingdom falls not on men [sic] of practical wisdom, of arete, of experts in freeness, but on tax collectors and prostitutes, who enjoy preferential treatment over the upright and well behaved. In addition, in the Kingdom the way to be arrayed with all the glory of God is to neither sow nor reap but to behave like the lilies of the field. If you try to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose it you will be saved. In the Kingdom one should hate one's father and mother but love one's enemies, and if a man strikes you you should offer him the other cheek. There, if you are rich, you have a very fine needle indeed to thread to get into the Kingdom. If you would want to become rich with the treasures offered by the Kingdom, you should sell all you have and give it to the poor. Moreover, you should give to the poor not only what you can afford but even what you need for yourself. If one of your sheep is lost, then you should not worry about endangering the other ninety-nine but go out and search for the lost one, which is an unaccountably odd way to count. If you host a party--even a wedding for your children--you should go out into the streets and welcome in the passers by. There bodies pass easily through solid walls, rise from the dead, traverse the surface of water without sinking, glow with a blinding whiteness, and pass instantly from one state, like water, into another, like wine. Cripples are made straight, lepers are cured, and the dead rise from their grave. All these bodily metamorphoses are in turn figures of a personal transformation best described as metanoia, which might be retranslated from "repentance" to "being of a new mind and heart," being turned and attuned to the new being that come of belonging to the Kingdom.
2. The event that shocks the world is not a strong but a weak force. Underlying, or arching over, all these famous paradoxes, there is, on my hypothesis, a thesis about God, or about the event that is harbored in the name of God, one that is contrary to the powers that be in theology and the church, a startling thesis found in what Paul calls "the weakness of God." Saint Paul puts this thesis about weakness very powerfully, even paradigmatically, in a veritably Deleuzian discourse on the "logos of the cross (logos tou staurou)," the mark of which Paul identifies as "foolishness." Here, in a virtuoso performance of the interweaving of sense and non-sense, of a logos that is the offspring of moria, Paul spells out the way this weakness jolts the world: God chose the foolish ones in the world to shame the wise, and what is weak to shame the strong, and what is the low down in the world, the ones who "are not" (ta me onta), to shame the men of ousia, men of substance, the powers that be. The "weakness of God," Paul says, is stronger than human strength. (I Cor. 1:25).
John Caputo, "Spectral Hermeneutics," After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (Columbia University Press, 2007). pp. 61-62.
Or, as Dom Crossan puts it: “But how is the kingdom of heaven like that?” “How is creation good?” Don’t take it as a challenge to be answered; take it as the beginning point of an exploration or, if you prefer, an adventure.
N.B. I have nowhere else to put this, but I just have to note that birds take the land before any other land animals do. And today we think birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. Which puts birds first on the land, before the other animals mentioned for day 6. It doesn’t prove anything, nor do I mean it to. I just find our narratives fascinating. It could be our science is constrained by our culture (the Big Bang is not antithetical to Christianity, and originated with a Jesuit); it could be (and this is more likely true) our insights are not “found” by our science so much as “justified” by it. Which, if anything, proves science is as human an endeavor as religion. Notice God “names” everything in this version of the Creation story; in Genesis 2: 19-20, God brings the animals to Adam for Adam to name. Adam also names his wife “Eve.” (Gen: 3:20). God giving names to the categories of creation (heaven; earth; sea) links these names to authority, just as science gives authority to terms like “elements” and “planets” (which is really just a Greek name we appropriated). Again, I’m not seeking to “prove” the story in Genesis 1; just to point out we do this kind of story-telling over and over, and it all looks oddly familiar. Truth is not a mutable concept; but truth is not an empirical one, either.
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