Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world
should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and
consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe
that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither
consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.
What then is to be done?
A Spark of the Divine
In Genesis 1, God creates the world with the divine, truthful Word,
generating habitable, paradisal order from the precosmogonic chaos. He then
creates Man and Woman in His Image, imbuing them with the capacity to do
the same—to create order from chaos, and continue His work. At each stage
of creation, including that involving the formation of the first couple, God
reflects upon what has come to be, and pronounces it Good.
The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters
outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and
ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its
profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence
through true speech is Good. This is true even of man himself, prior to his
separation from God. This goodness is terribly disrupted by the events of the
fall (and of Cain and Abel and the Flood and the Tower of Babel), but we
retain an intimation of the prelapsarian state. We remember, so to speak. We
remain eternally nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, the divine,
unconscious Being of the animal, and the untouched cathedral-like old-
growth forest. We find respite in such things. We worship them, even if we
are self-proclaimed atheistic environmentalists of the most anti-human sort.
The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is paradisal. But we
are no longer one with God and Nature, and there is no simple turning back.
The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their
Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their
eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more,
than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed,
rather than deserved or earned. They exercised no choice. God knows, that’s
easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for example, goodness genuinely
earned. Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness