itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters. Who can
speak with certainty about such things? I am unwilling to take these questions
off the table, however, merely because they are difficult. So, here’s a
proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and
the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and
makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—
reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility
and propensity for evil.
The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history
of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for
that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the
state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great
moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself
—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And
what would that mean?
And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1:
to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good
—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice. Back is the way forward
—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted—but back as awake beings, exercising the
proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire