1. With reference to Christ’s words on the subject of marriage, in which he appealed to the “beginning,” we directed our attention last week to the first account of man’s creation in the book of Genesis (ch. 1). Today we shall pass to the second account, which is frequently described as the “Yahwist,” since it uses the name “Yahweh” for God.

2. The second account of man’s creation (linked to the presentation both of original innocence and happiness and of the first fall) has by its nature a different character. While not wishing to anticipate the details of this narrative, because it will be better for us to return to them in later analyses, we should note that the whole text, in formulating the truth about man, amazes us with its characteristic profundity, different from that of the first chapter of Genesis. It can be said that this profundity is above all subjective in nature and therefore, in a certain sense, psychological. The second chapter of Genesis constitutes, in a certain manner, the most ancient recorded description of man’s self-understanding and, together with chapter 3, is the first testimony of human consciousness. With a deep reflection on this text through the whole archaic form of the narrative, which manifests its primitive mythical character (*), we find there “in nucleo” nearly all the elements of the analysis of man to which modern, and especially contemporary, philosophical anthropology is so sensitive. It could be said that Genesis 2 presents the creation of man especially in the aspect of subjectivity. Comparing both accounts at the same time, we arrive at the conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the objective reality of man created “in the image of God.” This fact is also, in another way, important for the theology of the body, as we shall see in subsequent analyses.

3. It is significant that Christ, in his reply to the Pharisees, in which he refers to the “beginning,” indicates first of all the creation of man with reference to Genesis 1:27: “The Creator from the beginning created them male and female”; only afterward does he quote the text of Genesis 2:24. The words that directly describe the unity and indissolubility of marriage are found in the immediate context of the second account of creation, whose characteristic feature is the separate creation of woman (cf. Gn 2:18-23), while the account of the creation of the first man (male) is found in Gn 2:5-7. The Bible calls this first human being “man” (“adam”), whereas, from the moment of the creation of the first woman, it begins to call him “man,” “ish,” in relation to “ishshah” (“woman,” because she was taken from man = “ish”). It is also significant that, in referring to Gn 2:24, Christ not only links the “beginning” with the mystery of creation, but also leads us, one might say, to the limit of man’s primitive innocence and of original sin. The second description of man’s creation was fixed in the book of Genesis precisely in this context. There we read first of all: “And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said: ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man’” (Gn 2:22-23). “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gn 2:24). “And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed” (Gn 2:24-25).

4. Immediately after these verses, chapter 3 begins with the account of the first fall of the man and the woman, linked with the mysterious tree that had already been called the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gn 2:17). Thus an entirely new situation emerges, essentially different from the preceding one. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a line of demarcation between two original situations of which the book of Genesis speaks. The first situation is that of original innocence, in which man (male and female) is, as it were, outside the knowledge of good and evil, until he transgresses the Creator’s prohibition and eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The second situation, on the other hand, is that in which man, after having transgressed the Creator’s command at the prompting of the evil spirit symbolized by the serpent, finds himself, in a certain way, within the knowledge of good and evil. This second situation determines the sinful state of man, as opposed to the state of primitive innocence.

5. Although the Yahwist text is very concise as a whole, it nevertheless suffices to differentiate and clearly set against each other these two original situations. We speak here of situations, keeping before our eyes the account that is a description of events. Nevertheless, through this description and all its details, the essential difference emerges between the state of man’s sinfulness and that of his original innocence (**). Systematic theology will discern in these two antithetical situations two different states of human nature: status naturae integrae (state of integral nature) and status naturae lapsae (state of fallen nature). All this springs from that “Yahwist” text of Gn 2 and 3, which contains within itself the most ancient word of revelation and evidently has a fundamental significance for the theology of man and for the theology of the body.

4. When Christ, referring to the “beginning,” leads his interlocutors to the words of Gn 2:24, he orders them, in a certain sense, to go beyond the boundary which, in the Yahwist text of Genesis, lies between the first and the second situation of man. He does not approve what Moses permitted “because of the hardness of… heart,” and he refers to the words of the first divine disposition, which in this text is expressly linked to man’s state of original innocence. This means that this disposition has not lost its force, even though man has lost his primitive innocence. Christ’s reply is decisive and unequivocal. Therefore we must draw from it the normative conclusions that have an essential significance not only for ethics, but especially for the theology of man and for the theology of the body, which, as a particular point of theological anthropology, is established on the foundation of the word of God that is revealed. …………………

Source: Encuentra.com

Notes:

(*) If in the language of nineteenth-century rationalism the term “myth” indicated what was not contained in reality, the product of imagination, or what is irrational, the twentieth century modified the conception of myth.

L. Walk sees in myth a natural, primitive and non-religious philosophy; R. Otto considers it an instrument of religious knowledge; for C. G. Jung, however, myth is the manifestation of archetypes and the expression of the “collective unconscious,” a symbol of interior processes.

M. Eliade discovers in myth the structure of reality that is inaccessible to rational and empirical investigation: in fact, myth transforms the event into a category and enables one to perceive transcendent reality; it is not only a symbol of interior processes (as Jung says), but an autonomous and creative act of the human spirit through which revelation is enacted (cf. Traité d’histoire des religions and Images et symboles).

According to P. Tillich, myth is a symbol, constituted by elements of reality in order to represent the absolute and the transcendence of being toward which the religious act tends.

H. Schlier emphasizes that myth does not know historical facts and has no need of them, insofar as it describes what is the cosmic destiny of man, which is always the same.

Finally, myth tends to know what is unknowable.

According to P. Ricoeur: “Myth is something other than an explanation of the world, of history and of destiny; it expresses, in terms of world, even of another world or of a second world, the understanding that man attains of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence (…). It expresses in objective language the meaning that man grasps from his dependence on that which stands at the limit and at the origin of his world” (Le Conflit des interprétations).

“The Adamic myth is the anthropological myth par excellence; Adam means Man; nevertheless, not every myth about ‘primordial man’ is ‘the Adamic myth,’ which… is the only properly anthropological one; for this reason three traits are designated:

a) The etiological myth carries the origin of evil back to an ancestor of present humanity whose condition is homogeneous with ours (…).

b) The etiological myth is the most extreme attempt to separate the origin of good and evil. The intention of this myth is to give consistency to a radical origin of evil distinct from the more original origin of the goodness of things (…). This distinction between radical and original is essential to the anthropological character of the Adamic myth; this distinction makes man a beginning of evil within a creation that has already had its absolute beginning in the creative act of God.

c) The Adamic myth subordinates the central figure of primordial man to other figures that tend to decenter the narrative, without suppressing the primacy of the Adamic figure (…)

“Myth, by naming Adam, man, makes explicit the concrete universality of human evil; the spirit of penitence gives in the Adamic myth the symbol of this universality. In this way we find (…) the universalizing function of myth. But at the same time we find two other functions, likewise aroused by the penitential experience (…). The proto-historical myth thus serves not only to generalize the experience of Israel to humanity of all times and places, but also to communicate to it the great tension between condemnation and mercy that the prophets had taught Israel to discern in its own destiny.

“Finally, the last function of myth, motivated by the faith of Israel: myth prepares speculation by exploring the point of rupture between the ontological and the historical” (P. Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilité: II. Symbolique du mal).

(**) “Religious language itself calls for the transposition of images, or rather symbolic modalities, into conceptual modalities of expression.

“At first sight this transposition may seem a purely extrinsic change. Symbolic language seems inadequate for undertaking the path of concept for a reason peculiar to Western culture. In this culture religious language has always been conditioned by another language, the philosophical, which is conceptual language par excellence. If it is true that a religious vocabulary is understood only in a community that interprets it and according to a tradition of interpretation, it is also true that there is no tradition of interpretation that is not ‘mediated’ by some philosophical conception.

“Thus the word ‘God,’ which in the biblical texts receives its meaning from the convergence of various modes of narration (stories and prophecies, texts of legislation and wisdom literature, proverbs and hymns)—this convergence being seen both as the point of intersection and as the horizon that fades away in every possible form—had to be absorbed into conceptual space, in order to be reinterpreted in terms of the philosophical Absolute as first mover, first cause, Actus Essendi, perfect being, etc. Our concept of God therefore belongs to an onto-theology, in which the whole constellation of key words of theological semantics is organized, but within a framework of meanings dictated by metaphysics” (Paul Ricoeur, Biblical Hermeneutics).

The question whether metaphysical reduction really expresses the content hidden within symbolic and metaphorical language is a separate theme.