Monday, September 13, 2010
I believe what St. Augustine was attempting to say through the City of God, is that the human condition is one of peril; that we are all essentially "bound by the necessity of dying". At first glance, the reader might not grasp this kind of abstract notion. I thought about it for a while... and a little longer... and now i realize, that the author is right! Perhaps the real reason that the apple was taken and eaten, is that Adam and Eve felt they had to take it. They had a human instinct driving them forward. Death, is a necessary part of life. Does this mean that subconsciously they wanted to die? Or perhaps they wanted only a purpose to live.... im not sure. What i see it as, St. Augustine feels that by giving these people the knowledge of good and evil, perhaps God was really giving them their own consciousness, and bringing them to the intellectual level of Gods... ready to command the creatures in the world...hmmmm i dont know. Maybe though.
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Doug,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this thoughtful post. Death certainly figures in a lot of these readings--the idea that had we stayed put in the garden, we would have been immortal (though how does the 'Tree of Life', which was also verbotten, figure in here?) and that the price we pay for knowledge is the limitation placed on our lives (and the ability to use that knowledge). Then again, maybe (like so much of the early parts of Genesis) its authors were simply trying to come up with an explanation for phenomena (like death, sex, etc.) that they could immediately observe in the world around them.