The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Babylon (12)
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate. Genesis 3:6 N ASB
Desirable – “It is our understanding of being as the ‘beginning of desire’ that precludes our reducing choice to reason.”[1] Yesterday we discovered that desire is more fundamental than reason; that man is first and foremost a volitional being rather than a rational one. Volition means choice, and the opportunity of choice comes before the exercise of reason. This is why reason is a tool, not a foundation. Now we can better understand the temptation narrative in Genesis 3.
Maimonides pointed out that the story of the disobedience in the Garden means that the decision to eat from the Tree cannot be about right or wrong. Why? Because the two have to know the difference between right and wrong in order for their act to be dis-obedience. The sin in the Garden is about something else. It’s about choosing what is desirable instead of what is honorable. Notice that the woman determines that the fruit of the Tree is good for food, aesthetically pleasing and able to make one wise before she even touches it. How can she know this? She can’t. What she decides about the fruit is not reasonable. There is no evidence to support her claim. She listens to her desire, not her understanding. She chooses based on that desire even before she can confirm any of her expectations. We learn that sin is not a rational decision. I don’t mean that choosing to sin is a form of insanity, as Berkouwer notes. I mean that her decision to fulfill her desire isn’t rationally based. It’s the free exercise of the yetzer ha’ra, and the yetzer ha’ra functions without regard to rational considerations.
This is why any rationally based ethics will fail. Rationally based ethics assumes that rational people will act rationally, and because upright ethical choices are rational, rational people will make upright decisions. But desire is not rational. Rational people have non-rational desires and they act upon those desires without regard to rational truth or consequences. Rationality is no bulwark against sin. If we’re going to deal with sin, we must deal with desire, and dealing with desire means we must confront the essential inner conflict between the non-rational yetzer ha’ra and the pre-rational yetzer ha’tov.
How do we do this? Luzzatto proposes the solution of deliberate watchfulness. We force ourselves to become aware of our non-rational concessions to the yetzer ha’ra. We start with the latest occurrence of sinful behavior, after the choice was made. We remember what happened in that situation. We use the tool of reason to examine the circumstances. We reflect. We pause. We dissect the act to determine the motivation of the yetzer ha’ra that propelled us to choose this behavior. Then we step backwards. Just one step. We listen once more to the whisper of the yetzer ha’ra that offered justification for our choice. Now we recognize its consequences, but at the moment of choosing, we were blinded by desire. We saw the fruit and determined its character from afar, without evidence. Once we understand why we took this step—why we listened to our desire and what motivated that last instant before we picked the fruit—we step back again. How did we come to be in the proximity of this temptation? What was the yetzer ha’ra suggesting before we arrived at this spot in the Garden? What was our emotional experience at that moment? How did we feel, not how did we think? And from there we trace our situation back again, probing deeper, looking for the underlying feeling that allowed the yetzer ha’ra the opportunity to suggest a solution. What threat to the existence of the yetzer ha-ra motivated its power. The serpent in the Garden was the most cunning of all the animals. Its motivation, its true agenda, was carefully concealed. Its arguments seemed plausible, even reasonable. But now we have reaped the consequences. Now we know it was a lie. This is not the time for the consolation of forgiveness. This is the time for repentant examination, deliberate recollection, and a zealous analysis. This is a time to exercise the strength of the breath in His image, the yetzer ha’tov.
Counterintuitively, Adam and the woman become fully human when they exercise the choice to obey their yetzer ha’ra. Potential is not existential until it is converted into the actual, but once it becomes actual the consequences alter existential reality. When we choose, we become different persons. We construct our own identity, one choice at a time. Watchfulness is choosing to change direction, to go in the direction of God’s animating breath., one step at a time. The second time in the Garden should not be the first time again.
Step 12: Examine your failure. What was the chain of emotions behind the steps that resulted in failure?
Topical Index: watchfulness, yetzer ha’ra, rational, volitional, desire, Genesis 3:6
[1] Ira F. Stone, in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. 88.
“Rationality is no bulwark against sin.” Man, is that ever true. I am rationalizing many things even as I write this comment. I am sure I am not the only one. Unfortunately, it is a habit or condition that takes a lifetime to hone to its razors edge and equally as unfortunate that it would, (will), can, take equally as long if ever to reverse. Or, maybe I am just rationalizing again.
This is really hard going Skip. The yetzer ha’ra is always there to whisper, you can never really follow your yetzer ha’tov, you’re just pretending, you’re motives are always questionable, you can never trust yourself, you’re not good enough, wise enough, spiritual enough, you will never understand, you don’t even know what the yetzer ha’tov is. If you were really connected to God, you would know that you should live in sack cloth and ashes. Misery and sufferihg are the highest forms of worship. Poverty is a virtue; wealth is a vice. You are nothing, everyone else is everything. You are utterly corrupt, and this world is utterly corrupt. Your only hope is to accept Jesus and depart this world for your home of eternal heavenly bliss if it even exists. Anyway, have a blessed day.
Sorry for the diatribe or maybe its a manifesto. Well Skip, I think you should have a pretty good idea of where I am at. For me, I don’t know how to begin to work through all the confusion to experience the kind of change you are talking about in this series. Depressing, isn’t it?
What amazing progress you’ve made! The fact that you can write down all the whispers of the yetzer ha’ra already says you are aware of its influence. That is miles ahead of most. Now you know what to recognize.
I like the way Viktor Frankl
nicely summed up this Musssar concept:
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
“…reason is a tool, not a foundation.” Indeed, and (as Skip has often pointed out) there is much of “Christian theology” built on the frame of human rationality and reasoning. A knowledge of God, by way of natural and intellectual means (so, natural law/theology) can be appealed to by both the Catholic and Post Reformed orthodox theologians. As such, humanity, in this frame, presumes to maintain a point of contact with God through the intellectual prowess.
But this type of intellectualist anthropology must be rejected by one who maintains that that humanity, after the fall, has nothing inherent in itself to make connection with God; i.e., nothing natural, so to speak. Indeed, “rationality is no bulwark against sin. If we’re going to deal with sin, we must deal with desire, and dealing with desire means we must confront the essential inner conflict between the non-rational yetzer ha’ra and the pre-rational yetzer ha’tov.”
Evil is a surd (an irrationality); sin is absurd—in that it stems from the conflict between desire and evil such that we must confront the irrationality of evil with a choice that requires us to exercise the choice to obey. And the power needed to choose to obey God, rather than choose our desire, subsequent to the fall, requires an absolute re-creation of humanity, in the vicarious humanity of Christ, in order for there to be a correspondence, or analogy of relation, between God and humanity (contra the analogy of fallen being and natural theology).
Humanity comes to have a correspondence for knowledge of God and power to exercise the choice to obey that knowledge insofar that Christ re-creates that for us in His resurrected and ascended humanity; and in His humanity come and coming.
Jesus answered [Nicodemus], “Truly, truly I say to you, unless someone is born of water and spirit, he is not able to enter into the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘It is necessary for you to be born from above.’ The wind blows wherever it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:5-8)