Divine Plagiarism

To the Ancient Greeks, Prometheus was a tragic hero, almost a martyr. He took the gift of fire from the gods and gave it to man. Enraged that he would take something of such precious value and give it to such a lowly creature, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to an eternity of suffering. From their reading, Prometheus is truly noble, truly a friend to man. He is the one who stands in the face of tyranny, defiant regardless of the consequences. A William Wallace of sorts. But there are always other readings, always another side to the story.

What if the gods were not petty and cruel? What if they had kept the gift of fire from man to protect man, not to spite him? What if they had known that man would turn the gift toward his own destruction? That he would learn to make more and more intense forms of fire, until he learned to split the elements themselves? That he would turn that fire against other men, until the world was utterly broken and spent? Prometheus, the tragic hero no longer, becomes the man who gives car keys to the ten-year-old. He is rightly arrested for gross negligence. We fashion ourselves like Prometheus. Perhaps we are more like Pandora.

I remember a scene out of Bruce Almighty where Jim Carrey accuses God of being like a kid standing over of an anthill with a magnifying glass. C.S. Lewis makes the same accusation in far more serious terms in A Grief Observed. The Divine Vivisectionist. There is a part of us that sees God in similar terms. If we stick our hand in the cookie jar, God will get angry. He doesn’t want us to be happy, and if we try to have any fun, He will make sure that we pay for it. Surely, there are spiteful fathers who want to keep their children small and dependent, men so insecure that they are threatened by the gifts of their children. But the God of the universe is not insecure. We flatter ourselves; He cannot be threatened by anything that we could possibly do, nor by anything we could possibly become. He simply has no need or reason to ‘get us back.’

The grounded teenager sitting in his room surely considers himself a Prometheus. His parents just don’t understand. ‘I was completely safe to drive… I only had a couple beers. It’s completely unfair that they took away the car keys. What do they know, anyways… they just want to stop me from having any fun.’ So he sits and stews and schemes, determined to liberate himself from his unjust imprisonment. Because, after all, it is far more comfortable to scheme than to consider the reasons his parents chose to restrict his freedom. And certainly more comfortable than deciding to change. Yet, in his zeal for ‘liberation,’ he never considers that he could never be un-grounded from a fatal wreck. In his current state, the worst thing that could happen to him is to get exactly what he wants.

In the Garden of Eden, there are two trees that are mentioned by name. One is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The other is the Tree of Life. Genesis tells us that after we ate of the Tree of Knowledge, God declares that we should not eat of the Tree of Life, lest we never die. So there is the Prometheus reading or the Pandora reading; God the Cosmic Killjoy or God the Grounding Parent. After all, trees are made for eating. So the tree is either a tease or a promise. If God is kind, then the tree is a promise, one that will be understood in the unfolding of His plan. If He is cruel, then the tree is a tease, placed there purely to provide unending frustration. The space between the two readings is trust. The eyes of trust see faith, hope and love. The eyes of distrust see only self-fulfilling promises of betrayal. This is no less true on this side of the fall.

The Prometheus reading gives us far too much credit. God has no need to establish who He is by belittling us. He is infinitely beyond that. He loves us, and knows us better than we know ourselves. He is not encumbered by any of our self-deceptions about our own goodness. He knows what we do with our freedoms. So He grounds us when we use it wrong, to stop us from hurting ourselves and to bring us back to Him.

Still, trees are made for eating. But a green apple may turn your stomach just as surely as a red apple will fill it. The fruit of that tree mixed with the bitter harvest our fall would have been a deadly combination. So instead of the death we chose, the death of our soul, He gives us the death of our bodies. He gives us a lesser death to show us our greater death, just as the parents of the drunk driver restrict him to his room to illustrate to him the much greater restrictions of a wheelchair. But no grounding is forever. Neither is the curse. So we leave the garden with His promise that the curse will one day be lifted and everything will be made new again.

Love in the time of Death and Suffering. Almost sounds like the title of a book. (Probably because I plagiarized Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) On this side of the fall, we have pain, suffering and death as our companions. But what is humanity’s clearest reminder that we are not God? Death. None of us were there when the skies were set above the world, and few of us will be here when they fall back down. Man is a vapor. We are not eternal. We are not God. God does not die. Or at least, He does not stay dead. Death is a constant reminder of our true place in the universe: higher than the beasts, a little lower than the angels, and much lower than God. After all, the whole problem started when we got those things out of order.

The curse brought with it many deaths. The heart can die many times, in a hundred little deaths. Even the body can die in little ways. Man is cursed to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and woman is cursed to suffer during childbirth. We say we ‘spend’ our lives working. We are right to say that. We must burn a little life every day in order to sustain life. Childbirth burns life as well. Remember that before modern medicine, childbirth was a leading cause of death. In parts of the two-thirds world, it still is. And raising that child spends life as well. Surely there is as much plucking of thorn bushes and building of fences in parenting as in any other profession. This principle is engineered into the very physics of life. The oxygen we breathe burns away life, quite literally. Respiration slowly rusts our cells, even as it sustains life. Keep breathing and die a little each breath. Stop breathing and die a lot all at once. Burn a little life every day working, or stop working and starve. Suffering is death‘s younger brother. Few deaths are unaccompanied by suffering. And unless are we are caught up in the clouds first, our lifetime of suffering will eventually sum into a death.

(Though not all of those deaths are bad. For the Christian, death is a release from this world, and an entry into the ecstasy of the presence of God and into new life. It is only fitting that He engineered the same dynamic in smaller ways into His universe. So the French phrase for ‘the little death’ is appropriate. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, know that I do not speak from experience. After all, JPII wrote Theology of the Body without the direct experience of all of its expressions. But I will defer to him, certainly here at least. Anyways, back to the main point.)

The smaller deaths serve the same purpose as the greater. What is it us that brings us back to God? Pain and suffering, more often than not. We find Him on our knees. Pain and suffering often knocks us to our knees, where we can find Him. We hear Him when we are broken. It generally takes pain and suffering to break us, at least at first. Saul is blinded so that he can gain true sight. Without the curse, Saul never becomes Paul. Without the curse, he never finds the blessing. He is broken by the curse so that he can be made whole by God.

Can you imagine a world where we are fallen, but lack the curse? There would be nothing to break us, nothing to bring us back to Him. Nothing to limit our evil. In our seeming self-sufficiency, we would cut ourselves off from the only true Source. We would become as self-sufficient as a corpse, asking neither water nor food nor are nor love from anyone. Completely independent. And completely dead. So the curse is a blessing, something to break the self-reliance that would be untouchable if men were still immortal and unlimited. We would be lost forever if left to our own devices. So our devices were broken.

But we don’t learn. The grounded child loses even more privileges in his attempts to escape. And so did we. Man leaves the garden, broken by the curse. So he immediately applies himself toward breaking the curse. We decided to build a tower to heaven. The capacity to form words is the basis of communication, imagination and power. We used our words to war against God, coordinating our efforts with unbroken words, thinking with unbroken thoughts, setting our unbroken power against His. We completely abused our words, so they were broken. Not destroyed, but fractured. On that day, mankind was also fractured. One people united in their war with God became many people divided by their wars with each other. It was better for men to become unreconciled to each other than for them to be reconciled in their rebellion. God was not afraid of man taking heaven by force. He did it to keep us from destroying ourselves. The day Absalom took up arms against his father David, he was as good as dead. Surely King David would have rather have broken his son’s arms than taken his head. So our arms were broken, and we were set to war against each other. But fear for the day when humanity unites once again in its war against God. There is only one way that day will end.

And we still didn‘t learn. Men were given a thousand years to live. We couldn’t handle it. In our millennia, we became tremendously evil. The child who is cruel to animals, given twenty more years of life, becomes cruel to people. Imagine if he was given centuries. Little vices, repeated over hundreds of years, become gross atrocities. So there was another breaking. Once again, the world was broken, and once again, men were broken. The fountains of the deep tore out canyons and raised mountains, and the fountain of life became a creek. Our millennium became a century. ‘Since you couldn’t handle a thousand years, let’s try a hundred,’ you can almost hear Him saying.

Death is the great equalizer, and we became more equal. Imagine a world where we could live to a thousand. It is not that people wouldn’t die. Powerful people wouldn’t die. They would send others to die. Just like now. Stalin lived out the entirety of his life span. The people around him didn’t. A thousand-year Stalin would have ensured the life expectancy of the rest of the country remained about forty. As he grew older, killing off any competitors, he would amass even more power and become even more unassailable. Death is the ultimate check on tyranny. Fidel Castro seems to be currently discovering this fact. So the Caesars and the Windsors and the Kennedys find themselves subject to the same mortality as the peasant. Maybe they get 60 years more. But not 960 years.

Reverse the curse. No offense to the Red Sox, but that desire burned within the human will long before it was spray painted about Storrow Drive. Fighting disease, or suffering or miscommunication are good things. They become deadly when mixed with pride. We are like the child scheming his way out of his grounding without considering the reasons for the grounding. We want to undo the consequences of the curse without acknowledging the purpose of the curse. How many billions of dollars are spent on medicines to buy one more year of immortality? How much time and energy are spent on cosmetics and treatments to appear forever young? It is completely futile, but we try so hard to break death’s curse through our own power. The same is true of the curse of pain. We medicate ourselves with Novocain and Prosac, we self-medicate with alcohol and sex and chocolate, we try quite hard to escape suffering. But there are things more dangerous than anesthetic.

In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the fall of Numenor came when men tried to undo the curse of mortality. The fall of this world will come from men trying to undo the curse of Babel. Mankind will find their Prometheus. And they will love him for it. In Revelation, the Beast gains power by networking economies, governments, and communications. He will bridge the fissures that God made at Babel, and humanity will turn back toward the hideous strength of that tower. They will finally get the last battle they sought for so long. They will get the conquering king, the Messiah they wanted. They will not like how they get Him.

A parent never enjoys seeing their child grounded. Curses do not last forever. If they are meant to draw men back to God, then they are no longer necessary when we come home. In Revelation, God promises us a world where there is no more curse, where everything will be made new again. The Tree of Life will grow, and He will invite us to feast on its fruit. Through the power of Christ, we receive a deposit on that promise. We are cursed with pain, but God gives us grace to bear up under it. When we do not have strength, He gives us His. We are cursed with miscommunication, but through the power of Christ, broken hearts are reconciled to broken hearts. In Christ, slave and free, Jew and Greek are reconciled. They learn to speak the language of the Word together. We are cursed with death, but the power of death is broken on the cross. Paul tells us ‘to die is gain.’ He asks, ‘Grave, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?’ As the Orthodox say, Christ has trampled down death by death.

The chemotherapy of the curse keeps us breathing long enough for Christ to operate. We would have been lost in our gifts, unreachable, suffocating in our self-sufficiency. So He allows the good of the self to come subject to the curse to draw us out of that lesser good to the greater good of Him. He allows the death of the self in order to forestall the death of the soul. So when Christ comes, He completes the promise. Through His death, He gives life. The curse breaks us. He heals us. Praise God for the law of death, for it brings us to the place where we can be saved by the law of Love. The curse is a greater blessing than we give it credit for.