Christ the Ophthalmologist

That which causes the great divide between God and man and that which can only be reconciled by Him who is both God and Man is the unfortunate reality the Church calls original sin. The substance of this teaching is most clearly expressed by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans:

"Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned...one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men" (Rm 5:12,18).

To refute the accusation that this teaching is outdated in its attribution of the transmission of a spiritual reality in the same manner as that of a biological one (as if one man's guilt can be passed on to his subsequent offspring as if he were passing on a gene) it may be helpful to look at original sin from a different perspective by considering another dimension of its reality. For, in remaining consistent with the Council of Trent's teaching that Adam lost "the holiness and justice [he had] received from God," and that he was "stained by the sin of disobedience [which] he transmitted to all mankind,"[1] the question is still perceived as unanswerable as to why Adam's eating of the fruit affects us in such a real way? Indeed, why and how is his guilt applied to our souls? What language can be applied to understanding this doctrine to give it a fitting and meaningful articulation to those who have trouble accepting it?

The first thing to try to do to bring original sin into a clearer focus is to ask the question: What exactly did Adam do? Was it a mere individual, autonomous act he performed by mistake or an intentional act prompted by an underlying, rebellious influence?

Adam's action in the Garden of Eden must be viewed in light of the Lord's direction to "eat of every tree of the garden, but of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die"(Gn 2:16-17). Once Adam acquiesced to the prompting of his wife to eat of this tree he is seen as objectively disobeying God; thus, he is no longer innocent of this charge.

Next to be examined is the tree itself from which this forbidden fruit originated. This particular tree was not intrinsically evil for it was good insofar as it too- alongside the rest of creation- was created by God; hence evil had no monopoly on its crop. However, in eating of it, Adam was consciously going against the expressed will of God as demonstrated above. The result of this absolute disregard for the divine command is what brought about the effects of his sin.

Perhaps then this begs the following question, once asked long ago by Socrates: "Whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?"[2] Indeed, was Adam wrong in reaching for this tree's fruit simply because God commanded him to not do so or was he wrong because he was actually endangering himself by consuming something poisonous to himself?

This consideration goes beyond the scope of this reflection, but it is worth noting that Christian tradition adheres to the belief that God- as Goodness Itself- loves good things because they are intrinsically good. C.S. Lewis adds the helpful caveat to this that one thing that is intrinsically good is for a rational creature to freely obey its Creator;[3] but here it is sufficient to say that God does not arbitrarily judge some things good and some things evil according to a whimsical will. He has made things good and only a distortion of their innate goodness is what makes a thing evil.

If then God commanded Adam to not eat of a certain tree it was precisely because that tree's fruit was objectively not good for the man to eat. It is not merely Adam's disobedience which is bad- although that disobedience certainly destroyed his relationship with God, and this ruin is at the core of the doctrine of original sin; rather, in addition to this, the tree's fruit in and of itself had a certain toxicity to it which is was why it was designated as nonedible for man to begin with.

But the original sin skeptic still might ask: Could the eating of this “forbidden fruit” really bring about the loss of physical and spiritual life for Adam and his posterity?

The tree of knowledge of Good and Evil can be seen as a symbol for the limits of man's domain in Eden; it delineated the boundaries to which man's existence was extended. As a rational and free creature, man could choose to remain within those boundaries or move beyond them. Hence, when Adam "ate" of it he chose to step beyond those limits originally established for his well-being and in so doing subverted the authority of the One who creates, judges, and orders. Thus, by Adam’s grasp of the fruit which to his subjective self may have seemed only a minor matter, objectively speaking, the first man did nothing less than grasp at the role of God Himself.

When Christ would eventually come, He would expose the real horror of such an act by demonstrating its very opposite: "Though He was in the form of God, He did not deem equality with God, a thing to be grasped" (Ph 2:6). Thus, by not grasping at the sovereignty of the Father as Adam had done before, Jesus Christ reversed the first act and instead chose to empty Himself in obedience (c.f. Ph 2:7). This humble kenosis of the Christ has ever since exposed Adam to us as the negative copy of the true Son who is the original image of God. The former Adam had fallen below his divinely ordained vocation of being a trusting son of which the latter “Adam” Jesus Christ, was certain to become the perfect fulfillment before our very eyes.

But what prompted such a missing of the mark on the part of the first Adam of Genesis? Whence came such a distaste for the rest of the fruit of Eden which consequently led to the appeal of the one forbidden fruit? Where in the world did this rebellion come from?

"You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gn 3:4-5).

Thus, it was the sinister figure of the serpent who spoke these words who had cunningly planted a destructive seed of rebellion in the hearts of Adam and Eve. This serpent is not to be seen as a fictional, literary myth that points to a more primitive and natural urge in Adam and Eve. No, by the inclusion of a serpent in this story, the author of Genesis was doing more than simply copying the idea from other ancient Middle Eastern cultures such as we find in the famed story of Gilgamesh of the spiteful, malignant snake who brings about death. Rather, the biblical Satan is to be recognized as a true myth that indeed points to a very real malevolent being who acts counter to the intended design of God's will- in the life of man and in the life of the world itself.

The seed that the serpent planted was destructive because it would prove to utterly destroy man's relationship with God by causing our first parents to not trust in the governance and concern God had for them. When that seed of distrust was planted then, an existential chasm was formed between the Creator and His creation. Competition was introduced between the two in which the needs of the creature were seen vis-à-vis the apparent “needs” of the Creator. The origin of Adam's sin then is to be found in this preposterous perception of God and man's relationship. No longer is God a Father to man; rather, He is perceived as a jealous master prohibiting freedom to be had by his inferiors. By the implantation of the serpent's seed, Adam had been stricken by this absurd outlook of a Divine Being who needs to “one up” His creation- nevertheless, this idea was novel enough to appeal to man’s preference for self, thus Adam adopted it. Tragically, as a result of turning on the divine harmony of reality, Adam had upended the order of the cosmos by this fatal decision. Even before our first parents opened their mouths to the fruit, the serpent had already closed tight his teeth on them.

By truly understanding this gulf between God and man which had now been formed, we are better set up to consider the punishment that ensues when the couple disobeyed: the Lord multiplied the pains of childbearing, He cursed with thorns and thistles the ground upon which man labors, He decreed a new command for man to depart from the garden and subsequently return to the dust from which he had been taken. All this is indeed a great mystery because the seemingly isolated act of Adam appears to have ramifications in every aspect of his co-existence with the world.

Thus, we can conclude from this that all things are interconnected at a deeper level than at first seems apparent. There is no such thing as an isolated act. Creation's design is so interwoven that one thread can hardly be discerned in view of the complete fabric. The particulars either enhance or subtract from the universal- they can never remain neutral. It is thus that Adam's sin, having immediately obliterated his formerly accurate perception of a Creator God who loves, is necessarily passed onto subsequent generations for no man acts on his own; or, as John Donne once put it: "No man is an island entire of itself."[4] 

Although we may admit of this obvious interconnectedness on a physical level in the past, apropos our human ancestry, and in the present- as well as in the future- apropos the effects our own actions have on others, we must equally consider the past, present, and future intimacy we share with others among our race on a much deeper metaphysical level. The good we do, the evil we do, all the decisions we make affect others in varying degrees dependent on the sublime nature of the good we choose or the gravity of the ill. An archipelago of humanity simply does not exist. We are more like a giant land mass.

But to return to our consideration of original sin, once this aforementioned closeness is recognized between ourselves and the rest of our race, there are some simple questions that follow: Could not one man stop the punishment from Adam’s sin by an apology? If one man's sin has such lasting effect because all men are so narrowly connected, could not another man's regret of that same sin have similar lasting effect? Indeed, could not one of Adam’s offspring express a sufficient amount of sorrow to reconcile all men back to God? Could not one man’s contrition remake on a universal level that which had been destroyed at the specific? In other words, could not one man’s apology reorder the disharmony of the cosmos, despite creation's high point, man himself, having called that very harmony into question?

It would seem that the problem of sin does not have such an easy solution for we must re-highlight the enormity of what Adam did in Genesis: Adam, having been established as the mediated cause of our own existence generations later, himself cast aside as unnecessary the Arbiter of right and wrong, the Judge of good and evil, the Source of existence in the void of non-existence. A mere apology cannot make things right again after such a serious act! This is evident by the fact that the will of Adam in choosing to not need God's commands is reflected throughout man's subsequent history. Indeed, it was the French polymath Laplace who once told Napoleon he had no need of God in his hypothesis of the origin of the universe. Laplace was simply echoing Adam’s act in the garden. Truly then Adam had set the stage, not only for Laplace's wanton dismissal of the idea of God, but for all mankind's indifference towards Him since the garden.

In Bethlehem, Christ would have to enter the disorder caused by Adam's mistrust in order to empower a man's heartfelt apology with such substantial reconciliatory affect. But until the true obedience of Bethlehem's Baby is tapped into, the garden remains shut, the chasm remains too wide to cross. An apology- until the Christ would come- could not alter reality.

Still, even if Adam and Eve were sorry for their disobedience and, after humbly accepting their punishment, left the Eden, does not God's lasting judgment on man seem a bit harsh? If God the Father loved His children, why does an apology not at least soften the effects of sin? The answer might be found within the written account of the fall itself or, perhaps more accurately, the lack of something written there.

It is telling the author of Genesis did not speak of our parents' reaction to receiving their sentence of exile. What are we to make of such silence? How are we to evaluate the lack of a description of such a crucial element in the story? We assume that they were sorry after the fact, but perhaps they were not completely so. Perhaps that seed of mistrust the serpent had planted in their hearts- though stunted in its germination by the shock of being found clad with dead leaves by the Lord who had created them naked- still lied dormant and ready to awake at the right moment. Perhaps that seed had continued to color their perception of their Creator in a darker light. Perhaps still, God was not perceived as a Father, but only as the Expeller who hoarded unlimited freedom. The only response then could be for them to turn their backs on Him and leave.

But what great folly was this! Did they fail to notice God's heart recoiling within Him (c.f. Hos 8:11) as He pronounced inevitable judgment on the world! Far from causing the pain that comes from Adam's sin, the Lord could only sadly say farewell to that primordial relationship He shared with His creation as its Father- because that creation had now hidden itself from His sight.

Yet is this not the risk God took in making man free? Unlike Odin whose "hand can only make slaves,"[5] the one true God ventured into the realm of uncompelled love, hoping against hope that His love would be returned. Alas, sometimes- as is the case with Adam- it is not. This unfortunate situation can be likened to a child telling its first lie to his parent. When he is eventually outed three things happen.

The first is the revocation of privileges. The child is grounded. That freedom which he previously enjoyed is taken away from him to teach him that the telling of the truth matters more than anything that could be gained by a lie. This sort of punishment Adam and Eve were conspicuously aware of. The Cherubim and the Flaming Sword are posted to guard the way back to the Tree of Life (Gn 3:24). Freedom was lost as they were driven out of the garden where they were previously not enslaved by their passions. There is no longer the privileged mastery of man's will over his spirit, no longer the clarity of his intellect in the light of truth. A war has broken out and man's heart is the battlefield in which he has lost command of his own forces. As Flannery O'Connor once put it: "Free will is not one will, but many wills conflicting in one man."[6] This explains the Apostle Paul’s words:

"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do...Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me" (Rm 7:15,19,24).

The second result of a child's lie to his parent is that the child becomes "enlightened" to the awareness that he is not bound to the truth and can live in a world apart from his parent. Like in the classic children's story Where the Wild Things Are, the lying child is epitomized in the mischievous boy Max. He is able to escape reality, go to his room and thence to the imaginary island of wild beasts, where, in his own imagination, is enthroned as king. He is no longer bound to the same world as others. He can create another world himself. The reality in which he now dwells is different than that of his parent and so he can now do what he wants. But, similar to the fictional Max, the lying child will begin to long for home and the way things were when he lived in the truth. The parent who had previously been the primary means through which he had encountered life and love in the world has now been separated from him (by himself) and, as a result, helplessness, dislocation, and loneliness become the child’s lot.

If not immediately aware of this consequence, having lost their innocence, Adam and Eve quickly recognized it as they ventured off on their own apart from God. Their pain of separation is enhanced by seeing the murder of one son at the hands of another (c.f. Gn 4:8), by struggling to attain their daily needs, and by succumbing to the rule of their passions over their sense of virtue. They quickly realize things are quite different east of Eden in the land in which they have chosen to encamp. When the constant security of their Father is removed from their sight, they are left toiling in the sweat of their faces, trying to make sense of the world- longing for those former days in which they could make sense of it.

Now the third effect instigated by the child's lie does not actually affect the child at all but is instead experienced by the parent. For so too must the parent now face the reality that the child- whom he has loved from the beginning- has chosen to live in a world apart from him. For the parent, the lie is more than a deception or distortion of the truth; it is the child's declaration that there is a part of him where the parent is not a welcome guest, a part of him that hides "among the trees of the garden" at the sound of the parent's footsteps (c.f. Gn 3:8). The parent can do nothing but mourn the lost intimate relationship he once had with the child.

And, just as the parent’s pain does not belong to the child to experience, our first parents could not know the heartbreak they caused the Lord by their sin. They were never able to comprehend the immensity of hurt they afflicted on the Father by the eating of the fruit because they could never really comprehend the love that He had for them from the start. The full force of their sin was hidden from their sight and, ever since, man has not been able to live an existence that wholly perceives the hurt paternal heart of God.

Therefore, perhaps this can be seen as the original sin of our race: our ignorance of God's love for us- our ignorance of how deep is the hurt He experienced by our rejection of His eternal plan to be a Father. Maybe because of Adam’s sin the love of God has now become for us a type of knowledge that must be acquired, rather than a type intuitively known. Maybe knowing the love of the Father was originally like knowing how to blink; now however it is more like knowing the multiplication table. Likewise, as it takes work to know how to speak, so too now something extra is needed to see the love of God. We could not be expected to know how to talk properly if we knew not the rules of grammar- similarly, because of the inheritance of the sin of our first parents, we cannot be expected to know how to live according to God's will if we know not His love. At the end of the day, God’s love is as structured as language and consistent as arithmetic. We are created to live in divine love and the travesty of original sin is that we are incapable of doing precisely that because we do not know Him; we must relearn the whole thing. He is a stranger to us, no longer a Father. Maybe Adam and Eve's vision has now become our own and, our sight having become blurred, needs healing by His grace.

Furthermore, as light is sometimes observed by physicists as being simultaneously particulate and wave-like, maybe original sin can be seen both as a stain passed onto us by the weakening of our wills as well as a state in which we are born into that has dimmed our intellect.

Or, put differently, whereas man's original sin primarily resides in the intellect through the form of ignorance of truth, a man's actual sin primarily resides in the will through the form of a volitional movement away from the good; for a baby is not held accountable for his father's sins because they were never willed by the infant himself- yet the Church still teaches the baby inherits his father's guilt apart from any actual sin it commits and is nonetheless still in need of redemption. St. Augustine formulates something akin to this important point with these words:

"[The infant] has broken the covenant, because it has been broken in him although not by him."[7]

Could this not be because the condition of original sin is an existence into which the baby is conceived- an existence that truly cannot see God because its parents have obstructed their offspring’s view by remaining hidden among the trees of the world. Perhaps the Holy Spirit's mission then to "convince the world of sin" (Jn 16:8) is not only to show man that he sins, but to show him what sin has actually done to his relationship with God. Maybe the Spirit’s job then when He is infused into the soul at baptism is to give a clear vision to the eyes of the newly redeemed soul; to make it docile once again, as his first parents once were at the beginning, to the paternal love of the Creator.

Perhaps Christ's words on the cross, "Father forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Lk 23:24) is in reference not solely to the actual sin of the soldiers nailing him to the tree of Calvary, but more universally to the original sin of the hands of men, which knowingly or unknowingly have reached for the tree of knowledge. Encompassed within the plea of the true Son for forgiveness of sin is a plea for light to come which will heal the blindness caused by original sin- a divine light that will obliterate once and for all man's ignorance of the God who loves and cares for him as Father. Like the smearing of the fish's gall in the eyes of the blind Tobit (c.f. Tob 11:8), the scales of original sin can then be peeled away and man might again receive the spirit of adoptive Sonship (c.f. Gal 4:5) which enables him once again to cry out: "Abba, Father!"(c.f. Rm 8:15).

In order for original sin to be thus washed away, this familial, intimate, and trusting relationship between Father and son must be restored. The blindingly dark situation in which man is conceived- this state of original sin which does not see God as love itself (c.f. 1 Jn 4:8)- must be enlightened by Him who is the "Light of the World" (Jn 8:12).

The chasm between God and man must be crossed by the bridge Christ Himself constructs by His obedient trust in the Father. In the language of that ancient sermon the Church recalls every year on Holy Saturday, the sword which pierced Christ's side will indeed sheath the Flaming Sword that blocks man's path back to the Tree of Life.[8] Let us then no longer fail to see the ignorance, the darkness which Adam's sin has brought to our race. If we accept Christ as our light, original sin with all its power will no longer cast its blinding shadow. "For judgement I came into the world," says the new Adam, the Great Ophthalmologist, Jesus Christ, "that those who do not see may see"(Jn 9:39).

[1] Council of Trent, Decree on Original Sin, canon 2 in Denzinger, 1512.

[2] Plato, Euthyphro in The Republic and other Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2013), 600.

[3] C.S. Lewis, Problem of Pain in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2007), 608.

[4] John Donne, For Whom the Bell Tolls

[5] Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, trans. Andrew Porter (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 110.

[6] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), Author’s Note to the 2^nd edition.

[7] Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book 16 in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 18, trans. Marcus Dods (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 439.

[8] c.f. The Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 2 (New York, NY: Catholic Book Publishing, 1976), 498.