Robert E. Joyce, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at St. John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota. A native of Chicago, he taught at De Paul University and Loyola University, and began full-time teaching at the University of Notre Dame. For thirty-two years, he taught philosophy at St. John's University, where he has been active also in administration and programming.
Dr. Joyce is a former chair of the combined philosophy departments of St. John's and the College of St. Benedict, and once served as Director of the Tri-College Program...an honors program of St. John's, the College of St. Benedict, and St. Cloud State University. He is a member of several philosophical and theological societies, and a past president of the Minnesota Philosophical Society.
His teaching specialties included the philosophy of being and God, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man and woman. While conducting other courses in philosophy, he developed special programs and courses in personal dynamics and in contemplative prayer. With his wife, Mary, he is the recipient of the Lumen Gentium Award from the Thomas More Institute, Tucson, Arizona, 1970.
Robert Joyce is the author of Human Sexual Ecology (University Press of America, 1981) and, with Mary Rosera Joyce, the co-author of New Dynamics in Sexual Love (St. John's University Press, 1970) and Let Us Be Born (Franciscan Press, 1970). His articles have appeared in various publications, including Cross Currents, The New Scholasticism, Marriage, Desert Call, Listening, and others.
The Book of Genesis was once revolutionary. When first written, its account of origins astounded the mind. Instead of discussing the many pagan gods, Genesis introduced one God, the sole Creator of the world. Unlike the pagan deities, the God eventually accepted by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic peoples...Yahweh-God-Allah...was seen as wholly Other than the world of creation.
Genesis also includes the story of Abraham, the father of all three theistic faiths. Through Abraham, the revelation of the one transcendent God becoming intimate with the human community represents a giant step out of polytheism and idolatry. The truth about God as both sovereign and solicitous is celebrated in this Sacred Book.
Today, creationists and evolutionists fight about the meaning of origins in Genesis. They quarrel over the manner in which the cosmos was formed and how human beings entered space and time. Creationists often tend to be too narrowly focused. They may take, as absolutely literal, phrases that common sense qualifies. Evolutionists are inclined to dismiss as virtually meaningless the classic descriptions of creation in six days, and of the creation of man from the earth and woman from a rib. By overlooking the depth of the symbolism involved, both sides exhibit a tendency to squander the revelation.
Including both literal and symbolic meaning, the Sacred Scriptures reveal...from the Heart of God...superabundant truths. And their meaning addresses not only our conscious minds, but also the depths of our spiritual unconscious. We cannot exhaust the riches of the revelation. We can only hope to deepen and develop our understanding.
On its surface, of course, Genesis can raise more questions than it answers. Yet these inquiries help to unpack the density, unfold the richness, and explore the depths of Divine Revelation.
The following are some possible questions that can be asked with reverence and explored through faith and reason working together.
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If the world was created perfect by an infinitely Perfect Being, what is a tree of knowledge of good and evil doing in the middle of Paradise? And if Eden was perfect, what was a diabolical, slithering serpent doing there?
If Adam was perfect, why was he lonely, as Genesis says he was? If both Adam and Eve were perfect creatures of God, how could they submit to the serpent without raising a single question?
If Adam and Eve had never sinned, would any of their children have done so and passed on the sin to their own children? If so, how could both sinful and sinless descendants inhabit the same world through inter-marriage?
Was the sin of Adam and Eve inevitable? After all, Yahweh God told Adam, "The day you eat of it (the forbidden fruit) you shall surely die." Apparently God knew the result of the "test." Was the temptation real, or was its result a foregone conclusion?
If God eventually commanded Adam and Eve to increase and multiply and fill the earth, why were no children born in Eden? And then, once driven from the Garden, how could a single first family develop without incestuous relations?
If the Book of Genesis includes the story of creation, where is the creation of the angels? Is there an untold story here? If so, what are some of the implications?
Perhaps creation is basically person-to-person, and only secondarily cosmological. The basically personal (person-all) story might be left untold. This seems to be a very noticeable and intriguing possibility.
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According to the surface story of Genesis, Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful Garden called Eden. They seemed to be doing well until they were confronted by a serpent, a tempter who deceived them. They fell for the ploy about how they could "better" themselves, even so as to become rivals to God in knowledge and wisdom.
Apparently, Eden was not...even from the beginning...all sweetness and light. First of all, in the very middle of the Garden was something that combined good with evil. Adam and Eve had been warned to stay away.
But why was evil there at all? Why was there something so imperfect in a supposedly perfect place? Why was there any tree whose fruit could be harmful to the first man and woman? Why were they not ecstatically happy and fulfilled by their existence such that they would not give a talking reptile the time of day? If they were really committed lovers of God, could they even be tempted, let alone succumb?
Though they were created sinless and perfect, the first man and woman, as portrayed in Eden, were too vulnerable to be perfect. They were in the presence of too much evil (including especially the tree and the serpent) to be in a perfect place. Is this a contradiction? No. It is a paradox that could lead us into another dimension of the truth, if we would follow its lead.
From the beginning, the six days of creation are permeated by the Spirit of God saying of various creatures, "Let them be." This command is done fully in the context of a process of things coming to be, but it might also suggest that the ultimate origin of these creatures...in a different dimension of being...is an immediate act of creation.
Also, in the depth of the revelation, we sense that Adam and Eve were created perfect. Yet, they appear to be literally in the presence of evil and vulnerable to it. At least two levels of meaning, enmeshed in each other, are calling for distinction and clarification.
Quite obviously, an important part of the creation story is missing. Below the surface we might begin to surmise the part of the story where human persons were created perfect in an interpersonal world: where God simply created persons, without any presence of evil, and the cosmic world of good and evil did not exist.
The present physical world of space and time, though very good, is structurally imperfect. Stars explode, black holes swallow the debris, meteorites pound the planets, animals stalk, prowl, pounce, and devour each other. How could a man and woman cause all of this imperfection by eating fruit from a tree? Something else happened to cause this good, but fallen, material universe even to exist. Something unfortunate transpired in the non-cosmic world, the world of persons only.
On the face of Genesis, human life began in a good, yet defective, universe. But according to the deeper implication of Genesis we fell from a perfectly interpersonal world into an imperfect one where good and evil combine, where animals eat each other, where tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes are natural, and where temptation threatens. Even now, we are not ultimately destined for this imperfect world, the cosmos. We are moving out of here toward the interpersonal world where we inherently belong, and where we belonged from the beginning of beginnings.
But what caused all of the imperfections in and around us? Some kind of fall from perfection could have occurred in the interpersonal, non-cosmic world. God could have responded by creating a redeeming world (the cosmos) where indecisive persons could finally decide between good and evil. The expulsion from the perfect, interpersonal world, could have been symbolized in Genesis by telling of an actual, historical banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden. Historical events can be both historically real and symbolic (in a revelatory manner) of trans-historic realities. In fact, every event in the space-time world is revelatory of our real, unconscious (ontological) continuity with the trans-historical.
Many questions, however, are raised by this claim of there being two levels of revelation in Genesis: interpersonal and cosmic, or ontological (including the supernatural) and historical. The single question that brings all others into focus might be Why me? Why must I suffer and die in a world-situation I did not start? This cry of why resounds in many human hearts and is repressed in others. We begin our search for an answer by listening to some plaintive, even rebellious, voices.
