On Genesis #1: Preliminary remarks

 

Moses, like a distinguished orator, composed Genesis in a twofold manner. He paid attention to the outward form of his text, but he also gave opportunities for deeper study for the few who are able to read with more understanding and who are capable of searching out his meaning.

 

Origen

 

We had already on several occasions the opportunity to touch upon certain aspects of Genesis (cf. for example here), as well as the notion of ‘primordial androgyny’ (here, here and here); nevertheless we think it certainly not a waste to dedicate a separate treatise to this topic, for not only are the first three chapters of the Torah a veritable ‘book with seven seals’ and notoriously dense with symbolism, but they are also without a doubt among the most essential passages of the whole Old Testament, since everything flows from them. 

 

To be sure, the first book of Moses is undeniably ‘obscure’, and as such it has been, especially in recent times, often victim to modernist distortions of all kinds, for not only has the error of ‘evolutionism’ tainted many a modern mind, but also the protestant hermeneutic of the ‘historical-critical method’ has taken ahold of a significant number of contemporary exegetes, which has led to considerable aberrations, some of them even making their into official Church teachings.

 

Let us only quote a brief passage from the Lenten Homilies of the venerable Papa emeritus Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger), who seems to sum up the modern consensus on the book of Genesis pretty well, when he says that

 

Scripture would not wish to inform us about how the different species of plant life gradually appeared or how the sun and the moon and the stars were established. Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world. The world is not, as people used to think then, a chaos of mutually opposed forces; nor is it the dwelling of demonic powers from which human beings must protect themselves. The sun and the moon are not deities that rule over them, and the sky that stretches over their heads is not full of mysterious and adversary divinities. Rather, all of this comes from one power, from God's eternal Reason, which became – in the Word – the power of creation.   

 

‘God created the world’, this is the basic takeaway from the whole creation account as such. However we have to wonder, if this is everything the God-seer Moses wanted to teach us, why he didn’t simply stop after the very first sentence (creavit Deus caelum et terram) and dispense with the rest of the story all together? Well, ‘by their fruits you shall know them’, saith the Lord, and if this is everything the ‘historical’ exegesis is able to extract from a text which is really quite inexhaustible in meaning, we say: to hell with it. What is more, this platitude is even interpreted as an act of a veritable ‘enlightenment’ avant la lettre! Quoting from the same homily:

 

Insofar as human beings realized that the world came from the Word, they ceased to care about the gods and demons. In addition, the world was freed so that reason might lift itself up to God and so that human beings might approach this God fearlessly. In this Word they experienced the true enlightenment that does away with the gods and the mysterious powers and that reveals to them that there is only one power everywhere and that we are in his hands.

 

Not only are we presented here with a rather simplistic view of the ancient paganisms (in fact the motive of ‘creation by the Word’ is abundant pagan cosmologies and even the myths that appear ‘polytheistic’ on the surface often have a quite sophisticated metaphysical meaning, that is of course all but lost on our ‘enlightened’ co-religionists), but also the attempt to anachronistically stylize Holy Moses into some ‘bronze age Voltaire’, who ushered in the age of reason (culte de la raison) among the ancient peoples is quite frankly ridiculous. The story of Genesis is mythological through and through and such we have to agree with the Papa emeritus, when he says that Genesis is decidedly not a ‘scientific’ account of the (‘quantitative’) formation of the different species of plant life and the likes. Now, when we say that Genesis is mythos we do not mean to say that it is merely some ‘camp-fire story of bronze age shepherds’ like many a snarky atheist has remarked, but rather that it is a ‘crystallization’ of a higher truth on our plane of existence and as such its language is one of ‘qualitative’ symbols (and not quantitative data). In fact the very idea of creation implies that our world has its root in a higher principle and as such its origination cannot be explained merely ‘horizontally’ (which also makes the attempts at a scientific ‘grand theory’ that explains everything a hopeless endeavor) and when God revealed His creative opus to Moses in the forms of symbols instead of mathematical equations this is not a mere ‘condescension to the primitive mentality of the time’  but due to the fact that creation (by its ‘vertical’ nature) is analytically inexhaustible on the plane of rationality alone.

 

The symbolic language of Genesis being thus quite incommensurable, we also do not claim that our following exegesis is the only valid one; far from it.  As Erigena says ‘there are many ways, indeed an infinite number, of interpreting the Scriptures, just as in one and the same feather of a peacock and even in a single small portion of the feather, we see a marvelously beautiful variety of innumerable colours’ (Periphyseon, IV.749D). The revealed text always points beyond itself and is never exhaustible by one definitive interpretation alone; this is especially true of Genesis which presents us truly with an indefinite number of possible readings, not only ‘macrocosmic’ and ‘microcosmic’, but also eschatological, moral and even ‘metacosmic’ (referring to the ‘birth of God’). As such some exegetes have interpreted the appearance of the ‘Sun and the moon’ on the 4^th day as signifying the advent of Christ (Solis iustitiae) and the Church (which also fits the Rabbinical sources, who predicted the coming of the Messiah in the 4000^th year of biblical time, which, as it happens, corresponds exactly to the first century of our calendar). Likewise St. Augustine interprets the emergence of the ‘dry land’ on the 3^rd day (the day of Resurrection) as signifying the soul purified in the baptismal waters, which then brings forth the ‘life’ of the virtues and becomes a ‘paradise’ for God to dwell in. Now, all these interpretations are of course not mutually exclusive but, in a sense, equally ‘true’; this does not mean introducing some kind of postmodern subjectivism however, for if there’s an indefinite number of ‘true’ interpretations, there are likewise just as many that are clearly false, many of which have been introduced by the ‘historical-critical method’ we already mentioned.

 

One of these error (which proves to be quite persistent) is the opinion that Genesis wasn’t even written by Moses in the first place, but by a collection of authors working over a long period of time in a veritable ‘patchwork effort’. As such, we’re told that the first chapter was written by the ‘Elohist’, the second by the ‘Jahwist’ and so on, whereas the authorship of the God-seer Moses, which is not only testified to by Holy Tradition, but even the Lord himself (‘If you had believed Moses, you’d believe Me’ – Joh. 5:46; a verse that is certainly also applicable vice versa) seems wholly forgotten. Alas! ‘Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools’ (Rom. 1:22), such that 'whenever they read in Moses, a veil lies over their hearts' (2. Cor. 3:15). 

 

It goes without saying that we for our part reject all proposals of a ‘collective authorship’ (at least in the way that the 'documentary hypothesis' proposes it), as well as the opinion that the 1^st and 2^nd chapter of Genesis are in any way ‘contradictory’ (you’d think that a whole ‘committee’ of authors working on a text for hundreds of years would come up with a more coherent narrative instead of just stringing two ‘contradictory’ accounts together). Instead of applying the framework of historicism we thus want to approach the text with a symbolical (or ‘archetypical’) hermeneutic (and we do not believe that in doing so we are reading anything ‘into’ the text but merely reading it as it was intended to be read). So without concerning us any longer with these falsities (which would be quite fruitless), let us instead turn to the text itself and see what it has to tell us.

 

As we know ‘in the beginning was the Word’ (Joh. 1:1), this saying by the Beloved Disciple should already suffice to prove that the ‘beginning’ (principio) spoken to us by the God-seer Moses (Gen. 1:1) does not necessarily denote a ‘temporal beginning’ (for saying that the eternal Logos should have ‘begun’ at some point in time would clearly be heretical) but rather the atemporal Principle (in principio and not cum initium), or, as St. John rightly says: The Word. For, as St. Augustine teaches, ‘God created the world not in time but with time’, according to the Scripture: Qui vivet in aeternum creavit omnia simul (Eccl. 18:1), meaning also that there was no time in which the world didn’t exist, which likewise renders the question what God did ‘before’ creation utterly meaningless, since there being no time, there likewise is no ‘before’ or ‘after’ to speak of, which is why Meister Eckhart says that ‘God created the world in the same eternal now in which He dwells from eternity, and in which the emanation of the Divine Persons eternally is, was, and will be’ (In Genesis).  All that God works is one, says the Meister, which is also why it is certainly not erroneous to say that God created the world from eternity.

 

This does not mean however, that world is ‘eternal’, which would be manifestly absurd; for even if all things eternally subsist in the Divine Mind, this does not mean that they have also forever ‘existed’ in manifestation. As St. Augustine tells us: ‘In the eternal Word dost Thou speak eternally all that Thou speakest; and yet not all exists at once and from eternity that Thou effectest in speaking’ (Conf. XI.7). As the Abbé Stéphane summarizes:

 

Creation, in the Divine Mind and in the Word of God, has an eternal character: it ‘manifests’ in time like a symbolic expression of an eternal decree … One cannot speak of a ‘beginning’ except in relation to a posterior moment in the temporal or ‘manifested’ order: in relation to God creation does not have a beginning and as symbolic expression of Eternity time has an eternal character, for it has neither beginning nor end (Ésoterisme Chrétien, I.8).

 

It seems that most of the bickering about the question of ‘the eternity of the world’ seems thus misguided, for, as already St. Thomas noted, even if the world is ‘perpetual’ (like the Platonist held) and lacking all temporal beginning, it can never be ‘eternal’ strictly speaking, for it is still ‘principled’ by God (in principio creavit Deus). We may thus conclude that, in a sense, the propositions 1) The world has subsisted forever, 2) The world had a beginning, and 3) The world was created in this very moment[1], are not at all mutually exclusive but depend merely on the respective viewpoint.[2]

 

Leaving aside further questions concerning the ‘beginning’, we want to turn to the actual Hexaemeron now. Giving a detailed account about each particular day is certainly beyond the scope of this little treatise (for the aim of this essay is really the second chapter) and would require a whole separate study, let us however make a brief observation about the general structure of the six days, which is certainly not wholly without interest.

 

As has been noted by many kabbalist, the pattern of the ‘six days’ fits perfectly on the ‘six sefirot of construction’ (the seventh being the ‘day of the kingdom’, Malkut) in the ‘Tree of Life’ (starting from right to left), the sefirot of each ‘pillar’ mirroring each other vertically (such as the ‘light’ of the 1^st day, and the ‘sun’ of the 4^th day on the ‘right’), so that we could truly say with St. Dionysus that ‘the higher world throws its light on the lower’.

 

2^nd Day: Waters above/below the firmament                                1^st Day: Light/Darkness

 

3^rd Day: Dry Land + Plants (herb-yielding/fruit-bearing)

 

5^th Day: Life above/below the waters      4^th Day: Lights in the firmament (Sun/moon)

 

6^th Day: Land Animals + Man (male/female)

 

This structure could also be depicted in a circle of six equal sections, in which ‘Day one’ (dies unus, as it says in Gen. 1:5 and not ‘the first day’) is mirrored by ‘Day four’, ‘Day two’ by ‘Day five’ and so on [3]; the first three days denoting a ‘descending’ and days 4-6 an ‘ascending’ motion (a movement of prôodos-epistrophé which is also indicated in Gen. 2:4, where we read of the ‘generation of the heavens and the earth in the day that the Lord made the earth and the heavens’). Keeping in mind what we previously said about the symbolism of the 6 and 7, we might also link the general structure of the creative work to the figure of the sphere emerging from a central point along the six directions of universal extension (which is also perfectly depicted in the Chi-Rho), or likewise what, in sacred geometry, is sometimes called the ‘Seed of Life’, i.e. six circles of equal sized placed equidistantly on the periphery of one central circle with a seventh circle enveloping the whole figure (‘six from one and one from six’, hence the word beresheet has also sometimes been rendered as bara sheet: ‘He created six’) [4]. This figure also shows in a quite elegant manner that the first and the seventh day (the Sabbath), centre and periphery are one, which has long been observed by many commentators such as Scotus Erigena, who concludes from this that the first and last division of nature (natura non creata non creans and natura creata non creans) are really non-dual in nature, manifestation unfolding like ‘fountain flowing into itself’ (St. Dionysius), for in God the ‘movement’ of the six days (‘His Word runneth swiftly’ – Ps. 147) is His rest and vice versa: : ‘At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is; neither arrest nor movement’ (T.S. Eliot), or as Hegel put it: Der trunkene bacchantische Taumel und durchsichtige Klarheit und Ruhe (‘the bacchanalian frenzy and silent tranquility’). This ‘sill point’ being at the same time the first and seventh day, the ‘sabbatical centre’ where all radii proceed from and flow back into.

 

However keeping with the depiction given above, we may observe that creation proceeds in a series of separations (omnia duplicia) along two complementary ‘pillars’, the ‘luminous’ (or solar/fiery) right one and the ‘waters’ (lunar) left one, the middle being the ‘androgynous’ means between them. It might also be pointed out that the ‘left’ and ‘right’ days count one creative ‘work’ each, whereas in the days on the ‘middle pillar’ (i.e. the 3^rd, and 6^th day) the fiat is of a twofold nature, such that on the 3^rd day God creates both the ‘firmament’ and the ‘plants’[5], and on the 6^th the ‘land animals’ as well as ‘man’.We see thus that each ‘half’ of 3 days counts 4 creative logoi (making up one ‘totality’ of 3+4=7 each): quand on est à trois, on est à quatre; a pattern which has been notably studied by Baader (cf. Ueber den Urtenar), who says that the ‘ternary’ is always a ‘quaternary’, not only in nature (cf. also the Pythagorean Tetraktys), but also in God himself (the ‘fourth effect’ being Sophia). This 3=4 pattern (which is inherent in the numerical symbolism as such, for as soon as there is ‘duality’, there emerge both the 1+2=3 and 2+/x2=4) is also often found in Scripture (for example in the divine name YHWH, a four-letter word consisting of three different letters, as well as the ‘four streams’ in Paradise of which ‘Tigris’ and ‘Euphrates’ could technically be counted as but one river etc.; we might also mention the Tetramorph with its three animal faces and the fourth being that of a man. Likewise in the Upanishads it is said that Brahman stands with ¼ of his ‘legs’ in the ‘three worlds’ (triloka) and with the other ¾ in the ‘fourth’ realm (turîya) of the unmanifested, a notion which obviously also applies the ‘four worlds’ of the Kabbala. [6])

 

It is to this ‘fourth’ and by extension also the ‘third’ world, that the first chapter of Genesis pertains to, hence why it could be said to recount to us the ‘creation in the Word’ or in the ‘world of (archetypical) creation’ (olam ha-beriyah). Thus the kabbalists count exactly 10 ‘words’ (‘and God said…’)[7] or logoi in the 1^st chapter, which corresponds not only to the 10 sefirot in jewish doctrine, but also the 10 ‘intelligible numbers’ (arithmoi eidetikoi) in the Platonic system, from which all the other numbers (the arithmoi mathematikoi) proceed like ‘instantiations’ from ‘form’; a doctrine we’ll find in different expressions in almost all Traditions (cf. here). These 10 ‘words’ or ‘numbers’ represent symbolically the totality of ‘archetypes’ or causae primordiales, which eternally subsist in the Word (hence why the word ‘creation’ has to be understood purely analogically in the context of this chapter, as do the ‘days’, for God ‘creates’ in fact omnia simul). This is also an opinion put forward by St. Augustine, who not only connect the 'creations' of the six days to the 'seminal reasons' (logoi spermatikoi), but also says that Genesis 1 pertains to ‘angelic world’ (cf. De Gen. ad lit. V) and that the six ‘days’ in question (dies from the same root as deus or skr. devas: ‘to shine’) do not measure some temporal period but could be said the mark the unfolding revelation of God’s eternal possibilities in the ‘angelic vision’ (‘When the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a loud voice’ – Job 38:7). To put it simply we might say that the first chapter mark the revelatory ‘forth shining’ (de-claratio) of the essences from the ‘dazzling obscurity’ of the Word (the locus of archetypes, pertaining to the ‘fourth world’) in the kosmos noetos (the ‘third world’, which we have previously linked to Sophia as the primary manifestation of the Logos; cf. here and here).

 

Now, it is said that in these two upper worlds ‘all is God and God is all’ (Tikkunei Zohar, XIX) and from this we might also get a first indication why the Holy Prophet speaks, in the first chapter, exclusively of ‘Elohim’, a name which is certainly mysterious and which has (like most divine names, of which there is a whole ‘science’ is jewish esoterism) seen a great number of interpretations, many of which are not without merit. As such it is linked by the kabbalists to the (feminine) ‘left pillar’, God’s immanence and receptivity (the Shekinah) or the sefira Binah (the ‘Great Mother’, or the divine ‘womb’) more specifically, thereby once more indicating that Genesis 1 deals primarily with the ‘creation in God’. However for our limited purposes we simply want to say for now that the name Elohim in the present context refers primarily to God in His absoluteness, i.e. God in se, for at this point there is not yet any real ‘other’ he could be ‘relative’ to. Not only does the word Elohim ‘include’ (aufheben) both plural and singular, but in a way even male and female[8], and as such it is perfectly fitting to express the pure undifferentiated infinity of the Divine Artificer, beholding His eternal possibilities in the Divine Knowledge. Furthermore the word Elohim starts with the letter alef (א), which, according to the Zohar, designates God as ‘the Absolute’, or God as ‘the One’. But there is also an additional reason why the alef is interesting in this context, for, as we have said many times before, the first letter in the Torah is beth (B’reshit), which has the numeric value of 2. Creation (as well as Scripture) thus begins with ‘duality’, namely that of ‘heaven and earth’ (the ‘world egg’) [9], but it is God as ‘the One’ (alef) who stand ante principium, who is the Principle and Author of all duality as such.[10]

 

If we probe even deeper, we will find that even the principal letter alef is not wholly ‘simple’, but made up of two yod ‘connected’ by a heh (י  - ו -  י). The gematric value of yod, the ‘divine letter’ par excellence (for, being the smallest of the whole alphabet, it is said that all other letters are composed of it)[11], that prominently figures in the most holy names of ‘JHWH, Jesus, Jerusalem’ etc., is 10. On the one hand the alef (as 10/10) could thus be said to designate the yet undifferentiated pleroma of the Word (10 designating of course ‘totality’), the 'mustard seed', which then explicated into the whole artifice of creation, and, according to another interpretation, we could even ‘decipher’ it as an indication of the Most Blessed Trinity itself: Schma Jisrael: YHWH (י) Elohenu (ו) YHWH (י)! (Deut. 6:4).[12]

 

Turning back to the text, we may note that at the end of the principal ‘creation’ stands man, for it is written: ^‘And Elohim said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Gen. 1:26).

 

As many of the Holy Fathers have pointed out, man is created last because in him all things are ‘recapitulated’ and it is he, as mediator and ‘king of creation’, who is called to ‘unite’ all things and bind them back to God. As St. Maximus says:

 

This is why man was introduced last among beings – like a kind of natural bond mediating between the universal extremes through his parts, and unifying through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance (Ambigua, XLI)

 

And Erigena, commenting on the venerable Father, points out that

 

Humanity is wholly in the wholeness of the whole created nature, seeing that in it every creature is fashioned, and in it all are linked together, and into it shall all return, and through it must all be saved … The whole spread of creation is understood to inhere in man … no part of it is found, either corporeal or incorporeal, which does not subsist created in man, which does not perceive through him, which does not live through him, which is not incorporated in him … The reason why man is introduced at the conclusion of the narrative of the equipping of this visible world is that we might understand that all the things of which the creation is narrated before that of man are universally comprehended within him (Periphyseon, IV. 760A-782C)

 

Man is the last opus and the first ‘thought’, the last ‘created’ and the first ‘formed’, alpha and omega of the creative work, the ‘primordial form’, and in him all is summed up: ‘Man has being with the stones, life with the plants, feeling with the animals, and intelligence with the angels’ says Saint Gregory the Great (Lectio, IX); there’s thus nothing that does not partake in him.  

 

This also indicated by the Prophet in the text itself, for the first part of the word Bereshit (‘In the beginning’), bere-, has the gematric value of 2-200-1. Creation thus proceeds from the primordial duality of ‘heaven and earth’ (2), which is then developed (200) in the ‘separations’ of the six days (light/darkness, upper/lower waters etc.), and finally brought back to ‘oneness’ in man (1) as the ‘image of Elohim’ (alef).

 

Next, we read that ‘Elohim created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27). The first part of this sentence refers to man in his primordial cause, his archetypical ‘image’ before all differentiation. It is ‘Universal Man’, Adam Kadmon, as blueprint of creation. As St. Gregory of Nyssa puts it:

 

I think that the entire plenitude of humanity was included by the God of all, by His power of foreknowledge, as it were in one body, and that this is what the text teaches us which says, ‘God created man, in the image of God created He him’ … The man that was manifested at the first creation of the world, and he that shall be after the consummation of all, are alike: they equally bear in themselves the Divine image ... Our whole nature, then, extending from the first to the last, is, so to say, one image of Him Who is (De imago, XVI).

 

The second part however (‘male and female he created them’) marks a logical ‘jump’ (from him to them), the interpretations for which are manifold. St. Gregory (as well as St. Maximus, Origen and others) for example reads this sexual ‘duality’ as a departure from the archetype[13], which is added by God in the ‘principal’ creation due to His ‘prognosis’ of original sin, as kind of ‘preemptive measure’, preemptive punishment even. As Erigena, ever the patristic commentator, sums up this exegetical strain:

 

All these things, the animal, earthly and corruptible body; the sex that is divided into male and female; propagation by a mode similar to that of the beasts; the need of food and drink and clothing; the increase and decrease of the body; the alteration of sleeping and waking, and the inevitable necessity of both; and all similar limitations from which human nature would have been entirely free if it had not sinned — as it is destined one day to be free again — are the consequences of sin and were added to man’s nature at the time of his creation as something external to his nature on account of sin before sin was committed, by Him whose foreknowledge is not deceived. (op. cit. IV.807D-808A)

The separation of the sexes appears thus clearly as a consequence of sin[14]; an idea which is likewise found in Böhmean theosophy, according to which the primordial Adam was created androgynous but, while naming the animals, he ‘in-magined’ himself into the lower animal nature, thus falling down into the ‘lower realms’ (the elemental world, which we inhabit).

 

Even if the differences in the teachings of the Holy Fathers and that of the theosophers are obviously legion, they yet all agree with the basic thesis that ‘sex came with the Fall’. This interpretation is certainly not wholly unconvincing, however we have to wonder how faithful it is to Holy Scripture itself, for anyone who studies the text with discernment will soon find that there are some problems with this exegesis that need to be addressed and in doing so we have to turn out attention to the 2^nd chapter.

 

[To Be Continued].