Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise?(Genesis 3:1)
Had some enemy decried me, I could have borne it patiently; some open ill-wisher, I could have sheltered myself from his attack.
But thou, my second self, my familiar friend!
How pleasant was the companionship we shared, thou and I; how lovingly we walked as fellow pilgrims in the house of God!
(Psalm 54:13-15)
Behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.
(Luke 22:21)
You would guess from reading the Bible that every Garden of Eden comes with its own serpent, that every relationship has the potential to be subverted by evil. And you would be right. What would be wrong would be to deduce from this the necessity to never trust anyone, to live alone and independent, to be sole captain of your ship and singular master of your fate. Humans are by nature social creatures because our Creator God is by nature Trinitarian. From the beginning love has flowed between the Father and the Son through the Spirit. We who are made in His image are also givers and receivers of love, with this difference, for us we need to add trust to our love, love to our trust, because we have the gift of freedom.
Being omniscient Almighty God does not have trust issues, He knows what is in our hearts better than we do ourselves, but by creating free spiritual beings, Angels, and free spiritual and material beings, Men (male and female), He does in a sense leave Himself vulnerable. Which is to say since love can only be given freely those who are created with the capacity to love must also have the capacity to refuse to give love. God’s first and greatest angelic creation, Lucifer, made that decision to withhold love and fell, and God’s first human creation, Adam, made the same decision with the same consequence.
Subsequently we see the first siblings, Cain and Abel, produce the first murderer and murderee respectively. Most of the Founding Fathers of the People of Israel colluded together to sell Joseph their brother into slavery and to deceive their father about it. The favourite son of King David, Absalom, rebelled against him and drew the King’s closest friends and advisers to his revolt. And Judas Iscariot, a hand-picked member of the inner-circle of the disciples of Jesus betrayed Him to His deadly enemies. And this only lightly skims over the surface of the treachery and betrayal to be found in the Scriptures involving people who were bound by the closest ties of family, love and gratitude to those towards whom they showed great treachery.
The opening sentence of Tolstoi’s novel Anna Karenina is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In a similar vein, although The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri contains three Cantos, about hell, purgatory and paradise respectively, it is only the Inferno which has any sort of hold on popular culture and the mind of the general public. Why is that? The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Adding all this together I would say that if we read the Bible as if it were primarily a story-book we would be left with the impression that absolutely the worst thing we could do would be to trust anyone else. However, those who, as it were, study the Scriptures for a living, the teachers of Judaism and Catholicism, unanimously come to the conclusion that strong families, close friendships and solidly united communities are the things that Divine Revelation prescribes for us. This is because although our imagination is drawn to the evil it is the real good, practised as a social virtue, which is the one force that enables the sequence of events, the People of God, to proceed across the whole of Scripture and then continue for several thousand years afterwards.
In some ways the real heroes of the Bible are the happy families, or at least the loving and faithful families, who provide the stable platform from which their children, the Samsons, the Samuels, the John the Baptist’s, the Son of Mary, can launch out into their various missions and to which they can return to be refreshed. However, all these stories of lurking evil and of betrayal do rightly point us to one form of distrust which we should always practise. We must always distrust ourselves.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.” Scripture possesses allegorical and moral sense in addition to (but not instead of) its literal sense. We would not then, I think, be wrong to read all these serpents in Paradise as being so many signs pointing towards our own treachery to ourselves. St Paul spoke for all of us when he said “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate.” (Romans 7:15, Knox Bible).
Despite the danger of betrayal, or even indifference, it is sometimes right to trust others but it is never right to trust ourselves (trusting our own abilities comes into a different category and that can certainly be something which we can sometimes safely do). The serpent is the most subtle of beasts, and we are that serpent, we are also Eve, and Adam. Our soul should be Paradise, and if we reject the serpent, if like Mary we trample upon it, then it can be Paradise with vigilance in this life and then Paradise unqualified in eternity. But not if we are alone and unaided. Scripture records fall after fall, deception after deception, treachery after treachery. And also recovery and revival after recovery and revival. The falls are all our own work, the recoveries come though our Covenant partner, our Father, our Saviour. By grace we are saved through faith. It is our heartfelt conversion, our full cooperation with the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts, that enables us to resist or, if we have failed, to recover and restart. There is no need for trust in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, only for love, and by grace through faith we can participate in that life which belongs to God by nature. And then we shall be safe.
The picture is a miniature which comes from an ‘history bible’ made in Haguenau in Lower Alsace c. 1460. It is now in the Zentralbibliothek in Solothurn, Switzerland (Cod. S II 43, f. 23v). ⠀
thoughtfully catholic 