In a series of homilies on the first chapters of the book of Genesis delivered in 1981, the then Cardinal Ratzinger mentioned that the biblical narrative of creation took its final form during the Babylonian exile. At the lowest point of their history, the people of Israel found themselves subject to a civilization superior to their own, leading many to question the truth of what they had been taught. In contrast to the two attitudes typical in such situations, either to renounce the received tradition (the progressive position) or to ossify it (the conservative position), the biblical author took a far more creative, far more effective third path. The Genesis story of creation was this third path: It answers the myths of the oppressors with its own, appropriating the images of the dominant culture and reinterpreting them in the light of divine revelation.
In the Babylonian creation myth of Enuma Elish, from the union of two primordial gods, Apsu and Tiamat, were born many deities. These raucous newborns incur the ire of their father who decides to kill them that he might slumber in peace. They murder him instead. Their mother, a giant dragon or sea serpent, decides to avenge her dead consort by sending an army of monsters led by her son Kingu. The other gods appeal to Marduk, the tutelar god of Babylon, to fight back. Marduk kills Tiamat, and from her carcass creates the heavens and the earth. He kills Kingu and, from the mingling of his blood with the earth, creates human beings whose fate it is to work in the servile tasks that were the responsibility of lesser gods. In this myth, and not unlike those of many other peoples, the world emerges from a primordial conflict, from a war between celestial powers. It is the fruit of violence: The order of the universe is imposed by force. Good and evil are confused and ambiguous. Marduk triumphs not because he is good but because he is more powerful. Having its origin in the rotting corpse of the great dragon, the world is fundamentally tainted and corrupt, as are human beings. All of creation is marked by putrefaction. And this myth has political implications. Marduk, the god of Babylon, maintains the order of the universe with his power: Submission to the power of Babylon is submission to Marduk, guaranteeing the preservation of universal order.
How radically different the Genesis myth is! Here there is no primordial conflict, no rival powers, no chaos to be tamed, no cosmic war, no monstrous creatures. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). The Spirit of God flutters peacefully above the primordial waters. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). God creates out of nothing, with his word, without violence. And his word is not mere prose, but poetry. The rhythmic repetition that gives the text its structure expresses the poetic character God bestows upon the world: God creates, God names; evening comes, morning follows. Each thing is created, given a place, and made beautiful.1 The world is a work of art born of the divine Reason. To highlight the contrast with the Babylonian myth, the Genesis narrative ends by stating, “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Human beings occupy a special place in this creative poem: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Man is not created from the decaying corpse of a rival power but from the earth that God saw was very good. God places man and woman in the “garden of delights” and, whereas the Babylonian man was created to be enslaved by the gods, the man of Genesis enjoys the continuous presence of God, who comes to walk with him. From the very beginning, Genesis reveals to us a God who delights in the company of men. He is a paternal God, not a tyrant nor a slave master—a God who loves his children, not one who would gladly kill them for another hour of sleep.
The Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the incarnate Word refute all pagan origin myths.
This leads us to the second creation narrative and the story of the fall. Ratzinger declares that the Babylonian understanding of the world—that conflict and violence are the heart of all that exists—is not a baseless belief. Empirical evidence seems to confirm it. The difference lies in that for the Bible, all conflict and violence, all disorder, results from a fall—from a rejection of the world as it had been created. For Babylonians, it was the very essence of creation. The prohibition concerning the tree of knowledge of good and evil is not the arbitrary whim of a capricious god. What is good and what is evil is inscribed in the very nature of things, in the intelligible order of creation: Morality is built into creation itself. Adam and Eve’s grasping for the fruit is a rejection of this order, a rejection of the goodness of creation. In believing the serpent’s lie, they contradict God; they declare that what they are is not good enough, that they should be like God. Except that they already were. Adam and Eve in the garden were as like God as one can possibly be. The devil deceives them into thinking that God is a competing power: that he has held something back to keep them under his boot. And so, man must overcome that rival power. But this is impossible, as Adam and Eve realize when they become aware of their nakedness.
In accepting the devil’s lie that the world is at its root a power struggle, Adam and Eve’s world quickly devolves into just that: upon being found out, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, they all blame God. Theologians have long taught that with Adam’s disobedience, man’s relationships break down: relationship with God, with other human beings, with nature, and even with himself. They are redefined as a struggle for power. In Genesis, we find the origin story of all pagan origin stories: to believe that the order of the cosmos comes from the triumph of a power over all its rivals—that it is the powerful who determine what is good and evil—is the flawed thinking of fallen man, not the truth. Original sin is a turning away from reality. The turning back cannot be achieved by man alone, for it is his very relationship with God and with reality that has been affected. The initiative must come from God himself, which he takes immediately. There follows a striking scene where God shows once more that he is not the tyrant Adam and Eve have come to believe him to be but is rather a loving father. Upon expelling them from Eden, God does not send them out in the shame of their nakedness. He clothes them, like a parent would a child. He is already at work redressing the damage they brought upon themselves by their turning away, showing that what governs the universe is sacrificial love.
The opening verses of St. John’s Gospel confirm the Genesis story: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be” (John 1:1–3). God still desires—despite our first parents’ betrayal, despite the chosen people’s repeated infidelities, despite the pagan nations’ stubborn idolatry—to be in the company of men: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). God, despite all the failures of mankind, remains Emmanuel, “God is with us” (Matt. 1:23). The work of restoration that God had begun at the fall and continued throughout the entire Old Testament culminates in Christ. The Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the incarnate Word refute all pagan origin myths. Almighty God does not “lord it over men” like the rulers of the Gentiles do, nor does he “make his authority over them felt” like the great ones, but rather came to serve and not to be served, to give his life as a ransom for many (Matt. 20:25–26). He comes in the form of a suffering servant, in weakness, as the prophet had foretold (Isa. 53). God himself shows men the right way to see things, calling them to turn back to reality, to conversion: “My grace is enough for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). If Adam and Eve had feared that God was keeping them under his heel, Christ put himself under ours. Our first parents’ fear opened the doors of death; Christ’s sacrificial love brought fullness of life.
With the modern age, this view of creation was abandoned. The original sin of modernity is its denial of original sin. It does this not by rejecting the fallenness of nature, but by mistaking fallen nature with nature as such. The broken-down relationships sprung from the fall are no longer seen as disordered, but as the “way things really are.” Creation is not “very good” because it, too, is endless strife. In modernity, the pagan myths have once again reared their viperine head. We find this very clearly in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, the universe is nothing more than bodies in motion acting on other bodies in motion—forces and counterforces, pushing and pulling in one direction or another, the greater ones dominating the lesser, all governed mechanically by the iron laws of dynamics. Humans are no different. Driven by their appetites and aversions and without a greater power to keep them in check, they will remain in a state of perpetual conflict: “Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of every man against every man.” This state of constant warfare results from human nature as such, and we cannot call it evil: “To this war of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.” Things are not good or evil because of the order God has bestowed on the universe, but because the man-made Leviathan, the power that overwhelms all rival powers, says so. Hobbes has thus brought us all the way back to Babylon.
The world is a work of art born of the divine Reason.
If the struggle for power becomes the horizon of human existence, we are left with nothing other than the striving after political power—understood in a tyrannical way—or after the economic power of wealth, or after the technological power that enslaves nature. These become the purpose of human life, a shrunken manner of existence we can hardly call life. Our world becomes smaller and more constrained, curving in on itself.
One of the most renowned verses of the Bible’s creation story is called the protoevangelium, or “the first gospel” (see Gen. 3:15), because in it is announced a savior, but it would perhaps be more appropriate to call the first three chapters of Genesis the protoevangelium, for they are good, even great, news. To the man-made world of interminable power struggle, which is a world of slavery and death, it counters with the deepest truth about the world. Creation might be fallen and wounded by sin, but it has never ceased being what it was created to be: “The Lord loves justice and right and fills the earth with goodness . . . The plan of the Lord stands forever; the design of his heart, through all generations” (Ps. 33:4–5, 11). To turn back to Genesis is to return to reality, and it is the starting point for redeeming our culture, our politics, our economy, and our technology. We ignore the lesson of Genesis at our own peril.
1 St. Thomas Aquinas classifies God’s work of creation into three stages: the work of creation, the work of distinction, and the work of adornment. (See Summa Theologiae, I, q. 65–73.)
