Felix Culpa (Fortunate Fall) or Becoming Like God
A Recovering Gospel Doctrine Class on Moses 4
In 1674, John Milton wrote a poem about the two naked people in the Garden and proposed that Adam, all things considered, was pretty happy about having munched on forbidden fruit. In his poetic, English way, Milton mouthing Michael the Archangel’s words wrote:
Whether in Heav’n or Earth, for then the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Then this of Eden, and far happier daies.
Now Michael the Archangel was talking to Adam in the poem and Adam responded thusly (thusly is the appropriate biblical-poetic term):
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Then that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By mee done and occasiond, or rejoyce
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring
So Milton didn’t have spell-check and it may feel a bit convoluted, so here is the cell phone version:
The particular Mormon twist on this passage of Milton is that Adam and Michael the Archangel are the same person in the church doctrine, so he is talking to, or texting himself. It isn’t quite as twisty as the disavowed theory of Brigham Young which had God and Adam as the same guy, but that transition point in evolutionary theory when you move from one species to another has always been kind of a grey area.
And nowhere is it more grey than in Mormon theology. Are we men* or are we Gods? Not to delve too deep into Mormon theology, but Lorenzo Snow (#5 on the prophet chart) had the couplet that has given rise to many evangelical Christian coronaries (and the Tanner’s movie): “As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may become.” A quip that Joseph Smith followed up with a funeral oration for King Follett confirming this as a doctrine of the new, nascent religion.
All of this is a necessary precursor to our two naked people in the garden, still naked and unashamed. Joseph Smith’s translation of Genesis makes it pretty clear that the entire garden set up was a coordinated effort by God, Satan, and Jesus to turn men into Gods. Satan gets cast down to lie to Adam and Eve as the Deceiver, but Satan, channeling a serpent, just can’t help himself, so he tells the truth:
9 But of the fruit of the tree which thou beholdest in the midst of the garden, God hath said — Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
10 And the serpent said unto the woman: Ye shall not surely die;
11 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Shame exists only in social interactions and is a desire to hide a violation of social norms. Adam and Eve had a norm of not eating of the tree of knowledge, this was the shame that caused them to hide, not necessarily knowing good and evil. But God knows all, not just good and evil, and knew that the social norm of the garden had been violated. To be a God, you must be a know-it-all. So God says to Adam and Eve, “Ah, you have clothes on, that must mean you’ve done what I told you not to do. Looks like you are like me now. Too bad for you.”
The only thing God still had that Adam and Eve did not is the fruit of the other tree they weren’t supposed to eat — the tree of life.
28 And I, the Lord God, said unto mine Only Begotten: Behold, the man is become as one of us to know good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand and partake also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever,
I’ve got to say, God isn’t coming out too hot in all this. Satan is sent down to lie, but tells the truth. Adam and Eve aren’t supposed to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but they have to for the whole plan to work. God convinces Jesus that they should block the tree of life with angels with fiery swords, so in a few thousand years, God can send Jesus down to die, suffer and get nails pounded through him, so they can let the now God-like creatures have eternal life. It reads like a poorly executed Oceans 11 plot — too much deus ex machina.
Meanwhile, Adam and Eve have to get dressed and go to work.
So as an earthly parent, not a Heavenly Parent, suddenly the whole religion thing makes a sort of metaphoric sense. God is us. We are God. This little blue dot of a garden is all we’ve got. Religions can be escaped, but the human condition is inescapable. We are born naked and unashamed. We learn the social norms of our society and we learn the difference between good and evil and learn that the norms and the morality don’t always coincide. Indeed, you could say we become like all the Gods that came before us. We live, but we are going to die.
Thinking about dying sucks. So we look for stories to ease the pain of existence and live our lives in the confused convoluted planning of Gods plotting a felix culpa or ‘fortunate fall.’
The fortune is that we are here. How we spend that fortune is up to us.
