Dates: March 25 – 30
2 Nephi 2: 22-25
22And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed, he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden, and all things which were created must have remained in the same state which they were after they were created, and they must have remained forever and had no end. 23And they would have had no children. Wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence—having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin. 24But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things. 25Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy.
This passage has always struck me theologically for its deterministic leanings. I have never been sure how widely to apply verse 24—what do we mean by “all things”? This comes back to Joe’s discussion of verses 11 ff, how far do we carry the opposition in all things? In verse 24, do we apply the phrase “all things” to the situation of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the felicitous Fall, or do we apply it in a Hegelian sense, to the totality of world history in a theodical way?
Bracketing that question, I want to think about the opposition and the Fall and rise of Adam, the Fall and resultant joy of Adam in terms of Victor Turner’s anthropological theory of social advancement through the ritual process known as structure/anti-structure.
Victor Turner posits that social life is a “dialectical process that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality” (The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1977), 97). Turner states that liminality in cultural rites is what characterizes “rituals of status elevation,” in which the ritual subject is transferred irreversibly from a lower to a higher position in an institutionalized system of hierarchical positions. (Turner, 167). The imagery of a naked Adam in the prelapsarian Garden clothing is analogous to neophytes, or “liminal entities,” which may go naked to symbolize that they have “no status, property… [or] position in a kinship system” (Turner, 95). Turner describes the behavior of neophytes as “normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint” (Turner, 95).
Turner elucidates why this humiliation and abuse gives dynamic thrust to a new relation: the subjugation of the one being initiated into a new social status is part of a process of being “ground down…to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life” (Turner, 95). Under this lens, Adam’s new relationship to God and status of joy after the fall as a reliant on his abasement, rather than a mere manifestation of grace. Adam and Eve must be abased and reduced to nothing before they can be exalted.
As all social relations are dynamic and dialectic, there must be a shift in the position of the one in the dominant role as well as the one in the subordinate role. In liminality, according to Turner, “the underling comes uppermost” and the authority is humbled, almost as a slave (Turner, 102). In the ritual process, the subordinate is elevated while the superior is made weaker (Turner, 168). As Turner observes, liminality “implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low” (Turner, 97).
Turner asseverates that religious institutions mimic this ritual process and that, though debasement is not the final goal of these groups, it is an essential liminal phase through which individuals must pass to reach a state (Turner, 94). Turner justifies the humiliation those preparing for rites of passage endure on the grounds that while they are “often of a grossly physiological character” which dually serves to “represent partly a destruction of the previous status and partly a tempering of their essence” so that they can be prepared to deal with the responsibilities of their new social status and to “restrain them in advance from abusing their new privileges. They have to be shown that in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society” (Turner, 103). Turner ultimately concludes that the humiliation of the rite of passage may be intended to humble the neophyte precisely because he will be exalted when the rite is terminated. The humiliation simultaneously punishes the initiand for “rejoicing in liminal freedom” and prepares her for a higher office (Turner, 201).
Through the expulsion from the Garden, Adam is simultaneously being punished for the disloyalty to God inherent in his transgression, the betrayal of his identity as belonging to God, and is being prepared for a new understanding of identity. The joy and exalted status of Adam in 2 Nephi 2 follows the Fall and abasement as a necessary, ritual process rather than incidentally. God does not save or exalt Adam despite his abasement, but because of it. The anti-structure of liminal chaos that follows the expulsion from the Garden—the loss of one’s identity and understanding of one’s primary relation—necessarily precedes the structure of the clearer and more exalted identity that follows. In this light, the transgression of Adam and Eve proves necessary for new creation.
Humiliation, the Fall, is a necessary part of progression. This brings me to an earlier point made in response to Joe’s posts on opposition. He wrote about the worldview of Ecclesiastes that creation is in motion but going nowhere. I responded by citing Doctrine and Covenants 121:33 “How long can rolling waters remain impure? What power shall stay the heavens?” to argue that creation is in a process of purification and sanctification. What I want to highlight here is that it seems—again somewhat deterministically—that creation is in this process even despite itself. That through transgression, progress is made and purification occurs. I want to connect this idea back to a recent discussion I was privy to about Nephite and the Jaredite voyages to the promised land. The point is this: Nephi obediently constructs a ship according to God’s commandment, not after the manner of the world (1 Nephi 18:2), but “after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across the waters” (1 Nephi 17:8). Now, the passage implies to me that Nephi will construct the ship and it will be smooth sailing after that—the Lord will carry His people across the waters. Similarly, the Jaredites construct ships that are “tight like unto a dish” (Ether 2:17) complete with means for light and air. Again, it seems like they have done what they were supposed to do to make traversing the ocean to the promised land possible and they will get their without incident. Of course, we know that this does not prove to be the case. They are, to borrow the turn of phrase employed by Lucy Mack Smith to describe Emma, “Tossed about on the ocean of uncertainty.” In both cases the journey proves tumultuous, unpredictable, and precarious. This brings us to another interesting point—though God is intimately involved in both cases in the construction of the vessels that will carry each party to their promised land, in each instance God points to God’s own (at least partial) absence during the journey and his final reappearance: God covenants with the Jaredites that he will “meet [them]” and “go before [them] into a land which is choice above all the lands of the earth” (Ether 1:42). Likewise, God tells Lehi that God will be their light and they will know that God is leading them to the promised land, yet God implies that they will have greater knowledge of this fact after they have arrived: “After ye have arrived in the promised land, ye shall know that I the Lord, am God; and that I, the Lord, did deliver you from destruction; yea, that I did bring you out of the land of Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 17: 13-14). There is no shortage of opposition as Nephi seeks to construct the ship or when they begin the journey; Nephi describes that “there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters for three days” (1 Nephi 18:13). What is especially significant given the context of 2 Nephi 2, the discussion of opposition, and the idea that transgression and humiliation are necessary for progression and joy, is that these set backs are the consequence of the sin and rebellion of Nephi’s brothers (v. 15). Both the Nephites and the Jaredites arrive at their promised land. What I want to point out is that it is not so much in spite of, but because of the opposition, the sin, the transgression, that they are able to move—that turbulence is generated and propulsive progress is made. Opposition, even being stymied by opposition, ultimately generates the necessary energy to move us forward, to allow impure waters to keep rolling until they become pure and sanctified. Adam’s progression is only possible through transgression and falling—it is only through abasement that he can become exalted, only through being stripped by sin that exiled that he can become clothed with righteousness and inherit a promised land, only through misery in a fallen world that he can know joy. And God is with him on the journey—even when God cannot be seen—and God, in God’s wisdom, carries Adam and Eve, and the whole human family, forward “through this vale of sorrow into a far better land of promise” (Alma 37:45) in which God reappears: God’s presence and guiding hand throughout the journey of world history becomes retroactively apparent.
Lehi's Discourse 
Fantastic discussion here, Deidre. I’m still puzzling over some of the details—it seems to me, for instance, that Turner’s characterization of the ritual process is complicated in certain ways when applied to the Fall—but I love the direction all of this goes. It’s certainly a beautiful articulation of the last bit of verse 23: “having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.”
I’ll do what I can over the next couple days to make time to make a few comments: (1) about what complications I see the dynamics of the Fall introducing into Turner’s outline of ritual process; (2) about your brief comments on “all things,” which I find most intriguing; (3) about the larger passage from which D&C 121:33 is taken; and (4) about verse 22 and its possible interpretations (about which Rico will have far more to say than I will, I suspect!). For the moment, just my thanks and this promissory note!
Through the expulsion from the Garden, Adam is simultaneously being punished for the disloyalty to God inherent in his transgression, the betrayal of his identity as belonging to God, and is being prepared for a new understanding of identity.
1) Deidre, I really like how you have articulated the situation here. Whatever else is going on, there is a punishment inherent in the narrative. In my view, in the last 100 years, Mormon interpretations have tended to ignore, downplay, or erase this feature of the text, and by so doing, this disrupts and does violence to the narrative.
2) I think this passage is often read so that “Adam’s transgression” itself is a necessary “opposition” that leads to man coming into being. In this way, verse 22: “they must have remained forever and had no end” performs the same function as verse 11: “Wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life, neither death, nor corruption, nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.” Both situations connote a negative state where there is no change. (Or, “and had no end” could be read as “and had no purpose.”) We should note that changelessness is as a positive virtue elsewhere in the text (1 Nephi 10:18; 2 Nephi 2:4; 27:23; 29:9; Alma 31:17; 3 Ne. 24:6; Mormon 9:9-10; Moroni 10:19).
Lehi’s reasoning seems to be as follows. In verse 11, Lehi is arguing that there must be an opposition in all things, or else things could not exist. In verse 16, after things exist, Lehi argues that there must be opposing enticements among the things that exist, or else man could not act for himself. Starting with verse 22, he appears to be arguing that after things exist and man is able to act for himself, man must “oppose” the commandments of God, or else mankind could not exist and mankind could not know joy. This chain of reasoning was severely criticized by early critics of the Book of Mormon (I’m not sure whether I we should discuss verse 25 this week or next. We grouped it for next week but it seem to conclude Lehi’s reasoning in verses 22-24).
Is there a way for Turner’s approach to make sense of this? Turner’s model seems to suggest that through ritual one goes from “total obedience” to “obedience to superior rank” (106), whereas progress in Lehi’s story requires Adam to be disobedient. In Adam’s case, he isn’t being asked to accept arbitrary punishment, or is he? The two examples you suggest for progression through opposition or movement, the Jaredite and Nephite vessels, are good examples that do not have the negative side-effect of requiring either the Jaredites or Nephites to be disobedient in order to progress. In addition, the opposition seems to come from the cosmos or external world, and not from man acting as the thing that “opposes” God himself. There is a strange argument implicit in Lehi that man must “oppose” God to have joy. What are we to make of that? Is this deliberate on Lehi’s part, or just an unintended consequence of his theology? Is this a case where Lehi has simply chosen the wrong Biblical narrative to make his point about progression?
3) “And they would have had no children.” Looking towards other interpreters within the text of the Book of Mormon for clues as to what Lehi means provides little help because, as far as I can tell, no one repeats this portion of Lehi’s discourse. It does not show up in the Nephite theological tradition, it never gets elaborated, or repeated.
So we might look at other traditions for clues. I’m not aware of any Jewish or Christian exegetical tradition that posits there is something wrong with Adam and Eve that in their immortal state they are physically unable to reproduce. It is unclear what Lehi makes of Genesis 1:28, which he notably omits from his discourse. In fact, this commandment is not mentioned in the Book of Mormon text at all (although Mormon readers have almost always read Genesis 1:28 into Lehi’s text to create a comprehensive Garden narrative). Even the most ardent celibacy advocates who used the Garden account to argue for celibacy, never argue that Adam and Eve had defective reproductive systems in the Garden only that they were celibate while in the Garden. For them the Garden represented not only the past but the afterlife. Inasmuch as they did not believe in marriage in heaven, they argued that there was no marriage in the Garden. Those who argued that marriage was preferable to celibacy on the other hand, didn’t argue that Adam and Eve had children in the Garden (accepting the Genesis account that mentions no children in the Garden), but only that they did, in fact, consummate their marriage in the Garden, and that they could have born children while in the Garden. The Book of Jubilees (not to mention Milton) has Adam and Eve having sexual relations before the fall. (It has been noted that in Jubilees Adam and Eve do not have relations inside of Eden but only outside of Eden because Eden is understood as the Temple and Levitical purity laws are assumed in the text).
Another possibility is that the text takes the position that innocence is the cause for absence of sexual relations, which would be closer to some Christian interpretive traditions (i.e. no children due to innocence, or lack of sexual passion, lust, or concupiscence, rather than biological incapacity. Lehi states they would not have had children, not that they could not have had children. That language may or may not be significant. A Jewish text from which some scholars believe Christian interpretations eventually developed is 2 Baruch 56:6:
For since when he transgressed Untimely death came into being, Grief was named And anguish was prepared, And pain was created, And trouble consummated, And disease began to be established, And Sheol kept demanding that it should be renewed in blood, And the begetting of children was brought about, And the passion of parents produced, And the greatness of humanity was humiliated, And goodness languished.
One can see some affinities with Lehi, but more differences. This text focuses more on the pain that is produced. But more importantly the author of the text sees the transgression in a negative light and not at all necessary. The text assumes that the prelapsarian state was in fact good (“goodness languished” and the “greatness of humanity was humiliated”). In terms of procreation, the text seems to place the lack of the “passion of parents” as the reason for no children in Eden. Scholars link this Edenic view with a view of the afterlife that posits no sexual relations. In terms of chronology, scholars argue that Jubilees is the earlier tradition.
Looking at the text alone, the logic of Lehi’s move appears to be based in verse 11: “Wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life, neither death, nor corruption, nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.” In which case, perhaps Lehi is understanding the Garden “as dead” in that there is no life (meaning no children) and no death, nor happiness nor misery, etc. This would appear to be the function of Lehi’s statement. Having children is better than not having children (which is precisely why rabbinic sources understand Adam and Eve to have sexual relations in the Garden). Therefore, to produce life is better than a changeless or endless or purposeless state.
Be that as it may, it is still a strange move, is it not? The Garden of Eden as “dead” with neither life or death? How can Lehi make this argument when Eden presumably contains opposites? He has needed to argue so at least twice already. Lehi remains silent regarding Genesis 1:28. This move is awkward from the point of view of marriage and eschatological metaphors: paradisaical marriage becomes a childless marriage and reclaiming Eden now means returning to a state of childlessness. No longer can Eden be considered the ideal state or a prototype of the afterlife. Again, is this a case where Lehi has simply chosen the wrong Biblical narrative to make his point about progression?
Rico, you’ve got some nice provocations here.
“Starting with verse 22, he appears to be arguing that after things exist and man is able to act for himself, man must “oppose” the commandments of God, or else mankind could not exist and mankind could not know joy.”
A bit nit-picky, but might it be important that Lehi doesn’t claim that “mankind could not know joy,” but rather that human beings couldn’t have joy and couldn’t know misery (and then the second version: they couldn’t do good, knowing no sin)? It’s not entirely clear what’s at stake in these formulations, but I think it’s worth thinking about the fact that the negative things, misery and sin, are what must be known, while the positive things, joy and the good, are what must be had and done. Does that speak to these issues?
“The Garden of Eden as “dead” with neither life or death? How can Lehi make this argument when Eden presumably contains opposites? He has needed to argue so at least twice already.”
Isn’t this rather easily answered? The logic of verse 11, it seems to me (and I’ve argued in our previous discussions), is that some kind of fundamental (“ontological”) opposition has to possibilize the sorts of oppositions (“ethical” and “existential”) that we actually experience. Verse 16, both on its own terms and through the remarkably precise allusions to the first sentence of verse 11, suggests that the opposition within the Garden was the fundamental sort of opposition, which only possibilizes (but doesn’t realize) the oppositions that make up the weave of experience. Hence it seems to me that all Lehi would have to be saying here is that, had Adam not partaken of the fruit, Eden would have been left with only the fundamental or ontological opposition, a kind of implicit because unexperienciable opposition. There would have been opposition, but it wouldn’t have been known by human beings. No?
The first of my four promised comments!
Deidre, I really like what you’ve done with Victor Turner here. I’m wondering, though, to what extent the nature of the Fall complicates the picture. At least, there’s a kind of irony about the parallel between the couple’s nakedness in the Garden and the neophyte’s nakedness in initiation rituals: where the latter are stripped naked as part of the ritual humiliation you refer to, Eve and Adam begin naked and their humiliation comes, in a certain sense, when they’re clothed. Of course, you might say that there’s a kind of stripping/humiliation in the realization of their nakedness, and so that the parallel is stricter than I’d suggest. Still, I think there may be reason to think of the Garden story as imposing a kind of reversal on what Turner is outlining, and it may be that Christian and Mormon rituals that employ nakedness in one way or another (early Christian baptism, for instance, and certain versions of the initiatory in Mormonism) mark a return from humiliation rather than to it.
Perhaps.
If I wanted to complicate this further, I’d drag Giorgio Agamben’s essay, “Nudities,” into all this, which I read for the first time recently. I don’t think I’ll complicate it further for the moment, however. :)
The second of my four promised comments!
Thanks, Deidre, for pointing out the reappearance of “all things” in verse 24. I’d noted this, but your comments forced me to think more carefully about exactly what’s going on in the text there. A few thoughts in response, then:
(1) We get “all things” twice in verse 24. First we have a reference to “all things” being “done,” and second we have a reference to God as He who “knoweth all things.” In the first case, moreover, we have a present perfect construction (“have been done”), while in the second case we have a simple present construction (“knoweth”). Still more, in the first case we have a passive verb (“be done”), while in the second case we have an active verb (“know”). How might we think about the relationship between these two verbs (“to do,” “to know”) these two constructions (present perfect, simple present), and these two voices (passive, active)? Is the simple present suggestive of a kind of atemporal activity on God’s part (God, regardless of time or history, knows all things), while the present perfect is suggestive of a kind of temporal activity on God’s part (God, enacting time and history, has ensured that all things are done)? Does the gap between active and passive suggest something about the active agent in each case (God actively knowing, but God not actually being the one who does)? Does the reference to knowledge suggest a kind of abstraction not present in the reference to doing? Does one of the two things precede the other, or how are they intertwined?
(2) What relationship does “all things” here in verse 24 bear to “all things” in its double appearance in verse 11? I suggested before that there’s a link between “all things” and creation in verse 11. Does the focus on creation in the verses leading up to 24 suggest that the same is the case here? But perhaps “all things” means something different when they’re “done” (maybe that’s a reference to creation?) than when they’re “known” (maybe that’s a reference to a kind of absolute knowledge on God’s part?). And is the echo of verse 11 meant to mark a connection between the “all things” of verse 24 and the oppositions mentioned at the end of verse 23 (“having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin”)? (Looking again at the end of verse 23 makes me realize that there’s a pairing of “do” and “know” there as well: “doing no good, for they knew no sin.” How does verse 23 help to clarify the basic meaning of verse 24? Does verse 24 mean to suggest that only God, because He knows all things, can truly do good—in fact, do all things? Or what’s the relationship there?) Finally, does verse 15, which repeats so much of the first line of verse 11, shed any light on all this. There Lehi has already transitioned to the story of Adam and Eve, but he’s again talking about “all things” need to have “an opposition” at their core, if God’s plan would get off the ground. Is that what we’re seeing in verse 24 also?
Much to think about here. Since I’ve more or less decided to write on this “all things” business in verse 11 for my paper, I’ll be thinking about this passage at length.
The third of my four promised comments! (I won’t be getting to number four until at least tomorrow.)
I love the reading of D&C 121:33 you’ve offered. I just want to offer the larger passage from which it was excerpted into the D&C (by Orson Pratt, incidentally, and in preparation for the 1876 edition). Here’s the whole text:
I think the larger text makes your reading all the more insightful.
Deidre, another rich and thought-provoking post. Thank you.
Two thoughts.
1) Re: Creation as ritual
What I see you drawing from the text here is that ultimately being separated from God and embarking on a journey (i.e., the narrative of the Fall) proves to be not a reactive/received punishment nor even necessary consequence, but rather a mechanism or structure by which progress toward God is made through the experiential knowledge gained. Am I on the right track here?
If so, then it seems that the creation narrative is not the story of earth, but rather of birth. It is not a planetary creation, but rather the emergence of an identity—it’s how we come to know our selves. We are beings both fallen and saved. The paradoxical tension in this identity needs narrative structuring to keep both potentialities open and in relation to each other; without this structuring, the identity collapses in on itself.
Lehi’s discursive address of opposites here, then, can be read as a thematic response to this tension (fallen/saved).
Recall the larger framework of this section: Lehi repeatedly identifies Jacob in terms of his birth(place/right) before shifting the discourse to all his sons. In other words, Lehi discursively employs identity-creation in an attempt to reconstitute a creation narrative that ultimately brings said sons into experiential knowledge of God as they are birthed into their identity as both fallen and saved.
2) Re: God as being “retroactively apparent”
I think this is a good place from which to consider Lehi’s own theological approach to the Fall: i.e., the Fall as beneficial (and therefore necessary?). This is not the Fall as inevitable, but the Fall as needful; it is also an acceptance that recognition of that beneficiality and needfulness may only be retroactively apparent—that is, God’s works may not be seen unless at a remove.
As both beneficial and needful, the Fall can be seen as opening a space in which God can work in individual lives and bring about salvation. (As Deidre stresses, God can’t save unless there is something to save *from*.)
Given this orientation, we can derive several ways in which Lehi “reads” the Fall:
• as a looking for or search for God?
• as another act of Creation?
• as charity?
• as an instance of seeing God’s hand where it is not explicit?
At root in this approach, I see Lehi’s own theological leanings as much more individually charitable than I previously thought. That is, Lehi’s God appears to be interested in saving *individuals* from the very beginning, something I would not have expected given Lehi’s identity as a covenant people (plural). I wonder if Lehi’s own experiences here, being individually called out by God, individually flung into the wilderness, etc. have influenced and nuanced his conceptions of God and salvation?
Jenny, nice stuff here.
Yes, birth of identity. That seems to me to be exactly right. Like the Genesis story, the point isn’t cosmogony (“How did all this stuff get here in the first place?”) but ethnogony (“How did we come to be who we are?”). Of course, ethnogony is here presented as possibilized by a certain telling of the story of the earth’s creation: we couldn’t have been who we are (identity as a function of the weave of oppositional differences at the existential and ethical levels) had the earth itself not been ordered in a certain way (with a fundamental ontological opposition that allows for the weave of oppositional differences necessary to our identity). Even here, though, the point isn’t one of cosmogony so much as cosmology.
And then thanks for your distinction between the inevitable and the needful. Because there’s such a strong emphasis in Lehi’s sermon on a kind of structuralism, I find myself consistently tempted to see a kind of inevitability here. (I tend to reproduce in my head something like Umberto Eco’s account of the Garden, where the fact that God spoke meant that the Fall would happen.) But Lehi’s God is, I think you’re right, sovereign enough to problematize any reading of inevitability—and perhaps, therefore, any ultimately structuralist or semiotic reading—into Lehi’s story. That’s an important warning I need to keep making to myself.
Rico,
In response to your 3rd point, I wanted to add in a thought. Verse 22 describes the Garden as a space of stasis: “all things which were created must have remained in the same state which they were after they were created, and they must have remained forever and had no end.” I think that stasis can be read as applying to Adam and Eve’s physical bodies as well.
The pregnant body is the very (literal) incarnation of the concept of change. And the arrival of parenthood demands an ongoing change in identity: one’s identity (and body) is constantly shifted by the demands of another.
Joe,
You say: “it may be that Christian and Mormon rituals that employ nakedness in one way or another … mark a return from humiliation rather than to it.” I’m agreeing with you on this point.
There’s a sense in which nakedness is a revelation, no? A removing of the veil/cloth that allows for the naked flesh to be experienced/known? The removal of the cloth is an invitation to knowledge: when Adam and Eve realize they’re naked, they’re realizing specifically that they are *not clothed*—they realize they’ve lost something they once had, and in that realization their naked bodies witness the reality of their Fall?
Verse 23 states that they were created “in a state of innocence,” where innocence is an absence of knowledge. Knowledge here is flat; it has no purchase and thus cannot exist. But it is when they see their nakedness that knowledge gains dimension. Knowledge, Lehi keeps insisting, arrives through opposites, through structures that demand conceptual space. When they see their naked bodies, they recognize the absence of clothing and thus gain a conceptual opposite, i.e., knowledge. The dimensionality of knowledge arrives through the flesh (something I would argue occurs for Adam and Eve in the Fall, but also, and perhaps more significantly, through the body of the atoning Christ).
Yes, I think this is right. The intersubjective character of this revelation as experienced in the Garden story complicates things greatly. It’s as if the realization of nakedness should have been a revelation—an endowment of knowledge of the other, perhaps this last word in more than one sense!—but it turns out to be a unveiling that veils all the more completely. How so? Adam recognizes his own nakedness when he sees Eve’s nakedness for the first time, just as Eve recognizes her own nakedness when she sees Adam’s nakedness for the first time. The result is that the revelation of the other ends up being diverted into a revelation only of the same, and the other’s flesh serves solely as the occasion for the self-palpation that marks one’s own flesh. Put another way: the other’s naked flesh, at the very moment of its denuding, ends up being veiled by my own naked flesh—but because the same holds for the other (my naked flesh ends up being veiled for the other by her own naked flesh), we’re each only seeing on the naked body of the other the mirror image of our own shame.
I blush at the other’s nakedness because it’s my own nakedness—even if I’m clothed.
So, yes, the dimensionality of knowledge arrives through the flesh, but the problem with the Fall is that it’s always and only knowledge of self that arrives through the flesh. What might be so important about your parenthetical reference to the body of the atoning Christ is that the atonement opens the possibility of a knowledge that arrives through the flesh that isn’t ultimately a self-knowledge. In or through (even reaching through) Christ’s flesh—which Hebrews equates with the veil—there’s a knowing that finally isn’t a knowing only of myself, but of the other, perhaps of the Other….
Finally, my fourth promised comment! And then I can get on to responding to others’ comments, and to John’s post!
Rico (as also Jenny in her brief response to Rico) has said a handful of very helpful things about the complexities of verses 22-23. I’ll respond to him directly in another comment, because I’d like here just to say a few things about the possible interpretation of verse 22.
If we pay close attention to how the words “man,” “Adam,” and “Eve,” and “men” are used in verses 14-25, we find the following:
(1) “Man,” despite the fact that it’s singular and unmistakably masculine (we get “he” as the pronoun that replaces it, for instance in verse 16), seems to have reference to both Adam and Eve. Importantly, it is the only term used for human beings, and always in the singular, up through verse 16. (It’s replaced by a rough equivalent in the first part of verse 18, “mankind.”) After verse 16, interestingly, it never appears again. If we take verse 18’s “mankind” as a final iteration, then it’s particularly interesting that it disappears precisely at the moment that the word/name “Eve” appears in the text. Once Eve has been introduced, the singular “man” disappears from Lehi’s narrative.
(2) As I’ve already just mentioned, “Eve” appears for the first time in verse 18. And, importantly, “Adam” doesn’t appear until verse 19. At first, it’s only Eve who intervenes. This separability of Eve from Adam is significant, I think, despite the fact that the two will appear together in verse 19 and then Eve will drop out of the narrative as a distinct character. The separability of Eve is, of course, here a function of her being the one the serpent approaches, but I don’t think that’s any reason to think that Lehi is sour on Eve. I’ll see if I can’t spell out the importance of what Eve’s doing here later on.
(3) “Adam,” as I’ve just noted, doesn’t appear until verse 19, where it appears right alongside “Eve.” The two are a couple, now a full replacement of “man.” Together they “had partaken of the forbidden fruit,” and together “they were driven out of the garden of Eden, to till the earth.” In verse 20, we get “they” (a nice change from the “he” of verse 16). By verse 21, they become the “parents” of “the children of men,” their names disappearing for a moment. But then Adam, alone suddenly, appears in verse 22. The couple remains in question in certain ways, but always pronomially (“they”), through verse 23. When we come to verse 25, it’s again only Adam that gets mentioned. Here we have a separability of Adam from Eve, and I think we ought to ask why. If verse 19 has been so careful to couple Adam and Eve, and if verses 20-23 are insistent on referring to both through the pronoun “they,” why does Adam get this separate role here and there in verses 22 and 25? I’ll be coming back to that.
(4) Suddenly in verse 25, we get “men” in the plural for the first time. Here Adam and Eve drop out of the story, and they’re replaced by the term used before (“man”), but now in the plural. It’s as if the singular gendered term has given way to the plural gendered term through the intermediary of Eve and Adam. Although “man” comes back in verse 27 (“all things are given them which are expedient unto man”), it’s a passing reference, and the focus seems to remain on “men.”
Okay, now: So what? All of the above might be used to offer a reinterpretation of verse 22 (and verse 23 along with it). Might the separability of Adam rather suddenly in verse 22 be significant? Why break up the couple at that point? That seems strange. But perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that the couple was broken up before in verse 18, when Eve was approached by the serpent. Might Lehi means what he says in verse 22, then? That is, might Lehi actually mean to suggest that it is specifically Adam’s and not Eve’s transgression that keeps “all things” from “remain[ing] in the same state,” etc.?
What do I mean? Well, what if we interpreted the verse as follows? Eve is approached by the serpent, and eventually both she and Adam eat the fruit. But there’s a curious space between her eating and him eating, and that’s the moment that interests Lehi in verses 22-25. In verse 22, Lehi is thinking about what might have happened if Adam had not decided to eat after Eve had already done so. And that would then explain the claim at the beginning of verse 23: “they would have had no children” because Eve and Adam would have been separated, and having children would have been impossible. And in that sense everything would have “remained the same”—perhaps “remained the same” as it had been before Eve was produced from Adam’s rib and presented to him. “Remained the same” in the sense that, problematic as it sounds to put it this way, Eve would have failed, like the other animals, to be an “adequate” help for Adam. And all this would clarify the meaning of verse 25: “Adam fell that men might be,” because he actually knew that children were an impossibility if he didn’t follow Eve into the fallen world.
There may be real problems with this reading, I’m sure—especially from a feminist perspective. (On the other hand, what about the Garden story isn’t problematic from a feminist perspective?!) But I wonder about it’s strength as well. It’d make 2 Nephi 2 into a rather startling reading of Genesis 2-3. Lehi would be suggesting that Eve, like the animals that had been brought to Adam before her, in a sense “failed” Adam, but that Adam chose to reverse that failure—recognizing that she uniquely was indeed bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. That might be the beginning point for a great deal of theologizing—and hopefully also for a good deal of careful rethinking of the gender issues here so that it can all be put less problematically, etc.
Is it a good reading? I don’t see any textual reason to dismiss it. And it makes a good deal of sense of what might otherwise be wild aspects of the text (malfunctioning reproductive systems?). And it might be said that an interpretation not entirely distinct from this seems to have been behind the narrative of the Fall in the endowment, where a drama not entirely unlike what’s been laid out above (though without a close focus on Genesis 2-3) is presented. At any rate, it’s one worth thinking about….
Joe, as I wrote in my other comment, this interpretation is essentially the interpretation advanced by Orson Pratt, although the path you take to get there is slightly different (you may have actually strengthened his claims).
Whether this is a “good reading” is complicated. It was certainly a powerful reading. This reading was either the only reading or the dominant reading of the Garden narrative for at least 70 to 100 years in Mormon discourse, for a variety of reasons, some of which you mention. First and foremost, it answered the charges of early critics of the Book of Mormon that Lehi contradicted bible passages such as Genesis 1:28 and it made God the author of sin by forcing Adam and Eve to be disobedient in order to be obedient. These were some of the strongest criticisms of the Book of Mormon that came out just months after the book was published in 1830. Early Mormon missionaries struggled with finding a good response to critics until Orson Pratt’s solution. The earliest account I have found of this interpretation dates to 1840, preceding the formulation of the temple ceremony (the first time), which perhaps explains why this is the interpretation we find in the temple liturgy. Brigham Young also embraced this reading (although he had additional theological reasons of his own to adopt it). You mentioned the space between the time Eve ate the fruit until Adam ate the fruit. That chronology was an important part of Orson Pratt’s narrative. He also fairly consistently taught that Adam and Eve could have had children in the Garden.
The reading was ultimately abandoned when John A. Widtsoe advanced his reinterpretation of the Garden. That interpretation, which modern Mormons are most familiar with today, can be traced to Widtsoe and Joseph Fielding Smith: Adam and Eve are unable to have children in the Garden and there are two conflicting commandments and Adam and Eve are being obedient to the greater commandment by transgressing the lesser commandment. This interpretation post-dates the temple liturgy which is why is no where to be found there. The Widtsoe interpretation, which may be more friendly from the feminist perspective, is highly problematic textually and theologically speaking. Pratt’s interpretation adheres much more to the textual language of the scriptures (though not without its own implications). See my other comment for possible textual difficulties.