What the Bible revealed through story, Paul Ricoeur has explored philosophically. Ricoeur suggests that humanity is made in the image of God because we enjoy the power of creativity:
“… according to Ricouer, human being is possibility: “it does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3: 2). Human existence is “forward-orientated,” constantly projecting itself in front of itself towards a possible way of being. Possibility is therefore intimately connected to the imagination which projects it, and to time, specifically the future. Human being, then, is not limited to the here and now, that is, to actuality … there is a “surplus of being” to human existence, and this surplus of being is nothing other than possibility. We are not as we shall be. Thanks to this surplus of being – possibility – humanity can hope.”[1]
Possibilities are, Ricoeur argues, real, although unactualised and it is through imagination that actualisation occurs and with it self-understanding:
“The point of phenomenology is to describe the meaning of “lived experience” rather than its factuality. Husserl calls the meaning of a thing its “essence” (eidos). We come to know the essence of a thing by exploring its various possibilities. These possibilities are explored in the workshop of the imagination. Ricoeur notes of phenomenology that “its favourite technique is the method of imaginative variations. It is in varying the possible realizations of the same essential structure that the fundamental articulation can be made manifest.” Husserl’s example of the meaning or “essence” of a table is helpful. By “free imaginative variation” we can alter its form, its color, its material. By then looking to see what there is in common among the various examples, we can determine its essence. We can also imagine possible uses of a table: we can eat a meal on it; we can write letters or do a jigsaw puzzle on it; we can stand on it to fix the lightbulb etc. These variations are not present, but they are imagined as possible. Phenomenological description is thus closely related to fiction and the realm of as if. As far as phenomenology is concerned, we may define the meaning or “essence” of something as the imagined ensemble of its possibilities”.[2]
God, as the source of all things, contains both actuality and possibility. In creation he actualised good, and evil remained only an unactualised possibility. God’s intention was to train humanity for our task of developing creation by assisting us to imagine possibilities as a means to the development of the creation and the self-understanding of humanity. This is what I noted in the story of Adam naming the living creatures and what Ricoeur speaks of free imaginative variation. In this way God was acting like a parent telling her child not to put his hand into a fire. The child imagines the pain of being on fire and learns the lesson. God in the creation stories wished to do the same. He wished to introduce human beings to the knowledge of good and evil by imagining, under his guidance, the possibility of evil, as a means of learning the dangers inherent in actualising evil. In this way, the story says, human beings could have developed into divinity by gradually developing in conversation with God the knowledge of good and evil and then, by eating the fruit of the Tree of Life, living forever.
This helps us to see then what is really being depicted in the story of the Fall, it is the rejection of conversation with God with all that that entails in terms of imaging possibility in harmony with the creation. As Josipovici says of the Fall:
“The temptation offered by the serpent is simple: eat and you will not need to talk to God any more, for you will be a God and know all. Instead of recognizing that we must go by way of dialogue, that we cannot ingest knowledge, Adam and Eve listen to the words of another and accept them, even when those words urge them to do something that will bring about the end of words.”[3]
The link between these creation stories and the giving of the Law to the people of Israel is this idea of life lived outside of conversation with God. Outside of conversation with God we retain our ability to create through the imagination of possibility but use this ability for our own ends and not in harmony with creation. In evolutionary terminology, out of conversation with God we act in terms of the survival of the fittest.
[1] K. J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 7.
[2] Vanhoozer, pp. 20 - 21.
[3] G. Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 176.
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Martyn Joseph - How Did We End up Here?
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