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And I teach New Testament at this seminary, and it is my pleasure this rainy morning to introduce Dr. Carol Newsom in the third Thomas White Curry Lecture of 2004. When I am asked, What in the world is going on in biblical scholarship these days? one of the things I try to describe is how porous

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the classic border between the biblical text and we, the readers, has become. And how many maps scholars are using to traverse this border, whether the map be theological, ideological, political, or, as we've seen in these lectures, cognitive theories of the moral imagination. The problem is that no one ever understands what I'm talking about. And now, at least for you in this room, I can point to these lectures and say this.

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This is what is going on. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that our readings are rarely done with the grace and insight that Dr. Newsom has displayed for us. Dr.

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Newsom, I thank you. not just for getting me out of a pedagogical bind, but for taking us on this journey about ourselves and the text, for the way both the face of the text and our own faces are revealed in your lectures. I give you Dr. Carol Newsom, Professor of Old Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University,

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And her third lecture in the series, Moral Imagination, Ethics, and the Bible, entitled, The Fall and Contemporary Ethical Issues. Dr. Newson. Thank you.

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very much for that introduction, and I also want to thank you, as Gordon has, for what has been an extraordinary two days for me. I'm going to leave here with my head so full of new thoughts and faces and encounters that I have much to thank you for. I also want to say I have great admiration for the trait of endurance that you share with Job. Well, yesterday we considered different ways of imagining good and evil.

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And today I want to go back to two of the texts that we looked at, the creation story in Genesis two to three, and that strange story about the origin of evil in first Enoch, but with a different focus. These two stories have long fascinated me. They've got different plots and involve different characters, but they're both what we call stories of origin. mythic accounts of how the world came to be the way it is.

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Now, two things strike me as I compare them. First is how different their moral imaginations are. And second is the fact that some of the same images, same figures, and themes show up in both texts and yet function very differently. This pattern of similarities and differences suggested to me that these were really two texts that ought to get together, buy a cup of coffee, and have a conversation.

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But there's something else I was curious about. Every moral imagination is a way of perceiving, a way of thinking. If I could characterize the contrasting moral imaginations of these texts, Would it be possible to think with their resources about a modern ethical dilemma?

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Now, this is tricky, especially for a biblical scholar, because it goes way beyond the comfort zone of exegesis. But it does provide a way, I think, to engage in some important hermeneutical activity. So at the risk of going out on a limb, that's what I want to do. Now, there are three parts to the lecture.

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In the first few minutes, I want to reflect on why some of the issues raised in origin myths never go away. Specifically, what the nature of human being is and what the nature of the world is. Then I want to turn to a more specific comparison of the two stories in Genesis and in Enoch. And in that part of the discussion, I want to draw attention to what I see as an implicit conversation between the two texts

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concerning, first of all, the role of desire as constructive or destructive of the human and its world. And secondly, the significance of the figure of the monster, that is, the creature who mixes two natures. And finally, and here's where things get really risky, I want to take a contemporary ethical dilemma. Genetic engineering, as it involves cross-species genetic manipulation, and try to show how the basic understanding of the world.

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etched in these two texts might lead to contrasting but equally profound engagement with this issue. So here goes. Genesis 2 to 3 and 1 Enoch are both what we would call origin myths, stories that tell how the world came to be the way we know it. Now you might think that this activity of telling origin myths was something that was done in ancient times but that we no longer do.

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I don't think that's quite true. We may no longer set our stories in the long ago and far away, but in popular culture, novels, movies, science fiction, we are often very much concerned to raise these two questions. What does it mean to be a human being? What's the nature of the world and our proper place in it?

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Now the first question, what does it mean to be a human being? We could call the question of philosophical anthropology. And the second question, what's the nature of the world and our proper place in it, leads us in the direction of ethics, how we are to act properly in the world, given who we are and how we understand the world. Now, the issue of ethics intrigues me because in comparing Genesis and 1 Enoch, it seemed to me that they're rather different ways of understanding the nature of human beings and of the world.

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are quite similar to two positions that I have heard in debates over the ethics of bioengineering. Now, as I suggested in my introduction, it's one of the curious things about human beings that we literally don't know who we are. Unlike most animals who roam the planet, humans don't come fully equipped with a developed set of instincts that organize our lives and offer us a ready-made set of tasks. We are those incomplete animals

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who have to complete ourselves by the symbolic systems of various human cultures. So the stories we tell construct possible identities, but identities that can be questioned and contested by other stories. Whenever we try to define something like a human being, we tend to do so by comparison and contrast. How is this like or unlike that?

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What's the boundary marker between this and that? Naturally enough, in the stories of origin that try to say what a human being is, one of the ways of doing so is by comparing or distinguishing humans from animals or humans from divine beings. In our modern world, we've added a third set of comparisons, humans and machines. So definition is often made in terms of boundaries.

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But these boundaries aren't just given. If they were, we would have no storytelling work to do. But these boundaries are constructed, and they involve specific decisions about what counts, what features are going to be used to mark the boundary between humans and animals, humans and machines, humans and gods. The use of language, the ability to think and feel, immortality.

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If language distinguishes humans from animals, what about animals that can be taught to use sign language? If the ability to think and feel is the boundary between humans and machines, what about artificial intelligence computers that some argue can actually think and perhaps even have emotions? Now it's not just science fiction, but already philosophy too is puzzling over the ethical status of the machines of tomorrow. And as for humans and gods, that's what Genesis is concerned with.

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the way we have become like gods but aren't gods. These sorts of boundaries that we construct to make sense of our world are never as obvious as we wish they were. And now that science is quite literally dissolving some of the categories, the taxonomies we've used to organize our world, these questions can be quite pressing. When animal organs and tissues are placed in human bodies,

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When genes are transferred from animals to plants, maybe to humans and vice versa, when we become bionic persons with a variety of implanted machines, well then, who are we? By what sort of comparisons and contrasts do we know ourselves? How do we deal with the fluidity of these boundaries? Are there some boundaries that are sacrosanct?

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Why do we feel so strongly and yet so conflicted? So with these general marks in mind, I want to turn now to the two stories of origin in Genesis and Enoch, and what they have to say about what it means to be human, the nature of the world, and how it came to be that way. Now, as I said, these two stories don't really overlap. They've got none of the same characters.

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They're about slightly different periods in the early history of the world. But each is an origin myth in the sense that it lifts up what it considers to be the crucial episode by which the world came to be the way it is. So each one tries to tell us something that it considers to be definitive of reality. Now, the Genesis story is fundamentally concerned with the issue of what it

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means to be human. It will tell us how what wasn't yet recognizable as fully human, that first being that God makes out of the mud, comes to be what we know is human, having two sexes, a being with moral agency able to distinguish between good and bad. Also, this story deals explicitly with the question of the boundary between the animal and the human on the one side, and the divine and the human on the other. The stories that follow, Genesis 4 through 11, deal with the consequences for the world of our adventure in becoming human, consequences that include the emergence of evil and its containment.

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The other story, the Enoch story, starts with human beings already in place. Its primary focus is not on constructing the human. Rather, it's concerned with the origin of evil in the world, how humans came to be corrupted and why the world is a broken world.

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But it explores that topic largely by means of the figure of violated boundaries, especially the boundary between the divine and the human. And in telling the story about the brokenness of the world, it has some important things to say about the nature of human beings. Now from this brief characterization, you can see why it's interesting to compare these two stories. In Genesis, the critical action starts with the desire of the human for that which belongs to the divine, the knowledge that makes one like God's.

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In Enoch, the action starts with the desire of the divine, the angels, for that which properly belongs to humans, sex and procreation. Desire is thus an important element in both stories, as is the role of transgressed boundaries. And in both, Knowledge plays an important role.

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Humans take knowledge in Genesis, and in Enoch, angels will give knowledge, heavenly knowledge, to humans. In Genesis, humans are active agents, but in Enoch, humans appear, at least at first, to be more sinned against than sinning. Although these two stories ostensibly tell episodes from different periods in the mythic history of the human race, the level of theme and imagery, they appear to be very much in competition and conflict about the nature of the world and human beings.

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Well, let's look more closely at Genesis 2-3. I'm going to assume that you know the basic plot. My interpretation here is guided by those who've examined this story in terms of comparative religion, which in certain respects differs from the way traditional Christian theology has read the story, but I think that perspective brings us close to the way it originally functioned in ancient Israel.

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I'm not dismissing the traditional Christian reinterpretation, but I want to make a place for this, what I think, more original function. From this perspective, as I suggested yesterday, Genesis 2 to 3 is fundamentally a birth story. the birth of a human, the birth of culture. In order to tell this story, it's got to construct two boundaries, the animal-human boundary and the human-divine boundary.

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Let's look at a couple of crucial episodes and see how the boundaries get negotiated. First, the naming of the animals. The first creature God makes is called Ha-Adam. And although it's usually translated as a proper name, Adam,

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It's really not, but means something like the earth creature, since the word for earth is adamah. At any rate, God observes that it isn't good for the earth creature, Ha'adam, to be alone. God wants Ha'adam to have a helper corresponding to him. So God makes a bunch of animals and birds out of the same material from which Ha'adam had been made and sends them to Ha'adam to see what he would call them.

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Now, some feminist commentators have criticized this passage as creating a relation of hierarchy and domination between humans and animals, since they argue the power to name is the power to control. Now, that view of language may have merit elsewhere, but that's not the way language functions here, and it's certainly not what God understands the exercise to be about. For this story, language is a means of discovery and recognition. God listens to see if any of the names Ha-Adam gives the animals would create a pun or a wordplay, because if they do, that would mark the recognition of the helper corresponding to him.

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The name would correspond in some way to Ha-Adam's. As it turns out, Ha-Adam doesn't recognize any such being among the animals, so God tries something else. God essentially subdivides HaAdam. And at this point, the pun of recognition appears.

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This is woman, Isha, for from man, Ish, she was taken. OK. So the story argues that gender is a form of same and different that's closer and more intimate than that which exists between the earth creatures and the animals.

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But although the episode hints at a difference between these not-quite-yet humans and the animals, it ends without constructing a clear boundary between them. That boundary will emerge later, and it will emerge as the consequence of the confusion of the boundary between humans and divine beings. The crucial episode is the infamous one of the tree, the talking snake, and the conversation.

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You remember the scene. In the story that's told in Genesis, the talking snake is not Satan, though that's the way later Judaism and Christianity reimagined him, but he's rather a trickster figure. And this talking snake engages the woman in conversation about what trees are and are not off limits to the man and the woman. And when the woman identifies the tree of the knowledge of good and bad as the one that can't be touched, even on pain of death, the snake makes its claim, Oh no, you won't die.

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But God knows that on the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and bad. Now I translate the words in Hebrew more broadly than good and evil, because I think they include not just moral knowledge, but more. The knowledge that comes is rather the knowledge between good and bad that makes all kinds of judgments possible. The power to make reflective, discriminating choices between what seems good and what seems bad.

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Now the significance of the next line is debated. This is the line that describes the woman seeing the fruit and taking it. Whenever I discuss this issue with my classes, one of the clever students will object, Well, the woman already seems to have the power to choose between good and bad because she chooses to eat the fruit, even though the power of choice ought to be the consequence of that act. Well, mostly, I've just shrugged my shoulders and said, Yeah, well, the storyteller kind of blew it and we move on quickly.

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But I've changed my mind. I think the story is not being clumsy. It's making a subtle distinction. When the focus of the narrative shifts from the snake's words to the woman's perspective, what the narrator's words describe is simply the moment of desire.

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And desire is not the same as discriminating judgment. Listen to the sentence and note the involvement of the senses, the vocabulary of appetite, and desire. Then the woman saw. that the tree was good to eat, and that it was pleasurable to look at, and that it was desirable for making wise, and she took some of its fruit and she ate.

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The desire for wisdom is described in language that suggests it's not so much a rational choice, but is folded into a more enveloping experience of desire that operates at a pre-rational level. And it's no accident that the crucial symbolic object in the story is food. Food is a basic object of desire, grounded in our physicality. Desire is a quality intrinsic to our pre-human state, but it's the one that serves as the mechanism by which the decisive change is set in motion.

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So we need to think a little bit about the structure of desire. Ever since Plato's symposium, desire has been described, first of all, in terms of lack. But the condition of lack is not properly a negative one. Desire is always desire for something.

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And so it's a form by which we go beyond ourselves, transcend ourselves. In fact, desire helps to create our sense of ourselves as selves because it teaches us about the nature of boundaries. Anne Carson wrote a wonderful book on desire in early Greek poetry called Eros the Bittersweet. And in her words, the experience of eros, or desire, as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general.

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It's the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs. The thing I desire is different from me. outside of me, but I want to draw it to myself for it to become me, or at least mine. Carson notes that in the play of desire, a curious shift of perspective takes place.

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I want it to be mine because even though I never knew I lacked it before I saw it, this thing or person now appears as a necessary part of myself. I'm incomplete without it, and so I draw it to myself. If you've ever fallen in love, you know exactly how desire operates. Until last week, I never knew I wanted him, but now I see him as a necessary part of me.

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I'd feel incomplete without him. That's the brilliant artistry of Genesis 2 to 3. The author knows that human beings are in fact characterized by the capacity for discriminating judgment represented by the tree of knowledge. That's a necessary part of what it means

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to be fully human. But the story takes us back to the moment of desire when this capacity to make judgments, represented symbolically by the desirable fruit, was both outside of us and yet seen and longed for, felt for the first time to be a necessary part of who we are. Okay. So the woman takes some of the fruit and eats it and gives some to her husband, and he eats it too, and then what?

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And their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked. Well, that hardly seems like the wisdom of the gods. But actually, it's a brilliant and densely packed symbol. Now, mostly the image has been associated with awakened sexuality, and that's there, but the recognition of sexual difference is not the main thing here.

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After all, that's what the man exclaimed so happily about when he first saw the newly created woman back in chapter two. Something else is primarily at stake here, and we can best get at what it is by considering the context in which the word naked can be meaningfully used and not. It's a word that can appropriately be used only of human beings. One cannot properly say of a trout, or a lion, or a deer, that it is naked.

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The concept of nakedness is one of the sharpest boundaries between the animal and the human. Animals make a lot of things, shelters, tools, maybe even weapons. But no animal makes clothes. Thus, as the woman and the man buzz the boundary between themselves and the divine, that action simultaneously establishes the definitive boundary between themselves and animals.

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If they become like gods, they realize that they are no longer like animals. But what exactly is that eye-opening knowledge? The philosopher and ecologist, Baird Calicott, said that what the woman and the man see is themselves. They become self-aware, self-conscious.

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And this self-consciousness is the prerequisite for the experience of shame. And so they make clothes to cover themselves. The quality of self-awareness is also what distinguishes us from other animals. But why, one might ask, would the story conceive of the ability to discriminate between good and bad not to have been appropriate to humans in the first place?

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It appears to be this. Humans can now choose, but all choice has to be made with reference to some center of value. And what will that be? With the emergence of self-awareness comes the possibility of self-centeredness, both individual self-centeredness and the species self-centeredness we call anthropocentrism.

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To grasp the full significance, we have to think of the combining of desire and self-consciousness of which the story speaks. For the animals, the powerful engine of desire operates within boundaries, hard set by the wiring of their instincts. But in humans, desire has now become freed and conjoined with a reflective and creative self-consciousness.

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Now that's not to say that human choices are necessarily tainted by self-centeredness. The combination of desire that has an other directedness and of self-consciousness that can imagine the self as other can also result in acts of great generosity. Agape, as well as eros, becomes a possibility for the human. But desire, coupled with self-conscious choice, is a highly unstable and unpredictable mixture.

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The birth of the human changed the world forever. The stories that follow in Genesis 4 to 11 play out the consequences of what it means that we have become human. These stories tell of the birth of civilization that follows from the birth of the human.

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And the arts of civilization, according to Genesis, variously include murder and musical instruments, urban planning, and cycles of revenge, metallurgy, animal husbandry, and the practice of religion. Now, it's certainly not a bad thing to be a human being, but it seems to be a wildly unstructured thing. Yet the human who comes to be in these narratives is a good fit for the world that has been constructed by the text.

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As people have often noticed, the character of God and the structure of the narrative itself seems to have an open, experimental quality. The world, as seen from the perspective of Genesis 2-3, has an open architecture, and that odd, non-self-identical creature that is the human seems well-suited to its possibilities. But everything's not free play. There are boundaries and

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limits that foreshadow the dangerousness of this creature. Humans may not become fully gods. As the events of Genesis 2-3 have blurred what had been the boundary of knowledge between humans and divine beings, it becomes necessary to establish another boundary. Humans are expelled from the garden to prevent access to the tree of life, and so from the immortality that now becomes the defining border between the human and the divine.

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Now, before we leave this story and turn to Enoch, I want to make one final observation about human identity and the way the story is constructed. According to the narrative in Genesis, human beings are, technically speaking, monsters. A monster, by dictionary definition, is A fabulous animal compounded of brute and human shape or the shapes of various brutes, an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure, as from marked malformation, something unnatural.

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Well, as the definition suggests, things that blur categories, things that transgress boundaries, are often treated as objects of fear, horror, and loathing. They're monstrous. Yet this story, in an odd way, seems to claim such a monstrous identity as the very shape of a human. And although the story sees this new mixed monster as problematic, it doesn't recoil in horror.

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Now some of you may see where I'm going with this. In some strands of recent thought, the category of the monstrous has actually been reclaimed as a positive and ethically significant image. precisely because it shows the various ways in which we form identities, not just by establishing boundaries, but by crossing, transgressing boundaries. Well, let's look now at Enoch.

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One of the reasons I want to use Enoch, even though he's a non-canonical text, is because his moral imagination is deeply similar to that of the priestly writer of the Old Testament. So I claim for him an extended biblical heritage. Now, Enoch doesn't tell a story about how humans came to be humans. In fact, as you'll see, that kind of a story would be utterly unpalatable to Enoch, because to use philosophical categories,

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It perceives the world not through the category of becoming, but through the category of being. So even though Enoch and Genesis two to three talk about issues that overlap, they're going to take different starting places. In the Book of Enoch, the story of the angels and their human wives occurs in chapter six. But in the preceding chapters, Enoch sets up the worldview within which this story is going to be understood.

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The first chapter is a hymn that describes the final intervention of God to rescue the righteous and judge the wicked. But that's followed in chapters two to five by a teaching in the form of a rebuke to sinners. And very importantly, Enoch cast this rebuke in terms of an argument from nature. Contemplate all the events in heaven.

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how the lights in heaven do not change their courses, how each rises and sets in order, each at its proper time, and they do not transgress their law. Consider the earth and understand the work that is done upon it. No work of God changes as it becomes manifest. Contemplate how the trees are covered with green leaves and bear fruit.

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All his work serve him and do not change, but as God has decreed, so everything is done. But you, you have not persevered nor observed the law of the Lord, but you have transgressed and have spoken proud and hard words with your unclean mouth against his majesty. You hard of heart, you will not have peace. Well, clearly for Enoch,

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God's will is expressed in fixed categories, clear boundaries, and orderly and harmonious embodiment of those orders in the activities of creatures. The order of nature stands as exemplary for humans. Now, following this admonition, the story of the angels and the human women serve as the parade example of the disaster that occurs when orders are not respected and boundaries are transgressed. The authors of Enoch have picked up this story from Genesis 6, but they've elaborated it and changed its significance substantially.

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Now in Enoch, here's how the story goes. And it came to pass, when the sons of men had increased, that in those days were born to them fair and beautiful daughters. And the angels, the sons of heaven, saw them and desired them. And they said to one another, 'Come, let us choose for ourselves wives from the children of men, let us beget for ourselves children.'

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Here's desire again, setting the plot in motion. But this time, it's divine desire for that which pertains to humans. Here, one might say, the apple reaches out for Eve. Now, there's several

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things to note. First of all, the fact that angels should desire humans is significant. Human existence is not something deficient or second class. Rather, humans have something that even the angels don't have.

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But what exactly? Now, sometimes the story has simply been read in terms of sex, you know, angelic lust. But that's not quite right. Although the desire is explicitly erotic, what the angels seek is a normal family life.

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marriage and children, the redemption of domesticity. Now, twice later in the story, there are references to the angels' concern for their children. If that sounds familiar, you may be thinking, oh yeah, those films, Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire, or its remake in City of Angels. Now, in those films, contemporary popular culture takes up the motif of angels who desire aspects of human existence, but really differently from Enoch.

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Those films make the point that love and delight in the sensual world of tastes and colors and touch makes mortal life not just endurable, but really quite wonderful. But those films are also sentimental and individualistic. The angel's decision affects no one but himself and his wife. These are angelic self-realization films.

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We have absolutely no way to explore what the Book of Enoch sees as the dark cosmic consequences of a desire that transgresses boundaries, desire for the wrong thing, for what's off limits, out of bounds, that can literally wreck a world and lead to the ultimate destruction of the desired other. Now, the warning about transgressive desire in the Book of Enoch becomes very concrete as the story describes the angel's offspring. As originally told in Genesis, the offspring of the divine beings and the human women were the giants who were called the giants of old, the men of renown. That is, Genesis puts a rather positive spin on the giants.

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But here's where Enoch makes the most significant change in the story. According to Enoch, The women became pregnant and bore large giants. These devoured all the toil of men until men were unable to sustain them.

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And the giants turned against them in order to devour men. And they began to sin against, that is to eat, birds, and against animals, and against reptiles, and against fish. And they devoured one another's flesh and drank the blood from it. Now with this passage in Enoch,

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We've come a long way from the representation of desire for the other as eating a lovely piece of fruit. What the images in the Enoch story suggest is that transgressive desire takes on a life of its own, and it produces a distorted image of itself. The angel desired human women and the families they might produce together, but this wrongful desire, once carried out, produces a mocking exaggeration of itself.

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It produces in the giants an appetite without limit, desire without the possibility of satisfaction, desire in which the incorporation of the other becomes an orgy of violence. The horror of it is marked in the fact that the giants don't just consume vegetable food, which is all that's permitted to humans at this stage of the world, but consume blood, life itself, in all categories of animals, in humans, and finally, in a self-destructive, cannibalistic self-consumption. Now, here we have the kind of monsters we're familiar with.

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The mixing of the human and the divine produces something ambiguous, fearful, out of control, something wholly loathsome. Now notice, though, that in Enoch, the giants occupy the conceptual space that humans occupy in Genesis. That is, they are the creatures of mixed identity, the product of blurred boundaries. But here they're regarded with revulsion.

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But we aren't yet through with Enoch's analysis of the full horror of the distortions of transgressive desire. The earth complains to God, and through the help of good angels, God intervenes. A flood will cleanse the earth.

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The giants who remain after their internecine conflict are killed by drowning. But like the monstrous force that it is, transgressive desire survives attempts to kill it. God has to explain the biology of monsters to Enoch. The giants were half human, half divine.

00:38:02.520 - 00:38:44.240

The flood can kill their mortal bodies, but what about their eternal spirits? those can't be killed but since they were born on Earth it's on Earth those Spirits have their home God continues and now the Giants who were born from spirit and flesh will be called evil spirits upon the Earth and on Earth will be their dwelling and these spirits will rise against the sons of men and against the women because they came out of them. The divine element of the giants, what had derived from their angelic fathers, now embodies sheer malice against humans.

00:38:45.080 - 00:39:25.520

Where the angels had erotically desired human women, the residue of their desire has now become its opposite, implacable hostility. Well, so far I've been talking about the angels and their offspring, but what about the humans? The story of how evil entered the world initially seems, as I suggested yesterday, to contrast with Genesis in perceiving humans as passive victims rather than as initiating agents. Of course, insofar as this story in Enoch is told as a follow-up to the admonition, it's warning humans, too, about the dangers of transgressing whatever boundaries are applicable.

00:39:26.640 - 00:39:47.600

But the story says some specific things about how the humans come to be implicated in the guilt. Humans aren't simply victims. Although the description of the angels' initial encounter with the women is very brief, I don't think the relationship is one of rape. Instead, it seems to be represented here more in terms of traditional courtship.

00:39:48.400 - 00:40:08.200

The angels can be seen as offering wedding gifts both to the women and to their male relatives. And these gifts are the heavenly secrets that the angels teach to the humans. So here, as in Genesis, knowledge enters the story. Humans receive knowledge that will make them more like divine beings.

00:40:08.960 - 00:40:26.880

And although humans don't initiate the request for knowledge, they appear to be eager recipients. But it turns out to be a deadly gift. Here's how it's described in chapter eight. And Azazel taught men to make swords and daggers and shields and breastplates.

00:40:27.360 - 00:40:53.600

And he showed them metals and the arts of making them, bracelets and ornaments, and the art of making up the eyes and of beautifying the eyelids, and the most precious and choice stones, and all kinds of colored dyes. And the world was changed. And there was great impiety and much fornication, and they went astray, and all their ways became corrupt. Now note a couple of things.

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The consequence of this gift of knowledge to humans is that the world was changed. And in Enoch, change is not good. But note what was taught. The art of making weapons, the art of personal ornamentation, the arts of magic and astrology.

00:41:13.360 - 00:41:41.240

If one translates those concrete terms into somewhat more abstract categories, these are three of the primary techniques by which desire accomplishes its object. Techniques of force, techniques of seduction, techniques of manipulation. The angels have infected human beings with their own transgressive desires and have equipped them with the means to accomplish them. And the world was changed.

00:41:43.360 - 00:42:12.080

Now, these two narratives have sketched 2 very different takes on the world, what it means to be human and how one might interact with the world and what the consequences will be. Now, in my opinion, they're just interesting on their own account. But as I suggested at the beginning of the talk, stories that offer us images of ourselves and our relationship to the world bear at least indirectly on the ways we continue to reflect on concrete ethical dilemmas.

00:42:12.920 - 00:42:35.040

Now, I want to be careful. I'm not saying that we can simply read Genesis or Enoch and then apply it to some modern question. These stories don't give oracular answers, and it would also be dangerous to read them as allegories of our present situation that we just have to decode. But I want to claim that in these narratives, and their various modes of thought,

00:42:35.760 - 00:43:12.880

General perspectives and symbolic images model a way of looking at, a way of thinking about the world. And to the extent that we can think through their lenses, we'll tend to see the relevant aspects of problems before us in one way or another, to set the parameters of the question, choose different starting points and different analogies by means of which to think. Now, these ways of looking at things don't necessarily dictate specific conclusions. but they direct the kinds of framing perception that guides our moral reasoning, and hence the type of decisions we make.

00:43:13.680 - 00:43:40.320

So let me try to illustrate with a somewhat whimsical example. What if we imagined Enoch and Eve sitting outside the Starbucks in heaven, arguing over an article in the newspaper concerning genetic engineering? It's a story about the implantation of a fish gene in a tomato plant to make it resistant to freezing weather. But of course, more is at stake than codfish and tomatoes.

00:43:41.200 - 00:44:07.520

I use this example of genetic modification, especially as it involves cross-species manipulation, since it so clearly raises issue of the nature of the world as given or constructed, the moral and metaphysical implications of changing the world, The nature of human. and desire and creativity. Now, there's no doubt where the type of moral imagination embodied in first Enoch comes out.

00:44:08.040 - 00:44:21.840

Enoch speaks a resounding no. His starting point is an orientation to the character of the world itself. Can you believe this, Eve? Putting fish genes and tomato plants?

00:44:22.680 - 00:44:43.360

There is a God-given wisdom already structured into the world of nature that has to be respected. You can't make proper moral decisions just by asking what people want. I want a freezeproof tomato. People's desires don't provide an adequate moral compass because we always want what we don't have.

00:44:43.840 - 00:44:58.880

There's no discipline to desire. It just wants what it wants. The only reliable moral compass comes from something that transcends human beings. Immanuel Kant got it right, Eve, the starry sky above and the moral law within.

00:44:59.880 - 00:45:15.200

Human beings have to resist the desire to tamper. Tampering breaks things, and a broken world can't be fixed. Well, Eve knows she disagrees with Enoch, although she isn't quite sure why. It's just not the way she looks at things.

00:45:15.200 - 00:45:30.080

Enoch, I don't think you have a clue as to what it means to be a human being. Desire is not a dirty word. Desire is at the root of human curiosity, human creativity. Humans have a hunger for knowledge, Enoch.

00:45:30.720 - 00:45:48.400

To be human is to see the world as full of wonderful things to be explored. Human desire reaches out for new possibilities, things not yet imagined. This is the heart and soul of scientific inquiry. But I disagree that desire has no discipline.

00:45:48.800 - 00:46:02.080

People aren't just pure appetite. We don't just grunt and point, Me want pretty apple. We've got brains, too. We make choices based on what seems good and what seems bad.

00:46:02.960 - 00:46:14.800

Now, I'll grant you, not every decision humans make is wise. We make some big mistakes. DDT seemed like a good idea at the time. But we face the consequences, and we make new and better choices.

00:46:15.680 - 00:46:36.600

One other thing, Enoch, I've always admired your environmental sensibilities, but your understanding of the world is so rigid. You see it as some fragile machine that's going to break at the slightest change. But change is itself part of the world. I see the world as open and adaptive.

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The world is always under construction. And what humans do is part of that construction.