Original Sin: The Bare Truth
One of the fascinating bits of the Bible’s account of our first parents has to do with the fact that they are described as being naked. The Scriptures are, for the most part, rather withholding in terms of providing descriptive details of how Adam and Eve might have looked. But as the one and only exception to this rule, Genesis 2 makes it a point to inform us that Adam and Eve were, in the beginning, naked and, in their nudity, absent any shame. This is the first thing about them to which the Bible draws our attention, in fact. Once Eve is fashioned from Adam’s rib, presented to him, and duly celebrated, the very next thing we are told is that the two of them are naked.
But unlike the biblical narrator and his readers, Adam and Eve are, originally, entirely unaware of this truth about themselves.
Their eventual discovery of their nudity is, we are informed, a function of their having wrongfully eaten fruit that God had warned them was deadly poisonous and, therefore, not to be consumed under any circumstances. But the serpent, whose identity and malicious intent are simply taken for granted in the passage, tricks our first parents into questioning God’s protective warning. He convinces them that there is more on offer than God has made available, that he is holding out on them by denying them the opportunity of a far better existence.
Of course, what Satan uses to tempt our primordial parents consisted of things that, for the most part, they already had. “If you eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” he says, “you will become like God.” But, as indicated earlier in Genesis, Adam and Eve were already like God and had never not been. According to Genesis, to be a human being is to be a bearer of the divine image, and therefore to be unique among all God’s creatures (even angels) precisely for our being like God by nature.
What’s more, and just because of this, Adam and Eve also already had intimate knowledge of the first of those two things for which the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil had been named. Goodness was not something with which they were unfamiliar prior to the Fall. In fact, having been made like God (i.e., capable of knowledge and love), they already had the unique privilege of personally knowing Goodness himself. The source of any and all goodness our first parents would ever know was one with whom they were already both acquainted and conversant. He had even gone so far as to call them in friendship to partner with him in doing the sorts of things he was already about: bringing new life into the world and helping to manage its good order. So, despite the serpent’s offer, Adam and Eve already had the knowledge of what was good. Genesis says so explicitly. Before she ever takes a bite of the forbidden fruit, Eve is shown to be quite capable of recognizing the goodness that surrounds her: “And she saw that the tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes.”
As a result, the only thing that the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil had to offer Adam and Eve which they did not already possess was the knowledge of evil, the nutritional value of which is wholly evacuative and, therefore, even less than nothing.
But, as often happens, the longer one converses with the devil, the murkier one’s thinking tends to become, and, so, they succumbed to the serpent’s temptation and ate the poisoned fruit anyway.
It is worth noting that Genesis says their eyes were not “opened” to their newly acquired knowledge of evil until both Eve and Adam had eaten the fruit—Eve’s knowledge of evil is described as being somehow contingent on her husband’s eating the forbidden fruit. Still more intriguing, however, is that the Scriptures describe the immediate consequence of their sin, the first new thing that they come to “know” by way of this fruit, is that they are naked. And upon discovering their exposure, we are told, they are ashamed.
But why this? Why does the author of Genesis introduce us to the first human couple and then immediately draw our attention to their unashamed nakedness? And why is it that the first thing that happens upon their self-devastation is an overwhelmingly anxious awareness of their exposure?
Perhaps it is because, in a certain sense, prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve were not ever really naked at all. Perhaps we are to understand that, as a direct result of their disobedience, Adam and Eve, for the very first time, became naked that day.
Should that suggestion seem unusual, consider the following. If you were to be out for an evening stroll and encountered your neighbor walking her Labrador Retriever on the sidewalk adjacent to you, you would not be likely to avert your eyes in awkward discomfort should the dog be wearing nothing but its leash. It never occurs to us to forbid our children from visiting zoos in order to protect their innocence, places that are filled with animals, none of which are likely to be wearing a stitch of clothing. Nor do we expect that magazines featuring bare animal flesh should be carefully hidden away behind black plastic covers in the event that we find ourselves aimlessly looking for something casual to read at an airport bookstore. Why not?
Simply because this is just how animals are in their natural state. That is how they are supposed to be. The very idea of any animal being considered properly naked is absurd. Non-human animals, it seems to us, are incapable of being nude. And the notion of a common animal wearing chinos and a sweater vest strikes us as wholly unnatural.
As narrated by Genesis, however, with humanity’s fall into sin, human beings’ equally natural unclothed state is subsequently perceived to be, for the first time, something about which we ought to be ashamed, to hide from one another in anxious fear, to conceal. With the arrival of the radical absurdity that sin just is, the natural begins to be perceived as entirely unnatural, even frighteningly so.
But this is the sort of world that the knowledge of evil (un)makes. Consequently, ours is, to borrow from Paul Griffiths, a devastated world—a world in which the natural is perceived as unnatural, where everything within the created order is inescapably filtered through the distorting lens of the absurd. It is a world in which human beings, creatures specially outfitted as divine image-bearers with the intellectual equipment necessary for perceiving the natural precisely as such, are demonstrably less capable of living into the natural than leashed Labrador Retrievers or animals on display at the zoo.
In short, humanity becomes naked at the Fall, for no such ridiculous a category had ever existed prior to it. And once the new (un)reality of their nakedness was known, it seems, Adam, Eve, and, we, their offspring, become incapable of ever unknowing it again. We can at best, in our post-lapsarian state, shield ourselves from one another artificially for a time, but the fear of exposure and nakedness remains.
In the face of this, our only real hope is to have to our knowledge of evil redeemed, to see the natural remade, and to come truly to know the Good whose image we bear once more.
Thankfully, it is for this reason that the Lord, in his mercy and cruciform love, took upon himself the very flesh we are so desperate to screen from one another, and allowed himself to be exposed to our shame in all its fullness. In so doing—taking our nakedness upon himself, embracing the shame of the cross, and rising again as the first fruits of a New Creation operative under a New Covenant—our Incarnate Lord made and makes it possible for us to join him in a redeemed world in which we need never feel the indignity of our nakedness again. Rather than live in perpetual anxiety from the threat of our undress, that is, the crucified and risen Lord invites us, as St. Paul puts it, to “clothe ourselves with Christ” (Gal 3:27).
The recognition of this great truth—that clothed in Christ we can be free of shame—is partly why catechumens in the early church who were to be sacramentally joined to the One who turns our sorrow into gladness were frequently baptized in the nude. The early Christians understood that, by way of the New Adam, human beings can be liberated from our fallen state of unnatural shame and “clothe ourselves with a new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator” (Col 3:10).
Of course, this does not mean that, by putting on Christ in freedom over the unnatural nakedness and shame of our first parents, baptized Christians, citizens of that New Creation of the New Covenant which Christ inaugurated through his resurrection, ought therefore to abandon clothing and witness to the present reality of their hope for final redemption by way of exhibitionism or public nudity. To think this were so would be to forget that what the New Adam accomplishes is not merely a restoration of our Edenic past, one wherein we might simply forget the (un)knowledge of evil introduced by our first parents, but something far more. As Jesus said, he came not only to offer us life—the natural, shame-free existence we enjoyed prior to the Fall—but life abundant—a share in his own divine life, supernaturalizing us for the most intimate union and knowledge of Goodness that any rational creature could even hope to experience (John 10:10).
But it does mean that, in sacramentally and habitually clothing ourselves with Christ, adorning that “new self” which is, by grace, “created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24), we may rest confidently in knowing there is a very real sense in which we can (and finally will) cease to be naked altogether. For, if the above is correct, if our nakedness and all its attendant fear and shame truly are a product of our devastation through sin—not a natural truth of ourselves revealed by our entering into the knowledge of evil, but rather the disfigurement of our knowledge of the Good who made us to be like him by nature—then, in being adorned by Christ, we can find respite in the hope of being robed in a glory that renders our nakedness impossible. We can, for the first time since the garden, enter into the peace of knowing that, clothed in Christ, we will someday stand together before the Lord absent the fear of shame forever.