SOURCE: “On the First Three Chapters of Genesis,” Daedalus, Vol. 87, Summer, 1958, pp. 37-64.

[In the following essay, Burke offers an examination of the covenants depicted in Genesis, focusing primarily on the nature of disorder, temptation, and man's “fall.”]

INTRODUCTION: ON COVENANT AND ORDER

We want so to relate the ideas of Creation, Covenant, and Fall that they can be seen to implicate one another inextricably, along with ideas of Sacrifice and Redemption.

Creation implies authority in the sense of originator, the designer or author of the things created.

Covenant implies authority in the sense of power, sovereignty—the highest or more radical sovereignty in case the Covenant is made by God.

The possibility of a “Fall” is implied in the idea of a Covenant insofar as the idea of a Covenant implies the possibility of its being violated. One does not make a covenant with stones or trees or fire—for such things cannot break agreements or defy commands, since they cannot even understand agreements or commands.

Also, the possibility of a “Fall” is implied in the idea of the Creation, insofar as the Creation was a kind of “divisiveness,” since it set up different categories of things which could be variously at odds with one another and which accordingly lack the proto-Edenic simplicity of absolute unity. Thus Coleridge observes (Table Talk, May 1, 1830):

A Fall of some sort or other—the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight.

Though this may be a mystery theologically, its logological analogue is not mysterious. Logologically, there is a “fall” from a prior state of unity whenever some one term is broken into two or more terms, so that we have the “divisiveness” of “classification” where we formerly had had a “vision of perfect oneness.” If the title of a book could be said to sum up the nature of that book, then the breakdown of the book into parts, chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words would be technically a “fall” from the Edenic unity of the title, or epitomizing “god-term.” The parts of the book reduce its “idea” to “matter.” Or, as Coleridge said (Table Talk, October 15, 1833): “The Trinity is the Idea: the Incarnation, which implies the Fall, is the Fact: the redemption is the mesothesis of the two—that is—the Religion.”

Presumably he is thinking of “religion” here in the sense of religare (to bind, connect, fasten)—and the logological analogue to his theory in this instance would concern our way of tying the particulars of a work together in accordance with the over-all spirit signalized by its unitary and unifying title.

Narratively, there was the Creation; then came the “Edenic” Covenant (which included the injunction against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil); then the Fall; and then the “Adamic” Covenant (III, 14-19), which included punishments for Adam's first disobedience. But though this order is irreversible from the standpoint of narrative, there is a sense in which we can reverse the order. For instance, we could “begin” with the idea of a punishment; next we could note that the idea of punishment implies the idea of some infraction which makes the punishment relevant; and such infraction implies the need for a set of conditions that make the infraction possible; and insofar as we looked for a “first” set of such conditions, the idea of them would imply the idea of the kind of Creation that allowed for disobedience.

Again, in the idea of punishment we might discern another kind of implication. Punishment being a kind of “payment” for wrong, we can see flickering about the edges of the idea of punishment the idea of redemption. To “pay” for one’s wrongdoing by suffering punishment is to “redeem” oneself, to cancel one’s debt, to ransom, or “buy back.”

Next, since the idea of an agent is implicit in the idea of an act, we can say that in the idea of redemption there is implicit the idea of a personal redeemer. Or, if you think of redemption as a condition or situation (a “scene”), then you may extract the same implication by thinking of a redeemer as an instrument, or agency, for bringing about the condition. And this step, you will note, automatically includes the idea of a substitution: the possibility that one character may be redeemed through the act or agency of another.

The idea of such substitution, or vicarage, neatly parallels at one end of the series an idea at the other: the notion that, as one character can redeem another by suffering in his stead, so one character can impute guilt to another by sinning in his stead. This would be true of the Pauline logic whereby Adam's disobedience represents a guiltiness in Everyman with regard to Covenants (“In Adam's fall / We sinned all”) and there is introduced a principle of representation whereby a “second Adam” can serve as sacrificial substitute for mankind when the categorical guiltiness is being “paid for.”

More specifically, the conditions for such a doctrine of “original sin” are set up when our “first” parent who commits the crucial sin has a name at once individual and generic, a name that can be translated either as “Adam” or as “man.” Thus, in his sin as “Adam,” he can personate mankind in general. We shall later consider other ways in which the purely narrative style operates here, but this shift between individual and generic should be enough for the moment.

The other six great Covenants mentioned in the Bible are the Noachian, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Palestinian, Davidic, and New (as in Hebrews VIII, 8). But the two mentioned in the first three chapters (the Edenic and the Adamic) are sufficient for our purposes, except that the step from punishment to redemption is tenuous. There are the ceremony of redemption by vicarious atonement in connection with the feast of the Passover (Exodus XII) and the sacrificial slaying of the goat set apart for Azazel (Leviticus XVI). Earlier, the principle of a personal redeemer was clearly present in Abraham's offering of Isaac (Genesis XXII). And as early as Genesis VIII, 20-21 (in connection with the third Covenant), Noah makes burnt offerings “of every clean fowl” (whereat the Lord “smelled a sweet savour” and “said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake”).

Though the idea of a redemptive sacrifice is clear enough as regards the Biblical idea of a Covenant in general, it is but inchoately there as regards the two Covenants in the first three chapters of Genesis. We have tried to argue for its implicit presence by showing that the idea of redemption is a further stage in the idea of punishment, and the idea of a redeemer (hence, of vicarious atonement) is implicit in the idea of redemption. And as regards our over-all concern (with the notion that the idea of a redeemer is implicit in the idea of a Covenant in general), the later developments of the Bible itself with relation to God's “peculiar people” make this relation clear enough.

But I might add, incidentally, that one Bible I happen to be consulting, The Scofield Reference Bible, professes to find “the first promise of a Redeemer” in Genesis III, 15, where the Lord God, in cursing the serpent for having tempted Eve, decrees: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; and it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” The editor asserts that here begins “the highway of the Seed,” which he traces through Abel, Seth, Noah (Genesis VI, 8-10), Shem (Genesis IX, 26-27), Abraham (Genesis XII, 1-4), Isaac (Genesis XVII, 19-21), Jacob (Genesis XXVIII, 10-14), Judah (Genesis XLIX, 10), David (2 Samuel VII, 5-17), Immanuel-Christ (Isaiah VII, 9-14; Matthew I, 1, 20-23; 1 John III, 8; John XII, 31). Thus, however strained the point may seem, it should apply insofar as there is a continuity between the idea of temptation and the idea of a redeemer when this continuity is expressed in terms of a continuity of “the Seed,” from the locus of “original sin” to the locus of its cancellation by redemptive sacrifice. Or, otherwise put: the hereditary line here listed would represent at every stage a contact with the principle of a Covenant, and the principle of a Covenant contains within itself the principles of both temptation (on the part of one who might break the Covenant) and “repayment” (or “redemption”) insofar as the aggrieved party is willing to impose and accept a fine or forfeit. (The thought, incidentally, suggests how the ideas of “justice” and “mercy” will also be found implicit in the idea of a Covenant—“justice” being but the idea of a proper repayment and “mercy” the “good” word for the idea of a willingness to accept a repayment that in some notable respect is disproportionate to the gravity of the offense.)

In Rashi's Commentary on the Pentateuch, with regard to the opening formula (“In the beginning”) another commenator is quoted to this effect: The main object of the Law (or Torah) being to teach commandments (mitzvoth), if this were the only consideration involved the Bible could have begun with the second verse of Exodus XII (“This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you”). Notably for our purposes, the passage he mentions deals with the rite of the paschal lamb sacrificed at Passover, and thus contains the thought that in a notable respect this book of beginnings might have begun with the principle of sacrifice.

For our purposes, this is a most important consideration. For we are to deal above all with “firsts” (or “principles”). More specifically, we are to be concerned with the “firsts” or “principles” of Covenants. And we are to be on the lookout for the important role played by the sacrificial principle in the cycle of terms that cluster about the idea of a Covenant. So it is notable that the most famous Jewish commentary on Genesis begins by considering a possible alternative first, one having to do with the instituting of a sacrifice as regards the Lord's governmental contract with his chosen people.

However, we are told in the Rashi commentary that the Bible begins as it does rather than with the establishing of a paschal ceremony because the first words of Genesis, by showing all the world to be the property of God, make clear Israel's rights to seize the lands of the Canaanites, since God could dispose of his property as he chose, and he chose to give the lands of Canaan to the Israelites. (Incidentally, there is a sense in which the beginning of Genesis as we now have it would be the proper “pre-first,” even for the commentator's claim: it sets up the conditions of division and dominion necessary for the idea of a Covenant by which Canaan became a promised land.)

Rashi also cites a rabbinical interpretation to the effect that God created the world for the sake of the Law (the Torah). And in connection with this position (as against the notion that the Bible is attempting to say what came first in time), he notes that there were waters before the creating of heaven and earth. (Also, the very word for “heavens” is a combination of words for “fire” and “water.”)

Rashi is interested in bringing out the notion that the world was created by God not solely to the ends of justice, but first of all to the ends of mercy combined with justice. As regards our cycle of the terms implicit in the idea of a Covenant, we need but note that the ideas of both justice and mercy are present in the idea of repayment for the breaking of a contract (justice when the penalty is proportionate to the offense, mercy when the penalty is favorably disproportionate, while injustice would involve a penalty unfavorably disproportionate).

As regards Rashi's questioning of the notion that the Creation story in Genesis is dealing strictly with firsts in time, we should find his reservations logologically much to our purposes. Logologically, Genesis would be interpreted as dealing with principles (with logical “firsts,” rather than sheerly temporal ones). From the very start it is dealing with the principles of governance (firsts expressed in quasi-temporal terms, since they are the kind most natural to the narrative style). That is, the account of the Creation should be interpreted as saying in effect: This is, in principle, a statement of what the natural order must be like if it is to fit perfectly the conditions of human socio-political order (conditions that come to a focus in the idea of a basic Covenant backed by a perfect authority).

To get the point, turn now to Pope's line, “Order is Heaven's first law.” In Pope's formula, the idea of a “first” is ambiguous. The reader is not quite sure (nor need he be) whether it means first in time, or first in importance, or first in the sense of a logical grounding for all other laws, a kind of “causal ancestor” from which all other “laws” could be deduced or derived as lineal descendants.

Once we have brought out the strategic importance of the part played by the Biblical stress upon the idea of Covenant, there are advantages to be gained by locating our cycle of dramatistic terms about the term “Order” rather than about the term “Covenant.”

The most general starting point for the dramatistic cycle of terms would be in the term “act.” Under this head would belong God's creative acts in the first chapter of Genesis, God's enactment of the first Covenant (largely permissive, but with one crucial negative command), Adam's act of disobedience, and God's enactment of a second Covenant imposing penalties upon all mankind.

Also, of course, there would be terms for the many kinds of “rationally” purposive motion, along with their corresponding “passions,” which characterize human life in all its aspects. These would be without such stress upon “sin” or “guilt” as necessarily arises when we deal with the story of a first temptation. But for this very reason, such a general approach to a dramatistic cycle of terms would not serve our present purpose. Frankly, it would not be morbid enough. We need an approach that, like the Bible itself, leads us from a first Adam, in whom all vicariously “sinned,” to a “second Adam” by whom all might vicariously make atonement. For we are trying to analyze the respects in which the ideas of both guilt and redemption by vicarious sacrifice are intrinsic to the idea of a Covenant (which in turn is intrinsic to the idea of governance).

Yet the term “Covenant” is not wholly convenient for our purposes. Having no opposite in standard usage, it seems as purely “positive” as words like “stone,” “tree,” or “table,” which are not matched by companion words like “counter-stone,” “anti-tree,” or “un-table” (except sometimes in the dialectic of E. E. Cummings). And perhaps the notion of “positive law” secretly contributes to one’s feeling that “Covenants” can be treated as “positive,” despite the all-importance of the negative in defining the conditions of Adam's fall. The term “Order,” on the other hand, clearly reveals its dialectical or “polar” nature on its face. “Order” implies “disorder” and vice versa. And that is the kind of term we need.

However, when putting it in place of the word “Covenant,” we should try never to forget Hobbes's emphasis upon the severities of sovereignty as integral to the kind of Order we shall be studying. The idea of “Order” is ambiguous not only in the sense that it contains an idea of “Disorder.” The term “Order” is ambiguous also because it can be applied to two quite different areas, either to such natural regularities as tides and seasons or to socio-political structures in which people can give or receive orders, in which orders can be obeyed or disobeyed, in which offices are said to pyramid in an orderly arrangement of powers and responsibilities. The double notion of God's authority (in his roles as both originator and sovereign) obviously combines both of these meanings. It joins the idea of the creative verbal fiats by which God brought the natural order into existence and the idea of a divine ruler laying down the law by words, in keeping with Hobbes's stout statement: “He only is properly said to reign, that governs his subjects by his word, and by promise of rewards to those that obey it, and by threatening them with punishment that obey it not.”

Our task, then, is to examine the term “Order” by asking what cluster of ideas is “tautologically” present in the idea of Order. Such a cycle of terms follows no one sequence. That is, we may say either that the idea of Disorder is implicit in the idea of Order or that the idea of Order is implicit in the idea of Disorder. Or we might say that the idea of Order implies the ideas of Obedience and Disobedience, or that either of them implies the other, or that either or both imply the idea of an Order, and so on.

However, when such terministic interrelationships are embodied in the narrative style (involving acts, images, and personalities) an irreversibility of the sequence can become of major importance. For instance, the implications of a story that proceeds from order to disorder (or from obedience to disobedience) differ greatly from those of a story that proceeds in the other direction. We may say that “success” and “failure” imply each other, without equating the step from success to failure with the step from failure to success. There are also paradoxical complications whereby, for instance, a step from success to failure in some respects is at the same time a step from failure to success in other respects. And there is the possibility of a story so self-consistent in structure that an analyst could, ideally, begin at the end and deductively “prophesy” what earlier developments must have taken place for things to culminate as they did. But such considerations merely subtilize the narrative or temporal principle of irreversibility; they do not eliminate it.

The plan, then, is first to evolve a cluster of interrelated key terms implicit in the idea of “Order.” Then we shall ask how the narrative, or “rectilinear,” style of Genesis compares with the “cycle of terms” we have found to revolve “endlessly” about the idea of “Order.” And, finally, we shall draw some conclusions from the comparison of the two styles (the “timeless” terministic cluster and the kind of “temporal” sequence embodied in the Biblical myth). The distinction is one touched upon by Coleridge (“Idea of the Prometheus of Aeschylus,” in Volume IV of the Shedd edition of his Complete Works), where he speaks of the Biblical method as “sacred narrative” and “Hebrew archæology,” in contrast with Greek “philosopheme.”

TAUTOLOGICAL CYCLE OF TERMS FOR “ORDER”

First, consider the strategic ambiguity whereby the term “Order” may apply both to the realm of nature in general and to the special realm of human socio-political organizations (an ambiguity whereby, so far as sheerly empirical things are concerned, a natural order could be thought to go on existing even if all human beings, with their various socio-political orders, were obliterated). This is a kind of logical pun whereby our ideas of the natural order can become secretly infused by our ideas of the socio-political order.

One might ask: Is not the opposite possibility just as likely? Might not the terms for the socio-political order become infused by the genius of the terms for the natural order? They do, every time we metaphorically extend the literal meaning of a natural image to the realm of the socio-political. It is the point that Bentham made much of in his Theory of Fictions, his systematic procedure (“archetypation”) for locating the natural images that may lurk undetected in our ideas and so may mislead us into attempting to deal too strictly in terms of the irrelevant image. For instance, if Churchillian rhetoric gets us to thinking of international relations in such terms as “iron curtains” and “power vacuums,” then we must guard lest we respond to the terms too literally—otherwise we shall not conceive of the political situation accurately enough. The Arab nations are no “vacuum.” Theologians have made similar observations about the use of natural images to express the idea of godhead.

But it is much more important for our present purposes to spot the movement in the other direction. We need to stress how a vision of the natural order can become infused with the genius of the verbal and socio-political orders.

Thus, from the purely logological point of view we note how, inasmuch as the account of the Creation in Genesis involves on each “day” a kind of enactment done through the medium of God's “Word,” the sheerly “natural” order contains a verbal element or principle that from the purely empirical point of view could belong only in the socio-political order. Empirically, the natural order of astrophysical motion depends upon no verbal principle for its existence. But theologically it does depend upon a verbal principle. And even though one might say that God's creative fiats and his words to Adam and Eve are to be conceived as but analogous to ordinary human verbal communication, our point remains the same. For from the empirical point of view, there would not even be an analogy between natural origins and responses to the power of words. The world of natural, nonverbal motions must be empirically the kind of world that could continue with its motions even if it contained no species, such as man, capable of verbal action; and it must be described without any reference to a Creation by verbal fiat, whether or not there had been such.

By a dramatistic ambiguity, standard usage bridges this distinction between the realms of verbal action and nonverbal motion when it speaks of sheerly natural objects or processes as “actualities.” Here even in a purely secular usage we can discern a trace of the theological view that sees nature as the sign of God's action—and thus by another route we see the theological way of merging the principle of the natural order with the principle of verbal contract or covenant intrinsic to legal enactment in the socio-political order.

But to proceed with the “tautologies”:

If, by “Order,” we have in mind the idea of a command, then obviously the corresponding word for the proper response would be “Obey.” Or there would be the alternative, “Disobey.” Thus we have the proportion: Order is to Disorder as Obedience is to Disobedience. However, there is a logological sense in which the things of nature could be called “innocent.” They cannot disobey commands, since they cannot understand commands. They do not have a “sense of right and wrong” or, more generically, a “sense of yes and no.” They simply do as they do—and that’s that. Such would be the non posse peccare of natural things or even of humans insofar as their “natural” state was not bound by moralistic negatives. All was permissive in Eden but the eating of the one forbidden fruit, the single negative that set the conditions for the Fall (since, St. Paul pointed out, only the law can make sin, as Bentham was later to point out that only the law can make crime). The Biblical myth pictures natural things as coming into being through the agency of God's Word; but they can merely do as they are told, whereas with God's permission, though not without his resentment, the seed of Adam can do even what it has been explicitly told not to do. The word-using animal not only understands a thou-shalt-not; it can carry the principle of the negative a step further, and answer the thou-shalt-not with a disobedient No. Logologically, the distinction between natural innocence and fallen man hinges about this problem of language and the negative. Eliminate language from nature and there can be no moral disobedience. In this sense, moral disobedience is “doctrinal.” Like faith, it is grounded in language.

Looking into the act of Disobedience, we come upon the need for some such term as “Pride” to name the corresponding attitude that precedes the act. And some such term as “Humility” names the idea of the attitude that leads into the act of Obedience.

But implicit in the distinction between Obedience and Disobedience there is the idea of some dividing line, some “watershed” that is itself midway between the two slopes. Often a word used for naming this ambiguous moment is “Will” or, more fully, “Free Will,” which is thought of as a faculty that makes possible the choice between the yea-saying of Humble Obedience or the nay-saying of Prideful Disobedience (the choice between serviam and non serviam).

Ontologically, and theologically, we say that this locus of freedom makes possible the kind of personal choice we have in mind when we speak of “Action.” But note that, logologically, the statement should be made the other way round. That is, whereas ontologically or theologically we say that by being endowed with free will man is able to act morally, the corresponding logological statement would be: Implicit in the idea of an act is the idea of free will. (Another version of the formula would be: Implicit in the idea of an act is the idea of freedom.)

The ontological and theological statements may or may not be true. The logological statement would be “true logologically” even if it were not true ontologically. That is, even if we hypothetically supposed, with strict behaviorists and the like, that there is no such thing as “free will,” that all “action” is reducible to terms of mechanical “motion,” it would still remain true that implicit in the idea of action there is the idea of freedom. If one cannot make a choice, one is not acting, one is but being moved, like a billiard ball tapped with a cue and behaving mechanically in conformity with the resistances it encounters. But even if men are doing nothing more than that, the word “act” implies that they are doing more—and we are now concerned solely with the implications of terms.

As regards the dramatistic tautology in general, an act is done by an agent in a scene. But such an act is usually preceded by a corresponding attitude, or “incipient act” (as when an act of friendliness follows a friendly attitude on the part of the agent). The scene is the motivational locus of the act insofar as the act represents a scene-act ratio (as, for instance, when an “emergency situation” is said to justify an “emergency measure”). But as the act derives from an attitude of the agent, the agent-act ratio can be narrowed to an attitude-act ratio, as when a friendly agent does a friendly act. The term “Will” is apparently designed to assign a “place” to the choice between different possibilities of attitude-act development. Here a verb is thought of as a noun; the idea of “the will” as willing is conceived after the analogy of rain raining, though we do not speak of fear as fearing. But the idea of such a locus for “the Will” brings up a further problem: What in turn influences “the Will”?

On the Disorder side, this role is assigned to the Imagination, insofar as the imagination's close connection with sensory images is thought both to make it highly responsive to the sensory appetites and to make sensory appetites more enticing. In brief, the combination of Imagination and the Senses, by affecting the Will from the side of Disorder, is said to predispose toward Temptation, except as Imagination in turn is corrected from the side of Order by the controls of Reason and Faith (which can also be thought of as having a controlling effect upon each other). Another refinement here is the notion that, once Imagination is on the side of Reason, it can contribute to Order, rather than to Disorder, by making reasonable things seem sensible and thus inducing the Wills of persons weak in Reason to none the less freely choose, as it were, reasonably and thus to act on the side of Order, eschewing Temptation.

The idea of Reason in such a system is obviously permeated with ideas of Dominion, owing to its identification with ideas of control and as indicated in the formula, “the Rule of Reason.” So it brings us clearly back to the principle of sovereignty underlying the general idea of Order by Covenant. The relation between Reason and Faith becomes ambiguous because of the possible shift between the natural order and the socio-political order as grounds of Reason. For if the socio-political Order is conceived in “ultimate” terms (as it is in the idea of a Covenant derived from God), then Faith must be a kind of control higher than Reason, insofar as Reason is identified with “Natural Law” and with purely worldly rules of governance. (Incidentally, we might note the strongly verbal element in both, as indicated by the close relation between Rational and Logical and by St. Paul's statement that the doctrines of the Faith are learned “by hearing.” However, there is said to be a further stage of supernatural awareness, called by St. Anselm contemplatio and by Spinoza scientia intuitiva, which would by definition transcend the verbal.)

There is also an act-agent ratio, as with the Aristotelian notion of hexis, habitus, the notion that a person may develop a virtuous Disposition by the practices of virtue or a vicious Disposition by repeated indulgence in vice. And this brings us to the subtlest term of all as regards the set of major dramatistic terms clustering about the idea of Order; namely, Mortification.

Of all theology-tinged terms that need logological reclamation and refurbishment, this is perhaps the most crucial. Here the motives of sacrifice and dominion come to a head in everyday living. The possibility is that most ailments now said to be of “psychogenic” origin are but secularized variants of what might be called “mortification in spite of itself.” That is, if we are right in assuming that governance makes “naturally” for victimage, either of others (homicidally) or of ourselves (suicidally), then we may expect to encounter many situations in which a man, by attitudes of self-repression, often causes or aggravates his own bodily and mental ills.

The derived meaning (humiliation, vexation, chagrin) would figure here. But mainly we have in mind the Grand Meaning, “subjection of the passions and appetites, by penance, abstinence, or painful severities inflicted on the body,” mortification as a kind of governance, an extreme form of “self-control,” the deliberate, disciplinary “slaying” of any motive that, for “doctrinal” reasons, one thinks of as unruly. In an emphatic way, mortification is the exercising of oneself in “virtue”; it is a systematic way of saying no to Disorder, or obediently saying yes to Order. Its opposite is license, luxuria, “fornication,” saying yes to Disorder, no to Order.

The principle of Mortification is particularly crucial to conditions of empire, which act simultaneously to awaken all sorts of odd and exacting appetites, while at the same time imposing equally odd and exacting obstacles to their fulfillment. For “mortification” does not occur when one is merely “frustrated” by some external interference. It must come from within. The mortified must, with one aspect of himself, be saying no to another aspect of himself—hence the urgent incentive to be “purified” by “projecting” his conflict upon a scapegoat, by seeking a sacrificial vessel upon which he can vent, as from without, a turmoil that is actually within. “Psychogenic illness” would occur in cases in which one was scrupulous enough to deny himself such easy outgoing relief and, instead, in all sorts of roundabout ways, scrupulously circled back upon himself, unintentionally making his own constitution the victim of his hierarchally goaded entanglements.

To complete the pattern: On the side of Order, where the natural actualities created by verbal fiat are completed in sovereignty and subjection by Covenant, with Obedience goes promise of reward (as payment for service), while on the other side goes Disobedience, with threat of punishment as enforced payment for disservice.

Then comes the Grand Rounding Out, where the principle of reward as payment (from the Order side) merges with the principle of punishment as payment (from the Disorder side), to promise of redemption by vicarious atonement. Sovereignty and subjection (the two poles of governance) are brought together in the same figure (Christ as King and Christ as Servant, respectively)—and the contradiction between these principles is logically resolved by a narrative device, the notion of two advents whereby Christ could appear once as servant and the second time as king. Here is the idea of a “perfect” victim to cancel (or “cover”) what was in effect the “perfect” sin (its technical perfection residing in the fact that it was the first transgression of the first man against the first and foremost authority).

However, the symmetry of the design does not resolve the problem of the “watershed moment,” the puzzle of the relation between “determinism” and “free will.” The search for a cause is itself the search for a scapegoat, as Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, the serpent could have blamed Lucifer, and Lucifer could have blamed the temptations implicit in the idea of Order (the inchoate “fall” that, as we saw in the quotation from Coleridge, is intrinsic to the “creation of the non-absolute”). Adam himself has a hint of the Luciferian rejoinder when he says to the Lord God that he received the fruit from “the woman whom thou gavest to be with me.” Also, from the purely imagistic point of view, there is a sense in which the Lord God has caused Adam to be tempted by an aspect of himself, in accordance with the original obstetrical paradox whereby woman was born of man.

Here would be a purely “grammatical” way of stating the case: If order, implying the possibility of disorder, implies a possible act of disobedience, then there must be an agent so endowed, or so minded, that such an act is possible to him—and the motives for such an act must eventually somehow be referred to the scene out of which he arose and which thus somehow contains the principles that in their way make a “bad” act possible.

Arrived at this point, we might shift the problem of the “watershed moment” to another plane, by recalling that the same conditions of divisiveness also make for the inchoately “holy,” inasmuch as the Hebrew word for “holy,” qodesh, means literally the “separate,” the “set apart,” as does the word qudesh, which means “Sodomite.” This verbal tangle has often been commented on, and it applies also to the New Testament word hagios, which means both “holy” and “accursed,” like its Latin counterpart, sacer. Here, we might say, is a purely terministic equivalent of the problem of choice, or motivational slope. The question of de-terminism narrows down to a kind of term that within itself contains two slopes (two different judgments or “crises”).

As regards the matter of terms, we could move into the area of personality proper by equating human personality with the ability to use symbol-systems (centering in the feeling for the negative, since “reason,” in its role as the “sense of right and wrong,” is but a special case of the “sense of yes and no”). Thus, more broadly, we could say that the conception of the creative verbal fiat in Genesis is essentially the personal principle. But insofar as personal character is defined by choice (cf. Aristotle on proairesis, Poetics, VI, 24), the question becomes one of deciding how far back the grounds of choice must be traced. Since Genesis would depict us as arising from a scene that is the act of a super-person and redemption is thought to be got by voluntary enlistment on the side of Order, conceived sacrificially, the ultimate formula becomes that of Jeremiah XXXI, 18: “Turn thou me, and I shall be turned” (converte me, et convertar). Here the indeterminate watershed of “free” choice is reducible to a question of this sort: Though all men are given enough “grace” to be saved, how can anyone be saved but by being given enough grace to be sure of using it? Yet how could he have as much saving grace as that, without in effect being compelled to be saved (in which case he would not, in the last analysis, have “free will”)?

Fortunately, it is not our duty, as logologers, to attempt solving this ultimate theological riddle, entangled in ideas of providence, predestination, and the possibilities of an elect, chosen from among the depraved, all of whom deserve eternal damnation, but some of whom are saved by God in his mysterious mercy and may attest to their future glory by becoming a kind of materially prosperous elite here and now.

Fortunately, as logologers, we need but consider the ways in which such ideas are interwoven with the conditions of dominion, as they prevail among human symbol-using animals. As seen in this light, the thought of all such issues leads us to revision of our initial dialectical pattern. That is, the Order-Disorder pair is not enough. And what we need now is another kind of antithesis, setting Order against Counter-Order.

Methodologically, we might say that we have now come upon the penalities resulting from our earlier decision to approach this problem in terms of “Order” rather than in terms of “Covenant.” For the idea of a “Counter-Covenant” would have been somewhat different from the idea of such a mere disintegration as is usually suggested by the term “Disorder.”

In sum, there is a notable qualitative difference between the idea of a mere “fall” from a position in which one still believes, but to which one is at times unequal, and the idea of a deliberate turn to an alternative allegiance. It would be a difference between being “weak in virtue” and being “strong in sin.”

But perhaps we should try to sum up the line of reasoning we have been pursuing in these last paragraphs. We have been considering the problem of a possible ultimate ground for “Temptation.” Logologically, “Temptation” is but a tautological aspect of the idea of “Order.” It is grounded in the idea of a verbal command, which by its very nature contains possibilities of both obedience and disobedience. We do not “command” the nonverbalizing things of nature. To the best of our ability, we simply set up conditions which we think likely to bring about the kind of situation we desire. We reserve our commands (or requests!) for language-using entities that can, to varying degrees, resist. And the command is backed, explicity or implicitly, by promises or threats.

However, ontologically, or theologically, such a purely “tautological” point of view would not be enough. And we confront such problems as St. Augustine was concerned with in his battles with the Manichaeans. We may, like the Manichaeans, conceive of an ultimate Tempter, existing in his own right and with powers rivaling those of God. Or we may derive everything from a God who is by definition merciful, and good, the author of a wholly good Creation, yet who not only lets man sin but permits the existence and incessant schemings of a supernatural tempter endowed with diabolical ingenuity and persuasiveness. Hence arises the “problem of evil” (as with Augustine's urgent question, “Unde malum?”). We have considered in the previous talk how Augustine proposed to solve the problem theologically by his notion of evil as a “deficient cause,” a kind of “eclipse.”

But logologically, the question takes on a different form. Logologically, moral “evil” is a species of negative, a purely linguistic (or “rational”) principle. And insofar as natural calamities are viewed in terms of moral retribution, we should say that the positive events of nature are being seen through the eyes of moral negativity (another instance of ways whereby the genius of the verbal and socio-political orders can come to permeate our ideas of the natural order). All told, “evil” is implicit in the idea of “Order” because “Order” is a polar, or dialectical term, implying an idea of “Disorder.”

But there can be two kinds of “Disorder”: (1) a tendency toward failure to obey completely always; (2) disobedience due to an out-and-out enrollment in the ranks of a rival force. We might call this a distinction between mere Disorder and deliberate allegiance to a Counter-Order. (There is an analogous situation in contemporary politics, since a person's disagreements with those in authority may be interpreted either as temperamental deviation from the prevailing orthodoxy or as sinister, secret adherence to an organized enemy alien power.)

Theologically, perhaps the analogous distinction would be between the kind of “Temptation” that is intrinsic to the possibility of choice and the kind that attains its ideal perfection in the notion of a Faustian pact with the Devil—the difference between ordinary “backsliding” and “heresy” or “black magic.” Problems of “predestination” lie in the offing, inasmuch as different people are differently tempted or differently enlightened and such differences are not of their own choosing but arise in connection with the accidents of each man's unique, particular destiny. (In the Confessions, for instance, we see St. Augustine interpreting as God's will many decisions which he had made for quite different personal reasons. And no man could sell his soul to the Devil if God, who was necessarily present at the signing of the contract, but chose that moment to flood the victim's imagination with the full realization of his danger.)

At this point, we should look at Hobbes's Leviathan, since it illustrates so well the idea of Disorder in this more aggressive sense of a Covenant matched by a “Counter-Covenant.” And in the course of doing so, it well illustrates the role of the sacrificial principle which we believe to be “logologically inseparable” from the idea of dominion.

COVENANT AND “COUNTER-COVENANT” IN HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN

Part I of the Leviathan is “Of Man.” But this subtitle can easily mislead us. For Part I is not just “Of Man.” It is of man in the commonwealth. That is, the principle of Part II, which explicitly concerns commonwealth, is already implicit as a germ in Part I. Thus there is no break in continuity as we turn from Part I to Part II. The quickest way to make it obvious that the motives of commonwealth are already operating in the first section, and coloring the philosopher's view of man qua man, is to cite such chapter headings as: “Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthiness” and “Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated.” Perhaps one cannot explicitly write just “of man” without implicitly writing of man in the commonwealth (or, at least, of man in the tribe), since man is, as Aristotle puts it in good Athenian fashion, a “political animal.”

Similarly, in Genesis, though the first three Covenants have to do with man and woman, brothers, parents, and children, and though it is not until the fourth, or Abrahamic, Covenant that God deals with Israel as a nation, yet the generic and familial motives exemplified in these early Covenants are but the beginnings of such motives as come clear in terms of dominion, however theocratically conceived. This is to say that man's notion of his “pre-political” self will necessarily be seen in the light of a socio-political perspective. And all the more so because “pre-political” childhood is experienced in terms of family relationships that are themselves shaped by tribal or national conditions as a whole.

As regards Part II, “Of Commonwealth”: If one reads this section along the lines of our notion that the first section is “in principle” saying the same thing, one gets the essence of Hobbes's politics. Here, near the end of Chapter XVII, occurs an almost gloriously resonant passage succinctly summing up the Hobbesian notion of a Covenant, made with a “common power” and designed to keep the covenanters “in awe and to direct their actions to the common benefit”:

The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their own industry, and by the fruits of the earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own, and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person, shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgments, to his judgment. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the commonwealth; which, to define it, is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence.

And he that carrieth this person, is called SOVEREIGN, and said to have sovereign power; and every one besides, his SUBJECT.

In Part III (“Of a Christian Commonwealth”) Hobbes adds a dimension, by introducing from the Bible his terms for what he calls “Christian politics.” Essentially, this section involves his devices for subjecting priest-rule to the powers of secular sovereignty. That is to say: In another way, by new ingenuities, he reaffirms the principles of the commonwealth that were adumbrated in Part I and explicitly expounded in Part II. Perhaps the most quotable passage for our purposes is the last paragraph of Chapter XXVIII:

Hitherto I have set forth the nature of man, whose pride and other passions have compelled him to submit himself to government: together with the great power of his governor, whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one-and-fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, calleth him King of the Proud. There is nothing, saith he, on earth, to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He seeth every high thing below him; and is king of all the children of pride. But because he is mortal, and subject to decay, as all other earthly creatures are; and because there is that in heaven, though not on earth, that he should stand in fear of, and whose laws he ought to obey; I shall in the next following chapters speak of his diseases, and the causes of his mortality; and of what laws of nature he is bound to obey.

The reference to Leviathan as “King of the Proud” is perfect for our purposes. However, we have said that where Governance is, there is the goad to scapegoats.

And that brings us to Part IV (“Of the Kingdom of Darkness”). The curative victim here is not Christ, but Popery, conceived as Anti-Christ.

At this point (praise Logology!) we most decidedly need not enter the fray on Hobbesian terms. But we most decidedly should be admonished by Hobbes, in accordance with our ways of translating. And his methodologically fundamental admonition gets down to the fact that, in the light of his title for Part IV, “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” we must shift from Order-thinking back to Covenant-thinking and thereby concern ourselves with the sheerly dialectical possibilities of a Counter-Covenant, though the word itself is not in Hobbes.

Viewed here not as doctrine, but as design, Hobbes helps us realize that implicit in the idea of a Covenant is the idea not just of obedience or disobedience to that Covenant, but also of obedience or disobedience to a rival Covenant. The choice thus becomes not just a difference between seeking the light and not seeking the light, but rather the difference between eagerly seeking the light and just as eagerly seeking darkness (a “Disorder” having an “Order” all its own, however insistent the orthodoxy must be that the Satanic counter-realm can exist only by the sufferance of the One Ultimate Authority).

About the edges of all such speculations lie variants of the Manichæan “heresy,” according to which Evil is a power in its own right. As we have observed before, logology must side with Augustine's attacks upon this position. For logology looks upon “evil” as a species of the negative and looks upon the negative as a linguistic invention. This would be the logological analogue of Augustine's theological doctrine that malum is a causa deficiens, a mere deficiency, like an eclipse. And from the purely dialectical point of view, we take it that all admonishment against the temptations of a Counter-Covenant are a recognition of the moral certainty that the mere stating of a position is likely to call forth some opposition. Hobbes's strongly nationalist position made it inevitable that Roman Catholicism would be his scapegoat.

But whether the scapegoat principle be conceived after the analogy of a villain, or after the analogy of arbitrarily chosen vessel that gets its function purely by appointment, or after the analogy of divine paraclete combining exhortation and guidance with victimage, the principle of Mortification is basic to the pattern of governance, as summed up in Paul's paradox (2 Corinthians, XII, 10): “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then I am strong.”

The idea of the Sacrificial Redeemer, in bringing together ideas of patience, repentance, and obedience to the verbalities of the faith, reproduces in the large the same principle that prevails in the minute scruples of Mortification. Here also would belong the idea of the “remnant,” those especially good Jews who maintained the continuity of a blessed relation to the deity despite the backsliding of the people as a whole. And the priesthood, too, would be an extension of the principle of sacrifice, in that it involves special persons set apart for the sacrificial services. The priests extend the sacrificial principle to themselves insofar as they practice special acts of mortification deemed to fit them for their special office.

The companion principle to such an idea of graceful, voluntary subjection being, of course, sovereignty, the other side of the sovereign-subject relation is presented in terms of the ultimate rewards in store for those of good will who subject themselves to the principle of governance. That is, as with the two advents of Christ, the logical contrast between sovereignty and subjection is resolved by translation into terms of narrative sequence whereby the principle of subjection, of mortification, first prevails, but is finally followed by the sovereign principle of boundless rejoicing. And in the meantime, the notion of “grace” itself (as a way of goading the sluggish Imagination to the proper fears) is extended to include the idea that natural calamities are “acts of God,” designed to warn or chasten—whereupon the principle of Mortification is introduced under another guise.

Mortification is as true of Order as mortmain is of contract.

PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNANCE, STATED NARRATIVELY

Imagine that you wanted to say, “The world can be divided into six major classifications.” That is, you wanted to deal with “the principles of Order,” beginning with the natural order and placing man's socio-political order with reference to it. But you wanted to treat of these matters in narrative terms, which necessarily involve temporal sequence (in contrast with the cycle of terms for “Order,” that merely cluster about one another, variously implying one another but in no one fixed sequence).

Stated narratively (in the style of Genesis, Bereshith, Beginning), such an idea of principles, or “firsts,” would not be stated simply in terms of classification, as were we to say “The first of six primary classes would be such-and-such, the second such-and-such,” and so on. Rather, a completely narrative style would properly translate the idea of six classes or categories into terms of time, as were we to assign each of the classes to a separate “day.” Thus, instead of saying, “And that completes the first broad division, or classification, of our subject matter,” we would say, “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (or, more accurately, the “One” Day). And so on, through the six broad classes, ending, “last but not least,” on the category of man and his dominion. [The clearest evidence that this principle of “divisiveness” is itself a kind of proto-fall” is to be seen in the use made of it by the segregationists of the southern Bible belt. Members of the Ku Klux Klan refer to the classificatory system of Genesis as justification for their stress upon the separation of Negroes and whites. In an ironic sense, they are “right.” For when nature is approached via the principle of differentiation embodied in the notion of Social Order, then “Creation” itself is found to contain implicitly the guiltiness of “discrimination.” Furthermore, the Word mediates between these two realms. And the Word is social in the sense that language is a collective means of expression, while its sociality is extended to the realm of wordless nature insofar as this nonverbal kind of order is treated in terms of such verbal order as goes with the element of command intrinsic to dominion.]

Further, a completely narrative style would personalize the principle of classification. This role is performed by the references to God's creative fiat, which from the very start infuses the sheerly natural order with the verbal principle (the makings of that “reason” which we take to be so essential an aspect of human personality).

Logologically, the statement that God made man in his image would be translated as: The principle of personality implicit in the idea of the first creative fiats, whereby all things are approached in terms of the word, applies also to the feeling for symbol-systems on the part of the human animal, who would come to read nature as if it were a book. Insofar as God's words infused the natural order with their genius, and insofar as God is represented as speaking words to the first man and woman, the principle of human personality (which is at the very start identified with dominion) has its analogue in the notion of God as a super-person and of nature as the act of such a super-agent. (That is, we take symbol-using to be a distinctive ingredient of “personality.”)

Though technically there is a kind of “proto-fall” implicit in the principle of divisiveness that characterizes the Bible's view of the Creation, and though the principle of subjection is already present (in the general outlines of a government with God at its head and mankind as subject to his authority while in turn having dominion over all else in the natural realm), the Covenant (as first announced in the first chapter) is necessarily Edenic, in a state of “innocency,” since no negative command has yet been pronounced. From the dialectical point of view (in line with the Order-Disorder pair) we may note that there is a possibility of “evil” implicit in the reference to all six primary classifications as “good.” But in all three points (the divisiveness, the order of dominion, and the universal goodness) the explicit negative is lacking. In fact, the nearest approach to an outright negative (and that not of a moralistic, hortatory sort) is in the reference to the “void” (bohu) which preceded God's classificatory acts. Rashi says that the word translated as “formless” (tohu) “has the meaning of astonishment and amazement.” Incidentally, in connection with I, 29, the Interpreter's Bible suggests another implicit negative, in that the explicit permitting of a vegetarian diet implies that Adam may not eat flesh.

In the first chapter of Genesis, the stress is upon the creative fiat as a means of classification. It says in effect, “What hath God wrought (by his Word)?” The second chapter's revised account of the Creation shifts the emphasis to matters of dominion, saying in effect, “What hath God ordained (by his words)?” The seventh “day” (or category), which is placed at the beginning of the second chapter, has a special dialectical interest in its role as a transition between the two emphases.

In one sense, the idea of the Sabbath is implicitly a negative, being conceived as antithetical to all the six foregoing categories, which are classifiable together under the single head of “work,” in contrast with this seventh category, of “rest.” That is, work and rest are “polar” terms, dialectical opposites. (In his Politics, Aristotle's terms bring out this negative relation explicitly, since his word for business activity is ascholein, that is, “not to be at leisure,” though we should tend rather to use the negative the other way round, defining “rest” as “not to be at work.”)

This seventh category (of rest after toil) obviously serves well as transition between Order (of God as principle of origination) and Order (of God as principle of sovereignty). Leisure arises as an “institution” only when conditions of dominion have regularized the patterns of work. And, fittingly, just after this transitional passage, the very name of God undergoes a change (the quality of which is well indicated in our translations by a shift from “God” to “Lord God.” [Grammatically, the word for God in the first chapter, “Elohim,” is a plural. Philologists may interpret this as indicating a usage that survives from an earlier polytheistic period in the development of Jewish Monotheism. Or Christian theologians can interpret it as the first emergence of a Trinitarian position, thus early in the text, with the Creator as first person of the Trinity, the Spirit that hovered over the waters as third person, and the creative Word as second person. (Incidentally, the words translated as “Lord God” in Chapter II are Jehovah-Elohim. Later, in connection with the Abrahamic Covenant, the words translated as “Lord God” are Adonai Jehovah. Adonai, which means “master,” applies to both God and man—and when applied to man it also includes the idea of husband as master.) The distinction between authority and authorship is approached from another angle in Augustine's Confessions I, X, where God is called the ordinator and creator of all natural things, but of sin he is said to be only the ordinator.] Here, whereas in Chapter I, verse 29, God tells the man and woman that the fruit of “every tree” is permitted them, the Lord God (II, 17) notably revises thus: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Here, with the stress upon governance, enters the negative of command.

When, later, the serpent tempts “the woman” (III, 4), saying that “Ye shall not surely die,” his statement is proved partially correct, to the extent that they did not die on the day on which they ate of the forbidden fruit. In any case, III, 19 pronounces the formula that has been theologically interpreted as deriving mankind's physical death from our first parents' first disobedience: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

The Interpreter's Bible (page 512) denies that there is any suggestion that man would have lived forever had he not eaten of the forbidden fruit. Verse III, 20 is taken to imply simply that man would have regarded death as his natural end, rather than as “the last fearful frustration.” Thus, the fear of death is said to be “the consequence of the disorder in man's relationships” when they are characterized “by domination” (along with the fear that the subject will break free of their subjection). This seems to be at odds with the position taken by the Scofield Bible, which, in the light of Paul's statements in Romans V, 12-21 (“by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin” and “by one man's offence death reigned by one”) interprets the passage as meaning that “physical death” is due to a “universal sinful state, or nature,” which is “our heritance from Adam.”

It is within neither our present purpose nor our competency to interpret this verse theologically. But here is how it would look logologically:

First, we would note that in referring to “disorder” and “domination,” the Interpreter's Bible is but referring to “Order” and “Dominion” as seen from another angle. For a mode of domination is a mode of dominion, and a socio-political order is by nature a ziggurat-like structure which, as the story of the Tower makes obvious, can stand for the principle of Disorder.

If we are right in our notion that the idea of Mortification is integral to the idea of Dominion (as the scrupulous subject must seek to “slay” within himself whatever impulses run counter to the authoritative demands of sovereignty), then all about a story of the “first” dominion and the “first” disobedience there should hover the theme of the “first” mortification.

But “mortification” is a weak term as compared with “death.” And thus, in the essentializing ways proper to the narrative style, this stronger, more dramatic term replaces the weaker, more “philosophic” one. “Death” would be the proper narrative-dramatic way of saying “Mortification.” By this arrangement, the natural order is once again seen through the eyes of the socio-political order, as the idea of mortification in the toil and subjection of Governance is replaced by the image of death in nature.

From the standpoint sheerly of imagery (once the idea of mortification has been reduced to the idea of death, and the idea of death has been reduced to the image of a dead body rotting back into the ground), we now note a kind of “imagistic proto-fall,” in the pun of II, 7, where the Lord God is shown creating man (adham) out of the ground (adhamah). Here would be an imagistic way of saying that man in his physical nature is essentially but earth, the sort of thing a body becomes when it decays; or that man is first of all but earth as regards his place in the sheerly natural order. You would define him in narrative or temporal terms by showing what he came from. But insofar as he is what he came from, such a definition would be completed in narrative terms by the image of his return to his origins. In this sense, the account of man's forming (in II, 7) ambiguously lays the conditions for his “return” to such origins, as the Lord God makes explicit in III, 19, when again the subject is the relation between adham and the adhamah: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Here would be a matter of sheer imagistic consistency, for making the stages of a narrative to be all of one piece.

But the death motif here is explicity related to another aspect of Order or Dominion: the sweat of toil. And looking back a bit further, we find that this severe second Covenant (the “Adamic”) also subjected woman to the rule of the husband—another aspect of Dominion. And there is to be an eternal enmity between man and the serpent (the image, or narrative personification, of the principle of Temptation, which we have also found to be intrinsic to the motives clustering about the idea of Order).

Logologically, then, the narrative would seem to be saying something like this: Even if you begin by thinking of death as a merely natural phenomenon, once you come to approach it in terms of conscience-laden mortification you get a new slant on it. For death then becomes seen, in terms of the socio-political order, as a kind of capital punishment. But something of so eschatological a nature is essentially a “first” (since “ends,” too, are principles—and here is a place at which firsts and lasts meet, so far as narrative terms for the defining of essences are concerned). Accordingly, death in the natural order becomes conceived as the fulfillment or completion of mortification in the socio-political order, but with the difference that, as with capital punishment in the sentencing of transgressions against sovereignty, it is not in itself deemed wholly “redemptive,” since it needs further modifications along the lines of placement in an undying Heavenly Kingdom after death. And this completes the pattern of Order: the symmetry of the socio-political, the natural, and the supernatural.