The Father lets the snake into the Garden. The snake is highly constrained, though; the only possible temptation was about one tree only, among surely a huge number of other trees. Satan is tightly fenced in while whispering to Eve, just like he is tightly fenced when assaulting Job. The Father constructs a world for his toddler that is full of good things, but, necessarily, has a few bad things. The father sees the garden, a bubble He built, and controls what gets in.
Satan’s fences with Eve are not the same as Job’s. Children are unique. The father knows each child’s design and
Though the children are created, they are not fully children until they choose the father. And He must be absent to be chosen. He must have given an instruction, and there must be a contrary and attractive vision for the child to, hopefully, reject. Prohibition, Absence, Temptation, Image: all asking the heart to choose, to want. Choice is all; there is no relationship when the two have not yet chosen each other.
Deeper still; If there is no choice there is no person. It is not possible to create a person and not endow him with choice. “Person” and “chooser” are nearly synonyms. This means that creation of the good and the existence of evil, and so the possibility of good becoming evil, are a single moral and intellectual complex, and the hesitation to believe in the Good in the face of the existence of evil is rooted in a superficial grasp of the Good.
None of this theologizing is meant to suggest that human fathers should arrange temptations for their children, in some sort of abstract but manipulative test. Lead them not into temptation.
No, the father knows the world holds evils and knows
“Choice” is a word that different people hear differently. The decadent substitute for choice is manipulation. And when all you have known is manipulation — when you have never been loved — “choice” feels false to you, or perhaps cold, in contrast to the too-warm webs of emotional blackmail which read, after a lifetime, as normal. You are cynical about such a word, because you came to realize, years after childhood, that you never really had free choices, just courses of action chosen by others and falsely depicted to you as your choices.
All the words from the theological glossary are like this: many people know the word, but have no experience of the reality, and so are bitter when the word is used.
There is no choice without distance. There must be a vacuum, with the real possibility of filling it with alternate stories from aberrant choices. If it is not possible to imagine and then create a story other than the friendship with the father, then there is no choice. There is no personhood and no friendship without having rejected alien stories in favor of this friendship story.
Distance, among persons, means occasional absence. So not all the absence of God is a result of the Fall. Some is, but see in Genesis how He withdrew a distance from us as soon as He made us, and before we had offended Him. So existence as we now experience it is an ambiguous mixture of pre-lapsarian distance and post-lapsarian distance. The first we should embrace, as the freedom of creation, but the other we should hate, as our exile. But one of the many existential puzzles is that these two distances are fuzzily tangled.
This confused tangle – of distance as gift and distance as bitter exile – is used by the devil to throw a pall of resentment over the human mind toward God in all His distance, so that the soul tends to hate God for the very core of His goodness. Hating God because of His goodness is the uniquely Satanic sentiment in our culture. It spreads.
You cannot have the gifts and reject the Giver. So goes the cliche. But it isn’t because the Giver won’t let you, but because the gifts won’t let you. They CANNOT work. The gifts won’t function forever in the absence of the Giver. But the Gift must LOOK like you can have it and reject the Giver, or the choice is not free.
Satan is commonly, in the folk imagination, depicted as a spinner of fantasies. But this is a vulgarization. No, what Eve sees, as he points the tree of knowledge out to her, is really there.
The tempter’s special skill is emphasis and proportion. He seldom makes stuff up; he actually just emphasizes his own facts. He is a spin-meister, in the sense of the modern political guru.
Temptation is the offer to see facts differently than the Father sees them. To see different is to be tempted. To choose this false image, interpreted by lying words, to not hide your eyes from seeing the image in its lying form, is to eventually sin, and die. Facts don’t exist in their own universe. Rather, they are formally false when they are used to draw false conclusions or paint distorted pictures. They are still facts, but they are not true.
Death
“Their eyes were opened…”
If you choose to see differently than the Father, your eyes sclerose and go finally dark. Death is simply a continuation of the process of temptation.
Of course this all flies in the face of the modern dogma that all potentialities are good and to be expressed. If I have a possibiity, it’s good that I explore it, especially if there is some happiness in that direction.
Notice that no-one actually ever believes this nonsense about anyone else, they just believe it about themselves. I have a deep dissatisfaction within me that my potential as a human being is wasted, and so I must follow my heart and run off with my secretary. But no-one, when they’re the one betrayed in this reasoning, reacts with anything but a snort and a slap. Self-actualization is an ethical justification for exactly nothing.