I've been thinking a lot about innoncence.
Innocence in the sense of not knowing. Because once you know something, you can't get back to ignorance. You have to live the rest of your life knowing. I think there is a heavy burden that goes along with that.
It's sort of like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. They could never go back, just like we can never go back to our childhood before life got complicated. When it was easy to love without inhibitions, and you knew God because he was God. There was no question of his existence. You just knew. Like you knew your parents loved you. It was undoubtable.
The more you know, the more you find doubts about. You realize, what do you really know? I think that is what Jesus meant when he talked about having faith like a child. Children don't doubt because the "knowledge" of the world hasn't taught them the world isn't safe. They aren't jaded.
But sooner, more than later nowadays, they learn pain, evil and sadness. It is the knowledge of good and evil: emphasis on evil. Their hearts harden and the sting of the fall of mankind haunts them. We may not realize the implications the fall has caused until we realized where we once were.
The perfect garden. Immortilized in our minds as a day in our lives when we weren't burdened with the knowledge that we are no longer innocent. We merely were.
2 comments:
Then again, on the brigher side, all this may point to the fact that after innocence comes virtue. As I recall, in the Areopagitica by John Milton, he talks about the blank/white (and ultimately not particularly worthwhile) virtue that comes from choosing "the good" by refusing to engage in the world or truly contemplate good and evil. And, it's by choosing the good through understanding the nature of evil that true virtue is attained.
True Mark.
It is very true that engaging our world is necessary for a full life. I am not a proponent of hermitage or misanthropy. First because it can lead to a miserable, lonely existence, and second because it doesn't actually remove you from the "evil" of the world. At least if you subscribe to the biblical presupposition of man's sinful nature.
I actually took an entire seminar class on Engaging Culture. It's a tricky thing.
I agree that understanding the nature of evil and still choosing good gives value to a decision. I shall also give Areopagitica a read. So far I've enjoyed Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and a couple of his prose pieces.
Thanks for the comment!
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