Canter Bridge

The serpent figures in the paradigmatic story of human origins as the Bible’s first cynic. He has strong ideas about the arbitrary nature of God’s decrees and the selfish motive that lies behind them:

But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

The serpent has some convenient data with which to work. God in fact does not give a reason for his unexpected ring-fencing of just one tree when he has already given the whole ranch over to the first couple. It seems so unreasonable and, certainly, asymmetrical. It is the kind of thing that raises suspicions.

The serpent has plenty of those. He knows, it seems, more than what mere appearances tell. He knows the benefit human eyes will reap if they don’t fall for God’s self-interested charade.

As the story proceeds, eyes are indeed opened. The result is very different from the one cynical expectations anticipate:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.

Cynicism is too easy to be much good in the real world where facts and motives are mixed, solid things, impervious to simple, totalitarian explanation. Cynicism protects itself from disappointment at the cost of participating in anything that is truly good.

The serpent told the first couple that they could know in full what God was up to and that they could be sure it was not a good thing for them. He was wrong on both counts.

Sometimes, the writer would have us intuit, God’s work is simply that: God’s work, reserved for his attention, fenced off from ours. To suspect the worst at such moments merits several labels. Among them: cynicism, paranoia, tragedy.