ABSTRACT
He spoke of the beginning, chaos and old night, and their division by God’s word; He recited the vigorous, blithely plural summons of God to Himself, the enterprising proposal: ‘Let us make man’…and indeed did God not go on to say: ‘in our image, after our likeness’? He spoke of the garden eastwards in Eden and of the trees in it, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge; of the temptation and of God’s first attack of jealousy: how he was alarmed lest man, who now indeed knew good and evil, might eat also of the tree of life and be entirely like ‘us’. So He drove out the man and set the cherub with the flaming sword before the gate. And to the man he gave toil and death that he might be an image like to ‘us’, indeed, but not too like, only somewhat liker than the fishes, the birds and the beasts, and still with the privately assigned task of becoming against His jealous opposition ever as much more like as possible…. The very creature which was nearer to the image of the Creator than any other brought evil with him into the world. Thus God created for Himself a mirror which was anything but flattering. Often and often in anger and chagrin He was moved to smash it to bits-though he never quite did, perhaps because He could not bring Himself to replunge into nothingness that which He had summoned forth and actually cared more about the failure of than He did about any success. Perhaps too He would not admit that anything could be a complete failure after He had created it so thoroughgoingly in His own image. Perhaps, finally, a mirror is a means of learning about oneself; Man, then was a result of God’s curiosity about Himself.
