Beauty Before Breakfast

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Beautiful Friends:

Let’s start today with an observation about Genesis 1-3. It is not an account of the historic act of creation (i.e. it’s not a science lesson any more than the Big Bang Theory is a theology tutorial). Genesis offers insight into how the ancients understood their ideal connection to creation, God and one another. It also explains why they found these relationships so fractured. Careful reading of their texts may provide us with some useful insights. I thank Rabbi David Fohrman for his analysis of the text; his writing brought my attention to the shift between God’s description of the newly created order and Eve and Adam’s experience of that same creation, with a particular focus on that pesky fruit tree.

In Genesis 2, after God breathed spirit into Adam, the text reads: “…the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (vv. 8-9, NRSVUE trans.) Note that in the sequence of adjectives regarding trees—“pleasant to the sight” and then “good for food”—beauty precedes appetite.

In Genesis 3, however, just before Eve took that historic first bite, her perception reverses that order. “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 (3:8). Here, in the Great Temptation, appetite leads, beauty follows and desire consummates.

Much can be and has been said about Adam’s complicity; he was standing there through the whole temptation and did nothing to intervene. Adam was also the one who had received the Divine’s direct warning about the side effects of this particular fruit (Genesis 2:16-17); the instruction was given before Eve existed. The depth of analysis is what makes this text so rich, but for me today, I’ve been musing about the relationship between beauty and appetite. Rabbi Fohrman’s textual analysis has led me to muse about how our consumer culture places far greater value on satisfying our appetites than enriching our appreciation of beauty.

The current drive for logging, drilling and mining in federal wildernesses, the reduction of national monuments to permit commercial development and an unnatural obsession with goldleaf are driven by Eve’s inversion. God saw the trees’ beauty first; their utility was also valuable, but secondary. Certainly, the value of food is heightened for a starving man, but once sated, even the most famished can return to appreciating beauty. Missing the joy of aesthetics is the obsession of the glutton. Eve and Adam were not starving; their temptation was rooted in an overriding desire to consume. Resisting temptation does not start with avoiding beauty. Resisting temptation means appreciating beauty without rewarding the desire to consume it.

Pausing to consider the beauty of the world, before gobbling it up, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor

Jonathan Krogh
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