Naughty, naughty children

The oddest thoughts come to me when I am doing exegesis - this week, of Genesis 1-11. I do not read Hebrew, and am relying on some of the most detailed translations. I am seeing how Adam and Eve, after the 'fall,' did not merely come to a moral knowledge (nor to sexual knowledge in itself), but to a certain maturity, perhaps the beginning of wisdom. No wonder Irenaeus treated of the fall as immaturity - but, as we all know of Augustine, who was far more influential, he could never deal with immaturity in himself or anyone else. This applied whether he was speaking of kids throwing pears to the pigs or young philosophers who just could not possibly have wisdom until later.

As usual, the profound and silly went hand in hand in my mind. I thought of the various 'folk heroes' (in this sense, the kids who were always in trouble) during my childhood. Some of them were, and would remain, genuine problems - in fact, some met an early death which resulted from their own pursuits. But most were not anything approaching wicked - and, if they could be malicious, I doubt they realised the ugliness of this.

One trait that always surprised me in the rabble-rousers was that they often had this need to 'take their punishment,' or at least resignation to cause and effect. This is not to be confused with contrition of any sort. Let it not be thought that they had any intention of mending their ways. I suppose (not knowing, since I was a quiet child who had no interest in tumult) that they had some vague sense of guilt which needed to be punished, so they could proceed to further deviltry unhampered by sentiment.

Then and now, I thought it was unjust, but also rather stupid, that teachers tended to punish an entire class for the actions of a few. Now and then, I heard the justification for this as that 'the others will get after the ones who started the trouble.' This flies in the face of human nature. First off, those most inclined to make trouble not only would feel no guilt about how others were punished because of them, but were most definitely in the 'not to be trifled with' category. Second, if the only reason one has for behaving is the threat of punishment, is it not likely that those who did not have folk hero status, but were in the secondary unit, may have joined in the trouble because they knew they'd be punished in any case?

But not only teachers, parents, et al, had the attitude of 'punish to let out my anger / show I am in authority / take revenge.' I'm not going to trace the history here (because, as usual, it is a theological point distorted), but there was a very strong feeling that God was of that stripe. After all, he was so insulted by disobedience that he could not be appeased and unlock the heavenly gates until reparation was made by an equal (his own Son.) In an equally distorted notion of the imitation of Christ, I suppose, we learnt as well that being one of God's friends got one into further trouble. I've never quite known why, but it seemed that, the friendlier one became with God, the more suffering he sent.

This comes from a part of human nature I have not yet begun to grasp. (We always tend to create God in our own image, or that of authority figures. We cannot grasp his true nature - he's too simple for us.) Many people, and by no means only those who are religious, love to be punished. Nor will thousands of years of recorded history keep them from being convinced that evil, weakness, whatever, all could be wiped out were there sufficient punitive measures in place.

Skip ahead forty years from the time of the initial story ... and here I sit, having travelled a bit on the Internet once again. I'll not explain how I ended up at such sites, but I noticed the very strong trend for those in discussion groups to love the bully among them - the more insulting, the better. They seem convinced that, whatever their 'goals' are, they must fear abuse from an authority in order to meet them.

There is one site (to which I shall not link, lest anyone think I agree with the views presented - though it contains a library of texts I sometimes find helpful) which has a 'Question and Answer' section on matters of Catholic faith. (Most of the questions have to do with guilt - and that guilt is mostly about sex in marriage. No, I don't know why one would feel guilt about that, either - but I did have a sense of the folk hero here, bragging about the naughtiness and somehow wanting punishment.) One question had to do with whether a baptised infant who died would have the same place in heaven as his parents, who'd like to meet him.

My answer, of course, would have been that we have no knowledge of the true nature of the afterlife, and let's not be so literal. (And please spare me snippets from 'life after life' books, since, to my knowledge, all have been authored by people who are alive.) But this dreadful site stressed that, though no one would have pain of loss in heaven, the child could not be expected to have as high a place as his parents because they had a longer life of 'suffering and penance.' So, the idea of the God who relishes punishing still endures...

Why do we cling to this? Perhaps it is immaturity - or having learnt, early if not correctly, that punishing is a great act of love from a caring parent. There is no answer. Yet letting go of such images is the only way to mature in faith.

Then again, maybe I intellectualise too much. There may be those who fear what messes they'd be in were they to lose an image of a punishing hand keeping them from them.