Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/236

 The only connected sense of the whole story according to the Book of Genesis, which is exactly the opposite of the church account, is this: God made man, but wished to leave him such as the animals were, who do not know the difference between good and evil, and so prohibited them from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At the same time, to frighten man, God deceived him, saying that he would die as soon as he ate of it. But man, aided by wisdom (the serpent), discovered the deception of God, found out the good and the evil, and did not die. But God was frightened by it and barred his way from the tree of life, to which, to judge from the same fear of God lest man should eat of that fruit, we must assume, according to the sense of the story, man will find his way, as he has found his way to the knowledge of good and evil.

Whether this story is good or bad is another matter, but thus it is told in the Bible. God, in relation to man in this story, is the same God as Zeus in relation to Prometheus. Prometheus steals the fire, Adam the knowledge of good and evil. The God of these first chapters is not the Christian God, not even the God of the Prophets and of Moses, the God who loves men, but a God who is jealous of his power, a God who is afraid of men. And it is the story about this God that the Theology had to harmonize with the dogma of the redemption, and so a jealous and evil God is combined with God the Father, of whom Christ taught. Only this reflection gives a key to the blasphemy of the chapter. If we do not know what it is all needed for, we cannot understand why it was necessary to misinterpret, contort (directly departing from the text) the simplest, most naïve, and profound story, and to make of it a conglomeration of contradictions and absurdities. But let us suppose that the story is correct as told by the Theology: what follows from it?