Abstract
From the very beginning, Adam is placed in the garden of Eden, he takes care of it and cultivates it. He works. Two of the trees have a name: the tree of life’ and ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam is allowed to eat the fruits of the tree of life and the other trees but not those of the second tree. And at this point Elohim says: It is not good for Adam to be alone. And Elohim made for Adam his counterpart. For the first time, in a creation that is still all good and beautiful, we find that there is something that is “not good”, namely, loneliness, a relational shortcoming. This is where one of the most striking and richest passages of Genesis starts. There is an assembly of animals and birds of the sky in front of Adam. Adam gives them their name, that is, he enters into a relationship with them, gets to know them and discovers their nature and mystery; but at the end of this procession of the non-human creation Adam is not satisfied because he has not yet found any creature that could stand by his side as his counterpart.
Death will come and will have your eyes.
(Cesare Pavese).
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Notes
- 1.
The structure of the 1,27 of Genesis contains in itself a clue about the relational nature of the image of God in human beings. It is the semitic rule of parallelism: in the first two lines the text puts in parallel ‘image of God’ and the ‘Adam’, and in the third final line the place of ‘Image of God’ is taken by ‘Man and Woman”: ‘(1) So God created mankind in his own image, (2) In the image of God he created them; (3) male and female he created them’ (Gen 1,27). – A redactional technique utilized to suggest that in this relation male-female is the full image of God. The Biblical anthropology is radically relational or personalist – the person, i.e. the individual in relation, founds also the spiritual value of the individual. I thank Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi for this suggestion.
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Bruni, L. (2019). Counterparts – From the Very Beginning. In: The Economy of Salvation. Virtues and Economics, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04082-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04082-6_2
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