By Anthony Esolen

But first a note from Robert Royal: Professor Esolen provides a call for action today. And one action we need urgently, today - tomorrow is Sunday when no one should fundraise - is to get this funding for 2024 done. We'd like to finish by next Friday, for the Feast. Help that to happen. Donate. Today.

Now for Professor Esolen's column...

It's a hard time to be Catholic, but when have the times ever been easy? Still, I wish to recommend a course of action, or a habit of mind, to those among us who are apt to grow discouraged, hearing the ax laid to the temple door. Consider this verse, which I translate from the Hebrew: "And they were both naked, the man and his woman, and were not ashamed. And the serpent was shrewd, of all the living creatures of the field which the Lord God had made." (Genesis 2:25-3:1)

Sometimes it's good to be 'ārum, for "a prudent man ['adam 'ārum] conceals knowledge, but the heart of fools proclaims foolishness." (Proverbs 12:23) Saul's envy drove David into hiding, so the king told the Ziphites to find David's hideout and to reveal the identities of those who had seen him, "for it is told to me that he has become quite shrewd." (1 Samuel 12:23)

We sense in the proverb what we see plainly in the account of David, that we must be shrewd because the world is fallen. So our Lord instructed the disciples, whom he was sending as sheep among wolves, to "be as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves." (Matthew 10:16)

We are to guard against men who seek our destruction, while we bring the Gospel to those who will hear it, and in this subtle way, we will be unacknowledged friends sowing good wheat among the tares of the world.

But if we return to Adam and Eve in the garden, we see foolishness, not shrewdness. The serpent's ruse is to persuade Eve that the Creator is so stupid as to place in the center of the garden a tree that will overturn his intentions; that their Lord was himself a snake, lurking and hiding; that He lied when he said that if they ate the fruit they would die; and that He was powerless to prevent their becoming "like the gods."

All this appears crafty enough, though really rather banal, as if the serpent could denude the tree of God's providence and wisdom. The serpent is the first reductionist. While he praises the tree for its supposed power to confer wisdom, he reduces God to a rhetorical trickster and wisdom itself to a commodity you can gain by material means. Adam and Eve are thus the first idolaters, who say in their hearts, "God is not here to notice," which is ultimately to deny that He is God at all.

When their eyes are opened, they notice they are naked, and that brings shame and fearfulness into their hearts. The same Adam to whose wisdom God had submitted the naming of the beasts - and the word shem, name, so often expressive of sanctity and solemnity in Scripture, is predicated first of Adam's naming - is reduced to cowering.

When he and the woman hear the voice of God - the first hearing in Scripture - they hide, even with the loincloths they have sewed out of fig leaves. "I heard your voice in the garden," says Adam, "and I feared, for naked was I, and I hid myself" (Genesis 2:10; 'ārum 'anochi, with heavy emphasis on both the adjective and the personal pronoun, whose first usage is here).

God is no miser of wisdom. He wants us to grow wise, but we do so by heartfelt obedience and deeper meditation upon his word, which, unlike the serpent, does not reduce, does not dismiss, does not envy.

Had God wanted us to remain barren of fruit, naked to the winds, he would not have made us in his image or blessed us with the command to increase and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and to exercise rightful dominion over all living creatures.

We must always assume that there is more to his words, more to his judgments, never less. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts," says ...