Empathy, Effeminacy, and the Fall of Man

Introduction

A few years back, Joe Rigney made what might be called “an empathy splash” when he and I discussed the whole subject on Man Rampant. And it has been something of a recurring theme in the time since then. It keeps coming back up because every so often someone will say or do something that will make the goddess angry.

Toby Sumpter recently weighed in with some really valuable thoughts on the whole subject, which you can find here. And Joe’s recent book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, also treats the subject in greater depth. That book is selling briskly, indicating that not a few people have had to deal with the realities of this kind of emotional sabotage. It’s a thing, in other words. And anybody who is familiar with the insights of Rene Girard and Edwin Friedman will be able to see how Joe has done a really good job setting forth those insights in an appropriate biblical setting.

I bring all this up because as I was reading some of latest discussion of the topic, something occurred to me, and it seemed to me to be an important something. Not only is untethered empathy “a” sin, but it is the primal sin, the root of all our sin, the ur-sin. How so?

Back to the Garden

If you follow Milton’s reasoning on this topic, as I do, the reason Adam ate the forbidden fruit was because he didn’t want to lose Eve. He was forced to choose between the authoritative Word from God and his feeling of identification with his wife. In the Argument at the beginning of Book IX, Milton says, “Adam, at first amazed, but perceiving her lost, resolves through vehemence of love to perish with her, and, extenuating the trespass, eats also of the fruit.”

The fatal words there are: “so forcible within my heart I feel . . .” On the one hand, Adam had the requirement that his Creator had plainly given him:

There is no room for maneuvering there. God put the tree there, and He also put that tree off limits. The prohibition was as obvious as the tree was. “This is the one thing in the world that you must not do.”

And so on the other hand, over against that plain command, given in large print, what did Adam have? A feeling in his heart. Empathy with Eve. He had a case of the feels, and it was forcible. Remember that Babylon Bee headline: “Couple Follows Their Hearts; Billions Dead.”

If untethered empathy is defined as complete identification with the plight and outlook of someone else, independent of any objective truth that God has established through His Word or in the world, then the thing that caused Adam to follow Eve was precisely this.

When the Fall Happened

So we know from Scripture what the sin was. The sin was the eating of the fruit, that being the thing that God had expressly forbidden them to do. So that was the sin that plunged our race into darkness and vanity. That was the point when the Fall happened, when Adam ate. He was the one who had been given the command, and Paul tells us that he was the one who brought sin into the world, not the woman. When our first mother ate the fruit, everything was in a perilous state, but the Fall had not yet occurred.

The offense “of one” is clearly the offense of Adam. It was not through the offense of Eve, and neither was it through “the offense of two.” That is what the context demands. The Fall is what happened when the human race fell, and the human race fell when the head of the human race, Adam, disobeyed the command.

And so we must distinguish between sin happening in the world, and the world crashing. Sin occurred before the Fall did. Paul is very clear that sin, human sin, existed in the world before the Fall occurred. But that sin was not sufficient to wreck everything.

When Eve was beguiled, she was sinning. When she listened to the serpent, she was sinning. When her mind was corrupted away from the simplicity of obedience, she was sinning. But the world was still unfallen. Sin was in the world, but the world was not in sin yet. The situation was dire, but recoverable.

Not only so, but when Adam was standing at the tree, wavering, that was not morally neutral either. To entertain thoughts of sinning is incipient sinning. To reach for the fruit is to sin, but it is still not the same thing as eating the fruit. Had Adam reached for the fruit, and then pulled back, horrified at himself, and confessed his fault to the Lord, I don’t believe that would have constituted a Fall. Something would need to be done about it, obviously, but I don’t believe that God would have needed to rectify it in the same way as He addressed the Fall through the passion of Christ.

Confronted with the fact that Eve had eaten from the tree, what should have Adam done? Was there anything righteous that he could have done at that point? Accusing her, and waiting for the Lord to take her away in handcuffs seems wrong. Holding back from eating himself, and waiting to see if she died later on seems a bad look also. So what should he have done? The only consistent thing for a federal head to do in such a situation would be to do what the second Adam in fact did do for us. Adam should have gone to the Lord and confessed that his wife had eaten the fruit, and to plead with the Lord to take him instead. But instead of Eve following Adam in repentance, Adam followed Eve into rebellion.

The point here is that prior to the Fall, there were options.

Temptation, Sin, and Rebellion

There is no sin in the mere fact of temptation. The Lord Jesus was tempted, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15). And even though we must contend with our remaining sinfulness, in a way that Jesus did not have to do, there is even a point for us where a particular desire is not yet sin.

The pattern is first desire, then sin, and then death. The first appearance of a desire is not sin, but it introduces the time of temptation. That is when the starter pistol fires. If that temptation is not immediately rejected, while it is not yet the sin that is being urged, it nevertheless becomes a sin in its own right. And there, out in front, is the sin proper, still beckoning.

To illustrate: say that a man is minding his own business, working on his computer. He goes to look something up, and is confronted instead with a pop-up ad, inviting him to some porn site. If the female issuing the invitation is attractive to him, but he clicks it off immediately, saying no, he has not sinned. The flammable material was there, and he knew it was there, but he did not follow it into sin. Say that he tells his wife about it, and she hopefully asks whether he found that woman repulsive and ugly. When he says, “well, no, she was very attractive, actually” and his wife bursts into tears, we can see that we are getting tangled up by a fundamental confusion on this point. She is not understanding the nature of temptation.

At the same time, if he spent fifteen minutes staring at the pop-up ad, deciding whether or not to go to the porn site, and he eventually decides not to, then while he did not commit the sin that he was being enticed to commit, he nevertheless did commit another one. Temptation is to be rejected, not rolled around in. He does not need to confess the sin of going to the porn site, because he didn’t go there. But he does need to confess the sin of indulging the temptation, tempting the devil to tempt him further. That he does need to confess.

Sin in a Perfect World

So then, back to the Garden. How was it possible for sin to arise in a perfect world? In our fallen state, we have to contend with the world, the flesh, and the devil. Our first parents did not have to deal with any remaining sin within them, but they did have the world, and they did have the devil. How the devil first sinned, how the devil got that way in a perfect Heaven, creates a similar problem, only more challenging, and that would be the subject for another time.

And so there were certain inducements, certain allurements, that drew Eve to her sin, and then another set of allurements that set Adam up for his rebellion. The force of temptation for Eve was worldliness, and the force of temptation for Adam was empathy.

We know the draw for Eve was worldliness by placing two passages of Scripture side by side. Genesis tells us what “the woman saw.” She saw that the tree was “good for food,” “pleasant to the eyes,” and desirable because it would “make one wise,” and so she took and ate (Gen. 3:6). Line this up with what John tells us about the nature of worldliness. He says that we are not to love the world, or the things of the world, those things being the “lust of the flesh,” “lust of the eyes,” and the “pride of life” (1 John 2:16). That’s a perfect match right there, and so the woman sinned when she ate the fruit. But the woman sinned before she sinned, and the initial sin, the thing that deceived her, was the lure of worldliness.

And Adam sinned before he rebelled also, and that sin was the sin of empathy. The prohibition of the tree had been given to him before the creation of Eve. The tree is put off limits in Genesis 2:17 and Eve is not created until Genesis 2:21. Adam had the command directly from God, and so he sinned with his eyes open. He knew exactly what God had told him, and he knew exactly what Eve had done. His dilemma, therefore, had to do with a personal choice. Does he go with her and how she feels about it? Or does he do the hard and challenging thing, and remain steadfast in what God had told him to do?

I believe Milton was right. When Adam reached for the fruit, he was untethering himself from the sure word of God, and identifying himself completely with his wife and her outrageous behavior. He gave himself over to the sin of empathy, ate the fruit, and that is how the world went dark.

Effeminate Slackness

This is the archetype, it is the primal pattern. And our current crisis of untethered empathy is following this same pattern. In countless homes, in a multitude of therapy sessions, in the dictatorship of how pretty much anything “makes somebody feel,” a central driving problem is men following their wives instead of taking godly responsibility. Men who know better will often go along with absurdities rather than draw a line, an action which they know will result in a scene.

Now I know that to say anything like this is going to bring out the aggrieved, hissing something along the lines of “sure, that’s it, blame the women.” But that is not it at all. Let us continue to draw from Milton. He uses a striking phrase later on in Paradise Lost, when the angel is showing Adam the future of the human race. When the angel shows Adam the future seduction of men by the “daughters of men,” Adam’s initial response is to blame the women involved—”Man’s woe holds on the same, from Woman to begin.” The angel contradicts him. That is not it at all: “From Man’s effeminate slackness it begins.”