East Meets West: Consumerism & Asceticism
Part 4: Communion with God and creation
Wherein your servant defends the moral goodness of self-interest.
The gift of self-interest
Especially among Christians, self-interest has a bad reputation. But this shouldn’t be the case. Or at least, we should be hesitant to equate self-interest with sin.
In the beginning, the pursuit of our own self-interest didn’t disrupt the peace of creation. Acting on our original hunger served the whole creation. In the beginning, human self-interest and the fulfillment of our physical and emotional needs revealed the nature and beauty of creation.
Let me explain.
A lonely man
God sees in the newly created Man what the Man doesn’t (at first) see in himself—that he is profoundly lonely.
It’s only after he engages and shapes the world around him, that the Man comes to realize that for all the beauty, wonder, and goodness of creation there isn’t a fit “help mate” for him. (Gen 2:20, KJV).
Only through a life of prayer and creative engagement with the creation (work) does the Man comes to know himself and so his need for human companionship. It is in response to Man’s new self-understanding that God creates the Woman (vv. 21-22, NKJV).
The equal but not fungible
The animal’s subservience to the Man is absent in the relationship between the Man and the Woman. And together as equals the First Couple gives a humanly meaningful shape to the creation. St Ephrem says “the woman was very diligent; she was also attentive to the sheep and cattle, the herds and droves that were in the field.”
Side by side, Ephrem says, the Woman works with the Man helping “with the buildings, pens, and with any other task she was capable of doing.” And so “He who was one in that he was Adam,” is now two because he has “been created male and female” (Commentary on Genesis 2.11).
So what went wrong?