by David John
Thoughts on Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and the darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”
The “deep” here is feminine in the various languages as is its other translation “abyss.” It is related to the goddess Tiamat in Babylonian mythology in the sense that she is the god of this kind of deep and abyss. And the spirit will bring order over this abyss.
The deep introduces into one’s imagination the demons who mediate a finality of death and destructive chaos. Sin returns one to the deep. It seems to point to a disordered tendency within the depths of the universe, and thus one wonders if demons and satan are the real destructive dynamism of this tendency. When it then rises into the human soul, it is concupiscence.
However, in the created order itself, its natural propensity is toward increasing intelligibility, being, and goodness. Thus it should natural rise up into life and good order.
This is the beginning of salvation history. The fallen angels are the great source of the fall of the human race. They have deformed the good order of all material creation so that it to needs to be made into a new earth. The earth is a feminine word as is the deep (the heavens are masculine by the way). She should be fertile. She should be the rich soil from which all else rises up. The deep should be as well. And when this awakens into the human heart it starts not as a fallen will, but as a man and woman rightly ordered in a garden that God had to set apart within the world. And so they had to be tempted inside and out. Pride and envy inside. A serpent out. In a fashion, it was the anti-masculine, anti-finality, that was at work. Finality regards the movement of potency to act. But this was not to act. And finality always operates within a fertile field, and it operates to enhance and protect the fertility of that field so that more life will rise up. But in this case, the anti-finality works to make the fertile field less fertile. It works to deform the abyss, the deep, the earth, the woman, so that she is not fertile, first in obedience to God, and then to the one who is suppose to love her, and then to her own children, and the rest of creation. And of the man, it works to deform him so that he become one who no longer moves a potency to act, no longer seeks to protect and enhance fertility, but rather brings on death.
So just as the Spirit breaths over the waters to create, so the Spirit has to breath over the fallen earth and fallen man to recreate a new earth and a new man. And with a new man, will come a new gift from man’s side while that man hangs on the cross. Just as the rib came from man’s side to build a woman, so now his spilled blood and water will build a new woman who will give birth to a new earth that will ascend into a new heaven.