Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The next time he invokes them man has fallen. The man has become like one of us, to know good and evil , says the Lord, and immediately afterward the names of the mysterious ones are made known: he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubim .

So right from the beginning there was a link between the angels and the Lord on the one hand, and human beings on the other. God’s statements and man’s creation and fall, respectively, both say something about the nature of this connection, according to Bellori. Both are concerned with change (in the first, man is created from nothing, in the second, he moves from innocence to knowledge) and about similarity (in the first man is created like “us,” in “our” image, in the second, he changes to become even more like “us”). The fact that similarity wasn’t a stable quantity in the relations between the human and the divine but was, right from the start, subject to the laws of change is of prime importance in Bellori’s theory of angels as developed in On the Nature of Angels . Man was created in the image of the divine, the two resembled one another, at the same time each stood on their own side of a divide, that of creator and created. When man ate from the tree of knowledge, the similarity increased, whereupon banishment made it clear that there was a limit to this.

Until that time the divine had functioned as one and the same, manifested only in the Lord’s use of the word “us,” but with the transgression the divine became differentiated: out of the Lord’s all-powerful shadow stepped the cherubim. It’s no accident that they were first mentioned then. Prior to the fall the difference between the human and the divine was absolute, after the fall it became fluid; a wide area opened between the two and in order to demarcate the boundary zone, the Lord was obliged to peel off the cherubim from the divine entity. And thus, as simultaneous guardians and representatives of the divine outer limits, the cherubim made their entrance onto the world’s stage for the first time.

But who were they? Where did they come from? What did they look like? And how long were they here?

Apart from the cherubim necessarily being trusted and in possession of a certain bodily strength or power, it’s impossible to make any final comment on the nature of the cherubim from what is written in the story of the fall. It isn’t even possible to say anything definite about the duration of their task. But certain assumptions are more likely than others. We know that the great flood covered the whole world with water, and as the Garden of Eden isn’t listed as an exception, it’s probable that it was flooded, too. It’s inconceivable that the cherubim would have continued their watch then. It is also unthinkable that their duty could have ended earlier without scripture mentioning or giving reasons for it. One may, therefore, conclude that the cherubim guarded the tree of life in the time between the fall and the flood. The lack of any description of their outward appearance may be because their guardianship of the tree of life first began after the banishment from paradise and that as a result they hadn’t been seen by the first human beings. But this need not mean they were never seen. A fragment of the Apocryphal writings found outside the Mesopotamian town of Mari in 1954 concerns the existence of the first human beings after the fall, and it tells the story of how Abel made camp one evening on the edge of the forest surrounding the Garden of Eden, where, despite his father’s absolute injunction, he decided to search for the tree of life. No more than fifteen lines of the narrative remain, it stops dead as if on a precipice with the sentence, And Abel saw the light of the angels .

Naturally Antinous Bellori knew nothing of the existence of this narrative, which once must have constituted a deeper understanding of the circumstances that led to the fratricide, but even if he had, it is unlikely that it would have occasioned any substantial changes in On the Nature of Angels . The fact is that the fragment only strengthens Bellori’s representation both of the actual geographically traceable existence of paradise and of the cherubim’s physical presence in the world in the time after the creation. The Lord’s ordering them to keep watch over the way that led to the tree of life indicates that mankind hadn’t moved far away but had presumably settled down in the vicinity. So they were able to have a foot in two worlds, the lost one, which they saw all the time but could never reenter, and the one they had, in which they lived and worked every day. For the first generation, paradise must have represented the real life, something they always harked back to, whereas life in the valley where they tilled the soil must have had something second rate about it. For the next generation, on the other hand, the opposite would have been true. For them, life in the valley was the real one. If they looked with longing at the forests bordering the Garden of Eden, it was a longing for the unknown that filled them.

ABEL HAD seen the glow from the cherubim in the sky above the hills in the west all through his childhood, an almost imperceptible quivering of the air during the day, which at dusk began to glow brighter and brighter as darkness fell, until the reddish gleam of the flames rolled back and forth beneath the sky during the night. He might have imagined that the black hills were actually coals, which the evening breezes blew into life, and must have on more than one occasion stood staring at this enticing light, which his father would never talk about, with aching muscles after a long day’s work, leaning on a pick or a hoe while the voices of the others, going in to eat, died away behind him and soon were completely absent. He no longer thinks about what causes the light, just as he doesn’t consider what makes the trees grow on the hillsides, it’s part of his surroundings and when, evening after evening, he stares at it, it’s because he finds it beautiful. Just as he finds the starry sky, the bottom of the river, the fish that flash there, beautiful.

He turns and glances over toward the houses lying beneath a hill on the other side of the field, and he sees that the figures, at this distance little bigger than beetles, will soon be home. All day their voices have echoed across the field. All day their bodies have moved to and fro over the ground, bending down, picking up stones, placing them in baskets, carrying the baskets over to the forest’s edge, emptying them, or stood swinging a sledgehammer at one of the great rocks, or dug out earth from around one of the tree stumps, or lain stretched out on the grass beneath the trees at noon, eating or sleeping. And it’s as if they’ve held him captive, for only now, now that they’re no longer there, does the landscape he’s been in all day long reveal itself to him.

The undulating cornfield with its grayish, dusty surface glimmers almost golden in the sunshine. The lush crowns of the trees that grow between the field and the encircling mountains on the opposite side of the valley form one single band of green, on the slope close to him one could pick out individual species: aspen, alder, oak, willow, pine, spruce. The small, unique habitats they each support. The jutting ledge beneath the pine covered in places with dry, green moss, in others bare and bluegray, everywhere carpeted in yellow pine needles. The blooming rose-hip thicket that nestles close, the air above it heady with bumble-bees and wasps. Its roots reaching serpentinely across the mountain only to disappear into the earth nearby. The straight pine trunk blushing in the glow of the evening sun, the shadow it throws across undergrowth and bushes, up across the hillside. The grassy bank below still flecked with wintry yellow, the barely year-old saplings that grow there, delicate and seemingly uncertain, as if they’ve ventured onto an ice that is so thin that they don’t dare to go on, or have the courage to turn and retreat to the safety of the forest, but must simply stand there motionless and wait until someone comes to rescue them.