In a previous post I talked about constraints that give rise to creativity. If you have less to work with you have to work harder and be more innovative. Limitations are the name of the game, and they confront us everywhere. Rules, for example, limit what we are able to do and force us to be more creative in our endeavors. In football, if defensive linemen were allowed to hold or trip their opponents, the quarterback would always have plenty of time to scan the field and find a receiver, so rules are in place that guarantee he will never be able to rest secure. So also, a professional basketball game without a shot clock has the potential to devolve into a mind numbing game of keep-away, which is almost as hard to watch as those interminable contests in which two tired, sweating behemoths clutch-hug each other desperately in the final third of a fifteen round heavyweight boxing match.

Isn't that just like us humans, to reside within the confines of an existential paradox? If we are too confined, we are enslaved; if too free, we are bored, a conundrum pointed out in the story of Zeus and Ganymede. Zeus appeared to the Trojan prince in the form of an eagle. Boy and bird conversed for hours at the vaunted gates of Troy, and Zeus became so enthralled he made the kid immortal and carried him off to Olympus as his cupbearer... and then promptly lost interest in him, for it was the boy's mortal perspective on the world which attracted Zeus, a view no immortal could appreciate. In typical god fashion Zeus destroyed the very thing he was attracted to.

What a bore immortality must be! We humans, we thanatoi, have that one essential limitation—death. We are, in Heidegger's happy phrase, being-toward-death, because everything we do, consciously or not, is done with an eye toward the fact that we will not be here one day. Suffering and death, with their constraints, define us.

Nietzsche once formulated an alternative garden of Eden myth: In six days god created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested... in the form of a serpent, beneath the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Nietzsche was asking us to imagine the mind-numbing boredom of Paradise. Day after day of perfection. No striving for anything, no fulfillment, no desire unmet. Thus does heaven become hell. God then tried to make up for this unforeseen consequence by introducing The Fall, with its penalty, Death, thus giving humans something to strive for. Oddly enough we are then striving for the very thing we were trying to escape—eternal life! Eliot gives this poetic resonance in the Four Quartets (East Coker):

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere...

The fact that we have to fall from grace in order to gain it was neither lost on nor explained by the church fathers. Ambrose (in a quote often ascribed to Augustine) wrote:

O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae takem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!

[O truly necessary sin of Adam, which by the death of Christ is done away! O happy fault, which merited such and so great a Redeemer!]

Nietzsche would not be impressed with such blather. If paradise was a bore in the beginning it will be a bore in the end. Putting heavenly bliss in the future like a carrot on a stick degrades the present, for it removes the constraints that make us strive to better this world and turns those who embrace such claims into empty shells like those Olympians of old, who eventually faded into the mists of time without ever contributing anything of value to society.

We humans, like the football quarterback, can never rest secure; death, like a blitzing linebacker, is constantly in our peripheral vision, but in that insecurity lies all the hope and glory of the modern world.