Chapters 1-3 in the Book of Genesis have not fared well in our time. Modernist scripture scholars consign them to the oblivion of "poetry" stripped of any theological content. Yet these short chapters contain the essential foundational story which alone renders Christianity intelligible. Without an actual Fall of Man, redemption is unnecessary and Christ's sacrifice is pointless. To "demythologize" Genesis is to "demythologize" the rest of the Bible.

Genesis is particularly rich in the understanding of human nature. Man is a being unique in the cosmos embodying elements of nature and super nature unlike any other created being. Angels are pure intelligences or souls without bodies while animals are bodily without substantive souls. Most of nature is inanimate. Adam lived on the frontiers of time and eternity, both dimensions incorporated into a single creature. This fact permits us to understand the sense in which man is the ultimate object of divine creativity, the one to whom all creation leads as portrayed in the first creation story and, the very point of the creation of everything else in the second creation account. Adam is placed as the ontological mediator between nature and supernature and is thus critically important to the completion of God's plan. In thinking of these profound matters, we need to remember that God, in order to be the first cause of all that is, must be perfect, completely actual, as St. Thomas puts it . God is holy and pure in a way that is for us unimaginable. This means that God does not have to create but does so to share His goodness and to show forth His glory. Therefore, our human nature is an unconditional gift of divine love. Adam's dual nature consists in his origin. He is raised "from the dust", from the material being of nature. He comes from nature and thus represents nature to God. But his soul, his supernatural part, is infused or inspirited in him directly by God which means that nature is linked to God in a special way in man. Man and only man can consciously and, therefore, with gratitude represent the creation. Adam's naming of the animals shows that he alone knows them but that they do not know his name. Adam's role was to return the creation to God transformed in love. Adam was to rule nature as a king and to offer it to God in prayer as a priest.

We can thus say that this mediation of the creation via the priest/king Adam was the proper work of the human race: it was that for which we were made. But as Genesis Chapter 3 explains, Adam's sin converted work into toil. The bare necessaries of life would now have to be forcibly extricated from a reluctant nature. The Fall had three devastating effects on man: It destroyed the inner harmony of his soul by clouding reason and weakening his will. It destroyed that perfect communion of Adam and Eve by inducing mistrust. Finally, it set man and nature at odds. So deep is the wound of original sin that we can but barely imagine and remotely conceive the glory that we have lost.

At the heart of Catholic theology is the redemptive act of Christ on the cross as expiation for the sin of Adam thus effecting the reconciliation of man with God. The three effects of Original Sin remain. But now through the mediation of Christ and the sacramental life of the Church, man has a chance of salvation. And, of course, at the heart of this sacramental system is the Mass. While the theology of the Mass rightly focuses on the representation of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary, it is also important to see that the Mass restores to man the possibility of regaining some semblance of that natural work for which Adam was created. For if Christ is the new Adam and if the Church is His Mystical Body then when we offer the Mass with the priest, we are doing what Adam was meant to do. Bread and wine represent nature transformed and consciously offered to God as natural material set aside for a sacred purpose. In union with the priest, nature is substantially transformed into supernature. In union with the priest, we are part of that primal ontological mediation of nature and supernature for which the human race was created. Hence, the Mass restores, to the degree possible to fallen creatures, the dignity of work lost in Eden. Cardinal Newman understood this when he said that he could "attend Mass forever". Yes, the Mass is preeminently a supernatural act but we, when we offer the Mass, are never more fully human; never more fully what we were meant to be and what we will be for all eternity. To comprehend the Mass as the culmination of true human work is to order all other human work in its proper proportion.

Sin and death entail the ultimate futility of all purely human work. As St. Augustine puts it, we toil to retain the goods we love but even as we do so they slip away. These transitory works, good as they may be, are at best preliminary to the true work of offering the Mass. Nothing else that we will ever do on earth comes as close to perfecting us according to our nature. We are never as close to Eden; never as close to Heaven. For that brief time we glimpse what human work was meant to be. If the Mass is indeed the occasion of Eden regained, the culmination of human work, then no effort must be spared to make the Mass as solemn, majestic, and radiant as humanly possible.

Sadly, this conception of the Mass is quite remote from contemporary Catholic culture which sees liturgy as an occasion for good fellowship or as merely a "Sunday obligation". Poor Mass attendance, sloppy liturgical practices, all indicate a view of the Mass as peripheral to the meaning of human work. For many Catholics, at best, is a kind of cultural echo of the past, an artifact which constitutes a link with their ancestors. These reflections on that aspect of the Mass as the recovery of the dignity of human work lost in Eden, merely reconfirms the necessity of placing the Traditional Mass at the heart of reform of modern culture. In place of the false humanity offered by secular and theological liberalism which sees man as an end in himself, the Traditional Mass invites broken man to become again what he was meant to be in the beginning.

Dr. Phillips is Chairman of Una Voce Hartford and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.