This time, I shall digress slightly to discuss what I wrote the last time: The "darkness" in John 1:5 – "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" – refers to human information and knowledge.

As I wrote in the early days of this column, the artist of the "San Damiano Crucifix" encountered by St Francis of Assisi depicted, at the top of the crucifix, a man holding a tube-like object with buttons, reaching out to hand it to Jesus Christ, who extends his hand from below.

I felt this must surely be the scroll described in the Book of Revelation as "sealed with seven seals" (Revelation 5:1). Since the central theme of this crucifix is the scene beneath the cross from the Gospel of John, Francis must undoubtedly have recognised that the San Damiano Crucifix revealed the manifestation of both the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation.

Reading "The Body of the Lord", the first theme of Admonitions, attributed to St Francis of Assisi, reveals that Francis gained a particular understanding of the Father's love and the Eucharist from the Gospel of John.

Meanwhile, in the second theme of the same Admonitions, "The Evil of Self-Will," his attention turns to the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" from Genesis. I believe Francis also read the Book of Revelation thoroughly. He may have contemplated the "dragon" of Revelation and the "serpent" of Genesis. Yet, in his time, some 800 years ago, clues to understanding what these represented would have been scarce.

The "dragon" of Revelation is described as "the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world" (12:9), and "the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan" (20:2), linking it to the “serpent” of Genesis 3. The "great dragon" of Revelation appears as if what the "ancient serpent" – that is, the serpent of Genesis – had evolved.

If we consider that after the woman and man were created from the first "man," information emerged between them, and that this information was the serpent of Genesis, then what the serpent of Genesis was becomes clear. All living creatures, once they become multiple, share information among individuals of the same species and evolve to optimise the preservation of their kind. Humans are no exception. However, the information that emerged among humans developed at a pace incomparable to other living creatures. The sensibility of Genesis, said to have been written over 25 hundred years ago, to liken human information to a "serpent" and perceive it as an "other" is truly remarkable.

If we interpret the dialogue between the first woman and the "serpent" depicted in Genesis chapter 3 as portraying how people assimilate information as knowledge (cf. Genesis 3:1–9), then the phenomenon experienced by that first "woman" resonates deeply with us today as we grapple with AI – an intelligence that competes with humanity.

Among those of us who interact with AI, I hear there are people whose sense of reality becomes blurred, leading them to mistakenly perceive it as an “entity with a life of its own” and become dependent upon it. Similarly, the first woman and man in Genesis, as they routinely shared the information they gathered, found their memories of the fruit of the tree forbidden by God to eat becoming increasingly vague, as follows.

God had caused the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to grow in the middle of the garden. Then God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (2:16-17). Yet the woman's recollection was that they could eat the fruit of the trees in the garden, but that "God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" (3:3). Human information had become mixed with God's words, altering her knowledge from what God's original command had been.

Amidst this discrepancy, doubt about God’s command arose in the woman's mind: "Did God truly say we must not eat from any tree of the garden...?" She likely vacillated between this doubt and her knowledge that "we can eat the fruit of the garden's trees...." Eventually, she recalled: "But God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die'."

In this situation, for a young person who had neither experienced nor witnessed death, it was easy to twist "lest you die" into "you will not die" (cf. Genesis 3:1-4). Furthermore, when she later came up with the reason, "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (3:5), a different reality became visible to her.

The text states: "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate" (3:6).

It was self-evident that the information exchanged between the two left a stronger impression on the woman's memory. Women, who participate in God's creation of humankind and are entrusted with wombs that nurture life for others, instinctively remain conscious of others' existence. Consequently, they possess strong communication skills and excel at sharing stories.

Although gender differences may not be apparent today, it is said that this very fact explains why humanity has survived history and achieved such development. Humanity has enabled large-scale cooperation through sharing stories.

After Jesus received baptism with water from John the Baptist, the Synoptic Gospels uniformly record the scene where Jesus "was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" (Matthew 4:1). Whilst the term or concept of "information" likely did not exist then, it seems that Jesus, being God, perceived the devil as an other, just as in the Genesis scene, revealing that it was human information, and thereby showing us an example of how to confront it.

Even Jesus, who was God yet possessed human flesh, must have encountered various forms of information from the moment He was born into this world. Yet, even if human information was incorporated into Jesus' memory and became part of his knowledge, it was completely distinct from the Father's will he himself had brought with him, which we understand from the dialogue in the wilderness scene.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus began to reveal to his disciples that he must suffer greatly, be killed, and rise on the third day, Peter took him aside and began to admonish him. Then it says that Jesus turned and rebuked him, saying, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men" (Matthew 16:23). The expression "of man" refers to human information.

I believe Jesus specially considered and trained His disciples who accepted His word and believed in His name to distinguish between His words and human information. John the Evangelist wrote, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it," precisely because he had that experience. Jesus would never have failed to leave a way for future believers to share that experience.

Maria K.M.