With his sins forgiven and his guilt swept away, Enos asks a crucial question in Enos 1:7: “Lord, how is it done?”
Enos has observed the effect—he knows he has been forgiven—but he doesn't yet know the cause. How was he forgiven? And why?
In this way, Enos is like all of us. At birth, he passed through the veil that divides “now” from “before” and, thus, he passed through the veil that separates this world's branching effects from their root causes. Having passed through the veil, Enos suffers from the fact that, as Baruch Spinoza puts it in the appendix to Part 1 of his Ethics, “all men are born ignorant of the causes of things.”1
The problem that results is threefold.
Ignorant of causes, Enos is ignorant of God, his first cause.
Ignorant of causes, Enos is ignorant of his father, one of his nearest causes....
