East of Eden

Poetry holds something beyond conceptual thought—and by the last, of course, I mean the rigorous, the philosophical kind. The poet tries to capture something elusive. He or she has been inspired. The act is a kind of mirror-making. The mirror is made of images drawn from sensory, actual, day-to-day experience. What it suggests is the not-quite-graspable. But if poetry then also mythographic works like Genesis. Both are subject to hermeneutics; we contemplate them; we try to extract meanings implicit but not sharply visible in them. Some view hermeneutics negatively: dissect the apple, analyze it chemically. The knowledge never tells you how an apple tastes. But we engage in hermeneutics all the time—even if the word is unfamiliar. We’re always pondering the meaning of our own intuitions and experiences.

The hermeneutic task I set myself today is to examined Genesis 3:19, the last verse of what is known as “the curse on man and woman” after their disobedience. It is interpreted to mean that death first appears in human experience after the fall. Yes. That’s an interpretation. The verse says (Revised Standard):

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The verse certainly doesn’t say: “Although my original plan was that you should live forever, always young, I’m now introducing a change. Your body will decay and you will die. You came from matter and back to that state you shall go.”

But then verses 22-24 complicate matters. They are much more specific. Do they already represent a bit of hermeneutics that got included into the myth itself later? Here is the passage:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

A curious verse. Adam had not been forbidden to eat of the tree of life. But now, now that he had knowledge, it was time to prevent him? Such readings of the Torah, of course, suggested to Paul (in Romans, for instance) that death came with the fall—not because of knowledge so much but because the fruit of the tree of life was then also denied—by denial of access to it.

But no. I’m not talking tongue in cheek here. This is a myth, a poetic statement. The sensory images of trees, magic although they are, are symbols easy for ordinary minds to grasp and to imagine. They simplify through images. They suggest the gist of things. The distance between human and the divine is symbolized simply as the distance between the lord-owner of the rich estates and the poaching peasant who doesn’t know his place. Genesis 3 is not a problem for the poet. Two big intuitions are wrapped up in it and turned into a story without too careful a logical parsing. One is the wayward, willful, selfishness of man. Another is an explanation of our current condition. One is said to cause the other. No critical analysis of each verse was contemplated by the writers—or, indeed, undertaken by them—much less the isolation of single verses as if they were hard facts like gravity.

There is no hint here, not the faintest, that after his body returns to the dust Adam’s soul shall rise into the heavens there to be judged. Materialists might find great comfort in Genesis 3. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return is rather, you might say, orthodox materialism. Isn’t it? But the poetry of humanity is not exhausted by reading Genesis. Genesis was one take on the subject. There are others. In some death may be viewed as a great blessing—rescuing the individual who, like Paul, in Romans 7:24, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

More Notes on The Fall

The story of the Fall commences roughly on the third page of Genesis; where it falls depends on print size. It is the very opener of the story. The story of Creation sketches in the setting, but the setting is not elaborated. We hear something more about Adam and Eve and how they came about, but nothing like a history of their lives in Paradise. The human events begin with the Fall. If this were not our own at least inherited myth—inherited by way of the decline of the last civilization and the myth’s acceptance by our own, in Christendom—but there promoted to the status of revealed truth—thus if we see it from the outside, objectively, it would be quite correct to surmise that it is a myth attempting to explain the mystery of human existence and suffering. At the same time, it recognizes our very high state in the order of nature, our transcending capacities—while also explaining the dark side, man’s war against himself and nature and, above all, the absolutely unavoidable—death.

We might also read the third chapter of Genesis as a head-shaking and despondent look back to another and ancient time. Tiny pockets of “paradise” have actually survived into ours: primitive hunting and gathering societies (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Amazon region, some island societies). The Fall in Genesis could thus also be read as a view of the transition between such primitive societies and the later agricultural dispensation, the last vastly more complex and riddled with conflict. The herding phase was an intermediate between the two here and there. That this surmise is also correct is evident. Agriculture is prominent in Genesis 3:17—and it is the new thing; it is part of the curse.

Now, of course, we tend to view the primitive as holy, the complex as riddled with evil. The higher the knowledge, the more complex the society always tends to be. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is thus—shifting to another culture—the opening of Pandora’s box. But sentimentality is clearly at work here. To know anything genuinely means to live it. The hunting and gathering life undoubtedly is also just—life. What characterizes it, when we find it, is ample resources and low levels of conflict; those two are obviously linked. That we find it is already a kind of fall—at least for the people who’ve been found. The next thing you know, they’ll be greedily wanting gas-engines for their boats. After that, kiss paradise good-bye.

When I ponder it, the paradisaical state is present all around us as the animal kingdom. It is primitive society—but without the presence of mind. It lives without our form of consciousness, without history, and without memory. Animals don’t consciously notice death taking others; no fear of it is present—as it it’s also absent in little children. Thus the ultimate Fall is the rise of consciousness as such—and secondarily those transformations in the environment that cause knowledge to increase and also to sharpen. Knowledge is only mildly present in the primitive, and always closely twinned with particulars; it is extraordinarily sharp (conceptual) in a vast, rich, and dying technological culture. Its level increases with every advance of civilization; conflicts multiply; and tools for giving it force become obscene, like atomic bombs.

Having said this much, the core issue sharpens. It is the stupefying observation that something sublime, like awareness, produces evil and the more it develops, the more its dark shadow grows. This is a real issue. Genesis attempts an explanation. The problem is disobedience. But Genesis’ explanation is paradoxical. The idea of obedience contains within it two crucial elements: freedom and knowledge. Adam and Eve knew something—before, as it were, they did. The knew about the Tree of Knowledge. They had been told about it. Something of the fruit of that tree had been given to them before Eve ever reached for that famous apple. The writers and editors of Genesis were people just like us—stupefied by the paradox of reality. And they, too, punted. The explanation must lie deeper than anything that we can now see from the shadows of this valley.

Blog posts should not grow into chapters. These comments will continue. I want to extract more from this, not least something more on death and its linkage to transcendence.