In his quest for God or the Divine, man has two overarching impediments: his separation from Nature and the Problem of Evil. As it happens, both are interrelated or, at the very least, one inevitably derives from the other.
In Judaeo-Christian tradition, it was the Original Sin of Adam that led man - and woman - to be cast out of the earthly Paradise, the famous garden east of Eden. While theologians have endlessly debated the exact definition of the sin involved, a literal reading of the Genesis account in the Bible forces us to accept that it was Adam’s refusal to obey God’s injunction against eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
God did not ban Adam from eating of the Tree of Life (mentioned as being distinct from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) and it is to that tree that we will return later in this Introduction. For now I will say only that the Tree of Life is described more fully in Revelation, where we are told
“On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
Equally as important to the deliberations of the theologians is the question of how to characterize the Expulsion. Much has been made of the notion that while in the Garden Adam and Eve were, essentially, hunter/gatherers, and their “transition” to life outside the earthly paradise implied an adoption of an agrarian lifestyle. This is clever, but it entirely misses the point of the forbidden fruit’s true significance.
God’s threat promising death to Adam if he eats of the fruit has been misinterpreted. Everything in Nature dies and this was also true of the plants and animals in the Garden. But – and this is of critical importance in understanding the Genesis account – none of the creatures were aware of death. This is implicit in the Biblical account, for the serpent tells Eve “You will not die [at least not right away], for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
As death is the primary evil, it is obvious that Adam and Eve as residents of the Garden are not aware of it. Or, if we view death from the perspective of animals who have not developed consciousness and the ability to reason, who live on a purely instinctive level, death is a state that occurs, but is not understood, not conceptualized, and which cannot be anticipated and thus cannot be feared. Survival instinct is merely an evolutionary adaptation, a genetically encoded means of ensuring a reproduction rate sufficient to offset species loss due to death. In Nature, the purpose of life is to continue life. It is only humans (so far as we know!) who insist that existence must have a meaning.
I have long maintained that while Adam and Eve lived in the Garden, they were akin to the other animals. In other words, they lacked consciousness and the ability to reason. Yes, the creatures of the Garden suffer – supremely so – and they are all subject to the horrid, though often protracted evil of death, but they experience these things only as present sensation and without a foreknowledge that permitted dread.
So how does this view change our interpretation of the ramifications of the Expulsion?
Well, before we can attempt to answer that question, we must take a close look at how Christianity decided to tackle it – and why they chose their peculiar method of reconciliation with God.
We must look at two sources – one given to us early in the creation of Christianity and the other much later, in the medieval period.
We all know that the Crucifixion of Christ somehow negated Adam’s sin. Although, how exactly this works is more than a bit of a mystery. One thing we can say is that once we ignore the inanities of the Church (and its Protestant offshoots), the placement of Christ on the Cross is a reversal of the plucking of the forbidden fruit from the tree. That this is so is made manifest in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Varagine, where we are told that the wood used to make Christ’s cross was taken from stock that descended from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To drive this point home, many medieval artists portrayed Adam’s skull at the base of the Cross in their paintings.
A full appreciation of what is happening during the Crucifixion can only grasped when we remember that Christ according to the Gnostics (a “heretical” sect eradicated by the early Church) was a man who was the embodiment of gnosis or knowledge, specifically knowledge of the Divine. Thus Jesus as the gnosis-fruit, placed back upon the Cross, negated the picking of the gnosis-fruit from the Tree.
To many, this is a startling realization. And it gives birth to a major problem. For if man in the Garden was not man, but one of the lower animals, and his expulsion from Nature is a metaphor for his achieving knowledge, then how was he to go about forsaking that knowledge so that he could return to the Garden? For if he can’t find a way to return to the Garden, how can he possibly ever again walk with God? And beyond that, how can his developing consciousness possibly be construed as a sin? Especially when it was something that occurred without his complicity, and therefore must have been a process initiated and overseen by God himself?
This point was taken up, oddly enough, by Dante in his Divine Comedy. According to Dante, the poet was able to be guided by Virgil, symbolic of Human Reason, until he came to the threshold of the Earthly Paradise, i.e. the Garden east of Eden. From that point on Virgil could not set foot. Instead, Dante must resort to the assistance of Beatrice, who represented Hope, Love and Faith. If he wished to make it to Heaven, he had to first successfully traverse the Garden.
In no uncertain terms, Dante is here saying that whoever possesses Human Reason, i.e. our brand of consciousness and self-awareness, cannot enter Nature. This is an impossibility. We must instead rely upon emotion, most particularly emotion that stems from deep-seated, primitive, one might say instinctual impulses. Emotion that produces a state of being that is not dependent on logic or science and is, indeed, antithetical to intellectualism in general.
Now, there are those who say I have presented Dante’s case unfairly. That reason (Virgil), informed by the three main Christian virtues (Beatrice), is just as important in achieving gnosis. But Dante himself nixes this notion when he insists on placing Virgil and other non-Christian worthies in Limbo, a location not of torment, but of eternal separation from God.
What we have, then, in Christian theology, is a system that must, in its promotion of Salvation, either implicitly or explicitly deny Human Reason. If any doubt of this remains, we need only look at Church history (or the history of Christianity in general) to see its centuries-long preoccupation with fighting intellectual progress and scientific discoveries. This battle has been engaged in with vigor from the beginning and is still is evidence today.
“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:14-15)
That statement, put in the mouth of Christ, is quite revealing. For children are ignorant, naïve, fully trusting, and their minds are composed of whimsy and fancy and imagination. They are utterly impressionable and a blank slate, waiting to be filled with lessons from their adult teachers. No one is more susceptible to religious indoctrination than children. It is only with the advent of an adult reasoning capacity, the product of a proper education with an emphasis on critical thinking and the development and lifelong cultivation of a discriminatory faculty, that children suddenly become ineligible for the kingdom of God.
I’ve already touched upon the problem of evil in western religious thought. The problem only arises because we insist on a personal God, of course. And, more specifically, the God who has been presented to us in Judaeo-Christian tradition. In brief, the problem of evil can be summarized as follows:
1) Evil exists. This is obvious to anyone who has experience of it, or who looks to Nature. Evil can be defined as not only moral evil, which brings certain consequences, but as evil that occurs outside the bounds of the moral choices made by man.
2) If God exists, and is all powerful, why does he allow evil to be in the world? The ‘free will’ argument is inadequate, as it will only allow for evil befalling a freely made choice. Natural evils, evils of suffering and death that are not a result of freely made moral decisions, cannot be accounted for in the free will argument. Instead, the religious must resort to “tests of faith” (see Job – as if God were so petty and insecure as to require such in order to inflate his own poor self-esteem!) or acts of punishment for perceived sins (Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind) or omission of worship (“I the Lord your God am a jealous God”, Exodus 20:5) as explanations for the occurrence of random incidents of natural evil. Lessons must be taught and punishments inflicted so that we might avoid hubris and be perpetually reminded of our inborn guilt as sinners.
3) If God exists, but allows evil to happen, it is because he is not a kind and loving God, but a cruel and vindictive one. There is evidence from ancient literature that Satan was considered a member of his heavenly court, and that the “Adversary” was used by God to inflict suffering on man in order to enforce belief through fear of retribution or to bolster God's ego.
4) If God exists, but is not all-powerful, i.e. his influence on our lives is in everlasting conflict with a negative force of equal power (cf. Persian dualism), then we cannot rely on God for protection. It would be a 50-50 world of good and evil. And we mortals would have no idea as to which side of the equation we would end up on. The notion that God is not all-powerful is often used to explain natural disasters that kill as many non-sinners or believers as sinners and non-believers. Surely, it can't be God who is to blame! It must be Satan who did this to us. And if Satan is equal to God in strength, why not swear our allegiance to him? That way, we can do anything we wish - and be rewarded for doing so.
5) The concept of Hell (eternal punishment for a finite crime) was invented to enforce good behavior and adherence to the creed. It also fulfills a profound human psychological need. As we know all too well, behavior is determined by a combination of nature and nurture, by genetics and experience. To damn someone to eternal punishment for a sin which arises from accident of birth and circumstance is not only supremely unfair, but an absurdity. Yet because we humans demand “justice” (all too often our euphemism for “vengeance”), and we are often denied such in the here and now, we look for it and expect it in the hereafter. For if someone does not have to pay for his or her crimes now, then justice (read “vengeance”) has not been served. And that would mean that the world is not just and does not punish the wicked as we would have them punished. Somehow, Christians who tout love and an all-loving, compassionate, merciful God have no problem with condemning sinners to eternal torment. This is something that may satisfy base human needs, and may, incidentally, act as a fear-based deterrent to committing sin, but it is not something that any loving, caring, forgiving and accepting human being should ever condone. It is also ironic. Threatening deposition in Hell is no different than a parent threatening corporal punishment to a child for bad behavior. Both are equally reprehensible. To ascribe to God qualities that belong to a father with anger management issues is to lower him to our level of gross imperfection.
Having outlined the problem of evil, it should be obvious to my reader that all of it is a product of our Expulsion from the Garden and our attempt to make sense of that Expulsion. For once we became fully conscious, fully self-aware beings, we were able to understand good and evil. And when we were able to do that, we were able to INVENT the concept of God and to then consider what role he plays in our experience of suffering and death.
What this amounts to is this: Christians (or, indeed, any member of a religious order who sees Nature in a negative light, or as illusion leading to suffering, etc.) are by dint of their belief forced to accept the insoluble problem of evil, which causes them unending distress – or denial. This discomfiture is forced upon them because they begin with the premise that there is an omniscient, omnipresent deity who is someone wholly good, while the world he created is pretty much completely bad. The contortions, the agonies, of thought and feeling required to maintain such a belief need not be recounted; they are a matter of record, stretching back centuries.
This is where we find ourselves: locked in a world of sin, pain and death. We cannot find our way free precisely because we cannot abjure reason and we cannot dispense with consciousness.
But might there be a way out of this dilemma? I believe so, although the way forward requires a willingness to embrace a radical mental/emotional shift in one’s world-view and a bravery not exhibited in the false, currying-favor humility and intentional, selfishly debasing self-abnegation of saints.
Ancient Mesopotamia preserves a remarkable story about a the first of the antediluvian sages who were sent by Ea to bring wisdom to Mankind. Adapa makes the mistake of incurring the wrath of Anu, god of Heaven. Having been summoned to Anu’s court to answer for his crime, the sage is advised by Ea not to accept from his divine host the bread and water of death.
Anu accepts Adapa’s apology, saying
“Why did Ea disclose to wretched mankind
The ways of heaven and earth,
Give them a weary heart?
It was he who did it!
What can I do for him?”
Anu in his generosity offers the sage the deadly food and drink, which his mortal guest refuses. This astonishes the God of Heaven, who remarks
‘Come, Adapa, why didn’t you eat? Why didn’t you drink?
Didn’t you want to be immortal? Alas for
Downtrodden people!’
Ea in the Sumerian Enki, was called ushumgal, ‘serpent, dragon’. In the Gilgamesh Epic, a snake at a pool steals the plant “Old Man Grown Young” from the hero. This plant would have restored Gilgamesh to his youth. Enki’s temple had in front of it a pool representing the freshwater Apsu. It is tempting, therefore, to identify this snake with Enki ushumgal.
An obvious parallel here can be drawn between Ea/Enki the serpent and the serpent of the Garden east of Eden. But there is a remarkable difference in the stories of Adapa and Adam. In the Adapa story, the serpent/dragon Ea bestows knowledge on Man, but lies to him so that he fails to obtain immortality from Anu, the God of Heaven. In the Genesis myth, God denies knowledge to Man, saying that if Man eats of the fruit he will die, i.e. he will lose immortality. The serpent lies to Eve, telling her that if she eats of the fruit, she will obtain knowledge, but that she will not die.
After God has cursed Adam and Eve for eating of the forbidden fruit, he says
“See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.”
Why did the Hebrews change the story in this way?
For one simple reason: the theological need to shift the blame for the origin of sin from God to Man. As sin is not only meaningless, but a non-concept to animals of the Garden, and only became identifiable to creatures possessing the knowledge of good and evil, had God willingly given the latter to Man, he would also be responsible for Man becoming aware or conscious of sin. And that was not deemed acceptable in the eyes of Jewish priests. So instead God is credited as trying his best to hold knowledge back from Man, and it is Man who not only makes the decision to burden himself with such knowledge, but who does so only by directly contravening God’s injunction not to consume the fruit.
God is, therefore, totally exonerated, acquitted of blame for Man’s Fall.
The shift in emphasis between the Mesopotamian and Biblical accounts was not difficult to make. Wisdom is either a gift or a curse. The ambiguous nature of this quality of mind is made manifest in the Adapa tale, where knowledge is characterized as being both good and bad. Once it is determined to be bad in the sense that it contains within it the origin of sin, it was not thought proper to have God be the dispenser of something that had started out as a gift, but ended up being a curse.
Yet despite the rewriting of the story, immortality remained out of reach. We might have God-like knowledge, but eternal life eluded us. And now instead of being able to claim that our knowledge was a gift, it was the vehicle of sin and the guilt that sin engendered. God was also off the hook for refusing us immortality, as everything he did after Man ate of the forbidden fruit was interpreted as proper punishment.
All of which necessitated – indeed, demanded - the invention of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. For if Man could not find eternal life here on earth, he must seek it elsewhere. But before he could do that, he had to rid himself of Original Sin. I have described above how Christ’s Crucifixion is the reversal of the picking of the fruit of knowledge. [How immortality was obtained by Christ is something I will treat of in the second chapter of this book.]
Prior to Adam and Eve’s consumption of the fruit, God told them in Genesis 2:15 that
“You may freely eat of every tree of the garden...”
The sole exception being the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, of course. The implication is that were they not to have eaten of that particular fruit, they would have been permitted to ingest fruit from the Tree of Life.
My reader will recall that I referred in my previous narrative to the Tree of Life. There are those who would seek, for no good reason, to identify this tree with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which made death knowable to the recipient of its fruit. I contend that the Tree of Life is entirely different and separate, and that our knowledge of it will help us transcend our Biblically-induced prison of angst.
And this Tree of Life may, in the end, be our way forward in embracing a reality that is neither delusory nor fraudulent, but instead a recognition of our place in Nature that abrogates our cultural bias demanding a perceived separation from it.
As it happens, the best source to utilize in becoming properly acquainted with the Tree of Life is the Celtic tradition. And the chief representative example from that tradition is King Arthur’s Avalon.
