Self-Consciousness: A Prelude to Adam and Eve

Using the KJV, the story of Adam and Eve has a total of eight hundred and ten words. Contained in this incredibly short and dense story are a number of themes. In no particular order and likely not exhaustive we see the themes of the divine order, the relationship between God and humanity, free will, moral choice, temptation, sin, the

consequences of knowledge, shame and guilt, responsibility and accountability, judgement human and divine, the consequences of disobedience, the pains of child birth, relational strife, the discovery of the future, the discovery of work, the discovery of mortality, gender roles both on their own and in relationships, the validity of God’s authority, the foreshadowing of redemption, paradise and its loss, harmony, communion with the divine creative force, the human separation of eternal life, struggle, mortality, human frailty, divine mercy and provision, man’s stewardship and responsibility for creation, innocence and its loss, deception and truth, community and companionship, hope amidst judgement, the best of men and women and how those qualities can be made pathological and the affirmation of hope for humanity’s future.

The nearly inexhaustible wealth and depth in such a short story is truly remarkable.

To put this into context, just the theme of the emergence of self-consciousness which, I believe, the Adam and Eve story does an incredibly sophisticated job at delivering, is something that you can find thousands of books on spanning neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroanatomy, anthropology, biology and more. V.S. Ramachandran, well acknowledged as the greatest living neuroscientist, has six books and hundreds of scholarly articles on just this topic alone.

The amount of meaning which is imbedded in these short stories is truly remarkable. Renowned religious historian Mircea Eliada, one of the primary influences for my current project, explains how the biblical stories come about out of the oral tradition. In the passing down of these stories from generation to generation over the course of ten thousand or more years the stories become distilled, condensed and left packed to the brim with meaning abundant.

There are plenty of attempts to reduce the biblical stories to a unidimensional understanding which undercuts their value. We can look, for instance, at Karl Marx’s understanding of religion as “the opiate of the masses.” For Marx, these religious stories were created to tell the gullible masses in order to keep them pacified while they were being exploited by the ruling class of elites in order to maintain a social system which extended privilege to them.

Marx’s unidimensional understanding of the biblical stories as tools from the elite to ensure their continued hold on power and wealth truly must leave any sane and sensible person speechless. His critique rests on the notion that all social systems are expressions of power and all forms of religion are tools of the elite to reinforce that power through a corrupt social structure.

There is so much flawed with Marx’s thinking that you can suffer paralysis just picking one thing to focus on. Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that Marx’s ideas rest completely on the notion that truth itself is non-existent and that the only meta-narrative which enforces normative structure is power. He never bothers trying to make this insane argument, he merely presupposes it’s accuracy in Das Kapital (1867) pointing to what can charitably be called a very poor understanding of Hegel and more accurately be described as sophomoric and resentment filled conclusions grabbing at poorly conceived straws for support and credibility.

The second thing that Marx’s idea assumes is that the biblical stories were created for this express purpose requiring an unbroken chain of conspiracy to maintain a fundamentally unjust social order for the benefit of the ruling class for over three thousand years. Taking this apart in detail and exposing it for its childish and feeble minded reasoning is not all that hard, but easier yet is simply the understanding that a thoroughgoing conspiracy to enslave the vast majority of people lasting for thousands of years goes beyond incredibly unlikely and into the realm of science fiction — science fiction being a very good way to express the materialism that Marx drew from the scientific revolution and applied to economics in order to support his wildly poor speculation about the nature of mankind and the emergence of religion in the west.

While also ultimately incorrect, Freud had a slightly more nuanced and intelligent take. It is important to remember that being wrong isn’t always bad. There is a value to being usefully wrong and Freud’s ideas on religion are very valuable. Unlike Marx, Freud was a genius and his ideas, even where they are lopsided, require real attention.

For Freud, the Abrahamic religions expanded the role of the familial father to cosmic dimensions (The Future of an Illusion, 1927 Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930). Mankind exists, for Freud, in the same relationship to the cosmic father that a child exists in relation to his own father. Freud’s idea was that people adopt religious beliefs that have a personified figure at their apex in order to act out the role of dependent child with a father — a world where there is no dread or terror because of the infantile comfort stemming from the all knowing father.

Ernest Becker in his groundbreaking and brilliant book The Denial of Death (1973) takes Freud’s reasoning all the way to its logical conclusion in a beautifully written masterpiece of argumentation. Becker’s work is flawed and ultimately incorrect, but is brilliant nonetheless and allows us to see clearly the Freudian ideas and their consequences.

For Becker it is the fear of death that leads to the Freudian creation of the cosmic all knowing father to act as a comfort against the existential reality of mortality and limitation. By aligning oneself with a framework where they are part of something larger and infinite man, according to Becker, can overcome his own finitude and the anxiety which that finitude ignites. God, he argues, is an attempt by human beings to recreate the infantile state of dependency thereby recapturing the comfort we experienced as children before the understanding of our limitation and knowledge of our mortality became fully formed and we were, as far as we knew, protected from the ravages of the world by our all knowing father.

There are plenty of ways to see where both Marx and Freud go wrong and for me the easiest is that all attempts to reduce large scale human engagement with the world to a unidimensional understanding are always faulty. However, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor takes what I believe to be an interesting route. Taylor, in his influential books Sources of Self (1989) and The Secular Age (2007) takes Freud and Marx to task with the simple suggestion that if religion were the opiate of the masses as Marx suggests or infantile wish fulfillment for safety as Freud suggests or a bulwark agains the anxiety of death as Becker does what would be the point of conceptualizing hell.

Historian of religion Elaine Pagels who has written extensively on the devil (The Origin of Satan 1995) hypothesized that hell was merely a place Christians invented to put their enemies. Pagels is, of course, correct that this is what Hell has been used for many times over the last two thousand years, but what Pagels fails to understand is the same thing Marx failed to understand — the proclivity of human institutions to be corrupted by power is in no way equivalent to the idea that human institutions are driven by power.

Taylor takes the idea of hell merely being a place to put ones enemies to task quite well pointing to the fact that the conceptualization of hell is one that suggests it not as a punishment for the nonbeliever but the existential state one finds themselves in when they do not properly walk the line. He further argues that the modern terror of the loss of self, our existential homelessness and loss of meaning, is a secular variant of the medieval fear of hell. He points further to James Joyce’s nightmares he would have about the hellfire sermons from the Jesuit priests of his youth. From the perspective of the religious tradition the dangers of hell are constant even for the most devout and Taylor argues, I believe convincingly, that owing to this religion as mere infantile safety or opiate of the masses can never be an idea to take with any seriousness.

So we are back to the original question here: what are we to make of these stories that in just a few short words convey such a wealth of deep wisdom and information that even aside from any possible divinity in origin represent a very strange phenomenon worthy of further investigation?

Carl Jung argues that beyond the personal and individual unconsciousness there is a collective unconscious which humans have access to in an almost dreamlike form. It is a reservoir of universal memories, instincts and archetypes which are inherited from our ancestral past and are common to all humans across cultures and times. The collective unconscious is, amongst other things, the reason for the cross-cultural ubiquity of sacred symbols like the open eye, the double helix or the dragon which can be found everywhere in the world dating back tens of thousands of years.

What are these stories of the Bible? To understand them we first must answer this question and to do that we have to look at what the Bible is. The Bible is a library of books. Here is the strange thing though, the collective human imagination over the course of some ten thousand years of oral tradition and leading up to the earliest writings and then written and edited over and over again over another several thousand years has somehow cobbled together an entire library of books which has an overarching plot. Just that, in and of itself, divorced from any other meaning or significance is absolutely incredible.

The biblical library is an attempt to solve the deepest and most important problems of mankind. Of these problems the primary one is that of self-consciousness. Man is finite, fragile and mortal but worse than that we are aware of it. We are aware of our limitations in space and time. As any professor of an intro level philosophy course will tell you, one of the best days in class is when you ask your students to draw the inside of a circle without the outside. The outside of the circle both imposes limitations and at the same time is constitutive of the inside’s reality (this will be a recurring theme in the essays to come about Adam). Understanding our boundaries in time have made us full of negative emotion as we are painfully aware of our limitations, but also bring us into being in a more real, fuller way than any other being.

The plot of the Bible is roughly this. God creates the world. In it he creates a harmonious paradisal state for man to live in. There is a cataclysm at the beginning of time which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings and that puts a rift into being itself.

Now, one can argue that consciousness has no cosmic significance and that nothing that happens to humans matters. Environmentalists with their cavalier attitude towards the rocks not caring about human consciousness have explored this avenue with their genocidal proclivities and none of them in a way I have ever found even remotely convincing or in any way valuable. Even in the absolutely most charitable reading of the idea that consciousness isn’t important to the universe it still remains a fact that it is important to conscious beings. The universe’s opinion doesn’t matter. The universe doesn’t have an opinion. Further, unless you are willing to live in a full performative contradiction (what Freud’s student Alfred Adler called “a life lie”) your actions cannot bear the weight of the articulated belief. When one lives out the proposition that consciousness is in no way a significant phenomenon it is, without fail, absolute catastrophe. If you can’t live the proposition then saying it is either bad faith, ignorant or an outright lie.

In the biblical stories our consciousness has a constitutive role to play in being and has a metaphysical significance which connects human consciousness to the world in a necessary and integral manner. Even if this is not true from outside the human perspective it is true inside the human perspective and since humans are the only things with a perspective it is not an idea which we should so blithely discard.

And so the plot of the biblical library, cobbled together over ten thousand years of oral tradition and then written by many authors and edited by many editors over the course of another three to five thousand years is that some time after the creation there was a cataclysmic fall which lead to a disharmony with being and the emergence of self-consciousness and the entire bible is the story of what it is we should do about that.

In the Old Testament the state of Israel is founded and it repeatedly rises and falls. There is an experimentation over millennia that the way to protect yourself from the tragic consequences of self-consciousness is by organizing yourself into a state. However, what happens is that the state begins to reveal its pathologies and as they compound the state becomes unstable and collapses then rises again and collapses again over and over.

Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry, 1947) argues that after numerous times of erecting a state to protect against the ravages of self-consciousness there is a realization that maybe the state is not the proper pathway to redemption. Frye says that there is something pathological about the idea of the state being the way to protect oneself from the tragedy of life is deeply flawed and this is what the constant rising and falling of the state of Israel in the Old Testament is about. Frye understands the state of Israel as an early attempt at what later is explained as a state of mind.

After the failed experimentation with the state of Israel comes the Christian revolution with the hypothesis that it is not the state that is the place of salvation but rather the individual psyche and an ethic of redemption. After the failure of the state experiment it is within the individual that redemption can become manifest. The reason for this is because the state is dependent on properly functioning individuals and the proper mode of redemptive being is truth and truth is the antidote to the suffering of the fall of man.

This understanding brings us back to Genesis 1 where it is the word of God in the form of articulated truth (logos) that generates order out of chaos. Even more importantly, and I really am astonished whenever I think of this, the clue that is given is that God keeps saying that the being which he speaks into existence with truth is good.

There is an insistence that the being spoken into being with truth is good. The hint here is that the harmonious state of being that is created for Adam and Eve in the beginning is good before the fall and the emergence of self-consciousness insofar as man was made in the image of God and acting out the truth that being itself was properly balanced. It takes the entire rest of the Bible to rediscover that which was lost. It is the classic return to the beginning theme — the wise person is the one who finds that which they lost in childhood and regains it.

However, the Christian answer goes further yet. The return is not (and cannot be) merely a falling backwards into childhood and unconciousness. Rather, the return is taken voluntarily to the state of childhood while being metaphysically awake and then to determine to participate through truth in the manifestation of proper being.

Author’s Note: Yes, I’ve not got to Adam yet.