John Gray writes on September 9 2017:
"...Throughout much of its long life, the story of Adam and Eve was
understood to be a myth – and myths can have many meanings. Third- and
fourth-century Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi in Egypt
portray Eve – later condemned for staining all humankind with original sin – as
the hero of the story, wiser and more courageous than Adam, while showing the
serpent as a liberator offering the first humans freedom from the rule of a
jealous God....
...What is most striking about the story is its capacity to express
contradictory attitudes to the experience of being human. This is not because
those who have told and retold it have been confused. The story expresses
universal conflicts within human beings, rendered into a vernacular language of
monotheism. The power of this inexhaustible myth comes from it not having any
univocal meaning. Yet in recent times the Genesis story has come to be regarded
as an erroneous theory of human origins invented before humanity received the
modern scientific revelation. Reviving a simple-minded 19th-century philosophy,
contemporary campaigners against religion dismiss the Genesis story along with
all other myths as rudimentary exercises in scientific theorising....
...The claim to be based in science is one of the defining features of
modern myths. After the collapse of European imperial power, the
pseudo-Darwinian mythology that propped up colonialism fell into disrepute. But
it was soon followed by other myths claiming a basis in social science. A
progressive mythology developed that viewed racism and imperialism as
exclusively Western vices and the flaws and conflicts of post-colonial states
entirely as consequences of colonial rule. These myths were channelled through
theories of modernisation, which posited a future fundamentally different from
anything that existed in the past.
Like the story of Adam and Eve in Christian orthodoxy, modern myths
claim to be objective truths. If we read the story as it was read in subtler
times by scholars such as Philo, however, it teaches us that human beings
become myth-makers when the increase of knowledge threatens to thwart their
need for meaning. If science reveals a world without any overarching purpose or
direction – as Darwin’s theory of natural selection does – science is distorted
to promote a vision of evolution that satisfies the demand for narrative
coherence.
This is what happened when Darwinism was appropriated by racists, and
later by humanists such as Julian Huxley who reinterpreted the aimless process
of evolution as the spiralling advance of intelligence in the cosmos.
With their babble about a godlike humanity taking charge of its future
evolution, today’s campaigners against religion do much the same. Since living
without myths is unendurable, these rationalists cover themselves with fig
leaves of cod-science, close their eyes and return to a state of happy
blindness. As part of its unfathomable richness, the story of Adam and Eve
reveals the nature of myth itself"
Artist:
Lucas Cranach (1472-1663), '
Adam and Eve', 1526
Geoff Dyer has an interesting take on this picture:
"...It could be a nice picture – if the wily serpent and the people were
removed. The artist Pavel Maria Smejkal did something like this in his series
Fatescapes, digitally erasing the defining events from famous photographs by
Capa and others so that there was just the innocent background. Do that here
and we get a kind of flash-forward to the way that Eden will look after A and E
have been shown the door...."
(
The Guardian, September 2011)
“Which is better—to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and get kicked out or to stick around here with nothing to talk about?”
Artist: Tom Toro, The New Yorker, December 2016
