The Story Expresses Universal Conflicts Within Human Beings....Adam and Eve

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