The Fall Story

In this week’s post we leave behind the creation stories and their emphasis on creativity and turn to the story of Man’s fall.  To summarise the myth: on pain of death, man is forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but he can eat of the fruit of any other tree.  Enter the serpent, who is clearly not a Biblical literalist, for he points out to curious Eve that she will not actually drop dead on the spot if she eats the forbidden fruit.  She takes him at his word, discovers the fruit is ok and gives some to Adam.  Immediately, they realise that they are naked and they experience for the first-time shame; not guilt, which is something much more psychologically developed and of positive use in helping us to be moral creatures, but something far more primitive and difficult to deal with than guilt: debilitating shame.  Here in mythic form is revealed to us the root of all human difficulty: a struggle with shame.  There are parts of ourselves we are deeply ashamed of for one reason or another.  Experiencing shame kills off the original innocence of paradise.  In the garden everything is laid on, it is the land of childish innocence where no sense of responsibility for actions exists.  Once the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is eaten all of that ends and humanity is cast out of Eden and there is no way back.  The soul resists this; it craves the original unity it enjoyed with the maternal creator.  When it is thrust out into the cold reality of life where choices have to be made, the immature soul experiences this as if it were a harsh punishment.

St Augustine’s take on this story lay behind his doctrine of “Original Sin”.  The idea he put forward was that, because Adam and Eve sinned, we are all infected with sin, rather like a disease being passed down the generations of a family.  This view of sin has dominated Christian thinking ever since Augustine proposed it.  However, it fails to explain why two presumably perfect creatures suddenly decided to fall for the serpent’s ruse.  Among the Early Church Fathers there was another line of thought that seems strangely modern.  Briefly it is this, that sin was the inevitable consequence of naivety and immaturity.  Sooner or later, due to curiosity, humans would go beyond the boundary set and would get a nasty shock.  

I would like to take this approach and move it on a bit.  I suggest that the story of the fall of Adam is, from a psychological perspective, a story not so much about total moral failure, but about growing up.  Part of growing up is the realisation that everything is not permanently laid on as it was at mother’s breast.  We come to realise that the world is made up of things we are ok with, because they make us feel good, and things we are not ok with, that threaten us.  To defend ourselves from the things we are not ok with we see the world as split into good and evil. To acknowledge that our world appears split into that which I am ok with  (i.e. what I perceive as “good”)  and what I am not ok with (i.e. that which I perceive as “bad” or even “evil”) is tough to put it mildly.  Also, we come to the disturbing realisation that we are responsible for the actions we take based on this split perception.  The temptation is to do what Adam and Eve do in the story and blame someone else. 

This division of the soul is what we struggle with as human beings and it is mired in a sense of shame because of what we push into our unconscious where it festers, demanding expression.  However, if we can accept it, this human reality  is rather like the grit in the oyster which eventually makes the pearl, or as Shakespeare put it rather more poetically in, “As You Like It” – “Sweet are the uses of adversity, which like a toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in the head”.  

One last thought: a relationship with God based on an acknowledgement of our struggles, shortcomings, sinfulness, etc, made possible by His intervention through Christ, is, I would venture, much more profound that a relationship of childish dependence and ignorance of external reality.  The question that arises from a theological standpoint – “did God intend us to sin in order to have a more mature relationship with Him?”  Well perhaps that is to put the question too starkly.  We as parents, if we have any sense at all, allow our children to make mistakes, take risks as we watch over them growing up.  A relationship which gets tested to breaking point and involves making up (reparation / reconciliation) is, I would suggest, stronger than one of placid compliance.