Adam and Eve: The Birth of Self-Consciousness

The first use which Adam and Eve make of their new wisdom is to look for something to wear. They have been promised the knowledge of gods, and their immediate discovery is that they are improperly dressed. There is an almost affectionate humor in this, for the bodies which now embarrass them were quite satisfactory a moment before. The fruit has made them capable of looking at themselves, and they are having some difficulty with the view.

We need only take the garden inward for this ancient predicament to become exceedingly familiar. A person can be quite happily occupied until the thought occurs that he ought to be happy, whereupon a second occupation begins: finding out whether his happiness is good enough. The pleasure continues, perhaps, but under inspection. Between ourselves and the life we are living there is now an opinion about how the whole affair ought to be going. In the language of the myth, our eyes have opened.

The Trouble With Being Somebody

To call this the birth of consciousness requires a little care, since Adam was already sufficiently awake to name the animals and tend the garden. The story gives him speech, work, and companionship before it gives him shame. What is being born at the tree is the peculiar consciousness of oneself as a separate person whose existence must be defended, justified, and brought into conformity with an idea. We have begun to keep ourselves company, with all the possibilities of disagreement which company entails.

Difference itself has an excellent ancestry in Genesis. God separates light from darkness, sea from land, and the waters above from the waters below, repeatedly finding his creation good. The world takes shape through distinction. An inward reading can follow the same movement as experience acquires names and boundaries, until we distinguish the person having the experience from everything that happens to him. The Hermetic correspondence between the world below and the world above suggests a likeness here: the making of a world on the great scale is echoed in the making of a world within consciousness. We can entertain that likeness without supposing that Genesis and the Hermetic text are saying the same thing.

Adam and Eve give the separation an intimacy which an abstract account could scarcely possess. Adam is earth given breath; Eve is formed from his own flesh. The other person comes from what was already his life, and stands before him with a life of her own. There must be two for either to address the other, while the very substance of their bodies declares their kinship. Through them the garden can represent our capacity to become both the one who experiences and the one who considers the experience, without assigning thought to the man and feeling to the woman as though the soul had been divided along anatomical lines.

For the time being, their difference is bearable. They are naked and unashamed. Nakedness will become troublesome when each can imagine a view of the body from which the body seems inadequate. A distinction useful for knowing where we end and another begins can then harden into the conviction that we must secure ourselves against the life around us. The garden will still be there, but we shall have acquired an anxious interest in our position within it.

The Fruit We Are Always About to Eat

The serpent has a persuasive way of addressing this interest. God has permitted the human creature to eat freely, with the exception of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There are many trees to enjoy, but the serpent draws attention to the one which seems to hold the explanation for our incompleteness. Perhaps God is keeping something to himself. Perhaps the generosity surrounding us conceals a refusal to let us become what we could be. The tree now offers a future from which the present life may be judged deficient.

Eve desires food, beauty, and wisdom, all of which are thoroughly intelligible desires. We should be reluctant to make a villain of the wish to know, since the intelligence which questions a divine command can also question a command that has merely claimed divine authority. Even within Genesis, the serpent has the disconcerting advantage of being partly right. Their eyes do open; God acknowledges their new knowledge. What the promise has failed to include is the experience of being the person whose eyes have opened.

Consider the small awkwardness of writing your own signature while trying to make it look exactly like your signature. The hand has done this often enough, but now each movement must answer to an image of the completed result. A familiar gesture begins to feel like an imitation, and the more carefully we supervise its authenticity, the less easily it goes. Nothing prevents reflection from being useful. The difficulty begins when the person reflected upon must constantly wait for the reflector's approval.

Adam eats with Eve, and the wisdom they acquire turns upon them both. They discover themselves as visible creatures, vulnerable to a judgment which can follow them even into solitude. Their fig leaves are an ingenious response to this discovery. One can sympathize with the workmanship while noticing that the people who have dressed themselves still find it necessary to hide. The covering has altered their appearance without satisfying the awareness of being exposed.

Nor does this awareness stop at the skin. The mind which can picture a wiser self tomorrow can picture its own absence in years to come. Death, announced in the prohibition and spoken again in the sentence of return to dust, becomes something we can suffer in anticipation. The appetite for wisdom grows into an appetite for assurance: we would like to know enough about life to cease being at its mercy. The fruit would be a wonderful bargain if knowledge could make the knower invulnerable.

An Innocence With Something to Prove

After a little experience of this arrangement, innocence begins to look extraordinarily attractive. We imagine a person who is at ease without examining his ease, who can be affectionate without watching himself being affectionate, and who has no private report to prepare on the impression he has made. We should like very much to become this person. Indeed, we may set about becoming him with all the determination which has made being ourselves so tiresome.

Now the original temptation has acquired a spiritual refinement. The desirable person beyond the fruit was wise; the desirable person beyond our present difficulties is innocent. Both are somewhere ahead of us, and both make the creature who is here seem insufficient. We try to abolish self-judgment by disapproving of ourselves whenever we catch it at work. Each failure gives us something further to correct, and the proposed holiday from self-supervision becomes a remarkably exacting occupation.

Suppose, then, that we identify ourselves wholly with the better side: generous, serene, free of envy. The generosity may be genuine, and serenity has its pleasures. But if being this person requires continual proof that we are no longer the other person, the unwanted self remains indispensable to our identity. Superiority needs something to be superior to. This is polarity as an inward predicament: two positions sustain one another while we imagine that one can finally dispose of the other. Our aspiration has become dependent upon the very condition it condemns.

Hawthorne gives the desire to perfect a person a terrible bodily conclusion in “The Birthmark.” Aylmer becomes so preoccupied with the small mark on his wife Georgiana's cheek that her beauty can no longer satisfy him. She comes to share his horror of it and consents to the remedy. At last the mark fades, and with it her life. The distinction between the woman and her supposed defect has been pursued until the woman herself must go. Beside the nakedness of Eden, the story raises an uncomfortable possibility: what we find intolerable in the beloved creature may be the evidence that she is a creature at all.

Such an ideal can also make us cruel in defense of our own goodness. Adam answers for his eating by pointing to Eve, and to God for giving her to him. The woman whose flesh he welcomed as his own has become someone upon whom a little responsibility can conveniently be placed. He preserves his innocence at the expense of their kinship. Moral knowledge, which could help him admit what he has done, is occupied with protecting the person who must not have done it.

A hurt person still needs an answer, and an injury may demand repair. Our determination to establish that we are good can consume the attention which the person we have hurt requires. Adam's explanation keeps returning to the circumstances which excuse Adam; Eve has to bear the consequences of that innocence as well as those of the fruit.

Who Is the God in the Garden?

If the garden is a drama within consciousness, God presents the most interesting difficulty of all. We might be tempted to identify him with the wisest voice in the mind, giving our best judgment authority over the rest. But we have already tried that arrangement. The self which appoints a ruler can appoint another, and a particularly exalted image of ourselves may be particularly sensitive to criticism. A god of this kind would spend an uncomfortable amount of time defending his divinity.

In the story, God's relation to Adam begins before Adam has an opinion about it, for the creature receives the very breath with which he will eventually answer back. Let God signify, then, the source of the whole life in which our opinions, desires, and acts of judgment occur. The frightened self depends upon that source as completely as the self who believes himself spiritually accomplished. We could no more establish the relation by forming a favorable opinion of it than Adam could furnish himself with the breath needed to make the attempt.

This makes his hiding wonderfully strange. He uses the garden to conceal himself from its giver, taking shelter among the very things whose existence belongs to the relation he is trying to evade. Inwardly, we can do something similar with our ideas about God, becoming so occupied with whether we have the correct idea that we scarcely attend to the life in which the question is being asked. We can even adopt the idea that we are beyond all ideas, and become rather possessive about that.

“Where art thou?” addresses Adam in the midst of this difficulty. The man answers from fear, though he has already taken the precaution of clothing himself. When God asks who told him he was naked, the certainty that his body is a sufficient reason for hiding becomes open to question. His nakedness existed before his alarm. For the first time since the eating, attention can turn toward the authority of the judgment under which he has placed himself.

We may still want to ask how this attention is to be achieved, what sort of person we must become before we can bear to be seen. The question is quite natural, and it gives the old temptation another beginning. Adam is being called while he is frightened, covered, and preparing an excuse. A more admirable Adam has not been required to answer in his place. In this reading, the possibility of communion begins with a creature whose embarrassment has plainly failed to put him beyond the reach of the voice.

Beyond the Gate

The second tree keeps this possibility from becoming a promise of invulnerability. After the eating, the way to the tree of life is guarded so that the couple cannot also eat and live forever. Knowledge has changed their condition without placing them beyond mortality. Any understanding available to them must belong to a life which can be injured and will end; otherwise spiritual awakening would merely complete the serpent's bargain by giving the anxious self everything it had hoped to secure.

Before the departure, however, God makes garments for them. The source of their life attends to the bodies which they have come to regard with shame. Judgment and provision occur in the same relationship. Their need for covering is acknowledged without the original nakedness being restored, and without the consequences of the eating being withdrawn. They leave the garden as creatures who have been seen and clothed, carrying both their knowledge and their dependence with them.

Adam is sent to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. The earth will resist him, and it will receive him when he dies, but throughout the labor it remains the substance of his own body. His exile is real; so is this continued belonging. If God names the source of life in our inward reading, the loss of paradise cannot mean that the creature has made himself independent of that source. Even the strength with which Adam works the difficult ground belongs to the life he fears he has lost. He goes out to meet it under the conditions of hunger, effort, and death, and must find, with his own hands, what it means to belong to an earth which no longer feels like home.

Sources

The Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis 1–3. Alan W. Watts, Behold the Spirit, Random House, 1971 edition; first published in 1947. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,” in Mosses from an Old Manse, Project Gutenberg eBook no. 512. The Emerald Tablet, English translation in Isaac Newton's Keynes MS 28, fol. 2r, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, Indiana University.