The good old days that never were

And now for a bit of theology from someone who couldn't be less qualified. I've been given to understand that generally, Jews don't interpret the story of Paradise as pessimistically as Christians do. That is, original sin, the idea that Adam and Eve's crime was so heinous that humans are born still tainted with it and need divine intervention just to escape inherited corruption, is originally Christian. But certainly some fall from grace, some loss of health and happiness, is inherent to the story of Adam and Eve, and was a theme the ancient writers of the Old Testament must have been conscious of. What I find strange to think of is that when the story was first composed and told, no later than 500 BCE, there were no "good old days" to substantiate the metaphor of the Garden of Eden. There were no glorious past civilizations for the contemporary Hebrews to look up to (were there?) in the way that Europeans during the Renaissance revered the ancient Greeks and Romans. Looking at the world they lived in, the Hebrews felt convinced things had once been better, despite not having any indication thereof.

The way I look at it, humans in general are dissatisfied with the human condition. We want a just world and we're constantly confronted with injustice. We want a meaningful world and we're constantly confronted with absurdity. We want happiness and we increasingly realize that to live is to suffer. In the words of Light Yagami, this world is rotten.

It seems morally logical that, somewhere down the line, we must've screwed up something fierce. Hence, Adam and Eve.

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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

So I'm most qualified to comment on the subject of the golden age myth, which oh man am I ever going to do, but it seems like the topic is really about original sin and the "moral logic" (and I like that phrase) that leads to it. So I'm going to have a go at the Christian theological bits and without further ado here is a disclaimer:

*Not an expert warning in effect for early Christian theological conclusions*
I took like one grad course on this and a lot of it got bogged down with Christological controversies

"Original sin" is commonly depicted as the result of the sin of Adam and Eve, but this is a specific sort of window dressing to cover up a much more abstract theological concept. There are essentially two premises:
1) Human beings are as part of their ontological situation separate from God
2) Christ through his death and resurrection healed the gulf between human beings and God

To understand why Adam and Eve come into it, you need to understand the exegetical hermeneutic we call typology. <--This is seriously how academics write let's burn down the university

Anyway, Christian biblical scholars since forever have looked for methods of reading Bible as unified text (this makes sense because so much of it directly contradicts so much else of it: you know, that second half predicated on ditching so much of the first). One method (one of Augustine's four modes of reading) is to look at a given section typologically, looking for ways in which OT figures and events anticipate* NT counterparts. The way this works is that there is an NT type (which is very, very often Christ, but it's not a rule) and an OT antitype. Example:
OT: Solomon built the temple: God's house on earth.
NT: Christ taught his ministry, bringing the Kingdom of God to earth.

OT: Noah saved everybody by putting his family and the clean animals on his ark.
NT: Christ saved everybody by his death and resurrection, saving everyone by bearing them on the "ark" of his cross.

Type and antitype aren't necessarily equivalent. Sometimes, Christ does the same thing, but better. For example:
OT: Moses led the Hebrews to the cusp of Canaan but could not enter with them.
NT: Christ welcomes everyone straight into Heaven, where he's been chilling.

And sometimes, the antitype is just sort of a f*** up who leaves unfinished business that Christ take care of:
OT: Adam sins against God and creates a gulf between God and God's creation.
NT: Christ accepts and atones for the sins of creation to heal the gulf.

The important thing to remember though is that the theology pre-dates the typological reading. That is: the OT text was molded into a shape so that it would accommodate the Church's NT-based teaching. That Christ's redemption is the fulfillment of the fall--the happy ending for Adam and Eve--is an illustration of the doctrine of original sin, but the illustration and the doctrine aren't identical, except perhaps in the popular consciousness where the doctrine might seem a little esoteric (and this, of course, once we get to the mythological thinking behind it all, counts for a great deal).

*Mark, if you're reading, yes, I got the verb from Vivec and Azura: http://uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Anticipations
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

So the golden age myth as such. Let's define it along a couple of possible formulations (which can totally overlap):
1) Human life is pleasant and/or endless
2) Individual humans possess impossible qualities that allow them to perfect society
3) The mortal sphere is identical with the divine sphere--the gods/ancestors walk the earth
4) And these circumstances are understood no longer to be the case, or there is some specific cataclysm that brings them to an end

First off, keep in mind that the golden age myth is by no means peculiar to the OT. Examples in other cultures abound, notably in the Babylonian Enuma elish, though there are clear iterations in Greco/Roman mythology as well (the entrance of death into the world with Pandora; the blight of the summer months beginning with the rape of Persephone). It's also the theme of the new Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris. This myth is everywhere and has its presence felt in the notion of the good ol' days and the cottage industry Cracked has carved out of pointing out that that's fake (possibly offensive if you hate swearing I guess?): http://www.cracked.com/article_18983_5-complaints-about-modern-life-that-are-statistically-b.s..html

Second, while it's correct to say that Hebrew civilization didn't experience a specific historical golden age before the text of Genesis was crystallized (and it's a little complicated to when we can date Hebrew civilization at all; keep in mind that the Hebrew scriptures *vastly* overstate the historical importance of the Exodus and Israelite kingdoms, having been written in, you know, the Israelite kingdoms), it's not at all right to say that the peoples of the near east lacked a golden age to look back to. Ninevah is much older than Genesis. They were building Ziggurats in Ur four thousand years ago. Hell, I've read the idea advanced (I believe in an underannotated Karen Armstrong book, so take it with a grain of salt) that in very very early civilization we didn't have the population density for epidemic disease or warfare, so once you lived past childhood and, for women, child-birth, it was pretty clear sailing and you probably got 70+ years. Is that why Adam lives a couple of thousand years? Some dim memory of your great grandpa who just would not die? I don't think so, but it's out there.

Third and most importantly, though, all myths come about and stick around not because they relate specific historical events but because they fulfill some psychological need in the human mind. These can be pretty general (myths to explain how the world came about) or pretty specific (catastrophic flood myths in which some guy builds a boat, because.... f**** if I know). Golden Age and Fall myths don't by any stretch have a monopoly on appearing to have been totally made up, so we can surmise from their frequency and their fictitious beginnings that they fulfill some very important need, but I'm uneasy assigning a single specific significance to the myths.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

The fact is that we learn many things from these myths, and only sometimes is human agency even brought into it. It all comes back to looking at the doctrine rather than the illustration. If we generalize out from the accounts we have, the common features are: (1) there must have been direct divine contact with the cosmos because the divine is the source of being and the cosmos exists, (2) contact with the divine is life-giving and life-sustaining, so when there was direct contact life must have been easier, stronger and longer (and this belief manifests in, among other things, the common human tendency to glamorize the past), and (3) evidently there is no longer direct divine contact with the world-as-lived.

There are a lot of instances in which the gap between 2 and 3 isn't a human mistake. A number of mythologies blame death on divine or demiurgic guilt (Prometheus in the Greek myths and Satan in Paradise Lost). A lot of ancestor worship is simply predicated on "well stuff was really cool when they were around, and we're less cool than they are" without positing a specific mechanism. It's enough to observe that this world is rotten without throwing in good old fashioned Judeo-Christian guilt.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

So human error isn't an essential quality of the golden-age myth. I see. And point definitely taken about them ziggurats. I was reading some ancient history not too long ago, so I should've remembered those.

From: willis5225 | Posted: 8/7/2011 1:02:46 AM | #002

The important thing to remember though is that the theology pre-dates the typological reading.

Do you mean that the idea of original sin was popularized before the Fall was identified as the source of original sin, or merely before Jesus was identified as the remedy to it?

From: willis5225 | Posted: 8/7/2011 2:09:29 AM | #003

…all myths come about and stick around not because they relate specific historical events but because they fulfill some psychological need in the human mind.

That's the idea, right? I guess it's the only explanation available for the universality of certain tropes—barring, perhaps, very subtle arguments postulating how common features of the environments of all peoples could have lead to these common myths. But as a psychologist, I wish this sorts of hypothesis was more amenable to experimental investigation.

From: willis5225 | Posted: 8/7/2011 1:02:46 AM | #002

…the exegetical hermeneutic we call typology. <--This is seriously how academics write let's burn down the university

Something relevant I wrote a while ago:

"Hermeneutics" is the most academically intimidating word in the English language. This means that if you're an academic and you want to frighten a layman, but what you're actually working on doesn't sound impressive enough, just add some form of "hermeneutics". Compare, for example, the tame "finite simple groups" to the downright terrifying "finite simple hermeneutic groups". The beauty of this trick is that it works just as well with any discipline.

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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

Cool link, cool topic, cool reference to The Anticipations.
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SIGNATURE

An in-depth analysis of the so-called "Fall" narrative in Genesis, suggesting that the theological testimony of the text is more a description of the ongoing human condition rather than just an account of something in the past, concluding with implications for preaching and doing theology especially from the Wesleyan perspective.

http://www.crivoice.org/gen3.html

I cannot recommend this enough.
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"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal

Part of that essay makes me think "This is a remarkably sane approach to theology.", especially the condemnation of speculation, but then the author goes on to speculate wildly. Boo-oo! Also, this is a vicious lie:

Human sexuality is never seen as evil or sinful in the Old Testament…

It isn't condemned as broadly as in the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps, but the God of Moses still frowns upon some ethically innocuous sexual behavior:

And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

Oh hey, I posted in this topic. What a crazy thing to have forgotten entirely.

Kodiologist posted...

Do you mean that the idea of original sin was popularized before the Fall was identified as the source of original sin, or merely before Jesus was identified as the remedy to it?

Yeah. It would go: (1) Jesus is recognized as redeemer of mankind (2) Formulation of what exactly Jesus is redeeming us from (3) Filling in the blank that the thing is attributable to Adam.

Kodiologist posted...

"Hermeneutics" is the most academically intimidating word in the English language. This means that if you're an academic and you want to frighten a layman, but what you're actually working on doesn't sound impressive enough, just add some form of "hermeneutics". Compare, for example, the tame "finite simple groups" to the downright terrifying "finite simple hermeneutic groups". The beauty of this trick is that it works just as well with any discipline.

I completely agree. The best (worst) part about it is that everyone's heard the word before, so it's harder to ask what you mean by that. If I start talking about metacharacterismos it's easy to be like "What? What is that word that I'm sure you didn't make up but somebody did?" but with hermeneutics there's the sense that you really *ought* to know what it means.

Kodiologist posted...

Part of that essay makes me think "This is a remarkably sane approach to theology.", especially the condemnation of speculation, but then the author goes on to speculate wildly. Boo-oo! Also, this is a vicious lie:

It condemns good ol' fashioned heterosexual sex too. Not as directly, direly, or categorically, but there are definitely tabus surrounding it: passing semen or menses render you ritually unclean, (female) virginity is better socially, that sort of thing. These aren't "evil or sinful" because that language wasn't really in current use, but the idea was still restriction rather than license. To say that they aren't "condemned" is technically true (with the exception Kodi points out, and I believe if you do an animal, but man I *just* trolled Leviticus for the virginity thing last week and I am not eager to dive into it again), but it's sort of missing the point.

On the whole, the essay isn't really sure how to treat tabus, because the result of transgressing a tabu isn't sin, it's yeckiness. For example, the clothing thing:
This is the real impact of verse 25. The couple are naked, and unashamed. Again, we risk losing the story if we focus on the sexual dimension of nakedness here. The fact that they are unashamed indicates that they are comfortable with who they are; they accept themselves and each other.

That's a way to read it, but it's not taking into account the historical setting of the myth. We know that there were tabus against nudity in place in the ancient near east, and particularly among the Hebrews. Compare this with the consequences of Ham seeing Noe's nakedness in Gen 9:22-25. It's pretty shocking that they'd be naked in front of God. That the narrator belabors the fact that they're unashamed is a reassurance that the tabu against nakedness isn't in yet place. This of course has a set of symbolisms associated with it too, and they aren't far off--they're comfortable with their actions because they're incapable of transgressing the tabu that doesn't exist yet.

Anyway, I don't mean to be down on it; it's a pretty good synthesis of a faith-based reading and a secular-historical one. Just keep in mind that sin is a largely Christian development and you have to read that into the narrative (which is cool, that's what myths are for).
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

Okay, but it's spelled "taboo". :P

Something funny I read in an essay by Borges last night:

…toward the end of the fifth century, the unrevealed author of the Corpus Dionysiacum declares that no affirmative predicate is seemly for God. Nothing should be affirmed about Him, everything can be denied. Schopenhauer dryly notes: "This theology is the only true one, but it has no content."

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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

Ugh yes much of my reading on the subject is from the early half of the 20th century. It causes me to spell certain words funny and gives otherwise the rage.

Also I hold up that I read your post and said "hey Schopenhauer didn't come up with that, it was Psuedo-Dionysius" that I'm too tired to be posting and will be playing Oblivion henceforth.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir