Eden/Shangri-la

Chapter 2
Eden/Shangri-la

Angus McDonald

1. (a) Of the many constellations of thought which consider the problem of evil, one is pre-eminent in Western culture, rooted in the early chapters of the first book of the Old Testament of the Bible.¹ The proposition is that knowledge of good and evil is a loss, which separates humanity from nature and from god. The defining image of this notion, two people beside a tree, is found in Genesis 3. So, an atheological reading of this scene.

The first scene of evil, then, is where the loss is a double loss, the loss of intimacy with god, and the loss of unity with nature. In this scene, evil is unnatural. This is evil as the interruption of the otherwise continuous connectedness of everything, because if evil is simply a position in a field, a link in a chain, then it is superfluous, part of normal functioning.

Is evil the first breach between god and creation? This narrative is so well known that it may escape our notice what exactly it asserts. Consider it afresh. The all-powerful god creates his creatures, but does not endow them with ethical knowledge, a condition of innocence marked by nakedness without shame. That the text makes the linkage (‘naked … not ashamed’) indicates hindsight, otherwise why would nakedness be linked to shame at all? Nakedness is shameful in the world after the expulsion from Eden, and it is only from this standpoint that the observation makes any sense. Shame is the awareness of having done wrong, as being naked is wrong in the post-lapsarian world. Nakedness in Eden is a natural unselfconscious condition. Awareness of right and wrong is precisely what Adam and Eve lack: they are natural humanity, as integrally harmonious with nature as all the other animals standing naked, shameless – and without ethical knowledge. Into this static situation is added suspense, for god imposes the first taboo, the ban on eating the fruit of one tree. Adam is told, for his own good, supposedly, that eating of that tree will be death. God makes no mention, either to ban access or to allow use, of the tree of life. Is Adam, at this point, immortal? We do not know. Why put that tree there, and then forbid it? Eve is enlightened by the serpent. The serpent lets her know that god has lied. Eating of the tree is not death. In this, the serpent does not lie: when the fruit is eaten, Adam and Eve gain ethical knowledge, and do not die. So, god made the first prohibition on the basis of a lie to his innocent creatures. God does not behave ethically towards his creatures. Indeed, Eve begins to gain ethical knowledge even before she eats, at the moment the serpent causes her to re-evaluate the tree independent of god’s taboo (‘a tree to be desired to make one wise’). Eve derives two impulses from the serpent: desire, and for wisdom. Two impulses god had not equipped her with. The consequences of ethical knowledge are immediate: self-consciousness, manifested as shame at nakedness, followed by the practical remedy of clothing, and furtiveness when god returns, manifested by hiding. As so often, it is not the breaking of the law, but, quite literally, the cover-up, which undoes them. God knows, by their shame, that they have transgressed. But god must also know, by their transgression, that they know that god lied. Can god be ashamed? Greek gods are shamelessly immoral. This one too? It seems not: his anger could be understood as the shameful anger of a liar caught out. Is this a text of god’s fall as well as humanity’s? God’s shame as well as humanity’s?

The theoretical consequence of ethical knowledge is shame; the practical consequence is expulsion. Both, ideally and materially respectively, figure alienation. A separation from nature, a broken relationship with god, a self-awareness which separates humanity from animality and from nature.

Notice, however, that god’s motive for the expulsion is not a simple punishment for transgression, but rather a policy of self-defence. God expels Adam and Eve because, having gained ethical knowledge, they might, by eating of the tree of life, also gain eternal life, which would make them ‘as one of us’. The tree of life was not forbidden, and had Adam and Eve had the knowledge to eat of it before sampling the fruit of the tree of knowledge … but they could not have done so, lacking the serpent’s knowledge. Divinity is revealed as being ethical knowledge plus eternal life. Or, at least, possessing these attributes makes one equal to, and therefore threatening to, divinity.

Before the breach with nature, only the serpent has awareness independent of god’s authority. The moral of the story is generally taken to be that humanity must heal its breach with nature and god; an alternative model would be that of the serpent; humanity must become a ‘subtil beast’. Certainly god seems to block such an alliance: god says to the serpent, ‘I shall put enmity between thee and the woman.’⁴ Where the serpent’s subtility came from is not revealed. Had it eaten the fruit? If the story is read, as here, without presuming god’s goodness or authority – as, with pagan gods, one assumes the latter but not the former–then god’s deception and petulant reaction are not justified, putting god in the wrong, and responsible for the breach.

The breach must be considered as twofold. The first breach, when the serpent and the fruit enlighten Adam and Eve, is a breach with nature in the form of self-consciousness which is figured as a first awareness of nakedness, addressed by the adoption of clothing. This leads to the second breach, with god, figured by the hiding from him. God’s realization that they have ethical knowledge leads to the expulsion and the setting by god of new terms in the relation between humanity and nature: the terms of hard labour rather than effortless existence. This is not an immediate consequence of self-consciousness, but god’s sanction against humanity for disobedience. In Christian teleology the breach with god is healed by Christ’s sacrifice, which could be viewed as god’s sacrifice for his wrongdoing against humanity in Eden. The breach with nature remains unrepaired. But the figure of the serpent, completely in nature but sufficiently independent to question the veracity of god’s claims, suggests a different reconciliation for humanity: with the serpent and against god. However the serpent gained its subtility, humanity can follow, in retaining ethical judgement, a judgement which condemns god, but may allow for reconciliation with nature, a reconciliation which need not be a mere return.

For a more orthodox reading from within the Christian tradition, Hegel’s argument that ‘as immediately natural human beings, we ought to regard ourselves as being what we ought not to be. This has been expressed by saying that human beings are evil by nature, i.e. they ought not to be the way they immediately are; hence they are as they ought not to be.’⁵ To Hegel it is ‘only with reference to cognition that human beings are posited as evil’.⁶ Hegel, in sum, concludes, ‘human beings become evil by cognizing’.⁷ For Hegel, although this is the story of the fall of humanity, the estrangement from nature and god is a necessary first step towards a later reconciliation at a higher level – with god, through Christ. But this is to accept god’s judgement against humanity, of sin, whereas an atheological reading, influenced by Bataille,⁸ might ask, why should humanity submit to the liar god?

Which leaves the question of a reconciliation with nature. God’s curse stands in the way, his imposition of enmity with the serpent and of labour as how humanity must relate to nature. Can this curse be lifted? Georges Bataille, reading Hegel through Alexandre Kojève, says the way back, the fiction of the nobility of nature imagined even by a writer like Jonathan Swift (‘the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express anything that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos’)⁹ is an illusion. Swift merely inverts terms; nature is noble, Yahoo humanity ugly, whose clothing is the most absurd symbol of estrangement from natural grace in the eyes of the idealized Houyhnhnms. This is not a resolution but a repetition with inverted values which still accepts separation. Bataille might seem to endorse this in phrases such as ‘The animal is in the world like water in water’¹⁰ but he goes on to say that ‘Man is the being who has lost, and even rejected, that which he obscurely is, avague intimacy.’¹¹ In festival, Bataille argues, man seeks a reunion with nature through the operation of sacrifice in the realm of the sacred, but ‘to subordinate is not only to alter the subordinated element but to be altered oneself’¹² which is the reality of the world of work, a world opposed to the intimate order, an order of ‘intimacy, in the trembling of the individual [which] is holy, sacred, and suffused with anguish’.¹³ The contrast is this: to the Christian and the Hegelian, humanity seeks union with god by a distancing from nature, whereas in Bataille humanity seeks an intimacy with nature which necessitates a sacred festivity. The sacred is the route back to intimacy with nature but, for the Christian, intimacy with god lies in a rejection of nature. But Bataille’s humanity can no more re-achieve natural intimacy than can the Christian, and the outcome, in the return of a consciousness of separation, is anguish.

If not through sacred festivity, an alternative passage might be aesthetic, the attempt to achieve intimacy through art. One place to think about this would be in the caves of Lascaux. Bataille wrote about the cave paintings of Lascaux as the birth of art. Bataille argued that the birth of representation this art work produces must be understood as a consequence of the painter no longer feeling part of natural animality but being separate: in this separation there may be a nostalgia, a wish to bridge the gap and return, but the way is barred and the reunion may occur only by other paths. The art is an excess, not a utilitarian activity but a celebration of the ability to represent the animal life surrounding the painter with an intimacy thought irrecoverable. When the figure of a man appears, insignificant, Bataille observes that it must surely be the first artist’s signature. The birth of art, a fecund birth which also births, in a dimension of transcendence, the essential ideas theorized by Bataille: taboo, transgression, law, the sacred and evil.

In Blanchot’s review of Bataille’s book¹⁴ he says, of the Lascaux painters, the subterranean paintings of Lascaux ‘make us enter into an intimate space of knowledge’.¹⁵ Bataille’s hypothesis, according to Blanchot, is that the paintings ‘are probably linked to … when man, interrupting the time of effort and work – thus for the first time truly man – returns to the source of natural overabundance … to what he was when he was not yet’.¹⁶

The ‘loss’ leads to a greater gain. The art work, Blanchot says, is: