GARDEN OF EDEN--TRUE OR FALSE?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. . . .God said, Let there be light and there was light. . . .And God said let the earth bring forth living creatures. . . and it was so. . . .And God said let us make man in our image. . . .so God created man, male and female. . . .And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. . . .And God said it is not good that the man should be alone. . . .And the Lord God made a woman and brought her unto the man. . . .and they were both naked. . .and were not ashamed. .........

Early Humankind

There is something quaint and powerful about this genetic tale, this ancient, sacred nudist colony in the Garden of Eden. Whether you believe it to be historically true or only a symbolic picture of man's divine origin does not matter. No archeologist has ever found the Garden of Eden. No geologist believes that the world was actually formed in six days by divine fiat. Human history actually begins with the emergence of homo sapiens from proto-human populations. If the Biblical story is to be taken literally then Adam and Eve were certainly homo sapiens not proto-humans like Neanderthal man or Cromagnon man, certainly not like the earliest skeletal remains dating back a million years. So Adam and Eve were certainly not the first human-like creatures on earth.

The process of human evolution was undoubtedly very slow, but by about 100,000 years ago scattered hunting packs of biologically modern kinds of man roamed the savanna lands of Africa and perhaps also inhabited regions with suitably mild climes in Asia as well. These earliest human communities depended in large part on skills inherited from their proto-human ancestors. The use of wood and stone tools, for example seems to have started before fully human populations had come into existence. Elementary language, and habits of cooperation in the hunt, were also proto-human in their origin. So, perhaps, was the use of fire. A longer infancy and childhood was what mainly distinguished fully human populations from the man-like creatures who flourished before them. This meant a longer time when the young depended on parents, and a correspondingly longer time when the elders could teach their offspring the arts of life. From the child's side, slower maturation meant prolonged plasticity and a much increased capacity to learn. Enlarged learning capacities, in turn, increased the frequency of intentional preservation of inventions and discoveries made, presumably, more or less, by accident.

When this occurred cultural evolution began to outstrip the slow pace of biological evolution. Human behavior came to be governed far more by what man learned in society than by anything individuals inherited biologically through the marvelous mechanism of the DNA molecules. When cultural evolution took over primacy from biological evolution, history in the strict sense began. Nothing is known for sure about the spread of the earliest human populations from their cradle-land, if indeed there was a single geographical center where modern man first evolved.

If there was an original Garden of Eden it may very well have been in East Africa rather than the Middle East or there may have been many Gardens of Eden. Minor biological variation certainly arose--witness the racial differences among existing humankind. But when and where modern races defined themselves is unclear. Even cultural differentiation may not at first have been very conspicuous. At any rate, hand axes and other stone tools show remarkable uniformity over wide areas of the old world and across comparatively vast periods of time. Indeed, about nine tenths of homo sapiens time on earth saw men confined to the life of hunters and gatherers, using simple tools of wood and stone, familiar with fire, and living so far as we can tell in an almost unchanging way from generation to generation.

The Appeals of Eden

Despite all these scientifically determined facts, the pristine purity and simplicity of the Adam and Eve story has exercised extraordinary power over the minds of man through some twenty centuries. In this corrupt, polluted, beastly world of the 20th century man find themselves drawn to that romantic, pure and beautiful mirage of the original love story. As life becomes increasingly complicated, crowded, industrial and technical, man has always tried to return to that Garden of Eden.

Rebels, reformers and revolutionaries through the ages have tried to transform human nature and man's material environment. Why? Because man cannot forget how good and happy life was in the mythologized original garden plot east of Eden. Peasant rebels, religious reformers, political revolutionaries, from Moses to Marx, from Maximillian Robespierre to Jerry Rubin, have tried to recreate the legend of an ideal existence. History is an endless tale of human degeneration and human recreation, of corruption and improvement, of backwardness and progress, of war and peace. Since history is primarily a study of man and his relation to himself, other human beings and his natural world, it would seem appropriate to begin with an assessment of human nature and human destiny.

Human Nature and Human Destiny

Man has always been his own great enemy. How shall he think about himself? Every positive assertion we make about ourselves is soon shot full of holes and contradictions when we stop to analyze them. Take for instance the notion that man is a child of nature, that he should not pretend to be more than the animal, which he of course is. But he is a curious animal who has the inclination and capacity to pretend to be more than the beast. If on the other hand man insists that he holds a unique and distinctive place in nature, he points to his obvious ability to think and reason. Reason automatically involves us in the problem of virtue. If man believes himself to be essentially good and attributes the admitted evidence of human history to specific social and historical causes he involves himself in begging the question, thus denying reason, for on close analysis all social and historic causes are man-made.

If we turn to the ultimate question, dealing with the value of human life and ask ourselves, ''Is life worth living'', the very character of the question reveals that the questioner must stand outside himself, that he must transcend the life he is judging and estimating. Man can reveal this transcendence not only by committing suicide but also by formulating reasons and philosophies which negate life and regard a lifeless eternity such as Nirvana as the only possible end of life.

What then is man's place in the universe? The obvious fact is that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits. But man is also a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world. That man stands outside of nature in some sense is admitted oven by naturalists like Charles Darwin who are intent upon keeping him as close to nature as possible. There are basically three views of man, the classical, the Christian and the modern. Let us look at them one by one.

The Classical View of Man

The classical conception of human nature was an amalgamation of the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoic philosophers. The essence of that conception is that man has to be understood primarily from the standpoint of his unique rational faculties--or his ability to think and reason. Both Aristotle and Plato make a sharp distinction between mind and soul or mind and body. It is the unifying and ordering principle, the organ of mind (or --- --- Greek word) which brings harmony into the life of the soul, as mind is the creating and forming principle of the world' Plato and Aristotle share a common rationalism, that is a common belief in the supremacy of the mind or intellectual power over the body and the material world. What are the consequences of this view?

• This kind of rationalism identifies rational man with God. Individuality is insignificant since it rests upon the particularity of the body. ln other words individuals are different only in their physical configurations. Mind and idea is everywhere the same and hence immortal.
  
  
• The dualism implied here has the consequence for the doctrine of man of identifying the body with evil and the mind or spirit with goodness. This mind-body, good-evil dualism stands in sharp contrast to the Christian view of human nature. The Bible makes no distinction between a good mind and an evil body.

The Stoics placed greater emphasis on the presence of reason in the world process (history that is) and in the soul and body of man than did Aristotle and Plato. But to the Stoics too man is essentially reason. The Stoics also emphasize the importance of human reason, which is a spark of divine reason, in dominating and controlling the material world. In simple words, it is mind over matter.

The classical view of man therefore is optimistic for it finds no defect or flaw in the center of human personality. But while the ancient rationalists have supreme confidence in the virtue of rational man they do not believe that all men will be either virtuous or happy. Not all men will be equally rational and hence virtuous. Some are ruled by their passions: in other words, their evil bodies hold the essential rationality in check. The mind, so to speak, has to be liberated from the bondage of the body in order for man to be happy. Since this struggle of the mind versus the body was an uncertain one, the Greeks were quite melancholy. Aristotle confessed that ''net to be born is the best thing and death is better than life'' . Misery accompanied genius. In other words, to be smart meant to be unhappy. The wise man would be virtuous, according to the philosophers, but they doubted that many men would make the effort to wise. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, reduced this view of human nature to the absurd when he said, ''forgive."

The Christian View of Man

The christian view of man is based on faith in God as creator of the world and hence transcends the contradictions of rationalism. It makes no distinctions between mind and matter, between consciousness and extension. God is not merely mind who transforms a previously given formless stuff. God is both vitality and form and the source of all existence. He creates the world. This world is not God, but it is not evil because it is net God. Being God's creation, it is good. The consequences of this view are that there is a unity of body and soul in human personality. There is no dualism of mind-body and good-evil here.

Man is, according to the Biblical view, a created and finite existence in both body and spirit. In the Christian view man is understood from the standpoint of god rather than the standpoint of man's rational faculties. There is me struggle between a good mind and evil body. Man in the Christian view resists the goodness of God with his will, the very center of his personality. Man finds peace only when he admits this sinful rebellion against his creator and submits to God's will thus unifying mind and body.

The Modern View of Man

This view is a mixture of classical, Christian and some distinctly modern motifs. The modern view, if there is such a thing, is complex and full of contradictions. There are many views rather than one single identifiable conception of man. These are idealists who protest against Christian humility and envy both man's creatureliness and man's sinfulness. This was the essential issue during the Renaissance which sought to raise man to the level of individualistic uniqueness. The infinity of human self-consciousness and the greatness of man are praised by such Renaissance man as Giordano Bruno and Leonardo da Vinci.

There are also naturalists who first appeared in the Renaissance and then again in the 18th century. The naturalists tend to identify man with nature, that is, man should try to understand himself in relation to nature. ln the end this conception heads to pantheism--the merging of mind and matter. God and man become identified with natural causes. German idealism and the French philosopher Descartes provided an antidote to this naturalism by emphasizing differences between man and nature. Man is purely thought, nature is purely mechanics and there is no organic unity between them.

With the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism we have a typically middle class or bourgeois conception of man. The capitalist philosophy of man seeks asylum in nature's dependabilities and serenities. After all nature can be controlled and exploited by science, a product of man's genius. The spirit of capitalism is the spirit of an irreverent exploitation.

There is also a romantic strand in modern views of human nature. Romantics interpret man as primarily vitality, rather than pale reason or mechanical nature. This is the newest element in modern anthropological theories. The French philosopher Bergson first introduced it as the ''elan vital'' . Unfortunately this theory led to bitter consequences in the 20th century, namely fascism and nazism. Marxist thought complicates this pattern further. It interprets man in vitalistic terms, discounting the pretenses of rational man, but the man who is to be will build a society which will be governed by the most remarkable rational coherence of life with life and interest with interest. In other words, the ideal classless society of the Marxists and Communists is really made up of the most rational of man, whereas the man who makes revolution to establish that kind of society is essentially a romantic vitalist. This contradiction has never been resolved wherever Marxist theory has been put into practice.

The concept of individuality in modern culture, of human dignity and human liberty found great emphasis in the Renaissance, although its root goes back partially to early Christianity. This emphasis on individualism was reechoed again with tremendous fanfare by bourgeois entrepreneurs. This bourgeois individual felt himself to be the master of his own destiny, the captain of his own ship. The capitalist attacked the communal togetherness of medieval life. But the modern individualist who thought it by his destruction of medieval solidarities. He found himself the creator of a technical civilization which creates more enslaving mechanical interdependencies and collectivities. than anything known in an agrarian world. No one can be as completely and discreetly an individual as bourgeois individualism supposes, whether in the organic forms of an agrarian or the more mechanical forms of a technical society.

All theories of man have to deal with the problem of evil. Modern man has an essentially easy conscience about this, however. Sin has become irrelevant. If sin or evil is there it must be because man is met using his reason properly. Either the rational man or the natural man is conceived as essentially good, and it is only necessary for man either to rise from the chaos of nature to the harmony of mind or to descend from the chaos of spirit to the harmony of nature in order to be saved.

The philosophy of history of modern man is expressed in the idea of progress. Either by a force immanent in nature itself, or by the gradual extension of rationality, or by the elimination of specific sources of evil, such as priesthoods, tyrannical governments and class divisions in society, modern man expects to move toward some kind of perfect society. There are of course pessimistic antidotes to this overweening optimism of modern man. These pessimists are still a minority, but these minority voices are more frequently heard as the isms of Friedrich Nietzsche. One of the modern fruits of Nietzschean thought is Freudian pessimism. Egotism and the will to power which Christian thought regards as the very source of sin and bourgeois liberalism hopes will fade away, these modern pessimists regard as normal and normative.

Today the claims of optimistic progressivists and Hobbesian cynicism and Nietzschean nihilism are everywhere in deadly combat. The outcome is uncertain.