The Garden of Eden and Our Psychological Regression

“The Garden of Eden With the Fall of Man,” circa 1615, by Pierre Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Public Domain

One of the reasons why I am such an ardent student of world mythologies is that they reveal so much of our psychology today. Why? Because human nature hasn’t changed since the beginning of human time. To put it another way, we haven’t progressed.

As Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a highly published cardiologist, said in an “American Thought Leaders” interview: “Even though we’ve advanced technologically in the last 2,500 years, ... we haven’t progressed psychologically, and I think, in recent years, I would say ... we’re regressing psychologically.”

There’s no denying our technological advancements and exponential achievements. But what use are they if we are not psychologically improving as humans—indeed, if we’re possibly regressing?

Ultimately, talking about this regression would extend beyond psychology and include a moral dimension: There’s been an increase in evil in our modern world.

We don’t like to use this kind of vocabulary, such as “evil,” today because it sounds absolutist and judgmental. Instead, we say things such as, “That is unacceptable.” Human regression over time, however, is something that the myths around the world talk about a lot: a descent from the Golden Age of humankind to Silver, to Bronze and, finally, to an age of Iron, when evil is rampant.

A detail from "The Golden Age" by Pietro da Cortona. Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy. Public Domain

This concept or its variants are common to Greek, Roman, Hindu, Norse (the Ragnarok cycle), Zoroastrian, Buddhist (cycles of decline), and Aztec mythologies.

Mythologies Addressing Humankind’s Decline

In their book “Doubt and Certainty,” cosmologist Tony Rothman and physicist George Sudarshan consider the Hindu version of this myth:

“Each cycle consists of four ages, each degraded from the last. The Fourth Age, which comes first in the Indian reckoning, is the ‘golden age,’ a beatific epoch of prosperity and justice in which dharma, or duty, law is respected. In the Third Age only three-quarters of the dharma is observed; humans now know suffering and death. The Second Age follows in which only half the dharma exists on earth, and evil and suffering increase; the human life span grows shorter. We, of course, live in the final Evil Age (the Kali Yuga), where wealth becomes the sole criterion of virtue, sex replaces love and calculators replace minds. At the end of the four ages, which last a total of 12,000 divine years or 4,320,000 human years, there is a dissolution, a general cleansing.”

Kismet, a robot head, which was made in the 1990s, can recognize and simulate emotions. With modern technology, are we losing our humanity? Rama/CC BY-SA 3.0

This pattern of moral deterioration is common. The quintessence and, arguably, the oldest myth of all is the Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). Things were once perfect—golden—and now, they are not.

To be clear here, these myths tell deep truths. Some, such as Austin Farrer, a mid-20th-century senior cleric in the Church of England, distinguish between the literal and mythological. He wrote: “Adam in the old story meets God walking in the garden. ... But that is poetry, and it would be very dull-witted of us to take it literally.”

While I am quite prepared to accept that the events in the story of Adam and Eve literally happened, whether it is literally true or not is irrelevant because the story is true in the deepest sense. It answers a question about the real nature of human existence. We can believe either or both; insisting on facticity is irrelevant; both fact and fiction tell us important lessons here.

Psychological Pathologies

Before looking at the story, let’s establish what I mean by psychological issues or disturbances, or—to use current jargon—pathologies. There are many of them. We find them in the news all the time, as some crime or atrocity is attributed to one or other of them. Here are an important few that exhibit negative mindsets: control of reactions, repression, blame, identification, sublimation, withdrawal, projection, rationalization, numbing, denial, and so on.

All these strategies are defense mechanisms designed to protect our own egos from being exposed to something that threatens or that it feels threatens its security or existence. But not all pathologies are equal; some are worse than others.

The biblical events in the Garden of Eden identify three psychological pathologies that human beings were prone to, and still are—as our nature has not changed.

Let’s look at them in reverse chronological order. First up is blame.

Blaming

Line engraving by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) after Jodocus van Winghe (1544–1603). Eve may have picked the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, but Adam did not seem overly opposed to eating it. Public Domain

Adam and Eve have done wrong by disobeying God’s explicit instruction. Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. It’s not their fault!

Blame transfers accountability to another; in other words, it says I am not responsible for my action. Someone else is to blame for it. Indeed, blame may be said to be the most endemic, the most pernicious, and the most destructive of all the psychological vices that beset mankind. It is the kingpin of all that is negative within us. Small wonder, then, that it wreaks such havoc. It’s also very difficult to counter.

On committing a fault, a more honest response would be to say: “Mea culpa”—my mistake. But this, alas, is relatively rare. Studying the myth helps us to see how deeply enrooted this vice of blaming others is. From a very broad perspective, we find that nations blame nations and grudges can last centuries.

We may not be able to stop our own nation from doing this, except perhaps at the ballot box, but how can we—individually—stop blaming others?

If we delve into the Garden of Eden events, they can take hold of our imaginations and become a do-it-yourself personal development program. We can see that this problem is also in us.

An additional, crucial aspect of why blaming is so bad is that—in the jargon of the personal development movement of the past 50 years—it is a little-understood fact. Each time we blame others, we are killing ourselves. In blaming others, there’s a sort of self-death because we are denying a part of reality that has been created with us and by us and through us, and saying we have no part in that.

Essentially, we are denying ourselves as co-creators of reality and, with it, that acceptance of things as they are. For this reason, blaming is a kind of blasphemy. We are denying our god-like powers to co-create. In short, we are exiting and isolating ourselves from the consciousness or Tao or God that drives the universe that we are a part of.

In theological parlance, we are heading for hell. From a secular perspective, we can say that hell is not a place beyond life, but a state of mind we enter into here and now. Or, as traditional Buddhists express it: “You will not be punished for your anger [or blame]. You'll be punished by your anger [or blame].” That is, any vice will become its own punishment.

Projecting

“Adam and Eve With Apple and Serpent” by Marcantonio Raimondi, after Albrecht Dürer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain

The second extreme psychological pathology is projection. Projection is the negative mindset in which we not only blame others, but also see and feel that others have a vice that characterizes us. Haven’t we all met a friend who constantly suggests others are being jealous or being competitive? Yet over time, we come to realize that the jealousy, the competitiveness, or other fault is very much a part of them, but they don’t see it. C.S. Lewis observed, “Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence.”

Adam and Eve are clearly unaware of the seriousness of their sin, even as they are being thrown out of Eden. They project their guilt onto the serpent. There is no evil in them, they think, but there is evil in the serpent.

Projection and blame work together and reinforce each other. If the serpent is to blame, then the serpent must be guilty, and so we are not! What we first find in the Garden of Eden, we now find in the workplace, where it’s called “excusitis.”

Denying

“The Rebuke of Adam and Eve,” 1740, by Charles Joseph Natoire. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before God rebukes Adam and Eve, he asks them questions.  Public Domain

Third, we come to the psychological pathology we have already alluded to in describing blame: denial. God asks Adam three questions: “Where are you?” to which Adam answers indirectly; then, “Who told you that you were naked?” Adam doesn’t answer this question at all. To the third question: “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Adam answers simply by blaming his wife. In short, Adam—and Eve doing much the same—both wish to deny the reality of what has happened while projecting evil onto another and blaming that other—the serpent—at the same time.

At the root of these crimes, denial is going on, a virulent denial of truth, of reality, of life. Within the Greek myths, the worst crime of all is hubris, which is also a form of denying the truth: the truth of who we are, and who we are in respect to the gods themselves. It is a fault of exceeding our limitations as mortal beings.

These myths—the Garden of Eden in particular—flatly contradict modern notions of progress and human perfectibility. We would do well to pay more attention to them; if we did, we would have a much greater insight into what is going on in the world, and what is going on in our own hearts.

As professor and philosopher Terry Eagleton expressed the matter: “What is needed ... is a recrudescence of myth which will put paid to the secular spirit of progress and optimism, currently beguiling the masses.” Amen to that.

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]