"Who is there so foolish and without common sense as to believe that God planted trees in the garden of Eden like a husbandman; and planted therein the tree of life perceptible to the eyes and to the senses, which gave life to the eater; and another tree which gave to the eater a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that everybody must regard these as figures under which a recondite sense is concealed".
Let us, then, follow up the suggestion of this early father of the Church, and enquire what may be the "recondite sense" concealed under this figure of the two trees.
The more we see into this position the more intolerable it becomes, because from this standpoint we can never attain any certain basis of action, and the forces of possible evil multiply as we contemplate them. To set out to out-wit all evil by our own knowledge of its nature is to attempt a task the hopelessness of which becomes apparent when we see it in its true light.
The reason why this is so is because intellectual study is always the study of the various laws which arise from the different relations of things to one another; and it therefore presupposes that these things, together with their laws, are already in existence. Consequently it does not start from the truly creative standpoint, that of creating something entirely new, creation ex nihilo as distinguished from construction, or the laying together of existing materials, which is what the word literally means.
To recognise evil as a force to be reckoned with is therefore to give up the creative standpoint altogether. It is to quit the plane of First Cause and descend into the realm of secondary causation and lose ourselves amid the confusion of a multiplicity of relative causes without grasping any unifying principle behind them.
No doubt for this affirmative use of our creative power it is necessary that we start from the basic conception of a single originating power which is absolutely good and life-giving; but if there were a self-originating power which was destructive, then no creation could ever have come into existence at all, for the positive and negative self-originating powers would cancel each other and the result would be zero. The fact, therefore, of our own existence is a sufficient proof of the singleness and goodness of the Originating Power, and from this starting point there is no second power to be taken into consideration, and consequently we do not have to study the evil that may arise out of existing or future circumstances, but require to keep our minds fixed only upon the good which we intend to create.
There is a very simple reason for this. It is that every new creation necessarily carries its own law with it, and by that law produces new conditions of its own. A balloon affords a familiar illustration of my meaning. The balloon with its freight weighs several hundredweight, yet the introduction of a new factor, the gas in the balloon, brings with it a law of its own which entirely alters the conditions, and the force of gravity is so completely overcome that the whole mass rises into the air. The Law itself is never altered, but we have previously known it only under limiting conditions. The conditions, however, are no part of the Law itself; and a clearer realisation of the Law shows us that it contains in itself the power of transcending them. The law which every new creation carries with it is therefore not a contradiction of the old Law, but its specialisation into a higher mode of action.
Only we must not forget that it is working through our own minds. It thinks through our mind, and our mind must be made a suitable channel for this mode of its operation by conforming itself to the broad generic lines of the Spirit's thinking. The reason for this is one which I have sought to impress throughout these lectures, namely that the specialisation of a law is never the denial of it, but on the contrary the fuller recognition of its basic principles; and if this is the case in ordinary physical science it must be equally so when we come to specialise the great Law of Life itself. The Spirit can never change its essential nature as the essence of Life, Love, and Beauty; and if we adopt these characteristics, which constitute the Law of the Spirit, as the basis of our own thinking, and reject all that is contrary to them, then we afford the broad generic conditions for the specialised thinking of the Spirit through our own minds. The thinking of the Spirit is that involution, or passing of spirit into form, which is the whole being of the creative process.
Doubtless this will imply changes in our old mode of thinking: but these changes are not forced upon us; they are brought about naturally by the new standpoint from which we now see things. Almost imperceptibly to ourselves we grow into a New Order of Thought which proceeds, not from a knowledge of good and evil, but from the Principle of Life itself. That is what makes the difference between our old thought and our new thought. Our old thought was based upon a comparison of limited facts; our new thought is based upon a comprehension of principles. The difference is like that between the mathematics of the infant who cannot count beyond the number of apples or marbles put before him, and that of the senior wrangler who is not dependent upon visible objects for his calculations but plunges boldly into the unknown because he knows that he is working by indubitable principles.
In like manner when we realise the infallible Principle of the Creative Law we no longer find we need to see everything cut and dried beforehand for, if so, we could never get beyond the range of our old experiences; but we can move steadily forward because we know the certainty of the creative principle by which we are working — or, rather, which is working through us — and that our life, in all its minutest details, is its harmonious expression. Thus the Spirit thinks through our thought, only its thought is greater than ours. It is the paradox of the less containing the greater.
This, as it appears to me, is the hidden meaning of the two trees in Eden, the Garden of the Soul. It is the distinction between a knowledge which is merely that of comparisons between different sorts of conditions, and a knowledge which is that of the Life which gives rise to, and therefore controls, conditions. Only we must remember that the control of conditions is not to be attained by violent self-assertion — which is only recognising them as substantive entities to be battled with — but by conscious unity with that All-creating Spirit which works silently, but surely, on its own lines of Life, Love, and Beauty.
"Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." (Zec. 4:6)