It is hardly necessary to say that the story of Eden is an allegory: that is clearly shown by the nature of the two trees that grew in the centre of the garden — the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. This allegory is one repeated in many lands and ages, as in the classical fable of the Garden of the Hesperides and in the medieval Romance of the Rose; always the idea is repeated in a garden in whose centre grows some life-giving fruit or flower which is the reward of him who discovers the secret by which the centre of the garden may be reached.
The meaning in all these stories is the same. The garden is the Garden of the Soul, and the Tree of Life is that innermost perception of Spirit of which the Master said that it would be a well of water springing up to everlasting life to all who realised it. It is the garden which elsewhere in Scripture is called "the garden of the Lord"; and in accordance with the nature of the garden, the plants which grow in it — and which man has to tend and cultivate — are thoughts and ideas; and the chief of them are his idea of Life and his idea of Knowledge, and these occupy the centre of the garden because all our ideas must take their colour from them.
But as soon as we descend to the Intellectual world, which is the world of man's conception of things, it is quite different; and until man comes to realise the truly spiritual, and therefore perfectly good, essential nature of all things, there is room for any amount of mis-conception, resulting in a corresponding misdirection of man's creative instrument of Thought, which thus produces correspondingly misinformed realities.
Now the perfect life of Adam and Eve in Eden is the picture of Man as he exists in the spiritual world. It is not the tradition of some bygone age, but a symbolical representation of what we all are in our innermost being, thus recalling the words of the Master recorded in the Gospel of the Egyptians [possibly The Gospel of Thomas — Ed]. He was asked when the Kingdom of Heaven should come and replied, "When that which is without shall be as that which is within" — in other words, when the perfection of the innermost spiritual essence shall be reproduced in the external part. In the story of Man's pristine life of innocence and joy in Paradise, we are reading on the level of the highest of the three worlds.
The story of "the Fall" brings us to the envelopment of this spiritual nature in the lower intellectual and material natures, through which alone it can obtain perfect individualisation and Man become a reality instead of remaining only a Divine dream. In the allegory, Man is warned by god that Death will be the consequence of eating the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is not the threat of a sentence to be passed by God, but a warning as to the nature of the fruit itself; but this warning is disregarded by Eve, and she shares the forbidden fruit with Adam, and they are both expelled from Eden and become subject to Death as the consequence.
To satisfy both statements, therefore, we require to find in Adam and Eve two principles, one of which is capable of being deceived, and is deceived, and falls in consequence of the deception; and the other of which is incapable of being deceived but yet is involved with the fall of the former. This is the problem which has to be worked out, and the names of Adam and Eve supply the solution.
Eve, we are told, was so called because she was the mother of all living (Gen. 3:20). Eve, then, is the Mother of Life, a subject to which I shall have to refer again by and by. Eve, both syllables being pronounced, is the same word which in some Oriental languages is written "Hawa", by which name she is called in the Koran, and signifies Breath — the principle which we are told in Genesis 2:7 constitutes Man a living Soul.
Adam is rendered in the margin of the Bible "earth" or "red earth", and according to another derivation the name may also be rendered as "Not-breath". And thus in these two names we have the description of two principles, one of which is "Breath" and Life-conveying, while the other is "Not-breath" and is nothing but earth.
It requires no great skill to recognise in these the Soul and the Body. Then St Paul's meaning becomes clear. Any work on physiology will tell you that the human body is made up of certain chemical materials — so much chalk, so much carbon, so much water, etc. Obviously these substances cannot be deceived because they have no intelligence, and any deception that occurs must be accepted by the soul or intellectual principle, which is Eve, the mother of the individual life.
New Thought readers will have no difficulty in following the meaning of the poet Spenser when he says:
For the soul of the body form doth take,
For soul is form and doth the body make.
And since the soul is "the builder of the body", the deception which causes wrong thinking on the part of the intellectual man reproduces itself in physical imperfection and in adverse external circumstances.
But without the recognition of it as the ultimate mode of the Divine Spirit (which is all that is), it becomes the deadly reptile, not lifted up, but crawling flat upon the ground: it is that ignorant conception of things which cannot see the spiritual element in them and therefore attributes all their energy of action and reaction to themselves, not perceiving that they are the creations of a higher power.
Ignorant of the Divine Law of Creation, we do not look beyond secondary causes; and therefore because our own creative thought-power is ever externalising conditions representative of our conceptions, we necessarily become more and more involved in the meshes of a network of circumstances from which we can find no way of escape. How these circumstances come about we cannot tell. We may call it blind chance, or iron destiny, or inscrutable Providence; but because we are ignorant of the true Law of Primary Causation, we never suspect the real fact, which is that the originating power of all this inharmony is ourself.
This is the great deception. We believe the serpent, or that conception of life which sees nothing beyond secondary causation, and consequently we accept the Knowledge of Evil as being equally necessary with the Knowledge of Good; and so we eat of the tree of Knowledge of Good and of Evil. It is this dual aspect of knowledge that is deadly, but knowledge itself is nowhere condemned in Scripture; on the contrary, it is repeatedly stated to be the foundation of all progress. "Wisdom is a Tree of Life to them that lay hold upon her", says the Book of Proverbs; "salvation is of the Jews because we know what we worship", says Jesus; and so on throughout the Bible.
But this knowledge of our thought-action is not reached in the earlier history of the race or of the individual, for the simple reason that all evolution takes place by Growth; and consequently the history of Adam and Eve in realisation — that is, the external life of humanity as distinguished from our simultaneous existence on the supreme plane of Spirit — commences with their expulsion from Eden and their conflict with a world of sorrows and difficulties.
If the reader realises how this expulsion results from the soul accepting Evil as a subject of Knowledge, he will now be able to understand certain further facts. We are told that "the Lord God said, 'Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil'; and now lest he put forth his hand and take of the tree of life and eat and live for ever, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden" (Gen. 3:22-23). Looked at superficially, this seems like jealousy that man should have attained the same knowledge as God, and fear lest he should take the further step that would make him altogether God's equal. But such a reading of the text is babyish and indicates no conception of God as Universal All-originating Spirit, and we must therefore look for some deeper interpretation.
The conclusion that the mathematical expression of God is zero is reached in this way: as soon as you can conceive of anything as being, you can also conceive of it as not-being; in other words, the conception of any positive implies also the conception of its corresponding negative. Consequently, the conception of the positive or of the negative by itself is only half the conception, and a whole conception implies the recognition of both.
Therefore, since God contains the all, He must contain the negative as well as the positive of all potentiality, and the equal balance of positive and negative is Zero. But the radical error of this argument is the assumption that it is possible for two principles to neutralise each other, one of which is and the other of which is not.
We find the principle of neutralising by equilibrium throughout Nature, but the equilibrium is always between two things each of which actually exists. Thus in chemistry we find an acid exactly equilibrating with an alkali and producing a neutral substance which is neither acid not alkali; but this is because the acid and the alkali both really exist; each of them is something that is. But what should we say to a chemical formula which required us to produce a neutral substance by equilibrating an acid which did exist by an alkali which did not? Yet this is precisely the sort of equilibration we are asked to accept by those who would make Zero the mathematical expression of All-originating Being. They say that a Universal Principle which is is exactly balanced by a Universal principle which is not; they affirm that Nothing is the equivalent of Something.
This is mere juggling with words and figures, and wilfully shutting our eyes to the fact that the only quality of Nothing is Nothingness. Can anything be plainer than the old philosophic dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing is made out of nothing)? There are disintegrating forces in Nature, but they do not proceed out of Nothing. They are the ONE positive power acting at lower levels — not the absence of the One Universal Energy but the same Energy working with less complex concentration and specific purpose than when directed by those higher modes of itself which constitute individual intelligences.
Above this there is a higher Law, to lead us to the realisation of which is the whole object of the Bible, and that is the Law of Individual selection. It does not do away with the Law of Transition, for without transition there could be no Evolution; but it substitutes the Individual Law of conscious Life for the Impersonal Cosmic Law, and effects transition by living processes of assimilation and readjustment which more perfectly build up the individuality, instead of by a process of unbalanced disintegration which would destroy it. This is the Living Law of Liberty, which at every stage of its progress makes us not less, but more and yet more, ourselves.
It is for this reason that the Bible so strongly insists upon the mathematical statement that God is ONE, and in fact makes this the basis of all that it has to say. God is Life, Expression, reality; and how can these things comport with Nothingness? All we can know of any invisible power is through the effects we see it produce. Of electricity and chemical attraction it may truly be said that "no man hath seen them or can see them"; yet we know them by their working, and we rightly argue that if they work, they exist. The same argument applies to the Divine Spirit. It is that which is and not that which is not; and therefore I ask the student who would realise reality and not nothingness once for all to convince himself of the fallaciousness of the argument that the Divine Being is Not-being, or that Naught is the same thing as ONE.
If he starts his search for Reality by assuming what contradicts mathematics and common sense, he can never expect to find Reality, for he has denied its existence at the very outset and carries that initial denial all the way along with him. But if he realises that all relations, whether relatively positive or negative, must necessarily be relations between factors which actually exist, and that there can be no relation with nothing, then, because he has assumed Reality in his premises, he will eventually find it in his conclusions and will learn that the Great Reality is the ONE expressing itself as the MANY, and the MANY recognising themselves in the ONE.
The more advanced student will have no difficulty in recognising the particular schools of teaching to which these remarks apply; their mathematics are unassailable, but the assumptions on which they make their selection of terms in the first instance are totally inapplicable to the subject-matter to which they apply them, for that subject is Life-in-itself.
But this is a conception very different from that of the All-productive ONE and arises, not from the true nature of Being, but from our own confused Thought. But because the action of our Thought is always creative, the mere fact of our regarding Evil as an affirmative force in itself makes it so relatively to ourselves; and therefore no sooner do we fear evil than we begin to create the evil that we fear. To extinguish evil, we must learn not to fear it, and that means to cease recognising it as having any power of its own; and so our salvation comes from realising that in truth there is nothing but the good.
Since the Woman is the Soul, or Individual Mind, her progeny must be thoughts and ideas. New ideas are not brought forth easily; they are the result of painful experiences and of long mental labour; and thus the physiological analogy contained in the text exactly illustrates the birth of new ideas into the world. And as the evolution of the Soul proceeds towards higher and higher intelligence, there is a corresponding increase in the lifeward tendency of its ideas, and thus there is enmity between the seed of "the Woman", or the enlightened conception of the principles of Life, and the seed of "the Serpent", or the opposite and unenlightened conception.
This is the same warfare which we find in Revelation between "the Woman" and "the Dragon". But in the end the victory remains with "the Woman" and her "Seed". During the progress of the struggle, the Serpent must bruise the heel of the Divine Seed — that is to say, must impede and retard the progress of Truth on the earth; but Truth must conquer at last and crush the Serpent's head so that it shall never rise up again forever. The "Seed of the Woman" — the Fruit of the spiritually enlightened Mind, which must at last achieve the final victory — is that supreme ideal which is the recognition of Man's Divine Sonship. It is the realisation of the fact that he is, indeed, the image and likeness of God. This is the Truth the knowledge of which Jesus said would set us free, and each one who attains to this knowledge realises that he is at once the Son of Man and the Son of God.
Thus the story of the Fall contains also the statement of the principle of the Rising-again. It is the history of the human race, because it is first the history of the individual soul, and to each one of us the ancient wisdom says, "de te fabula narratur" [this story is about you — Ed]. These opening chapters of Genesis are, therefore, an epitome of all that the Bible afterwards unfolds in fuller detail, and the whole may be summed up in the following terms:
The great Truth concerning Man is that he is the image and likeness of God.
Man is at first ignorant of this Truth, and his ignorance is his Fall.
Man at last comes to the perfect knowledge of this Truth, and this knowledge is his Rising-again; and these principles will expand until they bring us to the full Expression of the Life that is in us in all the glories of the Heavenly Jerusalem.