Creation
The work of mental creation described in Chapter 1 of Genesis ended with the creation of Man in God's own image, that is, as Spirit possessed of a mind like God's own Mind in miniature. And the details given in verses 27 to 30 of Chapter 1 makes it clear that, at least as far as the Earth was concerned, Man was designed to take charge of it as God's local agent. In chapter 2, we find the beginning of Man's attempt to get to grips with his task.God saw that everything He had envisaged "was very good". He can now sit back and let the project roll itself out. No wonder God allowed Himself a celebratory holiday!
Verses 1-3. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Compared with the conciseness of chapter 1, the emphasis in these verses on God "resting" must have a message for us. It seems to mean that God is saying to Man, "I have now provided you with everything you need to make your own way. Now it's over to you to make of it what you will". In other words, Man was placed on Earth to carry forward the creative work of God as the principal agent of conscious evolution.
Man's work on Earth is just beginning; and the remainder of the Bible can be interpreted as an account of his efforts to understand his situation and the consequences of his misunderstandings.
From Verse 4 onwards, we have a highly condensed account of mankind's early attempts to gain an elementary understanding of himself as a self-conscious being and of the operation of the natural laws prescribed by God as the limits within which mankind has to learn to work.
Verses 4-6. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens — and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no man to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.
These verses reflect Man's early appreciation of one of the salient features of the operation of natural law — that whereas Earth had been endowed with the potential to bring forth vegetation, water was also necessary to release the vegetative life forces; and someone was required to till the soil in such a way as to produce systematic distribution of vegetation in accordance with some policy for production of food for humankind. Agriculture had begun.
Notice also that God is now referred to as the 'Lord God'. This suggests that though primitive man recognised himself as being intellectually superior to other earthly creatures, he also recognised that he was not entirely self-sufficient, but derived his authority from some yet higher category of Being who was in over-all charge and had to be 'looked up' to. So he had to devise a story that would go some way towards explaining his own existence, circumstances, and apparent relationship to the rest of the world.
Verse 7. Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. [Some translations say "man became a living soul". — Ed]
Here we find an early attempt to explain the emergence of Man on the physical plane. It reflects the realisation that breathing is a prime necessity for the maintenance of animal life in a material body, and that there are significant differences between living beings and material objects. We are still exploring these differences.
Verses 8-9. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden, and there He put the man He had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground — trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
These verses encapsulate Man's first recognition of himself as a being localised in space and dependent for food on the fruits of the earth immediately to hand. They reflect the awakening of an aesthetic sense of pleasure in things that appeal to the sight. The references to the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil seem strange in the context of a material garden, so we may take them as being allegorical references with some deeper meanings which we shall explore in due course.
Verses 10-14. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden, from where it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there). The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
These verses conjure up the idea of Man the terrestrial explorer, motivated by curiosity about himself and his environment and ranging far afield in his quest for knowledge of his environment and of the different physical and chemical properties of the raw materials that might be available for his use or pleasing to his senses.
But do we not also get the feeling that even on the physical level, Eden is not simply a particular garden and the source of four particular rivers? Is it not more likely that it is allegorical shorthand for the entire Earth — that Eden includes everywhere that is habitable by mankind?
Verses 15-17. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat of any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die".
Here is clear recognition of a higher authority than Man, a suggestion of unease in Man's appreciation of his situation, and uncertainty, even anxiety, about what is and is not legitimate. This is the dawn of morality.
Verses 18-20. The Lord God said, "It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air, and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam, no suitable helper was found.
Man's ability to give names to other creatures shows not only that he had invented language but also that he had devised some logical system of classification by which creatures could be distinguished from one another. The biological sciences had been born. The authors of Genesis were fully conscious of their fellow-creatures as companions and sharers of the Earth, to be given names and to be treated with respect, while recognising their shortcomings as intellectual collaborators.
This is also the first occasion in Genesis on which man calls himself "Adam". Troward tells us:
"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'."
This indicates that man had become conscious of his own body not merely as another animal — part of a herd or species, mass-produced, as it were, from the ground — but as a distinct individual entity with greatly enhanced potential for collaboration, companionship, and perhaps even friendship, with other human individuals.
Verses 21-23. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, He took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and He brought her to the man.
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of Man".
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
These verses cannot be other than allegorical, for we are told in Verse 27 of Chapter 1 that "male and female He created them" (i.e. human beings). We are reminded of the old riddle, "Which came first — the chicken or the egg?" And Genesis gives the logical answer: they were created together in mind as complementary components of one grand idea.
On one level, we can treat this as a nice little story introducing human sexuality on the physical plane and explaining why it is natural for young adults of complementary sex to leave the childhood homes provided by their Mums and Dads, and start their own families.
On another level, there is an ancient tradition that the animal species (like many vegetable species) were originally hermaphroditic (i.e. self-fertile), so it possible that Adam's 'operation' may refer to the physical separation of the sexes whilst emphasising that it was not the creation of a different species. This could perhaps provide an explanation for the disharmony some individuals experience between physical form and psychological tendency.
The reference to nakedness on one level suggests a sense of vulnerability through being clad only in a delicate skin compared with other creatures with outer coverings of hair, hide, or feathers. But the allusion to shame is puzzling, and we may have to delve more deeply for a solution. I hope to return to this conundrum on another occasion.
So we continue reading into Chapter 3. And here we find the charming tale of the serpent which tempted the woman to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and she, in turn, persuaded the man to share her enjoyment.
The Bible contemplates Man as composed of "spirit, soul, and body" (1 Thess. 5:23), or in other words as combining into a single unity a threefold nature — spiritual, psychic, and corporeal; and the knowledge which it proposes to give us is the knowledge of the true relation between these three factors. The Bible also contemplates the totality of all Being, manifested and unmanifested, as likewise constituting a threefold unity, which may be distributed under the terms, "God", "Man", and "the Universe"; and it occupies itself with telling us of the interaction, both positive and negative, which goes on between these three. Furthermore, it bases this interaction upon two great psychological laws, namely, that of the creative power of Thought and that of the amenability of Thought to control by Suggestion; and it affirms that this Creative Power is as innately inherent in Man's Thought as in the Divine Thought.
Thought must always be limited by the range of the intelligence which gives rise to it. The power of Thought as the creative agent is perfectly unlimited in itself, but its action is limited by the particular conception which it is sent forth to embody. If it is a wide conception based upon an enlarged perception of truth, the thought which dwells upon it will produce corresponding conditions. This is self-evident; it is simply the statement that an instrument will not do work to which the hand of the workman does not apply it; and if the student will only fix this very simple idea in his mind, he will find in it the key to the whole mystery of man's power of self-evolution. Let us make our first use of this key to unlock the mystery of the story of Eden."
Verses 1-7. Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
These opening verses provide a salutary lesson on the psychology of temptation. They allude to the tendency of physical fleshly man to concentrate his attention on physical, rather than spiritual, matters. Humans had become "sensual" and "fashion-conscious".
"Free" will is thus seen to be a misnomer. It is only by exercising the will that one discovers to what extent one really is free to change the conditions under which one lives. Human freedom is always conditional, and it is only by attempting to make changes that the envelope of possibility can be explored. This is the principle underlying the "scientific method".
The natural consequence of knowledge of good and evil is awareness of pain and death. The exercise of will implies acceptance of the natural consequences, some of which may be painful and constitute sharp lessons for us to learn from.
Verses 20-24. Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
Death of the body is God's ultimate insurance against the ruination of the world by disrespectful evil-doers of unlimited longevity. That is why access to the tree of life is carefully guarded, and why artificial creation of life ab initio has hitherto eluded the most diligent experimenters.
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 corresponding 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. 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:
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 tales 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'. 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.
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.
There is no such thing as a Negative Power, in the sense of power which is not the ONE All-originating Power. All energy is some mode of manifestation of the ONE, and it is always making something, though in doing so it may unmake something else; and what we loosely speak of as negative forces are the operation of the cosmic Law of Transition from one Form to another.
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.
But this knowledge can only be attained through long experience, which will at last bring Man to the place where he is able to deduce Truth from a priori principles and to learn that his past experiences of evil have proceeded from his own inverted conceptions and are not founded upon Truth but upon its opposite. If, then, it were possible for him to attain the knowledge which would enable him to live forever before gaining this experience, the result would be an immortality of misery, and therefore the Law of Nature renders it impossible for him to reach the knowledge which would place immortality within his grasp until he has gained that deep insight into the true working of causation which is necessary to make Eternal Life a prize worth having. For these reasons, man is represented as being expelled from Eden lest he should eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.
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" [loosely, "it is you this story is about". — 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:
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.
Thought
By way of introduction, Troward says:
Temptation
Let's now follow chapter 3 of the Genesis story:
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die'."
"You will not surely die", the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil".
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Will
Perhaps the most significant lesson in the Bible is that Eve's disobedience and Adam's complicity constitute conclusive evidence that mankind is endowed with a "will of its own". In other words, it is always possible for human beings to desire some changes in prevailing conditions and it is sometimes possible to act so as to bring such changes about — even if the conditions or "laws" in question are thought to emanate from God Himself.
Natural Law
Verses 8-19. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?"
He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid".
And He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?"
The man said, "The woman you put here with me — she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it".
Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate it".
Then the Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."
To the woman He said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
To Adam He said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you 'You must not eat of it', cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return."
And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live for ever". So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out He placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Allegorical Interpretation
Troward comments:
Three "Worlds"
"We must recollect that human life is a drama whose action takes place in three worlds, and therefore, in reading the Bible, we must always make sure which world we are at any moment reading about — the spiritual, the intellectual, or the physical. In the spiritual world, which is that of the supreme ideal, there exists nothing but the potential of the absolutely perfect; and it is on this account that in the opening chapter of the Bible we read that God saw that all his work was good — the Divine eye could find no flaw anywhere; and we should note carefully that this absolutely good creation included Man also.
Human Psychology
Now if Eden is the garden of the Soul, it is clear that Adam and Eve cannot be separate personages, but must be two principles in the human individuality which are so closely united as to be represented by a wedded pair. What, then, are these principles? St Paul makes a very remarkable statement regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us that "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression" (1 Tim. 2:14). We have, therefore, Bible warrant for saying that Adam was not deceived; but at the same time, the story of the fall clearly shows that he was expelled from Eden for partaking of the fruit at Eve's instigation.
For soul is form and doth the body make.'
Deception
What, then, is the deception which causes the 'Fall'? This is figured by the Serpent. The serpent is a very favourite emblem in all ancient esoteric literature and symbolism and is sometimes used in a positive and sometimes in a negative sense. In either case it means life — not the Originating Life-Principle, but the ultimate outcome of that Life-Principle in its most external form of manifestation. This, of course, is not bad in itself. Recognised in full realisation of the fact that it comes from God, it is the completion of the Divine work by outward manifestation; and in this sense it becomes the serpent which Moses lifted up in the wilderness.
Good and Evil
But what is deadly to the soul of Man is the conception that Evil is a subject of Knowledge as well as Good — for this reason: that by thinking of Evil as a subject to be studied, we thereby attribute to it a substantive existence of its own; in other words, we look upon it as something having a self-originating power which, as we advance in our studies, we shall find more and more clearly is not the case. And so, by the Law of the creative working of Thought, we bring the Evil into existence. We have not yet penetrated the great secret of the difference between causes and conditions. [See Causes and Conditions in my Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science.]
God is ONE
The First Commandment [Exodus 20:2] is the recognition of the Divine Unity, a fact on which Jesus laid special emphasis when he was asked which was the chief commandment of the Law; and the purpose is to guard us against the root-error from which all other forms of error spring. If the mathematical statement of Truth is that 'God is ONE', then the mathematical expression of error is that 'God is ZERO', and as the latter position has sometimes been taken by teachers of reputation, it may be well to show the student where the fallacy lies.
Equilibrium
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 nor 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 exactly balanced by a Universal principle which is not; they affirm that Nothing is the equivalent of Something.
Individual Selection
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.
Fallacious Premiss
Now the deception into which Eve falls is mathematically represented by saying that 'God = Zero', and thus attributing to Evil the same self-existence as to Good. There is no such thing as Absolute Evil; and what we recognise as Evil is the ONE Good Power working as Disintegrating Force, because we have not yet learnt to direct it in such a way that it shall perform the functions of transition to higher degrees of Life without any disintegration of our individuality either in person or circumstances. It is this disintegrating action that makes the ONE Power appear evil relatively to ourselves; and, so long as we conceive ourselves thus related to it, it does look as though it were Zero balancing in itself the two opposite forces of Life and Death, Good and Evil, and it is in this sense that "God" is said to know both.
Consequential Penalties
Before quitting this subject we must glance briefly at the sentences pronounced upon the man, the woman, and the serpent. The serpent, in this connection being the principle of error which results in Death, can never come into any sort of reconciliation with the Divine Spirit, which is Truth and Life, and therefore the only possible pronouncement upon the serpent is a curse — that is, a sentence of destruction; and the Bible goes on to show the stages by which this destruction is ultimately worked out. The penalty to Adam, or the corporeal body, is that of having to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow — that is, by toilsome labour, which would not be necessary if the true law of the creative exercise of our Thought were understood. The woman passes under a painful physiological law, but at the same time final deliverance and restoration from the "Fall" is promised through her instrumentality: her seed shall crush the serpent's head — that is, shall utterly destroy that false principle which the serpent represents.
Summary
The great Truth concerning Man is that he is the image and likeness of God.