On Ignorance and Knowledge

 

On Ignorance and Knowledge

February 20, 2023

 

The Revised Common Lectionary for Sunday, February 26, 2023, the first Sunday of Lent, includes a few verses from the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden in chapters two and three of Genesis. I read those verses last night, and they got me thinking about the story of Adam and Eve in a way I never have before. I’m going to explore some of the story’s meaning in this piece. Before I do I need to confirm that I understand this story as story, as myth. It is not literally true. There never were two original people named Adam and Eve. I read it for meaning not for facts. That’s how you should read it too.

 It’s a simple enough story. The Lord God creates two earth creatures who we call Eve and Adam. God places them in an earthly paradise in the garden of Eden. God tells them that they may eat anything in the garden except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That tree stands in the center of the garden, perhaps a symbolic placement that emphasizes its importance. A tempter called only a “serpent,” not a snake, talks to Eve. It asks Eve what God has told her and Adam they could eat. Eve says we can eat of everything here except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She says God has told them that if they eat of that tree, on that day they will die. The serpent says no you won’t. It says that if they were to eat of the forbidden tree their eyes would be opened and they would be like God, knowing good and evil. Eve sees how tempting the forbidden tree and its fruit is and, it seems, is intrigued by the prospect of becoming like God. The tempter gives her the fruit from the tree. She takes it, gives some to Adam, and they both eat it. When they do their eyes are opened, but the only knowledge they seem to get is knowledge that they are both naked. They make loincloths and cover themselves. When God asks them what they have done hey confess to God that they ate the forbidden fruit. God imposes many of the common hardships of human life on them, throws them out of the Eden, and constructs an impassable barrier so they cannot return there.

Last night I got to thinking: What are the lessons here? One seems to be that we are more likely to listen to and follow the tempter than we are to follow God. Adam and Eve are prototypes of humanity, and that’s what they did. It is a common trope of traditional Christianity that it’s hard to resist temptation. Indeed, it is. I don’t mean the temptation of addiction. That’s another issue altogether. I mean the temptations to turn from God and God’s ways that the world puts before us every day. The temptation of wealth. The temptation of sex. The temptation and opportunities to use and take advantage of other people. Advertisers tell us incessantly that our number one task is looking out for number one. Surely there is at least one thing in life for every one of us that we shouldn’t do but that seems attractive. No literal serpent comes to entice us to do the wrong thing, but something inside us often does.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden is a symbol for temptation. Its fruit looks really good. Eve thinks that eating it will make her wise. The serpent tells her that God didn’t tell the truth when God said that if she ate it on that day she would die. Eve convinced herself that what was supposed to be the negative result of disobeying God’s command wouldn’t really happen. We see the serpent as the tempter in this story, but God is a tempter too. God made the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so attractive. God made the knowledge of good and evil itself so attractive. God could have made the tree ugly and not at all appetizing, but that’s not what God did. Eve and Adam are faced with a strong temptation indeed. Both Eve and Adam know what God has commanded. They violate it anyway.

What happens when they eat the forbidden fruit is that they know good and evil, but what happens at first is only that they become aware that they are naked. Why is that the first knowledge they gain in this story? The two people’s physicality is not more exposed than it had been before, but it seems that they had been unaware of it. I think the reference to nakedness here isn’t about sexual sin. It is about human physicality generally. Adam and Eve come to know that they are physical creatures. They probably also become aware that they are mortal. The couple’s awareness of their nakedness here is, I think, a symbol of who we really are, physical beings with all of the human limitations that come with being creatures of flesh and bone.

Because they did what God had told them not to do, God throws the couple out of the garden of Eden. God imposes some of the hardships of human life on them. The woman will suffer in childbirth. The man will have to till the soil and work to provide the necessities of life for both of them. We learn that gaining knowledge comes with consequences that are not always positive. God forces Adam and Eve out of the naïve paradise of the garden and into the real world. There they learn that life is hard. Adam and Eve gain knowledge, but they lose their innocence. We learn that we can be ignorant and blissful or knowing and suffering.

That is the choice life gives us. I have long thought that life must be easier for those not cursed with knowledge of how the world really is, of how people really are. There is a reason we have the phrase “blissful ignorance.” Some of us, however, are by nature curious. We want to know things. We seek answers to the questions we face. We don’t like unanswered questions. When we have one, we seek to solve it by finding the answer to it. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, that answer turns out to be something we’d rather not know. The answer doesn’t solve our existential angst, it makes it worse.

Astronomy is a good example. In ages past people were secure in the knowledge that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and other heavenly objects orbited around it. They were comfortable understanding that the universe with the earth at its center was eternal and unchanging. Today we know that none of that is true. We aren’t the center of the universe, we’re on an infinitesimal,  seemingly meaningless speck of dust orbiting a perfectly ordinary star near the outer edge of one of the arms of a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy. Our star is one of billions upon billions of stars in the universe. Our galaxy is one of a truly untold number of galaxies in the universe. We know that none of this is permanent. Our ordinary star will begin to die some day. As it does it will make the earth utterly uninhabitable. Eventually it will destroy the earth altogether. The entire universe may devolve into a static state with all its energy spent in which nothing new is happening at all. We know we aren’t protected from things like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Another asteroid could hit and kill all of us too.

This knowledge is hardly comforting. It doesn’t relieve our existential angst. If we ever think about it, it heightens that angst. We ask: What can the earth mean if it is that temporary? What can we mean if we are that temporary? Why should we bother to do anything seeing as how in the end none of what we do will even exist? Those are unavoidable questions that arise from today’s understanding of the nature of the universe. We wouldn’t have those questions if we understood the cosmos the way the ancients did. Our knowledge about the nature of the universe brings with it the negative consequence of increased existential anxiety.

So why do so many of us spend most of our lives seeking more knowledge? Why don’t the unavoidable negative consequences of much knowledge keep us from asking new questions and seeking new answers? The only reason I can think of is that God created us as curious people. It seems to be a characteristic of humanity to want to explore the unknown. To reach for an understanding of everything there is. To find unanswered questions that intrigue us and present opportunities for new discoveries. It's just human to long for more knowledge not less. We are creatures who strive to grasp things beyond ourselves. To strive to grasp even ultimate truth. What we discover in our search for more knowledge is that that knowledge often comes with increased not decreased anxiety over our lives and the meaning of our lives. We do it anyway, because doing it is part of who we are.

Adam and Eve could not return to the garden of Eden. God blocked their way back. They could not return to the naïve ignorance in which they once lived. Neither can we. You can’t unknow things you know. Moreover, we seem to be more content having knowledge with all of its negative consequences than we are living in the naïve simplicity of ignorance. Naivete seems foolish to us. For us to live in naivete we have to turn off our minds, and that is something most of us will not do. So we learn as much as we can about as many things as we can. We keep seeking more knowledge though we know new knowledge may well bring new discomfort. Adam and Eve didn’t give up when they lost their naivete. They lived full lives. They had children. They struggled with much of what human life is like. We know they did because we do. The story of Adam, Eve, and the garden is, among other things, a mythic presentation of these truths about human existence. That, I think, is why we continue to read and contemplate this very ancient story.