Old Worlds and New Beginnings

December 31, 1967
Plainfield

Old Worlds and New Beginnings

On a day such as this when we contemplate the man-made calendar defining the end of an old year and the beginning of a new, I would direct your thoughts and feelings toward Old Worlds and new Beginnings. The human condition seems to be a dynamic tension between the values we have prized in the past and the hopes we cherish for a different order of things in time to come. The human family wavers between believing that the Golden Age was in the past and, contradictorily, that the Golden Age is in the future. We sing “should auld acquaintance be forgot,” while making New Year’s resolutions to change our ways.

Some of mankind’s oldest myths deal with old worlds and new beginnings – Paradise Lost and Heaven to come. Because the myth is much more than usually assumed, understanding is to be acquired from searching out the meanings of myth. Furthermore, because Christian theology fixed at a wrong level the meaning of the myth of Adam, Eve, and the eviction from eden, I would suggest to you that that myth is one of growth and hope, not of regression and despair.

When considering the nature of myth, one can be guilty of either of two fallacies. One is to accept the myths of one’s religion literally and unquestioningly as the disclosure of God’s will. This mistake is made by the orthodox in all religions, but particularly it is an error committed by those who stand rigidly for Christian dogmas. About the turn of the third century of the Christian era, Tertullian, a Roman convert to Christianity, was an influential and controversial theologian. His pronouncement concerning the total body of Christian mythology is still quoted as a defense of unquestioning faith: “I believe it BECAUSE it is absurd.”

Unitarians are quick to reject such irrationality, and rightly so. But it is just as unthinking to dismiss blithely or cynically all the myths of the human family. More than that, to look upon the mythology of man either with wry distaste or obstinate hostility may impoverish our understanding of ourselves and others.

Myths have sometimes been called primitive science. Pre-scientific man, who had no technical knowledge of biology, evolution, or other scientific disciplines, tried to explain the events that happened to him. On this level of definition, the Garden of Eden myth was the attempt of [an] ancient folk [culture] to answer such questions as:

Why snakes have no legs
Why women suffer pain when giving birth
Why people must work hard
Why death comes to people

If mythology represented only the “why” stories of pre-literate, non-technical, scientifically ignorant, or intellectually naïve people, then myth would long ago have lost power, at least in Western culture.

But there is more to it. Myth is also that “which never happened but is forever true.” (John Courtney Murray). Adam and Eve were not historical persons. But the relevant meaning in the myth has nothing to do with the reality that Adam and Eve were not historical persons, as you and I are persons in history. The ancient folk-tale gathers into myth many of the loose ends of human experience in an artistic expression that helps us to understand ourselves and others. The fallacy of Christian dogma has been to insist that the symbolic be believed literally. Christian theology insisted that when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they disobeyed God, became guilty of sin, which was transmitted to all their descendants. The old story of salvation proceeds with the notion that this congenital sin could not be removed by man’s own efforts. Man could not save himself. Therefore God could save people from his own punishment only by supernaturally impregnating a peasant girl, some 2000 years later, whose child was the God incarnate. The plan developed that thirty years after that, God planned to be executed in an atoning death in order to descend into Hell, in order to rise from the dead three days later. Such an artificial salvation scheme can have neither truth nor guidance for us here.

But as C.G. Jung, the founder of analytic psychology, has pointed out, and as many others have understood, all enduring myths have more than one edge of meaning. Myths are levers with which we can pry open the door to more complete knowledge of ourselves. Myths, like dreams, can be interpreted many ways. I like the manner Henry Bamford Parkes wrote, “the great social myths by which a society is animated, are imaginative projections of man’s sense of membership in a larger whole, and of his belief in the objectivity of moral, political, and aesthetic values. If take literally, they are by rationalistic standards always untrue. Yet they convey truths that the human mind cannot apprehend directly, and as long as they meet human needs and do not lead to the denial or suppression of any important element of human experience, they should not be dismissed simply as illusions.” (GODS AND MEN)

It is in such a spirit of search for meaning in myth that one can think of Adam and Eve, not as the Fall of Man into “sin and corruption” but as the myth of the New Beginning when an old world was gone.

For me, it is not acceptable to believe Adam and Eve’s “sin” was that of sexual relations – that eating of the fruit of the tree referred to awareness of sexuality. Only the guilt-filled attitudes of Christian believers in many centuries allowed such an erroneous concept to become fixed and to prevail in theology and social attitudes.

It is of passing interest that the Adam and Eve myth, like most myths, has roots deeply buried in prior cultures. There is a similar myth in the earlier Sumerian culture but with some difference. For example, in that early myth from Sumer, eight fruits are forbidden, not one; and the animal that does the tempting is not a snake but a fox.

Neither can I accept a more sophisticated interpretation of Adam’s Fall which proposes that the myth symbolizes man’s rebellion against God. As this variety of interpretation goes, God protected Adam and Eve from death, pain, and the necessity to work laboriously, just as long as they obeyed God’s instruction not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. When they disobeyed, God punished them with death, pain, work and inflicted them with congenital “sin,” to be inevitably inherited by all their descendants, including you and me. A god who would set such unremitting punishments in operation would be a strangely inconsistent and vindictive deity who, I suppose, could be worshiped out of fear but not adored with love.

I believe we should think of this old story from Genesis as the myth of Adam’s growth, the myth of a new beginning, the myth of the emergence of conscious, deciding persons who are growing toward freedom and more complete self-realization. Adam, for me, becomes Everyman becoming aware of himself as a person. Animal behavior seems for the most part to be instinctive or conditioned. But one of the unique characteristics of the person is a consciousness of the opportunity to be deliberate and decide, not restricted to stimulus and automatic response.

One teacher has suggested that the serpent was not a seducer but a giver of good advice. Most older religions have had taboos – experiences forbidden because [the] sacred would be violated if the acts were committed. The giver of good advice said, “Don’t be fenced in by taboos. Eat the apple and discover for yourself if the experience is one of growth.” In this sense, the snake was a benevolent influence because Adam and Eve experienced the desire to know. It was an experienced-centered curriculum, if you will.

B.D. Napier, an Old Testament scholar, has some appropriate poetic lines about Adam’s awareness:

Read
Quote, “Come sweet death”
p. 16-17

“The road O Lord, I have to know the road,
I need to go and come and go again.
Your garden is a prison – or a tomb – without a road.”

A luxurious prison is a prison still. And Eden, without freedom, is Hell in the midst of comfort. As Tillich wrote somewhere, man alone has a complete self and a whole world. That is, where food is given, exemption from pain is granted, and eternal life is provided, the whole world is given. But without a self to be aware, to suffer the pains of growth and death, one is not a person. (STI 258)

In the TEMPEST, Shakespeare has Caliban renounce Prospero and become the slave of a new master. Caliban sings, “Freedom, hegh-day, freedom-high-day, freedom.” For in New Beginning, Everyman’s growth is accompanied not only by the satisfaction which arrives when we have wisdom, but also by the pains which are the consequence of our follies.

Help toward greater fulfillment as persons in society requires not the rejection of the great myths of man, but a fuller understanding of them or new interpretation. Myths are not contrived; they are not easily manufactured as one can fabricate a gear or wiring assembly, Perhaps man can no longer create myths which universalize both the cosmic and human condition.

But whether one can accept, appreciate or respond to ancient mythologies, it seems clear that salvation in this world resides in accepting the requirements of responsible personhood:

To be able to accept the pain and uncertainty which accompany the freedom to choose alternatives;

to accept the consequence of one’s decisions, including the labor necessary to bring the decisions to completion; and

to exalt in the joys and suffer the sorrows which flood in when one opens the tidal-gates of imagination.

It is far better to be a person knowing irritation as well as comfort, experiencing defeat but occasionally knowing victory, than to be in complete ignorance of possibilities which await the acts of persons who have deliberated and decided.

In summary, the myth of Adam and Eve charges us to be persons who are persons and not just organic responses to whatever stimuli may have acted on nerve endings.

Such an attitude toward Old Words and New Beginnings is to be recommended. For grow we must as persons and as members of a social order or we perish. Goethe said it well in “Noble Be Man:”

[Editor’s note: the rest of this sermon is missing]