Adam & Eve

Adam, Eva, and Ave Maria

It fills me with a sort of awe to imagine, in the primeval past, the gradual concrescence of individuality or “who-ness” out of the sea of collective consciousness; an ocean of which the lives of our distant ancestors rose and fell as the crests and troughs of its glimmering surface. I-hood, or self-consciousnesses, precipitates out of this sea like salt-crystals out of a solution of natural, instinctual wisdom.

Do you think “Adam” refers to the first “who”? In other words, when we read the Genesis Creation story, do we imagine that it recounts, foremost, the succession of the biological progenitors of the human race? Or do we imagine that the sequences conveyed in the Genesis narrative depict foremost the progressive evolution of the self, which is to say, the progenitors not of our “what-ness” but of our “who-ness”?

The expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in this light, must represent the awakening of self-consciousness through the knowledge of good and evil:

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil…¹

For other creatures, the moral question is foregone because decisions are predetermined by instinct, which, paraphrased, “the general and impersonal wisdom of Nature.” For Man, by contrast, this capacity for decision, which is to say, “morality,” represents the existential crux of his psychic existence. The friction wrought by the decision between competing volitional impulses generates a spark that may serve to kindle the light of self-consciousness in the substance of soul. The body and all inheritance from Nature sustains this spark, and represents a sort of temple for his soul, or wax and wick to nourish this flame of wakefulness. Scientific inquiry can disclose the parameters and dimensions, both spatial and diachronic, of this temple, and the chemistry of incandescence. But to answer questions about the god who makes his dwelling therein, it must give way to contemplation—

He alone is immortal and dwells in unapproachable light²

For Eve to consent to the Serpent’s proposition that she pluck the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge is to act from an impulse whose origin lies deep in the unconscious and instinctive strata of the soul; an impulse that did not arise as a free and conscious decision of the I but as a prompting from without it. When Adam consents to Eve’s proposition, seeded in her through the Serpent’s inception, it is a picture of the spirit that consents to being led into temptation by an impulse extraneous to the I, and whose origins are unconscious to it. The consent to this prompting entails the soul indenturing itself to carry out the mandates of one of its adventitious desires. This is consistent with how Christians have interpreted “Original Sin” in that it is said to be an inheritance from Adam and not from Eve. There is much more to this, because we can imagine that Eve represents the part of our souls that we “repress” or lose connection with in exchange for self-consciousness, but that is a story for another day.

Most importantly, Mary the Mother of God represents the counter-image of Eve in the Garden. The Ave Maria prayer has a line, originally found in Deuteronomy 28:4, “benedictus fructus ventris tui,” which is “blessed be the fruit of your womb.” The image of Mary receiving the fruit inwardly is a clear reversal of the image of Eve seizing the fruit from without. Eve’s action brought about the fall into duality while Mary’s passion gave birth to the one who resolves it. Eva is an anagram, reversal, and “turning”³ of Ave.

Znа́meniye (Russian: Зна́мение) or Our Lady of the Sign is an icon in the orans style, dated at the first half of the 12th century. The icon was painted in medieval Novgorod. It is one of the most revered icons of the Russian Orthodox Churchand the main holy of Russian North-West.

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1. Genesis 3:22

2. 1 Timothy 6:16

3. Cf. John 20:

14And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. 15Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. 16Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.