The Garden of Eden (Doughty)/Chapter 5

by John Doughty

 

 

V.

THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.—Gen. iii. 6.

S we familiarize our minds with the idea that this narrative of the Garden of Eden is purely allegorical, we experience less and less difficulty in grasping its real meaning, and in satisfactorily applying the laws of symbolism to its interpretation. The different events begin to group themselves naturally around the central truth, that Adam was the whole Church of the early age of the world, and not a single individual. We learn from the allegory that these people lived in the Garden of Eden, that is, in innocence and peace, in the very presence of the Lord and under his holy and immediate influence; that they remained in this state for a long period, eating of the tree of life in the midst of the garden, that is, living from the Lord as the inmost principle of thought and love; that they began to desire to feel the spiritual life as more their own and less the Lord's in them; that they inclined more and more to self-consciousness or the selfhood; and then the sensual principle—the serpent—began to assume control of the mind and to become a conspicuous figure in this Garden.

Sensuousness I have defined as the disposition to limit one's life to the small area of existence which comes within the purview of the natural senses. The principle is broad in its scope, but it invests life with the merely natural, and rejects, as a thing undesirable or unknowable, the supernatural. If we are Christians, under the influence of this principle we are apt to be very weak or very indifferent ones. If we seem to be earnest in our faith, that faith is based upon what we conceive to be a correct historical record of the coming of Christ, and of the miraculous evidence by which his character was proven. If, however, we are hurried by its advice, or under the impetus of its insinuations, away from Christianity, it forbids us to recognize God because natural sense has never seen Him; or to believe in another life, because natural law has been unable to prove it; or even to acknowiedge the existence of the soul, because no dissecting knife has ever succeeded in reaching its seat. It is a harsh term, perhaps, to apply to so eminent a scientist as Tyndall, yet he is a strong type of the sensuous man, when he asserts in substance: I do not deny God, for I know nothing about Him; yet I do not believe in God, for these senses of mine have never seen Him, felt Him or touched Him. I believe only what sense and natural science prove. There may be plenty of undiscovered truths, but I rest my faith only in what I scientifically know.

Very moral men may, after this manner, be sensualists. But the effect of such sensuous reasoning is demoralizing in the extreme. Pride may keep the strong sensual man from moral degradation. But when you efface from the mind spiritual intelligence, and substitute natural reason; or when you darken those spiritual lights, which are the stars of its higher consciousness penetrating all dark places with spiritual discernment, you take away that which gives this world its only life and hope. Then the man of weak mind, or he who has no stay of pride, sinks into dissipation and debauchery; this world becomes his all in all; its money, fame or pleasure, his only hope and joy; himself and his own gratification the only things worth living for. The Lord, the divine Sun, is blotted from his firmament; beyond the grave there is naught for him but darkness; to make the most of this world is his supreme purpose. So the serpent—type of the sensual nature—as monitor and guide, is the world's ruin.

What wonder, then, that in olden times, when he once gained the ear of those who dwelt in Eden, he advised them to their fall. Subtle he was and bold; "More subtle than any wild beast of the field." Is not the sensual nature the most crafty of all the affections of the mind? What argument so specious as that which insinuates questions like these: Who but a fool would believe in that which is not evident to the senses? Why should you deny yourselves the delights of self, of enjoyments so palpable and abounding, of pleasures so exquisite and close at hand, in the vain pursuit of that phantom called eternal life, that folly of superstitious follies called unselfishness?

So to the Eden people of old, it was the sensuous thought entering into the mind—the serpent trailing his tortuous way into life—which did the mischief that was done. The woman, as the symbol of affection in general, here, in view of the manner in which her name is used in the allegory, is made to represent specifically the affection for the selfhood. It was to her, therefore, to the selfhood ever ready to listen to any suggestion which increased its power or pleasure, that the serpent applied itself. "Yea, hath God said. Ye shall not eat of the tree of the garden?" Was it really true that God had counseled them not to draw spiritual life from any perception of the mind which could grow in such a place as Eden? Were not its trees all good? Were not all the perceptions which grew in the soil of innocence, purity and love, genuine and true? Why forbid themselves anything that came from so divine a source? This was sophistry, the serpent's cunning, in its most unadulterated form. Without mentioning the tree of knowledge, this reasoning included it—evidently insinuating that it also must be good, because it was one of the trees of Eden. Eden was all good, how could any of its trees be bad? The Eden state was all purity, how could any perception of the mind be false? Follow this new dictate, was the insinuation; it is of Eden in the heart, and it is therefore right.

But the selfhood was not immediately satisfied. It had been endowed by the Lord with spiritual life; it had been elevated into spiritual atmospheres; and even the self-consciousness, in its higher state, was not so easily convinced. So the woman's answer to the serpent's delusive insinuation was: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." It was evident that of all the trees of the garden they might eat, with this single exception. All perceptions of the mind were from the Lord; all that belonged to the Eden state and was rooted in its soil—perceptions of truth, of good, of love, of God, and whatsoever intelligence sprang from them—all these were from the Lord. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the idea of self as the origin of spiritual life, and that certainly was not from the Lord. They still saw this; it was not entirely obliterated from their consciousness. And God had said that not only should they not eat of it, not only ought they not to conceive of the soul's life as a thing of self, but they must not touch it, they must not even dream of such a thing, they must not for a moment come in contact with such an experience. For the consequence of so doing would be that they would die. All relapsing into self is spiritual death. It is not the decease of the body, nor the annihilation of the soul. It is not ceasing to think, will and act. It is the death of good—the death of genuine disinterested love; the lapsing into evil and falsity; the loss of all power to know, appreciate, live, or even comprehend the spiritual side of life, and God as its giver. This is to die in the spiritual sense.

But the serpent seemed to speak of natural death. He always speaks naturally. And it is of the nature of the sensual principle to lead us away from the true meaning of things, and make us satisfied to rest in mere appearances. So the serpent said to the woman, that is, the sensual element replied to the doubts of the better selfhood, "Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

Now it is a fact that, to this day, so inclined are the large mass of people to take sensuous views of things, that it is generally believed that natural death came into the world because two individuals, Adam and Eve, ate of the fruit of a natural tree. It is not seen that mankind fell, not because of any natural act of disobedience, nor because of anything heedlessly done on the natural plane, but because they became selfish, worldly and sensual. The first idea so generally accepted, is devoid of all rationality; the other commends itself to reason and common sense.

"Ye shall not surely die," said the serpent. Instead thereof, "Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." That their eyes would be opened, means that their understandings would be enlightened. That they would be as gods knowing good and evil, means that their power to distinguish between good and evil would be seen or thought of as a faculty originating in themselves; and that thus each one would be, as it were, a god unto himself, deciding for himself and from himself, and in the light of his own intelligence, what was good and what was evil.

Now, the effect of such an idea as this, we see plainly enough in the world's present condition. When human reason decides as to what is truth and what is falsity, with the serpent as chief pleader and the selfhood as umpire, spiritual truth has no chance of acceptance. And when human reason is, under the same conditions, the arbiter of good and evil, good becomes whatever panders to the pleasure, profit and aggrandizement of one's self, and evil whatever is in opposition thereto. Each man is a god unto himself; each man decides for himself; each man is self-glorified. This was the tendency with our early progenitors. The serpent that now holds high carnival in the world, was then exerting his most seductive influence.

We have considered the tree of life as the Lord and his love, and the tree of knowledge, as self and science. Eating of the one or the other symbolizes appropriating the one or the other of these principles to the life of the soul. We know that natural eating is for the sustenance and invigoration of the natural body. The food, or the life-giving elements of the food, are conveyed by the blood to the various organs of the system, and distributed according to the needs of this or that portion of the body. Its many parts, the brain, the muscle, the flesh, the bone, the nervous fluid, the cuticle, each and all partake of the blessings and the benefits. And the body lives and grows and strengthens by means of the food whereof it partakes; and the condition of the body, whether healthy or diseased, well or ill, depends very much on the character of its food. Good food makes a sound body; insufficient or improper food, an unsound one.

The correspondence of the natural with the spiritual system and its economy is exact. It is a matter of the greatest consequence whether we partake of nourishing spiritual diet or of that which is injurious. The Word of God everywhere recognizes this. It is for this reason that our Lord says by the mouth of his prophet, "Eat ye what is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness" (Isa. lv. 2); and that He said, when on earth, "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you" (John vi. 27). Again, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever" (John vi. 51). And again, "He that eateth me, even he shall live by me " (John vi. 57). Say we not well, then, when we assert that the Lord is the veritable tree of life which grows in the midst of Eden? Draw we then our food from Him, eat we of the fruit of that divine tree, recognize we his influence within our souls, obey we all his commands in their true spirit and intent, love we the higher life proceeding from the Lord who is in the midst of our mental garden, then truly do we live. The fruit of the tree of life is all the goodness and wisdom which we receive from the Lord—humbly acknowledging that it is his and not our own—and appropriate to the upbuilding and sustenance of the soul. Eat we of the fruit of that tree, and its life-giving principles flow down into every least thing of the spirit. They give light to the understanding, purity to the desire, sweetness to the affections, wisdom to the thought; they go down into the labors and works of the hands, and spiritualize every least act of life. They nourish, invigorate, sustain and build up the spiritual man into a glorious image and likeness of God. Life becomes love in its highest sense, and the joy of existence a thing unutterable!

But the tree of knowledge is self and science. Its fruit is error and falsity, evil and crime. We throw aside revelation; we deny its truth; we divorce our understanding from its fountain of wisdom; and we say. Let us rely on science or the senses. We read no more the commandments of God; we relegate those precepts to the realm of the impracticable; we grow indifferent to the voice of the Lord as it fain would speak to us in the garden of the mind; and we say, Let us consider self-preservation, and the wealth, honors and pleasures of the world, as the things most near at hand and of most immediate need. Then we eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree. The Lord did not desire man's spiritual death. He would not have him rest in mere worldly joys when there is a higher life; nor live merely for self when the well-being of his kind demands his services; nor study only his interest in this world, when there is an eternal world for which he was placed here to prepare. He would not have him shrivel his faculties, when they were made for wide expansion; nor invert the law of life when he is capable of enjoying its unspeakable blessings; nor become a creature of disorder and selfishness, when he was created in the grandest order and for the highest use. He would not have him confine his aims and ends to the body and this world, nor his reasoning faculties to natural science, when by doing so he loses the higher wisdom and fails to attain the higher and purer life. He would not have him wallow in the filthy mire of sensuous delights, when there are sweet fields of heavenly joy wherein to live and take pleasure. He would not have him a mere animal, when He had created him to be an angel. For as the fruit of the tree of life was goodness and wisdom, the fruit of the tree of knowledge was evil and error, crime and insanity. Therefore was it that the Lord commanded man not to eat of this, the forbidden fruit. God is not possessed of the human passion of pride. He did not utter an arbitrary edict for the sake of enjoying man's servile obedience. He did not make life and happiness to depend on refraining from a certain natural fruit. It is only sensuous thought that so drags the Lord down to the level of human frailty. He commanded man not to live from self, not to draw his mental food from sensuous science, not to place his life in mere knowledge; because, if he did, his spiritual nature would die. What He commanded was solely for man's own happiness and good.

But man ate. He no longer looked to the Lord for the food of his soul, but to self. He lost sight of those words of divine beauty, "He that eateth me, even he shall live by me;" and he made a god of himself instead, and recognized no other source of life. This food he ate, or appropriated as the life of his soul. With this he nourished all his faculties. It went through his whole system; it permeated his whole character; it poisoned his affections; it darkened his understanding; it nourished hatreds, cruelties and revenges; it rendered him incapable of spiritual perception; it capacitated him for crime; and it flung the world, as its final outcome, into that seething cauldron of misery, war and unrest, which is so largely our lot to-day. And so will the world remain until we cease to eat of the forbidden fruit, the source of all our woe, and return to Eden and the Lord.

There is an expression introduced into the third chapter of Genesis, which seems contradictory of the second. The tree of knowledge is here said to be in the midst of the garden; whereas previously it was asserted that the tree of life was in the midst of the garden. It is one of those points of which there are many, which infidel writers, reasoning from the serpent's point of view, hold up to prove the inconsistency and foolishness of Scripture. They reason from the standpoint of the letter. If you tell them it is a spiritual allegory, they will laugh at you; and if you attempt to show them that it is, they will understand you no more than if you spoke in an unknown tongue. Their spiritual understanding is closed to the higher light. But in the spiritual sense of these and all similar passages, the apparent inconsistency vanishes. The explanation is simply this: In the primitive condition of the people of the first Church, just as they were placed in the Eden state, the tree of life, or the Lord and his love, was in the midst of the garden; love occupied the central place in the soul; for it was in the very inmost of the heart, and the central source of the mind's intelligence. But after they began to listen to the serpent, the tree of life occupied no more the center, but the tree of knowledge took its place in the inmost of the soul, and self assumed the position which the Lord had previously held.

But in explaining these symbols, in order to bring out their meaning in bold relief, we find ourselves sometimes painting the principles represented in their extremest colors. Eating of the tree of knowledge, like all other spiritual habits, is a thing that comes gradually, and becomes a habit only by a slow process. The world at that early age did not change in a day, nor in a year, perhaps not in a hundred years. The serpent's voice, feeble at first, grew strong as time rolled on. Listened to at the beginning but feebly, the attention of the race became more fixed and their inclination to obey more strong as listening became a habit. Constant dallying with the subject on the part of man, gradually made the serpent more bold. The woman—the affection for the selfhood—was first approached. It was only by slow degrees she began to see that this fruit of the tree of knowledge was "good for food," or began to consider sense and science as things in themselves good. Yielding to this, they became also "pleasant to the eyes," in other words, agreeable to the understanding. And finally they were seen by the selfhood to be things "to be desired to make one wise;" that is, that they were really desirable, because they gratified the pride of self-intelligence, and made the man eminently wise in his own eyes.

And thus—so runs the narrative—when the woman saw these things "she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat."

Man as distinguished from woman, as was observed in a former discourse, symbolizes the intellect. Thus it was the woman who ate first—the love of self or the proprium. And then she in turn persuaded the man to eat. When the love of self appropriated as its food the delusions of sense, the intellect soon yielded its concurrence. It is the experience of all time. When we are on the downward path, what we love we are very apt to persuade ourselves is right. Into the arms of whatever evil the heart throws itself, intellect and reason are called upon for their assent, and they soon yield. The fall of each and every man and woman begins and ends in a similar way.

But as before observed, we have described the symbols in their more extreme meanings. The fall was gradual, extending perhaps through hundreds or even thousands of years. The fruit of the tree of knowledge changed its quality as time went on. The first aberration from the primal condition, was in life. From generation to generation the Adamic Church inclined to self and evil more and more. Still the true life would be acknowledged; but it would become, as one generation succeeded another, more and more a matter of mere faith, and less and less a matter of experience. Then gradually, with many, faith itself would begin to yield, while perhaps with others it would be longer retained. Thus at first the fruit of the forbidden tree was faith as the basis of religion. This also would be forbidden, because love is its true basis. Then its fruit became error; and at last positive falsity. The eating by the woman was a work of centuries; the offering to the man and his eating a work of centuries more. The letter makes it, in the fall of a man, the work of a day; the spirit makes it, in the fall of a race, the work of a period of indefinite and unknown length.

And so let us still follow the lesson in our hearts, and contemplate all its admonitions as given to make us wiser in our generation. There is only one tree whose fruit is life, for us as well as for our early progenitors. It is the Lord himself enthroned within the heart. It is that principle of love, so large, so all-embracing, so divine, that the mind of its possessor is an Eden of intelligence and delight. Its branches are far reaching; its roots strike deep; its fruits are all goodness and wisdom, and they nourish the soul from its centers of affection and thought to its extremities of active life and work. Other trees there are in the garden which contribute to life; other perceptions of the soul which are suggested from within and without; but this tree is Life Itself. Let us ask nothing of sense and science, except that they be willing servants of the Lord and love. Let us eat of no fruit that will exalt sense and drag down the soul, that will magnify self and degrade the Lord. Spiritual life and spiritual death are before us, according to the kind of fruit our souls eat or appropriate. Let us eat of the fruit of the tree of life and truly live!