by Brian Griffith.
In some ancient myths, the original humans lived in a pristine paradise, knowing neither suffering nor death. A Greek legend holds that the world’s first people were all men, who lived forever in brotherly accord, freely submitting to rule by the gods. The problem of disobedience first arose when a man named Prometheus stole fire from the deities, and gave it to his fellow men. For this act of insubordination he suffered an eternal penalty, being chained to a rock with an eagle gnawing his liver. In addition, Zeus decreed that the race of men would no longer live forever, but be doomed to die. And to further punish men during their lives, Zeus devised a new creature to afflict them. He had the first woman created from clay, and named her “Pandora.” This first woman was given a special box (or jar), and told she must never open it. But being inherently prone to temptation, curiosity, and disobedience, she furtively unsealed the container, releasing all the ills of strife, disease, toil, and old age that have cursed humanity ever since (Smith, p. 74).
Likewise in Genesis, we read (in one of the two creation accounts) that the first human made was male, followed by the first woman. Initially they were created immortal, and lived free from all care or fear in a garden of paradise. But then the woman did the one thing that God forbade. She yielded to Satan’s temptation, tasted fruit from the tree of knowledge, and then induced her man to do the same. For this first act of disobedience, humanity suffered expulsion from paradise, the curse of mortality, and the fate of unending labor for the means of life. As St. Augustine explained, “we are dust and we shall return to dust as a punishment for the sin of the first man” (Segal, p. 579). This first sin of Eve was the point when evil and death entered the world. Although the evil spirit Satan already existed, Eve served as “the Devil’s gateway” for introducing disloyalty among humans. As Thomas Aquinas emphasized, “Adam was beguiled by Eve, not she by him” (Holland, p. 106). Such myths are often described as stories of “original sin,” but maybe we should call them stories of “original blame.”
In the Quran, it is a disobedient angel who introduces all evils. Here, God creates all things of the universe before his ultimate act of making a man and woman (“from a single cell”). Then God summons the angels of heaven to witness this couple, and orders all of them to bow in reverent respect before this crown of creation. All the angels bow down, save one, namely Iblis, otherwise known as Lucifer. Iblis explains that he must refuse to bow, because it is apostasy to bow before any but God. And for this disobedience, the Lord casts Iblis out of heaven, making him a fallen angel and the source of all evils on earth (Quran 15:26–32).
We might interpret this story like Rumi did, as teaching that God requires reverent devotion toward fellow human beings. Rumi claimed that God’s requirement for angels to bow before humans showed that people are superior to angels, because humans alone have the capacity for love. The thing that God reportedly commanded might seem similar to Oriental traditions of bowing in respect to others. But the story’s most orthodox interpretation was simply that God required unconditional obedience, and Iblis disobeyed. Also, if all evil started with disloyalty, then it seemed obvious that the remedy was full submission to the highest authority. However, it also seemed obvious to many Muslims that Lucifer’s objection to bowing was actually valid. It was apostacy (or idolatry) for people to bow in respect for each other, because that would show reverence for something lesser than God.
In the stories of Prometheus, Pandora, or Adam and Eve, it seems clear that all problems and sufferings of the world are caused by inferior beings disobeying superior ones. It appears self-evident that morality is obedience, sin is insubordination, and the wage of sin is death. These stories also make a remarkable assumption, namely that humans were originally immortal. In the beginning, there was no death, but then people lost their immortality as a penalty for wrongdoing. In dealing with this “reality,” some Greeks and Jews accepted that death was now inescapable. All of the dead would either totally disappear, or else exist merely as shades in the underworld. In that case, it seemed that the only possible religious goal was to gain good fortune in this life, through earning divine favor. But some people felt that the main question of religion was how to regain immortality, either in spirit or in resurrected flesh.
We should note, however, that some cultures never made these assumptions. Chinese myth has no legend of a time before mortality, or any story of how death first entered the world. Death is assumed to be natural, either as the end of life, or as part of an eternal cycle (Olberding, p. 1). But in China also, the quality of both life and the afterlife often depended on one’s degree of loyalty to the right higher powers.
Sources
Holland, Jack (2006) A Brief History of Misogyny. Robinson, p. 106.
Olberding, Amy, and Ivanhoe, Philip (2011) Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought. SUNY Press, p. 1.
Segal, Alan F. (2004) Life After Death. Doubleday, p. 579.
Smith, Barbara (1992) “Greece.” In The Women’s Companion to Mythology, edited by Carolyn Larrington, Pandora, p. 74.