Tower and Town, August 2026 (view the full edition)Understanding Eden‘Adam' is the Hebrew word for Mankind. It is not primarily a person's name. So the first thing to understand about Eden is that it is not historical. It's a representative story, a Creation Myth. So we should think in terms of First Man and First Woman, not of historical characters named Adam and Eve. We also now understand our world in terms of slow evolution, not instant creation. So it makes little sense to think of Mankind as having full moral awareness and maturity from the moment of creation. Moral awareness and sensitivity must have built up gradually with the passing of centuries through the experience of trying to live together in communities. It is perhaps not surprising that writers from the years before Darwinian evolution fell into the trap of taking the Eden story more literally than it warrants. Our typical understanding comes from that era and has been fundamentally shaped by the interpretation of St Augustine along pre-evolutionary lines. But church history shows that there were other understandings of Eden of a rather different nature, but which were perhaps not fully worked out and were therefore eclipsed by the more comprehensive explanation of St Augustine. One such was hinted at by St Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons living some 200 years before Augustine. Irenaeus understood Eden to be about the Childhood of Mankind. He saw First Man and First Woman as being moral innocents, lacking the life experience necessary to build up a body of moral decision-making and the resultant moral character. Above all, when he read that God saw his creation, that it was very good, he understood it to mean that it was good for God's purpose, namely, that men and women should accumulate moral character by virtue of the decisions they make and the struggles and conflicts they face along the long dusty road of life. That is a quite different view from that of Augustine, who assumed that Mankind was created with instant moral maturity achieved at no cost and without struggle. There are theologians who feel that Irenaeus was right and Augustine was wrong. Moral maturity, they argue, cannot be achieved except by facing a string of real, hard decisions, learning from our mistakes what works and what doesn't and developing moral character as a result. That perhaps explains why our two First People were 'driven out of Eden': to face the hard graft and difficult decisions of the real world. That, we may surmise, was always God's purpose and we were made perfect for that purpose. Hugh de Saram |