Now He's Done It...Eden Vs. the Paradiso Terrestre

Having once, sometime in the Upper Paleolithic or possibly even the prehuman Late Cretaceous, written a doctoral dissertation titled "The Edenic Imagination: Studies in the Sacramental Reconciliation of Self and World," I was brought up short to discover, courtesy of John Crowley, that W. H. Auden long ago envisioned an Eden more like Ezra Pound's Paradiso Terrestre than like, say, Bob Dylan's reconciled existence "inside the Gates of Eden."

I confess it had never occurred to me, given the unhappy history of utopias of all stripes, that an Eden might be conceived of beyond the sacramental reconciliation of self with other selves and self with world that is part of the history of small-scale alternative community based upon an alteration of inwardness...no Eden without prelapsarian or more accurately postlapsarian Second Innocence, as envisioned by Kleist in "On the Puppet Theatre," and therefore a reconciliation probably capable of constituting no more than a geographically limited Eden fated to be temporary at best. (I cited the extent to which the advocates of the Edenic imagination had been unable to incarnate more than a fragment of their own vision of what was to be done...and thus suffered the consequences of being unable to carry forth in practice what could be dreamed so beautifully in theory.)

On the other hand, I cited Robert Heilbroner's An Inquiry into the Human Prospect on why if we did not succeed in carrying out some fundamental shifts in social attitudes and individual consciousness, the human story could be pretty well over as far as the planet's carrying capacity was concerned, so that the Edenic imagination simply had to be transformed from a singular inner journey into a realistic reassessment of human capacities that would entail transmuting some of our most fundamental socially ingrained presuppositions. I considered why this was unlikely to happen, but suggested that the kinds of inner transformation commended by the poets and novelists of the Edenic imagination might be less abhorrent to human beings as they now are than the painful puritanisms of the world's rationalist-atheistic utopias had proven to be.

Later I explored the hypotheses on why so many of us prefer certain types of landscape...bearing in mind that human beings have been capable of thriving in the most unlikely conditions, and that one group's definition of Paradise would be another emotional type's definition of Hell. I explored, for a while, the notion that across a variety of traditions, Paradise is a Garden but Heaven is a City, but both are controlled to ensure happiness, the world of Nature and the world of fallen humanity being places where happiness is anything but assured; quite the opposite, of course.

I never quite pulled all this together, other questions about the nature of human existence having suggested themselves in the interim. To find that Auden wanted to imagine how a social order could be maintained in Eden...that returns me to the topics I dropped soon after my doctorate. The myths can imagine a sacramental marriage in Eden, but scarcely even a sacramental family unit. The very act of generation becomes associated with the Fall, despite all the efforts to make it otherwise. The myths of the Manichaeans in this regard read like a Freudian fever dream (at least as Ioan Culianu summarizes them in his wondrously revisionist The Tree of Gnosis, a book that makes makes me regret anew that his outrageous perspective was removed so prematurely from a dialogue that seems only now to be coming to fruition).

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Re-reading or in some cases reading for the first time books on which I have commented previously, and having recently attended lectures by figures who seemed to have hold of the right questions without having propounded a single right answer, I find myself wondering why we are so incapable of imagining the conditions in which the right answer in the intellect's multiple-choice is "all of the above" or "none of the above."

Why couldn't, for example, shamans be mentally ill individuals [the psychoanalytic hypothesis] who acquire a certain social status only when the society around them is ready to support such a status [the Marxist hypothesis], but at the same time have devised experimentally a treatment program that not only stabilizes themselves but puts them in touch with interior conditions that are surprisingly stable cross-culturally? (and why couldn't some of them be adept fakers, like folks who pretend to professional qualifications they do not possess? for that matter, why couldn't they know that fakery was a necessary element of their practice?)

In parallel discussions that seem to arise with regard to shamanism, why couldn't chemically induced delusions be illusory but somehow beneficial in some circumstances and destructive in others? why couldn't states of mind also be induced without benefit of external chemical substances that are surprisingly consistent cross-culturally, and that induce a lasting condition of well-being or at least a temporary one? why couldn't such states of mind be non-universal, for that matter, and sufficiently fragile that they would make transitory conditions of extraordinary insight possible in individuals who could only be described, charitably, as mostly dysfunctional?

I was struck by the extent to which to which, as usual, the discussion was derailed the other evening by claims from the proponents of the value of the chemical approach, but the tendency to assign positive or negative values where the right answer is "both" or "neither" or "not enough information to answer" or "the question has no meaning because of the circumstances" seems endemic.

What kind of failure of imagination makes us incapable of believing that the human condition is always multiple, and that we might not understand all the component parts of it even after all these millennia of trying to develop modes of experimentation that will get us to the real shape of things?

The fact that Stephen Hawking could rouse a furor by declaring that a philosophical abstraction largely unrelated to most religious experience or practice was an unnecessary hypothesis (cf. Laplace two hundred years earlier) suggests we have not gotten that far. Alternate versions of the hypothesis in religious history have the Creator withdrawing and leaving the world to its own devices, and many other options have won adherents over the generations; problems arise only when the Creator is revealed as simultaneously all-knowing, all-powerful, and concerned with the outcome in a messed-up cosmos that appears to remain unsatisfactorily repaired for reasons that remain obscure, since the out-of-control aspects have in fact been brought back under control, or only seemed out of control from our perspective. For large parts of the world, these paradoxes exist because the initial axioms are given as textually supported truths. These interlinked propositions can only be accepted or rejected: there is only A or Not-A, never mind the nonexistent possibility of B or C, much less an unknown X.

That human beings are willing to kill one another to defend these propositions renders it unlikely, for reasons that the sociology of knowledge has analyzed very well, that anyone other than lunatics will feel inclined to investigate the possibility that some other model of the universe might reflect real experience rather than the mind working out its options...or, for that matter, that the two dominant narratives might both reflect the mind working out options, not necessarily congruent with the total structure of reality.