Anti-Gnosticism: The Two Creations

I feel like I glossed over Romans 1:18–25 (NSRVUE) in my previous post:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse, or though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

I stand by my commentary, but I’ve just emphasized what I implicitly deemphasized prior: the worship of things in nature, or of images of those things, as an origin of transgression. Usually, in Sunday School, the verses in this passage (as is typical) are read in isolation so we typically assume Paul is referring to the likes of the animal-headed Egyptian gods, or maybe personifications of nature in general (take any version of the Sky Father, like Baal or Zeus—which strangely are a category out of which The Name first emerges culturally), and we leave it at that, a jab at superstitious polytheistic cultures. But there’s something more problematic going on here: Paul identifies idolatry as the root of transgression from the creative-ordering principle of nature (the Logos). Okay, yeah, sure. Let’s say that again. Idolatry, as the worship of images, of which the first are usually animals, is the very point at which humans became filled with “injustice, evil, covetousness, malice” (1:29).

The less one reads what Paul is saying abstractedly and in isolation, the more striking of a claim it becomes. Genesis already has a cosmogony, an account of the creation of the cosmos and of humanity and of evil, and it’s one to which Paul constantly refers as part of his Christology. Let’s skip ahead to Romans 5:

To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come. […] Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 5:13–14,18–19

Compare this with 1 Corinthians 15, but I’m going to be honest: this is part of a beautiful passage in which Paul defends the resurrection of the dead, and I’m not going to touch it because it’s beyond the scope of this effort and past the point of him being broadly useful as a thinker, despite it being key to his euangelion. I am the sort of ‘believer’ he calls out when he says: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:17–19). Am I being dishonest by accepting some but not other aspects of Pauline thought? Maybe, but let’s table that. Anyway:

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.¹

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.

1 Corinthians 15:42–49

I don’t want to stake a claim on whether Paul views Adam or any of Genesis literally or allegorically. In fact, I think you can really go both ways, especially considering how the selections above from Romans 1 may suggest a certain metatextuality about the role of the crafty serpent in the fall of man. However, I think that Paul’s proposed origin of evil casts an interesting light on an already politically dense cosmogony. So, I’m going to go back in time and explore the significance of Genesis to anti-gnostic thought.

Genesis 1

Whoever divided the books of the Bible into chapters and verses has to answer to God. This isn’t really Genesis 1: it’s Genesis 1 plus Genesis 2:1–4, the latter portion describing God’s nap time after the six days of creation proper. Whatever. There’s a consensus that what we refer to as the Genesis 1 cosmogony is a different narrative than the one which begins in Genesis 2 and goes from Adam & Eve to Cain & Abel. The Genesis 1 narrative is also understood as being derived from the Babylonian cosmogony known as Enuma Elish, and I’d lovingly describe Genesis 1 as a remix: a retelling which intentionally subverts the themes of the story’s original or popular version. The Wikipedia article on the Enuma Elish compares and contrasts the stories in a kind of funny, brain-dead way:

Enūma Eliš contains numerous parallels with passages of the Old Testament, which has led some researchers to conclude that these were based on the Mesopotamian work. Overarching similarities include: reference to a watery chaos before creation; a separation of the chaos into heaven and earth; different types of waters and their separation; and the numerical similarity between the seven tablets of the epic and the seven days of creation. However, another analysis (Heidel 1951) notes many differences, including polytheism vs. monotheism, and personification of forces and qualities in the Babylonian myth vs. imperative creation by God in the biblical stories; permanence of matter vs. creation out of nothing; and the lack of any real parallel for Marduk’s long battles with monsters.

“Wow, these stories are similar, but they’re also different. Who’s to say?” Here’s my read: Genesis 1 is a secular, anthropocentric remix of Enuma Elish which humiliates the cast of Babylonian mythic characters by reducing their murderous drama of birthing, killing, and worshiping each other into an orderly sequence of creation which proceeds through the enumeration of binary distinctions commanded by a distant Elohim (again, relative to the many named personalities of Enuma Elish). No longer do Apzu and Tiamat beget Lahmu and Lahamu who beget Anshar and Kinshar who beget Anu and Antu who beget Ea (who would slay Apzu and create heavenly waters) who beget Marduk (who would slay Tiamat and make constellations of her body) who beget Man by mixing his blood with the earth. You probably remember what happens instead: light is split from darkness; heavens are split from the waters (the word is cognate with Tiamat!); the land is split from the ocean; living things are brought forth from the sky, the land, and the waters; the lights in the sky are placed to measure time; and finally humanity is created with dominion over creation. Everything is given to them.

I’d like to characterize the differences between the two narratives differently than Heidel. First, distinguishing between polytheism and monotheism is unhelpful: a polytheistic god is different from a monotheistic god, polytheistic gods exist in monotheistic religions and are called angels or demons, and monotheistic gods exist in polytheistic religions and are called cosmic principles and monads and all that shit (it's a relational, not ontological, category about who is venerated). Similarly, I don’t think there’s a real conflict here between permanence of matter or creatio ex nihilo, or at least that seems like a twentieth century question of science imposed on a totally different discourse; instead, I think the creatio ex nihilo of natural things is part and parcel with the humiliation of the Babylonian gods, that they not only had no conscious role in fashioning the cosmos but also that they themselves were created (not by each other, not by incestuous sex, not by getting sliced up, etc.). The universe is essentially impersonal except for the humans who have been given dominion over it by the only ‘force’ which would otherwise be in control. Anthropocentrism has become a problematic justification for the destruction of the earth over the last few centuries but, in the hands of a repressed people who were deprived of their land and culture, it’s a potent critical and ideological weapon.

You can see how it’s a stone’s toss to interpret Genesis 1 even more ‘naturally’; I’d even go as far as to say that it’s already a naturalist critique of Enuma Elish given how people understood the creation of the cosmos in their time. “Yeah, it’s like that, but you can’t say the ocean was a big monster. Look at it!” Philo, the Hellenic Jewish philosopher based in Alexandria, is typically understood as allegorizing Genesis 1 to reconcile it with Platonic philosophy in the same way the Greeks had reinterpreted their own myths—and maybe that is how he understood his own effort—but in the context of how and why Genesis 1 was written in the beginning, we can better understand Philo as attempting to update the underlying ‘science’ of the narrative. Some of it is good, like introducing the Logos (based on creation proceeding via dictum of God) as the image of God of which the cosmos is an expression or elaboration, and upon which humanity is directly based (“Then Elohim said, ‘Let us make humans in our image…’”; Gen. 1:26), since God is infinite and thus ineffable. Some of it is less good, like the Platonic shit about material being imperfect and thus evil by virtue of being alienated from God’s oneness. Early Christianity is understood by some as re-hebrewicizing the Logos by reinvesting its ontological function with personality, like in the Logos hymn in John’s Gospel:

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:1–5 (“Word” replaced with “Logos”)

And the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews (i.e., probably Hellenic Jews):

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word [!]. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name [!!] he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Hebrews 1:1–4

There’s another development in these texts, though, which characterizes the Logos not as an intermediary being (the Platonic demiurge) but as a cosmic ordering principle by which things were created and continue to exist and develop²—and which was also incarnated in a particular Palestinian. I think this is the understanding through which Paul developed his own natural theology (so to speak). In Romans 1, Paul claims that the Logos (i.e., “God’s eternal power and divine nature”) is clearly apparent from nature, and that humanity first deluded itself by worshiping images of creation. Note the language: not creation itself but an eikon in the minds of humans who are themselves made in the eikon of God (the Logos). Let me reiterate a point from the previous article, which in hindsight is particularly literal: humanity is the demiurge of a spectacular cosmos in which they have trapped themselves and through which they obscure from themselves the actual rerum natura.

Genesis 2–3

So, how does Adam factor into all of this? The gnostic reading is that after the cosmos is created, the demiurge creates humans and makes them ignorant of their material prison. However, the monad in the form of a snake tells them that they are imprisoned, and that by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil they can free themselves and rejoin the oneness of the true God. This obviously doesn’t align with any of the theological developments I describe above, and pretty much everyone knows that, but I’m not interested in defending orthodox theology as such. Instead, I want to ask how early Christians may have squared their theology with Genesis 2–3, and how the Church’s “counterrevolution” may have been reflected in its mythic symbology.

I’d like to do this by narrating what might be a novel interpretation of Genesis 2–3 based on Paul’s notion that transgression originates from idolatry, without taking idolatry in the unsatisfying general sense of putting things before God. Rather, I think there’s a signifying economy at play, of the creation and connectivity of images. Paul mentions the images of humans, animals, and of created things (or forces), and Genesis 2–3 has all these things in play plus what we might characterize as the image of God, The Name, who walks amongst His own creation in the garden He planted for Adam. There’s also the original woman Eve, whom The Name creates of Adam’s own flesh, and it’s by reference to Eve and analogy to God that Paul characterizes woman as an image of man in 1 Corinthians 11:3–12., which has been characterized variously as sexist rationale (true) and also as a loosening of sexist norms within the framework of a sexist mythos (also true—but I won’t give partial credit). I’m giving Paul grief because he didn’t take his reading far enough, so without further ado: let’s read Genesis 2–3 as the tragedy of Man (read: general definition, male connotation) who falls victim to the image of the spectacular world of his making.

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Genesis 2:4b–9

Like I said earlier, this story is usually considered a second account of the world’s creation from the cosmogony in Genesis 1 because we go back to there being no plants or humans and God (or in this case, The Name) goes back and creates them in a more detailed, maybe personal/physical way: He plants a garden, He forms a man from dirt. This is also seen as evidence of Genesis being a composite work of different traditions with different notions about the deity they worshiped, but I’m more interested in the compiler(s) who put these stories in sequence as if they were in continuity. I don’t think this is an oversight, but let’s take the above passage as setting the scene. Two trees. “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2:16–17). Great plot device.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Genesis 2:18–25

This has always struck me as a weird passage and one with thematic (if not chronological) continuity with Genesis 1, because Adam acts like a little God in naming all the animals as well as naming Woman. What do names and images have in common? They are signifiers, representations of things in symbolic systems which renders those things comprehensible to the subject situated within the system. God creates the material world, whereas Adam creates the symbolic world. This is why I think it’s significant that God appears in this tale as The Name, as another being who walks with Adam. Is The Name not a representation of God both in language and within the narrative? With Adam’s creation, the whole cosmos suddenly acquires significance and personality from his vantage. Adam’s creative power is precisely the sense in which he is godlike, but this creativity is internal and symbolic until it begins to shape the physical world in turn through Man’s dominion.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Genesis 3:1–7

Do we identify this event with Paul’s origin of idolatry in Romans 1? There’s even a legged reptile who speaks for God! I don’t want to imply anything about what the Genesis author believed or that Paul specifically had this etiology of evil in mind when laying out his own, though he may well have since he was working within the same tradition. But Paul casts a strange light on this story, especially when combined with the apparent narrative of Adam as the demiurge of his own semiotic universe. When humanity emerges as this creature trapped in the symbology of its own mind, when creation begins contemplating itself and is confronted by the terms of its own making, the cosmos is suddenly alienated from itself and its own nature (the creative-ordering principle, the Logos, by which it was made and through which it exists).

I’m evoking three things here. First, Mumford’s description of early human experience, as a species who had “became conscious of a haunting ‘supernatural’ environment … that no other animal paid attention to” and within its dreams developed a symbolic world parallel to the material one in which they actually lived.³ Second, Plato’s cave allegory, which has always frustrated me both for its wise-ass orientation (“unlike you idiots, I see things how they really are!”) and because it so proudly assumes the material world is a shadow of the ideal world rather than the other way around. I find it less likely that there’s some perfect form of a chair in idea-heaven which carpenters incarnate in wood, than that in language we have implicitly defined forms of things through which we interpret and act on reality. But let’s invert the allegory and say that humanity has trapped itself in semiotic systems, and confused the signifiers (images, names) which it originated for the things themselves. In other words, we can say the idea-heaven is a virtual reality in which humanity situated itself through language. Third, Hegel’s Geist, which we can conceptualize virtually instead of metaphysically and thus set it gently on its head. Compare to how Žižek characterizes the signifying field as being like Pokémon Go: "Look, a tranny! A Jew! A commie!"; perhaps augmented, rather than virtual, reality is more apt.

As for those damn trees. I'm comfortable referring to them as plot devices because I don't think the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents necessarily an attainment of something withheld from Man as much as a particular point in Man's development, the specific 'logical moment' when being godlike results in his alienation from nature. Humans are already created according to God's image, but to eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil is to realize that unique nature. Meanwhile, the tree of life is withheld from humans; they can create inner worlds like God and impose those inner worlds on the physical world, but they cannot live forever because that would be a bad situation. Maybe I'm being dismissive, but those are aspects of the story which I read as etiological to justify the arc of the characters and narrative rather than being fundamental elements in their own right.

An interesting tangent: there's a Chinese professor of history and literature I've started watching on Youtube because I miss school, and he makes an interesting argument that the author of the Yahwist tradition in the Torah (with which Genesis 2–3 are associated) was a woman, which is fascinating since the Adam & Eve story is often taken as overtly sexist. As such, for sure, but if we read it as an unreliable narrative from Adam's vantage, the story is at least more complicated. This is why I think it's unfair for Paul to establish any model of sexual relations on Genesis 2–3, based on the idea that Eve exists for Adam. The story gives us good reason to doubt the truth-value of its content through its structural logic.

Conclusion

My partner and I have been talking about peasant brain lately. On Xitter (link to Tumblr), JK Rowling had posted an AI-generated video of a social media conversation which flashed in and out of intelligible text, suggesting it was providers of trans healthcare being homophobic for maybe converting young lesbians into trans males? I don’t know. Shit's getting real fucking strange between that and the transhunt for anyone connected to the groyper assassination of Charlie Kirk, not to mention how many people inhabit a simply delusional cosmos. Paul, his literary antecedents, and modern thinkers who follow in his footsteps seem to attribute much human misery to the human condition of being linguistic, symbolic beings who use idolatry to divest themselves of responsibility towards nature and each other. I know we don't like transhistorical narratives, but this is one with which I'd somewhat agree. Maybe we can characterize capitalism as the fetish world par excellence confronting humanity as an alien force, considering not only the deep roots of the commodity form in lower forms of culture, but the earliest equivalences of economic with symbolic exchange. Just a thought.

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1. No relation to the gnostic notion of transcending the material world; this is just how he characterizes the perfection of the resurrected body, almost a synthesis between material and spirit. ↩︎

2. My understanding is that this is Stoic, but I don’t respect the Greeks enough to read them (this is a me problem). ↩︎

3. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, Vol. I, Ch. 3. ↩︎