Eden is often, if not always, associated with happiness. Adam is the first man (or the last) who experiences happiness, living in harmony with his environment, and enjoying in his human solitude this intimation with Nature.
The question one might ask is whether Adam is really happy in Eden, happy in his nudity. By nudity, here, I understand privation: Adam’s nudity is, in my opinion, a state of privation.
In Eden, Adam is not allowed to enjoy either life or knowledge; thus being deprived of the human dimension.
Adam becomes human only after Eva makes him eat the apple.
Therefore happiness as an idea or a state of mind – a concept debated over millenia by all philosophies –
appears as a questionable statement in relation to Adam(and Eve) in the Garden of Eden.
Because happiness as a complex feeling is not a natural state, but a human (read manmade) abstract notion.
Happiness comes both with life and knowledge.
Since the moment when Adam is banished from Eden,
doomed to temporality, to mortality, this duality life/knowledge has been split in him.
And Lord Byron tells us in “Cain”:
The snake spoke truth; it was the Tree of Knowledge;
It was the Tree of Life: knowledge is good,
And Life is good; and how can both be evil?
(Lord Byron,"Cain",act I,scene I)
This may appear as a riddle to any reader.
Indeed, in its answer lies the secret of happiness: never can humankind be happy with half-truth.
The key to happiness is a balance between body and soul, life and knowledge, work and pleasure, reality and illusion. Whenever the whole is split there is not only inhumanity, but insanity and infelicity as well.
And the humankind exists from the moment when Adam is expelled from Eden.
By living and striving to learn how to live, man finds a meaning of his condition.
After the Fall, Adam starts re-creating himself as a human being.
A fallen man, Adam, is a creature of God deprived of full enjoyment of Eden: life and knowledge.
Indeed, man appears in the world in its complete nudity. The newborn, this miracle of our planet, comes in its nudity before life and knowledge.
And neither clothes nor any other human being can protect it better than God alone, that is eternity and wisdom - peace.
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It's a metaphor for the childhood loss of innocence. In fact, the entire creation/adam & eve myth works very well as a metaphor for the evolution of the human consciousness. In the beginning there is darkness. The first thing that is created is light. Eventually, a person is accustomed with his surroundings. Thus, God creates the heaven and earth, creatures of land, sea and sky. Lastly God creates man, which is the last part of human consciousness, self-discovery, questionng the nature of existence.
--Mike
Not that I'm saying this is right, but have you ever heard the saying ignorance is bliss?
Anyways not that it was Adams position.
Wouldn't happiness be sort of a trite word?
I'd try to figure out what you're trying to say, but I'm not sure what happiness has to do with anything. Are you trying to somehow equate happiness with humanity? Happiness is found in so many forms..
"A fallen man, Adam, is a creature of God deprived of full enjoyment of Eden: life and knowledge."
I also wanted to point something out concerning that sentence.There were two trees, The Tree of Life, and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Before Adam and Eve partook of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, he wasn't yet fallen. Also, Adam is not a "creature of God", but a vessel made to contain God. He was made to contain God's life, but God did not want to mechanically install His life in Man... instead he gave Adam a choice...
Anyway.. just thought I'd randomly drop by..
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Life is short. Eternity isn't.
He gave Adam a choice yet he already knew that Adam was going to eat from the tree. Seems flawed to me and like we have absolutely no free will.
this was an intensely interesting read.
good point you have here.