As a preface, I know some may not exactly agree with the conclusion I come to, so I ask for some civility, all I bring is a general observation on human history. And this will be long winded.
I had a thought when reading about philosophy, art, politics, and religion, I consider myself to be a rather pious Christian, though with a mind just open enough to where I think my brains have not fallen out quite yet, I have been reading some G. K. Chesterton lately and that has brought me to several thoughts that I would like to share. The big one is on the nature of all things, but especially a sentiment I have observed in every age, though I speak in matters of philosophical and not historical terms, that being that there is in each heart, a longing for the primordial youth of the world, one that has defined all romance, poetry, and struggle since this unhappy lot of man kind has begun walking the earth.
Thinking back, I do not go as so far as to say that this has been the conscious struggle of every person, but it has been something in our past that I think signifies something greater. The earliest religions and philosophies, to my understanding have held that the world is in a state of fallenness, the Epic of Gilgamesh takes place in a time that was ancient to the most ancient of civilization, Hinduism posits a return to an ideal state, one that was timeless and primordial before creation, the Greeks posited at first there was pure essence of love as being, and thus began an age of chaos that was made ordered by the titans and gods and tamed to being by heroes of a golden age. For the purposes of this conversation, I will use the ethos that made the society I live in, because I think it to be the most true, and most defining for the present age, and that is this idea of Eden, of an ordered earthly and primordial paradise that predates sin entering to the world where man once walked alongside God, where nature, in her infancy as the sister to man, had her features named as virtues, each animal and tree bestowed some ancient and forgotten title of being that was its true first name. And in this state was a strange peace and beauty to the world, a world without suffering as it were. Yet man, in his voracious ingratitude had become a fallen creature, cast out from the garden in the infancy of the world, to suffer by the sweat of his brow and the strain of his feet in the mud. Ever since this supposed spring, we have been reaching back towards a garden that was.
This sentiment of longing for the primordial youth of the world has manifested itself in, honestly everything. I always found it strange how the most left leaning or progressive ideologies are often spoken of in terms of returning to a natural state, the anarchists wishing to return to a period before organized religion or state structures, or how often I hear others talk about a supposed communal state that existed before commerce brought with it a sort of decay to the natural order. On the other end of the spectrum, obviously there are reactionary ideas of returning to a pre modernity, or if you go to the extreme right, how you find a neopagan movement seeking to return to a likewise ancient state of worshiping old gods, before the cosmopolitanism and supposed weakness of Christendom spread, its why the Nazis had a strong neopagan sentiment. In this, I am not making a value judgement of either side of the political spectrum, only noting how both want the same kind of thing, a return to a supposed ideal before something corrupted society, a return to the natural order, both aim to be a progression of society by also being ironically, rather reactionary, no one believes that their aim is to regress society, but all seem to want a return to an ideal. Likewise, this can be seen in philosophy, Rousseau being the obvious example with his idea of a noble savagery before the corruption of society, or a lot of the libertine leanings of Romantic poets in the early 19th century of trying to get back to nature, or Simone de Bouvoire's notion of authenticity, that is being most true to the natural condition. Or on a more personal note, how many who suffered in childhood often feel cheated of what should have been, often rightfully so, they know as a fact that their childhood cannot be altered, but there is often a wish for a return, for an Eden that could have been so, if only the fall had not come so early.
These observations, of varying types have led me to several conclusions, the first being that the Christian doctrine of original sin seems self-evident, there is clearly something wrong with the world for people to commit such evil, we are all in want of washing. The second, though less verifiable by empirical metric, but seems to nonetheless be the case, it is very easy to accept that there is a notion that the world is in a fallen state, or at least, a good portion of the world, many of which are in no way related to each other, whether Hindu, Christian, Buddhists, or pagan seem to believe this is so, in the ancient Eden of Communists the garden was an orchard that provided, in the Eden of the Nazis, the garden was one of ancient and grotesque and gnarled oaks to which sacrifices and festivals were made to Odin and Thor, it seems so strange to me that such radically different world views, one that viewed the material without spiritual considerations and one that viewed the spiritual without material accountability came to the same strange conclusion that the right place for man was in a garden, a garden that we have been cast out of.
This brings me to what some might rightfully consider the worst or best part of my observation, that the Christian ethos was the thing that broke off from this notion towards a different ideal. The pagan philosophers of antiquity had held that the world was once in an ideal age and now was irreparably broken, to Plato, Atlantis had drowned, and to Aristotle the golden age of heroes had long since passed into shadow, and in Christendom, Eden had indeed drowned, but the resurrection was the eucatastrophe of all history, it is what turned from the lamentation of the philosophers into something more positive, it recognized that Eden could not be returned to, because the infancy of the world had ended, instead there was the New Jerusalem to march towards, a kingdom at hand, a battle to be won, a future without ceasing in spite of a finite and fallen past. Christ was the new Adam as the world was being made anew through him, it was this core doctrine of theology, that Christ as the redemptor mundi that broke from man's wanton search for Eden, because now there was something better to go towards, one with all the enjoyment of Eden, but one that would not fall. This brings me to what first brought on this thought, that being the Slav Epic series of paintings by Alphonse Mucha. The first in this series depicts a sort of primordial fear, of terror by the ancient pagan deities standing over a shriveling early humanity in a more ancient darkness, but there was light on the horizon, the middle painting out of the twenty was of Jan Hus preaching, of a declaration and fight against a tyranny for the truth that had to come out and behind him a tapestry of St. George slaying the dragon, a symbol of the sin of the world with its wide maw engulfing the heavens that must be stood against, and the final, the Apotheosis, a transfiguration of the material into the divine, a change in the essence of man heralding something anew, not a return to either primordial joy or terror, but something magnificent, ancient, and novel. It is this oldest idea, one that I believe every soul knows at heart to be true, though we wish to deny, that there is no return to Eden, that seems to be the most revolutionary sentiment in history, and it is so revolutionary because it is the oldest, things can only ever grow old because they become anew at each turn, the oldest trees are always growing and taking new forms, each mother acts as if her child is the first, and with each person, a new world and a new heaven is given, but it is on all of us to march towards the New Jerusalem, because it is far more ancient and greater than the old Eden.