The Garden of Eden Revisited — Shelley and Plato

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This is a brief follow-up to a recent article in my series Christianity’s Next Reformation. I’m arguing that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden story do not represent, either literally or symbolically, the first humans; they represent rather the immortal soul before its descent into matter.

Since writing that, I’ve come across a passage from Kathleen Raine’s selection of poetry by Shelley¹. In her introduction she says: “Shelley, a Platonist, believed that the soul is in its essential nature incorruptible, and that all evil results from a ‘descent’ into the material world. The Christian realization of ‘original sin’ belongs to the wisdom of bitter experience; but if the Christian view is, in terms of the living of a life in this world, the more realistic doctrine, it yet remains true that in the very idea of a ‘fall’ from some original perfection the Platonic view of the soul’s nature is implicit. Shelley was anti-Christian not as Marxists and other sorts of materialists are, but as a Platonist who saw in Christianity a distortion of a more ancient and universal knowledge”.

Such ‘more ancient and universal knowledge’ can therefore be found in Genesis 2–3 and also Plato. Isn’t it interesting that he seems to be in agreement with the author of Genesis?

Further reading, highly recommended:

From Plato to Neoplatonism | Why are we here? | The descent of the soul | The Gallerist

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Footnote:

1. Penguin, 1973