The Hero’s Journey
The Mormon Eve teaches us that sometimes it’s good to leave the garden
By Bryan Gentry
"Adam and Eve" by Daniel Heller, 2013. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons.
In seventh grade, I didn’t know I was a heretic. In fact, if I’d known the word “orthodox” back then, I would have readily used it to describe my weekly church attendance, daily prayer and eager scripture memorization.
But then in English class we read Daniel Keyes’ short story “Flowers for Algernon,” in which an experimental surgery triples Charlie Gordon’s IQ. Once mocked for his intellectual disability, the new Charlie is reviled for his brilliance. More than 800 of his coworkers sign a petition to get him fired.
“What's wrong with a man becoming intelligent and wanting to acquire knowledge?” Charlie asks. One coworker responds, “It was evil when Eve listened to the snake and ate from the Tree of Knowledge. … If not for that, none of us would ever have to grow old and sick, and die.”
Seventh-grade me rolled his eyes. “She doesn’t know the first thing about Eve,” I thought.
That’s when I realized that my Latter-day Saint, or Mormon, upbringing had taught me a unique view of Eve. For centuries, much of traditional Christianity blamed Eve for sickness, death, sin and the fact that childbirth is painful. The early Christian theologian Tertullian said that Eve made women “the devil's gateway.” St. Augustine called Eve “the weaker part of that human alliance” whose “bad use of free will” led to “the whole train of evil [and] miseries.” Reformation leaders focused on Eve’s “inferiority, evil and seductiveness.”
But I grew up seeing Eve as a celebrated heroine. The 19th-century LDS leader Brigham Young loved to tout this contradiction, saying, “Mother Eve … had a splendid influence” in persuading Adam to take the forbidden fruit. Russell Nelson, the church’s recent president, who just died in September, said that humanity is indebted to Eve’s “great courage and wisdom.” This unconventional take on Eve stems from the view that there was nothing forbidden about the knowledge Eve gained by taking the fruit—in fact, knowledge is the point of human existence.
The Fall is one of the most powerful archetypes in Western literature. It colors how we read Oedipus, Icarus, Faustus, Macbeth, Frankenstein and countless other stories that warn us of the dangers of seeking forbidden knowledge or power. It can even overshadow academic work when we mark controversial questions and conclusions as being off limits. But what if we stop reading the Eden story as a tale about the allure of forbidden fruit, and transform it instead into a hero’s journey—a story of choosing the challenging path? While the Eve of most religious traditions serves as a warning against seeking “forbidden” knowledge, the Mormon Eve teaches us how, and why, we sometimes need to leave the garden.
Gardens of Learning
A garden is a familiar metaphor for a school. Many of us begin our formal studies in a kindergarten, after all. In a recent video, Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi compares universities to gardens where students “step through the gates” into a place “full of surprises, full of wonder, full of opportunities for people to … find their own voice, their own set of meaning, their own set of values in the world.”
But that kind of personal transformation might not happen in a garden like Eden, where we imagine an endless buffet of fruit without human toil, where divine commands instruct our every step. In an Eden-like classroom, all ideas are amply detailed in the assigned readings and lectures—no need to question or debate.
Unfortunately, this metaphor accurately describes the situation at many universities today. The Open Syllabus project, for instance, has recently documented how assigned college readings focus on progressive perspectives, often omitting conservative counterpoints. And a 2011 paper on “forbidden knowledge” found that “despite their strong sense that science is characterized by open inquiry, most researchers [can] articulate entire areas of research that … could not or should not be conducted.” Indeed, we are all familiar with cautionary tales about scholars whose careers suffered when they pursued certain questions or reached certain conclusions. The authors note that each discipline has “a sense of mission,” a “unique, indispensable contribution to knowledge and progress” that scholars contradict at their own risk.
what if we stop reading the Eden story as a tale about the allure of forbidden fruit, and transform it instead into a hero’s journey—a story of choosing the challenging path?
This kind of garden, where it is forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, turns out to be a poor place to develop free thinkers. John Stuart Mill warns us that, without fearless debate, even true beliefs become “dead dogma.” Education without debate cannot “develop in [us] any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being.” We only weaken students, and ourselves, when we don’t wrestle with opposing ideas. “The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.”
A New Garden of Eden
While Mill was writing “On Liberty,” LDS theology was reshaping the Eden story in ways he could have appreciated. The Book of Mormon, which the faith regards as scripture, argues that without “an opposition in all things,” we would never be free to choose and learn. The Tree of Knowledge was planted so Eve could decide for herself whether to stay in the garden or to depart. The former choice would leave humanity underdeveloped, “having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.” The latter set in motion a plan to develop mankind through experience, learning and redemption.
If Eve had not taken the fruit, “we could never have possessed wisdom and intelligence,” Brigham Young taught. Without understanding opposites, “all the family of Adam and Eve would have been mere machines,” automatons rather than rational beings.
It may seem strange to quote Brigham Young as an advocate for open inquiry, since both universities he helped found faced academic freedom controversies more than a century ago. In 1911, his namesake university fired three professors for teaching evolution, and a few years later the University of Utah fired and demoted several professors, prompting more than a dozen faculty members to resign in protest and leading the American Association of University Professors to conduct its first investigation of a school’s administration. But the Eve that Young celebrated has something to teach scholars today: Knowledge is not forbidden. Facing opposing ideas helps us seek the truth much better than placid conformity. Sometimes we need to leave the garden to explore new paths and grow.
Sometimes by leaving the proscriptive garden or university we can discard dead dogma and challenge students to grapple with orthodoxies, question conclusions, and test new ideas. We can stop spreading cautionary tales about forbidden knowledge and instead seek the truth “without fear or favor.” Rather than chase academic heretics from the garden, we can wish them well as they leave on the hero’s journey, following in the footsteps of an Eve who believed that knowledge is won through experience and opposition. This open quest for knowledge is ultimately the only way for scholars to advance the truth and for students to become the independent thinkers that higher education promises them they can be.
About the author
Bryan Gentry is a communications director at the University of South Carolina and a co-chair of the Heterodox Academy Campus Community there. You can follow him on Twitter at @brygentry.