Were Adam and Eve the First Zombies?
Dying for the Afterlife: Part Two
“LOOK! The moonlight shows us for what we really are! We are not among the living and so we cannot die, but neither are we dead! We have all the desires of the living, but cannot satisfy them!”
The first time the word “die” appears in the Bible is when God warns Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit. “You may surely 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 surely die” (Genesis 2:16).1 God did not mean that Adam and Eve would die physically. They kept physically living after they eat the fruit. Rather, God meant that learning about good and evil would kill them in a non-physical way. Adam and Eve are cursed to live dead unless they “take also of the Tree of Life and eat” (Genesis 3:22). Does this mean that God turned them into zombies?
In Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century Crisis, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and his colleagues analyze zombie symbolism and its increasing cultural significance.2 A key aspect of the zombie is that it is unintelligible. It turns clear binaries into mysterious paradoxes. “If the zombie is both alive and not alive, what now does it mean to be ‘alive’? And if it is both human and non-human, what then does it mean to be ‘human’?” Vervaeke claims that the zombie is “ultimately…a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection.”
There is a difference between being a zombie and living dead. Consider villains like Darth Vader, Voldermort, and Captain Barbossa. They occupy a liminal space between life and death. They are like zombies in that they are cursed to forever live a life that isn’t truly alive. However, they aren’t actually zombies because they still have souls that can be restored. If they sacrifice what is necessary to repay their soul-debts, then they can overcome the deaths that plague them. Until that happens, they live with incomplete or broken souls.
Barbossa describes his experience of death in terms of insatiable desire. “Ten years I have parched of thirst, and not been able to quench it! Ten years, I have been starving to death and haven't died!” Zombies aren’t self-aware in this way, which is why they don’t suffer like Barbossa does. According to Vervaeke, the zombie’s key quality is that it lacks metacognition, the human mind’s “ability to recognize and reflect back on itself.” Zombies are vacant on the inside, while characters like Barbossa are profoundly unfulfilled.
Adam and Eve were not zombies because their death was like Barbossa’s. Learning about good and evil killed their endless contentment. They used to live in blissful ignorance of existential possibility – of all the ways their lives could be lived. They weren’t anxious about anything. They made all of their decisions effortlessly and instinctually like the animals that surrounded them in the Garden. They could not question whether they were living the right way, so they never felt ashamed for living the wrong way. They were immune to guilt, regret, worry, and fear before they ate the fruit that “opened their eyes” and turned them into (normal) humans (Genesis 3:7). Their bliss ended because they started questioning life. Am I living the wrong way? Is my life as good as it should be? Who am I, really?
The deepest existential questions aren’t intellectual ones asked in fancy words, but inward experiences of anxiety and despair. These experiences are the deaths that we die while we’re alive. Zombies don’t get bubbles of regret in their throats. They never experience the stomach wrenching dread of tomorrow’s work. A man questions life when he’s so profoundly bored that even the thought of getting up to brush his teeth makes him want to die. The questioning is the heaviness of his arms when he’s lonely, the nauseas vacuum he becomes in grief. Adam and Even couldn’t have had these inward experiences before they ate the fruit. Before their fall from bliss, they were anti-zombies – vacantly satisfied instead of vacantly insatiable.
Death can be outward (physical) or inward (spiritual). Within each type, death is both a state and an event. These distinctions create four possible senses of “death.” One is dead after he has died, inwardly or outwardly. Each type of death has a corresponding type of life. As with death, life, whether outward or inward, is also both a state and an event. One is alive after he is born, inwardly or outwardly. There are also other more abstract senses of “death”. A death is an end (event). Skinny jeans have died in the sense that their cultural popularity has ended. Death is an ending (process state), such as in a ”slow death” from aging, fading cultural relevance, gradual loss of resources, etc. Death is also loss and the process of losing, such as in the death of an identity. Death is everywhere!
Vervaeke argues that zombies symbolize cultural tensions resulting from the rapid decline of organized Christianity in society. Biblical symbolism has permeated culture in explicit ways for millennia. For better or worse, it has directly shaped the way people think for a long time. Although Christianity as an organized religion has rapidly declined over the last thirty or so years, its symbolism still pervades modern thought – just indirectly. Today, even if someone has never read the Bible, they’ve implicitly learned about Biblical themes through movies like Star Wars. Vervaeke argues that a culture plunges into a “meaning crisis” when it explicitly rejects the implicit symbolic basis of its ideas. Zombies represent a population living in “a world that no longer explains itself, nor provides…instruction for how to live within it.” When one finds himself in a meaning crisis of this nature, he exists in a state of anomie – normlessness, existential chaos.