Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil

It is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which means that it brings awareness of the opposites, the specific feature of consciousness. Thus, according to this myth… consciousness is the original sin.

Edinger identifies the tree’s fruit as the psychological symbol of ego-consciousness arising through awareness of opposites, making the Fall the mythic statement that consciousness itself is the original transgression.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis

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Because of this the knowledge of good and evil was an insurmountable curse. But if you return to primal chaos… you will notice that you can no longer separate good and evil conclusively.

Jung reads the knowledge of good and evil as a permanent psychic burden that splits unity, yet argues that growth — the upward movement of the tree — temporarily dissolves the opposition before it reasserts itself upon cessation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

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When you eat the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, you know about pairs of opposites, which include not only good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but male and female, and God and Man as well.

Campbell reads the forbidden fruit as the mythic trigger for the full differentiation of all opposing categories, interpreting the expulsion from Eden as the structural precondition for reflective human consciousness.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001thesis

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eating always from the tree of disobedience - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - in this way he acquired experientially through sense-perception a knowledge in which good and evil were intermingled. And it would not be untrue to say that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the visible created world.

St. Maximos identifies the tree of knowledge with the visible created world itself, arguing that human enslavement to sensory pleasure and pain constitutes a perpetual, ongoing eating of its fruit rather than a single historical event.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981thesis

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the tree of life is productive of life; the tree that is not called the tree of life, and so is not productive of life, is obviously productive of death. For only death is the opposite of life.

St. Maximos establishes a strict ontological opposition between the two trees — one productive of life, the other of death — grounding the ascetic tradition’s negative valuation of the knowledge-tree in contrast to psychological readings that see it as felix culpa.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis

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The tree of mortality (or death) is also the tree of consciousness---you can’t have one without the other---the lesson being that increased consciousness is accompanied by a spiritual death, a gift from the gods even more precious than eternal life.

Peterson synthesizes the Jungian tradition by identifying the tree of knowledge as simultaneously the tree of death and of consciousness, framing mortality and awareness as inseparable gifts that surpass the alternative of unconscious immortality.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis

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It is on account of this, I think, that the tree was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For only those fully established in the practice of divine contemplation and virtue can have concourse with things strongly attractive to the senses without withdrawing their intellect from the contemplation of God.

St. Maximos interprets the tree’s name as marking the ambivalent moral status of sensory experience, which destroys those who are not grounded in contemplation but can serve as a ladder to God for the spiritually perfected.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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commanded him freely to eat of all the heavenly trees therein, but forbade him wholly the taste of a certain one which was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus saying, ‘In the day that ye eat thereof ye shall surely die.’

John of Damascus presents the orthodox theological baseline — the divine prohibition and its lethal consequence — against which psychological reinterpretations of the tree as liberating gnosis are measured.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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‘you may freely 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 die.’

Campbell situates the biblical text within comparative mythology, connecting the two-tree Garden to Sumerian antecedents and arguing that the prohibition reveals a narrative logic structurally identical across ancient Near Eastern cultures.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting

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That fall is his deviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself… into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and death, good and evil, joy and pain… This is the fruit which Adam and Eve, Purusha and Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten.

Aurobindo reads the fruit of the knowledge-tree as the universal symbol of the soul’s descent into dualistic consciousness, mapping the Genesis narrative onto the Vedantic categories of Purusha and Prakriti.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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According to Hegemonius (Acta Archelai), Jesus was the paradisal tree, indeed the Tree of Knowledge, in Manichaean tradition: ‘The trees which are in paradise are the lusts and other temptations that corrupt the thoughts of men.’

Jung documents the Manichaean identification of Jesus himself with the Tree of Knowledge, revealing the gnostic tradition’s radical inversion of the tree’s valence — from instrument of corruption to vehicle of redemption.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting

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Seth knew that this was the tree of whose fruit his parents had eaten, for which reason it now stood bare… When Seth took a second look at paradise he saw that the tree had undergone a great change. It was now covered with bark and leaves, and in its crown lay a little new-born babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Jung traces the alchemical and legendary motif of the paradisiacal tree stripped bare by the Fall yet renewed by the infant Christ, establishing the tree of knowledge as the root from which both death and regeneration grow.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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There is a great and unutterable difference between the tree of life and the one which is not the tree of life… the tree of the knowledge of good and evil… Unquestionably, the tree of life is productive of life; the tree that is not called the tree of life… is obviously productive of death.

St. Maximos, in the Philokalia, argues from the asymmetry of the trees’ names to their ontological asymmetry, providing the patristic foundation for treating the knowledge-tree as constitutively death-producing rather than salvifically ambiguous.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting

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Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden lest they should ‘take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’… In Buddhist legend, on the other hand, the whole sense of the teaching is that one should penetrate that guarded gate and discover that tree — the Bodhi-tree.

Campbell contrasts the Abrahamic logic of exclusion from the life-tree with the Buddhist imperative to penetrate the guarded threshold, framing the cherubim and flaming sword as the psychological barrier of desire and fear.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

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Had there been no Tree of the Fall, there would have been no Tree of Redemption, no Holy Rood, as the Cross was called in the Middle Ages.

Campbell establishes the typological identity of the tree of knowledge and the Cross, arguing that the Fall-tree is the necessary mythological precondition for Christian redemption, linking Eden to Golgotha as two moments of a single symbolic complex.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001supporting

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This symbol is the cross as interpreted of old, viz. as the tree of life or simply as the tree to which Christ is inescapably affixed. This particular feature points to the compensatory significance of the tree.

Edinger, glossing Jung, identifies the Cross as the tree of life functioning compensatorily for what Christ had been separated from, connecting the knowledge-tree’s legacy to the problem of the reunification of moral opposites.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting

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This rare gift from the gods not only marks the advent of mortality, it symbolizes the regenerative cycle of spiritual death and rebirth that the humans must pass through in order to ‘become like the gods.’

Peterson interprets the aftermath of the knowledge-tree’s fruit — the divine gift of animal skins and the exile — as initiating the archetypal cycle of death and rebirth required for genuine deification.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting

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what is keeping us out of the garden is not the jealousy or wrath of any god, but our own instinctive attachment to what we take to be our lives. Our senses, outward-directed to the world of space and time, have attached us to that world.

Campbell reframes the cherubim guarding the garden as a psychological rather than theological barrier — the ego’s attachment to sensory existence — thereby psychologizing the consequence of eating the knowledge-tree’s fruit.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972aside

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the coincidentia oppositorum involves both the union and separation of good and evil. It is not possible to get round that.

McGilchrist, in the context of the Kabbalah’s yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, argues that the coincidentia oppositorum — the conceptual heir of the knowledge-tree’s duality — requires both the union and real separation of good and evil, resisting facile monism.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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