The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

Least anyone think the myth of Prometheus can be brushed aside as merely an idiosyncractic tale concoted by playful Greeks, let me remind you that in the Judeo-Christian tradition almost exactly the same truth is presented. I refer to the myth of Adam and Eve. This is the drama of the emerging of moral consciousness. As Kierkegaard said in relation to this myth (and to all myths), the truth that happens internally is presented as though it were external. The myth of Adam is re-enacted in every infant, beginning a few months after birth and developing into recognizable form at the age of two or three, though ideally it should continue enlarging all the rest of one’s life. The eating of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the dawn of human consciousness, moral conscience and consciousness being at this point synonymous. The innocence of the Garden of Eden—the womb and the “dreaming consciousness” (the phrase is Kierkegaard’s) of gestation and the first month of life—are destroyed forever.