Читать книгу The Animal at Unease with Itself - Isaac M. Alderman - Страница 4

Many scholars are now pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East by drawing on the insights from the study of cognition and emotion. To my knowledge, there has not yet been any biblical study which applies the work of terror management theorists, nor has the concept of animal reminder disgust been utilized to better understand the opening chapters of Genesis. The first part of this book (chapters 1 and 2) introduces biblical scholars to some of the current application of cognitive science to the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East. This is a broad topic, and I will narrow it by also introducing terror management theory and the cognitive implications of death anxiety. The second part (chapters 3–7) deals with issues of human bodies, the bodies of non-human animals, death, and clothing. It is necessary to cover these topics because their presence and interaction in Genesis 2–3 is the point of the third section (chapters 8–9). My purpose in writing this book is to demonstrate, using Genesis 2–3 as a case study, the usefulness of accounting for the cognitive implications of death anxiety when reading biblical texts that deal with themes of mortality, the human body, or the animal-human boundary.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida reflected on the biblical account of creation and life in the garden, which was brought to his mind as he began to dress. He noticed his cat looking at him and was surprised to find that, for a brief moment, he experienced embarrassment. Why should he feel ashamed or embarrassed, “when caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal?”^[1] His cat cannot be aware of his nudity, because she herself is naked and unashamed.

Ashamed of what and before whom? Ashamed of being as naked as an animal. It is generally thought . . . that the property unique to animals and what in the final analysis distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short without consciousness of good and evil.^[2]

In turning to reflect on the relationship between shame, nakedness, clothing, and the recognition of animal nature, Derrida focuses on the movement from the beginning of “this awful tale of Genesis,” where immodesty is unknown, to the end, where the animal that is human knows itself, “the only [animal] to have invented a garment to cover his sex”; for the human, “knowing himself would mean knowing himself to be ashamed.”^[3] In “crossing borders or the ends of man I come to surrender to the animal—to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.”^[4] Derrida draws our attention to a radical existence in Genesis 2, one in which the human animal is unaware of its animality and, therefore, unaware of its nakedness.

There is no nudity “in nature.” There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked. And it therefore is not naked.^[5]

It is the awareness of that animality that compels humans to invent clothing. In telling us of his embarrassment when being seen naked by his cat, Derrida emphasizes the fact that a human who is unashamed of his animality is as otherworldly as conversant snakes or trees whose fruit can give knowledge or immortality.

Now more than 150 years ago, Darwin made it impossible for us to ignore our relationship with animals. More to the point, he clarified our relationship to animals. On the Origin of Species was immediately controversial. In the popular account of the public debate at the meeting of the British Association in Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce asked Thomas Huxley if Darwin knew whether the apes were on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side.^[6] As Darwin actually proposed, and as our understanding of genetics now puts beyond such quips, the other great apes are not our ancestors but our cousins, a fact that theological and religious discussions must now take into consideration. The matter of death and dying, which Darwin rightly recognized as the driving force behind natural selection, is clearly no exception. Like every other animal, each of us will die. While we may recognize that we are destined to “go the way of all the earth” (Josh 23: 14; 1 Kgs 2: 2), humans also tend to view themselves as somehow special, different from other animals.^[7] This difference is felt so deeply that it seems to demand a permanence that, in a perfect world, should extend even to the physical body, but obviously does not.^[8] This is, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker has termed it, the “impossible paradox” of human existence.^[9] Becker and this paradox—perhaps plight is a better word—are central to the discussion of human mortality, for it is this paradox that we will see at the center of terror management theory and the role of death anxiety in the process of reading, writing, and storytelling.

Throughout this discussion, we will see many ways in which humans have tried to categorize or organize our species, not just in terms of difference, but in terms of exceptionalism. How is our one species different over and against every other species? How are humans different from animals? Perhaps the uniqueness that humans feel is simply one of superiority. We have become the apex predator, the most successful species ever to emerge from a complex evolutionary web. One might consider the breakthrough for our species to have occurred some 2.5 million years ago with the first tool-making primates, Homo habilis, whose fossils have been brought to light in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge.^[10] It was there that our cognitive development allowed for the technological leap that enabled us to remake the face of the planet, inaugurating the era some geologists now refer to as the Anthropocene.^[11] The very name we have given ourselves, Homo sapiens, acknowledges that we are more cognitively advanced than all other animals. This goes beyond our ability to fashion tools, however, and so some have suggested that it is the presence of a mind distinct from simple cognitive processing that separates us from animals. Descartes said that animals are automata with “no intelligence at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs.”^[12] Humans, on the other hand, act in unique ways, functioning on advanced levels of communication and reason, including the imaginative and pro-social behavior of storytelling. Heidegger acknowledges that humans have an animal nature, but also have a secondary nature, epitomized by language that permits “a single sharp line to be drawn between human beings and members of all nonhuman species.”^[13] Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall has taken this idea a step further, suggesting that our species be rebranded as Homo fictus.^[14] He asserts that, “story—sacred and profane—is perhaps the main cohering force in human life.”^[15] Pro-social behaviors have been key to the success of many species, and many play, or develop hierarchies or other complex social structures. Yet humans are able to communicate in a very particular way, telling and consuming stories almost constantly.^[16] The first chapter of Genesis tells a very particular story of human uniqueness. As with other ancient accounts and religious traditions, it asserts that humans are distinct from other animals by virtue of a special relationship to a divine being. In this opening account, creation reaches its culmination with the deity pronouncing,

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them. (Gen 1:26–27)^[17]

Whether we consider our position at the top of the evolutionary pile to be due to our technological advances of tools and weapons, or our advancement through stories and communication of cultural ideas, or as a result of a special relationship to a divine being, it is evident that our religious, philosophical, and scientific traditions clearly express our belief that we humans are distinct from the rest of the animal world.

In addition to sharing the same ultimate end as all animals, humans also experience terror in the face of death. A deer faced with a mountain lion freezes or flees, just as the mountain lion encountering a bear flees or fights. When the danger passes, so does the terror and the animal returns to life as before. Like the deer or mountain lion, our autonomic nervous system kicks into high gear when encountering danger. Unlike these animals, however, we make weapons in preparation for such encounters, devise religious rituals and stories to help avoid them in the first place, and can ruminate on the question, “What if?”^[18] It is this ability to reflect and experience the terror of imminent death in anticipation that led the psychologists Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski to suggest that we refer to ourselves as Homo mortalis: ^[19]

On one hand, we share the intense desire for continued existence common to all living things; on the other, we are smart enough to recognize the ultimate futility of this fundamental quest. We pay a heavy price for being self-conscious. . . . And here’s the really tragic part of our condition: only we humans, due to our enlarged and sophisticated neocortex can experience this terror in the absence of looming danger.^[20]

This conflicting experience is what they, taking their cue from Ernest Becker’s paradox, describe as the “worm at the core” of human existence.^[21] Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski are the developers of terror management theory, the approach to understanding death anxiety that shapes the present project. Proponents of terror management theory are far from alone in noting the importance of our awareness of death. Whether we are talking about the Greek origins of Western philosophy or twentieth-century existentialists, ancient stories or contemporary graphic novels, the topic pervades literature and philosophy.^[22] Just as the discussion of religious matters must account for Darwin’s insights, so we should also consider the fact that we anticipate, ruminate upon, prepare for, and deny our own death.

Although we know death is an absolute certainty, we rarely consider this fact in our daily lives.^[23] “We act as if we are exceptions to the fact of mortality,” as if we are the one of whom the psalmist wrote: ^[24]

A thousand may fall at your side,

ten thousand at your right hand;

but it will not come near you. (Ps 91: 7)

Death surrounds us, in our lives, news, and entertainment, but it is never me who is dying. It is always someone else’s death that we see so frequently.^[25] In being aware of mortality, humans are in some ways responsible for “the invention of death.”^[26] Though Wittgenstein might be correct when he contends that death is not an event in one’s own life, for it is not an event that one lives through, the death of others is a significant factor in our lives.^[27] We mourn, care for corpses, pray, and map “geographies for the dead to travel to.”^[28] Hand in hand with “the invention of death comes the invention of continuous life. We all go somewhere else. . . . We move on.”^[29]

Literary and philosophical reflections on death and dying are helpful for understanding death anxiety, but they do not describe what is happening cognitively during the process of reading, writing, and telling stories that remind one of one’s own mortality. Recent interdisciplinary use of the insights from cognitive science can help shed light on this process because we now know that death anxiety can influence the cognitive processing of the story. For most people, thoughts of their own death are infrequent and do not seem to bring great anxiety. Even so, as studies cited in support of terror management theory have demonstrated, though we may not generally recognize a distinct feeling we can attribute to death anxiety, it is present. Moreover, mortality awareness increases stress, decreases well-being, and influences our behavior.^[30] Terror management theory was developed to understand the many behaviors that are influenced by death anxiety and is demonstrably effective at explaining the impact of death anxiety on human behavior.^[31] At its most basic, terror management theory suggests that humans distance themselves from death-related thoughts by the development of defensive cultural systems that allow humans to symbolically separate themselves from the rest of the animal world. Hundreds of experimental studies have demonstrated the relationship between thoughts of death and the perceived boundary between humans and other animals. To oversimplify: if one is reminded of death, one more forcefully negates human creatureliness by emphasizing the uniqueness of human beings; if one is reminded of the similarities between humans and other animals, death thoughts become more accessible. Lastly, if one is reminded of the superiority of humans over other animals, or of the impressiveness of human society, death anxiety recedes, and death thoughts are less accessible. In addition to the knowledge of our own mortality, another uniquely human trait, related yet most likely evolutionarily distinct, is the emotion of disgust. Although disgust originated as a mechanism to prevent eating or to force the ejection of certain foods, it evolved to include the rejection of ideas. As the emotion of disgust evolved, it diversified such that several types of disgust can now be said to govern different domains. Animal reminder disgust is the aspect of the emotion disgust which has appropriated the food ejection response and utilizes it as a way of rejecting ideas that remind humans of their animality. Animal reminder disgust is an essential corollary to terror management theory because it also impacts the cognitive acts involved in the processes of reading, writing, and storytelling.

My initial interest in applying the insights of cognitive science to reading and interpretation was from an interest in emotion, particularly that of disgust. Few would dispute that reading triggers emotions. Aside from it being scientifically demonstrated, it is part of our regular experience as readers of news, scholarship, poetry, and fiction.^[32] Most of us have had the experience of crying, cringing, or laughing out loud while reading, and we might generally notice emotions like happiness or anger when we read. Disgust is also a powerful emotion that can also be elicited while reading. The passage that first brought my attention to the visceral experience of reading was an account of the Buddhist scholar Edward Conze. On his morning train, Conze opened the newspaper on August 7, 1945, to the headline that Hiroshima had been bombed. He wrote,

I have a very deep stomach, and normally cannot be sick. But on this occasion I vomited straight out the window. This was prophetic insight. For at that moment, human history had lost its meaning.^[33]

I doubt that many of us have ever had such a powerful physical response to something we have read, but the simple fact that words on a page can induce vomiting is itself astonishing enough to lead one to keep this in mind when interpreting the biblical text. Moreover, the emotional response of disgust has cognitive effects that are more subtle but perhaps more significant than being physically ill. As literary theorist David Cave points out, the act of reading and writing by ancient storytellers utilizes the same brain architecture, cognitive processes, and emotional systems that we use today, for with only 6,000 years or so since the invention of writing, not enough time has passed for our brains to have evolved in any meaningful way with regard to reading and writing.^[34] This neurobiological connectedness can be an aid to interpretation. That is, cognitive research not only tells us about ourselves, but about the working of the human brain, which includes the brains of the authors of scripture.

There has been surprisingly little done to integrate terror management theory into the study of religion. This oversight is surprising because

religion appears to be the paradigmatic means by which to manage our terror of death in which we can belong to something larger than ourselves that will live on past any individual believer, but also due to the promise of an immortal afterlife. . . . Recently, TMT theorists have also claimed that “religious worldviews provide a uniquely powerful form of existential security. Indeed, there may be no antidote to the human fear of death quite like religion.”^[35]

A 2018 issue of the journal Religion, Brain, and Behavior, from which the above quote was taken, has attempted to draw attention to this oversight with an entire issue devoted to issues such as afterlife beliefs. The journal has published articles which demonstrate a correlation between death anxiety and religiosity, that beliefs increase with that anxiety, and that artificially increasing religious belief can increase death anxiety in the non-religious and decrease it in those who are already believers.^[36] There is certainly still much more research to be done in these areas.

It is my view, and the goal of this project, to demonstrate the value of accounting for the role death anxiety might play when reading the Bible. By using the Jahwist’s narrative of creation and life in the garden, we can see that those elements which have been demonstrated to interact with death anxiety—such as animals, the emphasis of the animal-human boundary, and concern for body covering—are present in the narrative and should be taken into consideration. In Genesis 2–3, we see the author’s integration of the issues of life, knowledge of death, and the interaction of human beings with animals. The themes of the knowledge of mortality and human status vis-à-vis other animals are also found in other mythological literature, most notably Genesis 1 and Gilgamesh. However, the scholarly literature on the subject tends to treat these issues atomistically, isolating the inferiority of the animals, human mortality (or lack thereof), the acquisition of knowledge, and the need for clothing, treating these as separate concerns with their own significance and contribution to the narrative. However, the expanding field of cognitive science demonstrates that human death anxiety and human interaction with animals have deep cognitive connections, and many of the insights drawn from that field can contribute to a better understanding of these texts when one recognizes the integral relationship among these issues. By exploring terror management theory and animal reminder disgust, I hope to demonstrate that Genesis 2 and 3 are artfully crafted to deal with the stress of human awareness of its own creatureliness and mortality by creating a great gulf between humans and the rest of the animal world. Humans separate from the animals, and this separation is hardened as they move from being at ease with their nakedness to being, as Derrida puts it, “an animal that is at unease with itself.”^[37]

The first chapter will examine the cognitive turn in the humanities and the emerging field of the Cognitive Science of Religion. In the last decade, cognitive science has begun to make its impact felt in biblical studies, having already made interdisciplinary inroads into other aspects of the humanities, such as literature studies. This process is necessarily interdisciplinary, with art and literature now being studied as a cognitive act, not just an aesthetic product. In addition to literature, cognitive insights have been applied to the study of religion and religious texts. The Cognitive Science of Religion is a discipline that attempts to understand religion and religious practice primarily through understanding the cognitive constraints that shape them. This approach is largely directed to examining the origins of religious thought, the transmission and perseverance of these ideas, and religious acts or rituals. I will note here two concepts, the Theory of Mind (mentalizing) and Agency Detection, which are important to the discussion of human embodiment and the intuitive dualism that impacts religion and religious texts. An increasing number of scholars and research programs are endeavoring to study the Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christian origins by focusing on the insights that have been brought to the study of rituals and the transmission of ideas from cognitive science. This opening chapter concludes by examining several of these approaches.

The second chapter then moves from the broad aspects of cognitive science of religion and the cognitive turn and looks at the specific area of terror management theory and the emotion of disgust in regard to animals. Building on Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski have concluded that death anxiety does indeed drive humans individually and corporately to seek transcendence. Even though I might die, I will indeed live forever symbolically (e.g., through patriotism), genetically (e.g., through descendants), or actually (e.g., through afterlife). Animal reminder disgust is specific to those things that remind humans of their animal origins and involves issues of purity and sanctity. While the origins of disgust in pathogen avoidance and food ejection are clearly related to death, the proponents of terror management theory suggest that when our attention is drawn to our bodies, and their animality, we seek to separate ourselves from other animals through beautification, modification, and adornment. The naked body is shameful (even disgusting) because it is an animal body. The many studies supporting terror management theory and animal reminder disgust allow us to conclude that the animal-human boundary is comforting when we are presented with reminders of our mortality and that animal reminder disgust is a powerful emotion reinforcing the animal-human boundary. Animal reminder disgust and terror management theory are separate, though interrelated and, taken together, call for us to recognize their impact on any reading that involves human death, nakedness, and animals.

While these first two chapters are heavy on the scientific information and light on biblical references, I hope to show that the human experience of death anxiety, and death anxiety’s peculiar interaction with animals, should prompt us to consider the cognitive implications of reading any story that involves the themes of mortality, human creatureliness, and the relationship of humans to animals. The development of Genesis 2–3 was a cognitive process, as is our reading of it. At every stage, any thought of death or animals is a reminder of mortality (a mortality salience prime) which effects cognition and behavior, as terror management theory predicts and studies demonstrate. These features should be accounted for in the reading and can serve as an aid to interpretation.

The third chapter turns to religious responses to problems presented by the corporeality shared by humans and non-human animals. We begin by introducing some of the various religious responses to human evolution, focusing particularly on the situation in the United States of America, followed by a discussion of various religious responses to death, such as views of afterlife, immortality, or other aspects of culture that provide individuals with meaning in the face of death. Of particular importance is how religions have considered personal identity as embodied or disembodied. There are two fundamental questions around which this chapter is organized. The first is posed to us by the unhappy central character of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, who during the process of dying, wonders, “Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” He seeks a solution in various philosophies and scientific and religious views. However, he is continually confronted by the limitation of his own embodiedness. The second question was posed in the context of the challenge which Darwin’s book proposed to his society: What is the place of humanity within the natural order? The two questions combine in an existential threat: if we humans are not meaningfully separate from the rest of nature, then, in truth, our deaths are not particularly meaningful. Moreover, our lives might not provide for anything that is meaningfully lasting. Insights with regard to mentalizing and the mind-body problem help us to understand the persistent dualistic anthropology in religious thought. This intuitive dualism provides a buffer against death anxiety by allowing us to see ourselves as more than just an animal body. Evolutionary sciences, however, challenge this dualism and erode the animal-human boundary. This has had the result of making for an uneasy relationship between science and religion, particularly in the United States, which has a strong tradition of biblical literalism. Here I use the schema proposed by Ian Barbour, which posits four models for the relationships between science and religion to better understand how religious traditions have navigated the tension between the intuitive or explicit dualism of most religious traditions and the scientific approaches which call that dualism into question.

Staying on the topic of the human body and human death, the fourth chapter turns to these topics in the Hebrew Bible. Intuitive dualism is not simply a contemporary phenomenon but can help to better explain the widespread rejection of the previously held view of a major distinction between Greek and Hebrew worldviews with regard to dualism. While the Hebrew Bible does not have a systematic anthropology, it is a complex presentation of the human being that considers, bundles, and connects various aspects, but does not attempt to separate or unify them. Most often, various Hebrew terms such as bāśār, népeš, and rûaḥ seem to be referring to various perspectives or aspects, rather than components of a human being. Instead of describing what comprises a human, the biblical text presents a normative human that is whole, male, and well. The body which is not whole, male, and well becomes heavily regulated because of the danger it poses to the social body. Social structures are required to regulate and enforce conditions imposed on the non-normal body. The corpse represents the greatest departure from the normative body and is therefore heavily regulated. However, death itself is not an unnatural event: a non-violent death, in old age, and surrounded by family is a good death that is the best one can hope for. Immortality is neither expected nor necessarily even assumed to be possible.

Recognizing that various religions and the Bible itself have responded to the problems of embodiment and mortality in many different ways, chapter 5 will return to the cognitive and psychological responses to human corporeality, which demonstrate that many elements in our lives have the effect of drawing attention to human embodiment and therefore become existentially threatening. In other words, many common elements of human existence are existentially problematic as elicitors of animal reminder disgust and as mortality salience primes and therefore generate thoughts and behaviors that function as death anxiety buffers. As a result, the cognitively integrated concepts regarding our bodies which are united by their relationship to mortality awareness, such as clothing, hair, sex, gender, food, and relationships with animals, are highly regulated by religious and secular cultures. Social structures are required to maintain a system that establishes a normative body, and enforces compliance to that norm, along with the marginalization of those with non-normative bodies. Social control over the body is important because the body, as the site of social interaction, also represents the social body. Terror management theorists also recognize this relationship; but instead of focusing on the threat of unruly bodies to society, they assert that society exists to help us cope with our animal bodies, allowing us to transform them into cultural symbols of beauty and power. The body is a “cultural costume,” which is constantly communicating. Before moving on to a more detailed discussion of the role of clothing, it is useful to see exactly how the body is used to communicate, how it is controlled, and how the lack of control can elicit animal reminder disgust and increase death anxiety. As an example, we can examine the role of hair as communication and the emphasis on hair removal in many societies and across time. It is adherence to the cultural norms and regulations concerning the body, such as the shaping or removal of hair or the wearing of clothes, which help to assuage death anxiety by separating humans from other animals. Because the body itself is the problem, the covering up and manicuring of the body is essential to our identity as humans, and not animals.

Having already examined the existential crisis when confronted with our animal bodies, chapter 6 addresses certain methodological concerns brought to light by contemporary animal studies and the animal turn in the humanities. The bright line dividing humans from other animals is shown to be methodologically problematic because it divides the world’s creatures into an unsustainable human/not-human binary. Although one might think that the sciences and theology have different approaches, one only has to recognize the dichotomy of anthropology and zoology to recognize that the sciences as well implicitly uphold an animal-human boundary, which is sometimes called human-separatism, exceptionalism, or speciesism. Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), which forms the background (and title) of this project, has been an important catalyst for the animal turn in literary studies and some of its impact will be examined in this chapter. Two changes that have been brought about because of this critique from animal studies is a new emphasis on the shared evolutionary history among all animals and the emerging field of anthrozoology. Humans have a complicated relationship with other animals, whom we eat, keep as pets, protect, hunt, enslave, and observe. These behaviors are both ubiquitous and culture-specific. From domesticated animals to parasites, the modern human animal is one that has been shaped by its interactions with other species. An important development in the study of animal-human interaction is the cognitive impact of these relationships. I am referring specifically to animal reminder disgust and the increase in death thought accessibility. We seek to understand ourselves as something more than animals and often de-humanize (or animalize) those we oppose in the process.

After addressing certain methodological concerns with regard to animal studies, in chapter 7 I turn to the animal-human boundary as found in the ancient Near East and the Bible, with specific regard to clothing. The human relationship to non-human animals is complicated, with both ubiquitous and culture-specific attitudes. In the ancient world as today, different animal species held particular meaning or value. Some were symbols of wealth, cared for and collected, while others were despised and avoided. Surveying the ancient attitudes to animals, we see that most animals that were regularly encountered were involved in the mundane realities of daily life and related to the necessities of food, agriculture, and labor. Other species, however, were deeply meaningful and imagery such as the bull, large birds, or pets of the gods, gave expression even to the apex of religious thought and practice. Animals played a role in many religious rituals, with animals being directly involved or with humans mimicking behaviors or displaying attributes of non-human animals. Aside from the realities of life, we also see the literary presence of animals, both real and imagined. Here we will examine the role of animals in some of the literary works of the ancient world. The narratives of the Bible’s historical books give small glimpses into the interactions of ancient Israelites with domesticated and wild animals. Apocalyptic texts sometimes present symbolic elements of animals and monsters. The wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible enmeshes humanity in creation. Animals are central to the issue of purity, both in causing impurity and in restoring purity. Finally, animals in Ancient Israel served some of the same functions as they did for their Egyptian and Mesopotamian neighbors, and it is important to note areas of connection and distinction.

Just as with the study of animals, a great deal of work has been done on clothing that is outside the field of biblical studies, and it is important to be familiar with the methodologies used in such discussions. Humans engage with clothing as a source of information. Appearance and presentation is an essential aspect of how we function, for a society of strangers requires the ability to know one’s relationship to another at a glance. We read clothes as signs, and therefore very much like a language; because we can read clothing, it is even possible to develop a “hermeneutics of dress,” in which one can read social concepts regarding identity, power, sex, gender, etc.^[38] Clothing, then, is fundamental to knowing ourselves and our place in the world around us. Because this aspect of clothing is so foundational, clothing is dangerous and heavily regulated. In the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible, society engages clothing with regard to issues such as status, gender, and honor. There are many examples of how clothes operate within the larger society, and we can see how clothing can be used to distinguish humans from other animals.

The goal of this book through its first seven chapters is to demonstrate the basis for the claim that the continued maintenance and social enforcement of the unsustainable animal-human boundary is the result of a cognitive response due to a concern for our own mortality. In light of this, we should not be surprised to find expressions of these cognitively linked elements within an account whose primary concern is arguably the mortality of human beings. The final two chapters turn to the text of Genesis 2–3, which provides a striking constellation of those very elements which terror management theory asserts are impacted by death anxiety. In reading the many commentaries on Genesis 2–3, we see that these authors generally fail to connect important elements such as the concern for mortality, the relationship between the humans and the other animals, and the nakedness and eventual clothing of the humans. I am suggesting that we can indeed see unity among these elements and should not be surprised to find them all brought together in a narrative like Genesis, since the relationship to non-human animals and the concern to cover our animal bodies are, after all, cognitively linked to death anxiety as terror management theory demonstrates.

The final two chapters then turn to the text of Genesis 2–3 and attempt to draw together these elements linked by death anxiety. In chapter 8, I begin with a big picture view and, using the work of selected commentators on the text, seek to understand how the unit as a whole has been constructed and previously interpreted. I follow the structure outlined by the commentator Claus Westermann and divide the text into three narrative units. The first describes the account of the creation of the human, the animals, and a search for a suitable partner (Gen 2: 4b–5a, 7–9, 15–24). The second account concerns the humans moving from being naked to clothed (Gen 2: 25–3: 7). The final account is expulsion from the garden (Gen 3: 8–24). In each of the three accounts we find references to death, the superiority of the human(s) and the creation or reinforcement of the animal-human boundary. We see elements such as sex, clothing, the animals, the human body and even death are often subsumed under larger categories by commentators. We also see how often these categories have failed to account meaningfully for some of these elements. I suggest that the texts’ repeated and highlighted references to death as continually drawing the mind toward mortality.

The final chapter then turns to the individual elements of the Genesis text, focusing on the human body, animals and the animal-human boundary, and clothing, to see how terror management theory can help to better account for their presence in the text. While I assert that commentators fail to make certain significant connections among the elements and motifs that are united by means of terror management theory, these authors do present many valuable insights that can be even further elucidated by understanding the issues of death anxiety and animal reminder disgust. I believe that not only can accounting for death anxiety help us to better understand the passage in question, it also enables us to better understand many of the approaches commentators have taken to the text. By recognizing this cognitive connection as described by terror management theory, we are able to draw together the human interaction with non-human animals and the wearing of clothes by seeing these elements as interacting with and reinforcing the animal-human boundary, necessitated by our awareness of mortality. At the end of the account, the humans know that they will die. It is this new understanding that all human beings now share. Although we desire immortality, it is unattainable and we know that our bodies, like those of other animals, are destined to return to the ground. The cost of knowledge was the humans’ awareness of their animal bodies. They moved from being at ease with their nakedness and unaware of the inevitability of death to one of a state of anxiety, hiding, exerting dominance, and covering their bodies. Unlike other animals, humans are ill at ease with their bodies, with sex, with exposure, and with natural bodily functions. We seek to control all things that remind us of our animal bodies; we dominate our bodies and dominate each other because of the anxiety that we feel towards our bodies. The lengths we go to modify or hide our bodies, even beyond clothing, demonstrates just how much the awareness of our animal bodies disconcerts us.