Eternal temptation

Eve’s transgression, and Adam’s complicity in it, were deliberate acts that determined the shape of all our lives.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
ALBRECHT DÜRER’S engraving of Adam and Eve from 1504 (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
ALBRECHT DÜRER’S engraving of Adam and Eve from 1504
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
For thousands of years, theologians, philosophers, natural scientists, creative artists and ordinary people have tried to understand the implications of the fate of Adam and Eve. What, they ask, does the story of the naked man and woman in the garden and the talking snake reveal about who we are, where we came from, what is special about us, why we sin, and why we suffer? In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Stephen Greenblatt (a professor of the humanities at Harvard University; the author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; and Swerve: How the World Became Modern) provides a learned, lively, beautifully rendered and written examination of the long and fascinating history of one of the world’s most influential stories.
Sweeping and searching, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve analyzes the creation of the biblical account (which drew on and radically departed from rival origin narratives); Augustine of Hippo’s establishment of the story as literally true; the story’s full flowering in the Renaissance, with Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Fall of Man and John Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost”; and the critique of Enlightenment intellectuals, geologists, and a naturalist named Charles Darwin.
Greenblatt is, of course, scarcely the first person to assess the myth of Adam and Eve. Even when he traverses familiar terrain, however, his analysis is cogent and compelling.
Deeply troubled by his own experience of sexual passion, Greenblatt notes, Augustine maintained that in paradise, the primal pair knew a perfect serenity that extended to sexual intercourse.
Human beings, Augustine concluded, were not meant (at first) to feel what he had felt in Carthage’s fleshpots, or with the mistress who had borne his only child.
Ironically, Greenblatt asserts, Augustine believed that Adam had chosen to sin “out of a craving for undue exaltation” and because he “could not bear to be severed from his only companion” – but the theologian had also, with the doctrine of innate depravity, “undone Adam’s choice” and the free will of all who came after him.
As with Augustine, Greenblatt reminds us that Milton’s interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve was shaped by his own life experiences. In his teens and 20s, Milton struggled to preserve his chastity, and then made an impulsive decision to marry. After a disastrous honeymoon, his wife returned to her parents. Following a long separation, Milton accepted her pleas to return – and the couple had four children.
In Paradise Lost, the blind poet portrays Adam and Eve as anything but allegorical: flesh-and-blood people, they are innocent, free, and deeply in love. Eve chooses to eat the apple and urges her husband to join her in the newly acquired knowledge; Adam chooses to share her fate and leave the Garden of Eden.
Milton ends his epic poem with the theological scheme still in place. He endorses as just the punishments visited on humankind and the salvation that will be offered by Jesus. But “what most arrests Milton’s attention,” Greenblatt claims, is “the quiet intimacy of the married couple.”
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is also filled with less well-known worthies, several of whom challenged the received wisdom of their era. In 1654, Greenblatt reveals, Paternal Tyranny was published, two years after the death of its author, Arcangela Tarabotti, a nun.
“Truly,” Tarabotti has God tell Eve, “the devil stands for the male, who from now on will cast on to you the blame for his failings, and will have no other purpose than deceiving you, betraying you, and removing all your rights of dominion granted by my omnipotence.” Not surprisingly, the Inquisition put Paternal Tyranny on the index of prohibited books.
At almost the same time, Isaac La Peyrère completed Men Before Adam. Having concluded that a land bridge could not possibly explain the vast number of people in the New World, La Peyrère argued that Adam was the “father” of only one group, the Jews, whom God had chosen to receive his laws and to be, though Jesus, the agents of redemption. Copies of his book were burned, and to escape execution for heresy, La Peyrère recanted.
Two years before Darwin published Origin of Species, Greenblatt indicates, Philip Gosse, a fundamentalist preacher, naturalist, and the inventor of the first seawater aquarium, published Omphalos, the Greek word for navel. Responding to geologists’ evidence that the Earth was much older than implied in the Bible, Gosse claimed that God planted fossil evidence on the first day of creation, just as He had given Adam a navel (even though Adam had been “born” as an adult). Omphalos, Greenblatt writes, “was received with ridicule and contempt.”
Although science played a pivotal role in the fall of Adam and Eve, Greenblatt acknowledges that it “lacks and may never achieve” the moral lesson that is the essence of the story. In the biblical account, he reminds us, the first humans were free to adhere to or violate the divine prohibition against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Eve’s transgression, and Adam’s complicity in it, were deliberate acts that determined the shape of all our lives. Millions of people, including many who embrace “the underlying assumptions of modern science,” he among them, Greenblatt concludes, “continue to cling to the peculiar satisfaction that the ancient story provides.”
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.