The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  How would this have been possible, the Pelagians asked, if the bodies of Adam and Eve were substantially the same as our bodies? Just consider, Augustine replied, that even now, in our current condition, some people can do things with their bodies that others find impossible. “Some people can even move their ears, either one at a time or both together. Others without moving the head can bring the whole scalp—all the part covered with hair, down towards the forehead and bring it back again at will.” Still others—as he personally had witnessed—could sweat whenever they chose, and there were even people who could “produce at will such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that they seem to be singing from that region.” Why should we not imagine then that Adam, in his uncorrupted state, could have quietly willed his penis to stiffen, just enough to enter Eve? It all would have been so calm that the seed could have been “dispatched into the womb, with no loss of the wife’s integrity, just as the menstrual flux can now be produced from the womb of a virgin without loss of maidenhead.” And for the man too there would have been “no impairment of his body’s integrity.”

  It was awkward to think about Adam and Eve making love. Augustine knew that it would make his readers uncomfortable or, still worse, make them laugh. He was doing his best to imagine a time when sexual intercourse was not shameful, but precisely because we are fallen, we cannot recover that time. Even though he was deliberately restraining his eloquence in the service of modesty, he understood that any attempt to describe the sexual intercourse of our first parents would trigger a sense of embarrassment. There was a further awkwardness: to discuss sexual activity in a sermon or a conversation inevitably leads to the conjuring up of mental pictures. Those pictures carry over into dreams where it is impossible to distinguish between fantasy and reality. “The flesh is at once stirred into movement,” Augustine reflected at the end of The Literal Meaning of Genesis, “and the result is what usually follows upon this movement.”

  But involuntary wet dreams, his own (which he seems to be acknowledging here) or those of his readers, are a risk worth taking. For it was crucial, in order to understand who Adam and Eve were and what the human condition was meant to be, to grasp precisely how they were meant to reproduce. The embarrassment we feel when we try to envisage them having sex is part of the problem. “Everyone knows,” Augustine observed in the City of God, what act a married couple perform for the procreation of children. The whole marriage ceremony is all about the consecration of that act. “And yet when this act is being performed, with a view to the birth of children, not even the children who have already been born as a result of such an act are permitted to witness it.” “Not even the children”: did Augustine imagine then that in Paradise children would have been permitted to watch their parents in the act of copulation? Yes, that is precisely what he imagined, since the event would have been unnoticeable, unremarkable, and without a trace of involuntary arousal.

  This was how it was all meant to be for Adam and Eve. But, Augustine concluded, it never happened, not even once. Their sin happened first, “and they incurred the penalty of exile from paradise before they could unite in the task of propagation as a deliberate act undisturbed by passion.” So what was the point of the whole elaborate exercise of imagining their sex life? Augustine might never make all the world’s Christians believe that their sexual feelings were unnatural or evil, but he could try to win an important doctrinal debate with the Manichees and the Pelagians and shore up a doctrinal vision of Jesus as the miraculous child of a virgin who became pregnant without the experience of ardor. And in matters of doctrine, whenever there was an encounter between a moderate, commonsensical position and a hard, intransigently radical position, the latter stood a very strong chance of success.

  Along with these doctrinal purposes, Augustine’s obsessive engagement with the story of Adam and Eve spoke to something in his life. What he discovered—or, more truthfully, invented—about sex in Paradise proved to him that humans were not originally meant to feel whatever it was that he experienced as an adolescent in Thagaste. It proved to him that he was not meant to feel the impulses that drew him to the fleshpots of Carthage. Above all it proved to him that he, at least in the redeemed state for which he longed, was not meant to feel what he had felt again and again with his mistress, the mother of his only child; the woman he loved for thirteen years (a period almost as long as the one during which he struggled to write the book on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis); the one he sent away at his mother’s behest; the one who declared that she would never be with another man, as he would never be with another woman; the one whose separation felt to him, he wrote, like something ripped from his side (avulsa a latere meo).

  Adam had fallen, Augustine wrote in the City of God, not because the serpent had deceived him. He chose to sin because of pride—a “craving for undue exaltation”—and because he “could not bear to be severed from his only companion.” Augustine had, as best he could within the limits of his fallen condition, undone Adam’s choice. He had tried, with the help of his sainted mother, to move away from ardor, to flee from arousal. True, he still had those involuntary dreams, those unwelcome stirrings, but what he knew about Adam and Eve in their state of innocence reassured him that someday, with Jesus’s help, he would have perfect control over his own body. He would be free.

  7

  Eve’s Murder

  Augustine’s account of his mother’s tearful longing to save her husband and son from sin was so powerful that over the centuries it resulted in a cult. When eventually her remains were brought to Rome from Ostia, where she had died, miracles were said to have occurred all along the route. In a basilica built near the Piazza Navona and dedicated to her son, her sacred relics were deposited for veneration in a special chapel to the left of the high altar. The basilica’s handsome façade, as can still be admired today, was clad with travertine torn off the Colosseum; the symbolism would not have escaped either the son or his mother. Prayers invoking her aid entered the Roman Breviary, and the feast day of Santa Monica—patron saint of patient wives, long-suffering mothers, and abuse victims—is kept on August 27. A small Spanish encampment in California became a flourishing city (and freeway) that still bears her name. She served for her wayward son—and through her son’s eloquent words for many others—as a path back toward paradisal innocence.

  As for the other woman Augustine loved, his sexual partner and the mother of his son, she simply disappeared from his voluminous writings, as she had disappeared from his life. He was not interested in using her as an emblem of carnal temptation or holding her responsible for his own sexual desires. After all, his underlying model for the disruptive presence of those desires was solitary arousal: a young man’s stirring manhood in a bathhouse and an old man’s erotic dreams.

  But if Augustine did not choose to focus on woman as the primal source of temptation and the loss of innocence, others did. By making the story of Adam and Eve the central episode in the drama of human existence, Augustine opened the floodgates to a current of misogyny that swirled for centuries around the figure of the first woman. It did not matter that the rabbinical tradition had very little interest in focusing the blame upon Eve or that the Qur’an depicted Adam and Eve as equally culpable. It did not matter that Christianity in its formative years had welcomed women, along with slaves and criminals and others oppressed by the Roman social order, and had offered them a place at the table of the blessed. It did not matter that Augustine and numerous theologians in his wake held Adam principally responsible for the catastrophe that befell humankind. Many other authorities, both inside the church and out, were happy to assign responsibility almost entirely to Eve.

  In doing so, they could draw at least indirectly upon an ancient pagan tradition that blamed women for the woes of the world. Virtually everyone, Christians as well as pagans, would have known the story of Pandora, most famously related by Hesiod, a venerated Greek poet of the eighth century BCE. The god Zeus, the story wen
t, had been tricked by the titan Prometheus and was enraged at him. Since the titan had shown special favor to men, it was on them that Zeus determined to get his revenge. He commanded the blacksmith god Hephaestus to fashion a beautiful figure, the first woman, out of clay, and he directed each of the gods in turn to give her a gift. Athena taught her to weave; Aphrodite gave her seductive charm; the Graces gave her golden necklaces; the Seasons wove spring flowers into a crown; and sly Hermes gave her “the morals of a bitch.”

  The irresistible Pandora—the name means “all-gifted”—was then sent to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, who had been warned not to accept any presents from Zeus. But Epimetheus, of course, was smitten and forgot the warning. Once in his house, Pandora opened the lid of a jar (mistranslated in the sixteenth century as a box) and, before she closed it again, out flew all of the ills that have afflicted humankind ever since. Only one item remained in the jar, just under the lid: hope.

  Mankind, in this account, had been caught in the middle of a struggle between a god and a titan. As there was no human transgression in the first place, so too no human ritual of penitence could possibly appease the angry divinity. Men had once lived free from illness and heavy toil, but, thanks to Pandora, that life is gone forever. There is no great moral lesson to be learned. All that can be salvaged from the disaster, apart from the knowledge that Zeus always wins, is an awareness of the source of life’s miseries: “the deadly female race and tribe of wives.”

  Early Christians did not embrace the myth of Pandora, any more than they embraced the rest of the Greek and Roman pantheon. But the faithful could not help looking over their shoulders at the culture they were rejecting. Pandora may never have existed, wrote the second-century theologian Tertullian, but the seductive temptation she symbolized continued to cause terrible harm. In his book on women’s apparel, he grimly rehearsed the punishments God meted out on Eve and her descendants. Then he continued with mounting outrage:

  And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?

  Though widely read, Tertullian seems to have been regarded with wariness by orthodox Christians. Nonetheless, his emphasis on woman’s incorrigible vanity and moral failings found many echoes.

  More in the mainstream of early Christianity was Augustine’s contemporary Jerome, whose translation of the Bible into Latin (known as the Vulgate, after the Latin word for “popular”) became its principal conduit in the West. Hugely influential and admired—he is the patron saint of translators, librarians, and the writers of encyclopedias—Jerome returned again and again in his works to those feminine adornments and enhancements that so outraged Tertullian. He fulminated against women “who paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyes with belladonna, whose faces are covered with powder … ; whom no amount of years can convince that they are old; who heap their head with borrowed tresses; who polish up past youthfulness in spite of the wrinkles of age.”

  But the unmarried Jerome went much further than the married Tertullian. It was no longer enough to issue warnings against cosmetics or to insist that women cover their hair or keep themselves indoors. Surrounded by a circle of ardently pious women who were his generous patrons and with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence, Jerome actively disparaged marriage. He could not retroactively undo such marriages as they might already have made, but he sternly counseled widows against remarrying.

  “A widow who is freed from the marital bond,” he wrote in 384 CE to a woman named Marcella, “has but one duty laid upon her, and that is to continue as a widow.” Neither the widow’s age nor the circumstances of her life mattered. The Christian widow must resolve to avoid falling for a second time into marriage: “If the scorpion, jealous of her resolute purpose, with soft words urges her to eat again of the forbidden tree, let a curse crush him instead of a boot, and let her say, as he lies dying in the dust that is his due; ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ ” “To eat again of the forbidden tree”: for Jerome marriage itself was the Fall.

  • • •

  SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. The Hebrew creation story seemed to include an ecstatic celebration of marriage—“This one at last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”—and of procreation. The rabbis had interpreted the divine blessing to be fruitful and multiply as a solemn commandment. If you were married and capable of having children and you failed to do so, you had, according to the Talmud, committed the equivalent of murder.

  Augustine and Jerome were at the center of a radical rethinking of spiritual life and with it a rethinking of the lives that truly pious Christians should aspire to live. Most of the faithful, they recognized, would inevitably continue to marry and to produce children; such was the way of the world. But if the highest calling were a life of chastity, ascetic renunciation, and contemplation in the company of other celibate monks or nuns, then the whole account of Adam and Eve’s ideal existence in the Garden of Eden would have to be recast.

  In a fierce polemic against a Christian writer named Jovinian who had written in praise of marriage, Jerome maintained that, in Paradise, Adam and Eve were virgins, living a blessed life of bodily abstinence. So long as Adam fasted, he wrote, “he remained in paradise; he ate, and was cast out; he was no sooner cast out than he married a wife.” So too, he reminded one of his young female followers, in Paradise, Eve was a virgin. “Paradise is your home,” he told her. “Keep therefore as you were born.” The young woman duly took a vow of perpetual virginity and followed Jerome to Palestine, where she lived a radically austere life.

  These ascetic views were not uncontested in Christian communities of the fourth century, but Jerome and his allies prevailed. Jovinian’s writings in praise of marriage were condemned and burned. Convicted of heresy and labeled by his enemies “the Epicurus of Christianity,” he was flogged and then exiled to a small island in the Adriatic. Others who argued that marriage was as holy as virginity were similarly deemed heretics and punished, often brutally. Many Christians, both men and women, may have secretly thought that marriage was nothing inferior to monastic abstinence, that sexual relations between husband and wife were wholly good, and that women were the moral and intellectual equals of men and should feel free to speak out in church, but they were well advised to keep their opinions to themselves.

  The women who followed Jerome renounced lives of wealth and privilege. Helping to found nunneries in a harsh and dangerous environment, they were bold, determined, and impressively learned. Against all odds, they set out to recover at least the traces of the purity of the first woman, before she fatally reached out and tasted the forbidden fruit. But this spiritual achievement and the power that came with it did not free them altogether from their inherited taint. For there was no denying that Eve had sinned, and the consequences of that sin reached even the most pious of her descendants. One of her punishments, imposed directly by God, was that woman would be dominated by man: “and he shall rule over thee.” Everyone had to understand that whatever authority women wielded was strictly constrained by limits that were traced back to the sin of the first woman.

  Like many others who shared his perspective, Jerome drew support from a foundational document of the Christian faith. He cited a passage in the First Epistle to Timothy, one of three pastoral letters attributed to the apostle Paul:

  Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (1 Tim. 2:11–14, New Revised Standard Version
)

  Though in Galatians St. Paul had affirmed that “there is no longer male and female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:28), in his letter to Timothy, gender difference reappeared with a vengeance. And its underlying justification was not merely the local customs in Ephesus, where Timothy served, but rather an ineradicable difference reaching back to the beginning of time.

  “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor”: those words were repeated again and again over the centuries. They were drilled into small children, invoked whenever the balance of power between husband and wife was threatened, thrown up at intelligent, articulate women who did not seem to know their place. “A woman was the effective cause of damnation,” wrote a canon lawyer almost a thousand years after Jerome, “since she was the origin of lying.” She certainly should not be allowed to teach. “A woman taught one time,” a thirteenth-century Spanish friar put it, “and the whole world was overthrown.”

  This endless harping on Eve’s sin and the defects of all of her daughters obviously suited the mental world of monks and friars who had taken vows of chastity and abjured—at least officially—the companionship of the other sex. And it suited as well those husbands who were locked in a struggle to dominate their wives and daughters. The miseries brought by Eve became a standard talking point in the battle of the sexes, a predictable and highly useful charge because it seemed to carry the authority of the Bible itself.

  The obstreperous Wife of Bath, in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century classic Canterbury Tales, provides a comical glimpse of a typical skirmish. Her husband Jankin, she declares, was inordinately fond of reading her lessons night and day from an endless array of misogynistic authors, including inevitably a cardinal named Saint Jerome “that made a book against Jovinian.” One night, she recalls, her husband