The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Read on his book as he sat by the fire

  Of Eva first, that for her wickedness

  Was all mankind brought to wretchedness,

  For which the Jesus Christ himself was slain.

  Jankin underscored the conclusion: “Woman was the loss”—that is, the ruin—“of all mankind.”

  The Wife of Bath had had enough. Reaching down, she tore three pages out of the “cursed book” and struck her husband in the face, making him fall backward. He rose up and hit her on the head hard enough to knock her out. But, she says, it all worked out splendidly: fearing that he had killed her and repenting his violence, Jankin pledged to abandon his claim to domination: “He gave me all the bridle in mine hand,/To have the governance of house and land.” As the perfect sign of his pledge, he burned the book—Jerome’s Against Jovinian—that chronicled Eve’s wickedness.

  Chaucer’s comical outcome may have had its real-life equivalents, but the moral emblem of Eve’s transgression was endlessly reiterated in images and sermons, lighthearted jests and bitter denunciations. It had the force of scientific proof.

  It was not only men who invoked it and drew out its misogynistic implications. Many pious women, such as those who funded and accompanied Jerome, accepted and embraced the judgment against women’s nature. There were occasional exceptions: daring, saintly women who challenged the routine denigration. But for the most part the dominant account held sway, even among those Christians who had displayed their indifference to the reigning social assumptions of the times. Mere social rules were one thing—they were made to be challenged or broken. Eve’s transgression was presented as something else: historical fact, anthropological truth, biological nature, religious doctrine. The miseries of human existence could all be traced back to Eve, and Eve’s daughters bore the stain.

  The fierce condemnation of Eve was often linked to the ardent celebration of Mary, who was represented as undoing the first woman’s sin. Early on, the antithesis was worked out in detail. Eve was pulled from the flesh of the old Adam; the New Adam was born from the flesh of Mary. Encountering the virgin Eve, the serpent’s word crept into her ear; encountering the Virgin Mary, the Word of God had crept into her ear. Through Eve, the serpent’s word built the edifice of death; through Mary, the Word of God built the fabric of life. The knot of disobedience that Eve had tied by her unbelief Mary opened by her belief and her obedience. Eve gave birth to sin; Mary gave birth to grace. Eva became Ave.

  This elaborate counterpoint helped launch over the centuries an astonishing array of images: drawings, book illuminations, sculptures, frescoes, and paintings. On the left side of the great eleventh-century bronze doors at Hildesheim, Eve nurses Cain, while on the right Mary nurses Jesus. In a painting in Boston by the Netherlandish master Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke draws a picture of the Virgin while she nurses her baby. Carved on the arm of the wooden throne on which she sits are the tiny figures of Adam and Eve. If you look very closely, you can see that Eve is reaching to take an apple: Original Sin and the redemption are thus brought together. So too a splendid altarpiece in Cortona by Fra Angelico shows the annunciation in the foreground, while in the distance the angel Michael is expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise. And a fifteenth-century Italian illumination of Dante’s Paradiso plays an even more radical game with time and space. On the right, in front of a small chapel, the angel Gabriel kneels down to Mary. Just behind him to the left the naked Adam and Eve, covering their genitals, look at the scene in rapt wonder.

  Since Marian devotion in the Middle Ages was often linked to anti-Jewish polemics—the Jews, after all, were said to have been responsible for the Virgin’s sorrows—depictions of Eve and Mary often extend the contrast to that between Jews and Christians. In a German Bible illumination from 1420, Eve stands on one side of the fatal tree, and Mary on the other. The naked Eve reaches up with one hand to seize an apple; with her other hand, she touches a death’s head held by one of a group of bearded Jews wearing conical hats. The gowned Mary reaches up to hold a crucifix and looks benignly back at a group of priests and monks. The opposition is between synagogue and church—and thus between law and grace, death and life.

  In an unforgettable painting of 1605–6, now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, Caravaggio depicted the Virgin bending down to put her bare foot on the head of a writhing snake. She holds her naked son, who places his foot on top of hers; their weight together will crush the snake. In the shadows the child’s grandmother, Saint Anne, her face wrinkled and weary, looks on. Though she is nowhere to be seen, Eve is also implicitly present, for the event had been foretold at the beginning of time. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed” (Gen. 3:15), God told the serpent who had lured Eve into transgression. Now the New Testament savior and his virgin mother are fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy. This is the triumph of Christianity, and accordingly the child Jesus is conspicuously uncircumcised.

  The whole symbolic contrast could be used to suggest that Eve’s sin was a blessing in disguise. It was, after all, her action that ultimately led to Mary and, through Mary, to the birth of the Savior. And yet, since Mary was everything that Eve was not, setting them side-by-side often served to intensify the condemnation of the rashness, vanity, and pride that first woman had bequeathed to her offspring. Theologians seemed to compete with one another in berating women for their inherited defectiveness. Even that supremely intelligent and morally sensitive philosopher Thomas Aquinas concluded that man is more the image of God than woman. The woman, he wrote, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man. The notion was an ancient, pagan one; Thomas took it from Aristotle. But it found a ready home in medieval thought, where it seemed to account for the belatedness of woman’s creation, for her origin in what was called a crooked rib, and for her fatal succumbing to the serpent’s blandishments.

  Why then, Thomas asked, had God created her in the first place? She was meant to be a helpmeet, but, as Augustine had observed centuries earlier, another man would have been better for help with agricultural labor. So too, Thomas wrote, “for living together and keeping each other company, it is better for two [male] friends to be together than a man and a woman.” Her creation only made complete sense, he concluded, for the purposes of procreation.

  Women’s procreative power was acknowledged and honored, above all in the innumerable tender, reverential images of Virgin and Child. But though the cult of the Virgin Mary steadily grew in importance, it did not diminish the denigration of Eve. In at least some medieval Christians, particularly those living in monastic communities, misogyny reached levels that now seem to us clearly pathological. That the misogynistic rants did not seem so at the time was due to the fact that they found a relatively comfortable place within a larger structure of belief and within institutions that rendered them acceptable. St. Peter Damian, an eleventh-century Benedictine, was particularly devoted to Mary—he penned a celebrated Officium Beatae Virginis—but that devotion did not soften his frenzied attack on “the cause of our ruin:”

  You bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers, [who] cry “Give, give! without ceasing” (Prov. 30:15–16). Come now, hear me, harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, demi-goddesses, sirens, witches, devotees of Diana, if any portents, if any omens are found thus far, they should be judged sufficient to your name. For you are the victims of demons, destined to be cut off by eternal death. From you the devil is fattened by the abundance of your lust, is fed by your alluring feasts.

  In this crazed language of loathing, the human pair in Genesis—“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them”—has morphed into something sinister. More particularly, the woman, far from being the partner of man, has become his mortal enemy. Though she too is ultimately Satan’s victim, she is also the ally of the Evil One and the principal agent of humanity’s
downfall. Somewhere lurking in the saint’s mind as he sits brooding in his cell are suspicions older than Christianity, older too than the religion of the Jews. The woman is not merely Satan’s ally; she is his lover, joining her body to his in filthy rites.

  The serpent in these obscene fantasies is sometimes the form in which Satan couples with the woman. Alternatively, it is the woman who is the real serpent. Learned commentators remarked that the Hebrew name Eve was related to the Aramaic word for snake, but the misogynists did not need philology to lead them in this direction. The woman used her sexual allure to tempt and ultimately to destroy the man. The actual victimization of women was conveniently forgotten, or rather it was seen as the fault of the women themselves, who have learned, as the daughters of Eve, to arouse male desire.

  In the most extreme forms taken by this argument—less an argument than a mental disturbance or compulsion—the woman ceased to be fully human. “A woman is a menstrual animal,” wrote an early commentator on the Church’s canon law, “by contact with whose blood fruits do not produce, wine turns sour, plants die, trees lack fruit, rust corrupts iron, the air darkens.” The dehumanization of women, like the comparable dehumanization of Jews, was an invitation to violence.

  In 1486, two Dominican friars, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, published a celebrated book, The Hammer of Witches, in which they described the inquisition that the pope had authorized them to conduct in an extensive area of Germany and Switzerland. Their investigations, drawing on confessions extracted by torture, had led to the identification of a significant number of alleged witches, among them a few men but for the most part women accused of trafficking with the devil. The accused were condemned and executed. The inquisitors were eager to justify what they had done and to encourage others to take up their important mission.

  Citing church fathers and many others, Kramer and Sprenger explained why so many more women than men are drawn to the practice of witchcraft. It is, they wrote, because of a natural proclivity in all females to do evil. Of course, there have been heroic, pious, and even holy women: like Peter Damian, Sprenger was particularly devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary. But truly good women are rare exceptions: as a whole they are a very bad lot. “Since they are defective in all the powers of both soul and body,” the inquisitors wrote, “it is not surprising that they cause more acts of sorcery to happen against those for whom they feel jealousy.”

  Acts of sorcery, the inquisitors insisted, are not mere fantasies; the witches enter into actual binding contracts with the devil, whom they worship and serve in exchange for evil powers. “Demons can, in assumed bodies,” they explained, “speak with sorceresses, see them, hear them, eat with them and beget with them.” The demonic powers conferred upon the witches are often quite local—to kill a neighbor’s cow or cripple a child or render a man impotent—but they can also reach far beyond the village: “we find that virtually all the kingdoms of the world have been overturned because of women.”

  It all goes back to Eve. The fatal defects, they wrote, “can be noticed in the original shaping of woman, since she was formed from a curved rib, that is, from the rib of the chest that is twisted and contrary, so to speak, to man.” True, the devil misled her, but it was the woman, and not the devil, who misled Adam and brought about man’s ruin. That she did so only confirms the theory that women are imperfect animals: “in terms of the intellect or the understanding of spiritual matters they seem to belong to a different variety than men.”

  Only the small shred of verbal caution—“they seem to belong to a different variety than men”—kept Kramer and Sprenger from stating directly what their book so often implied: that women were not fully human. Though it was prefaced by an elaborate official approval of its orthodoxy, the theologians at the University of Cologne identified heretical errors in it, and three years after its initial publication The Hammer of Witches was condemned by the Inquisition as false. Despite this condemnation, it managed to circulate widely in multiple editions, and Heinrich Kramer, the more enthusiastic of the inquisitors, was repeatedly licensed by church authorities to go about his sinister work. Innocent women continued to die for what was imagined to be an innate propensity to evil that was traced all the way back to mother Eve.

  But though the misogynistic strain built deep into the origin narrative was drawn upon to justify the cruel mistreatment of women, though Eve’s transgression licensed anything from casual insults to judicial murder, the Genesis story was not always and inevitably used to prove the innate defectiveness of all women. All major Christian theologians, from Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin, held that the first woman, like the first man, was created in the image of God. That conviction placed a certain brake on the most extreme denigrations of Eve. And on occasion even her alleged defects could be used to defend women or at least to deflect their guilt. In the mid-fifteenth century the impressively learned humanist Isotta Nogarola argued with wry eloquence that women’s imperfections—their ignorance and inconstancy—were part of their God-given nature and therefore a mitigation of their sinfulness. Properly understood, Eve was “like a boy who sins less than an old man or a peasant less than a noble.” Adam, being made perfect and endowed with free will, had no such excuse.

  Many Christians, men as well as women, shared the view that Adam was the more culpable of the pair. The woman had been deceived by Satan; the man had transgressed freely. And even when the first woman was said to bear the principal burden of guilt for the ruin of all humanity, there was still a way to mitigate her crime by recalling, as the early church fathers had done, the salvation her act had helped to bring about.

  Early in the fifteenth century, a remarkably learned woman, the French humanist Christine de Pizan, imagined herself in conversation with the “Lady Reason.” “If anyone would say that man was banished because of Lady Eve,” Reason assures her, “I tell you that he gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve.” Rightly understood, Eve was humanity’s benefactor: “Man and woman should be glad for this sin.”

  A few bold interpreters went further. Perhaps the most remarkable was a very articulate, very unhappy nun in an enclosed Benedictine convent in Venice. The nun, Arcangela Tarabotti, was one of eleven children. Born in 1604 with a congenital disability—like her father, she was lame—she had been consigned to the nunnery as a very young girl, a strategy frequently adopted by parents who either wanted to save on a dowry or thought that their daughter would not find a suitable husband. By her seventeenth birthday she had taken the irrevocable vows that shut her up in the convent for the rest of her days. But she did not quietly resign herself to her fate, and in the course of her life she repeatedly found ways to communicate with the world beyond her cell.

  Her most famous book, published in 1654 two years after her death at the age of forty-eight, is Paternal Tyranny, a scathing indictment of the cruelty that led to the misery that she and others like her suffered and an indictment too of the lies men used to justify this cruelty. Understood properly, the Bible makes clear that the first woman was not merely the equal to the first man but rather his superior. Adam was formed of mere clay, Eve of the nobler substance of the human body; he was born outside of Eden, she in Paradise itself. She was the compendium of all perfections, God’s final and supreme masterpiece.

  Notwithstanding their evident inferiority, men have contrived through violence and deceit to subjugate women, and they have cloaked their wickedness by blaming everything on Eve. She is unjustly held responsible for all the ills that have befallen humankind. And the vicious slander against her has been used for centuries to justify and reinforce the virtual enslavement of all women. What a lie, Tarabotti wrote; God “did not tell Adam ‘You will rule over woman.’ Both male and female were born free, bearing with them, like a precious gift from God, the priceless bounty of free choice.” But men will not allow the opposite sex the freedom that they themselves cherish. They imprison women in oppressive marriages or still worse in gloomy convents wh
ere, apart from the few who have true vocations, the inmates are condemned to a miserable existence: “Their lives have no beginnings and no ends, gnaw but do not consume, kill but do not put to death.”

  A seventeenth-century nun could hardly call into doubt the whole story of the first humans in the Garden. But if the author of Paternal Tyranny could not deny the truth of Holy Writ, she could at least wrest its interpretation in a more humane direction. Eve was induced to eat of the forbidden fruit not because of pride but because of her thirst for knowledge: “hardly a blameworthy desire.” Her beauty may have contributed to Adam’s fall, but that was hardly the fault of the woman: “You vain men hate women’s beauty because your impure hearts prevent you from enjoying her presence without lust.”

  Immured for life in her convent cell, Tarabotti struggled mightily to unmask the sinister uses to which the story of Adam and Eve had been put. “I do not find literally or symbolically a hint of a shadow that God wished there to be women enclosed in convents against their wills,” she wrote. “The blessed Creator, in whose mind the numerous future procreation of the human race was present, could have entrusted to our first father Adam the task of founding religious orders of women dedicated to His service. But He did not do so… .” In the Bible story the woman succumbed to the blandishments of the devil in the shape of the serpent, but as Tarabotti retold it, God made clear how unfairly Eve and all women since had been treated: “Truly,” God tells 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.”

  It is possible that other women, both inside the convent and beyond its walls, agreed with Tarabotti, and it is possible that she had male allies as well. But, assuming they existed, few or none of them were in a position to say so openly. Paternal Tyranny was immediately attacked, and in 1660 the Inquisition condemned it in its entirety, banned any future publication, and placed it on the index of prohibited books.