The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Despite the heroic efforts of Arcangela Tarabotti, Isotta Nogarola, and others, it was almost impossible completely to erase the curse of Eve’s culpability from within the faith. No matter how much one assigned the greater blame to Adam or how fervently one celebrated the redemptive power of Mary, the taint of misogyny remained, like the bitter residue in a cask one can never completely scrub clean. It was only from a position firmly outside the story that the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft could look back in anger: “Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses’s poetical story,” she wrote in 1792 in A Vindication of the Rights of Women,

  yet, as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure.

  Near the end of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions, Wollstonecraft presumed that “very few” thoughtful people ever took the story of Adam and Eve in a literal sense. It was possible then for her to argue openly that it served—and that it had always served—as a device to justify the subjugation of women.

  People were no more credulous in the 1480s than they were in the 1780s or, for that matter, than they are now. In the case of witchcraft accusations, there is widespread evidence of skepticism, including within the church. The stories of flying through the air and mysterious trysts with the devil and occult power to maim and kill were frequently denounced as delusions, the fantasies of the mentally ill or of those with hidden agendas. But Augustine had succeeded in establishing as a key principle the literal reality of the events in the Garden. The insistence on the reality of Eve’s conversation with the serpent gave witch-hunters like Kramer and Sprenger the opening they needed, and their claims were reinforced by the mass-produced and increasingly powerful images of the fateful scene in the Garden of Eden.

  Among the greatest of these images were paintings, woodcuts, and etchings by the early sixteenth-century German artist Hans Baldung Grien, who also produced the most brilliant, intensely disturbing images of witches. Their long hair flying out like flames around their plump naked bodies, the witches cavort with one another in obscene satanic rituals. Those rituals are never far from the way Baldung Grien imagined Eve. In one of his most famous paintings, now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, a fleshy Eve with flowing hair stands, holding an apple in one hand behind her back, next to the fatal tree. No stray branch discreetly covers her nakedness; on the contrary, her body is turned fully toward the viewer. But she is not looking out at us; with a sly expression on her face, her eyes are directed down at the snake that has wrapped itself around the tree. In a gesture whose erotic implications are clear, she reaches out and fingers the snake.

  The artist made the consequences of this little sex game unmistakably clear. Behind the tree, smiling at Eve and holding her arm as he reaches up with his other hand to pick one of the fruits, stands Adam. But it is not the Adam we expect to see in Paradise. Already a corpse, his flesh is falling in tatters off his bones. The snake completes the circle by biting the rotting arm that the husband has extended to touch his wife. Better never to have had a wife, better never to have been sexually aroused, better never to have seen a woman’s body. But the painting itself centers caressingly on the body of Eve, and it is very obviously—indeed pornographically—meant to arouse.

  8

  Embodiments

  Beneath the streets of modern Rome, there is a vast network of catacombs, a city of the dead, much of it unexcavated. Paths tunneled in the tufa extend for many kilometers, twisting and turning in a baffling, unlit labyrinth. In the third and fourth centuries CE, pagans tended to cremate their dead; they placed the ashes in funerary urns deposited in what were called columbaria, from their resemblance to dovecotes (a dove in Latin was a columba). But, in the belief that the end of the world was near, Christians in this period opted for burial rather than cremation: why make resurrection more difficult, they thought, by reducing the body to ashes? Therefore, along the twisting paths of the catacombs, they laid their dead—by the thousands—in slot-like niches, known as loculi.

  The corpses of the wealthy were sometimes placed in niches topped by arches, or, as a still more costly option, in small rooms called cubiculae. These rooms, where whole families were interred, possess the most interest today, since they were decorated on the walls and ceilings with frescoes. Over the centuries, between the humid air and the smoke from the lamps of mourners and pilgrims, the frescoes were coated with a black layer that turned out to protect them. When the black layer is removed, the images glow in brilliant colors, as if they had been painted yesterday and not more than sixteen hundred years ago.

  In the Catacombs of Saints Marcellino and Pietro—an extraordinary site in a rather dreary, out-of-the-way neighborhood in Rome—certain figures recur again and again: the raising of Lazarus, Noah opening the ark and seeing a dove with a branch in its beak, Daniel in the lion’s den, and a narrative sequence that shows Jonah thrown overboard, swallowed by the great fish, spit out on land, and then happily relaxing in the shade of a vine. These are scenes of mortal peril overcome, designed to reassure the dead or rather to comfort the living, not only the bereaved but also the pilgrims who came to the catacombs to pray near the relics of saints and martyrs. Scattered in the cubiculae arrayed along the maze of narrow, underground tunnels are other signs of reassurance as well: images of Christ as the Good Shepherd carrying His sheep, Christ enthroned with the Apostles, the blessed sitting at a banquet, the woman with the issue of blood touching the hem of Jesus’s robe, Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman at the well, and even, somewhat anomalously, Orpheus, who in pagan myth descended into the underworld and then returned to the light.

  The artists who painted these scenes paid a surprising homage to the people responsible for the creation of the catacombs: mourners and pilgrims were treated to several large and unusually realistic depictions of the diggers, wearing work clothes and carrying their tools. Their backs turned to the viewers, these stalwart workmen were depicted excavating the tufa to make more graves. Still more surprising, in the torch-lit darkness, visitors could look up at wall paintings of the naked Adam and Eve standing on either side of a tree.

  Whoever created these images of the first humans had few or no models to draw upon from the Hebrew world that had given birth to the story. To be sure, Adam and Eve had always been imagined to have bodies of some kind or other—for some rabbis, as we have seen, the bodies of enormous giants; for others, bodies covered, while they were still in Paradise, by a protective carapace; for still others, bodies tethered to the Edenic ground by a kind of magical umbilical cord. But the Jewish prohibition of graven images meant that there were almost no graphic depictions of these bodies, no guides to picturing them, as it were, in the flesh.

  Early Christians had no comparable anxiety about graven images. And since the Romans who embraced Christianity were heirs to centuries of Greek and Roman art, we might have expected them to depict the first man and the first woman, who were said to be the most beautiful of all humans, as unabashedly naked. Instead, Adam and Eve in the Catacombs of Saints Marcellino and Pietro have bodies bent over and humbled, already in the grip of shame. Their heads lowered and their arms hunched forward, they are anxiously covering their genitals. All around them are emblems of hope. On the wall to the left, the corpse of Lazarus, still completely shrouded, emerges from his tomb; to the right, Moses strikes the rock to release the life-giving waters. Above their heads Noah arises like a jack-in-the-box out of a tiny ark. But the Adam and Eve figures here have no touch of redemption. They have every
reason to be ashamed: they are the pair responsible for the death that made the catacombs necessary in the first place.

  By the third century, Romans of all persuasions had distanced themselves from the public nudity permissible in ancient Greece—the Greek word gymnasium means a place to exercise naked. But, even when modesty became the order of the day, statuary in Rome continued to copy Greek models and therefore to celebrate gods and heroes comfortable in their well-toned, beautifully proportioned nude bodies. Christians would have seen such figures everywhere. Nothing could signal a greater distance from Apollo or Venus than these emblematic paintings in the gloom of the catacombs of Adam and Eve, crushed by shame.

  With the conversion of the emperor Constantine the Great, Christianity definitively came out into the sunlight of the Roman world, but the faithful remained committed to the imagery of shame they had embraced in the underground burial chambers. Around 359 CE the powerful Roman senator Junius Bassus died and was buried in a magnificent marble sarcophagus. As befitted a recent convert—“newly baptised,” as the inscription declares, he “went to God on the 8th day of the Calends of September”—his sarcophagus was elaborately carved with images from the Old and New Testament. The naked Adam and Eve were there, but not to represent the paradisal bliss to which the senator hoped to ascend. Rather they represent, in the words of St. Paul, “the body of this death,” from which the deceased was delivered. By the fatal tree, around which the serpent is coiled, they look down and away from one another. Disgraced, ashamed, and now painfully alone even in each other’s company, they press fig leaves to their genitals.

  Other Christian sarcophagi from the same period and in the centuries that followed repeat the same vision. Even when Adam and Eve are depicted at the moment before the transgression, they are already ashamed of their bodies. Reaching for the fruit with one hand, they awkwardly cover themselves with the other. The fruit may be still untasted, but the Fall has happened before it actually happens, or rather for anyone who sees the figures, it has already happened, decisively and irreversibly. After all, the viewer has fallen as a result of what took place in the Garden, and there is no escape from shame.

  In early medieval depictions of Adam and Eve, the only significant exceptions to the rule of shame are of the story’s early moments, before it lurches toward its tragic denouement. A beautiful carving in ivory from around 400 CE, now in the Bargello Museum in Florence, shows Adam with the animals that were brought to him to name. He is not, as we might expect, standing before them, like a general reviewing his troops. Instead, along with bears and lions and other beasts, he seems to be floating, as if in a Maurice Sendak drawing, in a kind of dream space—entirely unashamed of his nakedness. More common are scenes of the creation, and especially of the creation of Eve. Adam lies asleep while God pulls the form of Eve from his side. Both are naked, and they do not reach to cover themselves, so here at least we are at a moment in which the body does not display the awareness of its disgrace.

  But even these bodies imagined to be in a state of perfect innocence seem somehow to have shrunk back into themselves, as if they were already ashamed. The figures have lost most of the exuberance of the flesh that had characterized pagan representations; instead, they are on the way to becoming gaunt and wasted. The illuminated Grandvier-Montval Bible from around 840 and the sumptuous First Bible of Charles the Bald, from the same period, each depict the unfallen and naked Adam and Eve almost as if they were bodies risen like Lazarus from the grave.

  This way of representing the first humans as stripped-down, ascetic figures, little more than skin and bones, continued for centuries. My personal favorite is a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript, of Bohemian origin, in the Vatican Library. The text is by the twelfth-century French theological writer known as Peter Comestor—his last name is a Latin nickname, “the Eater,” not because he distinguished himself at the dinner table but because he was an insatiable devourer of books. Many readers in the Middle Ages encountered Genesis not in the Bible, which was only infrequently read, but in Peter Comestor’s popular and often illuminated paraphrase. In the version in the Vatican Library, naked Adam lies fast asleep on a kind of rock couch, while robed God stands behind him, delicately holding in his left hand a rib on whose top sits Eve’s head. He has not yet formed the rest of her body, so that she looks exactly like a stick puppet, but with his right hand God is already giving the bare rib his blessing. As Augustine had urged, the artist adheres to his understanding of the literal sense: “And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman” (Gen. 2:22).

  Such figures in creation scenes are in effect a gesture toward the nakedness of Adam and Eve in Paradise, but for the most part in Christian art of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the bodies of the first man and woman are only notionally there. The artists who crafted such images were not ignorant of the pagan past; they could still have seen around them many remnants of classical nudes in shameless beauty. They could, if they wished, have taken these nudes as models for the original humans in their perfection and their unfallen innocence. But they chose to fashion something else, something that marked the threshold of faith that had been crossed.

  That threshold did not, of course, also mark the abandonment of artistic ambition. Quite the contrary, as attested by innumerable Romanesque and Gothic churches adorned with magnificent paintings and sculptures. In the decorative schemes of these churches, Adam and Eve appear quite frequently in the form of small sculpted naked figures carved on the portals, or depicted in paintings as an aged patriarch and matriarch freed by Christ from Limbo, or simply, in the case of Adam, as a skull at the foot of the Cross in Golgotha, “the place of the skull,” where Jesus was crucified.

  There are tens of thousands of these painted skulls to be glimpsed on church walls or in medieval prayer books or now in the world’s museums. Very few modern viewers any longer realize what a medieval viewer would have known at once: that the skull is that of Adam, who brought death into the world. In the village of San Candido, situated in an obscure valley in the part of the Dolomites known as the Alta Pusteria, there is an ancient church that has above its high altar a painted wooden crucifix. A bearded Jesus looks out impassively from the cross on which he has been nailed, his bleeding feet resting directly on a head. The head, in this case, is not quite a skull, for it still has flesh and features: the worshiper is in effect looking into the face of Adam. He has fallen, as a result of his transgression in the Garden, but through Christ’s sacrifice, he will be redeemed.

  One of the most remarkable medieval representations of this vision of fall and redemption was created about a thousand years ago in an ancient city in northern Germany near Hanover. A rich and impressively well-educated nobleman who had served as tutor to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III was, as a reward for his service, made bishop of Hildesheim in 993. Having visited Italy and seen the wonders of the ancient world, this nobleman, Bernward, was determined to turn his bishopric into a new Rome. He had walls built around the cathedral hill and set to work on an elaborate decorative scheme, which he personally supervised. The results are only somewhat visible today, in part because of subsequent rebuilding and in greater part because on March 22, 1945—two months before the end of the war—Allied planes heavily bombed the medieval center of Hildesheim. Fortunately, the cathedral’s artistic treasures, having been removed for protection, survived and were restored to their place in the postwar reconstruction. The greatest of these, two enormous bronze doors with figures in three-quarters relief, prominently feature Adam and Eve.

  Bernward’s doors, each cast in one piece, were a fantastic technical achievement: nothing at that scale had been made in bronze since the fall of the Roman Empire. The sixteen scenes depicted upon them form an elaborate storytelling program, ranging from the creation of Adam and Eve, at the top left, down through the Fall of Man to the murder of Abel at the bottom, and then upward on the right-hand door from the Annunciation to the Virgin through the Cr
ucifixion to the risen Christ’s appearance in the garden to Mary Magdalene. The whole scheme is elaborately choreographed, with the Old Testament events on one side carefully coordinated with the New Testament events on the other.

  Adam and Eve are the central figures on the left-hand door, their entire history conjured up on successive panels. Even in the scenes before the Fall, there is nothing confident, independent, or beautiful about these first humans: in their postures and their forms, they are more like awkward children, not fully at home in the world or in their own bodies. The figures are particularly eloquent in conveying the medieval vision of the body in disgrace: after the Fall, the crouching Eve holds a fig leaf over her genitals with one hand, while with the other she points down at the serpent, depicted in a dragon-like form with its tail between her legs. Cowering Adam, also crouching and covering himself, tries to shift the blame toward Eve, while God (fully dressed, of course) points an accusing finger directly at him. Who would not shrink before such a finger?

  The creation scene in the first of those panels has posed a riddle that has not been solved to anyone’s satisfaction. At the panel’s center God is bending over and sculpting with his divine fingers a human who lies on the ground. Presumably, the human is Adam being formed at this instant from clay. But to the right, on the other side of a tree whose form strikingly resembles a heart, there is another figure, evidently also Adam, staring in amazement. The creature being made at the center then might be Eve, but there is no sign of a rib, and the amazed onlooker is wide awake. Perhaps, as some scholars have suggested, God has removed the rib from Adam’s side and is now finishing the task by adding some clay? Or perhaps the scene depicts Adam looking back in wonder at his own creation? Or perhaps the artist was thinking not of chapter 2 of Genesis, with the creation of the male from clay and later the female from the rib, but rather of chapter 1, where both humans are created at once: “male and female created he them”? That would at least help to explain the apparent absence of any sexual differentiation. The figures are androgynous, and they remain androgynous on the panels until the scene of the Fall, where Eve, luring Adam, holds the fruit directly in front of her apple-like breasts. Sexual difference is clearly part of the disgrace that is about to befall them. And that disgrace makes it impossible for medieval artists to give them naked bodies proud and unashamed.