The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  What is disturbing in innocence is the impossibility of understanding evil, no matter how many warnings you receive, no matter how much you try to imagine it. What is threatening in freedom is glimpsed in the pain of Adam’s acknowledgment, as he lets Eve go: “thy stay, not free, absents thee more.” There are some things that you cannot compel, true intimacy being foremost among them. And Eve’s loving, perhaps lightly ironic attempt to assume the mantle of submission—“With thy permission then …”—does not hide her persistent refusal or inability to give up her freedom. She might be persuaded, but she cannot and will not be compelled.

  Freedom threatens innocence. But Milton clearly thought that innocence without freedom was worthless, a state of perpetual childishness or bondage. Everything in his life—in his politics, his religious faith, his educational theory, his views of marriage and divorce—focused on consent, freely given or freely withheld. This is why, even in the bitterness of the divorce tracts, Milton never claimed that his wife had no right to leave him. He could not have brought himself to insist that she stay against her will.

  This sphere of personal freedom, the core of Milton’s sense of any life worth living, is why, notwithstanding Adam’s anxiety and frustration, it makes perfect sense for Eve to go off by herself for a few hours and why it is appropriate for her to be alone when she faces the fateful temptation. Freedom at its core is not a collective possession; it belongs to each individual.

  Eve, in Milton’s vision, could not have impulsively or thoughtlessly succumbed to temptation. There had to have been long exchanges between her and the serpent, and then, though she was quite hungry, she could only have made her fateful decision to eat the forbidden fruit after thinking through the implications of the serpent’s arguments. Knowledge of good and evil, she reasoned to herself, must in itself be a good, “For good unknown, sure is not had” (9:756). Is it possible that the prohibition to eat the fruit “Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise?” That makes no sense: “Such prohibitions bind not.” As for the death that is threatened to anyone who disobeys, “what profits then/Our inward freedom?” The prohibition, she concluded then, must be a divine test of the kind that readers of Paradise Lost have already witnessed when God proposed that Adam find a partner among the animals he has just named. To pass the test—to be worthy of the freedom that God has conferred upon humans—Eve determined to reach out, pluck, and eat the forbidden fruit. She chose to fall.

  In the wake of her fateful act, Eve, in Milton’s account, immediately found that she faced another choice. Should she tell Adam what she had done and urge him to join her in the newly acquired knowledge, or hold onto the advantage that, as she imagined it, eating the fruit had conferred upon her? If she were to decide, as she put it, to “keep the odds of knowledge in my power,” she would make up for the inferiority attributed to the female sex, the inferiority which the angel Raphael had sternly urged Adam to keep in mind.

  Like Adam, Eve believed that the truest love must be between equals. She could, she told herself, use her extra knowledge,

  the more to draw his Love,

  And render me more equal, and perhaps,

  A thing not undesirable, sometime

  Superior: for inferior who is free? (9:822–25)

  Milton almost certainly understood that last question as a sign of something seriously amiss in Eve, a corruption that had already begun to occur in the wake of her transgression. And yet the humans who emerged in his imagination had achieved enough independent reality to insist on the force of their claims. Eve had reason to believe that Adam did not want to love an inferior, and even that an occasional reversal of hierarchical order, with the woman on top, would be “not undesirable.”

  In the end, Eve decided to share with Adam—she could not bear the thought that she might after all die and that Adam would then wed “another Eve.” And Adam? Adam, in Milton’s conception, was not deceived. He understood at once that Eve had made a catastrophic mistake, but he immediately decided to share her fate. “How can I live without thee?” He refused to accept the official superiority that had been conferred upon him; she was for him the “last and best/Of all God’s works.” And he refused to accept what he intuited would be the official solution: to have God “create another Eve.” Even, as Adam put it to himself, could he afford another rib, the loss of the woman he loved would never leave him.

  Adam’s decision to eat the fruit completed the disaster of Original Sin. It was followed, in Milton’s vision, by mutual intoxication and intense sexual pleasure that then gave way to the bitterness of shame. The marital intimacy, so subtly drawn in its complexity before the Fall, disintegrated into recrimination and misery. Adam’s long lament—why did I do what I did? how can I bear the weight of my guilt? what is to become of me?—culminated in rage when Eve tried to approach him. He vehemently repelled her: “Out of my sight, thou serpent” (9:867).

  In Adam’s mind Eve had become indistinguishable from the hated agent of their ruin, and the sight of her—as Milton wrote in the divorce tracts—brought him only a sense of “trouble and pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel.” Bitterly unhappy, the first man would, Milton was sure, have descended into a loathing not of Eve alone but of all womankind. “Why did God,” Adam asked himself, create “This novelty on Earth, this fair defect/Of nature” (10:891–92)? Why should he or any man find himself married to an “adversary, his hate or shame?”

  But if at this point Milton tapped into his own most toxic feelings in the wake of the breakdown of his marriage, he also remembered the moment in which he let those feelings go. He recalled the occasion in his friends’ house in London when the woman who had, as he believed, deeply wronged him knelt at his feet and begged his pardon. Eve, not repulsed by Adam’s misogynistic reproaches,

  with tears that ceased not flowing,

  And tresses all disordered, at his feet

  Fell humble, and embracing them, besought

  His peace. (10:910–13)

  And Adam’s “heart relented.”

  Had Milton’s own heart actually relented in 1645, when he took up the weeping Mary and resumed the marriage? Was it from this moment and the years that followed that he derived the feeling of profound love that he attributed to Adam? The fact that they then had four children in quick succession—until the fourth childbirth took Mary’s life in 1652—does not really give us an answer. Paradise Lost suggests at least that Milton passionately longed to imagine a full reconciliation between the estranged husband and his wife. After all, in his decision not to ask God for another Eve, Adam had deliberately refused the Edenic equivalent of divorce. In the wake of the Fall, Eve proposed that she should plead to bear alone the full consequences of God’s wrath, but Adam rejected this idea, as he likewise rejected her proposal that they jointly commit suicide and her idea that they abstain from sex in order to remain childless. Slowly, as a married couple, they would have to put together their broken lives.

  They began to do so by acting in unison, kneeling down together to confess their faults to God and implore his mercy. They still hoped, Milton makes clear, that they might be able to avert the divine punishment: “Undoubtedly,” Adam reassured himself and his wife, God “will relent and turn/From his displeasure” (10:1093–94). And, he thought, if it remained their fate to return in the end to dust, at least they could expect “To pass commodiously this life, sustained/By him with many comforts.” After all, they have been living in the most beautiful garden imaginable. Rising from his knees, Adam declared that he was confident that their joint prayers had been heard: “the bitterness of death/Is past,” he told Eve, “and we shall live” (11:157–58).

  Of course, as its title already suggests, Paradise Lost does not have so happy an ending. The bitterness of death is not past. Adam was closer to the truth when, in his most despairing mood, he intuited that God had chosen to inflict upon them “a slow-paced evil,/A long day’s dying to augment our pain” (10:963–64). Expulsion from Parad
ise is decreed in order to make sure that the humans do not have the opportunity to reach out to the Tree of Life “and eat/And live forever” (11:94–95). Though Milton was simply quoting directly from Genesis at this point, he seems to have been uneasy with this archaic verse. He has God add a qualifier—“dream at least to live/Forever”—but the qualifier seems to undermine the motive for the expulsion.

  Could God actually have feared that if the humans were left in the Garden, they might have eaten from a magical tree that would make them immortal? Milton uncharacteristically failed to wrestle the theological problem to its knees. He focused instead on the intense human anxiety caused by the divine decree. Adam stands stunned with sorrow; he could not speak. Eve weeps at the prospect of saying farewell forever to the flowers she had planted and the nuptial bower she had adorned. The archangel Michael, sent by God to announce and enforce the decree, simply tells the woman that she should not be “over-fond” of what was not hers in the first place. The disconnect between this angelic perspective and the perspective of humans being evicted from their home by an implacable landlord shapes the conclusion of Milton’s poem.

  For by the close of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve had become so real in Milton’s imagination that they began to crack open the whole theological apparatus that brought them into being. They had, as Augustine had fervently wished, altogether lost the shimmering air of allegorical figures. They possessed an insistent, undeniable, literal human presence. This was the kind of presence that Shakespeare had conferred upon Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra, a presence that signals the triumph of literature. But the triumph of literature came at a theological cost. Next to Adam and Eve, all of the other characters—Michael, Raphael, Satan, even God and his Son—seem somehow reduced in significance. Of course, Milton continued to insist upon their inconceivable vastness, power, and importance, compared to puny humanity, and he persisted in the belief that he was justifying the ways of God to men. But he could not control his deepest loyalty, and he was the greater artist for this apparent failure.

  On God’s orders, while Eve is made to fall into a deep sleep, the archangel Michael leads Adam to the top of a mountain and gives him a vision of human life as it is to become over time. The vision, dismaying in almost all of its details, includes a tour of a hospital, so that he could witness the full range of convulsions, epilepsies, kidney stones, ulcers, madness, and the like to which humans would be subject. It is all Adam’s fault, Michael takes pains to underscore, “From man’s effeminate slackness it begins” (11:634). We are back to the stern warning to hold on to his dominant place that Raphael had tried to give Adam before the Fall.

  It is in the spirit of this warning that Michael concludes the long, painful tour of history: “He ended, and they both descend the hill” (12:606). But it is precisely here, in the descent from the grand angelic overview to the uncertain ground of ordinary human life, that Milton’s own shift in loyalty makes itself most clearly felt. Adam does not seek to linger in the presence of the angel; on the contrary, he hastens to get away from the celestial visitor and return to his spouse: “Adam to the bower where Eve/Lay sleeping ran before.” And Eve, who is already awake, speaks words that make it clear that she too is now focused entirely on her partner:

  With thee to go,

  Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,

  Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me

  Art all things under Heav’n, all places thou. (12:615–18)

  The theological scheme, of course, is still in place. Milton believes both in the justice of the horrible punishments that will be visited on all humankind as a result of man’s first disobedience and in the salvation that will be brought to the faithful by Christ. But what most arrests the poet’s attention is not this grand vision of fall and redemption but rather the quiet intimacy of the married couple. Though he has run ahead in order to have time alone with her, Adam, as Milton imagines him, cannot reply to Eve’s loving words, “for now too nigh/Th’Archangel stood.” The things that a man and a woman say to each other at such a moment are not public utterances intended for an angelic audience. The cherubim, advancing with their flaming swords, take their stations and begin to change the temperate climate of Paradise into something that resembles the torrid heat of Libya. Michael seizes Adam and Eve in either hand, hurries them down through the gate onto the plain below, and then disappears.

  What follows at the poem’s end are among the most beautiful lines that Milton ever wrote. The lines continue to express faith in divine providence but still more in freedom, the freedom that Milton believed God had conferred on the first couple, the freedom that still belonged to all humans. At its close Paradise Lost liberates Adam and Eve from the story that gave them birth and watches them advance together toward an uncertain future:

  Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

  The world was all before them, where to choose

  Their place of rest, and providence their guide:

  They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

  Through Eden took their solitary way. (12:646–49)

  More than a thousand years after Augustine, Adam and Eve have finally become real.

  12

  Men Before Adam

  Isaac La Peyrère must have been one of those children who give Sunday school teachers severe headaches. He asked too many questions, and the questions he asked were vexing ones. The pious Calvinists of Bordeaux, where La Peyrère was born in 1596 to a wealthy Protestant family, would have easily recognized the type: intellectually alert and full of spiritual zeal, but also annoyingly curious, argumentative, venturesome, and independent. He had the makings of a fervent believer, but at the same time he scrutinized as if from an odd distance the most cherished and familiar articles of the faith.

  At that particular time and place it would have been reasonable to deduce that at least some of the boy’s qualities might be traced back to Marrano roots—that is, to a concealed Judaism that his family, of Portuguese origin, had brought with them after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. The great essayist Michel de Montaigne, who had been mayor of Bordeaux in the 1580s, had on his mother’s side a similar background, which may have contributed to his comparable independence of mind. The wars of religion—murderous conflicts between French Roman Catholics and Protestants that raged all through the second half of the sixteenth century—had, in any case, undermined for most thinking people, Catholic and Protestant alike, the settled assumptions of both society and creed.

  The young La Peyrère displayed an intense interest in the Hebrew Bible and above all in the book of Genesis. And his restless curiosity was piqued by a peculiar detail early in the sacred book: in the wake of murdering his brother, Cain is driven forth and comes to dwell in the land of Nod, east of Eden. There, the Bible relates without further explanation, Cain “knew his wife, and she conceived … and he builded a city” (Gen. 4:17). Where, the schoolboy wondered out loud, did the woman Cain married come from? The traditional answer, scandalously enough, was that she was one of his sisters, though no daughters of Adam and Eve had been mentioned up to this point in Genesis.

  There the Sunday school discussion was meant to end. But little Isaac’s curiosity would not be quieted. A fugitive and a vagabond, Cain told God that he feared that “every one that findeth me shall slay me” (Gen. 4:14), but who could this “every one” possibly be, if the world was still unpopulated? And what was the woman Cain married doing in the land of Nod? And how could the fugitive have built a city there, without any other people around to inhabit it? Might all of these clues suggest, the boy asked himself, that there were already humans in the world before the creation of Adam and Eve, humans who lived outside the walls of the Garden of Eden and with whom Adam and Eve and their offspring interacted? It is not clear that the young La Peyrère dared to express this surmise openly. Even an irrepressibly curious schoolboy knew that such a question could get him into serious trouble.

 
; There matters might have come to rest, as they probably had many times before for generations of overly inquisitive schoolchildren, had it not been for several peculiar twists and turns both in La Peyrère’s life and in the culture into which he was born. Trained as a lawyer, he came to the attention of the powerful Prince of Condé, who brought him to Paris as his secretary. That position provided a measure of protection, enabling him to pursue his penchant for restless, potentially heretical inquiry wherever it happened to lead him. And he had access as well to a circle of daring philosophers, theologians, and scientists. Members of this circle were unusually alert to discoveries and encounters that had been taking place for more than a century but whose disturbing implications were still dangerous to speak about too openly.

  The implications already began to emerge on October 12, 1492, when Columbus and his men made landfall in the Caribbean and witnessed huge crowds of natives. “All of them go around,” the admiral recorded in his diary entry, “as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also.” Body paint yes, but no clothing. For the armed European adventurers this nakedness was good news, for it meant that the inhabitants were vulnerable. But at the same time it posed a theological problem: how was it possible for a whole, immense population to be exempt from the first and most basic consequence of the Fall, namely, shame? “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Gen. 3:7).