The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  But what about the consequences—work, pain in childbirth, death—that in Genesis follow from the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden? Did the earlier inhabitants live without these miseries? Not at all. “The natural death of men,” La Peyrère wrote, “arises from the nature of man, which is mortal.” So too women have always had natural pains in childbirth, just as serpents have always crawled in the dust. The curses pronounced by God in Genesis were spiritual punishments, added onto the ordinary, natural condition of existence. Wars, plagues, and fevers did not spring up as the result of eating the forbidden fruit; they were and are part of the “imperfection” of nature.

  If so few readers of the Bible have understood these simple truths, it is, La Peyrère wrote with astonishing candor, because the Bible is such an imperfect document. The few things that we need for our salvation are made clear. But as for the rest, much of it is written “with so great carelessness and obscurity that sometimes nothing can be more obscure.” How could Moses have been so careless? The answer is that the Bible, as we have it, is not Moses’s own copy, handed down directly by him; after all, we read in it of his death. In the course of innumerable transcriptions, errors inevitably were introduced. It is no wonder that so many things are “confused and out of order”: the Scriptures are “a heap of copy confusedly taken.”

  These confusions have led to innumerable absurdities in interpretation. Adam could not, as most commentaries claim, have been created as an adult. He must have been fashioned as an infant and have passed through the slow growth of childhood before God brought him to Paradise. How else could he have acquired the basic competencies that human beings only achieve in their early years? Then in Paradise the naming of the animals must have taken far longer than most people imagine. It could not possibly have been the work of a half-day,

  for thither must the Elephant come from the furthest parts of India and Africk, who are of a heavy and a slow pace. What shall I speak of so many several species of creatures and fowls, unknown to our Hemisphere, who must swim so much Sea, pass over so much Land, to come from America, and there receive their names?

  In such passages it sounds like La Peyrère is making fun of the Adam and Eve story, but the opposite is the case. We tend to think of belief as a kind of on/off switch—either you accept or you do not accept a particular story as the truth. But there are many intervening stages between blind faith and outright rejection. Like Milton, La Peyrère was an heir to Augustine’s insistence that the Bible’s account of the first humans be taken literally. Yet from childhood he had been bothered by cracks that appear as soon as one tries to treat the myth as a description of reality. Determined, whatever the risks, to patch the cracks, he thought he could do so by reducing the Genesis narrative to a single strand—the origin of the Jews—in the much larger history of humanity.

  That left room for a vaster world, with a more complex demographic history. Noah’s Flood, for example, was a local rather than universal event; it “was not upon the whole earth, but only upon the Land of the Jews.” Since God’s intention was to destroy only the Jews, the revised understanding would allow for the global diffusion of peoples whose very existence early Christians like Lactantius and even the great Augustine doubted. “I would Augustine and Lactantius were now alive, who scoffed at the Antipodes,” La Peyrère wrote,

  Truly they would pity themselves, if they should hear or see those things which are discovered in the East and West Indies in this clear-sighted age, as also a great many other countries full of men; to whom it is certain none of Adam’s posterity ever arrived.

  Long before Adam and Eve were created, the pre-Adamites had been fruitful and multiplied and filled the earth.

  For La Peyrère this correct understanding was not so much a demotion of the Genesis story as it was a promotion of the significance of the Jews. Men Before Adam was dedicated “To all the Synagogues of the Jews, dispersed over the face of the EARTH.” His dedicatory epistle ends, “Bear up, and keep your selves for better things.” The better things, he believed, would include salvation through Jesus, whom they had been chosen by the mysterious will of God to bring forth, just as they had been chosen to bring forth the Law.

  That chosenness had nothing to do with any special virtue: “If you look upon the matter whereof the Jews were created, you will find nothing that shall make them appear worthy of the Election; For they were made up of the same flesh and blood as the gentiles, and were tempered with the same clay of which other men were framed.” But their history as the chosen people is uniquely important, and for La Peyrère it is not fatally tarnished by their role in the Crucifixion. After all, if Jesus had not been crucified, he would not have been the savior of all mankind. The Jews in the first century did kill Jesus, he wrote, but Jews have already been amply punished over many generations for participation in this act. Persecution of the Jews now, he wrote, was almost the same crime as the deicide committed in the first century.

  La Peyrère fearlessly proceeded to work out the implications of this argument, in terms that would have seemed to his contemporaries almost as shocking as his theory of the pre-Adamites. The world would soon witness, he wrote, the coming of a Jewish messiah. This coming will complete the history of the Jews—that small, finite fraction of the world’s vast population—and in doing so it will also bring redemption to all humankind. There will be no distinction between pre-Adamites and descendants of Adam, no separating of the saved from the damned; no weeping souls driven to an eternity of torments in hell while other souls ascend to bliss. Everyone will be saved.

  To accomplish the coming of the Messiah, La Peyrère wrote, Jews and Christians should unite. Even though Christians may find Jews repulsive, anti-Jewish discrimination should be immediately stopped. Recognizing what ingrates they have been to the people who brought forth Jesus, Christians should begin to treat Jews decently. Working together, they will bring about the return of the Jews to the Holy Land from which they had been exiled, and in doing so they will fulfill the great design prophesied in the Bible. With the conversion of the Jews and their return to Israel, history will come to an end.

  It is difficult to imagine a set of propositions more likely than these to provoke nearly universal outrage. The publication of Men Before Adam aroused vehement condemnation from Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike. La Peyrère had stepped across boundaries very few others were willing to approach, let alone to cross. As the attacks mounted and his book was burned, he grew increasingly alarmed. His patron the Prince of Condé was in Catholic Brussels. There La Peyrère traveled to seek protection, but this move proved to be a disastrous mistake.

  In February 1656 thirty armed men stormed into his room in Brussels and hauled him off to prison, charged with being “un hérétique détestable.” At first, during long interrogations, he stubbornly upheld his view, but it became clear that neither the prince nor anyone else was going to intervene on his behalf. The situation was extremely perilous, but perhaps at this point La Peyrère’s very notoriety as the author of the Prae-Adamitae helped him. If he recanted his errors, apologized to the pope, and became a Catholic, his captors informed him, he would be spared. By June, La Peyrère had accepted these terms and was taken to Rome, where he was personally brought before Pope Alexander VII. It is said that the pope smiled, saying, “Let us embrace this man who is before Adam.” The General of the Jesuits, who was also present at the audience, remarked that he and the pope had had a good laugh when they read the Prae-Adamitae.

  There is no record of La Peyrère’s response to this merriment, but we do know that he set to work composing his recantation. He had been led astray, he wrote, by his Calvinist upbringing, which had erroneously taught him that he should interpret Scripture according to reason and his own conscience. That path brought him to the pre-Adamite theory, but now he understood: he had to follow neither the dictates of reason nor the promptings of conscience, but only the authority of the pope. He therefore renounced his claims about men before
Adam, his account of the Flood as a local event, his denial of Moses’s authorship of the entire Old Testament, and all the rest of his mistaken interpretations. His theory, he said, was like the Copernican hypothesis. If the pope said that it was wrong, then it must be wrong.

  La Peyrère’s recantation was accepted and printed. Two doctors of theology from the Sorbonne appended letters of approval. The pope, highly gratified, offered the repentant heretic a benefice and the opportunity to remain in Rome, but after a polite interval La Peyrère requested permission to return to Paris. There he resumed his service to the Prince of Condé. Though discreetly insinuating that he had not altogether abandoned his messianic dreams for a return of the Jews to the Holy Land, he managed to remain out of further trouble. He lived a long, quiet life in the shadow of his brush with an auto-da-fé. His wife and children, about whom we know next to nothing, probably predeceased him, and he spent his final years in a monastery.

  What did it all amount to, this strange intellectual adventure? The Messiah failed to come, the Jews did not return to Zion, and the daring idea of the pre-Adamites, attacked from all sides, faded into oblivion. It was one of those dead-ends down which searchers for the truth venture, when conventional explanations and received assumptions begin to crumble. Not that the biblical origin story was crumbling yet. The problem was that it had become too real—the triumph of that long process that culminated in Paradise Lost. This reality—the palpable presence of Adam and Eve as sentient bodies in a particular geographical setting at the onset of historical time—forced a thoughtful obsessive like La Peyrère to try to fit them into the actual world as it had come to be known.

  It is possible that La Peyrère did something more than hit a wall. He may have contributed in his odd way to persistent questioning that ultimately led to a more critical, anthropological, and historical approach to Genesis. He was both one of the precursors of Zionism and an impassioned voice for tolerance and for the redemption of all peoples. But his great idea turned out to be hopelessly wrong, and by a peculiar irony its most significant afterlife was as a justification for racism and slavery. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, La Peyrère’s Men Before Adam, long sunk into oblivion, was revived by those who wanted to claim that the peoples of color whom they had enslaved were not in fact descendants of Adam and Eve. That La Peyrère himself did not rank on a scale of superiority the diverse populations of the globe, whether pre- or post-Adam, did not matter. His notion of multiple human origins—polygenesis, as opposed to monogenesis—gave the racists just what they needed.

  As it happens, scientific studies of mitochondrial DNA overwhelmingly favor the notion of the shared African origin of all modern humans. Migration out of Africa was recent, by geological standards—that is, somewhere between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago—and it made use of such features as the land bridge that La Peyrère ridiculed. There is another mistake that proved crucial in the refutation of La Peyrère: as Malthus showed, populations multiply geometrically. There is therefore no mathematical reason why the human population should not have increased so rapidly—though the geographical distribution may have taken longer than the Bible allowed.

  But the strange fate of La Peyrère’s idea is a useful reminder of the leveling power that is always latent in the Adam and Eve story. Just as the medieval priest John Ball tapped into this power to challenge aristocratic fantasies of innate superiority—“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”—so too the slave-owners sensed that a single common ancestor pair at the origin of all humanity could give them trouble. They did not all depend on polygenesis—many Jews and Christians who believed fervently in universal descent from Adam and Eve were perfectly prepared to enslave their fellow descendants—but they knew that abolitionists would use our shared humanity as one of their most powerful moral arguments.

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  Falling Away

  The threat of being burned at the stake—always an effective inducement to concentrate the mind—could force public recantations of skeptical propositions and unwelcome doubts. But it was not so simple. For “detestable heresies” like La Peyrère’s were not the consequence of skepticism; they were the result of thinking of Adam and Eve as real. That is, they reflected the same forces that led Renaissance explorers to chart the location of their garden, Renaissance chroniclers to calculate the precise number of generations since their expulsion, Renaissance painters to give them bodily reality, and Milton, the consummate Renaissance poet, to confer upon them a complex marital relationship. The collective success of all of these efforts by believers—the triumphant fulfillment of the old Augustinian dream of a literal interpretation—had an unintended and devastating consequence: the story began to die.

  Of course, the figures of Adam and Eve within the story were always understood to be mortal, the result of their transgression. But their coming into full life, through the power of Renaissance science, art, and literature, caused the whole structure in which they were embedded to become mortal. It did so because the gap between convincingly real people and conspicuously unreal circumstances—mysterious garden, magical trees, talking snake, God taking a walk in the cool of the evening breeze—became increasingly untenable. So too a vivid and humanly compelling Adam and Eve brought into ever sharper and more uncomfortable focus the ethical problems that had long haunted the story: the inexplicable move from perfect innocence to wickedness, a divine prohibition that forbade the very knowledge needed to observe the same prohibition, terrible universal punishments for what appeared to be a modest local transgression. The problems kept accumulating, and earnest good-faith attempts to solve them, such as La Peyrère’s, only opened up new problems.

  The mortality of a narrative—one that has, as an article of faith, been taken as true—is not the same as a human’s. The aging process is not comparable; there are no telltale signs of impending collapse; no heirs crowd in by the bedside weeping or hoping for a legacy. Above all, there is no moment in which the living myth decisively stops breathing and a licensed physician hurries into the room to certify that indeed it has all come to an end. What happens instead is simply that a significant number of people cease to believe that the story convincingly depicts reality. Others may continue fervently to believe after the decline has begun, but the ground has begun to shift, and the process is usually irreversible. Even those who think that the story is untrue may hold on to it for some time, whether because it is awkward or dangerous not to do so, or because the alternative is not clear, or because it still seems to convey something important about life. But its key elements have begun to shimmer like a mirage. They have ceased to be solid truths in the real world and have begun to drift toward make-believe. The narrative becomes a just-so story, a fanciful attempt to account for the way things are. If it is powerful enough, it becomes a work of art.

  The drift toward make-believe did not have to end in disillusionment. After all, as we have seen, in the early history of the church there were those who had argued strenuously that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden was a tale that concealed a deep truth about human life but that it was not a description of history as it actually occurred. “Who could be found so silly?” the pious Origen asked in the third century CE, “as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted trees in a Paradise eastward in Eden?” But this position had been soundly defeated. “If there was no Paradise but in an allegory,” the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius replied, then no trees; “if no trees, then no eating of the fruit; if no eating, then no Adam; if no Adam, then are there no men but all are allegories, and the truth itself is become a fable.” Faced by this perceived threat, the defenders of Augustinian orthodoxy closed ranks. It was possible to read the Genesis account allegorically, medieval churchmen taught, just as it was possible to read it as a moral lesson for the present and a prophecy for the future, but only if it was also at the same time taken literally. For a millennium the strict accuracy of the biblical narrative remained dogma, u
nderwritten by the incontrovertible words of Holy Scripture and by the authority of the church.

  In the wake of this massive dogmatic investment, it was extremely difficult to make an about-face and return to the notion of allegory. It was all the more difficult to do so at the very time that the combined imaginative resources of Renaissance Europe were actually giving the story the life-likeness it so long had sought. The problem, as La Peyrère demonstrated, is that the life-likeness invited, even demanded, dangerous questions. The theologians themselves insisted on posing them, and the faithful followed suit. But hovering in the wings was skepticism, and skepticism was only a half-step from disbelief. In the 1630s, anxious authorities noted that some parishioners in Essex, northeast of London, were wryly asking where Adam and Eve obtained the thread to sew their fig leaves together.

  This provincial irony was only a small foretaste of what was to come. Thirty years after Milton first published Paradise Lost, a French philosopher, Pierre Bayle, published what he called A Historical and Critical Dictionary. The title sounds anodyne enough, but the author, a Protestant at a time of fierce persecution in France, knew that he was venturing into dangerous territory. As the pressure for strict conformity mounted, he had fled to Holland, where he could more freely pursue his thoughts. They led him first and foremost to call for toleration; a Christian church that tried to achieve uniformity of faith by means of the rack and the stake, he wrote, was violating the very essence of Jesus’s gospel. It was time, Bayle thought, to hold virtually everything up to careful scrutiny and to determine what it was proper to embrace or to discard.