The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  The Dictionary, which first appeared in 1697 in Amsterdam, is a wild hodge-podge; essays on theological and philosophical concepts jostle for place with biographical sketches, textual inquiries, and strange stories, all festooned with fantastically detailed, often wryly ironic footnotes. Bayle’s publisher and Bayle himself must have been astonished when it became a bestseller. Over the years, in successive editions, the work eventually grew to some 6 million words in length. There can be very few readers who actually waded through it all. But it was possible to plunge in almost anywhere and find startling things.

  In each entry in the Dictionary, Bayle attempted to state clearly the basic, known facts about a given topic and then in the footnotes to consider any dubious claims or unresolved questions. As befitted their importance, the entries for Adam and Eve took many pages, but they consisted mostly of footnotes, for there was very little, in the welter of biographical details, that withstood Bayle’s skeptical glance. By no means an outright unbeliever, he carefully rehearsed what he took to be the undeniable core truths. Yes, Adam was the first human, created by God from clay on the sixth day of creation. Yes, Eve was the wife of Adam, formed from one of his ribs. Adam gave names to the animals. He and his spouse were blessed by God, commanded to be fruitful and multiply, and warned not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Both of them violated the prohibition—first Eve and then, on her instigation, Adam. For their disobedience, they were punished and driven from the Garden.

  Thus much it was necessary to believe, Bayle averred, since the word of God positively affirmed it. But apart from these and a few other scriptural “facts,” the rest, he thought, was open to doubt. The Dictionary then consigned to the rubbish heap legends that had slowly accreted over a thousand years and more. Adam was presumably “a fine person and well-made,” Bayle wrote, but why should anyone credit the story that he was a giant or a hermaphrodite, or that he was born circumcised, or that he named all of the plants as well as the animals, or that he was in his spare time a great philosopher who wrote a book on creation? Did God originally give the first man a tail, as some commentators affirmed, and then, having changed His mind, did he cut it off and use it to form the woman? Was Eve truly so beautiful that Satan fell in love with her and seduced her? In the Garden did she break off a branch of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, fashion it into a big stick, and beat her husband with it until he ate the fruit? Or was she herself, as others affirmed, the fatal tree whose fruit was prohibited?

  Adam and Eve, Bayle thought, evidently did not have sex until after the expulsion, for it was only then that the Bible says that Adam “knew” his wife. But what about the rest of the innumerable speculations that had arisen about their lives? Did the first humans really have to consummate their marriage quickly in order to teach the animals, otherwise clueless, how to reproduce? Did Eve sleep with the serpent and give birth to demons? Was she pregnant every year, always with at least a son and a daughter, and sometimes with an even great number of children? How, despite these pregnancies, did she reach the ripe old age of 940, ten years older than her husband? Is it true that she instituted a religious order of young women who were always to remain virgins and to preserve unextinguished the fire that fell from heaven upon Abel’s sacrifice?

  Most of these time-honored claims have the musty odor, Bayle remarked, either of old books of romance or of “monkish” fantasy. There was nothing particularly new in dismissing any one of them, but the more details the Dictionary piled up, the less credible the entire story became. The imaginary name of one of the daughters of Adam and Eve might have slipped by, but a list of names culled from different sources and assembled in a footnote—Calmana, Azrum, Delbora, Awina, Azura, Sava, and so forth—served as a quietly ironic reminder that the Bible neglected to supply a single one. Bayle’s mockery was rarely open—even in tolerant Amsterdam, he had vehement enemies, and besides, he seems to have been sincerely attempting to hold on to his core faith. But it was difficult for him to contain his irony within safe bounds.

  Not everyone was amused. The Calvinist theologian Pierre Jurieu, who had earlier helped to bring Bayle to the safety of Holland, was outraged by the Dictionary, and he was not alone. He might have tolerated ironic reflections on the extravagant legends that had accumulated around Adam and Eve, but these reflections were in turn linked to disturbing questions about the origin of human sinfulness and about the justice of God’s punishments. The responses in the Dictionary to these questions seemed to Bayle’s enemies to undermine the Bible’s creation account and thus to undermine faith in God.

  If the world as it was first created had truly been pure and pristine, how was it possible, Bayle asked in several long philosophical essays, for evil ever to have entered into it? The traditional answers offered by orthodox theologians, the Dictionary stated flatly, were either pathetic or monstrous. Under the very thin cover of imagining what a heretic would say to these theologians, the full unnerving conceptual difficulties of the Adam and Eve story tumbled out.

  How could an all-powerful god who was truly good, Bayle’s imagined heretic asks, have exposed his beloved creatures to so much misery? Shouldn’t a genuinely kind deity have taken pleasure in making humans happy and in preserving their happiness? Surely, the all-knowing Creator knew in advance that his creatures would fall and, in doing so, would bring down pestilence, war, famine, and unspeakable pain on all of their progeny. Was he not then like a ruler who supplies a man in a crowd with a very sharp knife, though he knows full well that the knife will be used in a crime that will lead to the death of thousands? Wouldn’t preventing the catastrophe have been preferable?

  Other orthodox arguments fare no better. To the idea that God chose to give his beloved creature free will, Bayle observed that we expect any good parent to save his child from wounding himself, not to look on with indifference or to withhold help when danger threatens, let alone to punish him violently after the disaster has occurred. You do not need to be a philosopher to grasp this, and you do not have to limit the comparison to parents and children. A simple peasant understands that there is much greater goodness in stopping a stranger from falling into a ditch than in letting him fall in and taking him out later.

  These questions, as Bayle well knew, had long troubled readers of the Genesis story. Over the centuries many answers had been proposed, but they never succeeded in settling the matter, and the usual attempts to shut discussion down by dogmatic pronouncements, pious fervor, collective rituals, and—when necessary—torture did not bring about the desired silence. By the seventeenth century the questions had become more insistent than ever before, precisely because the Renaissance had made Adam and Eve seem more vividly alive than ever before. Bayle quoted a Latin couplet in which an angel sees Dürer’s Adam and Eve and exclaims, “You are more beautiful than you were when I chased you out of the garden of Eden.”

  There was danger in conjuring up lives so powerfully. For Bayle, as for Milton, the compelling vividness of the first humans called attention to the cracks that had always existed in their narrative. This is certainly not the outcome Milton wanted, and it is probably not what Bayle wanted either. But what did Bayle want? Milton was confident, in spite of everything, that he could justify God’s ways to man, but Bayle had no comparable confidence, and he saw the rage that his writing aroused. As a consequence of the questions he was asking, he had brought persecution down on his family; he had been driven into exile; he had turned his erstwhile friends and supporters into bitter enemies; he had suffered what we would now call a nervous breakdown. Though he had every reason to try to do so, he could not silence his doubts. And where—after the mighty wrestling with the problem of evil in the Garden of Eden—did he finally end up? Buried in a footnote to a footnote, deep in the 6 million words, is what he called his best answer. “The best Answer that can be naturally returned to the Question, Why did God permit that Man should sin? is this, I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know”: at t
his distance, it is difficult to grasp the depth charge hidden in the simple phrase and the courage required to write it. Though Bayle’s world was in many ways tantalizingly close to our own—Copernicus had decentered the earth, Bacon had already laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution, Galileo and Newton had transformed the understanding of the heavens—the Adam and Eve story remained dangerous to handle in anything but a spirit of piety. In a religious context, shored up by professions of faith, it was safe to confess uncertainty; in a skeptical, secular context, it was far more risky. The little word “naturally” in the phrase “The best Answer that can be naturally returned to the Question” served as a minimal defense; it acknowledged the possibility of a different answer, a supernatural one. But Bayle was a philosopher, not a theologian, and, despite the dangers, everything in his being rebelled against abandoning his reason and taking shelter in dogma. Many wanted to silence him, but he continued to write and in the end achieved at least one small victory for toleration: though he was stripped of his professorship and reduced to poverty, when death came for him—in Rotterdam in 1706, in his fifty-ninth year—he was not in prison but at home in his bed.

  At a dinner party one night in 1752 at the royal palace in Potsdam, the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great, and his guests entertained the idea of taking up Bayle’s project and penning a dictionary of their own. They agreed to begin at once. The next morning only one of them arrived at breakfast with a sample entry, but that was the philosopher Voltaire. What he brought to the table served as the germ for the Philosophical Dictionary that he worked on for more than a decade. He was a risk-taker who made no secret of his contempt for religious orthodoxy. But even fifty years after Bayle, as a Europe-wide celebrity, with a handsome annual stipend of 20,000 francs and under the personal patronage of the Prussian king, Voltaire dressed himself in protective clothing when he approached the Garden of Eden.

  In the first edition of the Philosophical Dictionary, published anonymously in 1764, Voltaire’s entry on Adam exclaimed in a tone of wide-eyed innocence on how interesting it was that the names of the father and mother of the human race were unknown to anyone in the ancient world except for the Jews. What a delightful mystery! “It was God’s pleasure that the origin of the great family of the world should be concealed from all but the smallest and most unfortunate part of that family.”

  Voltaire invited his readers to imagine a poor Jew telling Caesar or Cicero that they were all descended from one father, named Adam. The Roman Senate would have asked for evidence—they wanted to see the great monuments, the statues, the inscriptions on ancient buildings—but, of course, there was nothing to show. The senators would have laughed and had the Jew whipped: “so much,” Voltaire wrote in his best deadpan manner, “are men attached to their prejudices!” Or again, he suggested, imagine a Christian paying a condolence visit to a queen of China, Japan, or India who has just lost her infant son and announcing that the prince royal is now in the clutches of five hundred devils who will torment him for all eternity. The grief-stricken queen would ask why devils should roast her poor child forever, and the Christian would have to explain that it is because the child’s “great-grandfather formerly ate of the fruit of knowledge, in a garden.”

  Voltaire’s tone recalls the irony pioneered by Bayle, but it is an irony that has been sharpened into a cruel weapon. Why do some infants die at the mother’s breast? Why do others suffer months and even years of torments before they die an appalling death? Why does smallpox sweep away so many lives? Why in every age of the world “have human bladders been liable to turn into stone quarries?” Why pestilence, war, famine, and torture? It is all explained by the story of Adam and Eve. After all, Voltaire pointed out, one of the great champions of the Inquisition, the Spaniard Luis de Páramo, traced that splendid tribunal back to the Garden. God, calling the wrongdoer before Him with the words “Adam, where art thou?” was the first Inquisitor.

  For Voltaire, who ended letters to his intimate friends with the injunction to “crush the infamous thing”—Écrasez l’infâme—the Adam and Eve story lay at the center of what most needed to be crushed. The story was not merely a ridiculous lie; it was the justification for some of the most hateful aspects of human actions and beliefs. The biblical prohibition—“Eat not of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”—is very strange: “It is not easy to conceive that there ever existed a tree which could teach good and evil, as there are trees that bear pears and apricots.” But that is not the main problem: “Why is God unwilling that man should know good and evil? Would not his free access to this knowledge, on the contrary, appear—if we may venture to use such language—more worthy of God, and far more necessary to man?” Wouldn’t it have been preferable for God to command humans to eat more and more of the fruit? Why should religion enshrine a story that celebrates ignorance?

  It is only ignorance, or rather the deliberate imprisoning of the human capacity to reason, that upholds belief in a benign God. Powerful institutions have a stake in fostering this belief, and their agents will stop at nothing to impose it on everyone. They will see to it that anyone who calls their fables into doubt or questions their vicious doctrines is violently punished. But the story of the omnipotent Creator and the magical garden makes no sense. Look around, Voltaire wrote,

  The globe on which we live is one vast field of destruction and carnage. Either the Supreme Being was able to make of it an eternal mode of enjoyment for all beings possessed of sensation, or He was not.

  If the Creator was able to make the world a happy place and yet refused to do so, then you would have to conclude that that the god in the story of Adam and Eve was evil. But Voltaire was not urging a return to the old Manichaean heresy. Instead, he wanted his readers to conclude that God was simply limited in what he could do.

  Voltaire knew that it was unsafe to voice such heterodox views in print, and, like Bayle, he donned a fig leaf of submission: “I address myself here solely to philosophers, and not to divines. We know that faith is the clue to guide us through the labyrinth.” But he wanted to make perfectly clear that the submission was spurious: “We know full well,” he added in a mock declaration of faith, “that the fall of Adam and Eve, original sin, the vast power communicated to devils, the predilection entertained by the Supreme Being for the Jewish people, and the ceremony of baptism substituted for that of circumcision, are answers that clear up every difficulty.”

  Bayle’s questioning in 1695 had hardened by 1764 into outright mockery. Pressure from the church might compel a formal public acquiescence to its absurd fables, but only someone who had not actually thought about the story of Adam and Eve—only a fool or fanatic—could actually believe that it was literally true. As for the insane religious doctrines that had been extracted from the story, they reflected the infamous institution that they served. St. Augustine was the first, Voltaire wrote, who developed the strange notion of Original Sin, “a notion worthy of the warm and romantic brain of an African debauchee and penitent, Manichaean and Christian, tolerant and persecuting—who passed his life in perpetual self-contradiction.” Ridiculous as the Hebrews were, they at least would have recognized how absurd and reckless it was to treat their origin fable as a depiction of real people in a real world. “The first chapters of Genesis—at whatever period they were composed—were regarded by all the learned Jews as an allegory,” Voltaire wrote, “and even as a fable not a little dangerous.”

  By the late eighteenth century, allegory had experienced a resurgence. In the wake of the Enlightenment, there were too many contradictions in the origin story, too many violations of plausibility, too many awkward ethical questions to make it any longer comfortable to insist on a literal interpretation. Or rather what seemed at last like the real presence of Adam and Eve, in the art of the Renaissance and in Milton’s great epic, had turned on the story itself and begun to tear it apart. To many believers, even within the church, the strongest way to shore up the story of Adam and Eve was t
o beat a hasty retreat from the literal. Others dug in and insisted more fiercely than ever on its unvarnished, undistorted truth.

  AS WAS SO OFTEN THE CASE, all possible positions were pushed to their logical extremes in the newly formed United States of America. Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary was beloved by Thomas Jefferson, who purchased a bust of its author and placed it in Monticello. (Jefferson was also a great admirer of Bayle and included his Dictionary in the list of the one hundred books that would form the basis for the Library of Congress.) At the same time, hard-edged Calvinists, heirs to the Puritan founders, continued to preach fire-and-brimstone sermons about infant damnation and the universal taint of Original Sin.

  The literal truth of the Genesis story was taken in a different direction by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, who in 1838 led his followers to a site seventy miles north of present-day Kansas City, Missouri, where he established a settlement he called Adam-ondi-Ahman. It was in that very place, Smith declared, that Adam had once lived. The idea did not die out when Smith was killed and his followers were driven further west. In the mid-twentieth century Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson, who served as the Secretary of Agriculture during Eisenhower’s presidency, reiterated the original revelation. “This was the place,” Benson wrote, “where the Garden of Eden was; it was here that Adam met with a body of high priests at Adam-ondi-Ahman shortly before his death and gave them his final blessing, and the place to which he will return to meet with the leaders of his people.”

  Even outside organized religious communities, it was clear to many Americans that there was a peculiarly intense and meaningful relation between their land and the Garden of Eden. The longing was not only to find the ancient traces of Adam’s footsteps but also to encounter the first human here and now, at home in a world that had remained unspoiled and pure. “Adam in the garden,” Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined himself in 1839, jotting in his journal ideas for a new series of lectures; “I am to new name all the beasts in the field & all the gods in the Sky. I am to invite men drenched in time to recover themselves & come out of time, & taste their native immortal air.” So too, in his cabin by the small lake west of Boston, Henry David Thoreau dreamed of coming out of time and finding the way back to the primordial state. “Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden,” he wrote in 1854, “Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them.”