The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  In his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman took the literal identification with Adam, already glimpsed in Emerson and Thoreau, to a new level:

  As Adam, early in the morning,

  Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep,

  Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,

  Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,

  Be not afraid of my body.

  “Be not afraid of my body”: the words well up at once from the Garden before the Fall and from the streets of a crowded city. But what accounts for the unembarrassed self-display and the strange demand for intimacy? What manner of man is asking us to touch him with the palm of our hands? It is as if sin, pollution, shame—the miserable consequences of the primal disobedience—have vanished, and with them the crucial distinction between an original state of innocence and an abject state of fallenness. Vanished too is the primordial couple; though he is evidently not alone, this is an Adam without an Eve.

  The first man here is almost eerily alive. Accompanied by a startlingly vivid engraving of the poet—dressed in work clothes, his hat at a jaunty angle, his expression bold and direct—Leaves of Grass from the beginning made readers feel that Walt Whitman was physically present in his poem. But if Whitman seemed to embody Adam, bringing him back to a life almost palpable in its reality, the biblical story that gave birth to Adam in the first place, with its chronicle of crime and punishment, had, in Whitman’s vision, completely faded away. Small wonder that Whitman was denounced, his poem called obscene. Nonetheless, Leaves of Grass quickly found ardent champions, who heard in it a voice that was at once eccentric and representative. By its final edition in 1891, Whitman was widely celebrated both for his radical originality and for his truthful depiction of what the literary critic R. W. B. Lewis has called the American Adam.

  At almost the same moment that Whitman brought his great poem to completion, his contemporary Mark Twain wrote “Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” one of a succession of short pieces, some published and others left unpublished, that seem to reflect a virtually lifelong preoccupation with the Genesis story. More than twenty years earlier, in Innocents Abroad, a burlesque account of travels in the Middle East, he had become famous as a humorist for his mock-lament at the legendary tomb of Adam in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher:

  How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation. The unerring instinct of nature thrilled in recognition. The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned on a pillar and burst into tears.

  Now in “Adam’s Diary” in 1892, Twain continued to mock credulous belief in the literal existence of the first human by projecting himself into him and playfully imagining what it would have been like to live at the dawn of time.

  “This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way,” the first diary entry reads,

  It is always hanging around and following me about. I don’t like this; I am not used to company. I wish it would stay with the other animals… . Cloudy today, wind in the east; think we shall have rain… . WE? Where did I get that word—the new creature uses it.

  That is Monday’s entry; Tuesday’s continues Adam’s litany of complaints:

  I get no chance to name anything myself. The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest. And always that same pretext is offered—it LOOKS like the thing. There is a dodo, for instance. Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it “looks like a dodo.” It will have to keep that name, no doubt. It wearies me to fret about it, and it does no good, anyway. Dodo! It looks no more like a dodo than I do.

  Bayle’s anxiety and Voltaire’s outrage have morphed here into a comedy routine. Questions that haunted and on occasion tormented centuries of philosophers and theologians—how did the solitary figure in Paradise become a “we”? to what extent did Adam and Eve share their tasks? what did it mean to “name” the animals? what for theology is the status of extinct species?—have become wry jokes.

  The jokes come at the expense of the naïve, innocent Adam and Eve but equally at the expense of a Bible story that had served for so many generations as the infallibly accurate account of the origin of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century Twain can count on his readers joining him in finding the account absurd: “She engages herself in many foolish things,” Adam complains about Eve,

  among others, trying to study out why the animals called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other. This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other, and that would introduce what, as I understand it, is called “death”; and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the Garden.

  Twain does not belabor the point. His interest in “Adam’s Diary” and in the companion piece, “Eve’s Diary,” that he wrote to accompany it was less to ridicule the Bible than to explore with considerable tenderness and delicacy the comedy of sexual relations.

  The light touch did not altogether forestall controversy. The book version of “Eve’s Diary” that appeared in 1906 was accompanied by illustrations of the first pair that, though positively modest from our perspective, struck at least the librarians of one library, in Worcester, Massachusetts, as obscene. By and large, however, the pieces addressed a readership that no longer bristled at a humorous treatment of the Genesis story.

  Twain, who knew the limits of his audience well, did not publish in his lifetime everything that he wrote on a subject that continued to preoccupy him. Among the pieces published only posthumously—and even then over the initial objections of one of Twain’s daughters—are a series of further attempts to enter into the consciousness of Adam and Eve, as if they were recognizable human beings who found themselves trying to make their way through an entirely new and utterly unfamiliar world. In these, tenderness gave way to the irony and anger that seethed in Bayle and Voltaire. In one, Twain’s Eve recalls asking her husband about a tree with a peculiar name, and being given an entirely unsatisfactory answer, since Adam has no idea what either “good” or “evil” means. “We had not heard them before, and they meant nothing to us.”

  The same perplexity besets them, of course, when they try to understand the new word “death.” How could they possibly grasp it? They do not need, in this reimagining, the intervention of a serpent to induce them to eat the forbidden fruit. They only need perfect innocence and an earnest, well-intentioned curiosity:

  We sat silent a while turning the puzzle over in our minds; then all at once I saw how to find out, and was surprised that we had not thought of it in the beginning, it was so simple. I sprang up and said—

  “How stupid we are! Let us eat of it; we shall die, and then we shall know what it is, and not have any more bother about it.”

  Their act is deferred in Twain’s retelling by the chance appearance of an interesting creature that they have not seen before and that they name “pterodactyl,” but their dark destiny is already glimpsed.

  Like the dodo in “Eve’s Diary,” the dinosaur sends up the whole account, but this time Twain does not deflect his sarcasm. There is, he makes clear, something inexcusably cruel in the story. In another of his unpublished pieces, a further version of “Eve’s Diary,” written after the expulsion from Eden, the indictment is made explicit:

  We could not know it was wrong to disobey the command, for the words were strange to us and we did not understand them. We did not know right from wrong—how should we know? … We knew no more than this littlest child of mine knows now with its four years—oh, not so much, I think. Would I say to it, “If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements,” and when it took
the bread and smiled up in my face, thinking no harm, as not understanding these strange words, would I take advantage of its innocence to strike it down with the mother-hand it trusted?

  The questions, in almost the same terms, had been posed two hundred years earlier by Pierre Bayle. And the doubt and anger they expressed had deeper roots still, extending all the way back two thousand years to the first surviving traces of the Adam and Eve story in the Nag Hammadi codices. For centuries after Augustine’s doctrinal triumph, the moral paradoxes of the Genesis story seemed only to awaken more desire to reaffirm its truth and to fathom its underlying meaning. But by the time of Mark Twain, the tide of literal belief had decisively turned. The institutions that had once mobilized to suppress challenges were fatally weakened: the public library in Worcester, Massachusetts, was a far cry from the Inquisition. If Twain had published his more radical pieces during his lifetime, he might have lost some of his readers, but he would not have lost his life or even his livelihood.

  This decisive change may be traced to the work that had been done, for more than two centuries, by Bayle and Voltaire and by the whole Enlightenment project that they bravely advanced. But it may be traced as well to the scientific discoveries represented by the creature that, in Twain’s fantasy, appeared just in time to delay the Fall: the pterodactyl. Dinosaurs helped to destroy the Garden of Eden.

  14

  Darwin’s Doubts

  Darwinism is not incompatible with belief in God, but it is certainly incompatible with belief in Adam and Eve. Nothing in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, allowed for even the remotest possibility that our species originated in the form of two exemplary, fresh-minted humans at home in a paradisal garden. Darwin had already made public his evolutionary theory in his 1859 The Origin of Species. Written for nonspecialists, the book had had an enormous impact, but it had deliberately left humans out of the enormous range of species it discussed. It was possible for contemporary readers to take in the persuasiveness of the scientific argument for natural selection but to hold on to the notion that somehow humans were exempt from the biological processes that governed the struggle for life among all other creatures.

  After 1871, there was no longer any doubt that Darwin himself shared the conclusions that his followers had already been drawing from the enormous mass of data that he had patiently collected and from the brilliant overarching theory that made sense of this data. There was no exemption for humans.

  Paradise was not lost; it had never existed. Humans did not have their origins in the peaceable kingdom. They were never blessed with perfect health and abundance, a life without competition, suffering, and death. No doubt there were fat times, when food was plentiful, but those times would never last indefinitely, and our most distant forebears always had to share the bounty with other creatures whose needs were as exigent as theirs. Danger was rarely far off, and if they managed to hold the major predators at bay, they still had to reckon with army ants and intestinal parasites, toothaches, broken arms, and cancer. If circumstances were just right, human life could be extraordinarily sweet, but nothing in the whole vast landscape that Darwin surveyed suggested that there had ever been a magical time or place where all our needs were happily met.

  As a species, humans were neither unique nor created once-for-all. Except in our dreams or fantasies, we could not possibly have emerged as fully formed adults, ready to speak, take care of ourselves, and reproduce. The particular kind of primate that we have become evolved over a vast span of time from extinct types of humans who shared many of our physical features: upright posture; walking on two feet; hands distinct from feet in form and function; small upper and lower canines; a chin. Exactly how and when this happened is still very much an open question.

  Modern humans have particular qualities that mark us out as distinct—above all, language, moral consciousness, and the capacity to reason. But Darwin insisted that even these qualities were different in degree, not in kind, from those possessed by other animals to which our species is related. We exist in continuity not only with hominids—the primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, whom we obviously closely resemble—but also with many other species. Recognizing this continuity did not, he thought, necessarily require specialized knowledge of the behavior of exotic animals; it could be grasped by looking attentively at birds and at dogs.

  It is not surprising that Darwin, who tempered his scientific daring with a canny sense of what his contemporaries could bear, held off disclosing the full implications of what he had discovered. He had at home, in the person of his pious wife, an articulate and urgent witness to how upsetting his theories were. In the introduction to The Descent of Man, he wrote that for years he had collected notes on human origins, “without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish, as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views.” Readers of The Origin of Species could always draw their own conclusions, but he had not intended to articulate them in print.

  Even when he overcame his reservations and made his work public, Darwin was careful to make no mention at all of the Bible story—the story of the creation, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall of Man—whose claim to literal truth he knew that he was decisively destroying. The names of Adam and Eve do not appear anywhere in the work. But his theory of evolution grappled with the very questions that motivated the Genesis account of human origins: Where did humans come from? Why must we labor with such pain to survive and to reproduce? What is the shaping role of desire—the desire for particular individuals or features of individuals that Darwin termed “sexual selection”—in the long-term development of the species? Why do we suffer and die? Above all, Darwin and his successors attempted to account for the human inheritance of ancient drives, compulsions, and desires. Even when those drives are manifestly dangerous, even when they impel us toward actions that are violent, pathological, and self-destructive, they prove extremely difficult to surmount. It is as if our ancestors had passed along to us, through some hidden mechanism, a suite of experiences, accommodations, and choices that they had made in the remotest time and that remain active within us, despite the fact that our circumstances have radically changed.

  As the heirs to this very problematical inheritance, we may become aware of at least some of the most harmful impulses and distance ourselves from them. But we cannot by any means always do so; in the course of a lifetime, we are almost certainly going to succumb, probably on many occasions. And what we succumb to is not, for the most part, learned behavior; it is what we have inherited from birth, before our distinct personalities in our distinct cultural settings have been formed and before we have acquired the capacity to reason. Those personalities and settings interact with this inheritance, and our reason can struggle against its most destructive urgings, but it can never be simply erased. We bear responsibility for our actions—we are not automata—but at the same time our freedom is severely constrained and compromised.

  The interpreters of Genesis, particularly after Augustine, understood this whole legacy as punishment, consequent on the original sin of the first humans and our loss of Eden. But for Darwin there was no Eden. What we receive from our archaic forebears are not divine chastisements, but rather the living traces of successful accommodations our species made to the world over tens of thousands of years. Hence our sexual division of labor, our craving for sugar and animal fat, our mastery of fire, and our capacity for extreme violence take their place alongside our subtle social skills, our toolmaking, our expressive powers in language and imagery, all of which contributed to survival in a harsh, dangerous environment.

  If for the Bible the ceaseless exhausting work that humans have to do in order to find enough to eat—ranging from rooting in the ground for tubers to the agricultural revolution that enabled us to cultivate, plant, and harvest our food—is the consequence of transgression, for Darwin it is a necessary achievement. If for the author of Genesis the
pain human females experience in childbirth is one of the curses laid upon sinful Eve, for evolutionary biology it is a successful biological trade-off. That is, it is the price we pay for the combination of the maximum size of the pelvis in a creature that is bipedal and the minimal size of the skull in a newborn that allows our species to possess exceptionally large brains. Being able to stand upright on two legs enabled our species to see over the savanna grasses, to cover substantial distances in search of food, and to free our arms to throw projectiles. Possessing a large brain enabled us to develop a range of skills essential to survive and prosper, despite our relative lack of strength, sharp teeth, thick skin, and so forth. For Darwin these human traits are not penalties in consequence of transgression, but rather the essential, life-bearing gifts of random mutation and of skills acquired over vast tracts of time.