The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  236 Who are the genuinely civilized people and who the barbarians?: “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead,” Montaigne writes in his essay “Of Cannibals,” “and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead. (Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 155). The French Wars of Religion, to whose horrors Montaigne is referring, undermined for him and for many of his contemporaries any confident faith in the tenets of religious orthodoxy. It is telling that the close of his essay is an ironic joke about the natives’ nakedness: “All this is not too bad—but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches” (159).

  237 “hath occasioned some difficulty and dispute”: Matthew Hale, in Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought, 49. See, similarly, La Peyrère, Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford to a Nobleman in London: “The West-Indies, and the vast Regions, lately discovered towards the South, abound with such variety of Inhabitants, and New Animals, not known or ever seen in Asia, Africa, or Europe, that the Origine of them doth not appear so clear as some late Writers pretend … and their differences from all the rest of the Globe, in Manners, Languages, Habits, Religions, Diet, Arts, and Customs, as well as in their Quadrupeds, Birds, Serpents and Insects, render their Derivation very obscure, and their Origine uncertain, especially in the common way, and according to the vulgar Opinions of Planting all the Earth from one little Spot.” No surprise that this was published anonymously, even in 1695.

  237 the vast numbers of humans: “The Bible indicates,” he wrote, “that the survivors produced all of the Nations on earth in five generations. But could they really have produced the inhabitants of China, America, the Southland and Greenland, among others? Could this even account for the population of Europe?” (quoted in Richard Henry Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère [1596–1676]: His Life, Work, and Influence, p. 51).

  239 “acorns or arbute berries or choice pears”: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 5: 963–65.

  239 Maximus Tyrius: In Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, p. 149.

  239 “not planted by the hand of man”: The Eleatic stranger in Plato’s Statesman, in Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, pp. 121–22.

  240 Herodotus … Berossus: Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, rev. John Marincola (London: Penguin, 1972), 2: 142. For Berossus, see Berossus, The Babyloniaca of Berossus (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications: 1978).

  240 a government spy: Richard Baines, “Baines Note,” in BL Harley MS.6848 ff.185-6 (http://www.rey.myzen.co.uk/baines1.htm).

  240 “memorials of ten thousand years and more”: Spaccio della Bestia trionfante (1584), in Dialoghi italiani: Dialoghi metafisici e dialoghi morali, 3rd ed., ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia, pp. 797–98; in Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, p. 35.

  242 “a great danger imminent to religion”: Grotius, quoted in Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, p. 6.

  242 Men Before Adam: The English text is bound together with A Theological System.

  243 not Moses’s own copy: “I know not by what author it is found out, that the Pentateuch is Moses his own copy. It is so reported, but not believ’d by all. These Reasons make me believe, that those Five Books are not the Originals, but copied out by another, Because Moses is there read to have died. For how could Moses write after his death? They say, that Josuah added the death of Moses to Deuteronomie. But, who added the death of Josuah to that book which is so call’d?” (Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, pp. 204–5). La Peyrère was not alone in noticing the problems with claiming a direct transmission from Moses. The authorship problem caused by the inclusion of Moses’s death had long been noticed, and in the seventeenth century the French Protestant scholar Louis Cappel “had counted up eighteen hundred variants, amongst the various versions of the Hebrew Scriptures that had come down to his time” (ibid., p. 50).

  244 much larger history of humanity: “There is great errour in reading the Scripture many times, when that is taken more more [sic] generally, which ought to be particularly understood: as that of Adam, whom Moses made first Father of the Jews, and whom we hyberbolically [sic] call the first Father of all men” (in Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, p. 119).

  245 salvation through Jesus: La Peyère struggled to work out the complex theology that this argument entailed: The sin of Adam, he wrote, “was imputed backward unto those first men that were created before Adam” (in Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, p. 46). Why? Not for their destruction but rather for their salvation. For it is only if they had sinned, on the similitude (as he puts it) of the transgression of Adam, that they could partake in the glory and salvation of Christ. “They had perished, had they not perished” (47). He argues also that no one, after Adam and Eve, could sin as they had sinned, since it was not possible to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. All subsequent sin was “according to the similitude of the transgression of Adam” (37).

  246 nearly universal outrage: Already a century earlier the Greek-born Dominican friar Jacob Palaeologus had been beheaded in Rome for suggesting that all humans might not have descended from Adam and Eve and for proposing that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all offer legitimate routes to salvation.

  246 the pope smiled: Father Richard Simon heard this from La Peyrère. (In Popkin, pp. 14 and 181, n. 61.)

  248 no mathematical reason: The problem indeed is not that there are too many people for the time allotted between Adam and Eve and the present, but rather that there are too few. See Dominic Klyve, “Darwin, Malthus, Süssmilch, and Euler: The Ultimate Origin of the Motivation for the Theory of Natural Selection.”

  Chapter 13: Falling Away

  252 “Who could be found so silly?”: Origen, quoted in Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought, p. 66.

  252 “if no trees, then no eating of the fruit”: Epiphanius, quoted in Nicholas Gibbons, Questions and Disputations Concerning the Holy Scripture.

  255 Bayle’s imagined heretic: Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). An Historical and Critical Dictionary. By Monsieur Bayle. Translated into English, with many additions and corrections, made by the author himself, that are not in the French editions, 4: 2487).

  256 the knife will be used: “I did not tell him to use the knife,” Bayle imagines the ruler sputtering after the crime has been committed. “On the contrary, I specifically ordered him not to use it.” But the defense is worthless: the ruler understood perfectly well that a man placed in those circumstances would do exactly what he did and bring about untold miseries. It was in the ruler’s power to stop it, and yet he inexplicably chose not to do so.

  256 A simple peasant understands: As for the supposed justice of the punishments inflicted on Adam and Eve and their offspring, Bayle wrote, surely it is far better “to hinder an Assassin from killing a Man, than to break him upon the Wheel after he has been permitted to commit the Murder” (2488). If the climactic Christian answer is that God wished to demonstrate His great goodness by ultimately redeeming sinful humankind, then the dilemma, Bayle insisted, is even greater. Such a deity would resemble a father who allowed his son to break his legs—though he could easily have prevented it—in order to demonstrate to the whole city his skill in making a very nice cast. What kind of God is that?

  257 “I don’t know”: “La meilleure réponse qu’on puisse faire naturellement à la question, Pourquoi Dieu a-t-il permis que l’homme péchât? est de dire: J’en sais rien” (ibid., 504). In still another footnote he glossed the word “naturally.” It meant, he explained, “without consulting revelation.” It is impossible, I think, to determine whether there is any irony here.

  262 Adam-ondi-Ahman: Ezra Taft Benson, The Teachings of Ezra Taf
t Benson, pp. 587–88.

  262 Emerson imagined himself: Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry for October 18, 1839, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 270.

  262 “Walden Pond was already in existence”: Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864), chapter 9.

  Chapter 14: Darwin’s Doubts

  269 Darwinism is not incompatible with belief in God: Darwinism has inspired rigorously nontheological accounts of the genesis of life, as in John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Origins of Life. But such accounts have failed to dismantle faith. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, and Berry et al., Theology After Darwin.

  270 Exactly how and when: Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: “We are no more than about 5 million years from an ancestor we shared with the chimpanzee. The oldest species within genus Homo are now dated at less than 2 million years old; the oldest remains of fully modern humans are only 50,000 to 100,000 years old” (p. 22).

  271 “with the determination not to publish”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, p. 777. On the impact of Darwin’s thought on the biblical account of creation, see John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought.

  273 ancient pagan theory: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 5:932.

  275 White Cliffs of Dover: “In order to make the reader acquainted with the physical structure of the Valley of the Weald,” wrote Charles Lyell in the 1830s, describing the rolling hills in southeast England, “we shall suppose him first to travel southwards from the London basin. On leaving the tertiary strata he will first ascend a gently-inclined plane, composed of the upper flinty portion of the chalk, and then find himself on the summit of a declivity… . The geologist cannot fail to recognize in this view the exact likeness of a sea-cliff, and if he turns and looks in an opposite direction, or eastward, towards Beachy Head, he will see the same line of height prolonged. Even those who are not accustomed to speculate on the former changes which the surface has undergone, may fancy the broad and level plain to resemble the flat sands which were laid dry by the receding tide, and the different projecting masses of chalk to be the headlands of a coast which separated the different bays from each other” (Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols. [London: J. Murray, 1832], 3: 289–90).

  276 Fossils, such as seashells: See Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time.

  276 Denis Henrion: Cited in Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christianity, p. 182.

  277 “the primal Head of the Human Race”: Philip H. Gosse, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, p. 274.

  278 only the last volume has survived: On the Origin of Species (1859), in From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, p. 647.

  Epilogue: In the Forest of Eden

  287 much closer to the Last Common Ancestor: Among other arguments for the resemblance of chimpanzees to the LCA are their striking morphological similarities to gorillas, presumably because neither has greatly changed since the divergence from humans.

  290 some scientists have claimed: The claim has been contested by Russell H. Tuttle in Apes and Human Evolution, p. 576.

  292 they jump up and down and scream: Fiercely xenophobic, they cling to one another if they detect alien chimps nearby. Their hair standing on end from their distress and loathing, they vomit or have bouts of diarrhea. I did not see this for myself, but it is described in many scientific accounts, including Toshisada Nishida, Chimpanzees of the Lakeshore, p. 246.

  294 they are very much like us: The ancient views must have been based principally upon observations of monkeys and baboons, though there may have been early glimpses of the higher primates. Samuel Purchas, the great seventeenth-century collector of travel narratives, published Andrew Battell’s 1607 account of his captivity in Africa. Battell describes a “monster” called by the natives a “pongo”: “This Pongo is in all proportion like a man but that he is more like a Giant in stature, then a man: for he is very tall, and hath a mans face, hollow eyed, with long haire upon his browes” (“The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, Sent by the Portugals Prisoner to Angola,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 6: 398). See Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall, Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People. Chimpanzees and gorillas were not identified as a species and described by scientists until the modern period.

  294 they are amoral: Tuttle, Apes and Human Evolution. There is plenty of room for argument here on all sides: some researchers would claim that chimpanzees do indeed have something like a sense of good and evil; others would claim that, however much they pretend that they possess it, humans lack that very sense.

  294 Machiavellian politics: Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. See Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 18, in The Prince and the Discourses, trans. Christian Detmold (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 65.

  295 raiding parties to murder: Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

  296 Sarah too resembled an ape: Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 1: 167.

  296 an ape often lurks somewhere nearby: Cf. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

  297 “I would rather be descended from an ape”: These are unlikely to have been Huxley’s actual words, and the woman may have fainted from the heat or the crowd. See J. R. Lucas, “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter,” for criticism of possible legendary exaggeration; but even if the actual words were not exactly as remembered, the story circulated as a symbolic turning point.

  297 period of evolutionary ferment: Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet, p. 85.

  298 The sinister philosophical parable: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.

  299 characteristics found in both chimpanzees and bonobos: See Richard Wrangham and David Pilbeam, “African Apes as Time Machines,” in All Apes Great and Small, vol. 1: African Apes.

  Selected Bibliography

  A longer bibliography of works I have consulted in writing this book may be found on my website, stephengreenblatt.com.

  Adam, a Religious Play of the Twelfth Century. Translated by Edward N. Stone. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1928.

  Adar, Zvi. The Book of Genesis: An Introduction to the Biblical World. Translated by Philip Cohen. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990.

  Allen, Don Cameron. The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949.

  Almond, Philip C. Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2008.

  Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. Rev. & updated ed. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

  ———, trans. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

  ———, trans. Five Books of Moses. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

  ———, and Frank Kermode, eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

  Anderson, Gary A. The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

  ———. Sin: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

  ———, and Michael E. Stone, eds. A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve. 2nd rev. ed. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999.

  Andrewes, Lancelot. “A Lecture on Genesis 2:18,” Apospasmata Sacra, or A Collection of Posthumous and Orphan Lectures. London, 1657.

  Arendt, Hannah. Love and Saint Augustine. Edited by Judith Chelius Stark and Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

  Arias, Santa. “Bar
tolomé De Las Casas’s Sacred Place of History.” In Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience. Edited by Santa Arias and Mariselle Melé. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002.

  Aubrey, John. Brief Lives. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

  Auerbach, Erich. Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Edited by James I. Porter and Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

  Augustine. “The City of God.” St. Augustin: The City of God, and Christian Doctrine. Edited by Philip Schaff. Vol. 2. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1956.

  ———. Confessions. Latin text with commentary by James J. O’Donnell. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

  ———. Confessions. (Latin) Loeb Classical Library, with English translation by William Watts (1631). 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912.

  ———. Confessions. Translated by Gary Wills. New York: Penguin, 2006.

  ———. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Baltimore: Penguin, 1961.

  ———. Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 1984.

  ———. “De Gratia Christi, Et De Peccato Originali.” In St. Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings. Edited by Philip Schaff. Vol. 5. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1955.

  ———. De Haeresibus. Translated by Liguori G. Mueller. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1956.

  ———. “Letter Addressed to the Count Valerius, on Augustin’s Forwarding to Him What He Calls His First Book ‘On Marriage and Concupiscence’ in ‘Extract from Augustin’s Refractions,’ Book II. Chap 53, on the Following Treatise, De Nuptiis Et Concupiscenta.” St. Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings. Edited by Philip Schaff. Vol. 5. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1955.

  ———. On Christian Doctrine. Edited by D. W. Robertson. New York, 1958.

  ———. On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manachees, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, the Literal Meaning of Genesis. Translated by Edmund Hill. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012.