Source of book: Borrowed from the
library
I have had this book on my list ever
since I read one of Greenblatt’s other books, The
Swerve. I highly recommend that book for anyone interested in history
or philosophy.
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
goes back even further in history, to origins of the Hebrew scriptures, and the
Adam and Eve story itself. It then traces the ideas surrounding the story
through history, from the earliest Jewish interpretations, to Augustine’s
radical centering of the story in Christian doctrine, to Milton’s
epic poem, to the discovery of evolution and geological time. It ends with
a selection of interpretations and a collection of global origin stories.
Before I get into all that, however, I
want to lead with my key insight from this book, which is meticulously
researched and fully supported with substantial evidence.
Throughout history, which doctrines
become “orthodoxy” and which become “heresy” has absolutely NOTHING to do with
which are the best, the most logical, the most helpful, or the most true to the
original text.
The doctrines which win out do so
mostly because of who has the political power to declare the opposition to be
heretics and either burn them or force them into exile.
This was the most important part of
this book for someone like me, who aspires to follow Christ, yet finds the
modern American religion that has co-opted the name of Christ for something
that looks directly opposed to his teachings and example.
Why did Augustine’s view of The Fall
and its relation to sexuality become the “orthodox” view for over a thousand
years? Or, to be more blunt, why did everyone else have to give up sexual
pleasure just because Augustine had serious mommy issues?
Because Augustine had connections to
those with the power to exile those who disagreed with him.
Why did male-only priesthood win out,
despite the first few hundred years of the church being egalitarian, with
prominent female leaders and apostles? Because Constantine and his successors
suppressed those who disagreed with violence.
For that matter (although not in this
book), how did the pagan concept of Hell win out over universalism, which was
the dominant view in the early church?
Well, political power, that is how.
So, in our own time, it is clear why
today’s theofascists are hell-bent (and I use that intentionally) to grasp
political power: “official” orthodoxy is and has always been a matter of
politics, not belief.
In our own history, the question of
whether people with light skin can own people with dark skin wasn’t determined
by theological discussion, but
by the use of political and military power. Had the Confederacy won, it is
plausible we would still be enslaving African Americans today.
(Another somewhat related question is
whether political power can determine personal beliefs, and that seems a
lot less clear. And the question of whether belief can eventually shift the
balance of political power - it seems to have done so at various times in
history.)
This is why I am highly skeptical of
any argument that asserts that one particular theological position is the
“right” one simply because at some point in church history (or as often, in
their denominational history), those in power decided that viewpoint
would be the official one.
Although I have been unable to source
the quote, “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.” And usually
enforced by peer pressure - and political power - from living people who
benefit from the status quo.
Anyone who has read Greenblatt knows
that he brings a tremendous range of knowledge to his books. From art to
history to literature to music - he is widely read and experienced.
It is abundantly clear that Greenblatt
is fascinated by the Adam and Eve story, and has a warm love for it.
I wonder if, because he is a secular
Jew, it doesn’t have the same association with spiritual abuse that it has for
many of us former Evangelicals. He was raised going to the synagogue, though,
and he recounts that experience in the prologue. He was told that he needed to
keep his eyes down during the benediction, because God literally passed
overhead and he would die if he saw Him.
However, like most curious kids, he
cheated, and found that he had been lied to.
He mentions this both because he never
recovered that kind of naive faith and because he sees the Adam and Eve story
as a form of the same sort of story, one connected with the important things in
humanity - work, sex, and death - things that we share with all living things,
but that we treat them in a strange way.
Specifically, through this story (and
others like it), we presuppose a time when work, sex, and death didn’t occur -
that lost Eden that we long for in our own ways.
Greenblatt also notes that this story
has had vastly varying effects on humans.
For reasons that are at once
tantalizing and elusive, these few verses in an ancient book have served as a
mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and
desires. It has been both liberating and destructive, a hymn to human responsibility
and a dark fable about human wretchedness, a celebration of daring and an
incitement to violent misogyny. The range of responses it has aroused over
thousands of years in innumerable individuals and communities is astonishing.
Greenblatt examines the two (somewhat
inconsistent) accounts of humankind’s creation, and then looks at the earliest
interpretations. To a degree, the debate has centered on whether the story is
intended to be taken literally, or whether it is a metaphor. Even prior to the
birth if Christianity, there were already disagreements about this.
But elaborations like the Book of
Jubilees - which is now regarded as canonical only by the Ethiopian Orthodox
Church - were as much signs of doubt as they were reassurances. They suggest
that at least some of those who read the account of the garden and the first
humans and the talking snake wondered about its reliability. They wanted to
know how far they could trust it, or perhaps they sensed, just outside the
charmed circle of belief, its possible origin in a more more familiar scene of
storytelling, the realm of fantasy.
For a number of reasons, including the
overwhelming evidence of an ancient earth and the evolution of life, I have not
believed in a literal Adam and Eve for many decades. In fact, I am somewhat
unconvinced that the story of a magic tree and a talking animal was written
with the belief that it was literal history. That came later.
This book also illuminates the central
problems with the entire idea of a single all-knowing and all-powerful god in
the first place. This too is something that has troubled theologians since the
beginning, and is never really fully addressed in scripture. One might even say
that scripture itself moves from polytheism to monotheism, and seems to settle
on a god that is shockingly changeable and capable of being surprised.
But doing away with multiple gods
introduces certain problems, starting with the very notion of an all-powerful,
all-knowing god who nonetheless repents what he has himself created. Did the
wise maker not anticipate what his creatures would do? How is it possible for
an omniscient divinity to regret what he has done? And how is it possible to
justify or even comprehend the arbitrariness and cruelty of the destruction
that he unleashes, destruction that sweeps away not only adult malefactors but
also small children, newborn lambs, virgin forests?
Also fascinating is the mention of other
texts that we don’t often hear about. The Gospel of Thomas is better known than
the others, but I was not aware that some of the works discovered at Nag Hammadi
actually told the story from the perspective of the snake.
There are many works too that question
God’s justice and motives in the story. There is nothing new about these
questions: they have been asked for thousands of years.
Together with a massive body of
commentary, both rabbinic and patristic, the international popularity of The
Life of Adam and Eve indicates that by late antiquity the verses of the book of
Genesis had come to seem at once tantalizing and parsimonious, a blend of
ethical conundrums and baffling silences.
And there are so many different
interpretations and approaches to the story as well. He lost out politically,
but Marcion argued that Yahweh was a false god, and should be abandoned like
Marduk and Ammon Ra were - he was an evil creator according to the story, and
the opposite to Christ.
I was particularly interested in the
views of Origen. I find I agree with him on a number of things, including his
approach to Genesis.
The words of scripture should be
treated, he wrote, precisely in the way that pagan intellectuals like Celsus
treated their own classics. Why interpret Moses’s profound fables with dull
literalism while the comparable fables in Hesiod and Plato are accorded subtle
readings?
Why indeed?
It would have been interesting had
Origen’s views become the orthodox ones. But unfortunately, Augustine came on
the scene soon after Origen’s death, and changed many things for the
worse.
Augustine gets two chapters in this
book, and they are quite detailed. I read Confessions in my early 20s,
and I was fascinated and horrified by it. There is a lot of good in there,
but….my god did Augustine have mommy issues and sexual issues and just a lot of
stuff needing therapy.
Instead of therapy, he went and fucked
up Christian thought about everything from sex to women to sin. That could be a
whole post in itself - “Things Augustine Fucked Up.”
I can kind of see why he went where he
did, though. The idea that we are responsible for our own morality is indeed a
bit terrifying, and the idea of a universe that just exists, and doesn’t
require meaning is even more so.
Augustine did not want to live in a
universe in which the moral reckoning would be left unpaid, in which human
suffering meant nothing but the vulnerability of matter, in which wickedness
would not be punished or exceptional piety receive an eternal reward. It was
better to believe that accounts were being kept to the last scruple by an
all-seeing God, even one who was murderously angry at humanity, rather than to
believe that God was indifferent or absent.
The problem is that this meant
Augustine had to twist everything to fit this belief - and that meant that we
humans had to be evil from birth. From this has come generations of child abuse
in the name of God - the authoritarian
parenting most of us ex-Evangelicals of my generation endured. The wicked
had to be beaten out of us - and later when we were too big to beat,
spiritually manipulated out of us with threats of hellfire and divine
wrath.
Also the result of Augustine’s
worldview - and that of Jerome, who was, if anything, more misogynistic
even than Augustine - was that women were blamed for everything that went wrong
with humankind. This was not a Christian or Jewish concept though -
traditionally, both Adam and Eve were held equally responsible for The Fall
- it was a pagan one that was borrowed by certain theologians. The Adam
and Eve story was then used as justification for the belief.
As Greenblatt points out repeatedly in
the book, the misogynistic viewpoint was always just one of many.
Feminism is nothing new - many women have always sought equality. But it was political
power that made misogyny official orthodox doctrine.
People were no more credulous in the
1480s than they were in the 1780s or, for that matter, than they are now. In
the case of witchcraft accusations, there is widespread evidence of skepticism,
including within the church. The stories of flying through the air and
mysterious trysts with the devil and occult power to maim and kill were
frequently denounced as delusions, the fantasies of the mentally ill or of
those with hidden agendas. But Augustine had succeeded in establishing as a key
principle the literal reality of the events in the Garden. The insistence on
the reality of Eve’s conversation with the serpent gave witch-hunters like
Kramer and Sprenger the opening they needed…
There is an entire chapter on the art
portraying Adam and Eve, and it may be my favorite in the book. Greenblatt
draws from the first medieval works through the present, and discusses many of
my favorite artists. He particularly focuses on Albrecht Durer, one of my
all-time favorites.
Durer's version of Adam and Eve
I won’t get into all the details, but
will say that along with the color plates in the book, there was a lot of
enlightening discussion of the details and symbolism.
I did want to mention a line, though,
about Durer’s naked self-portrait - which is amazing. Greenblatt compares
Durer’s realism and lack of idealism in portraying the human body as being
pretty unique until Egon Schiele in the 20th Century. I think the comparison is
fairly apt.
Nude Self Portrait by Albrecht Durer
Nude Self Portrait by Egon Schiele
Greenblatt devotes no fewer than three
chapters to John Milton and Paradise
Lost. He calls it the finest poem ever written in the English
language, and it is pretty difficult to think of anything that even matches it,
honestly. Certainly, it is the greatest long poem in the English
language, and one of the finest works of literature ever written.
Like Confessions, Paradise
Lost grew in significant part out of Milton’s own sexual difficulties. He
was somewhat obsessed with his own virginity, and stayed pure until his
marriage to a younger woman.
Which turned out to be a huge fucking
disaster. After the honeymoon, during which something must have gone badly
wrong, because she went back to her parents’ home, and the two did not live
together for years afterward.
(Eventually, they did reconcile, she
had four children, and died from complications of the last birth, still in her
20s.)
He would remarry twice. His second wife
also died from childbirth complications, as did the child. His third marriage
was the charm, at least in that she outlived him. She feuded with his kids, and
the whole thing ended in a lot of estrangement - by his death, Milton’s
children were mostly not on speaking terms with him. The book gives more
history about this, including Milton’s developmentally inappropriate
expectations of his children and his general difficulty with human
relationships.
In any case, part of the impetus behind
Paradise Lost was for Milton to work out what went wrong in the
relationship of the sexes, and to imagine a true marriage - a marriage that was
happy for both spouses. In other words, Adam and Eve in paradise. (And
afterward, too, despite the Curse.)
That Milton also ended up writing a
story in which God comes off pretty badly, Satan seems the hero, is rather
fascinating. I doubt Milton intended it, but Satan is the most compelling
character in the poem. What he did intend - and accomplished - was to humanize
Adam and Eve, making them highly sympathetic characters, with recognizable
motivations, emotions, and frailties.
And yes, the relationship of Adam and
Eve is really quite touching. To Milton, Adam joined Eve in sin not because he
was fooled, but because the thought of losing Eve was too much to bear. He knew
God could and likely would make him a new partner. But Eve was who he loved,
and he chose her over immortality. I mean, damn.
There are so many great passages in
these chapters - Greenblatt’s knowledge of Paradise Lost is deep and
broad, and his tender love for the poem is evident throughout. If you can read
these chapters and not want to read Milton, you have a heart of stone.
I did want to highlight a few things
from this discussion. Milton is known for his poems these days, but it is easy
to forget that he was also a rather controversial political writer. Many of his
ideas, from freedom of speech and religion to his suspicion of autocracy in all
forms, were well ahead of his time. In fact, when thinking of later authors
like Thomas Paine and the American revolutionaries, consider Milton to have
been a significant influence and the founder of their ideals.
This includes some other ideas that I
was not aware of, and definitely was not expecting. See below.
One of the most interesting things
about his beliefs as a young man, is that he fully rejected the sexual double
standard. “Virginity” has pretty universally always been about female
inexperience - keeping her reproductive organs only for the legitimate offspring
of her male owner. From the Torah on down to the legal system of our own
country, female “virginity” has always been the focus. Men could pretty much
fuck as they desired, as long as they didn’t touch the (female) property of
another man.
But Milton rejected this. In fact, he
believed that the reverse as true. To him, it was more scandalous
for a man to have sex before marriage.
Milton’s life overlapped with that of
Galileo. In the tradition of educated young British men, he too the “Grand
Tour” of Europe as a young man, and indeed visited Galileo during his later
years, when he was under house arrest.
This meeting would later be cited as an
inspiration for his screed against government censorship and in favor of free
speech, Areopagitica.
But in addition to this, Milton’s trip
was a bit unusual. Unlike most young men, whose journey included a few (or more
than a few) brothel stops, Milton, according to his own account, returned with
his virginity entirely intact.
With this particular obsession, one
does wonder how many things were a complete disappointment when he finally had
sex on his honeymoon.
What I did not expect at ALL was to
find that, after the honeymoon disaster, and his subsequent separation, Milton
wrote a series of impassioned tracts calling for…..No Fault Divorce. And
the right of both spouses to remarry.
This happened in (checks the date) 1642.
California became the first state to
adopt no-fault divorce in…1970. Not too long before I was born. Milton was more
than 300 years ahead of his time.
Particularly interesting to me was that
Milton insisted that both spouses should have this right. A woman should
not be trapped in an unhappy marriage any more than a man should. This
was pretty egalitarian for its time, although Milton did have some
unfortunately typical sexism as well.
The most fascinating part of this,
though, was that Milton grounded his case in the Adam and Eve story. To him,
the point of marriage wasn’t primarily sex. Rather, it was companionship.
Eve was created because Adam needed a companion. And thus, if a marriage was
not providing that companionship, then either party should be free to seek a
partner who was a true companion.
These days, most of us take
companionate marriage as a given, but for the 17th Century, it was beyond
radical.
For the God who ordained marriage in
the Garden of Eden could not possibly want to condemn all those who made an
innocent mistake to a lifetime of unhappiness. If love, mutual help, and
intimacy were to be an integral part of marriage, as God intended, then there
had to be the possibility of divorce. Led astray by a corrupt church, men and
women had been penned up in a prison of their own making, from which they
desperately needed someone to lead them.
There is so much more - Greenblatt
quotes and paraphrases the argument at length. It is really good - Milton was a
fine rhetorician, and he writes with passion.
Speaking of which, he got himself in
political hot water by speaking out against the Divine Right of Kings. He
supported the execution of Charles I, which would eventually come back to haunt
him - he had to wield his connections and keep his head down for a while under
Charles II.
Again, Milton grounded his argument in
Adam and Eve. Humans were not created to be subservient, but to rule (and
caretake) creation. To him, no one could logically dispute that all men were
created equal - and “born free.”
From there, he argued that government
and all political arrangements were social contracts, which the people were
free to disobey if the ruler violated the terms.
A century later, Milton’s arguments
would be adopted by Adams and Washington and other fathers of our
country.
All of these ideas would find their way
into Paradise Lost. Perhaps that is one reason why it feels so fresh and
compelling 350 years after it was written.
Milton drew on Shakespeare for his
portrayal of Satan - Shakespeare wrote great villains. In his notes, there are
references to Richard III, and Iago.
Likewise, Milton sought to truly
humanize Adam and Eve. This was in contrast to many earlier stories, which
reduced them to bawdy stereotypes - often with viciously misogynistic
undertones.
God created Eve - goes a typical one
called “The Cunt That Was Made by a Spade” - from a hard bone in Adam’s side in
order to show husbands that they should beat their wives regularly, preferably
three or four times a day.
The vulva was created by Satan, using
the aforementioned spade, and then he farted on her tongue, so now women never
stop talking.
Yeesh.
In contrast to this, Milton saw that
the original story actually raised some conflicts with the “orthodox” view that
men were superior to women and thus should be subservient.
As Paradise Lost puts it, “Among
unequals, what harmony or true delight?”
What indeed. In the story, both male
and female are equally created in the image of God, and given the same command
and blessing.
Thus, in his poem, Milton creates a
shockingly egalitarian view of marriage, with Eve every bit Adam’s equal.
Greenblatt recalls the scene of their first disagreement - where they desire a
little distance from each other - together all the time is too much for both of
them.
Anyone who has had an argument with a
spouse - which is to say anyone who has ever lived with someone intimately for
a significant length of time - will recognize how brilliantly Milton captures a
peculiar seesaw of love, anger, hurt feelings, attempts at appeasement,
insincere compliments, passive aggression, frustration, submission,
independence, and longing. And the genius of this invention is all the more
remarkable, given the fact that Milton needs to persuade the reader that this
squabbling husband and wife are in Eden and still unfallen. This is what a
domestic quarrel in Paradise sounds like.
That’s insightful. As one who has been
in a fundamentally good marriage for over two decades, I recognize all this,
and in the poem as well. There is no way to imagine being human that excludes
this sort of squabble. A fight in paradise indeed.
Milton further recognizes a further
conundrum.
Adam and Eve must be intelligent,
well-informed, forewarned. They must be free, and they must be innocent. But if
they are both free and innocent, then there must be something disturbing in
innocence and threatening in freedom.
If you are truly innocent, you cannot
even understand the concept of evil. If you are truly free, then love and
obedience cannot be compelled by threats.
It is this sort of tension, this
discomfort with theological orthodoxy, that makes Paradise Lost so
compelling today.
After eleven chapters, we finally get
to some skepticism that gained traction. Not that there hadn’t been doubters
before, but around the time of Milton, the doubts about the veracity of the
Adam and Eve narrative started to gain momentum.
One of the figures mentioned is Isaac
La Peyrere, who the author described as:
[I]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.
That is me in a nutshell, actually. It
felt like looking in the mirror. That ultimately is the problem my parents had
and have with me. I’m too curious, too argumentative, too venturesome, and too
independent.
This led to him raising uncomfortable
questions about the narrative.
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.
Me too.
In La Peyrere’s case, it got him in
serious hot water with the political powers, and he was forced to recant his
doubts. But. Not before he was published and his views got around.
The problem, as Greenblatt correctly
notes, is that as soon as you give full reality to the myth, the inherent
contradictions themselves - the story itself, not the skepticism - lead to
irreconcilable problems.
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 poser 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 Peyrere’s,
only opened up new problems.
One that Greenblatt mentions, because
it troubled scholars across Europe, was how evil existed in a pure, pristine
paradise. And why didn’t God stop evil from happening? Didn’t he want his
creatures happy?
You can recognize the Problem of Evil
here - this wasn’t something atheists in the 20th Century invented - these are
questions which have troubled us for thousands of years.
I mean, as these theologians
understood, any good parent prevents a child from destroying itself. Is God
more of a psychopath than we are? (Hey,
I wrote about that…)
These questions, as [Pierre] 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.
To that question of “Why did God permit
that Man should sin,” Bayle finally conceded: “I don’t know.”
An actually fucking honest answer. And
a risky one at the time.
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.
That is where I have been my entire
life - unwilling to abandon my reason and take shelter in dogma. Ultimately, it
has cost me my connection to my religious community, and my relationship with
my parents. But I simply cannot bring myself to abandon the brain (and the
conscience) God gave me.
Voltaire went far beyond Bayle, and
challenged the underlying difficulty in the command itself.
“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?”
I have my own (tentatively held)
theories about this - and find that the Adam and Eve story, ironically, makes
more sense as a description of our evolution of sentience. But that is for a
different post.
Voltaire was also one of the first to
note that, as more ancient writings were uncovered, the more it appeared that
the writers of Genesis themselves saw the story as an allegory, a fable, a
parable. (Peter Enns makes
a solid case that it was intended as a synecdoche for the exile of
Israel.)
I’m sure nobody who reads my blog
regularly will be at all surprised that Calvinists do not come off well in this
book. Throughout history, it is the Calvinists who find a way at all possible
times, to imagine the most psychopathic and horrible interpretation of
everything. Here in the US, that means both the Puritans, and the Southern
Presbyterians who would become the enslaving class. Greenblatt notes the
disagreements between the Puritans and Thomas Jefferson on this matter.
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.
Also taking the story literally were
the early Mormons. Joseph Smith claimed that his settlement near what is now
Kansas City was literally where Adam had once lived.
By the time Darwin and Lyell put the
final nails in the literalist coffin, belief in a literal Adam and Eve had
faded, particularly among educated people. (Arguably today more people believe
in literalism than they did in the 19th Century.) It wasn’t just the
Enlightenment, but the inherent contradictions and problems in the story
itself.
Greenblatt notes, though, that the
story doesn’t have to be literal to be compelling.
For many people today, including me,
that story is a myth. The long, tangled history from archaic speculation to
dogma, from dogma to literal truth, from literal to real, from real to mortal,
from mortal to fraudulent, has ended in fiction. The Enlightenment has done its
work, and our understanding of human origins has been freed from the grip of a
once-potent delusion. The naked man and woman in the garden with the strange
trees and the talking snake have returned to the sphere of the imagination from
which they originally emerged. But that return does not destroy their
fascination or render them worthless. Our existence would in fact be diminished
without them. They remain a powerful, even indispensable, way to think about
innocence, temptation, and moral choice, about cleaving to a beloved partner,
about work and sex and death. They convey with exceptional vividness the
possibility of deliberately choosing in the pursuit of knowledge to disobey the
highest authority or, alternatively, the possibility of being seduced into
making a foolish choice whose catastrophic consequences will be felt for all
time. They hold open the dream of a return somehow, someday, to a bliss that
has been lost. They have the life - the peculiar, intense, magical reality - of
literature.
One part of my own spiritual journey
has been that one described above. By seeing scripture for what it is - human
writings about divine experiences - as literature and metaphor and fable and
myth - rather than as dogma literally dictated by God and intended as an
instruction book (and a bad one at that) has actually allowed the Bible to
meaningful to me again. Once it could be something more than a weapon we use to
damage other humans, and could instead be an often beautiful account of
humankind’s attempts to understand the world, I could find the divine in it
again.
That’s the thing about forcing
something with beauty and insight into being something it is not. Genesis is
not literal history, but it is a beautiful metaphor that has much to teach us.
The Bible is not a literal instruction book, but a record of how other humans
have worked out the task of living in harmony with the divine and each other in
particular times and places. There is wisdom to be gained, but not dogmatic
rules.
As I have found to be true for
everything from Nietszche
to Utilitarianism,
what you take from the Bible says far more about who you are than what it
is. If you see Satan farting on women’s tongues, then that says a lot about
your contempt for women. If you see a promise of true companionship within
marriage, then that says a lot about your aspirations toward
egalitarianism.
What you see is what you look
for.
After all this history and philosophy
and wonder, the book takes an interesting turn in the epilogue. Greenblatt
scores an invitation to join some evolutionary biologists and observe our
closest cousins (chimpanzees) in the Kibale National Park in Uganda.
This then, I thought, is what Paradise
must have been: no permanent address, no wearying labor, no planting or
cultivating, and, at that dizzying height, no predators and no fear. I had
glimpsed a part of the ancient dream: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayst
freely eat.”
Greenblatt goes on to note their lack
of shame. Humans, after all, are the only animals which experience shame - and
that is, perhaps, a key meaning of the story. And here is another.
The biblical contrast is not between a
life governed by a moral code and a wild, lawless life. No, the contrast in
Genesis is between a life lived with knowledge of good and evil -
presumably, an awareness of the symbolic categories themselves and of the
difference between them - and a life lived without such knowledge.
This is the significant
difference between us and other animals. A knowledge of good and evil, and
the shame we feel when we violate that distinction.
Also fascinating is Greenblatt’s
description of gender roles in chimpanzees. There is an uncomfortable amount of
similarity between their behavior and the worst of humanity. Males are bigger,
and bully and dominate females - and the practice starts from childhood. As
Greenblatt notes, this doesn’t have the moral valence, because there is no
evidence of chimps having the ability to see this as a moral issue. It just
is.
This is one of my theories of the
origins of patriarchy, by the way. Our common ancestor with chimps (and the far
less violent bonobos) likely functioned in the “might makes right” way of
being. When we gained sentience, this practice continued, but with a problem:
we knew at some level it was wrong. So endless theology and philosophy and
thought had to be invented to justify what was just a base animal behavior - to
morally justify the unjustifiable.
I think Greenblatt’s point is well
taken: this is actually what life without the knowledge of good and evil looks
like. It looks like animals. That’s in its own way, paradise. No shame. No
understanding of death. No need to be responsible for our actions.
Of course, very few humans in their
right mind think that the life apes live in the forest is the life humans would
actually want for themselves in Paradise. But that is because we construct our
idea of Paradise from notions that we derive from our knowledge of good and
evil. We are already fallen; they are not.
Another fascinating question Greenblatt
raises is that of change. Can human nature change? And he thinks it can.
Case in point: bonobos and chimps are
extremely close genetically. (And they look almost identical.) At some point in
the relatively recent past, they diverged from a common ancestor with chimps.
While physically the are similar, and many behaviors are the same, their social
life is vastly different.
Researchers observe that males continue
to be competitive with one another, but their aggression now rarely turns
against the females, who enjoy greatly increased rank and status. Forming
intense bonds with one another, by acting together the females are able to
dominate most of the males. Sexual activity is greatly heightened. The females
show signs of being in heat even when they are not fertile, so that copulation
is no longer exclusively linked to reproduction. Bonobos engage in fellatio;
there is frequent male-male and female-female sexuality; and, perhaps most
remarkably, encounters with neighboring groups lead not to violence but to
intercourse. Behavior then that seemed constitutive of being a chimpanzee
proved amenable, with isolation, the right environment, and enough time, to
radical change.
Make love, not war, indeed.
Greenblatt notes that humans have
social characteristics of both of their cousins. On the one hand, we are prone
to xenophobic violence, and male dominance of females. On the other, we have
non-reproductive sexuality, friendship, cooperation, and the ability to be
egalitarian and peaceful with other groups.
We can be better. And sometimes we are.
And, importantly, we have that ability to choose between good and evil.
Choose wisely.
The final two sections are devoted to a
selection of interpretations of the Adam and Eve story, and a selection of
world myths about the origins of humans, respectively.
That first one is a real trip. Here are
some of my favorite (or least favorite?) ideas.
According to Clement of Alexandria,
humans were originally blind. That’s why they didn’t know they were naked, and
why the Bible says “their eyes were opened.”
Theophilus of Antioch believed somewhat
like I do: humans were not ready for the knowledge of good and evil, but ate
prematurely. God would have eventually bid us eat, but we were like babies
trying to eat steak. (True story: one of my kids demanded and ate steak before
teeth. They are now a vegetarian. Who knew?)
And from a female theologian, Hildegard
of Bingen, Adam had once known the songs of the angels, but after his sin, all
he had was an ugly wind. Methinks she didn’t like men much.
Luther thought hatred of God (or
perhaps boredom with Him?) was at the root of the fall.
And, of course, the prize for the most
nasty and cruel interpretation comes from John Calvin. Not only did God know
Adam and Eve would sin, he actively and deliberately compelled them to do it.
To do otherwise would have been disobedience. So literally, damned if you do,
damned if you don’t. And unbaptized infants burn in hell. God, I loathe that
hateful man.
The prize for most intriguing modern
idea comes from Huynh Sanh Thong, who argued that the reason there is a snake
in the story is that serpents were responsible for humans developing language.
In a world where snakes can be deadly, we needed to be able to warn our
children about them - particularly once we came down from the trees. It was an
evolutionary nudge toward the development of language.
I am kind of fond of one not found in
this book, but in another one, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by
Douglas Adams.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of
the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small
unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight
million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose
ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think
digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
...lots of the people were mean, and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion
that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first
place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one
should ever have left the oceans.
Regarding the human origin stories, it
is striking how similar they are in certain specifics - humans come from the
same stuff as soil (true), we all die (true), and, in most case, we offend the
gods. The existence of the sexes is often given a “just so” story. Animals are
common, cainids as often as snakes. If nothing else, this is proof that humans
have always been contemplating life, death, work, and sex.
This book was a great read - Greenblatt
clearly loves his topic, and brings a wide range of connections together in a
way the reader can understand.
And, again, let me finish with the key
takeaway: there is no One
True Interpretation™ of the Adam and Eve story. What we can be sure of is
that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the story being a fantasy, not
a literal event. This is both because of science: the earth is old, evolution
is real, and a two person genetic bottleneck would have led to fatal inbreeding
in a few generations. And also because of the story itself, which includes
magic trees and talking animals.
The need for it to be literal is not
driven by fact or by literary considerations, but by a perceived theological
need for it to be literally true. Augustine was the originator of this
perceived need, and we are only now beginning to free ourselves from the fruit
of his unresolved mommy issues.
Over the centuries, orthodoxy has
mostly been determined by political power. In our own age, at least for now, we
have freedom of thought and religion, and it is our responsibility to interpret
in a way that heals, not harms.
There is, as Greenblatt says, that is
useful and beautiful in the Adam and Eve story, and to turn it into the
damnation of infants, anti-intellectualism, and the subordination of women is
to take a good thing and turn it evil.