The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac

Source of book: I own this

 

So far, this is my third Kerouac book - previously read were The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. I also read Joyce Johnson’s book about his early life, The Voice is All. 

 

The Subterraneans is, like all of Kerouac’s fiction, mostly autobiographical. He fictionalized his life, with some changes and exaggerations for artistic effect, but they still very much read like non-fiction, and the characters are easily recognizable as their real-life counterparts. 

 

This book is fairly short, and is all about Kerouac’s brief relationship with Alene Lee, an African-American member of the Beats, who at the time was working as a typist for William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. She also has an appearance in Big Sur, but under a different name. Here, she is called “Mardou Fox.”

 Kerouac and Lee

On display throughout the book are some characteristics of Kerouac: his alcoholism, his mental illness, his inability to form healthy relationships, his tendency to objectify women. But also, it is still fascinating just how self-aware his is in his writing. He knows he is all of those things, but feels powerless to change. 

 

One additional fault he acknowledges in this book is that he objectifies Mardou not just as a woman, but as black. He sees her as “exotic,” as in some way an “other,” and he knows he is doing it. But he also isn’t sure how to stop. 

 

Actually, I really get this. Exoticizing minority women is so deeply embedded in our (white) culture that there really are only two options: either acknowledge the implicit bias and try to counter it, or remain blissfully unaware of it. “Colorblindness” is a myth. 

 

The book takes a narrative arc through the relationship, starting with when they met, peaking around the halfway mark with them enjoying a passionate relationship, and then the long slow decline until they break up. 

 

There are some things that definitely struck me about Kerouac’s perspective on the relationship. First, while he acknowledges that both parties had their flaws, he mostly blames himself for the breakup. 

 

They grow apart for a variety of reasons - neither of them was entirely mentally healthy, for one thing. They also have different goals for their future, which I think both of them knew would make the relationship temporary. 

 

The final straw is when he becomes jealous of another of the Beats (Gregory Corso), who he thinks is trying to steal her. After they fight, she does in fact sleep with the other man, which becomes the direct reason for the breakup. 

 

Another thing that struck me was that not only was Kerouac quite frank about sex, he was particularly concerned with making sure his partner orgasmed. For 1958, this was probably somewhat unusual for a male writer. What I recall seeing a lot more in those books that did address sex, was an assumption that the woman climaxes from intercourse alone, and simultaneously with the man. (As the book puts it, “Mardou did not gain orgasm from normal copulation.”) 

 

This is actually not the way sex works for most women, and Kerouac actually notes that. And makes sure his partner is satisfied. That’s admirable - and I am glad that Kerouac actually puts that in the book. More men need to understand that, and up their game. 

 

In general, I enjoy Kerouac’s “stream of consciousness” style of writing. I think it is a lot easier to follow than, say, Ulysses, and has a truly poetic feel. Apparently, in this book, Kerouac was attempting to capture the rhythms of jazz - music which is central to the book and a recurring theme. 

 

I also want to mention a passage where Kerouac and Mardou argue about his devotion to his mother. (Who, to be fair, was largely supporting Kerouac in the years before his books started selling.) Here is Kerouac’s reply to her:

 

“I really do really love her and love you too and don’t you see how hard I try to spend my time, divide my time between the two of you - over there it’s my writing work, my well-being and when she comes home from work at night, tired, from the store, mind you, I feel very good making her supper, having the supper and a martini ready when she walks in so by 8 o’clock the disses are all cleared, see, and she has more time to look at her television…”

 

On the one hand, it is touching to see Kerouac doing the Donna Reed thing. Of the Beats, he seems to have been the only male who actually cooked and cleaned. On the other, I can kind of see Mardou’s point - he is still tied to those apron strings a bit. 

 

Later, near the end, when he knows the breakup is inevitable, he writes more about his mother. 

 

You see a vision of the face of the woman who is your mother who loves you so much she has supported you and protected you for years, you a bum, a drunkard - never complained a jot - because she knows that in your present state you can’t go out in the world and make a living and take care of yourself and even find and hold the love of another protecting woman - and all because you are poor Ti Leo - deep in the dark pit of night under the stars of the world you are lost, poor, no one cares, and now you threw away a little woman’s love because you wanted another drink with a rowdy fiend from the other side of your insanity.

 

That pity party is lit for sure. 

 

Another passage mentions the fetishization of Mardou, and I thought it was an interesting way of putting things. The stream of consciousness technique heightens the point. 

 

This being the last deepest final doubt I wanted about Mardou that she was really a thief of some sort and therefore was out to steal my heart, my white man heart, a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white man for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled…

 

This leads him to a memory of Tennessee Williams story, and reminds him of being called a slur. 

 

“Man what are you, a fag? you talk just like a fag.”

 

There is another moment where Mardou gets jealous of the time Kerouac was spending with Burroughs, and insists that “It’s him or me goddamit.” This is a recurring issue for Kerouac in his books. He gets off track, spending all his time with one person, or buried in his writing, and neglects his partners. 

 

One time, when Kerouac and Mardou go to a movie, she refuses to hold his hand walking on the street, for fear she would be considered a prostitute. (Even in San Francisco, where the book was set, or New York City, where the events actually took place.) Kerouac is perceptive here. 

 

I wanted to go into a bar for a wine, she was afraid of all the behatted men ranged at the bar, now I saw her Negro fear of American society she was always talking about but palpably in the streets which never gave me any concern…

 

Although he wouldn’t have used the word, he realizes his privilege, even as a French Canadian immigrant (who were reviled at the time). 

 

He also touches on a problem with being part of a privileged class: feeling like others are more in tune with life. 

 

As I pass Mexicans I feel that great hepness I’d been having all summer on the street with Mardou my old dream of wanting to be vital, alive like a Negro or an Indian or a Denver Jap or a New York Puerto Rican come true, with her by my side song young, sexy, slender, strange, hip, myself in jeans and casual and both of us as if young…

 

The last lines are quite good as well. 

 

And I go home having lost her love.

And write this book.

 

One cannot but think of the risks of dating someone like Kerouac. It is a bit like dating Taylor Swift: you might end up in a song or a book. Although at least Kerouac is more likely to blame himself than give a sick burn to an ex. 

 

My favorite Kerouac so far is still The Dharma Bums, because Gary Snyder is in it, and there is an epic hike. But this one was enjoyable and thoughtful and worth reading. 

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

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.