The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt, Bodley Head, £25
The story of Adam and Eve is one that everyone knows. Even without ever having picked up a Bible, the man on the Clapham omnibus knows the outline of the tale. This may be because it occupies the first few pages of the Bible, after the story of the seven-day creation, and thus has been read by those who got no further than Genesis, Chapter Three. But it is just as likely that the story resonates because it is so true: not true historically, but true in that it explains something about the human condition we all share. It is the first truly existential novel in miniature.
Back in the day when I studied the Scriptures, we were told that the story was the product of something called the “Solomonic Enlightenment”; it dated from the time of the wise king, and was all of a piece with the other examples of Wisdom literature such as the Book of Proverbs, while at the same time having its roots in various Babylonian myths, which are its ultimate sources.
Stephen Greenblatt, perhaps more up to date, places the emergence of Adam and Eve in Jewish consciousness after the Babylonian Exile. In so doing, he gives it another layer of meaning, for it becomes impossible to think of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden without also thinking of the Hebrew slaves lamenting their lot by the rivers of Babylon. But you don’t have to be Hebrew, or a slave, or an exile, to understand the story of Adam and Eve: you just have to be human.
Greenblatt’s excellent book surveys the history of the story through the ages. He writes very well about the Babylonian sources, traditionally a dry as dust subject, killed stone dead by so many scriptural scholars, but here brought wonderfully to life. He also writes superlatively well about Milton’s treatment of the subject. Indeed, it is hard to envisage a better introduction to Paradise Lost than what one reads here.
Greenblatt clearly loves Milton and communicates his enthusiasm effortlessly. This makes a refreshing change: Milton was not an easy man, as we all know, and the false assertion that he was of the Devil’s party without knowing it can cloud a reader’s enjoyment of the greatest poem in the English language.
When it comes to Augustine, Greenblatt gets a little bogged down with the repeated statement that Augustine believed the story of Adam and Eve to be literally true. Moreover, he credits Augustine with the discovery (one doesn’t want to call it “invention”) of the doctrine of Original Sin.
On both counts he is not altogether right. It is true that Augustine sees Original Sin as based on a common descent from Adam, as something transmitted down the generations. However, in this he is only explicating the teaching of St Paul, who says “… just as all men die in Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:22). And the question of historicity is a minor one compared with the existential truth of the story. Augustine is the first existentialist, one who sees Adam in himself, and that is why Adam is always going to be of more than purely historical importance.
Greenblatt is perhaps not alone in thinking that Augustine’s focus on human sinfulness went a little too far. But to some of us, Augustine is the great revealer of our fallen nature. He makes sense because as we read his Confessions we recognise ourselves, and we see what he saw in himself: the old Adam at work. And if we die in Adam, we can live in Christ. O felix culpa – “O, happy fault of Adam that won for us so great a redeemer.” Adam and Eve are always with us, but so are the New Adam and the New Eve, Jesus and Mary.
Greenblatt is greatly drawn to Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of our first parents, about which he writes eloquently, and which he compares to Dürer’s naked self-portrait.
He also considers the fresco depicting the expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio. With such a great work, one wishes he would do so at greater length. He misses the fact that Masaccio’s Adam and Eve are naked – a deliberate deviation from the biblical story, where God in his mercy clothes our first parents with garments of skin. But there is no compassion in the Masaccio fresco, which shows Adam and Eve thrown naked into the world, the anguish on Eve’s face reminiscent of the few surviving pictures of naked women being herded into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Masaccio clearly sees something in the story that others may have missed, and his vision contrasts with the relative optimism with which Milton closes Paradise Lost. Does Masaccio know something the rest of us have yet to discover, or have only glimpsed? Perhaps he does.
But that is the glory of the Adam and Eve story: when we want to put the impossible into art, it is them to whom we turn, because in the end they are the ones who tell us so much about ourselves.
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