Genesis is a beautiful piece of writing: part poem, part folk tale, it is hard not to fall victim to the idea that here is something pure, which has been dirtied by celibates and misogynists to the subsequent ruin of womankind. As though there were such a thing as an original, Edenic text, in which man and woman were equal, and no one or nothing was to blame. For the first 66 lines of the Bible, this balance seems to exist, then Adam points the finger, says, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree,’ and God curses her into loving him anyway.
The story of the Fall is one of the most enduring stories we have, and it is never fair. You could use it as a template for a certain kind of novel: put a choice in there, tip the balance, make the consequences so disproportionate we doubt our sense of cause and effect, make them suffer, make them into better human beings. Visually, the narrative is brilliantly successful, for being so easy to hold within a single frame. There is nothing static about the way the viewer sees an image of the first couple considering apples. It is a moment of great tension, and they are wearing no clothes. So, to the rules for writing a successful fiction, we might add, pretend that it is not about sex, make the world symbolic, expand the small asymmetries. Here are two human beings who are slightly, but perhaps disastrously, anatomically different. She likes something long, he likes something round – what could possibly go wrong?
The story is a riddle about authority and predestination that has survived the theological palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean.
Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who was, at this stage, an unimportant figure. Although he played a sporadic role in the torment of Job, or in the temptation of Christ in the desert, Satan was not a mythical force before the bestiary of Revelations, and the rebellious Lucifer was some other angel until Milton came along. The idea of a great battle between light and the forces of darkness did not get going until early Christian times, possibly because this small, persecuted sect needed to find a great spiritual enemy against which to pit themselves. The creature in Genesis was just a snake, and though he was crafty, he didn’t seduce, nor did he ‘tempt’ Eve – this last term means ‘to test’ and is used only once in Genesis, when God tests Abraham, requiring the sacrifice of his son Isaac. So Eve did not tempt Adam, either, nor was he seduced by her nakedness. There is, in fact, very little sex in the story. Our readings of it are all subtext, all interpretation, all error. (...)
The story of Adam and Eve (...) is an invitation to childhood curiosity. The question of whether they had belly buttons has occupied both great minds and small. They are not just naked: their story is about nakedness and the idea, puzzling to an infant, that we should hide our bodies from view. Whether they had sex in the garden and, if so, what was it like – these were proper theological concerns. In fact their story is also about curiosity, and it does not end well. Almost before we know what the question is, we have received a catastrophic sequence of answers: shame, exile, suffering, death itself. When, ‘Because I say so’ fails to work, God must, like an Irish mother, resort to the fully tragic: ‘Because all men must die.’ So now you know. No wonder we try to get back to the moment before the question started to form. We try to imagine what it might be like to live without the knowledge that we are naked, and what that nakedness implies.
‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation. As for ‘no shame’, Jerome in his translation into the Vulgate Latin uses ‘et non erubescebant’ implying that Adam and Eve did not blush – and this is sweet, for Jerome. It suggests a moment of virginal self-consciousness, full of possibility. It also, perhaps, reflects Jerome’s skill as a linguist. The original word in Hebrew, bosh, comes from a primitive root ‘to pale’, and is here used reflexively – ‘and they were not ashamed before one another.’ In the rest of the Old Testament, bosh is used in contexts that involve feeling confounded or disgraced, but it is rarely linked to ideas of impurity and abomination (when it comes to sex, the Old Testament is mostly worried about marrying out). Other Latin translations settled on the stronger pudere, a term for shame which conveys bashfulness, as well as a sense of decency. Pudor contains the idea of being caught out, but it also had social and ethical implications. It was, for the Romans, a manly difficulty and not something a slave could experience. A woman’s honour was usually limited to sexual respectability, and this was referred to by the more limited form pudicitia. The concept conveyed by the word pudor suffered a narrowing of meaning over time, becoming more sexualised and specific. By the 17th century the root had yielded ‘pudenda’, meaning ‘genitals’, usually female. This is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck.
The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a term in popular psychology for the unbearable feelings of worthlessness that flood the infant when abandoned or alone. Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom, merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had been found out, but because they realised their fragility and insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal ones. (...)
Augustine’s ideal of voluntary desire is contradictory in a way that is hard to describe. It begs the question of where desire, or more properly arousal, comes from, and how it begins. What would sex be like with no sense of taboo? One answer is that sex without shame sounds a lot like sex, another is that sex without shame would be pretty dull stuff. A third might be that sex moves us through a series of hugely interesting, transgressive propositions to a less shame-bound place; the happier Eden of conjugal bliss.
According to Augustine, our pure affections become disobedient because wounded by the Fall. The uncontrolled or spontaneous nature of desire was both proof of, and the penalty for, Adam and Eve’s sin. The fact that mankind was subject to its vagaries was a sign that this sin did not die with them, but ran through us still, like three big letters through a stick of rock. The problem of concupiscence was also spiritual, but it lapsed repeatedly into the libidinal, partly because of the method of transmission – babies were made bad by the pleasure that made babies. This highly contagious idea became so central to Christian thought that it is worth noting the anxiety about performance and arousal that underlies it. This was not just a Catholic position, or a Catholic problem. Luther and Calvin were both proponents of original sin, and in 1563, the founding articles of the Church of England stated that it was ‘the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man’, and the resulting lust is ‘an infection of nature’.
It is a long way from talk of infection to the benign modern Anglican view that the story of Adam and Eve is about free will and the choices that face us all in our daily lives. There is a long humanist tradition in which Adam and Eve were made better by the Fall, not worse; that this was God’s plan all along. Without Adam there can be no redemption in Christ. For fundamentalist churches, this is not just a metaphor, the story of the Fall has to be as true as that of the Resurrection, and as historical. In 2017 a Gallup poll found that 38 per cent of Americans believe that humans were created, by God, in their present form, within the last ten thousand years. The Catholic Church agrees, a little surprisingly, not because salvation is real, or transubstantiation is by definition real, but because of the doctrine of original sin. According to the Catechism, Genesis 3 ‘uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man’. (...)
Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.
It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal. Instead it was, for centuries, taken literally. It was her fault. Woman was to blame for the fact that mankind must toil, suffer and die. Of course she was. Misogyny was also a moral position, it was seen as natural instead of a disordered point of view. Woman, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall.
To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a child: a toddler who blames his sister, or his shoe, or his own foot, perhaps, because to be less than perfect is unbearable. And, besides, God is very big now.
The whole thing was a trap, a plot, a conundrum about free will. It seems people only believe the story in order to point out how unfair it is. This is the way Adam and Eve played out on Twitter today: ‘God may have wanted to keep Adam and Eve innocent,’ says a woman called Jamie, a Trump-hating conservative from Tennessee. ‘But he still gave them free will which is why Eve ate the shit outta that apple, and her nakedness got Adam to agree.’ Meanwhile in Johannesburg a young man asks, ‘Is it ever considered that it wasn’t the woman’s fault, that it was the serpent, the devil, who coerced them?’ and his online friend Victoria weighs in with: ‘Didn’t he already know they’d eat the fruit anyway?’
The questions raised are familiar for being so ancient, but because they come from random believers, it is easier to see how entangled people become in their own riddles about authority. They don’t have to believe in this God, who is so unfair, but they do anyway. The wound of his omniscience is deeply felt. Adam and Eve were stooges, the story was over before it began, it swallows its own tail. There is some finger-wagging about disobedience, but also a fretfulness about the authority of the text: ‘If God said to Adam and Eve, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” why didn’t they die that day?’ Meanwhile, Nathan, Trump supporter and Mormon, moves towards Milton’s humanism when he says: ‘Has anyone ever had the thought that Adam and Eve would never have had children in the Garden of Eden and Eve figured this out first by her conversation with the “serpent”. And that all of this was part of God’s plan for us. Eve was one of the most brave people ever to have lived.’
The story of the Fall is one of the most enduring stories we have, and it is never fair. You could use it as a template for a certain kind of novel: put a choice in there, tip the balance, make the consequences so disproportionate we doubt our sense of cause and effect, make them suffer, make them into better human beings. Visually, the narrative is brilliantly successful, for being so easy to hold within a single frame. There is nothing static about the way the viewer sees an image of the first couple considering apples. It is a moment of great tension, and they are wearing no clothes. So, to the rules for writing a successful fiction, we might add, pretend that it is not about sex, make the world symbolic, expand the small asymmetries. Here are two human beings who are slightly, but perhaps disastrously, anatomically different. She likes something long, he likes something round – what could possibly go wrong?
The story is a riddle about authority and predestination that has survived the theological palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean.Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who was, at this stage, an unimportant figure. Although he played a sporadic role in the torment of Job, or in the temptation of Christ in the desert, Satan was not a mythical force before the bestiary of Revelations, and the rebellious Lucifer was some other angel until Milton came along. The idea of a great battle between light and the forces of darkness did not get going until early Christian times, possibly because this small, persecuted sect needed to find a great spiritual enemy against which to pit themselves. The creature in Genesis was just a snake, and though he was crafty, he didn’t seduce, nor did he ‘tempt’ Eve – this last term means ‘to test’ and is used only once in Genesis, when God tests Abraham, requiring the sacrifice of his son Isaac. So Eve did not tempt Adam, either, nor was he seduced by her nakedness. There is, in fact, very little sex in the story. Our readings of it are all subtext, all interpretation, all error. (...)
The story of Adam and Eve (...) is an invitation to childhood curiosity. The question of whether they had belly buttons has occupied both great minds and small. They are not just naked: their story is about nakedness and the idea, puzzling to an infant, that we should hide our bodies from view. Whether they had sex in the garden and, if so, what was it like – these were proper theological concerns. In fact their story is also about curiosity, and it does not end well. Almost before we know what the question is, we have received a catastrophic sequence of answers: shame, exile, suffering, death itself. When, ‘Because I say so’ fails to work, God must, like an Irish mother, resort to the fully tragic: ‘Because all men must die.’ So now you know. No wonder we try to get back to the moment before the question started to form. We try to imagine what it might be like to live without the knowledge that we are naked, and what that nakedness implies.
‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation. As for ‘no shame’, Jerome in his translation into the Vulgate Latin uses ‘et non erubescebant’ implying that Adam and Eve did not blush – and this is sweet, for Jerome. It suggests a moment of virginal self-consciousness, full of possibility. It also, perhaps, reflects Jerome’s skill as a linguist. The original word in Hebrew, bosh, comes from a primitive root ‘to pale’, and is here used reflexively – ‘and they were not ashamed before one another.’ In the rest of the Old Testament, bosh is used in contexts that involve feeling confounded or disgraced, but it is rarely linked to ideas of impurity and abomination (when it comes to sex, the Old Testament is mostly worried about marrying out). Other Latin translations settled on the stronger pudere, a term for shame which conveys bashfulness, as well as a sense of decency. Pudor contains the idea of being caught out, but it also had social and ethical implications. It was, for the Romans, a manly difficulty and not something a slave could experience. A woman’s honour was usually limited to sexual respectability, and this was referred to by the more limited form pudicitia. The concept conveyed by the word pudor suffered a narrowing of meaning over time, becoming more sexualised and specific. By the 17th century the root had yielded ‘pudenda’, meaning ‘genitals’, usually female. This is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck.
The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a term in popular psychology for the unbearable feelings of worthlessness that flood the infant when abandoned or alone. Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom, merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had been found out, but because they realised their fragility and insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal ones. (...)
Augustine’s ideal of voluntary desire is contradictory in a way that is hard to describe. It begs the question of where desire, or more properly arousal, comes from, and how it begins. What would sex be like with no sense of taboo? One answer is that sex without shame sounds a lot like sex, another is that sex without shame would be pretty dull stuff. A third might be that sex moves us through a series of hugely interesting, transgressive propositions to a less shame-bound place; the happier Eden of conjugal bliss.
According to Augustine, our pure affections become disobedient because wounded by the Fall. The uncontrolled or spontaneous nature of desire was both proof of, and the penalty for, Adam and Eve’s sin. The fact that mankind was subject to its vagaries was a sign that this sin did not die with them, but ran through us still, like three big letters through a stick of rock. The problem of concupiscence was also spiritual, but it lapsed repeatedly into the libidinal, partly because of the method of transmission – babies were made bad by the pleasure that made babies. This highly contagious idea became so central to Christian thought that it is worth noting the anxiety about performance and arousal that underlies it. This was not just a Catholic position, or a Catholic problem. Luther and Calvin were both proponents of original sin, and in 1563, the founding articles of the Church of England stated that it was ‘the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man’, and the resulting lust is ‘an infection of nature’.
It is a long way from talk of infection to the benign modern Anglican view that the story of Adam and Eve is about free will and the choices that face us all in our daily lives. There is a long humanist tradition in which Adam and Eve were made better by the Fall, not worse; that this was God’s plan all along. Without Adam there can be no redemption in Christ. For fundamentalist churches, this is not just a metaphor, the story of the Fall has to be as true as that of the Resurrection, and as historical. In 2017 a Gallup poll found that 38 per cent of Americans believe that humans were created, by God, in their present form, within the last ten thousand years. The Catholic Church agrees, a little surprisingly, not because salvation is real, or transubstantiation is by definition real, but because of the doctrine of original sin. According to the Catechism, Genesis 3 ‘uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man’. (...)
Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.
It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal. Instead it was, for centuries, taken literally. It was her fault. Woman was to blame for the fact that mankind must toil, suffer and die. Of course she was. Misogyny was also a moral position, it was seen as natural instead of a disordered point of view. Woman, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall.
To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a child: a toddler who blames his sister, or his shoe, or his own foot, perhaps, because to be less than perfect is unbearable. And, besides, God is very big now.
The whole thing was a trap, a plot, a conundrum about free will. It seems people only believe the story in order to point out how unfair it is. This is the way Adam and Eve played out on Twitter today: ‘God may have wanted to keep Adam and Eve innocent,’ says a woman called Jamie, a Trump-hating conservative from Tennessee. ‘But he still gave them free will which is why Eve ate the shit outta that apple, and her nakedness got Adam to agree.’ Meanwhile in Johannesburg a young man asks, ‘Is it ever considered that it wasn’t the woman’s fault, that it was the serpent, the devil, who coerced them?’ and his online friend Victoria weighs in with: ‘Didn’t he already know they’d eat the fruit anyway?’
The questions raised are familiar for being so ancient, but because they come from random believers, it is easier to see how entangled people become in their own riddles about authority. They don’t have to believe in this God, who is so unfair, but they do anyway. The wound of his omniscience is deeply felt. Adam and Eve were stooges, the story was over before it began, it swallows its own tail. There is some finger-wagging about disobedience, but also a fretfulness about the authority of the text: ‘If God said to Adam and Eve, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” why didn’t they die that day?’ Meanwhile, Nathan, Trump supporter and Mormon, moves towards Milton’s humanism when he says: ‘Has anyone ever had the thought that Adam and Eve would never have had children in the Garden of Eden and Eve figured this out first by her conversation with the “serpent”. And that all of this was part of God’s plan for us. Eve was one of the most brave people ever to have lived.’
by Anne Enright, LRB | Read more:
Image: detail from Hugo van der Goes, The Fall via:
