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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us
Stephen Greenblatt
Norton (2017). 419 pp.
As with many great books, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve has its origins in the personal biography of its author. Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, begins with the shattering of his own naïve childhood faith, when, looking up during the priestly benediction at the end of the Sabbath service (in direct violation of his parents’ orders), he encounters not God passing over his head (and thus certain death), but a host of other distracted worshippers, eyes wide open. Greenblatt never returns to this story, but it functions as a parable for what follows: what do we do with a story—the Genesis account of human origins in the persons of Adam and Eve—that for Greenblatt is so obviously fictional, and yet has “proved so durable, so widespread, and so insistently, hauntingly real” (p. 3)?
Until the final pages, one must read between the lines for an answer. That is because The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is not, firstly, a constructive response to that question, but rather the “life history” of the Adam andEve story itself (p. 2). It shows, in other words, via an elegant, expansive, and charitably-written reception history, just how pervasively the story of Adam and Eve has shaped Western civilization. Greenblatt takes the reader from ancient Babylon—the exilic context in which the Hebrews’ origin story took its final shape (in competition with, e.g., the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Atrahasis)—to Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man and the loss of Adam and Eve as real figures of the remembered past. In between we meet the earliest Jewish and Christian attempts to backfill the terse Genesis account (Apocalypse of Adam, Life of Adam and Eve, Testimony of Truth, etc.); the philosophical and allegorical exegesis of Philo and Origen; devastatingly misogynistic readings of the story; the pervasive focus on Adam and Eve’s shame in Medieval art; their striking realism in Renaissance art; and early cracks in the story resulting from the discoveries of explorers and scientists—cracks exploited by the likes of Bayle, Voltaire, and Twain (et al.), so that what we have by the end of the nineteenth century is the “mortality of a narrative” (p. 251). Along the way, we meet a host of fascinating characters and works of art and see Adam and Eve’s effect on theology, politics, art, literature, science, and sex.
The central roles in Greenblatt’s tale, however, belong to Augustine, Milton, and Albrecht Dürer. And here we are some way back toward a reading-between-the-lines answer to the initial question above. For the above figures are where, on Greenblatt’s telling, things go (ironically) wrong. It is precisely the “making real” of Adam and Eve—the literalism of Augustine’s theological project, the photographic quality (and wide distribution) of Dürer’s artistic project, and the vivid realism of Milton’s literary project—that creates the edifice which can only but crumble in the Enlightenment. Thus, the irony: “Thinking of Adam and Eve as real . . . had an unintended and devastating consequence: the story began to die . . . 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” (p. 250). To live in the modern world as Christian, Jew, Muslim, or none is to feel the force of Greenblatt’s argument. What, then, shall we do?
Greenblatt does not make the reader read between the lines forever. He is explicit at the end of the work. Rightly returned to the “sphere of the imagination”—that is, to myth—we treat the story as what it is, great literature, a “powerful, even indispensable, way to think” about what it means to be human in the world (p. 284). Far better for Adam and Eve to be an allegory with the ongoing power to shape us than to make them real and consign them to irrelevance. There is a compelling power to this logic, and what makes it more palatable still is that The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is not, emphatically not, a self-congratulatory paean to the Enlightenment, and its “fearless” (scientific) debunking of an ancient (religious) myth. Nor, again, is it a call to leave the story of Adam and Eve behind: “Our existence would be diminished without them” (p. 284). In fact, the scientific consensus on human origins engenders an “unsettling absence of a plot” and lacks “an aesthetic shape” (p. 282). That it is true, Greenblatt writes in a wonderful line, “does not in itself make it good to think with” (p. 281). Indeed—the effects of “thinking with it” were manifestly not good for victims of Nazi eugenics. Humans live by stories, and Greenblatt, for one, finds the Adam and Eve story peculiarly satisfying, and commends it as having much still to offer—so long as we return it to its (pre-Augustinian) allegorical beginnings, and Adam and Eve’s life pulses not with flesh and blood, but with the “magical reality” that is literature (pp. 284, 299).
For the vast majority of Greenblatt’s readers, this may very well be the necessary move. And one can be thankful that a generation of Harvard students are meeting Adam and Eve at all—as literary figures or otherwise— and with a charitable guide at that. The question, of course, is whether a purely allegorical Adam and Eve can generate the sort of cultural capital that Greenblatt so obviously admires in figures like Dürer and Milton. To put it otherwise, it is not clear to me that Greenblatt’s preferred reading method could actually produce the sort of aesthetic works he loves, or that the Western civilization to which he holds out Adam and Eve afresh would be what it is apart from the reading method he critiques. It is Dürer, after all, who produces the Fall of Man, and Milton who writes Paradise Lost. The loss of such great cultural goods may just be the price (of knowledge) we have to pay post-Darwin, but if that is the case, give me (second) naïveté any day of the week. I’ll keep my head down during the priestly benediction, and let God pass by overhead—a richer, deeper, and more beautiful life that way lies.
Benj Petroelje (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the Pastor of 14th Street Christian Reformed Church in Holland, MI. Benj is a member of the St. Peter Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
