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This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

On the face of things, writes Stephen Greenblatt with refreshing candour in his account of the Adam and Eve myth, the story at the heart of his book is insane. That the fruit-based misdemeanour of a distant ancestor might have doomed humanity to inescapable suffering is a theory difficult to credit. But, however preposterous the tale, Greenblatt rightly asserts that we have been “made in its image”.

Part of the explanation for Adam and Eve’s impact, though Greenblatt doesn’t say as much, is that the story’s authorship is entirely unknown. “Outside the charmed circle of faith,” he writes, “the belief that Moses himself wrote down the creation story told in the first chapters of Genesis is no longer credible.” This has provided the tale’s countless interpreters with a blank canvas onto which to project their own ideas. As God is said to have made man in his own image, so too numerous thinkers and theologians have made the Adam and Eve myth in theirs.

The man and woman integral to the history of our civilisation might have been relegated to the status of simple allegory, had a prolific Christian theologian had his way. Origen, born in Alexandria in 184 CE, argued that Adam and Eve ought to be taken as symbolic. It didn’t help to think of the prototypical man and woman as real human beings; we must instead, proposed Origen, treat them as fables. As Greenblatt explains, it was largely thanks to the influence of one philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, that this free-thinking interpretation was replaced by a more literal reading of the story.

Augustine perfectly encapsulates two regular and unceasingly remarkable features in Greenblatt’s book: the extent to which evidence tends to be considered irrelevant by those trying to comprehend the story of Adam and Eve, and the degree to which the tale could come to haunt a man for as long as he lived. Again and again, those grappling with the meaning of the third chapter of Genesis demonstrate a line of thinking crucial in the story’s preservation: it is preferable to believe the story wholesale than to resign oneself to the idea that God might be “indifferent or absent”.

Augustine’s argument was that the events in Genesis must be taken literally. Eve, after all, “assumed disastrously that God’s words were not to be taken literally”, and was exiled as a result. It is difficult not to read pity in Greenblatt’s coverage of Augustine, an insecure man who was strangely preoccupied with the mechanics of Adam and Eve’s lovemaking and spent 15 years on a book entitled The Literal Meaning of Genesis despite seeming to understand that a more logical approach would be to allow events to be understood allegorically.

As with Origen, radical thinkers with interesting interpretations flash past the reader, sometimes so quickly that one wishes to know more about their vision. Both Pelagius, a British-born monk contemporaneous with Augustine, and the 17th-century nun Arcangela Tarabotti, ­deserve more pages to accommodate the fresh air their novel interpretations breathe into the book. A little more space is devoted to the tragic case of Isaac La Peyrere, a French theologian who had his books burned and a recantation forced out of him after he argued that the world was populated by men before Adam. It is infinitely more forgiveable, goes received wisdom, to posit that a devious snake spoke to a woman than it is to imagine that Adam was not the very first man on Earth.

Figures such as these are crowded out, of course, by the thinkers whose impact has been objectively more significant: the Augustines and the John Miltons. Greenblatt manages to both provide a gripping and comprehensive account of the people who definitively shaped our perception of the Adam and Eve story, and engender a curiosity to read more about those peripheral thinkers whose voices were silenced by orthodoxy.