Adam: the Genesis of Consciousness

✲ CHAPTER ONE ✲ Adam: The Genesis of Consciousness THE BIBLICAL FALL WHO among us has not been moved bythe familiar tale? After God has accomplished the immense labor of creating heaven and earth, he amuses himself bymodeling from the moist dust of the ground—almost playfully, it appears—a figure into which, through divine CPR, he breathes life. What now to do with this weakling on an earth still raw and inhospitable from the Creation? As a home for his “Adam,” whose name in He- brew is the generic word for “man,” he plants a garden in Eden, a horticulturalist’s delight in which thrives everyvarietyof tree both pleasing and useful: among them in the center the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He informs his Adam-Man that he mayeat freelyfrom everytree of the garden except, on pain of death, the Tree of Knowledge. Then, to provide companionship for his new earthling, the divine potter shapes from the same clay, in sportive experimenta- tion, various beasts of the field and birds of the air. Although the man asserts his authoritybygiving names to all the cattle and birds, he finds among them no helpmate suitable for himself. (According to ancient tradition, Adam’s first and unsatis- factorysexual intercourse was with the animals.) 1 So God anes- thetizes the man and removes one of his ribs, from which he clones a being similar to him. For an unspecified period—some rabbinical readings grant them no more than that first day— the two protoplasts live happily, and still in nameless generic universality, in their nature preserve, neither aware nor ashamed of their nakedness. 9 ANCIENT THEMES But the serpent, wilier than anyof the other creatures that God made and with no apparent motivation other than mis- chief, approaches the woman to ask whyGod has forbidden her and her mate to eat the fruit of the tree in the center of the garden, or even to touch it. “You will not die,” the serpent as- sures her. Rather, if theyshould taste it, their eyeswould be opened, and theywould be “like God[s], knowing good and evil.” Since the tree’s fruit looks both nutritious and delicious (the biblical phrase anticipates the Horatian dulce et utile) and is reputed, moreover, to make wise, she samples a piece and takes some to her husband, who also partakes. Then their eyes are opened and, becoming suddenlyaware of their nakedness, theycover themselves with makeshift aprons of fig leaves. When next theyhear God strolling in the garden in the cool of evening, theyhide among the trees. But God summons them, and theyconfess that theyconcealed themselves out of shame for their nakedness. At this point the whole story, along with its sad but psychologically plausible finger-pointing, comes out. The man’s eyes were opened to his nakedness because, at the woman’s bidding, he consumed some of the forbidden fruit. The woman, in turn, pleads that she was just following orders: the serpent beguiled her. Thereupon God, in a most unholy burst of anger, curses everything in sight: the serpent is condemned to crawl forevermore on his belly, to eat dust, and to be trodden on byhumankind; the woman, to feel sexual desire for her husband, to whom she shall be subservient, and yet to suffer great pain in bearing the children that result from their union; the earth, to bring forth thorns and thistles; and the man, hitherto the beneficiaryof a lavish garden, to toil labori- ouslyfor his sustenance in the sweat of his brow. The man and his mate, finally, are condemned to eventual death and a return to the dust of the earth from which theywere taken. At this point, when theyhave been cast through sin from generic universalityinto human individuality,Adam names the woman Eve, therebyaffirming his dominion over her in the same manner as previouslyover the animals. As a last gesture 10 ADAM of goodwill—he angers easilybut does not hold grudges—God clothes Adam and Eve in garments of animal skin and then ex- pels them from the garden into the arid wilderness beyond, lest theyeat from the Tree of Life and thus achieve the immortality that he has prohibited. To ensure their compliance, he posts cherubim with flaming swords at the entrance to block the way back into the garden and to the Tree of Life. THIS so-called second narrative of the Creation with the myth of Adam and Eve, the Temptation, and the Fall (Gen. 2.4–3.24) is one of the most familiar stories of Western culture. Saint Paul established a powerful tradition byidentifyingAdam as the “type” of natural man who was to be redeemed by the Second Adam, the “antitype” yet to come, in the person of Jesus Christ (Rom. 5.14). Just as sin and death entered the world through Adam’s deed, so “one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquit- tal and life for all men” (Rom. 5.18). Earlier he had preached to the Corinthians that death came byone man and resurrec- tion byanother. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15.22). This “figural” analogy, which juxtaposes the Fall and the Redemption, Adam and Christ, and more generallythe Old Testament and the New, is evident as earlyas the fourth centuryin images in Christian catacombs and on sarcophagi,2 and it also informs those curious and closelyrelated apocryphalbooks known as the Apocalypse of Moses and the Vita Adae et Evae.3 It is not conclusivelyunderstood whether these Greek and Latin works, both of which were prob- ablywritten sometime between the first and the third century of the common era and translated into manylanguages, go back to a Hebrew original or to Judeo-Greek or Aramaic sources. Both works, which profoundlyinfluenced medieval views of Adam and Eve, recount the life of the first couple after their exile from Paradise and feature a quest for the Oil of Mercyto relieve Adam’s suffering, followed byAdam’s death, pardon, and burial. While both works end with Eve’s death and burial, and although the Apocalypse includes a testament in which Eve 11 ANCIENT THEMES warns her children against sin bytelling them about the Temp- tation and Fall, the Vita explicitlyexonerates Adam and blames Eve for the expulsion from Paradise. The familiar storywas rehearsed again and again in such pop- ular medieval texts as the ninth-centuryOld Saxon Genesis, the tenth-centuryOld English Genesis B, the eleventh-centuryMid- dle High German Viennese Genesis, and the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman mystery play Jeu d’Adam. At the same time, it provided images for scores of illuminated manuscripts as well as the bronze doors, reliefs, mosaics, statues, and stained-glass windows of medieval ecclesiastical buildings.4 The tale of Adam and Eve was matched in popularityonlybyscenes from the lives of Jesus and the Madonna. Lucas Cranach’s well-known paint- ings of the Temptation were paralleled in Reformation Ger- manybysuch dramatic representations as Hans Sachs’s Tragedy of the Creation, Fall, and Adam’s Expulsion from Paradise (Tragedia von scho¨pfung, fal und außtreibung Ade auß dem paradeyß, 1548). The age of the baroque in Catholic Spain as well as the Protes- tant Netherlands and England—from Lope de Vega’s La crea- cioń del mundo y primera culpa del hombre (1618–1624) to Joost van den Vondel’s Adam in ballingschap (Adam in exile, 1664) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)—was obsessed bythe subject. The fascination of the theme continued into the music, art, and poetryof the nineteenth century,and its popularityin the tradi- tional genres was paralleled in folk art byits use on tiles, baking forms, and wedding chairs, and in songs and riddles (“Whydid Adam bite the apple?” “Because he had no knife”).5 The myth of Adam and Eve provides without doubt several of the shaping images of the Western consciousness, which have demonstrated their continuing popularityin such twentieth-centurymedia as advertisements and New Yorker cartoons. FOR that reason it is all the more astonishing that, after their walk-on performance in the earlychapters of Genesis (2–5), Adam and Eve do not reappear in the Old Testament. Adam is mentioned once byname at the beginning of the genealogyin 12 ADAM Chronicles (1.1). And Ezekiel (28.11–19), without naming him, laments the Son of Man who once walked blameless in Eden, the garden of God, until iniquitywas found in him and he was cast out as profane. But the storyitself apparentlyheld no inter- est for the judges, the kings, the chroniclers, the psalmists, or the prophets. Nor, apparently, did Jesus know, or at least care about, Adam, who is mentioned onlytwice in the Gospels— once as one of the two unnamed protoplasts (Matt. 19.4–6) and once byname as the terminus a quo for the genealogyin Luke (3.38). Not the Gospels but the Pauline letters sound the key- note for the Christian obsession with the Adamic myth, and the earlyChristian theologians, eager to demonstrate the historical continuitybetween their upstart religion and the traditions of the Hebrew Bible, worked out the typological-figural analogies in elaborate detail. The myth of the Fall, one might almost con- clude, became important onlyin light of the mythof Redemp- tion.6 Thus Milton exhorts his HeavenlyMuse to sing Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat...

Load more