Adam and Eve story still resonates in its simplicity, says professor
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From John Milton's Paradise Lost to the Sistine Chapel to an appearance in The Simpsons, the story of Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden has been a fixture throughout the history of Western art.
You hear this story as a little child, and you never forget it.- Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
The tale makes up only two short chapters of the Book of Genesis — but its influence has been outsized.
"The fact that there isn't a lot of detail must be one of the things that makes it have the strange long life that it's had," Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, tells The Current's Friday host Megan Williams.
"You hear this story as a little child and you never forget it … It explains everything, or professes to explain everything: species dominance, love, sex, desire, the need to work, the fact that women suffer pain in childbirth, male domination, the fear of snakes, the fact that we die. Everything seems to be jammed into this tiny space."
But the simplicity of the story has left it open to arguments over interpretation that have boiled up through the centuries. And that includes the debate over whether it is a tale to be taken literally — or as metaphor.
"Early commentaries on the story make it clear that it was possible to think it was literally true, or possible to think it wasn't literally true, as you wished, in the way that Greeks took their myths," says the Harvard University professor.
Every generation that condemns us to be sinners, that's a notion that really originates with Augustine- Stephen Greenblatt
It was St. Augustine, in the 4th century AD, who came down firmly on the side of a literal interpretation. He also introduced the concept of "original sin," which is not mentioned in Genesis.
"The notion that we had this original act in the origins of human life that was then transmitted — and in Augustine's case it's a sexually transmitted disease — through every generation that condemns us to be sinners, that's a notion that really originates with Augustine," says Greenblatt.
Some common interpretations of the story that blamed Eve for the fall of humanity lead to centuries of misogyny that we haven't quite escaped to this day, according to Greenblatt.
But there were always dissenters —including Arcangela Tarabotti, a nun in 17th century Venice who was cloistered against her will.
"She began to brood about why her father had done this to her," says Greenblatt.
"And she traced it all the way back to a misogynistic interpretation of the very first humans. She planted a flag, with extraordinary elegance and ferocity, that said this whole thing is a lie, is a twisted excuse to dominate women and force them to do thing that they shouldn't be forced to do."
Greenblatt himself reads the story of Adam and Eve as a myth — but that doesn't make it any less powerful.
"It's good to think with," says Greenblatt. "It's difficult to think about the things that most matter without the myth that we have lived with for so long."
This segment was produced by The Current's Karin Marley.