Adam and Eve

Adam was still solitary in the vastness of his empire. He took solemn possession of it by imposing names upon the animals, his slaves: upon a divine command, they passed in his presence and received, each according to its species, names suited to their nature. But none of them was like man, nor capable of hearing his communications and responding to them. Something was therefore missing from the fullness of Adam's life, because he was effectively not organized to be alone, and his thought and his heart needed the fraternal sympathies of another thought and another heart; then, one might perhaps do without a friend in misfortune, but never in felicity.

And the Lord said: "It is not good that man should be alone; let us make him a helper who resembles him." However, He did not create the woman as He had created the man: He formed her not from coarse silt, but from clay already purified and ennobled. He sent a deep sleep upon Adam, and from that hard casing which covers and protects the heart, He detached a bone, and made of it the woman: for He is the author of life as He is the master of death; matter softens between His fingers, and nothingness itself trembles and comes to life under His breath. Thus, to mark no doubt that the woman would be the honored companion, and not the slave or the mistress of man, the Creator formed her from a bone taken from that region of the body where the organ of generous sentiments palpitates, a sort of sanctuary inhabited by all that man cherishes and respects, and inaccessible to all that man hates and despises.

When God had thus built the rib of Adam into a woman, as Scripture speaks, in order to paint, by this grand and severe style, all that there is in woman of admirable proportions and magnificent order; when He had finished the new creature equally made in His image and likeness, He brought her before Adam. She was pure and graceful, and her innocence equaled her beauty: for no disorder had yet altered the works of God, nor converted their spotless simplicity into peril. Adam emerged from the ecstatic sleep where his soul, touched by the light from above, had contemplated what God was doing; he recognized himself in the woman; future times unfolded before his eyes, and he pronounced these words full of knowledge and mystery: "This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh; she shall be called by a name that marks man because she is taken from man." — "Therefore," adds the Lord, whether by Himself or by the mouth of Adam, "a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh." It is in this way that the union of man and woman was contracted and established, by the inspiration and in the presence of God, a sweet community of thoughts and sentiments, a reflection of the eternal union that rejoices the divine persons, a prophetic image of the august nuptials that the Word was one day to celebrate with human nature. Marriage thus received, from the beginning, a character of unity and indissolubility by which it escapes the dark appreciation of the senses and of selfishness, and reaches the merit of a religious act and the sublimity of a tender and delicate devotion. By stripping it of this double seal which consecrates and strengthens it, pagan peoples had lowered it in legislation and debased it in morals: the Christian religion has restored to it its primitive conditions of purity and glory.

After blessing the man and the woman, God communicated to them fertility, a glorious emanation of His creative virtue, and constituted it, in a way, the dowry of the first marriage: "Increase," He said, "and multiply: fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the animals that move upon the earth." Then He assigned to them for food the herbs and the fruits of the trees. By sticking to the terms of the biblical account, and especially by comparing them with the permission that God gives to Noah after the flood to eat the flesh of animals, one would have to think that, in the beginning, the human race lived only on vegetables, plants, roots, seeds, and fruits. This does not mean that it was not organized to also live on flesh; it only supposes that beings are not required to exercise all their faculties everywhere and always. The happy fertility of the earth, the flavor of plants and fruits, the robust constitution of the first men, perhaps the scarcity of animals and the necessity of their reproduction, all explain and motivate this abstinence imposed on the ancient ages. No one is unaware, moreover, that peoples have kept the memory of a simple and frugal life, which they place at the origin of the world; they have sung in beautiful verses of the sobriety of our ancestors, who, eating only to appease hunger, were content with food without preparation, which rich and submissive nature spread of its own accord at their feet.

God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good. The different beings not crossing the natural limits of their faculties, balance and harmony reigned in creation. The whole of nature seemed to smile at man; the sky was serene, work without fatigue; the animals bowed docilely to the order of their king; as the soul obeyed God with fidelity, it exercised an easy empire over the body, its companion and its subject: everything moved in the plan traced by the wisdom of the Creator. This peace did not last long, but it left indelible traces in the imagination of peoples: like outcasts recalling in exile the lost joys of the homeland, all have given regrets and dedicated songs to this age of innocence and bliss that they called the golden age. Only sensualism made them forget or misunderstand the greatest marks of order that God had imprinted on His work: they depict hardly anything but the mild and pleasant seasons, the peaceful animals under the hand of man, the earth producing everything without cultivation; some add to this picture certain traits of the moral beauty that honored the nascent world, such as the simplicity of meals, the moderation of desires, and that equity of which they complain of finding only a remnant in the customs of pastoral life. But what is most serious escapes them; the Bible, on the contrary, grasping an astonishing character of the current disorder, reveals to us the vanished order by the most expressive sign, when it teaches that the human body, clothed in holiness, did not have these shameful insolences: "Both," it says, "were naked, and they were not ashamed." For originally nothing was to lower in confusion the august face of man; modesty, like repentance, is the virtue of a wounded nature that feels itself infirm, and not the privilege of an innocent and invulnerable nature; modesty is like a veil that the soul spreads over its ruins.

Man and woman, created in the perfect age of life, rich in the gifts of nature and grace, were transported into Eden, or the earthly paradise. One is not settled on the true location of this enchanted garden: writers are divided in opinion, and they place it, some in Armenia, others in Palest ine, Éden Original place of residence of Adam and Eve. others finally in the plains of Chaldea. What remains certain is that it must be placed in Asia, in those regions where, on ruins heaped up by wars and centuries, and despite the changes that have degraded the globe and altered the seasons, the traveler still admires examples of astonishing fertility, wonderful sites, and a pure sky full of those warm and brilliant hues of which our climate offers, so to speak, only a cold and pale reflection. Eden had been planted from the beginning; there were all kinds of trees beautiful to the sight, and all kinds of fruits pleasant to the taste; an abundant spring watered it and divided into four rivers. The greenery, the flowers and the perfumes, the purity of the light and the heavens that refreshed the senses of man, were like the image of the superior joys in which his soul lived. He knew neither disobedience nor misfortune yet; guardian of the earthly paradise, he worked there for relaxation and not by painful exercise. Alas! the garden and the bliss have disappeared: of the one, there remain some vestiges in the great and rich nature of the Orient; of the other, we have kept a melancholy memory that nothing could appease or abolish.

Eden had two trees remarkable above all others: it was the tree of life, so named because it was to communicate immortality to man; for God attaches His benefits to what He wills, the noblest things to the humblest conditions; it was also the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was perhaps called so only because by touching it, contrary to the divine prohibition, man knew all the good he had just lost and all the evil he had just brought upon himself. Now, God said to man: "You shall eat of all the fruits of this garden; but do not touch the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil; for, the day you eat of it, you shall die the death." And this precept was also enjoined upon the woman. The blind elements of the material world become what an invincible force makes them and go where it pushes them; but spirits must be governed by laws that they can defy because they are free, but that they are inexcusable to infringe because they can fulfill them. Absolute master, God made a commandment; infinitely wise, He took as the matter of His prescription a sensible object, because of our complex nature; in His goodness, He gave an easy order, life having to be comfortable, if it had not ceased to be innocent.

Freedom therefore made evil possible; something made it seductive: rebellion became visible, armed itself with specious language, and came to assail the inexperienced man. There existed other intelligent and free creatures, but not attached to bodies; God had subjected all these pure spirits to a test, and several had succumbed. Like stars escaped from the force that held them in their orbit and carving out a new path in unknown spaces, they escaped from the hands of God by a sort of frightful flight, and the dream of their independence was converted into the agitation and pain of an inexorable remorse. Deserters of light and love, they fell into darkness, the natural punishment of spirits, and into hatred, the harshest punishment of hearts. From the depths of his misery, one of these fallen angels saw the happiness of man and became jealous of it. He took the figure of the serpent, to slip into the heart he wished to seduce, and to ravage there at their source all those joys whose spectacle was hideous to him. Assuredly he could have wrapped himself in any other figure; but there exist secret relations of analogy between things that are seen and those that are not seen, and it is as a result of this law no doubt and by a providential disposition, that the tempter, instead of presenting himself in the form of some noble or majestic animal, borrowed the form of the serpent; for there is I know not what image of fraud and cowardly perfidy in the manner of this reptile which only advances by crawling and kills as one caresses.

Moved by the evil spirit, the serpent approaches the woman without her being frightened, because animals then held themselves in a natural subjection toward their masters; he speaks to her without her being astonished, because, after all, an animal that struck the air with articulated sounds could not appear an exception when all things, still new and unexplored, were to be deemed equally simple or prodigious. And the serpent said to the woman: "Why has God forbidden you to eat of all the fruits of paradise?" He does not approach Adam at all, for fear of being too easily discovered and repulsed: he dreaded no doubt having to struggle against this circumspect character, jealous of initiative and forewarned by the consciousness of his strength against any foreign influence. He addresses himself to the woman, a delicate and lively organization that is set in motion at the slightest shock, at the lightest breath; a soul inclined to expansive communications and to trust because it needs support; an intelligence enlightened by a heart, and clothed by the same with all the charm, but also with all the mobility of sentiment.

Instead of using her power over the serpent to cover his interrogation with silence and contempt, instead of avenging the outrage done to the legislator, the woman stepped out of her dignity as queen and argued: "We eat," she said, "of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise; but, for the tree that is in the middle, God has forbidden us to eat of its fruit and to touch it, for fear that we might die." The response was neither generous nor loyal: it expresses fear and not gratitude or love, and it wraps in a form of doubt, "if we might die," the positive threat of the Lord: "You shall die the death."

Thus the tempter was encouraged: "Not at all," he replied, "you shall not die; God knows, on the contrary, that on the day you eat of this fruit your eyes will open, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." One could not lie with more assurance. Between two contradictory words of which one belongs to God and the other to the serpent, the choice was easy; but the first was full of terror and imposed shackles, and the second had agreeable promises and flattered the instincts of independence. Thus evil disguises itself to our eyes under the colors of good; it ingeniously opposes to the yoke of virtue and the gravity of duty the image of a pleasure that resembles liberty and happiness, too similar to those fires that float at night over marshes and attract the traveler to set foot in those abysses.

The woman had inclined her ear with too much complacency toward the serpent; she had poorly defended her heart against the desire and the hope of knowing everything; a beginning of revolt was declaring itself in the region of the intelligence; pride had just passed through it. The tremor extended to the senses, companions and subjects of the soul, as one sees the faces of servants light up with the joy or darken with the sadness that is painted on the face of a respected master; they became seditious in their own way. The woman looked at the forbidden tree; its fruit appeared to her good to eat, beautiful and pleasant to see; it was the final blow dealt to a fidelity already shaken and wavering. The fascinated senses reacted upon the spirit that had not governed them discreetly, and the spirit was vanquished. The woman took the fruit and ate it.

From then on the serpent believes itself more sure of the woman than of itself: it fades away and lets her appear. This nature, just a moment ago so weak to resist, is going to become powerful to conquer; she will strike down the man, whom the father of lies does not dare to try to deceive: for man is supported by a natural pride in his struggle against everything that is strong, and he is betrayed by his heart in his struggle against everything that is soft and frail. Thus Adam was led at first by complacency rather than determined by any reasoning; to sadden by a refusal his only and dear society appeared to him no doubt bitter and cruel; he felt himself yielding, and his softened heart succumbed, dragging the spirit into the fall: the woman gave fruit to her husband, who ate of it like her and obeyed the same attractions of pride and sensuality.

At that instant, the eyes of the guilty were opened, but not to those glorious lights that the serpent had led them to hope for: it was an awakening that stripped away the illusory riches that a dream had brought. Nakedness, until then covered by the simplicity and candor of innocence, became a sort of unbearable burden. The soul ceased to reign as mistress in its empire; something shameful appeared to it in the works of God, and it recognized its degradation in this broken balance. The two guilty ones covered themselves with fig leaves intertwined in the manner of a belt.

Such was the first crime that defiled the earth; in it, all subsequent crimes have their original cause and their type. The fault was committed; justice had to take its course. God came to conduct the trial of our fallen ancestors; a sensible form revealed His presence: the guilty heard in Eden the sound of His walking. It was toward the evening. The man and the woman, who had protected themselves with foliage from their own gaze, withdrew in fear into the midst of the trees of paradise to escape the face of the Lord. But the voice of the Lord reached them: "Adam, where art thou?" There was even more compassion than wrath in this word, as if God had cried out: "Thy flight and thy fears make thy fault known; from what honor thou hast just fallen, and into what ruin thou art cast!" An echo of this merciful and severe voice still resounds today among men, and all those who have done wrong hear it: it is remorse. After the violations of the prescribed order, the ignored duty and the wounded virtue rise up in the conscience like a specter. In vain the soul tries to appease it or flee from it; it pursues it, attaches itself to it and torments it, and, when it retreats into the fullness of a sensual life, as if to defy the domestic specter there, it seizes it even between the arms of pleasure, and sometimes throws it into dark terrors, by this vindictive word: "Where art thou?"

Adam answered: "I heard in paradise the sound of your passing, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself." And God said: "Who told thee that thou wast naked, if thou hast not eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?" The Lord addresses the principal culprit first. Stronger and greater in his origin, Adam became more ungrateful in his disobedience; more will be asked of him who has received more. Adam replied: "The woman whom you gave me to be my companion presented me with the fruit, and I ate of it." He thus wishes to shift the responsibility for the fault back to God, as if God had robbed him of intelligence and liberty by sending him a companion. Then, instead of sparing the shame of a confession to the one he had loved and voluntarily followed into revolt; instead of extending over her the generosity of his repentance, he abandons her with selfishness and oppresses her with the weight of a cowardly accusation.

Perhaps it must be said that one finds more uprightness in the confession of the woman. For, when she had been accused of having led the man into rebellion, God said to her: "Why hast thou done this?" She answered simply: "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." However, her confession is not marked either by that powerful repentance which merits and obtains great pardons. Finally, the judge pronounced the sentence. He said to the serpent: "Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed among all the animals of the earth; thou shalt crawl upon thy belly, and the earth shall be thy food." Thus, what was natural to the serpent was assigned as a memorial of the attempt it had served, and its food, dragged in the dust and mire, recalled its punishment. And God added: "I will put enmity between the woman and thee, between her seed and thine; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt seek to bite her heel." The tempter was therefore struck in himself as well as in the animal he had brought into play; cursed by the human race, instead of receiving from it the honors granted to the good angels; an enemy full of cunning and malice, but crushed by the son of the woman and laid in the dust to which the victory of the incarnate Word has reduced him. And, a singularly remarkable thing, most ancient nations were persuaded that the serpent hid some dark and malevolent spirit; they attributed marvelous faculties to it and rendered it a cult inspired by terror: so durable was the memory of its betrayal and so powerful the curse of God!

The Lord also said to the woman: "I will multiply the anguishes of thy pregnancies; thou shalt bring forth children in pain; thou shalt be under the power of thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." And indeed, pain was attached forever to fertility, and what would have been only the glory and joy of mothers became for them a peril and sometimes a torture. And, contrary to the order first instituted, the woman fell into a state of subjection with regard to the husband, whose gentle superiority soon converted itself and for a long time into a harsh and jealous domination. Nothing equals the despotism and debasement that one half of the human race weighed upon the other, almost everywhere, for forty centuries; we do not dare to express otherwise what the woman was in pagan customs and legislation. Even today she is not raised from this degradation among peoples who have not yet learned from the cult of the cross the respect for weakness; there are only Christian peoples who, by bestowing an affectionate veneration upon the woman, have protected her against her own fragility and against the harsh tyranny of man: under the protection of the customs and laws that the Gospel has caused to flourish in the world, she can practice liberty without usurpation and submission without abasement.

And God then said to the man: "Because thou hast listened to the word of thy wife and hast eaten of the fruit that I had forbidden thee to touch, the earth shall be cursed for thee; thou shalt draw thy food from it only with labor all the days of thy life. It shall produce thorns and thistles for thee; thou shalt eat the herb of the earth; thy bread shall be given to thee by the sweat of thy face, until thou returnest to the earth from which thou art formed; for thou art dust and thou shalt return to dust." Labor with fatigue, humiliation in death, punishment and remedy for the sensuality and pride of our ancestors, such was the portion assured to all the sons of Adam.

Doomed to death by divine sentence and knowing that other men were to come from him, Adam gave his wife the name Eve, which signifies life, because she was to be the mother of all the living. Then both clothed themselves in animal skins, God seconding their intelligence and inspiring the first effort of industry, which came to soften the evils of existence and to imprint upon the most vulgar and indispensable things the character of grace and beauty: a secondary creation where man remakes in the image of his spirit and transfigures matter enslaved to his needs. Finally, God said with a sort of paternal irony: "See, Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; let us therefore take care that he does not reach out his hand to the fruit of life, that he does not eat of it and live forever." And amidst His holy and formidable derisions, He drove the guilty from the garden of delights, and its entrance remained defended by a cherub, an angel of light armed with a flaming sword. It is since that day that life, changed into a dark exile, resembles a painful sleep where pain rocks us, while waiting for death which is the awakening.

However, Eve brought a son into the world, and, as if to console herself for her own mortality, she gave him the name Cain, saying: "Behold, I possess a man by the will of God." She then had a second son, who was called Abel, that is to say vanity, to mark no doubt the fragility of life. Now Cain, through a movement of envy, killed his brother, then, cursed by God, he ceased to dwell with his father and mother, and withdrew toward the eastern region of Eden. God consoled the mourning of Adam and Eve by sending them a son in place of the one they had just lost so sadly. Eve named him Seth, to signify that all her hopes were henceforth founded upon him; indeed, he was just like Abel, and his posterity followed the precepts of the Lord, while that of Cain walked in the path traced by his unhappy father. Adam and Eve had several more sons and daughters who allied themselves through marriage and thus propagated the human race, God bringing all men from the same source, so that they might remember forever, despite the interval of time and place, that they are all brothers, and that the difference of interests, habits, and laws should not divide those who are united by the bond so sweet and so strong of a common origin.

Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years. The longevity of the first men is generally attributed to the streng th o Adam The first human being created by God from the dust of the earth. f their temperament, to the natural qualities of the food they drew from the still-young earth, and to their simple and frugal life. It must also be added that Providence wished to govern the world with wisdom as it had created it with love, and that it entered into its designs to preserve men for a long time, whether for the rapid multiplication of the species or for the instruction of new races; for the patriarchs had numerous children, and, burdened with several centuries, they seemed to pause on the threshold of the tomb to bear witness to the history of ancient days, in the presence of several generations gathered together. As for Eve, nothing precise is known regarding the time when she died; it is a sentiment supported by very ancient traditions that she spent a few years more on earth than Adam. Some, especially those who place Eden in Palestine, think that our first parents were buried on the mountain of Calvary, near which extends, as is known, the valley of Jehoshaphat, where souls will come to attend their supreme judgment . Would there not be montagne du Calvaire The supposed site of Adam's burial according to certain traditions. , in fact, for things as for persons, reserved destinations? And would it not be fitting that this solemn drama which we call the life of humanity, and which will fill, through the unity of its action, the entire series of centuries, should show in one and the same place the three great scenes of which it is composed: the fall, the redemption, and the judgment?

Christian poetry has often clothed in the pomp of its language the memorable events that determined the fate of humanity: Tasso sang of the Seven Days of Creation; Vida, Sannazaro, and others less famous painted with graceful colors some of the scenes of the garden of delights. But the masterpiece of poetry on this fertile and difficult subject is Milton's Paradise Lost. A great power of invention and a great brilliance of imagery cover, or at least balance, most of the reproaches that literature may have the right to make against this learned and severe composition. Innocent Eve appears gentle and m aje Ève The first woman, created from Adam's rib. stic, adorned with grace and nobility; guilty Eve becomes fearful, she puts guile into her speech, but she remains powerful through her tears, and God has left in her fall some reflections of her former glory that create around her a respect mixed with dread, like an angelic guard.

The arts have anticipated or imitated poetry. Drawing, painting, and sculpture often happily retraced the main details of the creation, and particularly the story of our first mother. The catacombs, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican, the doors of the Florence Baptistery, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the portals of Reims and Strasbourg, the stained glass windows of our ancient churches, the Gothic Bibles and Missals reproduce some features of Eve's life: her creation, her temptation, her fall, and her penance. Angelico da Fiesole, Ghiberti, Nicola Pisano, Cimabue, Michelangelo, Raphael, painters or sculptors, have described on immortal c anvases or Michel-Ange Famous artist who depicted Jeremiah. carved into stone the joys and misfortunes of Eden. Among all these brilliant wonders of Christian art, perhaps one must place in the first rank, for composition, propriety, and the beautiful expression of the heads, the well-known painting by Domenichino. One sees there God reproaching man for his disobedience, Adam accusing his wife, and Eve casting the blame upon the serpent; this triple action is rendered with an exquisite feeling, and the spectator involuntarily shares the anxiety of our ancestors, who await from the mouth of their great judge the deserved sentence; yet the justice of the judge does not erase mercy, and one guesses that presently there will be two paths to reach heaven: innocence and repentance.

Les Femmes de la Bible, by the late Mgr Darboy Mgr Darboy Archbishop of Paris and author of the source text. , Archbishop of Paris.