The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Shame was not supposed to be a cultural acquisition; it was the inescapable, defining human condition in the wake of sin. Yet here were huge numbers of people parading around naked: Why did they not recognize their condition? And why did they not avail themselves of the means that God himself had given humans to cover their nakedness: “ Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them”?

  It was possible to argue that the natives had lost all shame and forgotten the gift of clothing. Apes, it was widely thought, had once been like us, but had degenerated into their bestial state. So too, some argued, the New World natives were creatures who had fallen below the level of the human. In 1550 certain Spanish intellectuals presented such an argument at a formal debate in Valladolid. They proposed that, despite certain resemblances, the newly encountered creatures were not actually human and that what sounded like speech were only animal noises. The testimony of eyewitnesses who had communicated with them and could attest that the natives were indeed human was deemed insufficient. The position that they were beasts who lacked the use of reason was ultimately defeated not by empirical observation but by religious doctrine: the natives, the winning argument claimed, had souls that were ripe for conversion to Christianity. But, if the inhabitants of these islands were not beasts, that is, if they were persons who had descended, like everyone else, from Adam and Eve, what then to make of their nakedness?

  The answer was hinted at by Columbus. On his third voyage and shaken in his belief that he had reached the Indies, the admiral began to entertain a new possibility. The world is not perfectly round, he wrote, but has instead the shape of a pear or ball on which there is “something like a woman’s nipple.” The new lands that he has discovered, with their perfect beauty and abundance, must be located on or very near that nipple, whose very center was the site of the Earthly Paradise. Columbus did not believe that he would be able to enter the garden itself, at least not in this mortal life. But it made sense that in their nakedness the people he saw, living so close to Eden, resembled its first inhabitants. Shame after the Fall evidently intensified with distance. It set in more deeply the further one moved from the original site of bliss.

  Proximity to Paradise would explain the rushing currents of fresh water that the Spanish seamen observed with wonder in Trinidad’s Gulf of Paria. After all, in Genesis it was written that four great rivers arose in the Garden of Eden. In 1498 the only alternative explanation Columbus could think of seemed even wilder: “And I say,” he added, “that if it be not from the earthly paradise that this river comes, it originates from a vast land, lying to the south, of which hitherto no knowledge has been obtained.” That thought—the idea of an unknown continent—was so difficult to fathom that he retreated to the safer ground of Eden: “But I am much more convinced in my own mind that there where I have said is the earthly paradise.”

  When, in the wake of further exploration, it became clear that there really was a vast land lying to the south—namely, the whole of South America—the idea that the site of Paradise was located nearby did not simply vanish. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Spanish chroniclers López de Gómara and Antonio de Herrera seriously entertained the possibility, as did the great naturalist Father José de Acosta in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias. In the mid-seventeenth century, Antonio de León Pinelo—like La Peyrère the son of Portuguese Marranos—proved to his own satisfaction at least that the Río de la Plata, the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Magdalena were the four great rivers that surged up from the Earthly Paradise.

  And, after the shock of the first encounter, what about the nakedness of the New World natives? Most European colonists, bent on ruthlessly exploiting the peoples they overpowered, conveniently interpreted it as a sign of their primitive state and left it at that. If the Great Debate in Valladolid concluded that the natives were human, it also concluded that they were what Aristotle had called “natural slaves,” people whose debased condition made it legitimate and even merciful for them to be enslaved.

  But at least one major figure, the great Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, vehemently disagreed. Las Casas, who had originally come to the New World as a colonist, had been deeply shaken by the atrocities that he had witnessed against its inhabitants and that he denounced in a celebrated indictment, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542). He shared Columbus’s conviction that the Americas were the likeliest site of the lost Garden of Eden. As for the natives, they were not only the same as all other humans, Christian and non-Christian alike, they were actually, as befitted their paradisal lands, morally superior. “God made all the peoples of this area, many and varied as they are,” Las Casas wrote, “as open and as innocent as can be imagined. The simplest people in the world—unassuming, long-suffering, unassertive, and submissive—they are without malice or guile, and are utterly faithful and obedient.” They were not quite in Paradise—for they lacked the Catholic faith—but, as their nakedness suggested, they were very close.

  “It was upon these gentle lambs,” Las Casas lamented, “that from the very first day they clapped eyes on them the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold.” The numbers of the dead staggered the imagination: “At a conservative estimate, the despotic and diabolical behavior of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve million souls, women and children among them, and there are grounds for believing my own estimate of more than fifteen million to be nearer the mark.” (Modern demographic studies have concluded that Las Casas’s figures—long thought to be a polemical exaggeration—are likely to be close to the truth.) If these tragic victims resembled the Edenic innocence of Adam and Eve, what did that make the Spanish? Las Casas did not hesitate to draw the conclusion: “The reader may ask himself … whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.”

  Las Casas’s book became a European bestseller, and not only among those whose main desire was to demonize the Spanish conquistadores or the Catholic Church. His searing indictment lies behind Montaigne’s subversive questions, questions that extended to all European Christians: Why do we think that our ways are better than their ways? Who are the genuinely civilized people and who the barbarians? Such questions had an unnerving relation to the basic story of primal innocence, fall, and redemption through Christ. And it was not solely the viciousness of the colonists that proved so unsettling; it was the sheer number of people in a hitherto unknown part of the globe, a part of which there was no hint in the Bible. How could they possibly have gotten there? Why should anyone think that there is a single, one-size-fits-all account of the entire world?

  The size of the population that the European adventurers encountered in the Americas and the range of flora and fauna were difficult to reconcile with biblical chronology. The recent “discovery of the vast continent of America,” wrote a distinguished mid-seventeenth-century English jurist, Matthew Hale, “which appears to be as populous with men, and as well stored with cattle [i.e., animals] almost as any part of Europe, Asia, or Africa, hath occasioned some difficulty and dispute touching the traduction of all mankind from the two common parents … namely Adam and Eve.”

  The problem, as Hale notes, was “traduction”: how was so much life carried across the ocean sea from one world to another? The Jesuit José de Acosta speculated—correctly, as we now know—that there must once have been a land bridge that linked Asia and the Americas. He had no physical evidence for its existence, but he needed to posit one in order to save the testimony of the Bible: “The reason which forces me to say that the first men of these Indies came from Europe or Asia is so as not to contradict the Holy Scripture which clearly teaches that all men descended from Adam, and thus we can give no other origin to man in the Indies.”

  To La Peyrère the idea of a land bridge seemed a d
esperate attempt—a Hail Mary, as it were—to save a bankrupt idea. No vanished bridge, he thought, could possibly account for the vast numbers of humans that, according to the orthodox account, would have had to descend almost immediately from the seven survivors on Noah’s Ark and to spread with unimaginable rapidity throughout the globe. Even the sheer diversity of human cultures—Lapland nomads and Chinese courtiers, the fashionable ladies of Paris and the naked natives of the New World—posed what seemed to him a serious challenge to the accepted understanding of Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all the humans in the world.

  La Peyrère was not alone in the doubts that seized him. In exactly the period when Milton set about to make Adam and Eve more intensely and fully real than they had ever been before, the credibility of the opening chapters of Genesis was being undermined on multiple fronts. Perhaps Milton was driven to write Paradise Lost in part by his very awareness of the challenges that were unsettling his contemporary La Peyrère. Though they reacted in different ways, they were registering the same seismic tremors: the vast expansion of the known world, the apparent absence of universal shame in many of its peoples, the viciousness of religious wars, the unnerving claims of Copernicus and Galileo.

  These were not the only tremors that began to cause cracks in the Bible’s origin story. Throughout Europe, humanists and artists had sparked a renewed interest in classical antiquity. The recovery of crucial texts from the ancient world gave new life to pagan theories of human origin that had been forgotten or ignored for centuries. No one rushed, as a result, to challenge the absolute authority of Genesis, but it was unsettling to become aware of alternatives.

  One of the most powerful of these alternatives originated in the late fourth century BCE with the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Though his works were almost entirely lost, the long, brilliant poem written around 50 BCE by his Roman disciple Lucretius was found, copied, and returned to circulation by the Renaissance book hunter Poggio Bracciolini. Lucretius wrote that our species, along with all the others, emerged as a result of random atomic mutations over a limitless expanse of time. He argued that the universe was eternal and that nature ceaselessly experimented with the creation of new species. Most of these species perished—nature was indifferent to failure and waste—but a certain number of them, including our own, managed to survive, find food, and propagate.

  Humans, Lucretius proposed, must have evolved only gradually and fitfully from savagery to civilization. The earliest humans were raw-boned, ignorant primitives scrambling to survive in a brutal environment. They had no sense of social order or the common good; by instinct each tried to seize what he could for himself. And the relations between man and woman had more to do with rape and barter than with anything like tender feelings: “The woman either yielded from mutual desire, or was mastered by the man’s impetuous might and inordinate lust, or sold her favors for acorns or arbute berries or choice pears.”

  The recovery by Renaissance scholars of the knowledge of Greek and the translation of Greek classics into Latin made available many other pagan origin stories. The archaic Greek poet Hesiod offered a vision of a golden age, along with the myth of Pandora, so oddly reminiscent of Eve. The storyteller Aesop invoked a golden time in which the animals (along with stones, pine needles, and the sea) all spoke, as well as humans. Aristotle’s student Dicaearchus of Messana wrote of primitive humans who lived like gods, were strict vegetarians, eschewed wars or feuds, and were by nature the best versions of ourselves. The Greek rhetorician Maximus Tyrius depicted Prometheus first creating man, a creature “in mind approaching very near to the gods, in body slender, erect, and symmetrical, mild of aspect, apt for handicraft, firm of step.”

  Vernacular translations, along with the printing press, made such accounts widely available, so that many people began to understand that Genesis was not alone or uncontested. Thus, for example, it was now relatively easy to come across the story, in Plato, of an earlier age in which humans were generated from the earth, without sexual reproduction. In that time long ago, the philosopher wrote, the climate was mild, and humans, dwelling naked and in the open air, had all that they needed: “The earth gave them fruits in abundance, which grew on trees and shrubs unbidden, and were not planted by the hand of man.” There were no forms of government, no private ownership, no separate families competing with one another for scarce resources.

  This and similar pagan stories could always be treated as distorted versions of the true origin story, the one that Moses had written, but the cumulative effect was still disturbing. It was not only the prestige of the classical authors that made it difficult simply to dismiss their accounts out of hand; the problem lay also in the chronology that they frequently invoked. A careful numbering of the generations recorded in the Hebrew Bible seemed to reveal that the world was some 6,000 years old. But Plato’s dialogue Critias, with its description of the lost kingdom of Atlantis, speaks of founding events some 9,000 years ago. And the Greek historian Herodotus reports that he had extensive discussions with Egyptian priests who claimed to possess records that went back well more than 11,340 years. The Babylonian priest Berossus, from whom the West learned most of what it knew about ancient Babylon, calculated that there were some 432,000 years from the first king, the Chaldean Aloros, to the Great Flood. If that figure seemed utterly impossible (which it is), there remained a queasy sense that the biblical chronology was far too short.

  Very few Catholics or Protestants in the Renaissance were eager to abandon the Bible’s chronology, and it was, in any case, dangerous to admit to any serious doubts. In London in the 1590s a government spy reported that the playwright Christopher Marlowe went around saying that “the Indians and many authors of antiquity have assuredly written above 16,000 years ago, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6,000 years.” In almost the same moment the renegade Italian monk Giordano Bruno asked how it was possible that so many people could continue to believe in the biblical chronology despite the fact that there is “a new part of the world, where are found memorials of ten thousand years and more.” Marlowe and Bruno were compulsive risk-takers. One was mortally wounded with a knife stuck into his eye by an agent of Queen Elizabeth’s secret police; the other was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori.

  Still, rumors continued to circulate. La Peyrère heard that in Mexico the Aztec priests had written records far antedating Genesis but that the Spanish church authorities ordered them destroyed or buried. (Buried in the mid-sixteenth century, the Aztec Calendar Stone, now in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, was not rediscovered until 1790.) It was obviously prudent to keep one’s distance from such occasions for doubt, but for La Peyrère they served as confirmations of the theory that he had secretly harbored ever since he was a boy.

  In the mid-1640s, La Peyrère spent several years in Sweden and Denmark, where he formed a close friendship with a celebrated physician and scholar named (quaintly enough, to English ears) Ole Worm. Worm was a passionate and inveterate collector of “curiosities.” The wild array of objects he assembled in his home-based museum, known as the Wormianum, ranged from fossil bones to narwhal tusks, from an Eskimo kayak to an ancient Roman clasp, from a stuffed crocodile to an American tobacco pipe. It may have been the simple presence of these objects, or their shared interest in the sheer diversity of things, that inspired La Peyrère to tell his friend about the great idea that had been germinating in him since childhood.

  Adam and Eve certainly existed, La Peyrère asserted, but they could not have been by any means the first humans on earth. There must have been innumerable others before them and all around them, peoples with diverse languages and cultures and histories. Long before the Fall, these peoples had struggled to survive, experienced their share of wars, plagues, and fevers, suffered the pangs of childbirth, and shared the fate of all mortals—not, that is, because of the eating of the forbidden fruit, but because such is the natural existence of humans.

  La Peyrère told Ole Worm that
he had written all of his theories up in a manuscript called the “Pre-Adamites” and that he had already shown a draft to a few others in the hope that they would be convinced. Their initial responses, he acknowledged, had not been encouraging. One of his readers, the distinguished Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius, had become particularly upset. The American natives seemed to pose a problem for religious orthodoxy, Grotius conceded, but the problem was resolved if they were the descendants of the Viking expeditions of Eric the Red and Leif Erikson. La Peyrère’s alternative suggestion should not be allowed to circulate: “If such things be believed, I see a great danger imminent to religion.”

  But surrounded by the precious objects he had collected, Ole Worm did not agree. Perhaps he was attracted by La Peyrère’s claim that only the pre-Adamite theory could explain the existence of the American Indians and the Greenland Eskimos whose artifacts were so prominently featured in his museum. Undaunted by the warning signs, he helped La Peyrère in his research, introduced him to important friends, and encouraged him to make his views known to a wider world.

  The result, in 1655, was the publication in Amsterdam of a book in Latin, the Prae-Adamitae, followed a year later in London by an English translation, Men Before Adam. The prince for whom he had originally worked had died, but the son and heir, the new Prince of Condé, kept La Peyrère on and must have made him feel secure, for his book holds nothing back. He recognized the risks: “As he who goes upon ice,” he writes, “goes warily where he crack it … so I dreaded first, least this doubtful dispute might either cut my soles, or throw me headlong into some deep heresy.” But now, after years of study and research, he walked on boldly, convinced that he was treading on safe ground.

  Adam, La Peyrère explained, was not the father of all humankind; he was only the father of the Jews whom God had mysteriously chosen to receive the law and to be, though Jesus Christ, the agents of redemption. This particular genealogy is the reason that the time frame of Genesis seems so out of sync with “all profane records whether ancient or new, to wit, those of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Scythians, and Chinensians [sic],” not to mention “those of Mexico, not long ago discovered by Columbus.” The problems disappear, if you recognize that the world was already full of people before the creation of Adam.