Thinking about Adam and Eve with Augustine and Milton

Abstract

Thinking about Adam and Eve with Augustine and Milton Raymond N. MacKenzie, Editor Key Words Adam and Eve, Augustine, Milton, Paradise Lost, Fall of Man Speculating about our origins, wondering how humans came to be and trying to imagine what the first people might have been like—this must be pretty nearly a universal trait among humankind. We seem to think that understanding our origins would give us a better understanding of what we are now—or perhaps we keep coming back to the subject just because the various origin stories are so fascinating. We read about the creation of human beings in ancient myths from many cultures, and in many of them, humans have a less than exalted origin. In Sumerian myth, a god is sacrificed, and from his body clay is derived—and from that, the first people are molded. The ancient Greeks too saw humans as having their origins in mud— molded into human shape by Prometheus, and given life by the breath of Athena. And then there is the account in Genesis. Encountering the tale as a child, I remember my own vivid imaginations of what that garden must have looked like, and I still remember the way I pictured God himself walking there “in the cool of the day.” As an adult, I’m sadly less likely to let my imagination range as freely as a child does, but I can’t help trying to imagine what it would [End Page 5] have been like for the first people—how life would have felt, how the world might have looked to them. Psychologically, their minds couldn’t have operated in the convoluted ways ours do; and as for their emotions, what would they have felt, and what would that feeling have been like? What was their umwelt, the “world they lived in,” to use Helen Keller’s phrasing for it? Impossible to imagine it. Unburdened by memory, with free, fresh minds and open hearts, the only “culture” the trees and animals around them, the only sounds the rustling of the leaves and the birdsong up in the branches above. The American poet Billy Collins wrote a fine short piece titled “The First Dream,” in which he imagines the first person to have had a dream: “How quiet he must have seemed the next morning.” The account of the first people in Genesis is endlessly compelling, and yet we can’t—anyway, I can’t—ever quite decide exactly what truths reside in it, how literally we ought to take certain elements, or how allegorical it might be. Our lead article in this issue, from Professor Kemp, is an intriguing take on the topic. I’ll give a proper introduction to that article a bit later in this preface, but that paper is what got me thinking about this general subject. In this preface, I’d like to think a little about some of the ways later writers have thought about key elements in the Genesis story, and specifically about the characters of Adam and Eve. The literature on the subject—theological, philosophical, historical, scientific—is vast, so without any pretense at being comprehensive, I’ll look at just two treatments that strike me as having a legitimate, perhaps even urgent claim on our attention in the twenty-first century: first, I’ll examine briefly some key moments in Augustine’s work on the subject, and then look, in a little more detail, at John Milton’s great treatment in Paradise Lost. Augustine, who wrote very extensively about Genesis in several important texts, begins with the assumption that we ought to take the story pretty much as written, though his various studies add a great deal of interpretation. With regard to the first humans, his treatment in The City of God is particularly rich (and had a great influence on Milton). Before the Fall, he tells us, “the love of the pair for God [End Page 6] and for one another was undisturbed, and they lived in a faithful and sincere fellowship.”1 Augustine dismisses the idea that their sin was a felix culpa: had Adam and Eve remained unfallen, the future of human-kind...