More on Eve's "Femal charm"

Legends of the Fall

Entrance to Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France

The Tree of Knowledge: A Serial Fondler?

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a blog entry of about one week ago, "But fondly overcome with Femal charm...", I commented upon a sermon that I'd heard in which Adam was portrayed as making a heroic decision to sacrifice himself out of love for Eve.

Incidentally, that sermon can be listened to online at the SIBC website's list of sermons by Pastor Jack Peters, where it appears under the title "Adam and the Reign of Death" (August 19, 2007). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a transcript, which would be far more convenient ... for me, anyway, though not for anyone who might be 'volunteered' to transcribe it.

Anyway, in that sermon -- unlike in the Milton quote that I used for the blog's header, which portrays Adam as foolish, i.e., "fondly overcome" ("fondly" at that time meaning "foolishly") -- Adam's love was portrayed as a pure, Christlike sort. As you may recall, I thought the pastor's reading of the text to be based on a misunderstanding of Romans 5:14.

But that's not my point this morning. Rather, I merely want to direct interested readers to other hermeneutics on the Genesis story of Adam's fall that I've come across in my search for an essay topic on Milton. One interesting interpretation, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, appears indebted to Milton -- or at least readings that present Adam as motivated by love -- but reinterprets the text to show woman's intellectual superiority to man:

A man and a woman were placed in a beautiful garden. Every thing was about them that could contribute to their enjoyment. Trees and shrubs, fruits and flowers, and gently murmuring streams made glad their hearts. Zephyrs freighted with delicious odours fanned their brows and the serene stars looked down upon them with eyes of love.

The Evil One saw their happiness and it troubled him. He set his wits to work to know how he should destroy it. He thought that man could be easily conquered through his affection for the woman. But the woman would require more management. She could be reached only through her intellectual nature. So he promised her the knowledge of good and evil. He told her the sphere of her reason should be enlarged, he promised to gratify the desire she felt for intellectual improvement, so he prevailed and she did eat. Did the Evil One judge rightly in regard to man? Eve took an apple went to Adam and said "Dear Adam taste this apple if you love me eat." Adam stopped not so much as to ask if the apple was sweet or sour. He knew he was doing wrong, but his love for Eve prevailed and he did eat. Which I ask you was the "creature of the affections"? ("Address by Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Woman's Rights, September 1848," The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Paper Project)

Stanton apparently accepts Milton's view that Adam was "fondly overcome with Femal charm" (PL 9.999), but she overturns Milton's understanding of the relative intellectual power of the sexes by elevating Eve above Adam -- Eve as the more intellectual, Adam as swayed by emotions.

Interestingly, the scholar Jean M. Higgins notes a similar interpretation in the Irenaeus fragment XIV, which is appended to the standard editions of Irenaeus by way of an excerpt from Anastasius Sinaita's Anagogicarum Contemplationum in Hexaemeron Libri XII (PG 89.851-1078). The citation occurs in Book 10 (PG 89.1013-1014) and reads as follows:

Why did the serpent not attack the man, rather than the woman? You say he went after her because she was the weaker of the two. On the contrary. In the transgression of the commandment, she showed herself to be the stronger, truly the man's "assistance" (boethos).

For she alone stood up to the serpent. She ate from the tree, but with resistance and dissent, and after being dealt with perfidiously. But Adam partook of the fruit given by the woman, without even beginning to make a fight, without a word of contradiction -- a perfect demonstration of consummate weakness and a cowardly soul.

The woman, moreover, can be excused; she wrestled with a demon and was thrown. But Adam will not be able to find excuse in having been defeated by a woman. He had himself personally received the commandment from God.

The woman, finally, even when she did hear the command from Adam, must have felt she was being made little of; either because she had not been judged worthy to converse with God herself; or because she suspected there was an even chance that Adam had given her the command on his own. (Jean M. Higgins, "Anastasius Sinaita and the Superiority of the Woman," Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), p. 254)

As Higgins acknowledges, patristic scholars strongly doubt that this late 7th-century passage excerpted from Anastasius Sinaita truly stems from Irenaeus. I also doubt it, for the interpretation sounds more typical of Gnostics than more orthodox Christian writers. Perhaps Anastasius Sinaita had some garbled text containing a Gnostic passage that Irenaeus was critiquing.

Be that as it may, there it stands, in all its fascinating detail, for your contemplation.