In Our Time - The Fall

Episode Date: April 8, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of original sin and its influence in Christian Europe. Genesis tells the Bible’s story of creation, but it also carries within it a tale of the ‘fall of mankind’. After their primal transgression, Adam and Eve are banished from Eden and cursed by God:“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”What effect has this passage had on western culture, and how did the concept of an ‘original sin’ influence gender and morality in Christian Europe?With Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; Griselda Pollock, Professor of Art History at the University of Leeds; John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Genesis tells the Bible story of creation, but it also carries within it the story of the fall of mankind. After their primal transgression, Adam and Eve are banished from Eden and cursed by God. Unto the woman, he said,

I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth. children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam, he said, because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it, cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow, shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. What effect has this passage had on Western thought and culture, and how has the concept of original sin influence gender and morality in Christian Europe over the last two millennia? With me to discuss the fall,

John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, Griselda Pollock, Professor of Art History at the University of Leeds, and Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture. Martin Palmer, can we start with that story in Genesis? I think the significance of the story is where it comes from. The first three chapters of Genesis can be found in much earlier literature. This was probably written down about 500 BC,

but it draws on much, much older stories, going back probably another 2,000 years. The significance of the story as told in the Bible is that whereas in the earlier stories, humanity is simply puppets. We are just performing for the gods who determine what's going to happen. The great revolutionary achievement,

literary achievement of the writer of Genesis is that we are made the centre of the story and we are given free will. And that is the essence of the fall, as it were, as a reworking of one of the most ancient stories. What then happens is that the story of the fall, which of course arises originally within a Jewish setting, and within the Jewish setting it is the story of a kind of primal disobedience, but is a disobedience that gives us the knowledge of who we are.

There is this constant tension within Judaism that the fall is about growing up, as much as it is about losing some kind of special status. But then you come to Christianity, and Christianity initially... What are you talking about the story? you're talking about the taking of the apple, the tree of... They're taking the apple, yes. For non-monotheists. For the non-monotheists.

For the non-monotheists and post-monotheists out there. Essentially, God creates a perfect world. Humanity is created on the sixth day. Adam first and then Eve, and there's some wonderful stories about why she comes from his rib, but we haven't got time for that. And they're placed in the garden. And the garden is in Western thought.

It's a place of sort of primal bliss. But in traditional Jewish thought, it's actually a place where you have to work. You have to tend the garden. But then in the classic storytelling mold, they're told you can do anything you want, but don't go and eat from the apple. That marvelous tension that you set up where you say, you can have everything you want, but just don't go there. And of course, every good story happens when they go where they're not supposed to go. And they take from two trees that they're forbidden to take from. They take from one tree, the tree of the knowledge of life and death.

and this is the result of Eve being duped by the snake, by the serpent. And as a result of that, they realize that they are naked, they hide, God comes, and realizes that they have broken his commandment. And before they can eat of the second tree, the tree of eternity, the tree of life, they are banished from the garden and sent out, as you said in the reading at the beginning from Genesis, into a harsh world. And the theological question that Christianity posed was, why did this happen?

What was this all about? Genesis was grappling with a fundamental question, which Paul puts very beautifully, he says, why do we do the things we should not do, and why do we not do the things we should do? And it's that tension. Where did sin come from? And the development of the Christianity undertakes

is to create, in the 5th century, a terrible theory of original sin. Griselda Pollock, although Judaism and Christianity share the book of Genesis, Judaism has a very different interpretation. It isn't looking for sin in that sense, is it? No, I think Martin's already suggested some very important distinctions because I think Jewish theology,

receiving at the same time an old fable with its own kind of Middle Eastern associations with other stories, works to interpret it as a kind of story of growing up in a sense that you know that if you say to a child don't do that, the very thing the child will do. And precisely the transition from childhood to adulthood is in a way not to live in a world which is just bound by rules because with the rules you have no morality, only when in a sense you have the knowledge of right and wrong.

Do you have choice and do you have adult maturity? And I think Jewish theology tends to interpret not the fall of man or the coming of sin, but the inevitable loss of childhood innocence, which not only humanity had to undergo, but every human being has to undergo. There is a moment when you are no longer. bound by the rules that are given to you by your parents, but you must actually make some kind of moral choice.

The state in the Garden of Eden is a state of a kind of, in a sense, an eternal Shabbat, as far as, you know, a kind of permanent rest and peace. There is no strife, there is no struggle, there is no work. And in Jewish thought, this alternation between work and the aspiration to a state of peace is in constant tension. And that the kind of, I suppose one could say that the cremate, preachers come out of the garden in a hagelian mode. They are going to have to have consciousness and labour,

and it is that which will make them human. And in then doing good deeds, they will re-aspire to the state of godlikeness from which they were originally but a shadow, but through their own action of becoming moral adults, they have separated themselves to become part of a history of time. What role does Eve have in Judaism, and is it Paul who first articulates the idea of an inherent sinfulness in women?

Yeah, I think this is an important mark of division because, of course, Pauline Christianity or Paul, as those many people who see that Paul is actually the origins of Christianity as a theology, inherits the kind of misogyny that is much more widespread in the Hellenistic world. And although there is a definite distinction between the sexes in ancient Judaism and some element of traditional patriarchal hierarchy, there isn't an inherent misogyny. Because again, in the Garden of Eden's story,

the naming of the woman Isha as Eve, which occurs after they have partaken off the fruit, and it's not an apple. The apple is only because in Latin malum is apple and evil. But in the Hebrew Bible, it's just the Perihate's. It's the fruit of the tree. We don't know what it is. It's just fruit.

But Eve is called Hava, the mother of all living things, which is obviously some residue of a great mother goddess figure. But her name, the word her name, I mean the name Havah is connected to life, Chai. So while Adam is related to the earth, Adama, which is the earth from which he's formed like a potter, forms a clay pot. The making of Isha and the making of Eve is of a different order.

And she brings sexuality. and desire. And the key thing is that there is no conflict between female sexuality and female motherhood. But in Christianity, that becomes the conflict. John Kerry, how do you see Adam and Eve and the idea of original sin? Well, it seems to me that the notion of original sin, like many things that come from the Genesis account, is really the creation of theology rather than the creation of the account itself. The account itself is filled out by theologians in various ways. example, the snake is not Satan in the account. Later, he's interpreted as Satan.

The account is very self-contradictory in that Adam and Eva told that they will die, the day thou editherto, they will surely die. Big problem for theologians, because they don't actually die. An original sin, I think, is really the invention of Augustine, who, for whatever personal and theological reasons, invents this notion that we are so corrupt, I mean, or rather as Augustinianism was later interpreted,

so corrupt that we are not capable of any good ourselves. With grace, some of us may attain good, but actually the human being is hopelessly corrupt. And certainly by the 17th century, Calvinist theologians interpreted this as saying that an unbaptized child was hateful to God. I think John's absolutely spot on there.

I think the fascinating thing is that for the first 400 years of Christianity, the story in Genesis was treated as moderately important. It was not the most important story because as heirs to Hellenistic thought, the early church

had far, far better science, far better philosophy on which to draw. What happens is that you get to a situation in which the culture itself is falling apart. And Rome is sacked during Augustine's lifetime

and this is a huge trauma. It's as though everything that was normative. Early 5th century. Everything that Augustine thought was normative and substantive and good is falling apart. And out of that you get two responses and the fascinating thing is

the debate that takes place between the earliest known British theologian, Pelagius, and August And Augustine, Pelagius essentially argues that humanity is good, that what Christ came to do was to reveal our potential, and that out of the example of Christ we could earn our own salvation. Augustine, exactly as John says, goes completely against that, and comes up with this notion that we are, well, as Griselda says,

we're cursed, but this is a new interpretation, it's a radical interpretation, and it's strongly resisted by much of the church. Grisel de Paul, once you have accepted original sin, then you can re-read the passion of Christ because that redeems the original sin. And so the two are come together. Well, yes, I think we have to make that quite clear because, I mean, and I think we must reiterate, there is no indication of original sin in the Genesis text itself. And the Christian thinkers, it seems to me, or in terms of coming at it from the kind of is your tradition, treat the Old Testament, what they call the Old Testament,

as this kind of anticipatory series of stories which will be matched and paralleled with the New Testament, etc. So you have a kind of typological symbolism. So this Adam is then, as it were, redeemed by the new Adam, which is the figure of the Christ figure, and Eve is paralleled with the Virgin Mary. And we see this frequently in imagery that the kind of of the, even in the 11th century already, the doors of great churches like at Hildesheim, you will have Adam and even the tree in the centre, and then, in a sense, Christ, on the cross, and the Virgin Mary and one other apostle or other person beside them. So you have a kind of tripartite system.

So that there is a kind of imaginative link between this tree in the garden and, in a sense, the tree, which lends some support to why did the cross become such a powerful symbol in Christianity? But I wanted us to go back because I think there are two other things that need to be said. One is this idea of sin. Now, I think the question of the ancient religions of which the Hebrew Bible or what Christians call the Old Testament is a very, very sophisticated and literary reworking, still is in the world of prohibition, transgression, taboo and sacrifice. So when you make a mistake, it's out there, you did it,

and then you perform a sacrifice because in a sense you've broken a taboo the order of the world has been disturbed and you must make a sacrifice. Christianity returns to the concept of human sacrifice which has been disowned by ancient Judaism in the notion of the sacrifice

of the Christ, the passion of the Christ and then you have sin. Now sin in Julia Christavis terms what makes Christianity interesting is you internalize it. It's not out there you did it perform a sacrifice, it's the order of the world's corrected. You become a sinner.

Now this is a terrible thing in terms of original sin, but it's also the root through which we will become the different kind of subjectivity will be aware of ourselves and for which this inner world of self-reflection will arise. John Kerry, do you see this notion

as it begins to gather force in the early medieval, the medieval, up to the rest of the spirit? Do you see it as a notion which is fruitful? I mean, it's a very big question, I'm obviously sorry, but it is fruitful for the West? Or it is something that takes energy and thought away from the development of wider thoughts? It does become a great force, doesn't it? The idea of sin, the idea of church being the way in which your sins can be relieved and forgiven and so on and so forth.

Well, it's the motor of many hundreds of years. Yeah, the medieval Catholic notion is that because of, yes, we sinned, but without sin, we wouldn't have had the Virgin, we wouldn't have had Jesus. We wouldn't have had the passion. We wouldn't have had the passion. The incarnation, God becoming man, this astounding thing that happened. So it's rejoicing. It's, the great change comes, I think, from that,

with really with Protestantism, the vise of Protestantism, there are earlier premonitions of it, but with Calvin, when the emphasis is much more on, the befelled world, It's quite an interesting point, actually, because that's what we believe now, isn't it, actually? That's what we think we live in now, we realise. And, I mean, someone like Rousseau, just to hop forward a bit,

would have said that the fall actually takes place when man starts to think. What is the matter is we developed a big brain. No one knows why it happened. And words that's changed of the prison house. A growing boy, yes. I mean, it's more a physical thing. We actually developed a brain. Look at the chimpanzees and look at the other primates.

We develop a big brain. fall. No one knows, but what it means is that when one primate a big brain, he can destroy all the other animals as we are doing. I mean, I think this theme of the need for a fall is fundamental, whether it's because we've been conditioned to think we ought to have one. But if you look at all the major social and ideological movements, whether that's Marxism or whether it's the environmental movement today, there has to come a point at which something goes wrong to explain why we're where we are now.

Gizelda, you were going to come in on. It's so many things are going on here, but I think we need to come back to the idea that the so-called fall of man is blamed on woman, and this particular problematic about how does sin come into the world, why is the woman the depository of it, why must therefore the Christ be, as it were, born of a virgin, is such an important point to argue

because I read somewhere that the idea of original sin that sin was actually in the male organ and therefore in a sense every act of procreation by a man would in a sense taint. So this is why I have to have a virgin birth because she's therefore not touched by. It's not that she's in a sort of divine state of purity. It's because she has had no contact with this.

And this whole development of celibacy and monasticism and the kind of renunciation of sex which has caused such difficulty for the church in terms of not being able to imagine a world in which this particular dimension of human activity must be responsibly carried on. So in a sense, in Judaism, the circumcision of that organ says,

just remember, if you touch another, you must do it with moral meaning, not with irresponsibility. And the notion of one of the explanations of why evil bring forth children in pain is precisely because the commentator, the biblical writers were trying to explain why human beings produce children,

and therefore don't, they do die, but the species carries on. So that's the question of why they don't do. But this big head is going to be a painful process of delivery. They're trying to explain what they already know. The childbirth for animals is easy and for humans is more stressful, but it's stressful because of the size of that brain. It's right to say, isn't it, that things do change in that respect with Protestantism. That is to say, changing from Catholicism with its celibate clergy to Protestantism,

you get actually very much in opposition to what you've been saying an emphasis on the fact that procreation is not evil is natural. But so much of Protestantism is a rereading of certain elements of the Old Testament as they understood it. I mean a lot of evangelicals are very premised on, a very deep, close reading, which is a result of having the Bible in the vernacular and having access to it as literature. What you have in the emergence of the medieval church is, a de facto struggle between an Augustinian theology that is official and, as it were, an unofficial theology that says, actually, you know, we're not that bad.

Life is actually pretty good. We should celebrate it. And as Johnny was saying, this whole sense of celebration, and the whole development of monasticism as essentially at the hot house of education, of learning and so forth, there is a kind of procreation that comes through that. What I think happens with Protestantism is that it takes on the notion, of an original sin. And it again comes to grapple with this terrible dilemma

that Christianity poses itself, which Islam doesn't have. Islam basically looks at the problems that Judaism has and the problems that Christianity has and says, right, let's solve the lot and creates a completely omniscient God for whom the fall is an apprenticeship. We're thrown out of paradise, we fall to earth.

You can go and see Adam's footprint in Sri Lanka where he hit the ground. We're here on probation and then we go back up again. or a very neoplatonist idea. But Christianity is literally bedeviled with this tension between the God of justice and the God of compassion. And Calvin resolves it. But there is... There isn't a tension.

I mean, always through the Hebrew Bible. God has both qualities. Of course. But in Christianity, it becomes this real tension only with Augustine saying either or. Whereas previously everybody went, well, a bit of both. Calvin ultimately resolves it by saying, there is no free will. He undoes the full.

in the most extraordinary way. He says, before even the world was designed or built, God knew that Gazelda was going to be saved and John and I are going to be damned. There's absolutely nothing we can do. That's how it is. End of story, which ironically gets rid of the entire need for Christ. But Calvin

soon to miss that. Speaking from Limbaugh at this end of that. We've got to go to John Milton. We've took the second half of the 17th century, after the Civil War, Republican apologists for Cromwell, our second grade poet and of course Paradise Lost.

Now what does he bring to the table, John Gary? Well, I think he rewrites the fall and in a surprisingly and interesting modern way in that he makes much less difference between pre-fall and post-fall man, certainly than Calvin and the most interpreters. In Milton's Paradise Lost, in the Garden of Eden, there is work, Grizeldar says,

that is in the Jewish tradition, quite true. There is actually sexual passion. It's amazing. I mean, it's exactly what Augustine said came about because of the fall. But in Paradise Lost, Adam finds that when he's near Eve, he can't think straight. And he tells

Raphael, the visiting angel, about this. He says, it's extraordinary that when she's near, I can't think. My brain won't work properly. And Raphael's very upset by this. It's very bad. He says, in loving thou as well, in passion, not. We're in true love,

resides not. So there's passion in the Garden of Eden and sex. Because there wasn't all was sex. In many Garden of Eden accounts previously, they'd been like children and they hadn't had sex. Augustine said they didn't have sex. He said they could have done absolutely deliberately without any passion but it never happened. In Milton there is work, there is sex, there is quarrelling. They have a quarrel about whether she should go gardening alone. Very important because when she's alone the devil finds her. And there is knowledge of good and evil. It's Milton doesn't believe get it from eating a food or an apple.

Adam, when Eve has a bad dream that Satan puts into her head, says evil into the mind of God or man can come and go so unapproved and leave no spot or taint behind. He talks about good and evil. Furthermore, he knows it goes into God's mind. I said, it's such a revolutionary work, Paradise Lost. It completely reinterprets the story. Where does that take us?

Because as Martin has pointed out, we don't have. have theologians in England, we have, our theology goes in narratives and great poems, but that poem had a most tremendous effect. So where does that take us in our particular narrative on this programme

taking the idea of the fall through? Post-built and where does that go result? I suppose it gives us permission to behave like writers or literary critics, etc., and to see this text as much as the Genesis text as a text. And so I think that what comes

after and is given permission by such works of imaginative rewriting such as Milton and then you get Blake in terms of a kind of visual representation, which leads on in sense to the 19th century higher criticism where you return to the Bible as not a kind of divine scripture with God's signature on it but in sense a compilation of writers. It leads to things like the 1895 Women's Bible when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is one of the first feminists, or the sort of great generation of American women's suffrage campaigners who rewrites the Bible, an interesting way, rewrites Milton, because she says Eve talks to the serpent,

because it's so boring to talk to Adam, because he's just mooning around. And it's very, very interesting, because we sort of missed out the Renaissance. The struggle of the Renaissance artist to represent Adam is very interesting because he's a very foppish character. He's always, they can't get any heroism into him, they can't understand this. Whereas I think in the Genesis text and what Milton's building up, which is that when Adam awakes from his sleep and Isha, the woman has been created, he turns and he says, at last someone like me, this is such an important one,

because it's not quite sex, it's not quite passion. It's actually the recognition of the possibility of a human relationship, which includes difference, interestingly enough, to invoke desire, but at the same time, you know, variety and similarity, because he doesn't feel that with the animals. Martin, what effect these things have? I mean, you study the whole contrary of the development of theon. You have a poem like Paradise Lost.

Does that intervene in the argument that the West is having with itself about the purpose and the potency of the philosophies that have come out of the fall? And if so, can you give us an example of how it does? Oh, hugely, but I think Brazil is quite right. We need to trace the roots of that back to the Renaissance and then forward into the Enlightenment because the notion that somehow we were so, such a mass of sin and so helpless,

breaks down with the Renaissance. The Renaissance says, no, hang on, we can actually do astonishing things. The discovery of technology, the discovery of techniques of the mind and physical developments, technical developments, is a sign of progress. And you begin to get this fascinating theology

called progress theology, which says we're actually getting better. And you have whole religious movements that emerge on the belief that particularly during the Civil War in Britain, but in Iran with the Baha'is in the 19th century, a belief that humanity is now in a position of such maturity that we are getting better and better and we can actually bring about the kingdom of God.

John Kerry. Enlightenment, I suppose you could say the enlightenment in some way works in the opposite direction. And that's to say not that we can perfect ourselves and reach some ultimate. But, I mean, certainly Rousseau thinks, doesn't he that? The perfect state was when there was no society, when men wandered the forests alone at acorns, had sex with every woman they met,

and never felt any guilt, and never bothered to fight or anything like that. If a stronger man came, they ran away. It was perfect. And, of course, they couldn't think and they couldn't talk. as soon he says as you can think and talk he says that a thinking animal is a monster and it's clearly true because we've laid the world waste

because we can think and other animals can't he foresaw that and he was after all of enlightenment thinker so I mean true but I mean if you take someone more like Locke and his followers is much more grappling with the potential that humanity has not discounting the problems but believing that actually as we still do that if we do technology right we might solve it Now, you could argue, as many environmentalists do, that's actually the fall.

The moment at which we thought we had that kind of power was when it all went wrong. But it came out of a sense that maybe things could be better if we could control them more efficiently. I just think this question of who we are, because I think what we're doing by talking theologically is to confuse a kind of a certain vision of the world with certain historical and social processes. And so who is the we who's caused this? I think it's much more interesting to understand why these recurrent fits of terrible self-abnegation and self-mortification,

because it's not human beings, it's only some human beings. You know, this tension in some sense between a theological view that man has done this to the world as opposed to some people in their interests have done that. What is it that theologies offer us is these competing visions between a kind of lost childhood, overburdened with guilt, and are longing for return to it

and are facing up to the realities of responsibility. And if we could get that straight now, instead of, as you said, the demonising of the terrorist, we don't want to go into that imaginary, we want to say quite rationally, adultly, what is it we need to do to restore and achieve peace? Well, thank you all very much indeed for putting all that into such a short amount of time.

Thanks, John Kerry, Griselda Pollock, Martin Palmer. Thank you for listening. And next week I'll be talking about the later Romantics. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio four.