Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought PDF
Preview Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-66076-1 - Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought Philip C. Almond Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-66076-1 - Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought Philip C. Almond Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-66076-1 - Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought Philip C. Almond Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-66076-1 - Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought Philip C. Almond Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-66076-1 - Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought Philip C. Almond Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-66076-1 - Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought Philip C. Almond Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Introduction In Paradise, then, man lived as he desired so long as he desired what God had commanded. He lived in the enjoyment of God, and was good by God's goodness; he lived without any want, and had it in his power so to live eternally. He had food that he might not hunger, drink that he might not thirst, the tree of life that old age might not waste him. There was in his body no corruption, nor seed of corruption, which could produce in him any unpleasant sensation. He feared no inward disease, no outward accident. Soundest health blessed his body, absolute tranquillity his soul. As in Paradise there was no excessive heat or cold, so its inhabitants were exempt from the vicissitudes of fear and desire. No sadness of any kind was there, nor any foolish joy . . . The honest love of husband and wife made a sure harmony between them. Body and spirit worked harmoniously together, and the commandment was kept without labor. No languor made their leisure wearisome; no sleepiness interrupted their desire to labor. Augustine, City of God, 14.26 This book is about the central myth of Western culture - the story of the creation of Adam and Eve, of the Garden of Eden, of mysterious trees of life and the knowledge of good and evil, of a talking snake, of tempta- tion, of nakedness shamed and shame clothed, of loss and expulsion. It occupies only some fifty-five verses in the Book of Genesis. But it is the foundation upon which, endlessly interpreted and elaborated, Christian men and women have built their various understandings of the human condition for the last two thousand years. For the better part of this period, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was understood as an historical account of how things were in the beginning, as the opening scene in the great drama of redemption which shaped the Christian understanding of history. But it functioned as myth, for it presented a story which enabled its readers to construct accounts of the relations between men and women, Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 27 Mar 2017 at 15:31:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/Cwawmw.bcarmidbgreid gBeo.oorkg/sc oOren/tlienrme s©. h Cttpasm://bdoriid.ogrge/ 1U0.n1i0v1e7r/CsBitOy 9P78re05s1s1,5 285011004.001 2 Adam and Eve in seventeenth-century thought between God and humanity, and between God, nature, and human- kind. It gave answers to the questions of suffering, pain, and death. It legitimised particular authorities and institutions. And it explained the nature of humans in their present physical, moral, social, and political conditions. Thus, it provided the key to interpreting the nature of the present in terms of an ideal past to which all were temporally linked, though one from which all were separated by the cataclysmic event of the Fall, at least until such time as Eden would be restored and Para- dise regained, for some in the inner life of every individual, for most at the end of time. In seventeenth-century England, the Bible was central to all intellec- tual endeavours. As Christopher Hill has pointed out, 'by the mid- seventeenth century English men and women had experienced a quar- ter of a millennium of emphasis on the sovereignty of the Scriptures as the unique source of divine wisdom on all subjects . . .3I And it was the myth of Eden that shaped seventeenth-century understandings of why things were the way they were, in the light of how they ought ideally to have been. This work will examine the way in which the gaps, hints, and allusions within the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were filled out in seventeenth-century English thought. It will give a picture not only of the multiple mainstream theological and philo- sophical readings of the Edenic tradition, but also of the various and varied radical and sectarian understandings of it. In the modern West, the story of Adam and Eve no longer functions mythologically, although it still features inchoately in contemporary debates on animal rights, on the environment, on the relation between the sexes, on the status of women - if only among the theologically inclined. But the story of Adam and Eve was seminal for all aspects of seventeenth-century cultural life. It had to be read, and by all, not merely by theologians. For it was the focus of heated debates on democracy versus monarchy, on nakedness, on richness of apparel and the use of cosmetics, on androgyny, on sexual libertinism, on the nature of marriage, and on polygamy. It was the fulcrum around which moved excited discussions on the place of Paradise, on the date of creation, on the nature of the Adamic language, on the identity of the forbidden fruit, on the provenance of the American Indians, on vegetarianism, on the stature and longevity of prediluvian people, on levelling and agrar- 1 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1994), p. 18. Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 27 Mar 2017 at 15:31:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/Cwawmw.bcarmidbgreid gBeo.oorkg/sc oOren/tlienrme s©. h Cttpasm://bdoriid.ogrge/ 1U0.n1i0v1e7r/CsBitOy 9P78re05s1s1,5 285011004.001 Introduction 3 ian communism, on herpetology, on the delights of gardening and fruit-growing, and on the necessity and meaning of labour. So this book also explores the meanings of the story of the Garden of Eden in non-theological works — from books of history, natural history, political theory, and natural philosophy to writings on gardening, anthropology, fashions, language, travel, vegetarianism, anatomy, women, other worlds, botany, and geology7. Readers of this book will recognise the debt I owe to the work of Keith Thomas and Christopher Hill. But my approach has also been in- fluenced by that of Robert Darnton. For I have been concerned to attempt to capture some of the otherness of the seventeenth century through its many and varied readings of the story of Adam and Eve, to try, in his terms, to clear the way through a foreign mental world. To this end, I have explored much strange and unfamiliar territory. As a history of the reading of the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the seventeenth century, I hope it makes a useful contribution to the history of the Western reception of the biblical text. As a description of the seventeenth century's many imaginings about the life of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, I hope it may bring new insights into our understanding of a century which, in marked contrast to our own, still lived and breathed and had its being in a very different mental world, inspired by the Bible. Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 27 Mar 2017 at 15:31:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/Cwawmw.bcarmidbgreid gBeo.oorkg/sc oOren/tlienrme s©. h Cttpasm://bdoriid.ogrge/ 1U0.n1i0v1e7r/CsBitOy 9P78re05s1s1,5 285011004.001 CHAPTER I The origin of man (AB)ORIGINAL ANDROGYNES So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Genesis 1.27 All the Australians are of both Sexes, or Hermaphrodites, and if it happens that a child is born but of one, they strangle him as a Monster. Gabriel de Foigny (1676) Gabriel de Foigny was a defrocked Franciscan monk and a man in constant revolt against the sexual and moral restrictions of church and state. In 1676, he wrote A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, a work which purported to be the story of the shipwrecked explorer James Sadeur, cast up on the shores of the Great South Land, there to remain for twenty-five years. Australia was certainly Terra Incognita. A French map of Australia published in Melchissedec Thevenot's Relations de divers voyages curieux in 1663 outlined the northern, western, and part of the southern coasts, but little more.1 Europeans who landed were unimpressed. In 1605, Captain William Jansz had found only wilderness and wild, cruel black savages. In 1644, Abel Tasman found only black and 'naked beach-roving wretches, destitute even of rice . . . miserably poor, and in many places of a very bad disposition'.2 In 1688, the English buccaneer William Dampier imagined the inhabitants, whom he saw as little better than brutes: The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the World. The Hodmadods [Hottentots] ofMonomatapa, though a nasty people, yet for wealth are Gentlemen to these... and setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes. They are tall, strait-bodied, and thin, with small long Limbs. They 1 See Robert Clancy, The Mapping of Terra Australis (Macquarie Park, New South Wales, 1995), p. 82. 2 Quoted by Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London, 1987), p. 48. Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 27 Mar 2017 at 15:34:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/Cwawmw.bcarmidbgreid gBeo.oorkg/sc oOren/tlienrme s©. h Cttpasm://bdoriid.ogrge/ 1U0.n1i0v1e7r/CsBitOy 9P78re05s1s1,5 285011004.002
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