The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Pdf Summary Reviews By Stephen Greenblatt

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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Pdf Summary

The most influential story in Western cultural history, the biblical account of Adam and Eve is now treated either as the sacred possession of the faithful or as the butt of secular jokes. Here, acclaimed scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores it with profound appreciation for its cultural and psychological power as literature. From the birth of the Hebrew Bible to the awe-inspiring contributions of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in bringing Adam and Eve to vivid life, Greenblatt unpacks the story’s many interpretations and consequences over time. Rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, narrow literalism, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature: all can be counted as children of our “first” parents.

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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Review

Thomas J. Farrell

5.0 out of 5 stars Wide-ranging and perceptive
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2018

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Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (Norton, 2017) is hard to categorize. As I read over Greenblatt’s 2017 book, I kept looking back at the list of his previously published books and the list of books he has edited over the years. In addition, I kept looking at the acknowledgments (pages 321-324). In the acknowledgments, he says, “Part of the pleasure of pursuing this topic has been the incentive it gave me to venture outside the disciplinary orbit in which I ordinarily circle” (page 321). Yes, he does indeed “venture outside the disciplinary orbit in which [he] ordinarily circle[s].”

Because Christians eventually incorporated the Hebrew Bible into the Christian Bible, I suppose that Greenblatt’s wide-ranging book could be categorized as a work in church history, albeit a rather expansive work in church history.

In any event, Greenblatt’s book includes a prologue, fourteen chapters, an epilogue, two appendices, acknowledgments, notes (many of which are discussion notes), a select bibliography, illustration credits, and an index.

On page 297, Greenblatt says, “In a provocative book [The Genealogy of Morals] published in 1887, the German philosopher [Friedrich Nietzsche] argued that the crucial mechanism for the transformation of amoral ape-like creatures into moral human beings was pain – repeated remorseless infliction of pain. Punishment was the means by which the healthy, exuberant, violent energies of the dominant males – Nietzsche called them ‘the blond beasts’ – were gradually tamed. In the process, everything that those who had once ruled the earth regarded as good – the ruthless satisfaction of appetite, the swaggering insolence, the reckless blend of rapine and largesse, the unrestrained will to be the alpha male – was rebranded as evil. The mass of women and male weaklings who had once been gleefully dominated by the blond beasts managed to proclaim their values of self-sacrifice, discipline, and pious fear as good. The transformation – Nietzsche termed it a ‘transvaluation of values’ – was in effect a successful slave revolt. It must have been led, he thought, by an extremely clever priestly caste seething with resentment. He identified this caste with the Jews and declared that their culminating invention, in celebrating diseased suffering over amoral health, was Jesus, the new Adam” (pages 297-298).

Oddly enough, as Greenblatt details earlier in his book (pages 24-63), a certain number of ancient Hebrews had been relocated in Babylon. He says, “Abraham, the founding figure of the Jewish faith, began his life in nearby Ur” (page 24). But things did not go well for the Hebrew slaves in Babylon, to put it mildly. Eventually, the Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Assyrian Empire. But the anguish of the Hebrew slaves in Babylon found expression in certain key texts that eventually became part of the Hebrew Bible.

Greenblatt says, “If the Hebrew storyteller [of the story of Adam and Eve] intended to unsettle deeply held Mesopotamian beliefs, he succeeded brilliantly. He turned the ancient origin story upside down. What was triumph in Gilgamesh is tragedy in Genesis” (page 63). Of course, this is not exactly what Nietzsche meant by the “transvaluation of values.” But the Hebrew slaves exacted a kind of revenge in Genesis.

Now, on page 250 of Greenblatt’s book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, he sums up his survey of portrayals of Adam and Eve as “the result of thinking of Adam and Eve as real” – instead of thinking of them, as Greenblatt himself does, as “a myth” (page 284). I agree with him that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth.

Now, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984; doctorate in Catholic theology, Gregorian University in Rome, 1946 [conferral delayed by World War II]) has articulated the philosophical position that he styles as critical realism in his philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1992; orig. ed., 1957). Lonergan differentiates his philosophical position of critical realism from what he refers to as naïve realism.

What Greenblatt refers to as “the result of thinking of Adam and Eve as real” involves what Lonergan refers to as naïve realism.

A decade or more after the original publication in 1957 of Lonergan’s philosophical masterpiece, he worked out an essay titled “The Transition from a Classical World-View to Historical-Mindedness” (1966), which is reprinted in Lonergan’s book A Second Collection, edited by William F. J. Ryan, S.J., and Bernard J. Tyrrell, S.J. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974, pages 1-9).

In Lonergan’s terminology in that essay, Greenblatt’s 2017 book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve can be understood as an extended exercise in historical-mindedness.

Now, the thought of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) developed in a trajectory parallel to the trajectory of Lonergan’s thought about a classicist worldview. See Ong’s essay “World as View and World as Event” in the journal the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647; reprinted in volume three of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, pages 69-90).

However, if Ong was familiar with Lonergan’s essay “The Transition from a Classical World-View to Historical-Mindedness,” I am not aware of any publications in which Ong uses the expression historical-mindedness.

Conversely, if Lonergan was familiar with Ong’s essay “World as View and World as Event,” I am not aware of any publications in which Lonergan uses the expression world-as-event sense of life to refer to the human condition before the world-as-view sense of life emerged in Western philosophical thought exemplified by Plato and Aristotle – which Lonergan refers to as the classicist worldview.

But Ong + Lonergan = two overlapping terms + two non-overlapping terms = a trinity of terminology. Not the divine trinity. But perhaps analogous to the divine trinity, eh?

Now, the story of Adam and Eve as a myth originated with people who had a world-as-event sense of life. When people who had basically a world-as-view sense of life interpreted the story of Adam and Eve, they tended to think of them as real, as Greenblatt says.

Not surprisingly, Greenblatt devotes three chapters (pages 163-230) to the British poet John Milton (1608-1674), who studied Ramist dialectic (also known as logic) at Cambridge University in Latin and who later in life wrote a textbook in logic in Latin based on Peter Ramus’ work.

Ong’s massively researched doctoral dissertation centered on the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Ong’s dissertation was published, slightly revised in two volumes in 1958 by Harvard University Press: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory.

In 1960, Ong served as president of the Milton Society of America. In 1978, Ong served as president of the Modern Language Association of America. In 1982, Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger translated Milton’s logic textbook in volume eight of Yale’s Complete Prose Works of John Milton (Yale University Press, pages 139-407); Ong’s introduction is reprinted as “Introduction to Milton’s Logic” in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 111-142).

But in my estimate, Ong’s most important essay about Milton is not his magnificent introduction to Milton’s Logic, but his essay “From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence” in his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 189-212).

Milton announces that his overall purpose in Paradise Lost is to justify the ways of God to man. His goal establishes a logical structure for his poem. By contrast, Homer’s announced goal of singing about the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad establishes no such logical structure for his poem.

Granted, Greenblatt is not writing epic poetry. But he does announce his purpose: “This book is a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told” (page 2). Note the modifying word here “a” – not “the.” A wee bit of modesty.

Like Greenblatt, Ong is not writing epic poetry in his mature scholarly publications from the early 1950s onward. But does he tell us, as Homer and Milton do, what his purpose is in his mature scholarly publications? Well, in his preface to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word (pages 9-13), he finally at long last explicitly spells out his thesis (pages 9-10). Thank you very much, Father Ong. Better late than never.

“[The thesis] is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works [by Ong] do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to [contemporary] electronic culture, which produces secondary orality [today], causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major development, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state” (pages 9-10).

Major developments after the Gutenberg printing-press emerged in the mid-1450s include modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement in philosophy and the arts.

Even though Ong characteristically stops well short of making specific predictions about any likely major or minor developments that might emerge as a result of the emergence of what he refers to as secondary orality, we should note here that the emergence of secondary orality has also brought forth the emergence of the Internet and social media – further permutations in the technologizing of the word. It strikes me as fair to say that the critical mass of these various permutations of the technologizing of the word will bring forth further developments in culture and consciousness.

In the beginning, according to Ong, our human ancestors lived in primary oral cultures. To this day, many people around the world live in residual forms of primary oral cultures. However, with the advent of phonetic alphabetic writing systems in the ancient world, the thought and expression characteristic or primary oral cultures got written down. This writing revolution pinballed around ancient cultures. The pinballing of the writing revolution interacted with human freedom and creativity in certain ways – eventually producing the kind of abstract philosophical thought exemplified in Plato and Aristotle – the topic of Havelock’s 1963 book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963).

The pinballing of the phonetic alphabetic writing system in ancient Jewish culture eventually resulted in the canonical texts in the Hebrew Bible – and the writing revolution continued after Christianity emerged historically and eventually produced canon of texts known as the New Testament. The pinballing of the writing revolution continued throughout the roughly thousand-year period known as the Middle Ages.

Then the pinballing of the writing revolution went into orbit, figuratively speaking, after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s. Greenblatt is aware of oral traditions (pages 16, 18, and 39) and of the emergence of writing systems (pages 17 and 40) – and especially of cuneiform writing (pages 39-63). He refers in passing to the King James Bible (pages 5 and 325) and to the printing press (pages 239 and 247) – a key touchstone in Ong’s work.
However, in my estimate, Ong’s most important essay overall is “Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems” in Interfaces of the Word (pages 305-341). In it, he opts for the option of what he refers to as “open closure.”

Now, what Ong refers to as the world-as-view sense of life involves closed-systems thinking – as does what Lonergan refers to as the classicist worldview.

What Ong refers to as the opening of closed systems of thinking involves what Lonergan refers to as historical-mindedness – as exemplified in Greenblatt’s book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.

In my estimate, the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray (1904-1967; doctorate in Catholic theology, Gregorian University in Rome, 1937) assimilated Lonergan’s terminology about the classicist worldview and historical-mindedness with astonishing alacrity. Murray had been instrumental in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church. He drafted the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. Subsequently, Murray discussed it in his article “The Declaration on Religious Freedom: Its Deeper Significance” in the Jesuit-Sponsored magazine America, volume 114 (April 23, 1966): pages 592-593. In his article, Murray uses Lonergan’s terminology. For example, Murray says, “It was the transition from the classical mentality to historical consciousness. . . . The whole document is permeated by historical consciousness” (page 592).

Later in his article, Murray says, “A work of differentiation between the sacral and the secular has been effected in history. But differentiation is not the highest stage in human growth. The movement toward a new synthesis, within which the differentiation will at once subsist, integral and unconfused, and also be transcended in a higher unity” (page 593).

No doubt Murray’s frame of reference here is the Roman Catholic Church, and no doubt the new syntheses worked out by Ong and Lonergan could contribute to the Church’s growth toward the highest stage envisioned by Murray.
Nevertheless, in my estimate, Greenblatt’s book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve may fairly be described as a contribution to the secular side’s growth toward the highest stage envisioned by Murray for the Church. I don’t mean that his book is beyond criticism. It can be criticized.

For pointed criticism of Greenblatt’s book, see Marilynne Robinson’s incisive review of it in the New York Times Book Review dated October 8, 2017, page 18. To whatever extent Greenblatt’s book may be uninformed, as Robinson claims it is in certain respects, those are shortcomings that Greenblatt can perhaps correct in subsequent publications – or perhaps others can correct them, as Robinson herself does by quoting a pertinent statement made by John Calvin (1509-1564) about Adam and Eve.

Nevertheless, Robinson’s criticisms to the contrary notwithstanding, and my own criticism of Greenblatt for not discussing Ong’s account of Milton’s closure of existence notwithstanding, Greenblatt’s book is a valuable contribution – a step in the right direction. To use a characterization that is popular is certain circles, it is “good enough.” It is not only a “good enough” step in the direction of the highest stage of growth envisioned by Murray, but also a step in the direction of Ong’s sweeping account of Western cultural history in his mature work from the early 1950s onward.

Now, because Ong and Lonergan and Murray were Jesuits, I should point out here that the short book known as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuits, includes a subsection titled “Principle and Foundation” (standardized numbered subsection 23.1-7). Basically, it is a statement of overall purpose roughly parallel to Milton’s statement of overall purpose. St. Ignatius Loyola’s statement of overall purpose establishes a logical structure for his instructions about how to proceed to engaged in guided imagistic meditations and reflections about one’s own life.

I am borrowing Havelock’s terminology about imagistic thinking – in his 1963 book Preface to Plato, mentioned above. I would argue that imagistic thinking is relevant to Greenblatt’s repeated discussions of images portrayed in various works of art.

As part of their Jesuit training, Ong and Lonergan and Murray, like all Jesuits, twice made a 30-day retreat in silence (except for daily conferences with the retreat director) following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. One of his frequently repeated instructions calls for the application of the senses to the imagistic biblical scene that the retreatant is meditating on. In Greenblatt’s terminology, the application of the senses to each imagistic biblical scene would help make it real to the retreatant.

As far as I know, the biblical scene of Adam and Eve in the garden is not included in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. However, the culminating exercise is titled Contemplation to Attain Love (meaning the love of God; standardized numbered subsections 230 to 237). The split focus is on oneself, on the one hand, and, on the other, all of God’s creation. (I have no idea why neither account of creation in Genesis is not explicitly used in this exercise. But I am sure that St. Ignatius Loyola just recorded spiritual exercises that he himself had found helpful – under the guidance of one spiritual director or another.)

Making such a 30-day retreat involves an inward turn of one’s consciousness – while one is wide awake. Jesuit spirituality involves an inward turn of one’s consciousness – while one is wide awake.

In Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Greenblatt describes the blind Milton’s experience of writing (dictating to scribes) Paradise Lost – when he was wide awake, but after he had been visited during his sleep by a feminine figure that he regarded as his inner Muse. The Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961), would refer to Milton’s Muse as an anima figure in his psyche.

Greenblatt says, “Each night in the early hours of the morning, if we can believe him [Milton], he had in this inner world of his [in his psyche] a female visitor. Milton called his nightly visitor Urania. The name was pagan, the ancient Muse of astronomy, but in Latin its literal meaning is ‘heavenly one,’ and she was for Milton the mysterious force within him that was enabling him at long last to write the great epic poem that he had dreamed all his life that he was destined to write. . . . I think we must take Milton’s claim of celestial visitation, however strange it sounds, seriously. The Muse would come to him, as he put it, ‘unimplored’” (page 201).

I agree with Greenblatt that we should take Milton’s claim seriously, because I agree with Jung that we have inner resources in our psyches that we need to learn how to access and draw on in our lives – perhaps even in our sleep. Had Jung been aware of Milton’s claim, I am sure that he would have been interested in it, because Jung was fascinated with H. Rider Haggard’s book She (1886) – as involving the inner feminine forces in the human psyche. In Greenblatt’s book, he repeatedly discusses misogyny (pages 6, 121-123, 125-127, 129-133, 136-137, 211, 220, and 342).

In my estimate, the best way to proceed to study Jung’s thought is to read his 1,600-page commentary titled Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung, 2 vols., edited by James L. Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 1988). (Ong was fascinated with Jungian thought.)

Now, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola involve inviting certain inner resources in our psyches to speak to us, as it were. Time and again, he ends with the instruction for the retreatant to carry on a conversation with Jesus or Mary – that is, a two-way conversation back and forth in which the retreatant plays both sides in the conversation. Your guess is as good as mine as to how well Ong and Lonergan and Murray and other Jesuits have carried on such imagined conversations.

Now, toward the end of Greenblatt’s book, he says, “For many people today, including me, that story [of Adam and Eve] is a myth. . . . The Enlightenment has done its work, and our understanding of human origins has been freed from the grip of a once-potent delusion. The naked man and woman in the garden with the strange trees and the talking snake have returned to the sphere of the imagination from which they originally emerged” (page 284).

In the epilogue (pages 285-302), Greenblatt says that “the focus on moral choice . . . lies at the heart of the Adam and Eve story” (page 299). Greenblatt says, “The Adam and Eve story insists that our fate, at least at the beginning of time, was our own responsibility. Millions of people in the world, including many who grasp the underlying assumptions of modern science, continue to cling to the peculiar satisfaction that the ancient story provides. I do” (page 299).

If Ong or Lonergan or Murray discusses the story of Adam and Eve in detail, I am not aware of it. But Ong was preoccupied with Darwinian evolutionary theory throughout his adult life – and his publications about it include three essays in his 1967 book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, pages 61-126) and his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, esp. pages 16 and 157-159). But I don’t know if Lonergan was or if Murray was. But Ong and Lonergan and Murray accentuate free choice and personal responsibility – both of which are accentuated in Jesuit spirituality.

Now, in his discussion of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Greenblatt says, “What follows at the poem’s end are among the most beautiful lines that Milton ever wrote. The lines [12:646-649] continue to express faith in divine providence but still more in freedom, the freedom that Milton believed God had conferred on the first couple, the freedom that still belonged to all humans” (page 230) – the kind of freedom recognized in Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.

About Stephen Greenblatt Author Of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve pdf Book

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) Author Of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve pdf book, is a Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.

Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as “cultural poetics”; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.