From Eden to Eternity

Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages

Alastair Minnis

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812291476
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

An impressively learned and beautifully illustrated review of medieval ideas about Paradise Did Adam and Eve need to eat in Eden in order to live? If so, did human beings urinate and defecate in paradise? And since people had no need for clothing, transportation, or food, what purpose did animals serve? Would carnivorous animals have preyed on other creatures? These were but a few of the questions that plagued medieval scholars for whom the idea of Eden proved an endless source of contemplation. As theologians attempted to reconcile their own experiences with the realities of the prelapsarian paradise, they crafted complex answers that included explanations of God's interaction with creation, the existence of death, and man's dominion over nature.In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis examines accounts of the origins of the human body and soul to illustrate the ways in which the schoolmen thought their way back to Eden to discover fundamental truths about humanity. He demonstrates how theologians sought certainty in matters of orthodox Christian thought and also engaged in speculation about matters that, they freely admitted, were not susceptible to firm proof. Moreover, From Eden to Eternity argues that the preoccupation with paradise belonged not only to the schools but to society as a whole, and it traces how lay writers and artists also attempted to interpret the origins of human society. Eden transcended human understanding, yet it afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

CHAPTER 1

The Body in Eden

At first I couldn’t make out what I was made for, but now I think it was to search out the secrets of this wonderful world and be happy and thank the Giver of it all for devising it.

—Mark Twain, Eve’s Diary¹

In the widely read Liber de ordine creaturarum, an anonymous seventh-century author draws on all the stylistic devices at his disposal to convey something of the wonderful life that Adam and Eve could have enjoyed. “But while man lived there, immortal and blessed, was not the domination of the whole orb subjected to him? . . . Fire would neither burn him, nor water drown him, nor the strength of beasts rend him, nor the stings of thorns (or anything else) wound him, nor the absence of air suffocate him, nor would all those things which harm mortals hinder him.”² Such sentiments were echoed again and again by his successors. They envisaged a world wherein our first parents were untroubled by the present-day perils or fire, water or air, free from the violent attacks of wild beasts or indeed of their fellow-men. And death had no dominion over them. The human body has never had it so good.

“Tot tens poez vivre sit u tiens mon sermon,

E serras sains, nen semtiras friczion.

Ja n’avras faim, por bosoing ne beveras,

Ja n’averas frait, ja chalt ne sentiras;

Tu iers en joie, ja ne te lasseras,

Et en deduit ja dolor ne savras.

Tute ta vie demeneras en joie . . .” (50–56)

[“You can live forever, if you obey my word; you will forever enjoy health, never will you be afraid. You will never be hungry, nor will you drink because you need to, never will you be cold, nor will you feel heat; you will live in joy without ever feeling weary, and in our pleasure you will never know pain. Your whole life you will spend in joy . . .”]³

Thus speaks the voice of God in an Anglo-Norman play dated circa 1125–75, the Ordo representacionis Ade.

Adam and Eve were fine physical specimens, in possession of superlative degrees of nobility, dignity, strength, intelligence, and spiritual insight that were lost following the Fall. The robustness of their bodies was well attested by the fact that, in the early days of the human race, men stayed alive for several centuries. According to Genesis 5, Adam lived for 930 years. Or, as our first father himself eloquently puts it, as reported by Dante,

“. . . vidi lui tornare a tutt’ i lumi

de la sua strada novecento trenta

fiate, mentre ch’ïo in terra fu’mi.” (Paradiso, XXVI, 121–23)

[“. . . while I was on the earth I saw him (= the sun) return to all the lights of his path nine hundred and thirty times.”]⁴

When Adam was 130 years old he begot a son named Seth, who himself lived for 912 years. Other descendants enjoyed similarly impressive life spans: 905 in the case of Enos, 910 in the case of Cainan, 895 in the case of Malaleel, and 962 in the case of Jared. If such extraordinary longevity was possible outside Eden, how much more durable would the human body have been within it? Would it have lasted for ever? That question was a hypothetical one, of course, since the durability of the original human body was never put to the test, because the Fall quickly rendered it fragile, disorderly, and mortal. Indeed, it was doubly hypothetical, inasmuch as, had the first humans not yielded to temptation, they would have been transferred, without dying, to an even better state, a place where their bodies would no longer require material nourishment but would be sustained only by the spirit.⁵

But nevertheless the schoolmen speculated. It was common to pose the question of whether the body of the unfallen Adam was capable of “dissolution” (posset dissolvi) or destruction, and answer it in the negative. Typically, Bonaventure concludes that “in the state of innocence” the human body “could not actually be dissolved, though it had the potential (potentia) to be dissolved,” which potentiality became reality after the Fall.⁶ It would have been “unfitting (inconveniens) and contrary to the order of the Divine Justice” for “the body of a man” to have been dissolved “in the state of innocence,” that being possible only after Adam’s fault, by way of punishment. John Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (d. 1308), took a more robust line, his crucial point being that the first human being was created immortal in paradise not through some intrinsic gift or some inherent feature of his body which only his disobedience could have revoked or altered, but rather because of an act of extrinsic divine protection. That is to say, God undertook to ensure that humans would stay in good shape for as long as they lived in Eden.⁷ Adam’s body would have been translated into heaven well before it could have developed any debility which would have resulted in death. Had Adam, and by extension the first family, not been thus translated, they would have died. To stay close to Scotus’s technical language: divine grace did not exclude formally the potential to die, but only the act of dying. It would seem, then, that the original human body had a “sell-by date”—but of a very long duration, which would not have expired before the time that its owner was elevated to a higher existence.⁸

Creating Bodies

Elsewhere in his Sentences commentary, Scotus joined his contemporaries in celebrating the many excellences of the bodies of Adam and Eve.⁹ Peter Lombard was confident that Adam was made “of a fully mature stature”—not because that was how God had to create him, but rather because that was the way God chose to create him.¹⁰ The first man’s proud manliness was sometimes imaged in plastic art by giving him a face wearing a fully grown beard, as, for instance, in the depiction of Adam and Eve with God and the animals in paradise which is included in British Library, MS Egerton 912, fol. 10r (c. 1415, from the Paris area), a French translation of Orosius’s Historiae adversum paganos (see Plate 5). Quite how Adam came by that beard is an interesting puzzle: was he created with it ready-grown, or did his hair grow with great speed once God placed him in paradise? Setting that quibble aside, the symbolism is obvious. The “association of hairiness with holiness,” as Giles Constable nicely puts it, is of long standing.¹¹ Throughout the Middle Ages Jesus was generally depicted with a beard, and the same was true of such major biblical figures as Moses, Abraham, St. Peter, and John the Baptist, not to mention legions of subsequent hermits, saints, and sages. A beard, then, frequently bespoke wisdom and authority.

More broadly, the “universal and obvious meaning of beards was their association with masculinity, virility, and strength.”¹² In his Enarrationes in psalmos Augustine asserts that “The beard signifies strong men; the beard signifies young, vigorous, active, quick men. When therefore we describe such men, we say that a man is bearded.”¹³ A similar statement, couched in the discourse of late medieval medicine, may be found in the Le Livre des Eschez amoureux moralisés of Evrart de Conty, regent master 1353–1405 in the Paris faculty of medicine and physician to King Charles V of France. A beard shows man’s great dignity (grant dignité) and powerful heat (chaleur vertueuse), and makes known his generative power.¹⁴ “And so wise philosophers say that animals which have more hair, and birds that have more feathers” than others of their kind “are more potent (poissans) than others.”¹⁵ Similarly, according to the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, the growth of facial hair marks a boy’s passage from boyhood to manhood; indeed man “grows hair when he begins to be capable of sexual intercourse.”¹⁶ There are aesthetic considerations also: “The beard looks very good on men and is an honest and beautiful thing,” to quote Evrart again.¹⁷ In contrast, Nature “ordained no beard at all for women, for it would be repugnant to their complexion, which is cold compared to that of men.” Indeed, Evrart claims, this function of clear sexual differentiation is the “principal end and the greatest profit” which nature intends by the beard.¹⁸ Men who shaved their facial hair (in fashionable ways offensive to moralists) or—worse—were incapable of growing beards at all, were deemed effeminate and suspected of sexual deviancy.¹⁹

The sexes are clearly differentiated in the Egerton illumination. Adam’s normative masculinity is powerfully conveyed. Bearded, and making hand gestures which express wonder and respectful receptivity,²⁰ he gets most of God’s attention; indeed, God has his face turned toward him. Writing around 1150, the Leviticus commentator Ralph of Flaix remarked, “The beard on a man is a sign of the perfect age. Whence the virtue of the saints is often designated by a beard.”²¹ The “perfect age” (widely supposed to be around thirty-two) was the age at which Christ had died and Adam was created.²² So, then, the Egerton artist has used a beard to intimate the physical perfection of the newly created Adam, and his virtue both physical and spiritual—all the strength of his robust mature body, all the mental prowess at the command of this most intelligent of men. Eve in all her feminine beauty comes across as dignified and self-possessed yet subordinate. Her left hand seems to be clutching God’s left hand or wrist, in a gesture of daughterly respect and submission to this the ultimate father figure.²³ It is an unusual, and arguably rather moving, touch, which brings a hint of familial warmth to a scene which could easily become stiff and quite unrelentingly formal (though, of course, a high degree of formality is obligatory here). Even as it presents a woman who knows her place.

But did not the fact that Adam was made from “the slime of the earth” (de limo terrae; Genesis 2:7) somewhat mar his image of grant dignité, of proud and potent masculinity? By no means. The schoolmen explained that, as a matter of fact, all of the elements were involved in his composition, not just earth and water (slime being a mixture of earth and water). Admittedly, these were the dominant components, but that is only to be expected of worldly or “lower” creation. (In contrast, fire and air—the nobler elements—are the prime constituents of the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, planets, stars, and spheres).²⁴ Man remains the most honorable of God’s creatures on earth, the noblest of animals (in Aristotle’s phrase).²⁵ He stands erect—for many good reasons.²⁶ The other animals, Aquinas explains, use their senses to obtain the necessities of their lives, taking pleasure in the objects they sense only inasmuch as they involve sex or food. But man uniquely “takes pleasure in the actual beauty of sense objects for its own sake.”²⁷ Here Aquinas is specifically thinking of how the senses can function in the pursuit of knowledge.²⁸ Given that “the senses are mainly concentrated in the face,” it makes good sense for the faces of animals to be close to the ground, so they can seek out food.²⁹ But the face of man must be held aloft, so its senses “may be free to become aware of sense objects in every direction, in the earth and in the heavens, so that from them all he may gather intelligible truth (intelligibilem veritatem).”³⁰ Besides, man’s big brain has got to be positioned up there so that it works to best advantage.

Aquinas then offers a grotesque image of what a man would look like if he had been created with a horizontal rather than a vertical posture. In that case his hands could not be the wonderful tools they now are because he would have to use them for feet. Indeed, he would have to use his mouth to gather food. “And so he would have an oblong mouth, and hard coarse lips, and also a hard tongue to prevent it being injured by external objects, as is clear from the characteristics of other animals.” Human speech, “which is the special activity of reason,”³¹ would have been impossible. Here, then is a monstrous creation, an alternative design which God in His wisdom chose not to follow.³² For a brief moment we are allowed a glimpse of how things might have been otherwise, in some strange and troubling alternative universe, even as Aquinas affirms that humankind “has the best possible disposition (dispositio) in relation to the disposition of the world as a whole.” It was utterly appropriate (conveniens) for our first parents to walk tall.

But a cluster of issues emerged, concerning size and scale. When God spoke of increasing and multiplying (cf. Genesis 1:28), what did he mean—that Adam and Eve needed to grow bigger, taller, following their initial creation? Robert Grosseteste dismissed any such (potentially demeaning) suggestion, asserting that “they were created with perfect stature,”³³ and therefore the Genesis passage must refer to the bodily increase and multiplication of humankind in general—though, to be sure, God in His wisdom has on occasion taken this ability away from certain individuals, leaving them barren. (That last remark refers to the postlapsarian world, of course.) But how could a fully grown woman have been made from a much smaller thing, Adam’s rib (cf. Genesis 2:21–22)? Peter Lombard defines the problem thus: if God had added anything extrinsic to the rib in making the body of the woman, then “the addition would be gr...