Stephen Greenblatt, "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve"

Adam and Eve were intended to explain the origins of life, the nature of good and evil, punishment, shame, gender roles, moral responsibility, and much else. Their story has always raised as many question as it’s answered. St. Augustine struggled to make coherent orthodoxy out of an inconsistent Biblical text. Milton wrote Paradise Lost as an investigation of marriage and companionship. Like Dürer, he made Adam and Eve real people, not symbols. For Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and author of eleven books including the award-wining The Swerve, the Renaissance marked the pinnacle of Adam and Eve’s cultural life. With the Age of Exploration, new geological and ethnographic information challenged Biblical truths, and Darwin’s theories finally replaced Genesis as the pre-eminent creation story. Yet Adam and Eve have not gone away.

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