Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight
Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Madrid, Prado.
Moralist critics have always read one continuous story into the three panels. It is obvious to them that the center panel is an intermediate step between Paradise and Hell, and therefore is to be read as a sermon against lust.
In order to discuss this boneheaded idea we must go back to the part of the Genesis story that leads up to the expulsion of Adam and Eve. We'll use a literal English translation of the Vulgate, the version Bosch knew, and we begin with Gen. 2:7.Accordingly the Lord God formed man from the slime of the earth and blew into his face the breathing-place of life, and man was made a living being. Also the Lord God had planted a garden of delight in the beginning, into which he put the man whom he had formed.The Hebrew word eden means "delight." What we now call the Garden of Eden was a pleasure garden, a garden of delight.
Now we turn to Gen. 3:1.But the serpent was more cunning than all the animals of the earth which the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman, Why has God commanded you not to eat of all the trees in the garden?This powerful story has always trailed something confused and mysterious after it, a sense of something hidden, mislaid or forgotten. Howard N. Wallace suggests that the phrase "good and evil" is a merism meaning "everything" (in the same way that "old and young" means "everybody").n But this does not explain the crucial point: Why does the forbidden fruit make Adam and Eve self-conscious about their nakedness?
To which the woman answered, We may eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden. To be sure, God has commanded us not to eat or touch the fruits of the trees that are in the middle of the garden, lest perchance we die.
But the serpent said to the woman, By no means shall you die the death. Truly, God knows that in whatever day you eat of it, at that moment your eyes will be opened and, like the gods, you will know good and evil.
Accordingly, the woman saw that the tree was good to be eaten and pleasant and delectable for the eye to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate and gave it to the man, who ate.
And the eyes of both of them were opened. When they knew themselves to be naked, they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves girdles.
And when they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the air of the afternoon, Adam and his wife hid themselves from God's face in the midst of the trees in the garden.
And the Lord God spoke and said to Adam, Where are you?
And he answered, I heard your voice in the garden and was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.
And God said, Who revealed to you that you were naked, unless you ate of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?
And Adam said, The woman you gave me for a companion gave me of the tree and I ate.
And the Lord God said to the woman, Why have you done this? And she answered, The serpent deceived me and I ate.
And the Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this thing, you are cursed among all animals and beasts of the earth: on your breast shall you go, and earth shall you eat all the days of your life.
I will put enmities between you and the woman, and your seed and her seed: she shall trample your head, and you shall lie in wait for her heel.
To the woman also he said: I will multiply your labors, and your conceptions: in sorrow shall you bring forth children, and you shall be under thy husband's power, and he shall rule over you.
And even to Adam he said: Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I told you not to eat, the earth is cursed in your work; in labor shall you eat of it all the days of your life.
It shall sprout thorns and thistles for you, and you shall eat the plants of the earth. In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread until you return to the earth from which you were taken: for dust you are and to dust you shall return.
God asks them, very reasonably, "Who revealed to you that you were naked, unless you ate of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"—since they had never seen anybody with clothes on, unless it was God himself.
St. Augustine believed that it was the spontaneous erection of Adam's penis (together, we suppose, with a swelling of Eve's clitoris) that made the couple ashamed, because they saw that these organs were no longer under their conscious control. In Leo Steinberg's words, "Augustine explains that the shame felt by Adam and Eve after their punishment was not caused by the sight of their nakedness, nor by a sudden first notice that they had genitalia (they had not been created blind, he protests), but by the novel insubordination of these altered organs."n
This is scholastically ingenious, but a better explanation can be found in the Bible itself. The phrase "to know good and evil" occurs twice more, once in the Old Testament and once in the New, and in both places it means "to have mature judgment." (Not "to know everything," but "to know what's what.")Your children, of whom you said that they should be led away captives, and your sons who know not this day the difference of good and evil, they shall go in: and to them I will give the land, and they shall possess it. (Deut. 1:39)This reading gives us the kernel of an explanation for the shame felt by Adam and Eve. Their eyes were opened, they saw that they were made in the image of God, and yet, unlike God, they were naked. From this, using the reason God had given them, they concluded that it was wrong to be naked. Eating the fruit had given them the power to decide for themselves what was right and proper, not only in matters of dress, but by extension, other things too. It was this extension into future possibilities that alarmed the Lord God, and their blushes were merely a symptom.
For whereas for the time you ought to be masters, you have need to be taught again what are the first elements of the words of God: and you are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.
For every one that is a partaker of milk, is unskillful in the word of justice: for he is a little child.
But strong meat is for the perfect; for them who by custom have their senses exercised to the discerning of good and evil. (Heb. 5:12-14)
After all, God had made Eve as a companion for Adam, and he had made Adam as a sort of android gardener.n They had never been designed to be members of God's tribe—"one of us, to know good and evil."
Barr traces to a Pauline misunderstandingn the idea that Eve's disobedience brought death into the world. The Genesis story never says that Adam and Eve were created immortal. Indeed, God expels them from the Garden precisely because he fears they might eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.
It would have been pointless for him to say, "If you eat of this forbidden fruit, you and all your descendants will eventually die," since they were all going to die eventually whether they ate the fruit or not. What he threatened was death as retribution; instead, for reasons best known to himself, he expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise. We may conjecture that the serpent told the truth about this, and that God's threat was empty to begin with—that he merely wanted to frighten his puppets.
Because of our Pauline prejudices, we usually suppose that Adam and Eve had no children until after they sinned and were expelled from the Garden; but the text never says so. Indeed, that assumption is contradicted by Genesis 1:28, wherein God says to Adam and Eve, on the sixth day of creation, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it."
We have no reason to believe that Adam and Eve disobeyed this or any other commandment until they ate the fatal fruit. Depending on how long they were in the Garden, they might have had dozens or hundreds of children. (Where did Cain get his wife, and how many men and women did it take to populate his city?)n
All we know for certain is that Cain and Abel were Eve's first children after the expulsion, under the new harsh conditions that God had laid down: "To the woman also he said, I will multiply your hard labors, and your conceptions: in sorrow shall you bring forth children, and you shall be under your husband's power, and he shall rule over you." The Vulgate does not say dolores, pains, in the first part of this sentence: it says aerumnas, hard labors. This suggests that labor in childbirth was a new thing, and that the task of multiplying was easier before the expulsion—perhaps it was done by a different method altogether.
