Humilitas and Sublimitas: Genesis B

    In chapter seven of Auerbach’s Mimesis, Adam and Eve, the author recounts how the Biblical literature of the Middle Ages was always informed by the notion that, whatever event was being represented, the whole story was informed as a piece of “one great drama whose beginning is God’s creation of the world, whose climax is Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, and whose expected conclusion will be Christ’s second coming and the Last Judgment.”. As such, it was a duty of this literature to be comprehensive in a way little known before: the humilitas of the human was to be incorporated into the sublimitas of the absolute, and without a loss to either aspect. Auerbach shows with finesse how this was accomplished in medieval liturgical dramas like the Old French Mystère d’Adam and the Italian dialogic Passion poem of Jacopone da Todi. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on how the poet of the Old English Genesis B was able to accomplish a similar representation in his non-dialogic form, and particularly in his representation of the Fall. It seems to me that this poet was able to hold together the humilitas of the human and the sublimitas of the absolute by weaving together the perspectival representations of the psychologies and personalities of Adam and Eve with the ultimate truth of their characters in the history of salvation. He at once offers their sentiments and motivations as apparent to them and their sentiments and motivations as conditional parts of the whole. 

    The poet begins at the outset of his description of the Fall by offering a description of the grounds for the successful temptation of Eve. These grounds are described unconditionally: “The woman’s mind / Was more malleable to him, her heart / More hospitable to his concealed cunning” [emphasis added]. He begins, in other words, with direct reference to the character of creation, and not with reference to how things “seemed” to any personality: this grounds the story in the absolute. As soon as this is established, however, the poet goes into the mind of Eve, and here the unsolidity of human psychology reigns: “She was led to believe that the deceitful devil / Was a divine messenger sent from God. / His tongue seemed truthful, his words wise, / His sign spectacular.” Here things “seem.” Yet, immediately, the two are combined: “She sidled up / To her lord and master, saying to Adam.” The poet returns to the absolute narrative without qualification, but makes of the unsolidity of Eve an absolute fact with a suspicious word (assuming the translation is accurate) like “sidled.” This opening is a presentiment of the poet’s procedure in general: he goes, not “freely,” but with assured connection from the absolute, to the perspectival, and back again. (A word on “freely.” This seems to be one of Auerbach’s favorite adjectives for the emergence of his preferred style of “realism,” at least in its more primitive forms. However, the value he places on “freedom” -- of diction especially -- seems to be ultimately subordinate to the rightness or substantive connection between word, deed, and personality present in the realistic style at its peak, for Auerbach, in Dante. But, at least as early as Genesis B, we see such connections already being formed.) 

    This transformation sets the pattern for the rest of the poet’s narrative. It is echoed already in Eve’s immediately subsequent speech to Adam. In the first phase of her speech, she begins haltingly “Adam, my lord, this fruit is so sweet-- / It’s a taste of bliss and a pleasure to eat. / It will warm your heart and open your eyes / To the world’s brightness. God’s beautiful angel / Is everything he claims.” She begins as if personally overwhelmed by a sudden and carnal pleasure and has recourse to mere “claims.” In the second phase of her speech, she is on the way to speaking more unconditionally, but, as is shown through her use of merely comparative or pragmatic arguments -- “He’s better a friend than an adamant foe” -- her pathetic humilitas is still embarrassed by the sublimitas of the “King of heaven” and “almighty God.” It is only in the last phase of her speech that Eve has the confidence to approach the absolute. As is shown by the abounding and stressing of personal pronouns, however, what Eve glimpses of the absolute by virtue of tasting the forbidden fruit is conceived to be essentially hers, and thus a spurious combination of the perspectival and the absolute. We have: “My mind is a miracle-- / Since I ate the apple, my eyes are enlightened. / Here take this fruit I hold in my hands. / I offer it openly. Share my vision. / Taste this greatness. I believe it’s brought / From the hand of God by his own command / Through this mighty messenger” (note how many of the personal pronouns open lines or follow the central stress). Eve’s vision has spuriously and willfully particularized God -- it is not the “particularization” -- the word pales in light of the event -- freely offered in the form of Christ, and in so doing grants her a position that can seem at least rhetorically to be staked beside God’s omnipotence. However this may be, it is clear that the poet's combination of Eve’s conditional psychology, her claim on the absolute, and the absolute as it actually is that makes for the drama of her speech. 

    As we reach Adam’s final acquiescence this drama comes full circle. Adam’s acquiescence is represented with the following words: “His beautiful bride urged Adam on / To share the fruit, till his spirit softened, / And trusting her undaunted loyalty and love, / He took the fruit. He ate the apple / And lost himself.” These lines suggest that Adam acquiesced not for any of the reasonings asserted by Eve in her speech, but for a certain psychological understanding sensed to underlie all of Eve’s asseverations: that, whatever Eve said in fact, love must be behind her speaking. Adam does not acquiesce with a reasoned speech in this presentation, but with a softening of the spirit. The poet has prepared this representation by the observation he puts in his own name: “Eve incessantly urged Adam all day long / With words thick and fast to taste the fruit. / This lure was aimed at expanding love / Or sharing blame” [emphasis added]. In other words, Adam, in his humilitas grasped only one half of the true grounds of Eve’s urging: he had to take it that “this lure was aimed at expanding love,” while in fact it was equally aimed at “sharing blame.” We are therefore presented with a web of perspectival motives, a spurious claim on the absolute on the part of Eve, an expectation of love on the part of Adam, unified by a true psychology: that “expanding love” and “sharing blame” had become tragically inseparable in the absolute event of Eve’s temptation in the history of salvation. The poet’s editorial comment in his own name on this event confirms that his web of representations all along was meant to bring out the interconnectedness of these partial perspectives and the actual truth: “So now the children of Eve know sin / When they fall as all of mankind must, / Though they may find through their suffering / And amending their ways their Maker’s mercy / And be restored to their Lord again.” 

    One can see throughout the artistic or “mythological” elaborations of scripture of the Middle Ages such as this one in which so much in the way of psychological representation is added how much they were meant to bring out the coherence of the whole of human experience in light of the history of salvation. From the embedded circularity of word and image of the codices to the human representation of the sublime in liturgical drama, this comprehensiveness seems to be a guiding ambition.

-LB

Auerbach, E. (2003). Mimesis: The representation of reality in Western literature. Princeton University Press.

The Complete Old English Poems, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. https://doi-org.proxy.uchicago.edu/10.9783/9780812293210