Category Archives: Eve

Beautiful Evil – Part the Second

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In Marina Warner’s book Alone of all her Sex, each chapter is dedicated to one of the numerous roles that Mary assumes in Christian theology, including her symbolic function as the Second Eve. Mary, a virgin, was sanctified through her motherhood. There was no such glorification of woman’s creative power for women in the Old Testament. For them, as for Eve, childbirth, menstruation, and nursing were a duty, not a privilege. Motherhood was identified with nature, with the imperfect world of the flesh that keeps the human soul from attaining spiritual perfection. The feces and urine of childbirth epitomized the closeness of woman to all that is vile, lowly, corruptible and material; in the “curse” of her menstruation, she was likened to the beasts. Even the lure of her beauty was nothing but an aspect of death brought about by her seduction of Adam in the garden. St. John Chrysostom warned: “the whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum, and the fluid of digested food… If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is merely a whitened sepulcher.” Chrysostom’s writings, which of all the works of the Ascetics had a particularly sallow view of women, were later used as support for priestly celibacy, but his condemnation extended to the universal human body.
The voice of God is the voice of man, a potent tool for social control. Religion does not only embody human belief, it reflects the attitudes, the moral and social codes of its adherents, and of the priests and scribes who interpret it. Those in power can reshape religious stories and societal myths in a way that preserves the existing social order. The early Catholic Church carefully cultivated a dual image of Eve as both mother and temptress. The evidence of this association is quite apparent in early iconography, in which the serpent is often depicted as a woman. This connection extends even to later artistic works: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling portrays Eve receiving fruit from a very muscular but feminine serpent.

An anonymous painting of the Immaculate Conception for the Burgundian Emperor Maximilien highlights Mary’s role as the Second Eve. In this painting both the serpent and Mary are given Eve’s likeness, reinforcing Mary’s ability to “reverse the curse” of Eve. The stigma of the evil that has been attributed to the female sexual organs is most striking in Paul Klee’s 1926 drawing Die Busche der Pandora als Stilleben. There is no doubt to the eye that the “jar” holding the flowers resembles a vagina, and the menacing vapors pouring from its mouth only reinforce the element of shameful darkness that has been used to justify the repression of women for millennia.
In comparing Eve to Pandora, it seems logical to begin with the motivation behind their respective creations. Pandora, the first human woman of Greek mythology, was created as a punishment for the wise and cunning Prometheus, who skillfully stole fire from Zeus with his phallic fennel stalk. In Hesiod’s Works and Days Zeus says: “Son of Japetos, there is none craftier than you, and you rejoice at tricking my wits and stealing the fire which will be a curse to you and to the generations that follow. The price for the stolen fire will be a gift of evil to charm the hearts of all men as they hug their own doom.” Pandora is thus an instrument of divine retribution, yet possesses the beguiling charm of a youthful virgin. Each god bequeaths to her a small gift; among the first are the voice , the power to move, and the face of an immortal goddess. Athena gives her the belt of a bride, and dresses her with robes of silver and a crown that rivals the shield of Achilles. Aphrodite gives her grace, desire and passion, but Hermes bestows the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature. The gods call her Pandora, which literally means “bitter gift of the gods”, or as Hesiod defines her, ‘a scourge for toiling men.’ This paradoxical combination of godlike and bestial traits is described in Greek with a playful turn of words, kalon kakon, or beautiful-evil.
Unlike Pandora, Eve was not created as a punishment for Adam, but was made to be a helper, a wife. Pandora is made from elemental Earth and Water, in obvious reference to Gaia and Uranus, but Eve is derived from Adam’s rib, an image of inferiority that feminists ironically embraced through the magazine entitled Spare Rib. This almost comical creation story echoed in the heads of ancient rabbis who sniggering equated women’s ‘foul smell’ with their origin in ‘putrefying bone’. Another interesting commentary on Eve’s creation is the 1106 Duomo carving of Wiligelmo’s Creation of Adam and Eve , in which Adam is depicted with a bulging pregnant stomach, genitals conveniently tucked out of sight.

Beautiful Evil- The First Installment

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A young woman reclines in a suggestive pose, one elbow cradling a skull, while the other rests comfortably on the lid of a decorative but non-specific jar. The painter has depicted this young woman with fair creamy skin, breasts small but firm, and hips and limbs with supple muscle tone. Her gaze is modestly to the side, exposing a lean elegantly seductive neck. Resting on luxurious fabric that wraps around her arms and her hips, she lounges beneath the shade of a tree in a sumptuous garden while a stream murmurs in the distance. This feminine beauty could be the likeness of Venus or any other goddess, but a plaque placed above her head proclaims EVA PRIMA PANDORA, or EVE, THE FIRST PANDORA. Under this title her gaze takes on a slightly different affect. While not looking the viewer straight on, her coy sideways glance suggests a sexuality and sensuality of which she is unaware. The skull, while morbidly out of place, now seems a clear reference to our human mortality. Similarly, the presence of the jar carries more significance. This is no ordinary wine jar; it is meant to suggest the jar of Pandora, and the casual manner in which her hand rests on its lid is symbolic of Eve’s congenital curiosity, and of that curiosity’s consequences for mankind.

For centuries, Eve and Pandora have been placed alongside one another. Scholars have scrutinized the narratives of their creation and the motivation thereof, their legendary ‘dangerous beauty’, and their epistomophelia, or drive to curiosity. These two mythical women, who both lay claim to the title First Mother, were likewise both blamed for the downfall of humanity within moments of first meeting their beloveds’ eyes. Their seductive charms and illicit curiosity have profoundly impacted social attitudes towards women, just as their original disobedience has served as a blueprint for characterizing and vilifying Woman.

The female sexual organs have long been a subject of morbid fascination among Christian scholars. This is largely attributable to the early writings of Church fathers like Augustine, John of Chrysostom, Aquinas, Tertullian and Justin the Martyr, who, as part of the 4th century ascetic movement, which consisted of rejecting worldly pleasures, contributed much to the glorification of virginity. By praising virginity for its individual holiness, these powerful men were acting as both heirs and agents of the Roman Empire, which likewise promoted virginity as the primary vehicle for refusing carnal temptations. These scholars wielded their pens in slander against women as they continued to wage a cultural war between the flesh and the spirit. To reinforce the Church’s patriarchal morality, it was essential for the Church to link the origins of evil, sin and sex with the female gender and its reproductive role. If childbirth was the woman’s postlapsarian duty, and the pains associated with labor her curse, it was a logical step to extend the shameful darkness of her womb to the whole person, a concealing of the feminine in a secretive darkness like that imposed by veiling: “Veiling implies secrecy. Women’s bodies, and, by extension, female attributes, cannot be treated as fully public, something dangerous might happen, secrets be let out, if they were open to view….. The secrecy associated with female bodies is sexual and linked to the multiple associations between women and privacy.”1 Only in 1854, with the acceptance of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, did Christian theology revise its views on the sinfulness of childbearing itself, but many of these attitudes have nonetheless endured.

Beginning with Augustine, who was particularly entrenched in questions of the origin of sin, the fathers of the Church have viewed woman as the cause of the Fall. She is, by her nature, an evil seductress, the collaborator of Satan, and the ruin of the human race. The wrath released by Christian thinkers against Eve and all women can seem almost flattering, so embellished is their picture of a creature so supremely charming, so deadly, that man cannot resist her. Tertilliun declared with Latin spitefulness that echoed the early chronicler Tacitus: “Do you not realize, Eve, that it is you? The curse God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world. Guilty, you must bear its hardships. You are the devil’s gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the law of God, you softened up with your cajoling words the man against who the devil could not prevail by force. The image of God, Adam, you broke him as if he were a plaything. You deserved death, and it was the Son of God who had to die!”2 Woman, thus held responsible not only for the Fall, but also for Christ’s suffering and sacrifice, is at once derided and yet seemingly empowered by her crucial role in shaping human existence.

[1] Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions. London: Harvester Press, 1989.

[2] Tertullian, Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works (New York, 1959), trans. Rudolf Arbessman, Sister Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain; quoted in France Quere- Jaulmes, ed., La Femme. Les Grands Textes des Peres de l’Eglise (Paris, 1968), p.138.