Eve: The Originator of the Sin of Lust
[Fig. 11] Olivuccio di Ciccarello, The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve, tempera and gold on wood panel, c. 1400, The Cleveland Museum of Art.
St. Augustine understood Original Sin as not an event, but a condition imposed by God for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, which produced a certain susceptibility toward sexual lust. (1) In his Literal Commentary on Genesis, Augustine, contemplating the role of Adam in the Fall, wrote:
“If Adam were already spiritual (in mind, at least, if not in body), how could he have believed what the serpent said?…woman was given to man, woman who was of small intelligence and who perhaps still lives more in accordance with the promptings of the inferior flesh than by the superior reason…that through her the man became guilty of transgression.” (2)
Augustine states that Eve’s susceptibility, caused by her “small intelligence” and propensity to follow “inferior flesh,” is what led Adam to temptation and sin. Elsewhere in the Commentary, Augustine explained that “for he called the man the head of the woman, and Christ the head of the man, and God the head of Christ.” (3) The inferiorly minded Eve was subservient to Adam, who was made in God’s image under Christ, yet Augustine assigned most of the fault to her. As the first woman, Eve came to represent the sinful, tempting nature inherent in all women. Women were subservient to men, but somehow, it was a woman’s fault for the tempting of Adam.
In City of God, Augustine expanded upon the Fall and its consequences for humanity. He wrote, in an explanation of Eve’s role in the Fall:
“…so we cannot believe that Adam was deceived, and supposed the devil’s word to be truth, and therefore transgressed God’s law, but that he by the drawings of kindred yielded to the woman, the husband to the wife, the one human being to the only other human being…because the woman accepted as true what the serpent told her, but the man could not bear to be severed from his only companion, even though this involved a partnership in sin.” (4)
Augustine thus assigned blame to both Adam and Eve. Eve was tempted by the serpent to sin, perhaps due to the aforementioned “small intelligence;” Adam was not tempted in a similar way, instead he complied due to their relationship and the vice of pride. Augustine rationalized desire as the loss of the soul’s control over the body as a consequence of the Fall. (5)
Best expressed through the rebelliousness of the sexual organs, Augustine theorized that the separation between pre-and postlapsarian humanity is the human body’s lost of control over desire. (6) Sexual desire happens whether we willed it or not, and thus original sin is transmitted through these unruly feelings of lust. (7) So then, the sin of lust, that uncontrollable desire, is directly a result of the temptation of Eve and the subsequent Fall. Women were associated with Eve, who was seen as the originator of the sin of lust, through her perceived temptation of Adam leading to the fall. Eve was the harbinger of concupiscence, a sin that then became conscribed as part of women’s nature.
The cultural legacy of Eve is visible within Hell. Like Eve, Taddeo’s women are naked, have long blonde hair, and one even interacts with a snake. In the section of Lust, a snake bites the genitals of a tortured woman and another snake-like demon tail winds itself through her loose hair, pulling her upwards [fig. 7]. Serpents swirl around the image, visually linking the sinner’s human body with the demonic. The iconography of the snake is a visual allusion to the figure of Eve through the imagery of her temptation by the serpent in the garden, which was often paired with images of the Virgin Mary in medieval art. For example, Olivuccio di Ciccarello’s c.1400 The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve presents a clear dichotomy between the chaste Virgin Mary and the sinful Eve [fig. 11]. (8) Reflecting the medieval theological concept that set Eve and Mary in direct moral opposition, the nude, long blonde-haired body of Eve, made even more tantalizing by a drapery of cloth fallen away from her shoulders, stands in stark contrast with the single exposed breast of Mary, who nourishes the Christ Child, reminding the viewer of her divine intercessory capabilities. (9) Even while staring at the scene of the Virgin and Christ Child, Eve is tempted to raise the forbidden fruit to her lips by the human-headed snake emerging from between her legs, a motif with obvious sexual overtones, evoking her beguiling role in the Fall. Medieval theological thought placed much blame on Eve’s disobedience as the cause of the Fall. The primordial Eve came to represent the sexually sinful, tempting nature inherent in all women, and as such, Taddeo’s sinful women share similar iconography with representations of Eve.
(1) Mann, 47. For more on Augustine’s Doctrine of Concupiscence, which describes the rebelliousness of human sexual desire as a result of Eve in the Fall, see Leo Steinberg, “The Ubiquity of the Erection Motif,” in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; particularly 318-322.
(2) Elizabeth A. Clark, Women in the Early Church, ed. Thomas Halton. Wilmington: M. Glazier, 1983. 40-41.
(3) Saint Augustine, On Genesis: Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichees and on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, trans. Roland J. Teske. Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aul/detail.action?docID=3134826. 148.
(4) Augustine, City of God, 14.11.
(5) For the soul, reveling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body…then begun the flesh to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh.” Augustine, City of God, 13.13.
(6) Steinberg, 318.
(7) “…even those who delight in this pleasure are not moved to it at their own will, whether they confine themselves to lawful or transgress to unlawful pleasure; but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves.” Augustine, City of God, 14.16.
(8)
(9) Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf, 1976.