The Genesis of Perfection

Rating:
Summary: [Re:]Imagining Genesis
Review: If I recall correctly, Claude Levi-Strauss once defined a myth as the totality of its variations. It is from here, then, that I wish to set out and discuss Gary Anderson's fascinating book on the many different readings - the many different variations - of the myth of Adam and Eve. My usage of the word "myth" should not be seen as derogatory or as intended to undermine the readings of Adam and Eve that have been informative to both Judaism/s and Christianity/s. Rather, I use the term as a way of referencing via a singular noun what is, in fact, a cluster of stories that all center on a particular narrative: the narrative of Adam and Eve.

The subtitle of the book is "Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination." For this reader, placing religion within the realm of imagination is a welcome step, as it removes religion from epistemological disputes that ground themselves in certain notions of knowledge as "certainty"; furthermore, it gives room for hermeneutics - the interpretation of texts - and recognizes that different interpretations need not necessarily be seen as antithetical to or divergent from a larger tradition.

It is interesting, for example, to compare St. Augustine's readings of Genesis with St. Ephrem's readings. Although both early Christian thinkers are Doctors of the Church in Roman Catholicism and considered by the Orthodox and Anglican churches to be among the greatest of all Christian theologians, their understandings of the Adam and Eve narrative - particularly the fall and sexuality - are quite divergent. What becomes apparent is that context and cultural tendencies play a role in their interpretations; in particular, St. Ephrem's interpretations very closely parallel those of Jewish beliefs that were widely held in Syria, where Ephrem lived, at the time of his writing.

The book is neither limited to Christian readings of the story nor do Jewish readings simply serve as a stage on which to present Christian interpretations. Anderson spends a good time detailing both Rabbinic and non-Rabbinic writings; while he spends less time detailing Rabbinic (= normative Jewish) sources than detailing normative Christian sources (such as the aforementioned interpretations of Augustine and Ephrem), this does not mean that he spends less time on Jewish thought as such: he spends quite a good time discussing so-called "apocryphal" Jewish and Jewish-Christian literature, neither of which ever became normative in either tradition, but both of which are important for understanding the context/s and the spectrum of belief/s that were a part of the Jewish and Christian worlds during their formative periods. And, as can be seen from the example of Ephrem, such seemingly distant "apocrypha" may, in fact, be far more a part of the larger understanding of such a seemingly simple text as Genesis 1 - 3 than would otherwise be assumed.

This is a great book that works on multiple levels: historical, theological and socio-cultural. By bringing in so many voices - Jewish and Christian, normative and distantly normative - Anderson shows the incredible ability of "the" standard text to be read in ways that are both insightful and imaginative. It is in the imagination that the space for reading exists, and Anderson illuminates this almost perfectly.