Fall of Man | Bible, Painting, Genesis, & Dürer (2024)

Fall of Man, in Christian doctrine, the descent of humanity from a state of innocence lived in the presence of God to a sinful world of misery and death. After disobeying God and eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and cursed in various ways. According to the Christian concept of original sin, Adam’s guilt was transmitted to all of humanity; only the death and resurrection of Jesus could erase the stain of Adam’s disobedience.

Creation and expulsion from the Garden of Eden

In the Bible there are two accounts of the Creation. The Priestly (P) source of the 5th or 6th century bce relates in Genesis 1:27 that God, on the sixth day of the Creation, “created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” The first humans are not named, they are created as a pair, and there is no reference to the Fall. The longer Yahwist (J) narrative of the 10th century bce worked the material of an older creation myth into the story of the Garden of Eden without reconciling notable contradictory elements. Thus, in the story of Genesis 2:5–7 and 2:15–4:1, Adam, the first man, is not totally ignorant (Genesis 2:20), and, being created out of the earth (Hebrew adamah), he is naturally mortal (Genesis 2:7).

This account of the origin of man—more precisely of man and woman as sexually differentiated—marked a departure from other religions of the ancient Near East. Sexual differentiation was found in the gods of various pantheons and was thought to be as much a primary datum as the gods themselves. The authors of the Yahwist source, rejecting any sexual character in the Deity, insisted that sex was instituted in lower forms of being by a God who was above sex.

Adam and Eve (the latter, in the Yahwist narrative, a female companion crafted by God from Adam’s rib) lived in the Garden of Eden in a state of naked innocence (Genesis 2:25). Eve’s creation from the body of Adam showed her community and equality with him and her capacity to share his life. A serpent, “more crafty than any other wild animal” (Genesis 3:1), tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, telling her “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). Adam joined her in eating the forbidden fruit, whereupon they both perceived their nakedness and fashioned fig leaves into aprons to cover themselves. Fearing that God would find them naked, they hid among the trees of the garden. God confronted Adam and Eve, and both admitted that they had eaten from the tree of knowledge. The punishments meted out for having defied God are decisive, not only for the human pair and the serpent but also for their respective descendants. For its deception of Eve, the serpent was condemned to be despised by humankind, traveling on its belly and eating dust. God then sentenced the first man and woman. Eve was cursed with painful labour in childbirth (Genesis 3:16) and subordination to Adam (“he shall rule over you”). Adam was relegated to work the accursed ground and sweat for his subsistence for the length of his mortal life—“you aredust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).

Death, being the natural consequence of Adam’s earthly nature, was not part of God’s punishment. The tree of life could have given him immortality, however, and God determined that “man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:22). To prevent Adam from achieving full parity with God, the first man had to be driven out of the garden where the tree of life grew. Cherubim and a great flaming sword were placed east of the garden to prevent Adam and Eve from returning. Immortality was lost by the free choice of Adam (his sin, properly speaking) for a knowledge which would bring him to an equality with God but which in fact had a laughable conclusion: the discovery that he was naked. The story of the Fall thus offers a pessimistic verdict on the human race and shows a fundamental religious distinction: the distance in essence between humanity and God, the radical conflict between human ambition and God’s absolute sovereignty.

Meaning and interpretations of the Fall

The narrative arc of the Creation and the Fall attempts to explain humanity’s progression from the state of bliss in which it was created to the present human condition of toil and misery. It attributes the Fall to ambition (hubris), whereby humanity is not merely content with obedience to the will of God but also desires the “knowledge of good and evil” (a classic expression for all knowledge) which is the prerogative of God and which in addition has been expressly forbidden (Genesis 3:5). The story and the beliefs which it expresses are distinctively Israelite, unparalleled in the ancient world, resting upon Israel’s unique conception of God and of his relations to the universe and humanity. Mesopotamia and Egypt could accept the historical condition of humanity because the will of their gods—more powerful than the human will—did not surpass the human will in morality. The Israelites believed in the divine moral imperative and did not conceive that God could create a disorderly world. Therefore, the evident disorder in the existing world cannot be due to the inability of God to create a world worthy of himself; it must be attributed to the rebellion of humans—in the story, to humanity’s refusal to recognize the true character of the Deity.

This rebellion of humanity is primeval and universal. Because of it, humans suffer in family life, in the struggle with nature, in strife with their fellows (notably the fratricidal encounter between Cain and Abel in Genesis 4), and finally in death. None of these is an intended portion from the Creator; they are the fruits of efforts to rise to the divine level. Given the significance of the Fall, it is perhaps surprising that Adam and Eve do not appear elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (except as a passing reference in 1 Chronicles 1:1), but it should be remembered that the Old Testament rarely cross-references itself. The heavy yoke which rests on the sons of Adam (Ecclesiasticus 40:1) is the only possible allusion in the Greek Old Testament to the Fall.

Adam and Eve do appear in the New Testament, most notably in the works of Paul, and the Fall is portrayed as the beginning of the redemptive journey that concludes with the Resurrection of Jesus. Paul illustrates human frailty by the serpent’s seduction of Eve (II Corinthians 11:3). In I Timothy 2:11–15, Paul argues the authority of men over women from the chronological priority of the creation of Adam and because “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” The connection between Adam and Jesus was already fixed in Paul’s mind when he wrote I Corinthians 15:22. Here Adam, who brought death to humanity, is contrasted with Christ, who brings the eternal life of the resurrection.

Paul’s writings also serve as the main scriptural foundation of the Christian doctrine of original sin. In Romans 5:12–19, Paul again draws parallels between Adam and Jesus, concluding “For just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” The concept of original sin was later greatly expounded by St. Augustine, and it would serve as a motivating factor for the practice of infant baptism in some Christian denominations.

The Fall in art and literature

Although there are comparatively few scriptural mentions of Adam and Eve, the Fall was a popular topic with the writers of the pseudepigrapha (noncanonical works) and apocrypha (highly regarded but noncanonical books for Jews and Protestants; deuterocanonical books for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians), who retold it with many embellishments. The Life of Adam and Eve, written between 20 bce and 70 ce, contains a much fuller account of the Fall and what followed. The narrative runs from the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to the deaths and funerals of the first humans. The religious message in the story involves the repentance of Adam and Eve after the Fall, and the description of their deaths does not show any traces of the idea of original sin. The Fall of Man is rationalized in a modern manner by the author of II Baruch (c. 100 ce), who states that each man is his own Adam.

The story of the Fall has long been a source of inspiration for writers and artists. The unknown author of the 14th-century poem Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight composed a tale that was, in essence, an Arthurian recapitulation of the Fall, with Gawain in the role of Adam and the tempting Lady Bertilak as Eve. Josuah Sylvester translated an earlier treatment of the Fall by Huguenot Guillaume du Bartas as Divine Weekes and Workes (1608), and this collection remained popular in England until superseded by John Milton’s epic masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667).

Milton examines Adam’s disobedience in parallel with Satan’s rebellion against God, reasserting in the face of Enlightenment science a Christian humanist view of God, humanity, and nature. The picture of Eden is a symbolic rendering of Milton’s vision of perfection, but it is presented when the reader accompanies Satan into the garden, so that idyllic innocence and happiness are seen only under the shadow of evil. Eve, in her fatal desire for the godlike knowledge the serpent (Satan) promises, and Adam, in his scientific curiosity and his following of Eve, reenact the sin of Satan, irreligious pride and rebellion. Both, far from attaining godlike knowledge, succumb to animal lust, yet, when grace and penitence begin to work in them, they have a strength beyond the reach of Satan. Profoundly compassionate irony pervades the moving last lines which describe Adam and Eve as they depart from Eden—not now the majestic lords of creation but two frail human beings beginning life anew in the world of sin and sorrow and death, though “with Providence their guide” and the hope of achieving a “paradise within.”

Notable depictions of the Fall in the visual arts include Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504), a delicately engraved examination of human proportion that recalls Classical images of Apollo and Diana. Masaccio’s fresco Expulsion of Adam and Eve (c. 1427) powerfully conveys Adam and Eve’s anguish at being expelled from the Garden of Eden with a dramatic use of light and shadow. Titian’s Fall of Man (or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; c. 1550) compounds the serpent’s deception by cloaking the Tempter in the guise of an innocent-looking cherub.