Mimesis (28 page)

It is divided into two parts. The first contains a conversation between Adam and Eve concerning the desirability of dealing with the Devil; here the apple is not mentioned. In the second, Eve takes the apple from the tree and tempts Adam into eating of it. The two parts are separated by the intervention of the serpent—the
serpens artificiose compositus
—which whispers something into Eve’s ear. What it is we are not told, but we can imagine it, for immediately afterward Eve reaches for the apple, offers it to the reluctant Adam, and utters what will be her principal motif, often repeated:
Manjue, Adam
! Thus she breaks off the first conversation, concerning dealing with the Devil, before it is finished; she does not reply to Adam’s last speech, but brings about a completely new situation, a
fait accompli
which cannot but surprise Adam the more since so far there has been no mention of the apple in his conversation with her. She appears to be acting upon the serpent’s advice and this also explains the serpent’s intervention at this precise juncture: for to win Eve over to itself and for its purpose would no longer be necessary; that had already been accomplished in the preceding scene between Eve and the Devil, which had concluded with Eve’s decision to taste the apple and give Adam some of it too. The serpent’s intervention in the middle of the conversation between Adam and Eve can serve no other purpose than to give Eve a
directive which is needed at this precise moment: namely, that she should break off the discussion, which from the Devil’s point of view was becoming dangerous and useless, and should instead proceed to action. But the reason the discussion is dangerous and useless from the Devil’s viewpoint is the evident fact that it fails to convince Adam, while there is even a risk that Eve herself may again begin to hesitate.

Now let us examine the first part of the scene, that is, the conversation concerning the desirability of dealing with the Devil. Adam calls his wife to account as a French farmer or burgher might have done when, upon returning home, he saw something that he did not like: his wife talking to a fellow with whom he has already had unpleasant experiences and with whom he does not want to have anything to do. Woman,
muiller
, he says to her, what was that fellow doing around here? What did he want with you? Eve answers in a way that is meant to impress him: “He talked of how we could better ourselves!” (for “weal, advantage, betterment” would seem to be the sense of
honor
here; even in the
chansons de geste
the word has a strongly materialistic value). “Don’t you believe him,” says Adam emphatically, “he is a traitor, I know all about him!” Eve knows all about him too, but it has never occurred to her that such a thing could be called treason. There is no moral consciousness in her as there is in Adam; in its place she has a naive, childishly hardy, and unreflectingly sinful curiosity. Adam’s clear appraisal and condemnation of the Devil and his schemes disconcerts her. She falls back on an insincere and impertinent but embarrassed question, the sort of question which has been asked a thousand times in similar situations by naive, impetuous people who are governed by their instincts: “How do you know?” The question does her no good. Adam is too sure of his ground. “I have found out by experience!” These words cannot be Eve’s, as a textual critic has recently assumed (we shall have more to say about this); for only Adam has consciously had such an experience, and it is the tone of
his
voice which we hear in this energetic reply. Eve on the other hand has in nowise interpreted her conversation with the Devil as an experience of his treachery; her playful curiosity failed to grasp the ethical problem. Even now she does not grasp it, for she does not want to. She has made up her mind to give the other side (the Devil) a try for once. But she senses that she cannot contradict Adam seriously when he says that the Devil is a traitor. So she abandons the course she had taken with the question “How do you know?”, and instead comes out—half frightened and half brazen—with her real
thoughts: “Why should that prevent me from seeing him. He will change your mind for you too!” (
changer saver
refers to
bien le sai
, the knowledge of the Devil’s treachery which only Adam has). But this was a wrong move, for now Adam grows seriously angry: “He won’t do that, because I shall never trust him!” And with the authority of a man who knows himself master of his house and fully in the right as to the facts, he now clearly states the reasons for his view and forbids Eve to have any dealings with the Devil (“with a scoundrel who did a thing like that you can have nothing to do”), for he remembers the part which God bade him play in relation to the woman:
Tu la governe par raison
(l. 21). At this point the Devil senses that his plan is miscarrying and so he intervenes.

I have discussed this passage in detail because the text of the manuscript is somewhat confused in respect to the distribution of lines between the two speakers and especially because S. Etienne (
Romania
, 1922, pp. 592-595) proposed a reading for lines 280-287 which was adopted in Chamard’s edition (Paris, 1925) but which I do not find convincing. It is as follows:

280
Adam
Ne creire ja le traitor!

Il est traitre.

Eva
Bien le sai.

Adam
Et tu coment?

Eva
Car l’asaiai.

De ço que chalt me del veer?

Adam
Il te ferra changer saver.

Eva
Nel fera pas, car nel crerai

De nule rien tant que l’asai.

Adam
Nel laisser mais. …

I consider this impossible. The very different tone of the two characters is completely confused. It is not possible for Eve to say
bien le sai
, nor for Adam to ask how she knows, nor for Eve to refer to her previous experience. And to expunge Adam’s emphatic answer “the Devil will never succeed in that” from the conversation by interpreting it as a reassuring remark which Eve offers to calm Adam’s apprehensions, strikes me as completely misguided. In support of his proposal, Etienne contends that Eve’s answer,
de ço que chalt me del veer?
to Adam’s assertion, “I know from experience” (as the earlier editors, and I too, have understood it), would be
d’une maladresse inconcevable
; she would be admitting to Adam that she was in league with the Devil:
ayant ainsi convaincu Adam de sa complicité avec le tentateur elle réussirait dès la scène suivante à le persuader d’accepter d’elle ce qu’il avait refusé de son compère!
This, Etienne insists, would be against all verisimilitude, as it would be that Eve should say: Satan will make you change your mind—for
Satan n’intervient plus
, and after all it is Eve who leads Adam astray! It is evident that Etienne conceives of Eve as an extremely skillful and diplomatic person, whose object is to soothe Adam and make him forget the tempter Satan against whom he is prejudiced, or at least to make him understand that she does not blindly rely on Satan but intends to wait and see whether his promises come true.

Such speeches are hardly calculated to soothe Adam, and the fact that Satan does not reappear is in no way an argument against Eve’s remarking that he may make Adam change his mind. Aside from these minor flaws, Etienne’s view proves that he has failed to understand the significance of the serpent’s intervention and the tremendous effect produced on Adam by Eve’s compliance with the serpent’s advice (that is, her picking the apple from the tree), although these points furnish the key to the entire scene. Why does the serpent intervene? Because it senses that things are going badly for it. Eve, in fact, is clumsy, very clumsy, even though her clumsiness is not hard to understand. For without the Devil’s special help she is but a weak—though curious and hence sinful—creature, far inferior to her husband and easily guided by him. That is how God created her from Adam’s rib. And God explicitly ordered Adam to guide her, and Eve to obey and serve him. Confronted with Adam, Eve is fearful, submissive, self-conscious. She feels she cannot cope with his clear and reasonable and manly will. The serpent alone changes all this. It upsets the order of things established by God, it makes the woman the man’s master, and so leads both to ruin.

The serpent accomplishes this by advising Eve to break off the theoretical discussion and to confront Adam with a wholly unexpected
fait accompli
. Earlier, when the Devil had talked to Eve, he had given her the directive:
primes le pren, Adam le done!
(take it—the apple—first, then give it to Adam). It is of this directive that the serpent now reminds her. Adam must not be approached where he is strong but where he is weak. He is a good man, a French peasant or burgher. In the normal course of life he is reliable and sure of himself. He knows what he is supposed to do and what not. God’s orders were clear, and his honest decency is rooted in this unambiguous certainty
which guards him against dubious entanglements. He also knows that he has his wife under his thumb. He is not afraid of her occasional whims, which he regards as childish and not at all dangerous. Suddenly something unprecedented happens, something that upsets his whole system of life. The woman who a moment ago was chattering away with childish thoughtlessness, without rhyme or reason, whom but a moment ago he had caught up sharp with a few determined words which permitted no rejoinder—the same woman suddenly displays a will of her own, completely independent of his will; she reveals it through an act which to him seems a monstrous portent. She picks the apple from the tree as though it were the easiest and most natural thing in the world to do, and then presses him hard with her
manjue, Adam!
four times repeated. His horrified refusal, which the Latin stage direction expresses in the words
Ipse autem nondum eum accipiet
, cannot possibly be exaggerated. But his earlier calm assurance has vanished completely. The shock has been too severe; the roles are exchanged; Eve is master of the situation. The few words which he still manages to stammer out show that he is in a state of utter confusion. He vacillates between fear and desire—not actually a desire for the apple but rather a desire to prove and assert himself: is he, as a man, to be afraid of doing what the woman has just successfully done? And when he finally overcomes his fear and takes the apple, he does it with a most touching movement of feeling: what his wife does, he will do too; he will trust her:
jo t’en crerrai, tu es ma per. Perniciose misericors
, as Bernard of Clairvaux once described it (Pat. Lat. 183, 460). Here we see how wrongly Etienne formulates the situation (see above), when he thinks it surprising that Eve, as the Devil’s ally, should succeed in leading Adam astray although the Devil himself could not do so. Actually no one but she could succeed here (with the Devil’s help), for only she is connected with Adam in so special a relationship that her actions affect him spontaneously and deeply. She is
sa per
, the Devil is not—quite apart from the fact that an essential element in Adam’s seduction is the
fait accompli
of the apple picked from the tree and offered to him, and that the apple had to be picked by a human being, not by the Devil. Now, while in this second part of the scene Adam appears to be disconcerted and confused, Eve—to use the language of sport—is in great form. The Devil has taught her how to get the better of her man; he has showed her where her strength is greater than his: in unconsidered action, in her lack of any innate moral sense, so that she transgresses the restriction with the foolhardiness
of a child as soon as the man loses his hold (
sa discipline
) upon her (l. 36). There she stands, seductive, the apple in her hand, and plays with poor, confused, uprooted Adam. Urging him, holding out promises, ridiculing his fears, she leads him on, and finally she has an inspired idea: she will take the first bite herself! And so she does. And then, when, praising the flavor and the effect of the fruit ecstatically, she approaches him once again with her
manjue, Adam
, there is no escape left for him. He takes the apple, with the touching phrase we quoted above. Again she says, for the last time, “Come, eat it! Don’t be afraid!” And it is all over.

The episode which is here presented to us in dramatic form is the starting point of the Christian drama of redemption, and hence is a subject of the utmost importance and the utmost sublimity from the point of view of the author and his audience. However, the presentation aims to be popular. The ancient and sublime occurrence is to become immediate and present; it is to be a current event which could happen any time, which every listener can imagine and is familiar with; it is to strike deep roots in the mind and the emotions of any random French contemporary. Adam talks and acts in a manner any member of the audience is accustomed to from his own or his neighbor’s house; things would go exactly the same way in any townsman’s home or on any farm where an upright but not very brillant husband was tempted into a foolish and fateful act by his vain and ambitious wife who had been deceived by an unscrupulous swindler. The dialogue between Adam and Eve—this first man-woman dialogue of universal historical import—is turned into a scene of simplest everyday reality. Sublime as it is, it becomes a scene in simple, low style.

In antique theory, the sublime and elevated style was called
sermo gravis
or
sublimis
; the low style was
sermo remissus
or
humilis
; the two had to be kept strictly separated. In the world of Christianity, on the other hand, the two are merged, especially in Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, which realize and combine
sublimitas
and
humilitas
in overwhelming measure.

This is a very old Christian motif (see above, especially pp. 72f.). It comes to life again in the theological and particularly the mystic literature of the twelfth century. In Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines it occurs frequently, with both
humilitas
and
sublimitas
being employed, in relation to Christ as well as absolutely, in antithetic contrast.
Humilitas virtutum magistra, singularis filia summi regis
(says Bernard,
Epist
. 469, 2, Pat. Lat. 182, 674),
a summo coelo cum
coelorum domino descendens
. …
Sola est humilitas quae virtutes beatificat et perennat, quae vim facit regno coelorum
(Matt. 11: 12),
quae dominum majestatis humiliavit usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis
(Phil. 2: 8).
Verbum enim Dei in sublimi constitutum ut ad nos descenderet, prior humilitas invitavit
.