WHO could possibly be more damned than Adam and Eve — first of the lost, the wellsprings of perdition? That’s what I’d have said in my earlier years.
Encountering the Orthodox icon of the resurrection was quite a shock. It shows Christ, within the centre, pulling precisely that pair out of their tombs: Adam on one side, Eve on the opposite. Far from being archetypally damned, they’re the primary of the redeemed.
Although I discovered that unexpected, the thought seems to be quite common. Adam appears in Dante’s Paradiso, not in his Inferno, telling the poet about how Christ rescued him. In Western art, like that Eastern icon, Christ’s Easter victory is shown this manner: whether flattening the gates of the underworld, or breaking the bars of its prison, or fishing the redeemed from the mouth of hell as from some dragon or monstrous fish, the primary pair he rescues are Adam and Eve, often grasping them by the hand.
In Fra Angelico’s Harrowing of Hell, Christ has burst the door off its hinge (squashing the devil in the method), and it lies flat on the ground. The first five figures to be released have distinguishing features: David with a crown, Moses together with his radiant “horns”, Abel with a wounded head, John the Baptist, and — at the pinnacle of the gang — Adam, grasping Christ’s prolonged hand with each of his.
THE Orthodox liturgy for Easter resounds with this theme: “Having slept within the flesh, as a mortal, O King and Lord, on the third day Thou didst rise again, raising up Adam from corruption, and abolishing death: O Pascha of incorruption, salvation of the world!”
Irenaeus of Lyons — certainly one of the Church’s earliest theologians of the foremost rank — dealt firmly with any denial that Adam had been redeemed: “Thus also do those that disallow Adam’s salvation gain nothing, except this, that they render themselves heretics and apostates from the reality, and show themselves patrons of the serpent and of death.” Tell us what you actually think, Irenaeus!
Much nearer our own time, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown (1921-96) has Christ descend step-by-step to the depths of Hades. At the underside, he encounters “the tall primal dust” — Adam — who turns to him with a cry of joy. It is a remarkable poem, and all of the more moving once we learn that Brown accomplished it in the ultimate week of his life.
IRENAEUS thought it “absurd” to suppose that God would redeem Adam’s children but not Adam himself. That’s because he was so sure that Satan had been utterly defeated by Christ at Easter, so couldn’t possibly be said to have retained his spoils, least of all the primary of them. Ephrem the Syrian (who may win the crown as most creative of Christian hymn-writers) invoked the scene of Moses’s staff devouring the wands of the magicians; the Cross has devoured the serpent that ate Adam and Eve.
As Irenaeus has it, death really has been swallowed up in victory. “This couldn’t be said with justice, if that man, over whom death did first obtain dominion, weren’t let loose. For his salvation is death’s destruction. When due to this fact the Lord vivifies man, that’s, Adam, death is at the identical time destroyed.” The query, so far as Irenaeus is worried, is straightforward. Did Christ triumph in cross and resurrection? If so, Adam is redeemed.
ACCORDING to 1 old legend, already familiar by the point of Jerome, Adam was buried on what would turn out to be Mount Calvary, or Golgotha. If you see a skull on the foot of the cross in a painting of the crucifixion, the chances are high that it’s imagined to be Adam’s. Gregory Nazianzen wrote that one drop of Christ’s blood could redeem the world. In some paintings, a drop falls on Adam’s skull, setting him free.
Crucial in all of that is Adam’s status as representative: as primordial or “ur” human. Adam is humanity; humanity is Adam. That is especially clear at first of Genesis 5, where the fledgling human family tree is traced back to Adam. Only here, the Hebrew emphasises primordiality. While the AV gives us “Male and feminine created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam,” the NRSV has “Male and feminine he created them, and he blessed them and named them ‘Humankind’.” That’s why we don’t at all times see Eve in these images or texts: there’s a way by which Adam stands for humanity, encompassing every difference, including female and male.
DID Christ redeem humanity? Then he redeemed Adam. At the guts of St Paul’s theology is his cry that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If all are in the primary Adam — if that “all” is Adam — then no less is Adam in that second “all”: those that are made alive. And don’t forget Paul’s remarkable message that “the free gift just isn’t just like the trespass,” by which he seems to mean something like “You think that sin is infectious? Wait until you see how expansive is the treatment!”
Adam’s representative meaning can also be why scientific concerns are inappropriate here. Perhaps there was some representative pair: the primary human beings to face before God with moral responsibility. If so, as Aquinas put it, humanity was in Adam “as one person”. But that isn’t the one way it could work. In all this theology, including Paul’s, “Adam” is the character and state we have now in common: a state and nature, not without glory and dignity, but mired in sin and a terrible predicament. Paul’s point is that it’s us Christ has come to avoid wasting, our grave that he has broken open, us he takes by the hand.
THE rescue of Adam and Eve is at the guts of an ancient sermon, now quite famous since it features within the Roman Catholic Office of Readings for Holy Saturday. It describes Christ raising Adam from Hades, proclaiming “Arise, O Sleeper, and wake from the death”: arise, because “I actually have not made you to be held a prisoner within the underworld. . . Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, allow us to go hence.”
The sermon activates the concept Adam’s God has turn out to be Adam’s son in order to redeem him: “I’m your God, who in your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and people in darkness: Have light, and people who sleep: Rise.”
The concept that Adam and Eve were redeemed is common enough within the West, although we have now to look to the East to search out it promoted to a spot within the liturgy. The book of Wisdom (within the Apocrypha for Anglicans) was an influence, where we read: “Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created; she delivered him from his transgression, and gave him strength to rule all things.”
A LOT is being said when Christ is depicted pulling Adam and Eve out of the jaws of the grave. For one thing, it suggests something necessary in regards to the priority of grace: that God offers mercy and repentance to all. Right from the beginning, Tertullian wrote (in On Repentance), from the time when our first parents were ejected from paradise, God inaugurated “repentance in his own self . . . engaging to grant pardon to his own work and image”, ceaselessly exhorting us to repentance.
Irenaeus saw something hopeful within the shame that Adam and Eve felt, the start of repentance, since: “The fear of the Lord is the start of wisdom.” The curse, he wrote, lay more heavily upon the earth — and particularly upon the serpent — than it did upon the human pair. And Christians have been encouraged to see the start and promise of the gospel, even within the enunciation of the curse: that Christ, the “seed” of Eve, would crush the serpent’s head.
From the start, there may be hope, nevertheless obtuse human beings will be. God is rarely without witnesses to his mercy, and the door stands open.
ACCORDING to Irenaeus, Adam is the final word lost sheep — since the first to go astray — and Irenaeus was certain of God’s disposition towards lost sheep. What hope there may be in that! As the traditional sermon has it, “Truly he goes to search out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to go to those that sit in darkness and within the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who’s God, and Adam’s son.”
“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those within the tombs bestowing life”: even on Adam, even on Eve — especially on Adam and Eve.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Starbridge Professor of Theology and Natural Sciences within the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and currently a Visiting Fellow of the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, within the United States.
