“It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself since I first came here as a young art history student,” she said. “I looked up at the ceiling and thought, ‘It’s dark. It’s unwelcoming. I don’t want to be here.’ But about fifteen years ago, when I started working on Michelangelo’s depiction of women, I began to ask a different question. ‘How can this room, painted five hundred years ago for old white guys in dresses, a room I wouldn’t even have been allowed in for hundreds of years, be a place where I feel so completely at home?’

  “And that’s when I began to realize,” she continued, “that everywhere in this room where there’s a hero, there’s a heroine, too. There’s a partnership between man and woman that’s a reflection of the partnership between humans and God. That’s what I would tell your daughters. You can take the path in life that allows you to navigate on your own. It may lead to tremendous fortune and success, but I’m not sure it leads to serenity, joy, or a real sense of fulfillment.

  “Or you can take the other path. The one that leads you to form relationships. And when you come into a room like this and look at the ceiling, you realize that our earliest ancestors were in relationships. They were the first to do this thing we’re all still trying to figure out.”

  “So what can we learn from them?”

  She thought for a few seconds.

  “First, that we’re made for love. That’s what that initial image shows: We were made out of love, and we were made for love.

  “Second, that real love is gentle. The gentleness with which God awakens Adam is a powerful expression of how we are supposed to love. Not the forceful, ‘Come here, do what I say,’ but the gentle giving of ourselves. God gives of himself to awaken Adam, then Adam gives of himself to awaken Eve.

  “Finally, that real love is about completion. That’s what happens when Adam and Eve leave Eden: They learn that they are incomplete without each other. Love is not a brief flash of pleasure. Nor is it a long, dutiful trudge. Love is an opportunity to find a situation with another person that will lead you to greater holiness. Ultimately, you’re trying to build on the inside what Michelangelo depicts on the outside: two people, equal in size and stature, that with the grace of God are growing into something that’s more like God, something that’s very good.”

  3

  THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

  What We Do for Love

  AROUND FOUR O’CLOCK in the afternoon is a great time to visit a cemetery in London. The light has usually mellowed. The rain-stained crypts seem to soften under the lengthening shadows. And children on their way home giggle, shout or play hide-and-seek among the gravestones. These sometimes forbidding monuments become approachable, even gregarious, and, if you’re lucky, their ghosts are free to talk.

  Late one summer afternoon, I stepped through the entrance of Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds on the eastern edge of old London. I was accompanied by Lance Pierson, a genial, balding, sixtysomething Oxford-educated actor with a passion for Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry. He wanted to show me what might be considered the birthplace of marital bliss.

  “Even most Londoners don’t know about this place,” he said.

  At a little under ten acres, Bunhill Fields is hardly the largest of London’s cemeteries. Opened in 1665, after the city’s churchyards overflowed during the plague, it wasn’t an especially desirable place to be interred. It is the final resting spot of some of the country’s most notorious religious rebels—John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake, and the “Mother of Methodism” Susanna Wesley.

  But soon after it opened, Bunhill Fields became the front yard and unwitting inspiration for another notorious rebel, a golden-tongued diplomat who rose to the highest levels of English government, only to be disgraced, thrown into prison, and exiled to live out his days across the street from a graveyard.

  John Milton was right at home at death’s door. By the time he moved here at age fifty, he had buried his mother, his father, two wives, a son, a daughter, countless friends to hanging, and more than a few to disemboweling. He was also ill, suffering from gout, and completely blind. One of his contemporaries wrote that he used to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat at the door of his house, enjoying the fresh air and receiving visits.

  “It’s very evocative to me that he could be just there and we could go and talk to him,” Lance said.

  “And what would you ask him?”

  “How do you find the will to go on living?”

  The answer is that he retreated into the company of the earliest heroes of his faith and reimagined their story as no one else had. In the process, Milton gave life to an idea so commonplace today it’s hard to remember that it was once a crime. The idea was that people should love the person they wed, and if they don’t, they should be allowed, even encouraged, to divorce them. The inspiration behind this unlikely crusade was his own failed marriage, along with his lifelong desire for emotional intimacy and his belief that romantic companionship was the ultimate answer to loneliness.

  John Milton, scholars believe, invented the idea of what we today call companionate marriage. And to bring this notion to life, he used the story of history’s most famous couple. At the time, few people considered the inhabitants of Eden paragons of a good marriage. Milton single-handedly changed that, and he did so against extraordinary challenges: He composed his epic while entirely blind.

  Paradise Lost is many things: the greatest poem ever written in English; the bane of high schoolers everywhere; the cri de coeur of an angry, bitter, thrice-married man. But above all it is the step-by-step argument for the idea that Adam and Eve are the first and best example of a loving relationship.

  In the march of Western civilization, one of the great hinges in the evolution of love from abstract philosophical ideal to messy, elevating reality was the invention of a heartsick poet and pamphleteer who lived across the road from a cemetery. In marking this achievement, John Milton deserves credit for doing more than anyone in history to advance the belief that Adam and Eve is a love story.

  • • •

  IN 1597, eleven years before John Milton was born, William Shakespeare published Romeo and Juliet, or, as it was known at the time, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. That play helped popularize the idea that a love story must be built around pain. As philosopher Robert Solomon puts it, love is not just a momentary passion but an emotional development, an arc, a narrative. And the crux of that narrative is a difficulty that must be surmounted.

  “The heart of the love story, what makes it romantic, is the ‘problem,’” Solomon writes. “Love is a challenge, an enormous and often pathologically stubborn effort to overcome misunderstanding, tragedies and apparent betrayals.”

  While this formula is sometimes attributed to Shakespeare or the classic Greek plays he was inspired by, no place more brilliantly brings it to life than the opening verses of Genesis. In the story of Adam and Eve, the chief conflict is whether the protagonists will eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the chief tempter is the serpent.

  The narrative of the tree begins in chapter 3 and the first thing to note about it is that almost everything we think we know about it—that the snake is the Devil, that Eve is the victim, that her succumbing initiates the descent of evil into the world—is not in the original text. Even the word “fall” does not appear. These interpretations are layered onto the story by the almost exclusively male commentariat.

  The biblical narrative begins with Adam and Eve in a state of wedded bliss, as captured in the last line of chapter 2: “The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.” Chapter 3 opens with an ominous, even peculiar shift, the introduction of a heretofore unmentioned character, a talking snake. “Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made,” the text says. “He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’”

  Serpents have a long association with deception in the ancient Near East. Mesopotamians considered them symbols of guile; Egyptians used them to represent black magic. The Bible alone links serpents to divination, the Devil, and dragon monsters. But serpents were also associated with health and wellness, as in the serpent-entwined Rod of Asclepius, still in use by the American Medical Association. Like so many elements of the story, the true symbolism of the snake is twisted in mystery.

  The serpent immediately zeroes in on the tree and tries to undermine God’s command. What exactly is this tree? Eden actually has two named flora. The first is the tree of life, a common symbol that appears throughout the Bible as a sign of divine presence. The second is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, an awkward name that suggests it bestows godlike powers on anyone who consumes its fruit. The tree becomes the subject of a taut back-and-forth between the serpent and Eve. She responds, “We may eat of the fruit of the other trees,” but of this particular tree God has said, “You shall not eat it or touch it, lest you die.”

  The serpent counters, “You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings.”

  Now comes the test. Eve must decide whether to follow the will of God, even though she never hears it directly, or follow what she sees with her own eyes. With remarkably little wavering, she sides with her own eyes. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took the fruit and ate.”

  What exactly has she eaten? All we are told is that the woman eats the fruit, or peri, of the tree. Over the years, countless interpretations have been offered for what type of fruit it is, including pomegranate, carob, pear, quince, apricot, and date. The most popular choice, “apple,” seems unlikely on the surface since apples are not native to the ancient Near East. This association began with the Vulgate, the popular fifteenth-century Latin edition of the Bible, which used the Latin word for evil, malus, in the name “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The Latin word for “apple” is the similar-sounding malum, and the association stuck.

  An apple also plays up the sexual overtones that came to be associated with the story. “The Song of Songs,” with its heavy allusions to Eden, compares apples to female breasts. Ancient Greeks and Romans spoke euphemistically of sexual relations as “stealing apples.” In another linguistic oddity that many believe has erotic origins, the larynx, or voice box, which is noticeably more prominent in men than in women, came to be called the “Adam’s apple” after the idea that the forbidden fruit got stuck in Adam’s throat as he swallowed.

  There is clear sexual innuendo in yet another possible fruit that’s alluded to in the Jewish commentaries and picked up by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. In the third panel of his Adam and Eve sequence, at exactly the moment Eve’s head is stationed alongside Adam’s scrotum, Eve reaches for two figs shaped unavoidably like a pair of testicles. We know that figs, unlike apples, are actually in Eden, because when Adam and Eve discover they are naked immediately after they eat the fruit, they cover themselves with fig leaves. Some observers have also pointed out that in the Italian of Michelangelo, the word for “fig,” fico, sounds remarkably like fica, a Renaissance Italian vulgarism for female genitalia and the root for the verb ficcare, which means to drive and thrust.

  Regardless of what fruit it is, what happens when Eve tastes it? We are poised to expect thunderclaps, lightning bolts, instant annihilation. Plenty of times in the Bible when God is defied, he responds with immediate, bloodcurdling death. Surely this first transgression will be met with definitive retaliation.

  Instead, here’s what happens: nothing. Eve doesn’t die. She’s not even wounded, injured, hobbled, or roughed up in any way. God, at least in the internal logic of the story, appears to be wrong.

  Even more surprising, the serpent turns out to be right! The story reports what happens next in a remarkably understated way: “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.” Adam and Eve have both eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and both have lived to tell about it. They end their minidrama exactly where they began: bound together as one.

  • • •

  IF ONLY.

  The story of how this narrative has been interpreted over the centuries is elaborate, at times deeply misogynistic, and profoundly consequential to the history of male-female relations in the West. Jews put meaning enough into these events, but Christians made them the centerpiece of their entire worldview, a precondition for the rise of Jesus Christ. The popular American spiritual “Them Bones Will Rise Again” captures the connection:

  That’s all there is, there ain’t no more.

  Eve got the apple and Adam got the core.

  That’s the story of the Fall from Grace.

  Until Jesus saved the human race.

  Looking back, it seems fair to say the two-hundred-word set piece about the forbidden fruit became the pivotal story in the first two thousand years of Judeo-Christian life. Before examining how we might read this story today—or how Milton read it in his time—it’s important to understand the consensus interpretation that built up in the first millennium of organized religion.

  For many early commentators, the responsibility for eating the fruit was clear: It was the girl’s fault. The earliest source to link Eve’s eating the fruit with the larger decline of humanity was a Jewish text from the second century B.C.E., the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach. “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die.”

  Christian interpreters picked up on this theme and homed in on why the serpent chose Eve. One commented, “Not daring to accost the man because of his strength, he accosted as being weaker the woman.” No less an authority than Martin Luther wrote, “Because Satan sees that Adam is the more excellent, he does not dare to assail him; for he fears that his attempt may turn out to be useless.”

  Yet just because Eve took the brunt of the criticism didn’t mean Adam got off easily. If anything, many commentators were even more withering toward him. At least Eve had an excuse; she was duped by the serpent. Adam had no one to blame but himself. “Better had it been that the earth had not produced Adam,” wrote one rabbi. Again it was Jews who started this line of attack. The first century C.E. text 2 Esdras says, “O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.” But it was Christians who carried the idea through the centuries. “Sin entered the world through one man and through sin death,” wrote Paul.

  By the Middle Ages, the belief that Adam and Eve were failures whose weakness introduced iniquity, disease, and demise into the world was nearly universal. Before the Fall, wrote one sixteenth-century commentator, the stomach digested food better, the liver produced purer blood, and the heart was more resilient. After the Fall, “the body and all its limbs are feeble, dull, lazy, reluctant and frail.” Given this consensus, it was all the more remarkable that in the seventeenth century one man could tilt into the headwind of such ecumenical scorn and reintroduce Adam and Eve as a couple not just capable of sin and devastation but of deep, abiding love.

  • • •

  MOST OF THE PLACES John Milton lived were destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666, which wiped out 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and the homes of 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents. Only six people died, but the character of the entire city was altered. In 2008, on the four-hundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth, Lance Pierson decided to celebrate his favorite author by creating two live shows and a walking tour of his life.

  A bust of Milton near his burial site in St. Giles’ without Cripplegate, a church in London.

  The first place he took me was a small alley not far from St. Paul’s Cathedral in what is today the city’s financial district. Tucked away on the wall was a large marble plaque.

  JOHN MILTON

  was BORN in BREAD-STREET, on Friday, the 9th

  day of December, 1608

  “London was a walled, medieval city at the time,” Lance said. “And this was the market. All the streets were named after trades—bread, fish, meat, milk. But the neighborhood had a lot of money, and for Milton’s father it was an ideal place to have his office as a scrivener, a mix of lawyer and moneylender.”

  For the elder John Milton, who had been disinherited by his Roman Catholic father after he became a Protestant, his profession and ideal location earned him significant wealth. His son took ample advantage, with private tutors and the best education money could buy, first at St. Paul’s and then Cambridge, where he ranked fourth in his class. Following university, Milton continued studying on his own and completed his version of a Grand Tour, visiting France and Italy. While it’s tempting to imagine him inside the Sistine Chapel, he left no record.

  “This whole decade was his way of completing his education,” Lance said. “Meeting everybody who was everybody and reading everything he could find.”

  Milton dreamed of becoming a poet-priest, and from his earliest writings, he showed fervent interest in love. Sex was the theme of one of his first elegies: “What is lovelier than she as she voluptuously bares her fertile breast and breathes the perfume of Arabian harvests.” In his twenties he took pride in preserving his virginity for religious obligation, a decision that appears to have stoked his fantasies. “Losing no time he swung on the girl’s eyelashes, then on her mouth, then jumped between her lips,” he wrote in one poem. “I burned inwardly with love.”

  The elder Milton hoped his son would become an Anglican priest, but the younger Milton followed his father’s lead and rebelled against the religion of his youth. Inspired by the corruption he witnessed in Rome, Milton turned against similar corruption he saw in the Church of England. Milton became a Puritan, arguing that power in the hands of bishops should be rejected, Scripture alone should determine matters of religion, and everyone should be his own prophet. The next place Lance took me, Milton’s burial place at St. Giles’ without Cripplegate church, captured this asceticism. The only marker is a modest stone.