Adam and Eve in Scripture, Theology, and Literature. Sin, Compassion, and Forgiveness by Peter B. Ely (review)

Not surprisingly, Peter B. Ely’s Adam and Eve in Scripture, Theology, and Literature has had a long period of gestation. His 1974 doctoral dissertation prepared at Fordham University explored Hegel’s version of the reconciliation of religion and philosophy, out of which grew a passion in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion, with special reference to the spirituality and theology of forgiveness. More recently, reading Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, and Boyd Cool-man’s article, “‘Hugh of St. Victor on ‘Jesus Wept’” Compassion as Ideal Humanitas” (Theological Studies), a study of Hugh’s brief early twelfth-century work On the Four Wills of Christ, furthered Ely’s thinking on the centrality of compassion. He saw in Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo a movement towards the forgiveness of sins committed through ignorance and weakness “and often done by persons weeping and groaning” (Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 29:33). Further nourished by Julian of Norwich’s late fourteenth-/early fifteenth-century Revelations of Divine Love, Walter Kasper’s Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (2013), Pope Francis—notably his The Name of God is Mercy, A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli (2016)—James Voiss’ Rethinking Christian Forgiveness: Theological, Philosophical, and Psychological Explorations (2015), and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017), Ely offers us, now, a book in which compassion is seen to have a crucial mediating role between sin and forgiveness, a role that is challenging. Challenging, primarily, of course, to the one who has been offended.

Adam and Eve in Scripture, Theology, and Literature is no dry theological study. What Ely sets out to do is to meditate profoundly on the workings of the human heart and mind in a world that is fragmented through sin but invited and enabled by a compassionate God to redemption through compassion and Ely achieves his aim magnificently. Ely’s book, in fact, is best considered as an extended meditation on compassion and forgiveness.

Ely sets out his “apologia” (4) in his contextualizing introduction. He argues that original sin can have a liberating function and looks closely at the resistance to such a doctrine with the understanding that it is a reality that may be confronted both by individuals and groups. Such an engagement leads, Ely continues, to the realisation that to forgive is divine; that, in both Augustine’s and Anselm’s words, “faith seeks understanding” and understanding leads to human wisdom, and that through conversion, as suggested by Paul (Ephesians 1:18), comes a deepening understanding of the truth about sin. According to Ely, such truth, absolute and extra-temporal, is revealed over a period of time, as myth expressed symbolically, in thought, and in literature, narrative, and poetry, “thought returning to metaphor and narrative” (13).

The first part of Ely’s book explores Adam and Eve as myth, Paul Ricoeur’s comparison of four ancient myths of the origin and end of evil: the Creation or Theogonic Myth, in which humans continue primordial sin, sin which is “coextensive with the generation of the divine”(30), the Tragic Myth in which forgiveness is excluded, the Adamic Myth in which grace abounds over sin and is seen as “an expression of the infinite compassion of God” (42), and the Orphic Myth in which the divine soul is imprisoned in a body—the symbolic narrative of Adam and Eve in the Hebrew Testament in which the drama of human sin is matched by divine compassion, and St Paul’s transformation of the myth in Romans and 1 Corinthians in which Christ is perceived as the Second Adam.

Part Two examines how the symbol gives rise to thought, and how the Biblical narrative gives way to autobiography, theory, and doctrine. Here, Ely focuses on Augustine and argues that his “deep pastoral instincts ultimately prevail...