An Apple a Day

At the words forbidden fruit, an apple appears in our minds.

We did not have to summon it. It was already there, before we turned the page. Bright red, possibly with one small bite missing. Possibly with a serpent coiled around the trunk above it. Possibly with a beautiful woman extending it toward a baffled man.

We learned the apple before we learned the chapter. We learned it from Cranach and Dürer, from children's Bibles and Sunday school flannelgraphs, from a thousand cartoons and a thousand sermons that used the apple as a shorthand for original sin. We learned the apple so thoroughly that we have to be told, slowly, that the apple is not in the text.

It is not.

The apple is medieval before it is Renaissance. The earliest paintings of Eden often picture a generic fruit — sometimes a fig, sometimes a pomegranate, sometimes a peach or a citron. Eastern Christian iconography to this day frequently shows the fruit as a fig or grape. The apple became the dominant Western image during the high Middle Ages, locked in by a Latin pun that few people noticed they were making.

The Latin word for evil is malum. The Latin word for apple is also malum. They are homonyms. Mali — the genitive form, the form Latin uses for of evil — sounds and looks identical to mali, the genitive of malum meaning of apples. So when Latin-speaking Christians read Jerome's Vulgate translation of Genesis — lignum scientiae boni et mali, "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" — they were hearing, with one ear, "the tree of the knowledge of good and the apple." It was a pun, half-noticed, in the air. Augustine and Jerome surely knew. Medieval preachers played on it. Medieval painters showed it on canvas.

The Greco-Roman world supplied a second layer. The apple was, in Greek and Roman mythology, the fruit of consequence. Eve and the apple slot neatly into a Western imagination already trained on Atalanta and her golden apples, on the apples of the Hesperides, on the apple of discord that Eris rolled into the wedding feast of the gods. By the time the medieval Christian imagination reached for an image of the Fall, the apple was waiting, polished, ready.

By the high Renaissance the apple was unshakeable. Albrecht Dürer's Adam and Eve (1504): Adam holds a branch with an apple, Eve reaches for another. Lucas Cranach the Elder, in painting after painting, depicts the same red fruit. Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling — a fig, actually, in his case, but most viewers see an apple, because the apple is what the eye has been trained to see. Milton, in Paradise Lost, is careful in his Latinity and calls it simply fruit most of the time, but lets apples drop here and there. The cultural inheritance was sealed.

Charitably, the apple was doing legitimate catechetical work. It gave a memorable visual hook for the doctrine of the Fall. It connected the biblical story to a wide cultural conversation about temptation and consequence. The medieval and Renaissance painters were not lying; they were teaching, in the only register their audience could read. The mistake was not in their theology. The mistake was that the picture they used to teach it became, over the centuries, more vivid in our heads than the text, even when the picture had quietly become what we believed the text said.

Here is what Genesis says:

The Hebrew word for fruit in 3:6 is peri. It is the generic word for fruit. It appears across the Old Testament for the fruit of any tree — apples and grapes and figs and dates and olives all alike. The text does not narrow the species. It declines to.

The tree, by contrast, is named — and named carefully. It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Not the tree in some generic sense; not the tree with the red fruit; but a tree with a theological name. The text is interested in what the tree represents, not in the produce it bears. And the name, when we slow down to listen to it, is more disturbing than the bright red apple our imaginations have been showing us.

The knowledge of good and evil. The Hebrew is da'at tov va-ra — knowledge, here, in the sense the Hebrew Bible characteristically means it: not the abstract grasping of information, but the experiential, intimate kind of knowing. To know good and evil, in this idiom, is to experience them, to decide about them, to be the one who determines what counts as good and what counts as evil. The tree is offering, in its very name, the moral prerogative that belongs to God alone.

And listen to the serpent. He does not say, Eat this fruit and you will gain culinary satisfaction. He does not even, in the end, say, Eat this fruit and you will gain knowledge of the world. What he says is this:

You will be like God. That is the offer. Not knowledge in the abstract; not pleasure in a particular fruit; but a place in the universe currently occupied by the Creator alone. The tree is the door. The eating is the act. The temptation is divinity.

And after the eating, the text does not describe the species of fruit. It describes the aftermath:

The text gives us a fig leaf, not a fig apple. The leaves are a clue that fig trees were nearby, or that fig leaves were the largest convenient leaves to hand. They are not a clue about which tree the fruit came from. The text is not telling us. It declines to tell us, in chapter 2 and again in chapter 3 and at every opportunity afterward.

The fruit was never the point.

It would be a small thing to write an essay just to correct a botanical detail. The apple is not the problem. The apple is the doorway into the problem.

The problem is what the apple displaces.

The cultural picture, with the bright red fruit at the center, makes the Fall a story about a small thing — a piece of fruit, a momentary disobedience, perhaps a punishment that seems out of proportion to the offense. They ate an apple. They got kicked out of paradise. Was the apple really worth all that? The mocking question writes itself, and is written, in every generation. The popular imagination has cooperated with that mockery for centuries, by making the central object an ordinary fruit and the central act an ordinary bite.

But the text is not telling that story. The text never mentions an apple. The text does not focus on the fruit at all. The text names the tree — and the name is the knowledge of good and evil. What is at stake is not produce but prerogative. The first sin is not a violation of dietary law. It is the creature's reach for the place of the Creator.

This is the Lutheran reading of the Fall, and it is sharper than the picture has let us hear. We confess, with the Augsburg Confession, that since the fall of Adam all human beings are born without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence — disordered desire, the will curved in on itself. Those are not the diagnostic marks of a people who once ate a bad fruit. They are the diagnostic marks of a people who, in their first parents, grasped at being God and have been trying to make the seizure stick ever since. Original sin is not an inherited bellyache. It is an inherited posture: the orientation of the heart away from God and toward the self as ultimate arbiter.

The apple flattens this. It lets us imagine the Fall as the kind of mistake a child might make at the kitchen counter. Genesis describes the Fall as the kind of catastrophe that requires, three chapters later, the killing of an animal to clothe its perpetrators, and the expulsion from paradise of every human being who has ever lived. The text does not let us make this small.

But the text also does not leave us at the catastrophe. In the same chapter, in the same speech of the LORD to the serpent, comes the first sentence of the gospel:

The offspring of the woman will crush the serpent's head. Lutheran tradition has called this verse the protoevangelium — the first preaching of the gospel, set down in the same chapter that records the Fall. Before Adam and Eve are out of the garden, the LORD has already promised the One who will undo what they have just done. Christ is in Genesis 3 already, in shadow, in promise, in the assurance that the catastrophe is not the last word.

The apple iconography rarely shows this. The painters paint the eating; they rarely paint the promise. The pageant tells of disobedience; it rarely tells of the seed who is coming. The picture, taken alone, leaves us in the wreckage. The text, read whole, places the wreckage inside a larger story whose ending we already know.

The Fall is not a story about a piece of fruit. It is a story about the desire to be God, and the seed who is coming to crush the head of the one who whispered the lie.

Three marks: without fear of God, without trust in God, with concupiscence. The Lutheran tradition has refused, here, to soften any of them. Original sin is not a tendency we can train ourselves out of. It is not a small thing that grace can decorate around. It is the radical corruption of the human heart, inherited from Adam, condemning every child of Adam and Eve until the second Adam — Christ — undoes it in Baptism and the Holy Spirit. The popular picture's small fruit cannot bear the weight of this diagnosis. The text's named tree can. The text is bigger than the picture, and harder, and — when we follow it from Genesis 3:15 to Calvary — full of more hope than the picture ever offered.