In recounting God’s creation of the universe, Moses makes clear that man is unique. For the rest of the cosmos, God merely speaks a word to bring things into being from nothing, but man’s body He forms specially from the slime of the earth, the adamah, and then breathes life into him with His own breath (Gen. 2:7). And so, unlike the others, man is created in God’s image (Gen. 1:27).
Something that naturally intrigues us about the Mosaic account, however, is the two-stage production of the sexes. Gen. 1:27 tells us, “Male and female he created them,” but we learn in Chapter 2 that Adam was created first, taken into the garden,1 and given the command to tend it and not eat of the forbidden tree. Then God immediately says, “It is not good that the man is alone; I will make him a helper like himself” (Gen. 1:18).2 Was woman, then, an afterthought to God’s order, a last minute addition to address an unforeseen need? Certainly not!
We know that Adam was appointed head of the human race and was given dominion over the creatures of the earth. To fit him for this role, God infused clear and ample knowledge of the created order into Adam’s mind. At the same time, Adam had no experience; as yet, he had received no confirmation of his vast understanding from the data of the senses that comes from living life. As yet, he had not felt the sensations of loneliness.
To this end, God brings a vast array of animals into the Garden. Adam, as their lord, stands before them and gives to each its name. He goes through the cattle, the birds, the beasts of the field, every last animal. But, despite, their presence, he is still alone, because Adam “found no helper like himself” (Gen. 2:20). He had experienced his need for the companionship of one of his own kind. And this was the right moment for God to complete His creation of the human species.3
As Adam’s body was not created ex nihilo, so too Eve’s. In an action that the Fathers always understood as being of utmost significance, God made Eve from Adam’s own flesh. What did He wish to indicate by this?
Firstly, following the teaching of Holy Mother Church, we are to infer the unity of the human race. All of its members come from a single source. Adam came from God (cf. Luke 3:38), Eve came from Adam, and everyone else has come from them, the first parents of the entire human race. “The whole human race,” says St. Augustine, “which was to become Adam’s posterity through the first woman, was present in the first man.” 4 Thus, we are to love all men, not only because we share a rational nature, but also because we have a common origin.5
We also see from this, following St. Thomas (I, q. 92, a. 2), the great dignity given to Adam, since, as God is the principle of the whole universe, so the first man, in likeness to God, was the principle of the whole human race. Likewise the dignity of Eve, whom Adam fittingly names “Mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20).
Secondly, the taking of Eve from Adam’s side and her naming by him indicates her dependence upon him. “The manner in which her formation is described,” says a Catholic commentator,6 “is designed to teach that in the institution of the family the husband and father is the natural and divinely instituted head to whom all the other members are subordinate as good order requires a central authority in every society.” St. Thomas remarks that this subjection was necessary, even in the state of innocence, but was not a servile one (I, q. 92, a. 1 ad 2). In 1 Cor. 11:9-10, St. Paul uses the episode as a motive for women to have their head covered in church, as a sign that they are under the authority of another.
At the same time, thirdly, it is clear that Eve, while being under Adam, is in another sense equal to him. She is a helpmate “like himself.” While the ancient pagan and patriarchal civilizations often degraded women, placing them on a lower level than men,7 as if they were of a different nature, Moses repeatedly asserts the equality of the sexes in their common species. Adam understands that Eve is his very own flesh, “bone of my bone” (Gen. 2:23), and gives a name to the female sex meaning “taken from man.”
A fourth inference from this scene is the perpetuity of the matrimonial union. God designed the family unit such that man and woman are to stay together for life, whereas this is not true for many animals. To indicate this close union, He makes them in a sense inseparable by giving them a common flesh. St. Thomas remarks that God fashioned Eve from Adam that he might love her all the more and cleave to her more closely (I, q. 92, a. 2). Divorcing himself from her would be equivalent to despising his own flesh. And, indeed, we may wonder if the Fall would have ever happened if Adam had been with Eve at the moment of the Satanic temptation.
Gen. 2:24 applies the union of Adam and Eve to the entire human race. It gives a veritable definition of marriage, saying that, in it, a man leaves his father and mother to become one in flesh with his wife. Exegetes are divided as to whether these words were spoken by Adam or are an insertion to the narrative by Moses. Regardless, Our Lord uses them in one of his contests with the Pharisees in Matt. 19:5 to condemn divorce, attributing the words to God Himself. The consequence He draws from this union in flesh brought about by marriage is immediate, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”
Pope Leo XIII sums up these implications of this rich Genesaic passage (Gen. 2:18-25) in his encyclical on Christian Marriage, Arcanum Dei, §5:
“We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time. And this union of man and woman, that it might answer more fittingly to the infinite wise counsels of God, even from the beginning manifested chiefly two most excellent properties—deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it—namely, unity and perpetuity.”
Franz Joseph Haydn, who was a devout Catholic, dwelt long on the scene of the meeting of Adam and Eve, and set it to beautiful music in the third part of his oratorio Creation. The pair join together in acts of adoration and praise of God, before turning to one another and delighting in each other’s company and in the Paradise that God has made for them. They conclude with a duet, singing to one another:
With thee is ev’ry joy enhanced,
with thee delight is ever new;
with thee is life incessant bliss;
thine it whole shall be.
Before we leave the lovely scene of the union of our first parents, and without treating of its tragic aftermath, we must turn to the spiritual sense for one last signification: the union of Adam and Eve as symbol of the union of Christ and His Church. God, being master of all reality, can cause an event at one point of time to be a type of another event that will occur far off into the future.
St. Augustine explains that God put Adam to sleep and took Eve from his side as a symbol of Christ sleeping in death on the cross and, His side being pierced, bringing forth the life of the Church, His Spouse: “[T]hat sleep of the man was the death of Christ, whose side, as He hung lifeless upon the cross, was pierced with a spear, and there flowed from it blood and water, and these we know to be the sacraments by which the Church is ‘built up.’ For Scripture used this very word, not saying ‘He formed’ or ‘framed,’ but ‘built her up into a woman’; whence also the apostle speaks of the edification of the body of Christ, which is the Church.”8
In this deeper signification, upon which St. Paul elaborates in Eph. 6:21-33, we see again that marriage is indissoluble. If it is impossible for Christ to abandon His Spouse, and the union of Adam and Eve is a prefiguring of His marriage, then the union of our first parents was also meant to be for life.
Just as it belongs to God to bring men into existence as their Creator, so too it belongs to Him to establish the goals that they are to pursue, and order them to those goals. From the very beginning, in the two-stage creation of our first parents, He clearly indicated His design that the human race was to propagate its kind by men and women joining together in a perpetual union. In this sense, God alone is at the origin of marriage and has complete ownership over it. When men enter into this divinely ordained construct and pursue its God-given goals, they attain an end of their very nature. When, however, they reconfigure the family to satisfy the aspirations of a perverse independence, they necessarily destroy the humanity that has been conferred upon them from above.
1 St. Thomas, in I, q. 102, a. 4, says that Adam was created outside the Garden to indicate that it was not owed to him according to his nature, but was something added.
2 This and succeeding quotations are taken from the Confraternity Douay Rheims Bible.
3 Cf. Orchard, A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, §143i. About being alone when you are not with your own kind, see I, q. 31, a. 3, ad 1.
4 The City of God, bk. 13, ch. 3.
5 Cf. Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, Denzinger 2280.
6 Fr. Sutcliffe, S.J., in Orchard, A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture.
7 Cf. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §7: “[M]an assumed right of dominion over his wife, ordering her to go about her business, often without any just cause; while he was himself at liberty ‘to run headlong with impunity into lust, unbridled and unrestrained, in houses of ill-fame and amongst his female slaves, as if the dignity of the persons sinned with, and not the will of the sinner, made the guilt.’ When the licentiousness of a husband thus showed itself, nothing could be more piteous than the wife, sunk so low as to be all but reckoned as a means for the gratification of passion, or for the production of offspring. Without any feeling of shame, marriageable girls were bought and sold, like so much merchandise, and power was sometimes given to the father and to the husband to inflict capital punishment on the wife.”
8 The City of God, bk. 22, ch. 17.