The Second Adam
By Gerald O’Collins, S.J.
The paintings on the
walls of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence show Masaccio (1401-28) at his
artistic and spiritual best—not least in the way he links Adam and Eve with
Christ. Driven from the Garden of Eden, our first parents are in despair.
Weeping and weighed down with terrible pain and loss, they move along a path of
sorrows. But the same path brings them toward the next scene: Christ on the
shores of Lake Galilee surrounded by his apostles, who will found the church.
In his own brilliant fashion, Masaccio follows a tradition that reaches back to
St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (Ch. 15) and his Letter to the
Romans (Ch. 5), the contrast between the first Adam, who initiated the whole
story of human sin and the new Adam, who has brought the blessings of grace and
eternal life.
Calling Christ the
second Adam is a solidly traditional practice. In the second century St.
Irenaeus developed the differences between the first and last Adam. By
referring twice to Adam, an early liturgical text, the Exultet or Easter
Proclamation (still sung at the Easter Vigil) implies Christ’s role as the
second or new Adam. In the medieval mystery plays, the actor who played Adam
usually reappeared to play Christ—a vivid way of connecting the first and
second Adam. A contrast between the damage done by the first Adam and the gifts
of the second Adam entered into the Council of Trent’s 1547 decree on the
justification of sinful human beings. Right down to the 21st century, images of
Adam and Christ are still wonderfully joined in icons used in the official
liturgy of the Eastern Christian tradition and in the decoration of its
churches.
This iconographic
tradition links creation, which reached its climax in the making of the
original Adam and Eve, with the redemption effected by the second Adam. Adam
and Eve symbolize the human condition in its glory and misery. After being made
in the image and likeness of God, they lapsed into sin and lost paradise.
Eastern icons show the last Adam descending into the dark pit of the underworld
and releasing from their long bondage Adam, Eve and innumerable others waiting
for redemption in the “limbo of the Fathers.”
In some of those icons
Christ carries the wooden cross on which he has died, and so reminds us of the
tree from which Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit. Even more explicitly, a
hymn by the Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus (died ca. 610), Crux Fidelis
(“faithful cross”), links the tree of life with the tree of death in the great
drama of creation, fall and redemption. The preface for the feast of the Holy
Cross (Sept. 14) declares, “Death came from a tree, life was to spring from a
tree.”
An enduring legend
helped to relate in this way creation and redemption. The tree from which Adam
and Eve took the forbidden fruit was given a story. Through the centuries it
came to be identified with the tree of Calvary on which Christ died to save the
world. Piero della Francesca (d. 1492), in his fresco cycle “The Story of the
True Cross” in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy, followed this
legend and used the cross to link the Adam of Genesis with Christ, the new
Adam.
According to another
legend, Calvary was the place where Adam was buried. Christian artists have at
times placed his skull, and occasionally even his skeleton, at the foot of the
cross. Some artists pictured Adam and Eve standing together in a sarcophagus
below the cross. One representation even has a tiny figure of Adam holding a
chalice to receive the first drops of blood falling from Christ on the cross.
Christian architects
and builders have made the same connection. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in
Jerusalem has its Adam chapel below the place of Christ’s crucifixion. Piero
della Francesca himself was encouraged to link Adam and Christ by what he had seen
in a sanctuary in the Church of San Sepolcro in Rome: a sculptured scene of
Calvary stood above a chapel that bore the name of Adam.
In connecting Adam and
Christ, no work of literature has surpassed “Hymn to God my God, in my
Sickness” by John Donne (d. 1631):
We
think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ’s
Cross and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;
Look,
Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As
the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May
the Last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
A major reference to
the second Adam turns up several decades later in Paradise Regained, by John
Milton (d. 1674). After expanding the Genesis story of Adam and Eve into the 12
books of Paradise Lost, Milton focused the four-book sequel entirely on the
temptation in the wilderness. Unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus, the second Adam, succeeds
in resisting temptation.
The images of Adam and
Eve and the image of Christ the new Adam have been linked in art, literature,
legend and liturgical traditions to hold together creation and redemption. To
be sure, considering Christ as the new or second Adam is not the only way to
understand and interpret what he did for us in his life, death and
resurrection. But it is one way that has proved enduringly successful, from St.
Paul down to John Henry Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius” (“A second Adam to the
fight and to the rescue came”) and beyond. Generations of Christians have found
here light and strength, and in three particular ways.
First, the Adam/Christ
contrast vividly reminds us that we are saved not merely through divine power
“from the outside.” By the loving kindness of God’s plan, we are also saved
“from the inside,” through the incarnate Son of God, who is our brother. The
two figures in Masaccio’s pitiless scene seem to have lost paradise forever.
But they are on a path that leads to Christ, the second Adam who will heal and
transform human destiny for all eternity.
Second, this contrast
shows the deep link between the whole of creation, in which Adam and Eve are
the high point and God’s intended stewards, and redemption. What Christ did for
us in his glorious resurrection from the dead involves the whole created world
and our stewardship for the earth. Eastern icons of Christ’s descent to the
dead hint at this link. Huge rocks, which have been shattered to open Christ’s
passage down into the “limbo of the Fathers,” suggest that the Easter transformation
includes the whole world.
Third, Eastern icons
depicting Christ’s meeting with Adam and Eve show large crowds of people
standing behind them. In liberating and raising Adam and Eve, the second Adam
raises all humanity. This way of representing Christ’s redemptive work differs
dramatically from a familiar painting of the resurrection by Piero della
Francesca to be found in San Sepolcro and acclaimed by Aldous Huxley as “the
finest picture in the world.” The victorious Christ stands majestically alone
above the prostrate soldiers. No one else is present. The Eastern icons do much
better by introducing Adam, Eve and their companions to indicate vividly that
the resurrection is not only an individual victory for Christ but also the saving
event for all the world.
Through the sequence of
his frescoes Masaccio pointed Adam and Eve in the direction of Christ, the
second Adam. He drove home the connection by placing diagonally opposite the
tormented figures of Adam and Eve a scene of St. Peter baptizing a group of
neophytes. The shame and loss of the fall into sin do not have the last word.
Incorporation through baptism into the last Adam, now raised from the dead,
brings the new life of present grace and future glory.
Source: Gerald
O’Collins, S.J., is a professor of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome. (America, April 12, 2004).
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