The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part I, Chapter III. Scripture Types of the First Joyful Mystery: Eve and Mary; Anna the Mother of Samuel
1. The comparison between Eve and Mary, There are two mothers to whom all of human kind are united by the most near, and, in a certain sense, even kindred ties—Eve and Mary. Eve, so-called by Adam, because she was the “mother of all the living” (Gen. iii. 20), and Mary, chosen and elect of God to be the Mother of Jesus, the “Life of our life.”
From the first mother, Eve, are born all the living, for whom the Virgin Mother Mary has brought Jesus into the world. From the first we derive that birth of which the Sacred Writ thus speaks, “In the womb of my mother I was fashioned to be flesh; and being born, I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth that is made alike to all; and the first voice I uttered was crying, as all others do. I was nursed in swaddling clothes with great care; for none other among kings has had any other beginning of birth, and all men have one entrance into life, and all the like going out” (Wisd. vii. 1–6). The second and the Virgin Mother, Mary, is she from whom “A Child is born to us, and a Son is given to us; and the government is upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace. He shall sit upon the throne of David in His kingdom, to establish it and to strengthen it with judgment and with justice from henceforth and for ever” (Isa. ix. 6). Or, to sum up all that has been said in the Sacred Scriptures and the Christian Theology of these two mothers, in the words of St Augustine, Peccatrix Eva, Reparatrix Maria—Eve who fell into transgression, Mary the repairer of her fall. But to proceed without further preface to the particulars of our comparison. The history of the fall of Eve is thus related in the Book of Genesis:—“Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you that you should not eat of every tree of paradise? And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat, and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold; and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband, who did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened; and when they perceived themselves to be naked, they sewed together fig-leaves, and made themselves aprons” (Gen. iii. 1–7).
It will not need more than a moderate attention to this narrative to be able to perceive in what way Eve’s fall was brought about, in the form of a gradual progress from one misguided step to another, during each of which she was led onward with no ordinary daring and subtlety by her merciless deceiver, counting from her first formal act of indiscretion to the last final completion of her sin; it having been, as we must not fail to observe, notwithstanding always in her power, at each step of her gradual surrender, to have torn herself away from the fatal persuasion which effected her ruin. Indeed, what is Eve’s history in this respect, but the history of almost all subsequent human transgression, which perhaps in no known example has ever reached its climax otherwise than in the way of a similar gradual surrender. No one ever became completely base all at once, is the Roman satirist’s trustworthy testimony to this truth, * which the French nation, we may incidentally observe, also acknowledges in one of their remarkable proverbs, “C’est le premier pas qui coûte” (it is the first step which works the mischief).
But to proceed. Eve’s first formal act of indiscretion lay in consenting to any kind of interchange of words with a speaker whom the Scripture narrative shows to have been a perfect stranger to her. As the queen of paradise, and the royal consort of its king, Adam, it was clearly, on Eve’s part, an indiscreet act of surrender of her dignity to permit any unknown speaker whatever to approach her person. For what form of presentation had the unknown visitor gone through, which was Eve’s guarantee that he was a fitting person to whom the queen of paradise might grant the honour of an audience? Here, then, is her first false step. She admits a perfect stranger to the privilege of a colloquy, without taking the precaution to inquire if he is even known to Adam, or has Adam’s warranty for seeking and holding any kind of interview with her.
The visitor appears to know that he has a very difficult point to gain, and that he must make the most of his chance. Extreme boldness is, therefore, his wisest course, so, omitting all ceremonious preliminaries, he goes straight to his purpose, and boldly puts the queen of paradise through an interrogatory, saying to her, “Why hath God commanded you that you should not eat of every tree of Paradise?” Here Eve makes a second false step, and falls into a second complete surrender of her dignity. If she had only asked in return, as her dignity required that she should have asked, “In whose name, pray, # “Nemo repente venit turpissimus” (Juv. ii. Sat. 83). do you come to put this question to me, and what reason have you for wanting to know?” the spell of the temptation would probably have been there and then broken; at least the speaker would then have been obliged to have given something like an account of himself; and it not being very easy to see how he could possibly have done this without raising some just alarm in Eve’s mind, this would, in all probability, have brought their colloquy to an abrupt end.
It is worthy of note, then, that Eve tamely submits herself to the interrogatory of the stranger, and from the nature of her answer, we are led to infer the springing up of a certain fascination which the presence of her unknown visitor is already beginning to exercise. If we may guess from her answer what is passing in her mind, the queen of paradise does not appear to wish that the stranger should go away with the idea that their sovereignty in paradise had been subjected to any material limitation. “Of the fruit of the trees that are in the garden,” she replies, “we do eat. It is only of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that we do not eat;” and the reason is, adds Eve, (disposed, under the influence of the fascination, to attenuate as far as possible both the urgency of the divine command, and the extent of the limitation of her own prerogatives,) “lest perhaps we die.” Now, there was no “perhaps” at all in the case, as Eve must have very well known. The words of God had been clear and express, “In the day that you eat thereof you shall die the death” (Gen. ii. 17), and Eve must have known this. But it is one of the evils of a first false step that it draws on another; and under the influence of a fascination to which from the first she ought never to have trusted herself, the terrible express threat of God dwindles away to a comparatively unimportant “perhaps.”
The subtle deceiver is not slow in perceiving both how much he has gained, and in what way he will have the best chance to improve his advantage. Here, again, his policy is to put no limit to his daring. “No,” he says to Eve, “you shall not die the death,” but you shall gain by eating of the fruit. “Your eyes shall be opened, and you shall become as gods, knowing good and evil. And this your God knows.”