REREADING EVE: THEOSIS IN EDEN, THE WOMB, AND THE TOMB

The story of Eve and Adam is perhaps the closest thing we have to a universal story. But the stories we tell about Genesis 1-3, like “woman is created from man’s rib” or “the serpent is the devil,” are interpretations of the biblical text. If you look closely, a lot of details we remember are not there (e.g., there’s no “apple”). Orthodox Christians should be aware of the things we bring to the text because creation stories and their resulting cosmologies “are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.”[1] In other words, there are consequences. 

Unfortunately, the weight of Orthodox tradition accreted in patristic texts, hymns, and homilies reinforces an interpretation of Eve’s story that is often referred to as “Eve-new Eve” (or “Eve-second Eve”), in which Eve is the quintessential woman who brought sin into the world through disobedience and the Theotokos is the “new Eve” (or “second Eve”) who brings the savior through obedience. As a result, the leitmotif of the Eve-Theotokos relationship is obedience. This reductive narrative was wielded, and continues to be, against women to justify prohibitions against women’s “authoritative speaking [and] teaching” in the Church, let alone ordination and entrance into the Holy Altar.[2]

This paper argues that the “Eve-new Eve obedience” paradigm fails to fully reflect Orthodox theology and does not facilitate our theosis, which is our individual and collective becoming like God. However entrenched the interpretation may be, it is not “dogma,” which are the unchanging beliefs of the Church established by the Ecumenical Councils from 325 to 787 CE. There are relatively few dogmas such as Trinitarian ones, God is Trinity, and Christological ones, Christ is both fully human and fully God. 

Instead, the “obedience” interpretation falls into a category of beliefs that the Church discerns over time, guided by our unchanging belief that God became human in Christ so that humans can become like God. The question that guides discernment, then, is what facilitates a theotic journey of becoming like God. Inherent to discernment are “notions of change, movement, could-be-otherwise, [and] context.”[3] Discernment critiques not only “what is” but also imagines “what could be.”[4] 

This paper advocates for an alternative interpretation of Eve and the Theotokos, which it calls “shared theosis” because it argues that Eve, the Theotokos, and Mary Magdalene all seek communion with God at different points along a theotic journey. It replaces the leitmotif of obedience with theosis and characterizes the Eve-Theotokos relationship as continuity rather than contrast. The “shared theosis” interpretation more fully and beautifully reflects Orthodoxy’s eucharistic cosmology that sees the “world as a church,”[5] in which the human person acts as a priest, bringing the “stuff of creation” into union with God.[6]

This paper draws from the writings of Church Fathers and Mothers, including Irenaeus, Maximus the Confessor, and St. Kassiani, along with the weekly Sunday Orthros service before Divine Liturgy, the Akathist Hymn and Small Compline read during Lent, and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s Encyclicals. A continuity surfaces between Eve and the Theotokos. They have more in common than the sexist interpretation is willing to recognize: they share in theosis that continues across time, beginning with the former and continuing with the latter, thereby demonstrating the free will, discernment, and synergy that make all creation’s deification possible. 

Eve and Theotokos’s refusal to be passive, and instead, their choice to seek out God, is the scaffolding of the arc of theosis that leads towards God. Eve is the human person coming into being; the Theotokos “forms Christ” within (Galatians 4:19); and Mary Magdalene witnesses and proclaims the Resurrection. If we insist on reducing Eve to a woman who disobeys and the Theotokos as the corrective, we miss the model these women provide for our individual, collective, and cosmic theosis. 

In this “shared theosis” paradigm, Eve, Theotokos, and Mary Magdalene become “priest[s] of creation,” to which all humans are called, by bringing “the stuff of creation” into union with God.[7] To do this priestly task, they are microcosms and mediators of God’s creation. Through theosis, the three women harmonize the human (created) and divine (Uncreated) within themselves (microcosms); they also unite (mediate between) the created and Uncreated in the world around them. Each woman embodies Sophia (the Wisdom of God) who inhabits the “in-between” space between the created cosmos and the Uncreated God.[8] 

By uniting all of creation with God, Eve, the Theotokos, and Mary Magdalene actualize Orthodoxy's eucharistic cosmology, or cosmic liturgy, in which the whole world is deified and experiences theosis. When Patriarch Bartholomew, “the Green Patriarch,” calls for ecological repentance and reconnection with the cosmos, His Eminence should consider the models of priesthood that Eve, the Theotokos, and Mary Magdalene provide. 

From Eden to the womb to the tomb, these women across time and space model our collective story of learning to be in relationship with God. The “Eve-new Eve obedience” paradigm is “just a story we’ve told ourselves and we can claim another.”[9]

This paper offers an original rereading of Eve uniquely in the context of Orthodox theology and ecotheology, and through that rereading, challenges the often-touted exclusively male lineage of Christ and his apostles. 
 

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (milkweed, 2013) 7.

[2] Fr. Lawrence Farley, “Women, Lived Orthodoxy, and Ordination,” ORTHOCHRISTIAN.COM, October 18, 2023, orthochristian.com/156727.html.

[3] Aristotle Papanikolaou, Twitter, July 27, 2022, https://x.com/atpapanik/status/1552312214446546945?lang=en.

[4] Faafetai Aiava, “Eleele Interrupts the Eden Wedding,” Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges, ed. S. Lily Mendoza and George Zachariah (Eugene: Pickwick, 2022).

[5] Elizabeth Theokritoff, “Creator and Creation,” The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 63-77, p. 73. (quoting Maximus)

[6] Theokritoff, 73.

[7] Theokritoff, 73.  

[8] “Exploring ‘Sophia’ in Modern Orthodox Theology: An Interview with Sarah Livick-Moses,” Public Orthodoxy, April 4, 2024. https://publicorthodoxy.org/video/exploring-sophia/

[9] Kimmerer, 31.