counterpart be created for it to assuage its loneliness and provide for continuation of the species. It is this very relationship of secondariness which is so important for Philo, for in his platonistic thought secondariness in time is a figure for lower ontological status. Accordingly, the corporeal female is twice-fallen, once from the first Adam of pure spirit and once more from the male, who in Philo's scheme represents "mind." And all this takes place, as Bloch emphasizes rightly,
before
the "apple" is eaten. The very coming into being of woman is already the Fall.
5
Describing the existence of the second man, Philo says:
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 | | But since no created thing is constant, and things mortal are necessarily liable to changes and reverses, it could not but be that the first man too should experience some ill fortune. And woman becomes for him the beginning of blameworthy life. For so long as he was by himself, as accorded with such solitude, he went on growing like to the world and like God, and receiving in his soul the impressions made by the nature of each, not all of these, but as many as one of mortal composition can
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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| | Philo does write, "And when Moses had called the genus 'man', quite admirably did he distinguish its species, adding that it had been created 'male and female', and this though the individual members had not yet taken shape" (1929b, 61). I think that Wegner has slightly misread Philo here. By "genus" and "species,'' I think he means logical genus and species and not biological ones. Although it is still not identical to the passages I have cited above, this interpretation renders the passage less of a contradiction of Philo's explicit claim that the first human, in the image of God, was androgynous, owing to the androgyny of souls, which are both male and female because they are neither male nor female. This minor disagreement, however, does not materially affect my total agreement with the thesis of Wegner's paper.
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| | 5. As Bloch formulates it (not specifically with reference to Philo, but appropriately applied to him):
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| | Adam's chronological priority implies a whole set of relations that strike to the heart not only of medieval sign theory, but to certain questions of ontology that make it apparent that the Fall, commonly conceived to be the originary momentthe cause and justificationof medieval antifeminism, is merely a fulfillment or logical conclusion of that which is implicit to the creation of Adam and then Eve. For the woman of the Yahwist version, conceived from the beginning as secondary, derivative, supervenient, and supplemental, assumes, within the founding articulation of gender of the first centuries of Christianity, the burden of all that is inferior, debased, scandalous, and perverse.
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| | (Bloch 1991a, 25)
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| | I would emphasize, however, that what Bloch leaves out here is the necessity of an interpretation for this set of values to be animated. The text of the Bible itself certainly does not automatically give rise to either the ontological or the axiological notions Bloch lists. I shall be dealing with this point more fully in a forthcoming article in
Paragraph
. See also n. 6.
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