XX
THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
The Scriptures give no indication whatever as to the size, shape or colour of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which grew in the midst of Eden, and it has been variously interpreted. Adam is depicted with an apple, a pear, a quince, a fig, according to the individual opinion of the painter. Milton took the tree to be an apple:
‘A goodly tree....
Laden with fruit of fairest colours mixt
Ruddie and gold ...
Sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair apples.’[303]
And the majority of artists have chosen that fruit. It grew in every part of Europe, and, except the cherry, it was almost the only cultivated fruit in Germany and the Netherlands. Besides grapes, figs and pomegranates it is the only fruit mentioned in Scripture, and it is also possible that some found reason for identifying it with the fruit which brought sin into the world in the apparent similarity of the two Latin words, ‘mălum’ = evil, and ‘mālum’ = an apple.
And as the fruit varies in the hand of Adam so it varies in the hand of the Infant Christ, the second Adam. Memling and the painters of Cologne depict Him with an apple. Il Moretto paints a pear,[304] Giovanni Bellini a quince,[305] and Botticelli a pomegranate.[306] The Eve of Jan van Eyck holds a lemon,[307] but he keeps to the older convention in the symbols which he places in the hand of the Infant Saviour: the bird, emblem of the human soul, the inscribed scroll or the cross-surmounted orb.
The apple, when in the hand of Adam, is always the symbol of the Fall; when in the hand of Christ, it is the symbol of the sin of the world which He took upon Himself. ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’