Dean's Lecture Series: Ronna Burger on Man and Woman in Plato and The Bible

"Man, Woman, and the Wholeness of the Human: A Biblical and Platonic Account" by Ronna Burger, Tulane University.

“And God created Adam in His own image . . . male and female created He them.” The primordial, androgynous human in Genesis 1 is subsequently divided into two partial beings, man and woman; their punishment for violating the first divine prohibition explains the reality of life as we know it. This biblical narrative has a remarkable resonance with a Platonic account—Aristophanes’ speech on eros in the Symposium: each of the original, whole humans who rebel against the gods is split by a divine punishment into two partial beings, always longing for their missing half. What can we learn, from these parallel texts, about the understanding of the human condition in the two roots of the West, Jerusalem and Athens?

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