"Nor can the Apostle mean that Eve only sinned; or that she only was Deceived, for if Adam sinned willfully and knowingly, he became the greater Transgressor"
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Astell’s sentence is a scalpel aimed at a culture that treats “Eve was deceived” as a permanent indictment of women. She doesn’t merely defend Eve; she turns the familiar theological excuse into an accusation that boomerangs back onto Adam. If Adam sinned “willfully and knowingly,” then male authority isn’t just compromised, it’s morally disqualified. The line is doing courtroom work: intent matters, knowledge matters, and by those standards the supposedly rational, governing sex looks worse.
The specific target is the lazy sermon logic of her day, where Paul’s words were routinely weaponized to justify women’s subordination in church and home. Astell, writing at the edge of early Enlightenment reason and Anglican orthodoxy, refuses to concede the Bible as an all-purpose gag order. Instead she reads it with a kind of proto-feminist legalism: deception mitigates; deliberation aggravates. That’s not a sentimental rescue of Eve. It’s a tactical reframing that exposes how selectively “scriptural” misogyny tends to be.
The subtext is sharper still: if men pride themselves on superior reason, then they can’t have it both ways. Either women are too weak to be trusted (in which case deception is predictable and blame is complicated), or men are strong and knowing (in which case their wrongdoing is heavier). Astell’s brilliance is to keep the argument inside the religious frame her opponents insist on, then rearrange its moral math until patriarchy starts looking like bad theology.
The specific target is the lazy sermon logic of her day, where Paul’s words were routinely weaponized to justify women’s subordination in church and home. Astell, writing at the edge of early Enlightenment reason and Anglican orthodoxy, refuses to concede the Bible as an all-purpose gag order. Instead she reads it with a kind of proto-feminist legalism: deception mitigates; deliberation aggravates. That’s not a sentimental rescue of Eve. It’s a tactical reframing that exposes how selectively “scriptural” misogyny tends to be.
The subtext is sharper still: if men pride themselves on superior reason, then they can’t have it both ways. Either women are too weak to be trusted (in which case deception is predictable and blame is complicated), or men are strong and knowing (in which case their wrongdoing is heavier). Astell’s brilliance is to keep the argument inside the religious frame her opponents insist on, then rearrange its moral math until patriarchy starts looking like bad theology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Bible |
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