The Great Theological Debate

[The Sage Nabooru]

From The Best, Worst, and Most Unsual, by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler, 1976, in entry listed as Worst Theological Debate:

 

Whenever artists set out to depict Adam and Eve in their innocence, they run into a theological problem that has been acrimoniously debated for centuries. They subject of this ongoing controversy was "that tortuosity or complicated nodosity we usually call the Navell." as Sir Thomas Browne put it in 1646. Browne contended that since Adan and Eve were created and not born, they should be portrayed with smooth, unindented abdomens. Then, in 1752 Dr. Christian Tobias Ephraim Reinhard published the definitive work on the issue - Untersuchung der Frage: Ob unsere ersten Uraltern, Adam und Eve, einen Nabel gehabt (Examination on the Question: Whether Our First Ancestors, Adam and Eve, Possessed a Navel). Dr. Reinhard argues the pros and cons interminably, siding ultimately with the antinavel forces.

 

In actual practice, artists vacillated for many years, and an examination of Adam and Eve portraits from the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance shows some with and some without. By Reinhard's time, however, the immaculate stomach was a hopeless cause. On the Sistine ceiling Michelangelo boldly asserted the legitimacy of picturing the umbilicus and greatly influenced subsequent navel tradition. In his incomparable panel of Adam receiving the spark of life from Jehovah, the new creation sports an inny belly button.

 

The navel controversy was unexpectedly revived in 1944 by the House Military Affairs Committee. Representative Durham, a North Carolina Democrat, loudly opposed distribution of a government pamphlet entitled The Races of Mankind to American servicemen, ostensibly because in some of the illustrations "Adam and Eve are depicted with navels," an insult to fundamentalists everywhere. There were, however, some cynics who maintained that the congressman was really more concerned about a statistical table in the pamphlet showing that the average IQ for blacks in some Northern states was higher than the average for Southern whites.

[mwc]

I would say that they were created without belly buttons but after the fall, when god made animal skin clothes for them, he then installed belly buttons so the lint had somewhere to collect.

 

mwc

[Thackerie]

I would say that they were created without belly buttons but after the fall, when god made animal skin clothes for them, he then installed belly buttons so the lint had somewhere to collect.

 

mwc

 

LOL! Thanks for the explanation, mwc. It effectively solves that other great question which has been the subject of theological debate for many centuries, i.e. "If Adam and Eve did have belly buttons, were they innies or outies?"