Adamites

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The Adamites are a name attached, again and again over fifteen centuries, to Christian groups held to have sought the innocence of Adam before the Fall — the condition of paradise recovered, in which shame and the law of marriage no longer applied, and which some were said to mark by gathering without clothes. The label is older and more durable than any single movement it was pinned on.

Almost everything reported about the earliest such groups comes from their opponents. The fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis, cataloguing what he took to be the errors of his age, described a sect that called its meeting-place a paradise, entered it naked, and considered itself restored to the state from which Adam had fallen; earlier writers had mentioned similar claims among the followers of a certain Prodicus. These are descriptions by enemies, written to refute, and modern scholarship treats them with care: the heresiologists worked from rumour and from a settled habit of casting opponents as libertines, and it is often impossible to recover, behind the charge, what any actual community believed or practised. Whether a discrete “Adamite” sect existed in late antiquity, or whether the name gathered up several unrelated reports, remains unsettled.

What the name carried, in every period, was a particular logic. If salvation genuinely undoes the Fall, then the saved might already stand where Adam stood before he sinned — beyond the shame that clothing answered, beyond the prohibitions written for a fallen world. That argument could be pressed toward ascetic purity or toward freedom from ordinary moral restraint, and accusers generally assumed the second. The reasoning recurs wherever a group holds that grace has remade the believer completely in this life rather than only at its end.

The name surfaced most concretely in fifteenth-century Bohemia, among radicals on the fringe of the Hussite movement, sometimes called Picards. They were reported to reject private property and conventional marriage and to live as the restored innocent; the Hussite commander Jan Žižka moved against them in 1421 and destroyed them — the assault on their island camp ended the community, and those taken alive were put to death by sword and fire. Reformers of the sixteenth century revived “Adamite” as a term of abuse for radical sects they wished to discredit, and it passed into later polemic as a stock charge rather than the description of a continuous body.

The result is a word that points less to one church than to a recurring temptation and a recurring accusation, hard to separate from each other. To the groups who may have owned the name, it promised that the gospel had given back what was lost in Eden. To those who applied it from outside, it named a disorder. The sources rarely let the two voices be heard apart.

→ Related: Albigenses · Gnosis · Apologetics · Middle Ages