Detail of the floor mosaic in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Annunziata at Otranto, Lecce, Italy, executed between 1163 and 1165. The artwork has in the center a great tree of life, around which various representations of the holy history are distributed. The figure shows Eve, with the serpent beside her, in the Garden of Eden.
The story of Eve’s creation from a rib of Adam reveals the markedly “androcentric” character of Christianity compared to most of the religions of the Ancient World, that is an attitude that confers to males a primary role in social and religious life, at the expense of women. The tale of the birth of the woman from the first man’s rib reverses the real process of human birth, in which both males and females are born from the woman. “By making a male God the midwife of the birth of the female from the side of the male, it defines woman’s place as auxiliary and secondary to the male” (Ruether 2005: 334). The androcentric definition of humankind adopted by Christianity is evidenced by St. Augustine, who affirms that “the woman, together with her own husband, is the image of God, so that
the whole substance may be one image, but when she is referred to separately in her quality as a helpmeet, which regards the woman alone, then she is not the image of God, but as regards the male alone, he is the image of God as fully and completely as when the
woman too is joined to him in one” (De Trinitate, 7, 7, 10, cited in Ruether 2005: 334-335).


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