The Fall

What precisely happened at the Fall? If we are to believe moderns, it is simply a myth that archaic Christians like myself tend to buy into. Rabble like myself, who do not have any intellectual sophistication about them, accept these myths as a way to deal with the cold tragedy that is reality. Sophistry has never been so loud as today; or is it that in arrogance it has always been dropping sonic booms?


At any rate, in a book I've been composing I have highlighted the two laws that St. Paul tells us about in his letter to the Romans. He gives us the example of the law of the Spirit and the law of the flesh. The one is affirmation and life, and the other is bound to decay. This is one of those passages where I cannot help but see Plato shining through in Paul's doctrine.

Indeed, following John Paul II's catechesis on the Theology of the Body, I started to really recognize what precisely happened at that Fall. He mentions primordial shame, and says that when Adam and Eve hid themsleves from each other, it was because they realized they were subjects with inherent dignity, but at the Fall they started looking upon each other as objects for mere utilitarian gratification.

After having studied classical philosophy, the conclusion dawned on me that we have a way of understanding what took place at the Fall.  Of course, if we ask sophisticated moderns with their "open minds" they will tell us we need to put away the children's stories and start approaching things scientifically.  As if the scientific method, to which we are all now slaves, can tell us the cause of evil in the world?  So let us be unsophisiticated  biblicists and try to find answers wherever they may be, rather than prima facie shutting off avenues to truth based on a hubristic pseudo-sophistication.

In the book that I hope to publish I make the claim that Aristotle's ethics are a philosophic roadmap to reorienting ourselves -- when supplemented by the Gospel virtues -- back to our primordial state.  You see, the classical philosophers dissected the powers of the human soul into three (Plato) or four (Aristotle) parts.  For Plato, there were the reason, spirited, and desiring elements.  For Aristotle there were the intellect, the will, the irascible (responsible for anger and like emotions,) and the concupiscible (desiring) elements of the soul.  Aristotle most blatantly -- without revelation -- suggests what happened at the Fall.  Indeed, the correlation of his statements on the way each of the powers rule, if they have charge of the soul, and what things were probably like before the Fall, should make all of us marvel at Providence.  He says that when reason rules, it rules like a monarch; when the sense powers rule, they rule as tyrants. (See the first book of his Politics.)

This is, then, precisely what happened at the Fall.  Augustine, following Paul, tells us that our disordered desires are providential punishment for our first parent's sin.  So what happened?  Quite simply, it used to be that the intellect and will reigned supreme, properly measuring the lower sense powers so that they could reach their ultimate perfection.  At the Fall, the lower powers rebelled and alas, Eve started looking like a mere body to Adam and vice versa.  Sin, quite simply, in its principle is a disorder of the proper ordering of the soul; it is a lack of perfection of being.

Our Lord tells us "Blessed are the meek" and He means that those who properly measure their passions are happy.  Sounds very compatible to Aristotle, right?  Nietzsche thought so, which led him to lump classical philosphy together with Christianity in his "ascetic ideal."  The greatest atheist there ever was recognized the compatibility -- we should too.

So when we start hearing terms like "slave morality" bantered about, we ought to ask, "Who really is the slave?" The person who allows his reason to self-determine his activity, or the person who is determined by the pull of the passions.  Who is a slave?  The one who can say, "No," or the one who cannot?

So let us be archaic and buy into the so called "myth."  Let us open our minds, instead of pretending to be big minded while cutting off pursuit of the truth.  If the real haters would only allow us to hunt, we might find answers.  They tell us not to join the tourney because it is the activity of simpletons.  I say, let us rise and be on our way.  If you will not look, do not blame me for your blindness.  How the silencers came to be called open has always baffled me? 

Psuedo-sophistication and supposed objectivity of method have silenced a world burgeoning with answers; a poetic world; a plethora of life; a manifold of being; all this blindness in the name of method and a poor one at that!  I mean poor in the true sense of poverty: we are an intellectually starved race with our "science."How long shall we choose to live in the dungy ghetto of a world without God?  How long should we allow these pretenders to cut us off from being?  How long should we continue in our slavery?

Trust is an amazing thing.  Knock and the door will be opened.  We are no longer allowed to even knock.  Indeed, we cannot find the door.  Let us, then, ignore the slave moralists, and be free to be human; be free to live our humanity!  No longer shall the darkness abound. No more silence!