GK Chesterton suggested that the fall of man is a view held around the world; in fact, “It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life.” The Catholic Church teaches that man has suffered a privation of Grace and thereby has incurred the defect of Original Sin by his original disobedience. All are born of sin and destined for a life of difficulty and trial. The only real remediation is for a soul to submit his will to the Creator and cooperate with graces freely given that his nature might be perfected. That man has suffered the Fall is overwhelmingly evident for the observant; and yet, we live in a time when our teachers and philosophers deny that there was any fall ever, and that man can perfect himself by his own efforts.
Legends of the Fall
Most major traditions hold stories and legends portraying the fallen nature of man. In Gnosticism, there is gratitude for the snake revealing hidden knowledge to Adam and Eve which liberates them from the “demiurge’s” constricting control. In Islam, Adam and Eve are deceived by Shaitaan who promised them immortality and other delights; but even after having been warned, they gave into Shaitaan’s temptations. In Zoroastrianism and Persian myths, humankind is created to resist and endure through degradation and decay by cultivating good habits of charitable deeds, the correct use of speech and by the right use of the intellect.
The Hindu tradition has prayers to Varuna, Indra, and Agni, which allude to a corrupt human nature, by constantly asking forgiveness of their sins and for their offenses against the gods and their neighbors. In Buddhism, the predominant theme is suffering and fallenness. In the words of the Buddha in the Dhammapada, 147-148: “Behold this painted body, a body full of wounds, put together, diseased, and full of many thoughts in which there is neither permanence nor stability. This body is worn out, a nest of diseases and very frail. This heap of corruption breaks in pieces, life indeed ends in death.” Even Confucius in his Analects stressed the importance and difficulty of cultivating the virtues to live the moral life. He called for men to constantly remind themselves of the inverse golden rule. This is similar to the Ancient Greeks who clearly understood the need to cultivate virtue to combat man’s natural inclination towards evil.
Perhaps the most notable non-Christian tradition to elucidate man’s fallen nature is found in the myth of Pandora. The Titan Prometheus was charged with making man out of dust. Man was a feeble creature with a poor lot in life. Prometheus had pity on man and asked Zeus if he could give them fire. Zeus refused but Prometheus stole fire from Zeus anyway and got caught. Zeus had Prometheus chained to the side of a mountain while he planned revenge on Prometheus’ family.
In the meantime, the gods made beautiful Pandora out of clay. Pandora means “all gifts” and she is named so because Zeus had all the gods and goddesses each give her a gift as he made her a live person. Hera gave Pandora an insatiable curiosity. Zeus offered Pandora as a wife to Prometheus’ dimwitted brother Epimetheus and gave them a box for a wedding present with the instruction that she was never to open it. Of course Zeus knew she wouldn’t be able to resist and when she opened the box and let loose its contents, Zeus’ punishment was complete, for in the box were all the evils, sicknesses, and sins that ushered death irrevocably into the world. Of course, man has lived in this fallen state ever since
Plato and Gyges’ Ring
There is further corroboration in philosophy. In book two of The Republic, Plato alludes to man’s fallen nature by having Glaucon assert that it is good to perpetrate injustice for gain but bad to suffer it. Glaucon further proclaims a fallen notion of justice by a compromise between the distorted notion that doing injustice without punishment is a benefit and suffering an injustice without the ability to retaliate is a great evil.
Glaucon suggests that conventional laws are asserted to protect victims, “not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honored by reason of the inability of men to do injustice” without interference. Plato has Glaucon further assert that, concerning the conventional law, “no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did.” To illustrate his point, Glaucon tells the myth of Gyges’ Ring to demonstrate that the just and unjust man alike will find themselves on the same road, if only given the right circumstances.
Plato later demonstrates that because of our fallen nature we are called to cultivate virtue and commit to moral formation for excellence if we are going to do the right thing for the right reasons. There is no doubt that most men in Gyges’ position would take advantage of invisibility for personal gain, even though it is immoral. This is an illustration of man’s fallen nature because our uncultivated inclinations do not square with natural law of goodness and truth.
All the major philosophical and religious traditions in the history of the world have acknowledged and responded to the fallen nature of man. The obvious incongruity between the natural good and man’s inclination to do the opposite is a glaringly evident thing. The history books demonstrate a record of the strife, sin and death that have plagued all peoples in all lands and at all times.
We Have Fallen and Can’t Get Up (By Ourselves)
It is appropriate that Chesterton alerts us to the fact that seeing human existence by the reality of the Fall is not only enlightening, but encouraging. It is enlightening because it is self-evidently true. It is encouraging because we have the Saints to confirm that the solution is to turn to the Creator, to align our wills with His and to accept by cooperation the freely given graces that have the potential to perfect our fallen nature.
We are in a unique time when a growing number “educated” souls operate in fields that systematically deny the fallen nature of man. Professions such as education, psychology, the social sciences and several more operate as if all of humankind’s strife has its root causes in genetic accidents and material inequalities.
The greatest folly of this age is that we have denied the Fall in our universities, and in our governments have told ourselves the great lie that we are capable of perfecting ourselves. The ensuing death and destruction goes largely unnoticed by a world steeped in denial and self-deceit. Let us at least recognize that despite modern consensus, we are indeed fallen and the answer to our fallen nature is as it has always been, to acknowledge the truth, live in reality and cooperate with the graces to become restored to God.
17 thoughts on “Recognizing the Fall of Man”
Now if you called it by its right name – The Rise – I could stop loathing all those silly myths. We never fell. We crawled out of the ocean, then down from trees to leave the caves as our consciences were RAISED and with these leaps of thought came responsibility, duty and the upward climb to our perfection as a species – because we are guided by the Holy Spirit. The fact that at the age of reason
we become aware of our mortality and live with this ever slippery sword above that will one day FALL
is punishment enough for spiritually frail souls trapped in a body that will die. Guilt is not what life is about.
Greetings in Christ James!- The Rise? My atheist friends agree with you- they say “we are not fallen men but rising apes.” If you use Darwin’s Origin of Species as your bible, then sure- but St. Pope John Paul II explained that the philosophies under-girding evolution are incompatible with Catholic Truth and the dignity of man, especially the notion you allude to here that spirit comes from matter- At least one thing you say is true “guilt is not what life is about.” But neither is life truly explain by any kind of material reductionism. The Fall is self-evident.
Creation myths of many religions and many cultures are amazingly similar, they are that alone, “myths”. Myths are attempts by primitive peoples to explain phenomena in simplistic ways and without an understanding of science. Fallen men are a mythical creation to explain the need to be subjugated by the gods. Of course, these are stories made by men to explain the world in primitive terms. Evolution is science based and is NOT incompatible with Catholicism… the Source can be ultimately similar.
Fallen people are a myth as we need no pressure to subjugate ourselves to higher powers or energies. Hold a new born, sit with a totally disabled child, hold a stillborn baby and then have the audacity to claim that people are fallen creatures. “Fallen-ness” is not the nature of the multigenesis evolution…..it is a function of nature and nurture. Understanding evolves…..
Adam Aquinas,
Your definition of myth is far off the mark. Myths were never a way to primitively explain things away in the absence of “science”, that is a silly tenant of progressivism- Although man’s fallen nature is conveyed by myth, the nature of fallen man is anything but mythic- these are not man made stories-
Evolution is “science” based as you call it and in so far as it deals with the fossil record as an artifact of scientific inquiry, it does not contradict Holy Mother Church- but to try to use it to explain the origin of man does violate reasonability and goes against church teaching- Pope St. John Paul II explains clearly that spirit cannot arise from matter. So sure, if you understand that the theory of evolution as a material study of the fossil record, it fits into the bigger picture of Catholic truth, but what I am afraid you are suggesting is that Catholicism fits into the big picture of evolutionary truth, and if this is what you are saying, then you are wrong.
Adam since you have free will you do not have to subjugate yourself to anything, this fact does not make the fall a “myth” as you call it. We Catholics are called to submit our wills to the Will of the Father, this is not subjugation, but a free will choice to embrace the truth.
I have no idea what on earth you mean by “audacity” here and there is no connection between holding a newborn, disabled or stillborn child and making the truthful claim that man is fallen. Catholics claim man is fallen, atheists claim we are apes rising- Also, your nature-nurture is only an expression of a false dichotomy and a denial of freewill-
Then you refer to de Chardin- “Teilhard’s views on original sin and consequently many of his works were censured by the Catholic Church”- I don’t have time to go into this right now, but most of what you have posted here misses the mark by a fairly large margin mostly because it is steeped in modern reductionism and I suppose “evolutionary theology.”
Myth:a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, especially one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature. 2. stories or matter of this kind: realm of myth. (dictionary.com)
Of course, myths in the Bible are man-made stories. Given what we know, multi-genesis would negate the straight story of Adan and Eve, science and logic defies the particular order of creation. The fact there are two distinct stories of creation in Genesis, it has to be man-made…God would have gotten it right the first time; like the two sets of commandments of Moses. Autographs do not exist, even of the NT, scribes have many versions and interpolations of events.
God continues to reveal Himself mysteriously, at his pwn pace and manner…revelation is never complete, kind of like evolution. And, de Chardin has been “redeemed” by the past two Popes.
The Bible is the inerrant and inspired word of God. The stories in it are not man made but truths conveyed by words inspired by the Holy Spirit. Your declaration that these stories are “mythical” by the definition of the ever evolving dictionary.com is not credible or weighty. Tell me what Mythos meant to the ancient Greeks and we might begin a real conversation on the nature of myth. To use materialy reduced, self-referencing assertions is just the exercise of self-expression and excludes reasonable dialogue. Just stating a thing doesn’t make it so.
Chardin was not redeemed in any important sense by the last two popes- many of his ideas go against Church Teaching and those are irremediable.
(1) “inerrant and inspired word of God.” Would any God establish a warrant for bride-price, for genocide (Canaanites), slavery, stoning of people, filicide, restrictions on eating pork and shellfish, trafficking in humans, indiscriminate massacre, etc. etc.
(2) I provided documentation that deChardin was the inspiration of the vision of Christianity in Gaudiam et Spes. It is not de Chardin who you castigate, it is modernism and non-static revelation….just ain’t so!
Adam, I am going to tell you up front, I am a Catholic who fully embraces the Doctrines and Dogma of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and I do so because the Church represents the fullness of the faith and is by far the most comprehensive embrace of faith reason and science in all their deepest and most integral implications- I certainly cannot address your concerns adequately here because time and space do not permit- so I will briefly refute your errors- but in general I tell you that you present little more than self-referencing opinions informed by modern and post-modern reductionism so reasonable conversation is all but impossible.
(1) Your assertions here demonstrate Biblical illiteracy- There are distinctions to be made between different kinds of Biblical literature and it is far too much to teach you the errors you express here- but would St. Thomas Aquinas grant your interpretations here? No literate Catholic would- but I do understand where you are coming from-
(2) I castigate Chardin in the same way Deitrich Von Hildebrand does, if you claim to be wiser than him, that is something we ought to take up with him.
(3) Are you familiar with Aristotle’s four causes? In a similar way the two accounts are two explanatory factors for a thing well beyond human understanding. There is no contradiction here, just self-arrogation based on appearances-
(4) Bart Erhman is infantile- his work is untethered. How about St. Augustine? St. Thomas Aquinas? St. Jerome? would they agree with Bart Erhman? He is a protestant academic raging against God-
I am afraid Adam that we don’t speak the same language, but I remind you this is a Catholic site- You did not answer the question about myth and I am claiming here that you have no idea what that word signifies in real ontological, doxastic and semantic terms- Language, thought and the world correspond in an integral way that is absent from this present age, if you would like to become Catholic I would start with a proper first philosophy and a recovery of ontology and metaphysics- Aristotle can help you get started. Let me know if I can be of service to you.
Ours did. If you don’t like it, take it up with Him. If we start accepting the premise that Scripture is not an infallible record of the Word of God, then where does it end?
First, we make the “reasonable” conclusion that God never really gave some of the specific edicts in the Old Testament. Then, we conclude that maybe He never really claimed to give us His objectively real flesh as the Bread of Life (and already, at this point, we’re outside Catholicism). Maybe He never really designated Peter as the head of His Church – heck, maybe He never ordained Apostles to be special ministers apart from the laity in the first place, or maybe there were women Apostles that were edited out. From there, we question whether Jesus really claimed to be divine at all (a la the “Jesus Seminar”). And, if we’ve already gone that far, what stops us from treating the whole thing as just another myth?
Without Scripture – not just the parts you find reasonable, but all of Scripture – there is no Christianity. There’s only “Jesus-ism” (i.e. the notion that this historical mortal, Yeshua ben Yosef, was a pretty cool guy and had a lot of wise moral ideas).
Yes, and Tertullian and Origen were both responsible for some critical doctrines of the early Church. They were both also heretics, who wrote things that no good Christian could believe.
The fact that de Chardin was cited for some of his ideas in an encyclical does not “canonize” all of his ideas as Catholic doctrine (nor does it even make the cited ideas part of Catholic doctrine). Gaudium et Spes is a document of the Magisterium – whatever or whomever may have inspired it is not. So, de Chardin’s ideas are adopted by the Church only to the precise extent that they are expressly affirmed in Gaudium et Spes.
YES! We (being orthodox Catholics, presumably including Steven) do absolutely castigate “modernism and non-static revelation”.
“The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Dei Verbum)
As against modernism, see the entirety of St. Pope Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis.
The Church’s truths do not change over time, and what was once taught as divine truth will never be “revealed” to be error.
I don’t know why you thought I alluded to the Spirit coming from matter – that makes no sense. What crawled out of the ocean had the same spark of life as a newborn today.
It’s the responsibility from having ones conscience raised that allows the HS to work in
us. Anyway, Christmas greetings to you too.
James – I am truly baffled by how you can manage to make reference to the Holy Spirit (thus identifying as a Christian), and yet deny the explicit Biblical truth (contained in Genesis and in Romans, and in First Timothy and in Corinthians – among others) that mankind was created blameless but fell via disobedience.
Perhaps the mode of our creation was via evolution – the Bible does not obligate us to believe any particular thing about how God created Man. But the Fall is Biblically undeniable.
Also, our perfection will not come by evolution, and it will not come by reason, and it will not come as a species. If we are to be perfected, it can only be through Christ, and only as individuals (which is not to say that our relationship with God must be exclusive to each person – only that each person is individually responsible for accepting the grace of salvation).
” James – I am truly baffled…”
Anthony – most orthodox are.
Scoffing is not counterargument.
As I said to “adam aquinas” a few posts up – either Scripture (all of it) is the inspired Word of God or it is not.
If it is, then the Scripture passages I cited expressly disprove your doctrine of “the Rise”. There’s simply no way around it.
If it is not, then Christianity is purely ludicrous. If Scripture is not a reliable guide to truth, then all our doctrines are basically made up (not just those of the Church, but of all Christians, including you). How do you even know there is a Holy Spirit, or that He works within us? How do you know that Jesus was and is the Son of God and the Second Person of the Trinity? How do you know that there is any such thing as sin?
Anthony, black or white ceased being an option to anyone using reason and
intellect. As I have said in previous posts throughout the two sites I comment
on, even if Jesus did not rise from the dead my faith in God would be totally
unaffected. If you can’t feel God working in your life then any faith is a dead
end. You really got to get out of this dogma business and realize that the end
point of religion is to point out the obvious, the end point of theology is quite a
different focus and will never be understood this side of life. Merry Christmas !
Black or white are the only options for reason and intellect. Either a thing is true, or it is not. “Shades of grey” are just newsprint – they appear grey, but when you look under enough magnification, you can see that it’s just tiny dots of black and white, close enough together that they are hard to distinguish.
Either God exists (white) or He does not (black). Either XYZ is a sin (black) or it is not (white) – there may be nuances of circumstance (e.g. it is a sin if done under these circumstances and with these motives, but not otherwise), but that’s just smaller dicing of the black and white.
[And please, I really hope everyone can understand that my use of “white” as “positive” and “black” as “negative” is merely longstanding symbolism. It has nothing to do with race – and I really wish I could believe that it’s not necessary to disclaim that…]
Then your faith is something totally alien to me, and certainly not Christianity. You can’t have Christianity without the Risen Christ.
Either He was and is the Lord, and He rose from the dead, or He was a mere man, and is long since dust and worms. There is no grey area.
My faith isn’t about what I “feel”. It’s about what I believe and Whom I obey. Warm fuzzies are no substitute for the Incarnate Savior – the Great I AM.
You couldn’t be more wrong. Virtually everything that God revealed to His people, whether in the Old Testament or the New, was totally shocking to them – they could scarcely have imagined the truths He revealed, much less figured them out just by paying attention.
God’s basic existence and some of His nature can be known through human reason. But the Christian religion is nothing without revelation.
If your God is “obvious” without revelation, then I’m sorry to say, you’re nothing more than a pantheist, worshiping a “God” which is nothing more than the world, deified. I’m not insulting you – just putting a label on what you’re preaching.
You can have your “obvious” God – I’ll take Jesus at His Word, when He said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
Good for you, Anthony. and the 100 of thousands who believe that. Peace and out.
Very different and very good angle on the non Catholic versions of the Fall. Look into everyone your attainment of plenary indulgences for you or the dead of your family in your diocese in the Year of Mercy. I believe that one involves the usual requirements added to visiting your diocesan lead church.
Ask your priest.