Paradise Lost - revisited

The fall depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel

This is a blog post on original sin and salvation with recourses to Augustine and Kierkegaard. The idea is to apply Augustine’s idea of fall and resurrection to the processual worldview that is found for instance in the social sciences. According to social sciences, a phenomenon like human identity is developed in the course of a process and is therefore "processual". In this blog post the intent is to re-use Augustinian thought in order to point to salvific moments in the processes of life.

According to the great patristic author Augustine of Hippo (354-430) human nature is severely depraved because of Adam’s sin committed in the Garden of Eden. According to Augustinian logic, the story goes like this: By his free will Adam broke God’s commandment and thereby committed the original sin: “… man in paradise was capable of self-destruction by abandoning justice by an act of will…” (Enchiridion 28.106). Since this “fall of man” sin has hunted mankind and made itself manifest in the wrongful desire of human beings. Every individual, born into the race of Adam, has inherited sin and is thus doomed. Only because of God’s grace and redeeming act in history, is it possible for human beings to regain Paradise lost.

Augustine’s idea of original sin and salvation can be put into a scheme: In the beginning - in Paradise - Adam had the choice either to sin or not to sin, and as we know he handled his freedom poorly. After having used the free will to sin, Adam and every man after him entered the fallen state and were at once unable not to sin. However, when experiencing rebirth as a Christian, man enters a new state – a state where he is able not to sin. And finally, in the resurrected state, man is totally unable to sin.

The fall and redemption thus constitute a process that contains the following four stages for the individual:
1)      In Paradise: able to sin, able to not sin / posse peccare, posse non peccare
2)      After the fall: unable to not sin / non posse non peccare
3)      As a "reborn Christian": able to not sin / posse non peccare
4)      When resurrected: unable to sin / non posse peccare

1400 years after Augustine formulated his thoughts on original sin, the Danish theologian Kierkegaard came up with his existential interpretation on the subject. Kierkegaard recognized that everyone falls into sin, however not because of an ultimate ancestor – everybody falls in his own right: “Through the first sin, sin came into the world. Precisely in the same way it is true of every subsequent man's first sin, that through it sin comes into the world....” (Concept of Anxiety). Just as Adam’s sin brought about sinfulness in Adam, so does each individual sin while in a state of freedom and sinlessness, and only then is sinfulness in existence for the individual.

This existential approach is exactly what I want to promote, but taking all four stages of Augustine’s “fall and salvation”-scheme into account. My idea is to apply Augustine’s mode of thought to the processual character of human life and thereby make the case that the fourfold process from fall to salvation not (only) is one course that stretches backwards into the mythical past and forwards into eternity, but that it is also the very mode of life. In life we constantly move between the states of feeling free, capable, bound and unaccomplished. Is life itself not a row of falls and resurrections? The stages in the process of grief are but one example. I don’t want to suggest that human beings can accomplish their own salvation. I am not in the business of reducing the means of salvation, nor do I want to minimize the hope in eternal salvation. However, I want to point to the experience of fall and salvation within life and thereby acknowledge the possibility of pure goodness within creation and within human beings. Thus we might win moments in Paradise. It is already here, although not yet. I propose to see the macro history of salvation unfold on a micro scale over and over again in  human life.

- Maria Munkholt