Fall Of Man

Fall of man, 144, 299, 382; from unity into division, 148, 151, 159, 181, 209, 222, 239, 247, 255, 257, 266, 323; into sexual division, 153; equated with the creation, 151, 159, 161, 163

This index entry in Abrams maps the full semantic range of 'fall of man' across Romantic literature, tracing its transformation from theological transgression into philosophical categories of division, alienation, self-consciousness, and the equation of fall with creation itself.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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"The Mosaic legend of the Fall of Man," Hegel remarks, "has preserved an ancient picture representing the origin and consequences of this disunion" — a "Mythus vom Sündenfall" whose power of survival over thousands of years is a sign that it incorporates a content which the philosopher "cannot afford to neglect."

Hegel reads the Fall myth as a philosophical allegory of the necessary self-division of consciousness from nature, which initiates the dialectical journey toward a higher, earned unity.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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the original human sin is identified as self-centeredness, or selfhood, the attempt of a part to be sufficient unto itself; while the primary consequence of the fall — death — is described as a state of division from the one Being.

Abrams articulates the Neoplatonic-Romantic reading of the Fall as ontological fragmentation from divine unity, in which death signifies separation rather than biological cessation, and redemption is conceived as reintegration.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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"This fall [Abfall] of man from instinct" ... is also right in wishing good fortune to this important step of human nature in general toward perfection" and in calling it "a giant-step of humanity," for by it man "first put his foot upon the ladder which after the course of many millennia will lead him to become master of himself."

Schiller's secular felix culpa converts the Fall from catastrophe into the inaugural step of moral and cultural ascent, translating the theological paradox into a philosophy of progressive self-mastery.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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The beginning of this speculative philosophy was the metaphysical fall of man ... We began to philosophize through pride, and so destroyed our innocence; we discovered our nakedness, and since then we philosophize out of the need for our redemption.

Fichte identifies philosophical self-reflection itself as the metaphysical re-enactment of the Fall, making the birth of speculative thought structurally homologous with Adam's transgression.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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Blake's founding image is recognizably in the lineage of that ancient mythical being, the primal man or Adam, who falls into fragmentation. And Blake's underlying premise, which he shares with other writers in this tradition, equates essential good with unity and essential evil with separateness.

Blake's mythology of Albion's fall into division recapitulates the ancient primal-man myth, making fragmentation of unified being the defining structure of both cosmic and psychological evil.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine principle underlies the genesis of the world and of human existence in the majority of gnostic systems. "The Light fell into the darkness" signifies an early phase of the same.

Jonas identifies the pre-cosmic fall of divine light into matter as the structural foundation of Gnostic cosmology, distinguishing it from the Biblical fall as an event preceding creation rather than following it.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis

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nonreligion is equivalent to a new "fall" of man — in other words, that nonreligious man has lost the capacity to live religion consciously, and hence to understand and assume it; but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it.

Eliade reinterprets secular modernity as a second Fall, in which the loss of conscious religious experience drives the sacred into the unconscious, where it continues to operate as latent memory.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

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What in the Biblical story form is "represented," then, as "the exit of man . . . from Paradise" was in historical fact his "passage . . . from the tutelage of instinct to the condition of freedom" — the burden of free choice in the knowledge of good and evil.

Kant secularizes the Fall as humanity's transition from instinctual determination to rational freedom, framing it as simultaneously a loss and a morally necessary gain.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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Sin first enticed Adam and tricked him into breaking the commandment; and by giving substance to sensual pleasure and by attaching itself through such pleasure to the very root of nature, it brought the sentence of death on all nature, since through man it impels all created things towards death.

Maximos the Confessor articulates the patristic doctrine that the Fall embedded pleasure-driven passion into the very root of human nature, making death the necessary consequence transmitted through generation to all creation.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting

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After the fall the generation of every man was by nature impassioned and preceded by pleasure. From this rule no one was exempt. On the contrary, as if discharging a natural debt, all underwent sufferings and the death that comes from them.

This Philokalian passage grounds the universality of post-lapsarian suffering in the mechanism of pleasure-driven generation, establishing the soteriological need for an unjust, undeserved redemptive suffering to counteract it.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting

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Man, then, was thus snared by the assault of the arch-fiend, and broke his Creator's command, and was stripped of grace and put off his confidence with God, and covered himself with the asperities of a toilsome life.

John of Damascus presents the Fall in classical Orthodox terms as diabolically induced transgression resulting in the loss of divine grace, the onset of shame, and the subjection of human existence to labor and mortality.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting

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God in His prescience knew that man would transgress and become liable to destruction, He made from him a female to be a help to him like himself; a help, indeed, for the conservation of the race after the transgression from age to age by generation.

John of Damascus presents God's foreknowledge of the Fall as the theological ground for the creation of Eve and the institution of sexual generation, linking the Fall directly to the structure of human reproduction.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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In Boehme, for example, we find still the ancient myth of primal and spiritual man, the microcosmic androgyne who fell into sexual as well as into material and psychological division, and whose redemption — the recovery of his lost integrity — is made possible by Christ, who, like unfallen Adam, unites the attributes of both sexes in himself.

Abrams traces how Boehme's theosophy recasts the Fall as the androgyne's descent into sexual and material division, with Christology providing the prototype of reintegrated wholeness.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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in their newly fallen state and having experienced a spiritual death, Adam and Eve are now qualified to "become like the gods." As a token, the gods slay an animal and present the preserved skins to Adam and Eve, to protect them from the harsh elements.

Peterson reads the Fall paradoxically as initiation into a regenerative cycle of spiritual death and rebirth, interpreting the divine gift of animal skins as a symbol of the mortification prerequisite to apotheosis.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting

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Had there been no death and had our race not become mortal prior to death... we should not in fact have been enriched with the firstfruit of immortality, nor should we have been called into the heavens.

Gregory Palamas articulates an Orthodox felix culpa argument: the mortality introduced by the Fall becomes the very condition for humanity's ultimate elevation above angelic orders through the Incarnation.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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Fall of Man and Angels due to pride and disobedience; Lust disobedient to will was not cause of Fall, but a fit punishment for Man.

Sorabji, indexing Augustine, distinguishes pride as the cause of the Fall from disordered lust as its punitive consequence, a crucial theological distinction for the patristic anthropology of original sin.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting

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Adam is associated with sin and corruption and Eve, etc. In alluding to Adam in this way he means Adam in his original, unspoilt form, when just created by God... the man who has not yet passed through the process of corruption.

Von Franz identifies the alchemical prima materia with pre-lapsarian Adam as an image of the Self in its original wholeness, before the Fall introduced corruption — making the Great Work a symbolic reversal of the Fall.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting

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For them it was an evil prison, vitiated in its very nature, produced as a result of the fall of a spiritual power... For Plotinus, in this entirely true to Plato's doctrine, the visible universe was good... not the result of any fall or error but of the spontaneous expansion of the divine goodness.

Edinger juxtaposes Gnostic and Plotinian cosmologies to show that the Fall of a divine spiritual power into matter is the Gnostic premise Plotinus explicitly rejects, marking a fundamental metaphysical division within late antique thought.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting

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a daughter who "takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls. But one day coming to hate her shame, she puts away the evil of earth, once more seeks the father, and finds her peace."

Abrams invokes Plotinus's erotic-familial figure of the soul's fall into material attachment and return to the One as the Neoplatonic archetype underlying the Fall narrative in both pagan and Christian forms.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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We began to feel the oppression of culture, we desire with painful longing to go back home... we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.

Schiller frames the nostalgic longing for pre-lapsarian innocence as a cultural condition that cannot be reversed, redirecting the energy of the Fall myth from regression toward the demand for a higher synthesis.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside

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in the Bible, God and man, from the beginning, are distinct... The fashioning of the world, of the animals, and of Adam was accomplished not within the sphere of divinity but outside of it. There is, consequently, an intrinsic, not merely formal, separation.

Campbell contrasts the Biblical structure — in which the Fall intensifies an already-given ontological separation between Creator and creature — with the Indian model of divine self-division that has no equivalent rupture.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962aside

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Hermeticism did not draw the modern sharp division between the animate and the inanimate but applied the categories of living things to all of nature; it also posited a correspondence between the human and the nonhuman.

Abrams situates the Hermetic tradition's anthropomorphic cosmology as the esoteric context within which fall-and-return myths are reinterpreted through the figure of the macroanthropos.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside

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