www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Death prior to the fall

I guess I don't get how someone could have the potential to die but not the necessity (that is setting aside the basic biological necessity of death for all living things including those which long pre-dated the appearance of humans). What if the first people became sick, but didn't die outright? How would their bodies react to an illness if they had the ability to die but not the necessity?

Fr. Alexander Schmemman has a great essay on this idea in his book, for the life of the world. He talks about the fact that the whole world was suppose to be our food, and we were suppose to offer it back to God as Eucharist. But we fell, because we considered the eating as an end in itself, rather than as a means of union with God.

In an earlier post (page 1, #254273), responding to Joe's original question I described what I mean here.

In the view described there, Adam and Eve had the gifted potential not to die; not a guaranteed immortality. All natural beings with life have the potential to die.

The more I've thought on these two posts, the more I think they (Joe and AMM) are really on to something.

I suspect the problem is a lack of belief . . . or, to use a term from the theatre, a "suspension of disbelief."

When people watch a play or a film, they must suspend disbelief. They must forget that what they are watching is an illusion . . . precisely in order to partake of it and enjoy it and learn from it. Furthermore, the deeper the suspension of disbelief, the more one gets immersed in the story, and the more one can potentially profit by it . . . if they don't get carried away by it. ;-)

All of this could be said to apply to religion, too. The stories that we tell ourselves might not be historically accurate (in whole or in part), but they can neverthless be true like a good play or film can be true. The historical dimension of religion is, perhaps ultimately, a testimonial that what they in the past (saints and apostles and so on) expereinced and did and became -- we can too.

Just speculating out loud . . .

-- John

The distinction doesn't make sense. All natural beings with life don't have the potential to die, they will die. That is a biological necessity. The only other possibility is they were born with immortality but chose to relinquish it through the exercise of the will.

Angels do not die.

I should clarify myself. I did not mean to imply that Christianity is a myth. I mean that there must be a certain amount of suspension of disbelief in order for Christianity (or any religion) to work.

-- John

From a friend's blog, here is a passage quoted from Chesterton:

When a man is as great a genius as Mr. [H.G.] Wells, I admit it sounds provocative to call him provincial. But if he wants to know why anybody does it, it will be enough to point silently to the headline of one of his pages, which runs: "Where is the Garden of Eden?" To come down to a thing like that, and to think it telling, when talking to an intelligent Catholic about the Fall, that IS provinciality; proud and priceless provinciality. The French peasants of whom Mr. Wells speaks are not in that sense provincial. As Mr. Wells says, they do not know anything about Darwin and Evolution. They do not know and they do not care. That is where they are much better philosophers than Mr. Wells. They hold the philosophy of the Fall, in the form of a simple story which may be historic or symbolic, but anyhow cannot be more important than what it symbolises. In comparison with that truth, it does not matter twopence whether any evolutionary theory is true or not. Whether or no the garden was an allegory, the truth itself can be very well allegorised as a garden. And the point of it is that Man, whatever else he is, is certainly NOT merely one of the plants of the garden that has plucked its roots out of the soil and walked about with them like legs, or on the principle of a double dahlia has grown duplicate eyes and ears. He is something else, something strange and solitary; and more like the statue that was once the god of the garden; but the statue has fallen from its pedestal and lies broken among the plants and weeds. [My emphasis] This conception has nothing to do with materialism as it refers to materials. The image might be made of wood [rather than pre-human primates]; the wood might have come from the garden; the sculptor[God] presumably might, and probably did, allow for the growth and grain of the wood in what he carved and expressed [thus allowing for the possibility of some sort of pre-human evolution, as Pius XII allowed for in Humani Generis (1950)] . But my fable fixes the two truths of the true scripture. The first is that the wood [pre-human body that became human] was graven or stamped with an image, deliberately, and from the outside; in this case the image of God [the human, spiritual soul expressed in the body]. The second is that this image has been damaged and defaced [The Fall, no matter how it actually occurred], so that it [the statue of the god�human nature] is now both better and worse than the mere plants in the garden, which are perfect according to their own plan. There is room for any amount of speculation about the history of the tree before it was turned into an image [ideas of evolution or not]; there is room for any amount of doubt and mystery about what really happened when it was turned into an image [God breathing into the clay? Other means?]; there is room for any amount of hope and imagination about what it will look like when it is really mended and made into the perfect statue we have never seen. But it has the two fixed points, that man was uplifted at the first and fell; and to answer it by saying, "Where is the Garden of Eden?" is like answering a philosophical Buddhist by saying, "When were you last a donkey? [referring to the idea of reincarnation current in Buddhism]"

Here is the rest of the chapter on the Fall from Chesterton,

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening,but the only encouraging view of life. It holds, as against the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused
a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one.
It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, on the colossal contrast between the completeness of man's machines and the continued corruption of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest; as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance," which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and
evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans and sceptics: "We look before and after, and pine for what is not"; which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; and that we are all kings in exile.

Now to people who feel that this view of life is more real, more radical,more universal than the cheap simplifications opposed to it, it comes with quite a shock of bathos to realise that anybody let alone a man like Mr. Wells, supposes that it all depends on some detail about the site of a garden in Mesopotamia, like that identified by General Gordon.
It is hard to find any parallel to such an incongruity;
for there is no real similarity between our muddled mortal
affairs and events that were divine if they were mysterious,
and scriptures that are sacred even if they are symbolical.
But some shadow of a comparison could be made out of the modern myths. I mean the sort of myths that men like Mr. Wells generally do believe in; such as the Myth of Magna Carta or the Myth of the Mayflower. Now many historians will maintain that Magna Carta was really nothing to speak of; that it was largely a piece of feudal privilege. But suppose one of the historians who holds this view began to argue with us excitedly about the fabulous nature of our ordinary fancy picture of Magna Carta. Suppose he produced maps and documents to prove that Magna Carta was not signed at Runnymede, but somewhere else; as I believe some scholars do maintain. Suppose he criticised the false heraldry and fancy-dress costumes of the ordinary sort of waxwork historical picture of the event. We should think he was rather unduly excited about a detail of mediaeval history. But with what a shock of astonishment should we realise at last that the man actually thought that all modern attempts at democracy must be abandoned, that all representative government must be wrong, that all Parliaments would have to be dissolved and all political rights destroyed, if once it were admitted that King John did not sign that special document in that little island in the Thames! What should we think of him,if he really thought we had no reasons for liking law or liberty,except the authenticity of that beloved royal signature? That is very much how I feel when I find that Mr. Wells really imagines that the luminous and profound philosophy of the Fall only means that Eden was somewhere in Mesopotamia. Now the only explanation of a great man like Mr. Wells having a small prejudice, like this about the snake, is that he does come of a religious tradition that regarded the text of Hebrew Scripture as the only authority and had forgotten all about the great mediaeval metaphysic and the discussion of fundamental ideas. The man who does that is provincial; and there is no harm in saying so even when he is one of the greatest men of letters and a glory to the English name.


You can read the entire book at http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/The_Thing.txt

Being born with immortality doesn't make it a naturally necessary immortality. A man who is born a into a wealthy family but loses his inheritance was not wealthy by natural necessity. On the contrary, by losing that wealth he is stripped down to merely his natural faculties which allow him to beg, having lost the "supernatural" gift of wealth. His nature doesn't change, but his existence is greatly altered.

Likewise with Adam and Eve, who were made of mortal nature and elevated above that natural fate by Grace. Their nature was always potentially mortal, but by losing Grace they sealed their fate as being bound to their inherent nature rather than the gift and promise of God.

Gotta love Chesterton, BTW. Thanks for posting that!

Peace and God bless!

I think Chesterton really has some of the same issues that have been mentioned. A lot hinges on the historicity of the story, and if you take it out of de-emphasize it, I think that calls a lot in to question. The patristic view AFAIK was rather literally historical, and I think for some important reasons.


My interpretation of the text is it says "Adam" and "Eve" were people born in to a state of innocence in the Garden of Eden with an implied state of immortality (though it doesn't say one way or another). When Genesis says this

"The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

It suggests to me they traded in their innate immortal nature by attempting to gain the power only God held, i.e. they can't eat and be immortal too.

If they had an innately mortal nature prior to the Fall, then we can't say we have the same nature that Adam and Eve had. Indeed, what we now call human nature would not be at all the same thing as what Adam and Eve were created as; we would no longer be damaged creatures, but wholly new creatures.

A car engine without motor oil is still fundamentally a car engine, but it will not run properly and will break down. Likewise, a human nature without Grace is still fundamentally human, but will now work with difficulty and break down. Both are changed by the alteration, but not due to any change in natures. It is the car engine's nature to break down through wear and tear without oil, and it is human nature to break down without Grace. This is in keeping with the writings of the Fathers, especially St. Athanasius.

As for Chesterton, he's not at all saying that the event is merely an allegory or anything untrue, but rather pointing out that the Truth of the matter is untouched by questions of historicity. The Fathers were unconcerned with the details of where or when this event occurred, and would be unphased by historical evidence that shook their preconceived notions. Worrying about such details actually betrays a lack of trust in the value of the story as it is told, IMO.

Peace and God bless!