"Evil Apple" "Mălum Mālum"

We bit the apple, but the bite mauled us.

Fallenness in a Darwinian World?

St. Augustine

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

(Wikipedia)

The painting above dates to 1480 and is said to depict St. Augustine at prayer, though his eyes are open. They are, however, directed upward, as though contemplating spiritual realities. This saint, however, also observed earthly realities, such as the radical evil of human beings, which he thought due to the enslavement of the human will by our sinful nature, which he argued was biologically inherited from Adam and Eve, who had fallen from innocence into evil by their violation of God's command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

My cyberfriend Bill Vallicella has been blogging on human evil, as I noted in a recent blog entry of my own -- "Fallenness as the Human Condition" -- on an article about "original sin" in the journal First Things:

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

I emailed Bill to let him know of my implicit 'hat tip' to him, and in noting an intriguing argument presented in the First Things article, I posed a query:

I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .

Bill has since responded to my query with another blog post, titled "Original Sin in a Darwinian World." I cannot do justice to his argument by a summary, so I urge interested readers to go directly to his own post, but I can indicate some of his argument as it relates to my query.

Bill rejects Augustine's view that guilt is inherited, so he absolves us of any guilt due to inheritance, what he calls "originated original sin" (following Kant), basing his view on our moral intuition that we are only morally culpable for actions or inactions over which we have control, i.e., libertarian freedom. In place of Augustine's view, Bill offers what he calls "originating original sin" (again following Kant), by which he means that the fact of our evil actions or inactions can be understood as due to our fallenness -- and Bill cites Kant explicitly on this point -- "as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." This distinction is presented in more detail in Bill's post on Kant's distinction "between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum)."

Bill also rejects a literal reading of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, for he takes seriously the evidence for evolution. Hence his response to my query radically reinterprets the meaning of the Biblical account, and he follows Kant in this:

Man enjoys dual citzenship. As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter. In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions. But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free. Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'

Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent. It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited: there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is not inherited] is true. But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time. It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.

How is the predisposition imputable? It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice. And so there is originating original sin. Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is imputable] is true.

If I understand Bill, then our fallenness, which follows from original sin, is to be understood as a state into which we have fallen due to an originating original sin that each one of us commits by acting (or 'inacting') wrongly at some first time in our lives, an action (or inaction) over which we had free control.

If I have understood Bill correctly, this seems to leave open a question that still requires an answer: Why do we, in our original innocence and freedom, choose evil? Admittedly, the same question can also be posed about the traditional story of Adam and Eve.

Fallenness as the Human Condition?

Fallenness?

(First Things)

A couple of days ago in a comment on the common Muslim dismissal of Christian "inconsistency" -- namely, the charge that Christians are inconsistent in granting legitimacy to a secular sphere when they ought to realize that God is ruler over all -- I wrote the following in response to a point that I recalled in the writings of Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

Yes, I recall his criticism of Christian 'dualism' -- as I think he called it -- echoing the typically Muslim critique of Christianity's 'inconsistency' in distinguishing between the sacred and the secular as two legitimate spheres.

In my opinion, the Muslim critique radically underestimates what Christians call human fallenness. Integralist visions always do underestimate our human capacity for evil and attempt to construct an ideal society subsumed under one big idea. The result is always Hell on Earth.

I suppose there's much more that should be said about this, but I will simply cite a bit from other thinkers who take 'fallenness' seriously, though they use the expression "original sin." Edward T. Oakes, in a November 1998 article for First Things, "Original Sin: A Disputation," accepts that the critics of original sin have a point in their criticism of the negative consequences that at times result from a belief in original sin, but then argues that this very harm is evidence of original sin's validity and that worse harm results from a commitment to what is called "progressivism":

It might sound intolerably paradoxical to say this, but it is precisely the very harm that sometimes comes from the doctrine of original sin that proves its validity. This is a point made time and again by Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish emigré intellectual now at the University of Chicago, author of a three-volume history of Marxist thought and a man who therefore knows something of the harm visited upon the human community by doctrines of progressivism. In his recent book of essays, Modernity on Endless Trial, he shrewdly notes how this third objection to original sin can be turned into a supporting argument . . . .

The "harm" referred that results from belief in original sin varies from a morbid obsession with one's individual guilt to a fatalistic acceptance of injustice in society, and Oakes goes on to cite Kolakowski's concession on this point, along with his observation that the denial of fallenness has even worse results:

The possible disastrous effects of the concept of original sin on our psychological condition and on our cultural life are undeniable [because of its use to keep people “in their place” and not alter unjust social structures]; and so are the disastrous effects of the opposing doctrine, with its implication that our perfectibility is limitless, and that our predictions of ultimate synthesis or total reconciliation can be realized. However, the fact that both affirmation and rejection of the concept of original sin have emerged as powerful destructive forces in our history is one of many that testify in favor of the reality of original sin. In other words, we face a peculiar situation in which the disastrous consequences of assenting to either of two incompatible theories confirm one of them and testify against its rival.

I take it that Kolakowski means that if a belief in fallenness has such consequences as a morbid obsession with personal guilt or a fatalistic acceptance of social injustice, such improper reactions are only to be expected of fallen creatures, but that the consequences of affirming human perfectability are even worse because such an affirmation raises the standard of expectations -- both individual and social -- far beyond what human beings are capable of and results in such utopian monstrosities as the Communist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which tried to scale the heights of heaven upon a mountain of corpses. In my opinion, Islamist integralism leads to the same result.

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

The Fall Had Its Price . . .

Apple Juice

(Image from Bar Code Revolution)

I stumbled across this form of artistic license just this morning by way of LinkedIn, which indirectly linked me to an article from two years ago by Cliff Kuang for Fast Company titled "In Japan, Even the Barcodes Are Well Designed" (November 9, 2009), which in turn linked to a gallery of aesthetically rendered barcode images, from which I've borrowed the 'apple' above.

As we see, Eve ought to have checked the price before she plucked that cherry-red, virginal 'apple', for as Milton shows in a subtle bait-and-switch, the price is too high for an ambiguous fruit becoming a fuzzy peach that "downy smiled" -- or, as I re-imagine, turning to the more acrid juice of Apfesinensaft through that original apple's sin-sap.

Although . . . we might recall a poem that I wrote nearly three years ago in which that bite into the apple results mostly in a sour wine:

Paradise Gainsaid

There is a garden in thy grace
Where trees of lively knowledge grow,
An earthy paradise to face
The harvest fruits of all our woe.
Here apples ferment, by and by,
Till tears of Apfelwein we cry,

If cry we must, when eyes disclose
That occidental sun aglow
Decline toward that which never shows
Its face though faced with that flambeaux.
Yet face it must we, by the bye,
Till tears of Apfelwein we cry.

Yet in this earthy garden still,
How statue-like I see thee stand
To counter time that comes to kill
All thou attempt with eye or hand,
From sacred apples' last good-bye
Till tears of Apfelwein we cry.

You thus see how things never turn out quite as they seem, for "Þe forme to þe fynisment foldez ful selden -- or as I once punned in a similar vein, "Wir bringen alles zusammen . . . um," which sounds initially as though it would mean "We bring everything together" but ends up meaning "We kill everything together."

Thus we find bitter truth in the reminder that "The beginning and the end accord hardly ever . . ."

John Milton's Eve: "She Stoops to Conquer"

Golden Eagle

"The Bird of Jove"

(Image from Thundafunda)

The title of Oliver Goldsmith's 18th-century drama could well fit Milton's Eve, albeit ironically, for she unknowingly 'stoops' in her attempt to 'conquer' heaven through a deceptively hopeful feeding on forbidden fruit. I've been looking into the effect of that Fall upon language, as readers have certainly noticed. The theme of unfallen and fallen language in Milton's thought is contested, however (as I've noted), but I think that there's something to it.

Milton's prelapsarian Adam appears to have a special linguistic gift for naming, as we see in the scene where he is made lord over the earth and given permission by God to name the animals:

. . . all the Earth
To thee and to thy Race I give; as Lords
Possess it, and all things that therein live, [ 340 ]
Or live in Sea, or Aire, Beast, Fish, and Fowle.
In signe whereof each Bird and Beast behold
After thir kindes; I bring them to receave
From thee thir Names, and pay thee fealtie
With low subjection; understand the same [ 345 ]
Of Fish within thir watry residence,
Not hither summon'd, since they cannot change
Thir Element to draw the thinner Aire.
As thus he spake, each Bird and Beast behold
Approaching two and two, These cowring low [ 350 ]
With blandishment, each Bird stoop'd on his wing.
I nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood
Thir Nature, with such knowledg God endu'd
My sudden apprehension: (PL 8.338-354)

Walter H. Beale describes this linguistically gifted Adam "as the prelapsarian Adam, in command of a not yet fallen language" (Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, page 27). One might readily infer this unfallen character of prelapsarian language from Milton's lines, given the close connection between understanding each animal's nature and naming each one as it passes, based on an intuitive knowledge guaranteed by God.

The animals, in turn, recognize Adam's lordship over creation, for they cower as though before royalty -- the birds even "stoop" on their wing. Alastair Fowler notes an intriguing point here, namely, that the word "stoop'd" has two possible meanings:

caused to bow down; brought to the ground (OED II 7); but with a secondary allusion to the intrans. sense, common of birds of prey: 'descend swiftly upon, swoop down on' (OED I 6) -- foreshadowing postlapsarian carnivorousness. See XI 182-90nn. (Alastair Fowler, ed., John Milton: Paradise Lost, London: Longman, 1971)

In the prelapsarian passage above from Paradise Lost, Milton intends the meaning of "caused to bow down." The postlapsarian passage noted by Fowler (XI 182-90nn), however, has the meaning "swoop down on," and as we also see, this postlapsarian passage is one of those treated in yesterday's blog entry, the one in which Eve's wish to remain in the Garden of Eden is cruelly thwarted:

So spake, so wish'd much-humbl'd Eve, but Fate
Subscrib'd not; Nature first gave Signs, imprest
On Bird, Beast, Aire, Aire suddenly eclips'd
After short blush of Morn; nigh in her sight
The Bird of Jove, stoopt from his aerie tour, [ 185 ]
Two Birds of gayest plume before him drove:
Down from a Hill the Beast that reigns in Woods,
First hunter then, pursu'd a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the Forrest, Hart and Hinde;
Direct to th' Eastern Gate was bent thir flight. (PL 11.181-190 ]

What I want to call attention to first is that "stoop" has acquired an ambiguity in postlapsarian conditions that it did not yet have in the prelapsarian world. The new meaning reflects the fallen world's deadliness. Hence the "signe" (8.342) of Adam's lordship in the first meaning of "stoop" has become one of the "Signs" (11.182) of Adam's subjection to Death in the second meaning of "stoop," as the repetition of "Aire, Beast, . . . and Fowle" (8.341) inherent in "Bird, Beast, Aire" (11.183) reinforces.

This acquired polysemy of language offers not just material for an ironic pun; the slippage of signification in a fallen world turns deadly serious as evidenced in the word "stoop" acquiring a secondary, evil meaning, and this is perhaps what is meant by the so-called 'fall' of language.

Eve's Confusion of Tongues in Paradise Lost

Substitution-Permutation Network

Confusion and Diffusion

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm still investigating Eve's 'confusion of tongues' in Paradise Lost, initially broached in yesterday's post, for I think there might be something of minor interest that I can say about Milton's depiction of Eve's Fall.

In a poem of 1645, "At a Solemn Musick," Milton sings of heavenly choirs above harmonized by earthly choirs below, prior to the Fall:

That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportion'd sin
Jarr'd against natures chime, and with harsh din [ 20 ]
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good. ("ASM" 17-24)

Would the sin-occasioned "harsh din" limit itself to the notes alone . . . or overpower the 'lyrics' as well? At first blush, we might hazard that words elude the Fall's corruption, for Milton writes in The Art of Logic:

But languages, both the first one which Adam spoke in Eden, and those varied ones also possibly derived from the first, which the builders of the tower of Babel suddenly received, are without doubt divinely given. ("The Art of Logic," in Richard Arnold, Logic of the Fall: Right Reason and [Im]pure Reason in Milton's Paradise Lost, Peter Lang, 2006, page 21)

An optimistic reading of Milton's words here, however, is undercut by the words of Sin personified spoken to an equally personified Death in Book 10 of Paradise Lost:

To whom th' incestuous Mother thus repli'd.
Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flours
Feed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowle,
No homely morsels, and whatever thing [ 605 ]
The Sithe of Time mowes down, devour unspar'd,
Till I in Man residing through the Race,
His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect,
And season him thy last and sweetest prey. (PL 10.602-609)

Note Sin's explicit promise to infect "words," implying that the 'lyrics' mentioned above also suffer corruption. Thus Milton's further words in The Art of Logic:

But as to those words that are derived or composite, either their origins are to be sought in other languages ancient and now obsolete, or by their own antiquity and the usually corrupt pronunciation of the lower classes are so changed, and by the habit of writing them falsely are so obliterated as it were that a true notation of words very seldom may be had. ("The Art of Logic," in Richard Arnold, Logic of the Fall: Right Reason and [Im]pure Reason in Milton's Paradise Lost, Peter Lang, 2006, page 21)

Milton reveals his hierarchy of class distinctions, but from the perspective of God, fallen human beings are all from the "lower classes," and what goes for composite words goes as well for composite grammar:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)

Yesterday, with respect to these lines, I stated:

As previously noted, the use of the participle "eating" mimics the use in Greek of the nominative participle after verbs of knowing. The irony here is that Eve does not know that she is eating death . . . or that death is eating her.

We see in process a fall of language here as Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, a confusion of tongues prefiguring the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, a confusion suggested by Milton in mixing Greek with English.

This 'confusion' of tongues receives emphasis in Book 12, where the Archangel Michael prophesies to a fallen Adam of fallen humanity's attempt to construct the Tower of Babel and the ensuing, large-scale linguistic "confusion" (PL 12.62) inflicted upon humanity:

But God who oft descends to visit men
Unseen, and through thir habitations walks
To mark thir doings, them beholding soon, [ 50 ]
Comes down to see thir Citie, ere the Tower
Obstruct Heav'n Towrs, and in derision sets
Upon thir Tongues a various Spirit to rase
Quite out thir Native Language, and instead
To sow a jangling noise of words unknown (PL 12.48-55)

Verse 44 of Book 12 makes explicit that these fallen human beings are intent upon building the Tower of Babel to reach up to heaven, which recalls Eve's desire to attain divinity through her own illegitimate efforts. Upon hearing of mankind's wicked ways, Adam criticizes his descendents but is reminded by the Archangel Michael that original sin is to blame:

Since thy original lapse, true Libertie
Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells
Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being: [ 85 ]
Reason in man obscur'd, or not obeyd (PL 12.83-86)

Milton may well believe that "[t]he end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents" and "that language is . . . the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known," as he writes in his treatise Of Education, yet his very words denote that something is to be repaired, and an effort must be strenuously made for education to be "recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages." An ultimate recovery might have been Milton's educational attempt in his epic Paradise Lost, for he must recover Edenic language to present to his readers the discourse of the prelapsarian couple, but the poem is centrally about loss, not recovery, and Milton would have to acknowledge that for the vast majority of mankind (i.e., perhaps everyone but Milton himself), learning has not repaired that ruin of our first parents, and that ruin would include the confusion of language.

Milton laments in Of Education that so much of what passes for the learning of classical languages produces little more than educated fools whose linguistic efforts are a "wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms," actual instances of a confusion of tongues that results from fusing languages divided at Babel. The confusion of tongues at Babel is a large-scale confusion, one in which human language in its totality is confused. The plethora of languages occasions more confusion, as one language influences another, 'barbarizing' it in the process. Perhaps this is what Milton is showing in Eve's Fall:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)

As already noted in the discussion of the Greek nominative participle following verbs of knowing, Greek grammar influences the English used here to describe Eve's Fall, and this is a 'barbarism' possible only after Babel's confusion of tongues, but it is retrojected upon Eve's act of eating, such that Eve's Fall prefigures Babel through a proleptic confusion of languages, specifically, Greek and English. In both Book 12's confusion of tongues and Book 9's confusion of grammars, therefore, Milton presents the effects of the Fall upon language -- the mixing properly called "con-fusion."

I'm afraid that I've been far from clear myself on this matter, but that's due to the ruin of our first parents and therefore not entirely my own fault . . .

Milton's Prelapsarian Seasons?

The Four Seasons

(Image from Wikipedia)

In Book 5 of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael descends from heaven to warn Adam and Eve to beware of the fallen angel Satan, who intends to do them evil if he can. As Raphael initially approaches the first couple's bower, Adam spies him coming and calls out to Eve to prepare for an arriving guest a table of fruits for noontime refreshment. We are told of Eve's response to Adam's words:

To whom thus Eve. Adam, earths hallowd mould,
Of God inspir'd, small store will serve, where store,
All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk;
Save what by frugal storing firmness gains
To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes . . . . (PL 5.321-325)

Eve replies by reminding Adam that everything needed for the midday meal is amply supplied, for the ripened fruits of all seasons hangs ripe on stalks, except for what is improved by plucking and storing. Later in the same book, the narrator describes Eve's table, laden with fruits:

. . . Rais'd of grassie terf
Thir Table was, and mossie seats had round,
And on her ample Square from side to side
All Autumn pil'd, though Spring and Autumn here
Danc'd hand in hand. (PL 5.391-395)

Here, we learn that autumn's fruits were piled upon the table. But what 'seasons' were being referred to earlier by Eve, and what 'spring' and 'autumn' are here being referred to by the narrator, for the earth had no actual seasons until Book 10, where God commands the angels to alter creation so as to produce the four seasons as part of the punishment for the original sin of Adam and Eve:

Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse
The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the Suns Axle; they with labour push'd
Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun
Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode
Like distant breadth to Taurus with the Seav'n
Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins
Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amaine
By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales,
As deep as Capricorne, to bring in change
Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring
Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours,
Equal in Days and Nights . . . . (PL 10.668-680)

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, December 2008]

Only now does the shifted celestial pole -- or perhaps the sun's altered orbit -- "bring in change / Of Seasons to each Clime" through the course of the year, so what is meant by the prelapsarian references to seasons? The narrator, being of postlapsarian times, could be speaking figuratively, having greater knowledge of such things, but how would Eve know anything of seasons?

Perhaps I'll look further into this point.

Augustine: Curiosity in the Catalog of Vices...

Aristotle, Copy of Lysippos

Louvre Museum

"All men by nature desire to know."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Let us look again today into Hans Blumenberg's chapter "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices" (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age), in which Blumenberg discusses St. Augustine's classification of "curiositas" as a vice.

I want to reflect on a couple of paragraphs in which Blumenberg notes that Augustine criticizes that cupidity (cupiditas) of vain desire in the appetite of our insatiable curiosity (curiositas) to seek knowledge beyond our proper limits, i.e., beyond either utility (utilitas) or self-knowledge:

When we return . . . to the central passage, book 10, chapter 35 of the Confessions, some light is shed on the catalog of the levels of curiositas: After amusment as a mutilated corpse, theatrical shows are mentioned, and from here a transition to investigation of nature and to the magical arts is found. The riddles of nature, to which the mere desire to know applies itself, are characterized as objects that lie praeter nos [beyond us], in the double sense that neither are they seen from the point of view of their utilitas nor do they relate to man's self-knowledge. Investigation of the things that nature does not make openly accessible to man is of no use to him. This proposition involves the teleological assumption, familiar from Cicero, that the degree of a thing's theoretical accessibility indicates its 'natural' relevance for man. When he goes beyond this region of what lies open to him, he obeys the cognitive appetite that is justified by no other interest.

The appeal to nature proves itself here, as so often, to be an ambiguous type of argumentation, whose self-contradiction Augustine seeks to avoid by not attributing a natural status to man's inherent cognitive appetite but instead interpreting that appetite -- as always where cupiditas is applied -- as a consequence of the condition of man having fallen away from his original nature as a result of his original sin. The first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics has become, through the omission of "by nature," a description of man's status defectus [failed, defective condition]. On this assumption, confirmation by the "predilection for sense experience" can no longer be a "sign" from which the vindication of the disinterested purity of the theoretical attitude "independent of need" can be obtained. The grasp at the 'tree of knowledge' caused the unregulated cognitive appetite to degenerate into the vana cura [futile care] of a godless state of being fallen into the power of the world. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 314)

The famous first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics states:

All men by nature desire to know. (Aristotle, Metaphysics (350 B.C.), translated by W. D. Ross)

Blumenberg's point is that Augustine, despite his appeal to the teleological point about not going beyond what nature has laid open to our senses, cannot consistently accept even Aristotle's assumption, grounded in nature, of our cognitive right to any knowledge, for our original nature has been distorted, as has been nature itself.

Augustine may rely upon Aristotle to critique our 'busybody' tendency to inquire into nature's riddles, a realm beyond that which is teleologically fit for us to know, but Augustine's views on the double aspect of fallenness -- mankind and the world both being fallen -- entail that the teleological fitness of mankind to the world no longer holds since sin has entered the world through Adam and Eve and ruined God's creation.

For Augustine, therefore -- if he were to be consistent -- curiosity about the cosmos would inevitably lead reason into the coils of error through any attempt whatsoever to study nature, given its deceptive, quasi-Gnostic appearance, let alone a foolhardy attempt to investigate the even more recondite riddles of nature.

Let's return to this tomorrow...

"Anecdote of the Jarred Interpretation"

'Supernatural' Halo

William Marrion Branham

(Image from Wikipedia)

Looking around the internet for more Christian sources portraying Adam as accepting the forbidden fruit from Eve in an act of heroic self-sacrifice, I came upon these words in an online transcription of a sermon by William Marrion Branham (1909-1965) titled "Polygamy":

Adam was a type of Christ. But whereas Adam's self-sacrifice brought DEATH upon all creation, Christ's sacrifice brought LIFE.

Adam did NOT sin. 'He that is born of God cannot sin' (I John 3:9). Taking Eve unto himself, he took her responsibility and caused the whole world to come under sin's curse -- death when he crossed the time-line and the Life-line to redeem his wife. How could Adam fall when he was in God's image?

Eve sinned when she broke God's covenant of works by UNBELIEF in His Word. Adam did NOT sin (or disbelieve the Word) and broke the Covenant by faith. He knew He was a Son of God and could no more be lost than God could be lost, and therefore God MUST redeem Him. If he joined Eve in time, God would redeem her with him. By the marriage union, the two were one flesh. However Adam took the 'permissive', and not the perfect will of God.

Interesting. It appears that Adam "took dominion everywhere," even in the "slovenly wilderness" outside Eden! Now, I'm not in any way suggesting that this version of the Fall is anywhere close to orthodox Christian interpretation. In fact, William Branham seems rather far even from mainstream pentecostalism, of which his 'church' is a branch. From my cursory reading on this website and others, Branham seems to have claimed to be the Prophet Elijah returning at the end times. He also rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, arguing for a sort of Modalism. Nevertheless, he seems to have been well-known in pentecostal circles in the 1940s and 1950s, especially for his role in the faith-healing movement.

Strictly speaking, the excerpt above is taken from what is said to be one of the "Teaching Sermons based on the Expositions of William Branham," so I don't know that it's an exact transcription of Branham's actual words, but from my cruising around the Branham sea of discourse, the message looks roughly consistent with things said by him elsewhere. I notice that the text of the sermon doesn't mention "love" as Adam's motivation, but in other transcriptions of Branham's words, Adam's love for Eve is given as the motive:

[W]hen Adam saw Eve had sinned and had done wrong, Adam walked right out not deceived but with both eyes open. But he so loved Eve that he took her place in death with her and walked out with her. ("God Making His Promise," Paragraph E-64 (December 9, 1956))

Similarly, in another sermon, Branham states that "Adam so loved Eve that he went out with her" from God's presence ("God's Servant Job," Paragraph E-69 (February 23, 1955)).

I'm not sure that this line of research is taking me close to anything that might become an article on Milton and his influence, but there may be subterranean connections to a stream that fed Milton's thinking despite the fact that Milton insisted that Adam's love in choosing Eve was a form of idolatry, for in Milton's reading, Adam put love of Eve above love of God.

From a Miltonian perspective, Branham's understanding is as limited as Adam's and falls into the same idolatry.