Chapter 2 — The Human Fall

What went wrong in Eden, why it matters, and what the broken inheritance keeps doing through history.

The Wound That Will Not Close

Every serious account of human life eventually runs into the same problem. Whatever else we are — clever, affectionate, capable of beauty — we are also reliably capable of harm, and the harm is not random. It comes from inside us, often most fluently when we are at our most gifted. William Haines opens his treatment of the Fall not in the garden but in the daily newspaper, because that is where the doctrine is verified hour by hour. The puzzle is not whether evil exists; the puzzle is why the same species that builds hospitals also builds death camps, and why both projects can be undertaken by sober, intelligent, well-spoken people.

The twentieth century, on William's reading, is the cleanest empirical case ever assembled for the doctrine of original sin. The same generations that mapped the human genome and put a man on the moon also produced the trenches of the Somme, the gulags, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda. The unprecedented ingenuity and the unprecedented brutality were not two separate stories, one cheerful and one grim; they were a single story, and they ran on the same machinery. The aeroplane that carried passengers also carried bombs. The chemistry that fed the world also gassed it. The radio that broadcast symphonies also broadcast propaganda. Whatever was wrong with us scaled exactly as fast as our cleverness did, which is why the problem of evil could not be quietly retired by progress; it grew up with progress, step for step.

That observation sets the agenda for the chapter. If evil were merely ignorance, then education would dissolve it. If it were merely poverty, then prosperity would dissolve it. If it were merely bad institutions, then a clever constitution would dissolve it. None of these has worked, and not because they were not tried hard enough. The wound is older and deeper than any of these remedies.

The Easier Road

Part of what makes the wound persistent is that, in any given moment, the wrong choice is usually the cheaper one. William is candid about this. He does not pretend that goodness is naturally attractive and evil naturally repulsive, the way a children's story might tell it. The truth, as he describes it, is closer to the opposite: evil is usually the path of least resistance, and goodness usually costs something.

If I were to ask you, what do you think is easier to do: what is right or what is wrong?... Speaking for myself, it is far easier to be selfish because often there's instant gratification in selfish actions. To pursue goodness often takes more effort and sometimes self-denial. The way of evil is often the way of instant gratification, which is why many people, especially the younger generation, tend to be drawn in that direction, not knowing the long-term results or consequences... Just a few days ago, we saw the tragic end of Gaddafi. For many people, it wasn't a tragedy, but I'm sure in the last moments of his life, just before he was killed, he must have concluded that all his power, fame, and riches were worthless... It reminds me of the statement of Jesus: for what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? (from The Human Fall)

Two things are doing work in that passage. The first is honesty about the structure of temptation. Selfishness is not chosen because it is ugly; it is chosen because it pays out immediately, and the bill does not arrive until later. A young person is not drawn to a self-destructive path because he has weighed the evidence and concluded that ruin is desirable. He is drawn because the early instalments feel good, and the long-term results are not yet visible. The trap is not that evil is attractive; the trap is that its costs are deferred.

The second thing in the passage is the figure of Gaddafi, used not as a political comment but as a parable. Here was a man who had taken the bargain to its logical conclusion — power, fame, riches, all secured by whatever means were necessary — and in the final moments the bargain disclosed what it had always been. Everything he had spent his life acquiring turned out to be unable to keep him company at the end. William reaches for the words of Jesus deliberately: what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? The line is not rhetoric. It is the accounting principle that the universe runs on, hidden from us for most of our lives by the slowness with which the receipts come in.

This is why, in William's account, the Fall is not an embarrassing relic of pre-modern thought to be quietly discarded. It is the only doctrine that makes sense of the daily evidence. We are not neutral beings making free choices on a level playing field. We are tilted. The slope of our nature runs slightly downhill toward the easier and the more selfish, and it takes constant effort, often painful effort, to walk uphill against it. Any honest spiritual life begins with the recognition of that tilt.

What Actually Happened in the Garden

Having established the symptom — a humanity tilted toward the wrong road, and a history that bears the bruises — William turns in the second lecture to the cause. Here he is careful, because the question is one on which a great deal of Christian thought has been content to remain vague. Many readers of Genesis, he notes, treat the story of Eden as an old picture meaning something modern: a metaphor for disobedience in general, a fable about pride, a poetic way of saying that human beings have always fallen short of their ideals. On that reading, the specifics of the story — the garden, the tree, the serpent, the fruit — are decoration, and what matters is only the moral.

William does not deny that disobedience was involved. But he insists that something more concrete took place, something whose effects are still being inherited, biologically and spiritually, by every child born into the world.

A lot of people who have heard this story or read it may take it at face value, thinking it was the literal eating of a fruit or, at the very most, perhaps just an act of disobedience. Irrespective of what the act was, simple disobedience was the problem. Of course, that's true, but we also see that there was an actual act which severed our relationship with God and resulted in our present-day people being born with original sin. This kind of situation leaves many unanswered questions, such as why it was possible for Adam and Eve to deviate from God. Did God know that they would deviate? If so, why did He allow it to happen? (from Human Fall Part 2)

The first move in that passage is to refuse two easy readings at once. The fundamentalist reading, in which the act is the chewing of a piece of fruit, is too small; the modernist reading, in which the act is only a symbol of disobedience in general, is too vague. Something happened that severed the relationship between God and humanity, and that something is still being transmitted. The original sin is not a guilt imputed by legal fiction; it is a real condition inherited at birth.

The second move is to refuse to silence the obvious questions. If God is good, why was deviation possible at all? If God is omniscient, did He foresee it? And if He foresaw it, why did He not prevent it? William does not pretend these questions away. He names them, and the rest of the chapter — and indeed much of the rest of the lecture series — is given over to answering them.

The Growth Period and the Logic of Love

The answer that William develops turns on a feature of God's design that the standard accounts overlook. Adam and Eve were not created complete. They were created at the beginning of a growth period, a stretch of time in which they were meant to mature into the full stature for which they were intended. During that growth period, the commandment not to eat of the tree functioned as a protective fence: a temporary boundary suited to immature beings, to be outgrown once they had grown into the sort of people who would no longer need it.

But here the structure of God's gift to them becomes the structure of their vulnerability. The Creator did not want creatures who obeyed Him because they had no other option; He wanted creatures who would freely love Him. Freely. And freedom of that kind requires a real possibility of refusal. Within the growth period — when they were still immature, when the commandment was still in force, and when their capacity to love was already awakening — there was a window in which love itself could be misdirected, and the commandment, being only a verbal instruction, could not by itself override the pull of misdirected love. This is what William means when he says that the Fall happened during the growth period because love is stronger than commandment. A commandment can hold a child; it cannot hold a heart that has begun to want something else.

That is the tragedy of Eden, properly stated. It was not a piece of legal naughtiness, nor a metaphorical lapse, nor an inscrutable cosmic accident. It was a real act of misdirected love, performed by beings who were not yet mature enough to bear the freedom they had been given, against a commandment whose strength was no match for the strength of love gone wrong. The relationship with God was severed at the root, and the wound has been transmitted from parent to child ever since.

The Inheritance We Did Not Choose

This brings us back to where the chapter began. The reason the twentieth century looked the way it did — the reason any century looks the way it does — is that the species walking through it is carrying an injury that none of its members signed up for. The cleverness is real; the affection is real; the capacity for beauty is real. So is the tilt. So is the deferred bill on every selfish choice. So is the way that every new power we acquire amplifies both halves of us at once.

Naming the Fall is not, in William's hands, an exercise in pessimism. It is the first honest step toward repair. A doctor who refuses to name a disease cannot treat it. A culture that refuses to name its wound will keep building larger and cleverer versions of the same harms, and will keep being surprised by the result. The remainder of the Principle — the long story of providence, restoration, and the work of the Messiah — is unintelligible without this chapter, because it is the chapter that explains why any of that work was necessary in the first place.

The Fall is not the end of the story. But it is the beginning of the only story that takes the human situation seriously.