The great Anglican bishop and theologian J.C. Ryle (1816-1900) astutely observed that most bad preaching, bad teaching, bad theology, and actual heresy may be traced to the failure of their authors to grasp the nature and effects of the Fall.
In the two millennia since the revelation of Christian truth by His Written Word (the Bible) combined with HIs Spoken Word (nature or creation), some of the best human minds, endued with high measures of His common and sanctifying grace, have struggled to trace, in their proper order and relations, the precise causes of the Fall.
One common error has been the tendency of commentators to attribute a fully corrupted and sinful nature to Adam before he disobediently decided or willed to partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But to attribute to man a sinful nature that supposedly caused his fallen and corrupted and sinful nature is, of course, circular and fallacious reasoning. It is an instance of the question-begging fallacy, as logicians would say.
The crux of the matter is Adam's willing. This is so because the ruling faculty of created man is his volition or will. And it is, specifically, the direction or orientation of his will — either toward God or toward himself — that determines the life course of a man and his use or abuse of all of his other faculties, including reason, sentiment or emotions, memory, the five senses, and imagination.
The Fall occurred precisely when Adam, by an act of his own will, determined to disobey God. It happened before his mouth touched the fruit. And God had forewarned and pre-announced the sentence for such disobedience — death, both spiritual and physical (Gen. 2:17). And after Adam partook of the fruit, the interrogation by the Lord of our original parents came (Gen. 3: 9-13), and then their expulsion from Paradise, to prevent their infinitely compounding their sin by partaking of the tree of life (Gen. 3: 23-24).
So we ask: When, before Adam's mouth touched the fruit, did Adam's will turn away from God and toward himself? And, far more importantly, what were the deeper causes — anthropological and metaphysical -- of that turning away from God by Adam?
Our concern here is to identify, as it were, the pre-sin-nature cause(s) of man's fall from the spiritual-moral state of original created innocence, where man could chose to sin or not to sin, into the spiritual-moral state of sin, where man, now in his damaged nature, sins continuously in thought, word, and deed. This latter state or condition descended on all humanity as of Adam's first sinful decision, and that condition would be inherited by all descendants of Adam, all of humanity, through his seed. So every person, from conception, is not able to not sin (non posse non peccare).
And man in the fallen state of sin is dead in trespasses and therefore, by definition, cannot — as no dead man can — help or save himself, but instead can be saved only by God's choosing (and not man's) and solely by His regenerative power. And so are all the elect and all the reprobated predetermined and foreknown by the Lord in their personal existences and ultimate individual destinies before the beginning of the world.
The deep and mysterious causes by which fallen and corrupted sinful human nature is passed on or inherited down through generations is a subject for another day. But in treating our present subject, the deeper causes of the Fall, we can consider how Adam's sinful decision, while committed by a single person in a discrete instance, was sin of a type that any created person would, by his very nature, commit. And this is where we do well to bring in two of the greatest Christian thinkers who have expounded on the subject, the great French Reformer theologian John Calvin (1509-1564) and the great German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).
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John Calvin's discussion of the original and ultimate causes of man's Fall occurs within the general context of his brilliant and systematic and definitive and irrefutable Augustinian discussion of the Biblical-Scriptural doctrines of election and reprobation.
Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (Ch. 23, Section 8), says:
"The first man fell because the Lord deemed it meet that he should: why He deemed it meet, we know not. It is certain, however, that it was just, because He saw that His own glory would thereby be displayed. When you hear the glory of God mentioned, understand that His justice is included, for that which deserves praise must be just. Man, therefore, falls, divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault. The Lord had little before declared that all things which He had made were very good (Gen. 1:31). Whence then the depravity of man, which made him revolt from God? Lest it should be supposed that it was from His creation, God expressly approved what proceeded from Himself. Therefore, man's own wickedness corrupted the pure nature which he had received from God, and his ruin brought with it the destruction of all his posterity. Wherefore, let us in the of human nature contemplate the evident cause of condemnation (a cause which comes more closely home to us), rather than inquire in a cause hidden and almost incomprehensible in the predestination of God. Nor let us decline to submit our judgment to the boundless wisdom of God, so far as to confess its insufficiency to comprehend many of his secrets. Ignorance of things which we are not able, or which it is not lawful to know, is learning, while the desire to know them is a species of madness."
So it is in our present corruption, Calvin most aptly reminds us, that we now contemplate the original causes of our Fall and corruption. And in this earthly life, in this veil of tears, we fallen men see through a glass but darkly (1 Cor. 13:12) -- including even the best and most powerful and most noble and most sanctified philosophical and theological minds among us; though, as Calvin's own genius attests, by God's unequal distribution of grace, all minds and hearts are far from being equally perspicacious.
Next, Calvin directs us to dismiss all (necessarily sinful) thought of blaming God for our fallen condition, but directs us rather to look more closely into our own human nature to find the causes of that fall. He then ends Section 8 of Chapter 23 with a philosophical warning, a fundamental and recurring but woefully neglected theme in Scripture, about the limits of the human mind and the wisdom of learned ignorance, a wise and pious warning that echoes the famous prior warnings of Socrates (c.470-399BC) and Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464).
Calvin correctly sensed that the locus of the ultimate cause of the Fall was in man's very nature, a nature which was indeed "very good" (Gen. 1:31) but alas, not perfect. And this is where, in order for the inquiry to proceed, we must turn to that sub-discipline of philosophy known as metaphysics, or the study of being as such. And this is where we must bring in Leibniz, the greatest metaphysician of the modern age and a Christian apologist with intellectual powers without equal (non pareil).
In his Theodicy, Leibniz says: "... it is goodness which prompts God to create with the purpose of communicating Himself; and this same goodness combined with wisdom prompts Him to create the best; a best that includes the whole sequence (of created nature), the effects and the process." Having thus explained the cause of creation in God, Leibniz then turns to the causes of the subsequent Fall of man, agreeing with Calvin in assigning blame to man as well as responsibility for his resultant misery; and in the process, Leibniz keeps going and penetrates deeper than any writer outside Scripture by saying: "... the creature alone is guilty, ... his original limitation or imperfection is the source of his wickedness, ... [and] his evil will is the sole cause of his misery" (emphasis added).
So here, with the phrase "... his original limitation or imperfection is the source of his wickedness", we catch a first glimpse of a deeper, metaphysical speech on the causes of the Fall. Significantly, close after that phrase in the Theodicy, Leibniz says, "... things are endued with that necessity which philosophers and theologians endeavor to avoid." Here Leibniz is lamenting the profoundly unscientific and unphilosophical and untheological sinful unwillingness of heathen thinkers in every age to consider the things of nature in their true light as creation, or as God's spoken Word.
To understand Leibniz' meaning here as it relates to the causes of the Fall, we must turn to his essay titled "A Vindication of God's Justice Reconciled with His Other Perfections and All His Actions." There, in Section 79, Leibniz tackles the problem head-on, saying:
"The true root of the Fall ... lies in the aboriginal imperfection and weakness of the creatures, which is the reason why sin has its place in the best possible series of events ... . As a consequence, sin had to be permitted despite the divine power and wisdom; indeed, this permission could not be refused without prejudice to these perfections."
Now, dear reader, there is much to consider here, in Leibniz' words: and we are now dealing in the realm of metaphysics, the deepest and most complex of all the human sciences. So what is Leibniz saying?
First, we note how Leibniz speaks of the "imperfection and weakness of the creatures" (emphasis added), thereby making clear that it was not a deficiency unique to Adam but was rather a generic propensity of his human nature that led to his first sinful decision, a spiritual watershed for man generally.
More generally, in this passage, Leibniz is saying that God Himself is perfect, and that God, in creating man, did not create God, a perfect being, but instead created a "very good" (Gen. 1:31) but imperfect being. For a part of being a perfect being is being a being that is uncreated (like God) and not created (like man). Made in God's image as the very centerpiece of creation, man, in the state of innocence before the Fall, was a partaker of divine wisdom and divine goodness and divine glory. His faculties, including will, reason, the senses, memory, and imagination, were powers given to man by God that allowed man to be a partaker of God's wisdom and goodness and glory, and to walk in Eden in close and direct communion with God. It was by these God-given powers that man was charged with ruling over all the earth (Gen. 1:26) and naming the animals (Gen. 2:20). And "very good" man, being less than perfect, required a helpmate (Gen.2:18), woman, derived from his own substance (Gen. 2:22-24).
Now Leibniz, being also a pioneering, and indeed, foundational, physicist and mathematician, was ever disposed and ever bent on looking hard into the nature of things. And here we find him, as metaphysician, looking hard into the respective natures of God and man. And in doing so, his comparison of these central things of all existence was inevitable and fruitful.
A Reformed Christian, Leibniz lived and wrote a century and a half after John Calvin, and being very learned and very well-read, would certainly have imbibed the Frenchman's Institutes and been acquainted with its central points. And arguably the most salient teaching of that work was Calvin's moral and metaphysical insight that true wisdom for man can come only from man's coming to know himself by honest and humbling comparison with the one and only true (Triune) God.
By suggestion and by implication, then, Calvin argued, and Leibniz later agreed, that the ancient Greek exhortation to "Know thyself" (gnothi seauton) can be fulfilled only by orthodox Christian faith and by recourse to Christian revelation about the nature of God and man. And from that revelation we find that the great differences between man and God are both moral and metaphysical.
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These two types of being, man and God, creature and Creator, are profoundly different in their ontic natures and yet lovingly connected by the Creator. And certainly, one of the most obvious and salient aspects of man's "aboriginal imperfection and weakness" is man's finitude of both body and spirit, as compared with infinite and omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent God, in His three Persons.
Finite man, in his freedom of will under God's sovereign will, is at liberty by God's predestinating decrees to focus on self instead of on God; and, as we shall see, it was precisely by and on this narrow avenue of mental focus, endemic to man, that man initiated his sinful self-separation from God. Infinite God, in contrast, is able to "focus" on or see completely and through all things, including Himself and all of His creation, all at once, in a manner therefore far beyond finite man's ability to comprehend.
Finite Eve, the weaker vessel, was beguiled by the Serpent, the fallen and evil archangel Satan in disguise, and then finite Adam, because of his natural affections for his specially-created mate and helper, and by his natural or endemic limits of thought and attention and focus, inclined toward joining her in the sinful partaking of the forbidden fruit. And, because of his priority in creation and headship over Eve, and because of his headship over the rest of creation -- excluding the angels, who were created by God as His messengers to man -- all creation fell and was corrupted upon Adam's sinful and disobedient partaking of the fruit, and death entered into the world.
Infinite God created a vast (to man) but ultimately limited creation consisting of finite things.
By a deep mystery far beyond the comprehension of limited or finite man, God created creation ex nihilo, or out of nothing; that is, from no pre-existing materials -- unlike, for example, Plato's demiurge in his creation dialogue Timaeus. The Christian metaphysician Leibniz explains in detail in his Theodicy and elsewhere how created things are necessarily finite and not infinite things.
But created man, because of his very finitude, is not merely limited in his focus and attention and range of vision, both physical and mental, but is also radically limited in his capacity to receive the things of God. This limited receptivity, or limited ability to receive or to take in all manner of good things from a perfectly good and great God, combined with his limited focus, are, again, anthropological-metaphysical conditions that made possible Adam's turning away from God and toward self and the forbidden fruit.
Man before the Fall cannot be justly and accurately charged with sinful pride, since the corruption of pride (or any other corruption) did not yet exist in man. Man can however be "charged" with limited mental and physical vision and focus. But to so charge him would be to sinfully condemn him for possessing a nature that God Himself had declared "very good." Man's original nature was therefore pure or uncorrupted yet susceptible to fall by its finitude, and the Fall occurred by man's free but errant willing.
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Following Leibniz, we agree that the world that God, the only perfect Being, created is the best of all possible worlds. Being perfectly good and perfectly great, God freely chose to create the best of all possible creations. And the world or creation He created consists of necessarily finite or limited things, including finite and limited man at its center. And the ultimate purpose for which God created was for His own glory, and not for the sake of all or of any part of creation, including man. And this last point is one that fallen and self-centered man tends to forget, just as man forgets, as the Westminster Standards remind us, that the first aim of created man is to glorify God. But man after Adam, again by his limited focus, seeing only his origin from proximate parents, becomes forgetful of his first parents and of their direct and divine creation.
Before creation, before the beginning of the world, God fore-decreed or fore-ordained and therefore of necessity fore-knew how all would proceed in creation, from its beginning until eternity-after, when the reprobate are in hell-everlasting separated from the Lord and when the elect are in heaven-everlasting in joyful communion with the Lord.
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In Eden, man's finitude did not lead to sin and Fall so long as man committed no covenant-breaking act of will. But direct violation of the express command of the Lord by Adam led to the Fall into corruption and to man's self-inflicted alienation and estrangement from God.
Infinite and all-knowing and all-good God had given finite and radically ignorant man a command, for man's own good. God told man to refrain from partaking of the fruit, but man was told through the woman by the Father of Lies that he would not die by partaking, but instead would thereby attain God-like knowledge. And of course, God and not man fully fathomed all the causes and effects attending this situation. Also, we are not told in Scripture if Adam and Eve, having had no experience of death before the Fall, possessed anything approaching an accurate conception of death. Instead, we are left with the impression that our first parents were expected to accept on faith that death was something bad and therefore something to be avoided. On the other hand, God-like knowledge is something they must have seen evinced in their direct communion with God, so such knowledge likely seemed to them a positive good, making it therefore a potential object of their desire. So, direct witnessing of divine knowledge and inexperience with death were elements in the lead up to Adam's sinful decision. And here, at this juncture in our analysis of the causes of the Fall, let us review another critical aspect of man's nature as created.
In his Disquisition on Government, the great political philosopher and statesman John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) points out how man was created with an internal psychological constitution such that, as a general rule, he feels more intensely those things that affect him directly than those things that affect him indirectly through others. Adam and Eve possessed this basic internal constitution before the Fall, just as all people have possessed it after the Fall. This structure of human feeling, as Calhoun argues, is essential for human survival and flourishing. Without it, the species could not be perpetuated. Calhoun also explains how exceptions to this general rule, such as a mother sacrificing her own life and well-being for her child, or a man giving his life self-sacrificially for his family and country, do not negate but rather underscore and confirm the general rule; and the evidence of this is how such self-sacrifice strikes all men as extraordinary.
So man in Eden, in his finitude, personified and gathered together in Adam (Romans 5:12), was impelled by thoughts and feelings infinitely less perfect than those of God, thoughts and feelings and passions that would coalesce into sinful decision. So Adam's disobedience was a disobedience universal to all humanity. And, because of man's aboriginal constitutional limitations and weakness, the eventual outcome could hardly have been otherwise. So finitude led to turpitude, and afterward, when the damage to human nature and to creation and to man's relation to God had been done, God alone could, for His elect (Romans 8:28), transform their personal damage during the earthly life by justification and sanctification, and then finally remedy completely their turpitude at the Judgment, as the elect enter the state of glory.
Near the end of his Theodicy, in a striking and brilliant passage, Leibniz says: "...among older writers the fall of Adam was termed felix culpa, a fortunate sin, because it had been expiated with immense benefit by the incarnation of the Son of God: for He gave to the universe something more noble than anything there would otherwise have been amongst created beings." So, without the Fall, there would be no glory for God as Savior and Redeemer. But in this best possible world, as fore-chosen and created by Perfect God, there is.
And so God, having created man, knows all that is to be known about man's good, and about all other things. But because of his finitude and imperfection, man, in Eden before the Fall, was able to mistake what was truly good for himself, and for his helpmate.
As the philosopher Rousseau (1712-1778), following his master Plato (424BC?-347BC?), notes in his Social Contract, all men, including vicious men, want what they consider to be good, but all men do not know what is truly good. Seeing that Eve his helpmate had transgressed, Adam joined her in sin and precipitated thereby the systemic corruption of all of nature, including himself. Had Adam refrained from sinning, after Eve's transgression, no Fall would have occurred at that point. But in the physical presence of Eve, and out of immediate proximity to God, Adam sinned.
Again, in Theodicy, Leibniz illumines deeper truth: "There is always a prevailing reason which prompts the will to its choice. ... The will is never prompted to action save by the representation of the good, which prevails over the opposite representations." So infinite and perfect God, in His willing, adheres always to what is truly good, and indeed, to what is best. But finite and imperfect man, according to the grace God dispenses to the particular man, wills either what is truly good or what merely appears to him good.
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For centuries, before Calvin and Leibniz, Christian theologians had struggled to explain the Fall. Calvin, in the Institutes, in his brilliant and systematic and definitive discussion of the Biblical doctrines of election and reprobation, grapples with the difficult and recondite subject of the ultimate and proximate causes of the Fall.
A century and a half later, Leibniz, influenced by Calvin, Plato and others, introduced metaphysical concepts and categories like finitude and infinitude to explain the Fall. Specifically, Leibniz employed the Platonic insight that evil is privation, or the absence of being, and inferred from that that finitude, being by definition existence that is limited, involves an absence of being or dearth by which moral evil may enter into the created world (but not, significantly, into the infinite God).
By creating a world of finite existents or beings, the Lord, to His glory, could derive or draw evil out of good, and then He could, by further interwoven pre-designing that far-surpasses human understanding, generate a good (the best possible world with its best possible outcomes) out of that evil. Well-versed in Scripture and in the Western philosophical tradition, including the Scholastics, Leibniz supplied the critical metaphysical categories and insights to give definitive explanation, so far perhaps as human capacity allows, into the central proximate cause of the Fall, with the ultimate cause being God's pleasure.
Metaphysical evil is lack of being, and lack of being is the root cause of moral evil. God is pure act, and man is a combination of act and potency or potential. But God, in this world, according to His plan, allows some potency to be thwarted away from healthy and full actualization, as in the Parable of the Sower, where grain seed falls on hard ground.
Calvin and Leibniz agreed that depth and clarity and accuracy about the causes of the Fall, to the extent humanly possible, are essential to undergirding Christian orthodoxy and to combatting heresy. Being pious and faithful men, the overarching object of their theological and philosophical inquiries was to fulfill their duty, using the prodigious and extraordinary gifts they were given, to give all glory to God.
When we reflect on God's Providence as His Plan for this, the best possible creation, we see that without human finitude and the consequent Fall of man, there would have been no need of a Savior and Redeemer for His elect. Without this best possible creation and best possible world, the glory to God would have been less. But God, being perfect, and encompassing all perfections, created that particular creation and world that, most befittingly, would give Him the most glory. So let impious men with their benighted and puny minds sinfully dispute with the perfect Triune and with His true followers and cavil as they will, and then let them consider how all their wicked impiety was, from before the beginning of the world, made by Him a part of His perfect and best plan.
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Dr. Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of Bill and Anne McCuen.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: "Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy." To find out more about Stephen Moore and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
