Continuing from a previous post The Fall:
As Joseph found affirmed in the book of Moses, the Fall was enabling, not damning. Needing to pass through mortality as a stage in their eternal progress, all premortal spirits “were born into the world by the fall.”20 By the fourth century, Western Christianity had adopted a radically different reading of events. Irenaeus clearly believed and taught that “Human-kind needed to grow accustomed to bearing divinity through trial and gradual maturation”; Adam’s action was “like the first fall of a baby learning to walk.”21 Agustine, on the other hand , saw the Fall as regression and original sin as a disaster repaired only partially by Christ. With preexistence fading from church teachings, Adam and fellow humans are not spirits sent here to undergo the crucible of mortal experience; they were flawless creatures whose fall was inexcusable. Human nature becomes deformed, and guilt and sensual appetite are the human inheritance. Unlike Olsen, who believed earliest doctrines were less rather than more reliable, Anthony Zimmerman (more reasonably) holds the earliest to be more authoritative: “Irenaeus heard from Polycarp what the Apostles had taught. Augustine lived several centuries later. Very likely, then, there is no Apostolic tradition that would affirm” Augustine’s views, even though they soon overwhelm Irenaeus’s more positive outlook.22
Even so, generous perspectives that see the Fall in a magnanimous light will emerge from time to time, as with the great fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich. She described a vision in which she saw a preexistent Adam, whom she understood represented “all men and their falling.”
[God] sends him to a certain place to do his will. Not only does the servant go, but he dashes off at great speed, loving to do his lord’s will. [But] soon he falls into a ditch and is greatly injured; and then he groans and moans and tosses about and writhes, but he cannot rise up and help himself in any way.
After the fall, Julian recorded that she attended carefully to the vision to know “if I could detect any fault in him, or if the Lord would impute to him any kind of blame; and truly none was seen, for the only cause of his falling was his good will and great desire.” In fact, the Lord explained to her that, since the servant undertook his task out of love and “good will,” “is it not reasonable that I should reward him for his fright and his fear, his hurt and his injuries and all his woe,” making him “highly and blessedly rewarded forever, above what he should have been if he had not fallen,” culminating in “surpassing honor and endless bliss?”23
In other words, Julian understood that Adam and Eve—representing humanity—deserved neither censure nor punishment but a compensation even richer than the goodly state and condition they risked in going forth. Inspired others joined Julian in rejecting mortality as a cursed consequence of transgression.
. . . .In the twentieth century, Nikolai Berdyaev, a theologian and philosopher of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, wrote that “The fall of the first Adam was a necessary cosmic moment in the revelation of the new Adam. This was the way to higher completeness.”25 We hear again such clear words of Adam and Eve’s greatness in Elder John Widtsoe’s teaching that “in life all must choose at times. Sometime, two possibilities are good; neither is evil. Usually, however, one is of greater import than the other. When in doubt, each must choose that which concerns the good of others—the greater law—rather than which chiefly benefits ourselves—the lesser law. The greater must be chosen. . . . That was the choice made in Eden.”26
However, prophets like Julian, Traherne, and Befdyaev were rare.27 In place of this joy-filled recognition of childhood innocence and of mortality as a precious boon, Western Christian leaders and theologians emphasized doctrines of Edenic failure on a cosmic scale, Eve (and all women) as inherently weak and inferior, and humanity as the damaged detritus of a plan gone tragically wrong. Such beliefs were creed-ally formulated and rigorously enforced upon a Christian populace through the Middle Ages and into the age of Protestant Reformation. It would be impossible to exaggerate the damage done by the view of life as a consequence of moral failure rather than triumph, of human nature as depraved and evil rather than good but unencumbered, and of Christ himself primarily as a repairman of cosmic catastrophe and shield against God’s wrath, rather than the co-architect of an original plan of induction into the society of heaven. ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, The Christ Who Heals (Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, 2017) 29-32
