The parallels in firstness explain why Augustine struggled to depict a huge Fall, a Fall so big that it would feel like a descent.<\/p>\n
At the top, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were in the state of Original Blessedness, where even their sexual organs were at the command of reason.<\/p>\n
Of course, this is impossible, given the nested form of \u201cconcupiscence\u201d.\u00a0 I put \u201cno normal context\u201d instead of \u201cOriginal Sin\u201d because, well, the workings of the sexual organs have a way to avoid contextualization.\u00a0 This fact made Augustine the butt of jokes by rowdy agnostics for centuries.<\/p>\n
Still, Augustine\u2019s logic defying claim served a purpose.\u00a0 It elevated the perception of height for the start of the Fall.\u00a0 \u201cOriginal Blessedness\u201d had to be at least as high as \u201cthe Blissfulness of the Platonic Soul before its Descent\u201d.<\/p>\n
A literal \u201cdescent from Adam and Eve\u201d deepens the pit of the Fall, far deeper than \u201cthe Platonic Body that Receives the Soul\u201d, for now the poor babe \u2013 that sweet innocent \u2013 comes from the reason-less heaving of body parts plus, some sort of flaw in the seed.\u00a0 That babe comes from concupiscence itself.<\/p>\n
Baptism was needed just to get back to innocence.<\/p>\n
Today, this makes no sense.<\/p>\n
However, it makes sense if Augustine was speaking in a world of Greek and Roman Paganism.\u00a0 The conversion of the Empire to Christianity did not provide a remedy for the collapse of the Western Roman Civilization.\u00a0 It gave a shelter for people desperate enough to abandon their ancestral ways.<\/p>\n
The parallels in firstness show that Augustine took the Platonic model and re-oriented it.\u00a0 The axis of descent was no longer set by gravity, but by a Celestial Axis; the Axis between the Father and the Son; the Axis that is the Holy Spirit; plus another Earth-based Axis; between Adam and Jesus; the Transgressor and the Redeemer; the Fallen and the Savior.<\/p>\n
Augustine altered the heights and depths of the Platonic model.<\/p>\n
The \u201cunion of spirit with descent\u201d that allowed the soul to animate the body was thus transformed.\u00a0 At the same time Augustine spoke to the Platonists and Stoics, he was taking their model from them.<\/p>\n
The resulting model was evocative and stunningly superior to more primitive explanations carried into the West by the invading tribes.\u00a0 Thus Augustine preserved the soul of a dying civilization by drawing it into his own Christian perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The parallels in firstness explain why Augustine struggled to depict a huge Fall, a Fall so big that it would feel like a descent. At the top, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were in the state of Original Blessedness, where even their sexual organs were at the command of reason. Of course, this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-science-of-original-sin"],"yoast_head":"\n