The Fall into Time

Engraving by Gustave Doré

The myth of the fall of man, of his expulsion from the Garden of Eden because of an original transgression, is as old as it is present. It resonates even among those who are unaware of its existence and even among those who did not grow up under the shadow of an Abrahamic culture. You may be from a part of the world that is adept of Brahmanism or Buddhism and yet you will still be influenced by the idea that there is something wrong with reality and that we are here to atone for some primordial disharmony. This is not because the expulsion of Adam and Eve was a true event in a historical sense—it was not—but because the idea behind the myth of the fall is true. The idea that we lost something in the early days of the species, an innocence, and that we are here suffering and seeking some form of liberation—this idea permeates many peoples, especially those inclined to philosophy.

And, using Schopenhauer's language here, it doesn't matter whether a religion is optimistic or pessimistic: the idea of ​​primordial disharmony will be present in some way in its constitutive mythologies. What is important for a religion to be classified as optimistic or pessimistic in Schopenhauerian philosophy is not so much the details about the creation of the world or specific prophecies about the future of our world, but the way in which it interprets the essential truths behind the myths. For Schopenhauer, what really differentiates religions from one another is not their stories, their sacred texts, their prophets or the number of gods, but whether they consider the world as something essentially good and worth continuing and defending, or whether they condemn it completely and preach the renunciation of what is physical. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer writes the following:

I cannot, as is generally done, put the fundamental difference of all religions in the question whether they are monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, or atheistic, but only in the question whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, in other words, whether they present the existence of this world as justified by itself, and consequently praise and commend it, or consider it as something which can be conceived only as the consequence of our guilt, and thus really ought not to be, in that they recognize that pain and death cannot lie in the eternal, original, and immutable order of things, that which in every respect ought to be.

This is why he places what he considers to be the most original Christianity, in the form of Marcionism and the different types of Gnosticism, in the same camp as the Dharmic religions of India, while placing Greco-Roman paganism, Judaism, Islam and what he considers to be corrupt Christianity in an opposite camp—especially Protestantism, because of its anti-monastic and anti-ascetic stance, although he also fiercely criticizes Catholicism. While condemning Catholicism for its violence and shameful abuses, Schopenhauer claims that Protestantism is a degenerate Christianity. For him, the first group, that of the Dharmic religions and early Christianity, is pessimistic, while the second is optimistic. It is important to make it clear that pessimistic religions or philosophies, for Schopenhauer, are the ones that come closest to the truth, while optimistic religions and philosophies are far from the truth. Still in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, he writes:

[...] in religions, as well as in philosophy, optimism is a fundamental error that bars the way to all truth.

All pessimistic religions practice asceticism, that is, they all have monks who take vows of poverty and chastity, something that, in Schopenhauer's view, shows the personal rejection that these individuals make of the brutal and blind metaphysical Will that animates all empirical reality and is behind our suffering. In the same work, he writes:

[...] that all is very good (παντα καλα λιαν) of the Old Testament is really foreign to Christianity proper; for in the New Testament the world is generally spoken of as something to which we do not belong, which we do not love, the ruler of which, in fact, is the devil. This agrees with the ascetic spirit of the denial of one's self and the overcoming of the world. Like boundless love of one's neighbour, even of one's enemy, this spirit is the fundamental characteristic which Christianity has in common with Brahmanism and Buddhism, and which is evidence of their relationship.

By criticizing the polemical texts of Clement of Alexandria against the Gnostics, Marcionites, Brahmins and Buddhists, Schopenhauer shows appreciation for the ascetic and antinatalist stance of these religions. Clement of Alexandria, it is worth remembering, lived between the 2nd and 3rd centuries and is considered one of the Fathers of the Church along with figures such as Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, Origen of Alexandria, Tertullian, Saint Hippolytus of Rome and Saint Augustine. Quoting part of Schopenhauer's criticism of Clement:

[...] he sticks to his principle that through their abstinence all these sin against the demiurge, since they teach that one should not marry, should not beget children, should not bring into the world new miserable beings, should not produce fresh fodder for death.

The fact is that, and sticking to the Christian tradition here, Schopenhauer separates the religion of the Old Testament from the religion of the New Testaments, he separates their gods and their messages, just as Marcion of Sinope and several other dualist groups from the beginning of Christianity did, from the Barbeloites to the Valentinians. He contrasts the figure of Adam with the figure of Christ, not considering them as historical characters, but as representations of opposing ideas about the world. In his perspective, Adam represents those who embrace the cosmos as a good or even as a perfect work of God. Christ, on the other hand, represents those who have an anti-cosmic position, rejecting material existence. In the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, he writes:

This sinner was Adam, but we all existed in him; Adam became miserable, and in him we have all become miserable. The doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is really the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity, while the rest is in the main only clothing and covering, or something accessory. Accordingly, we should interpret Jesus Christ always in the universal, as the symbol or personification of the denial of the will-to-live, but not in the individual, whether according to his mythical history in the Gospels, or according to the probably true history lying at the root thereof. For neither the one nor the other will easily satisfy us entirely. It is merely the vehicle of that first interpretation for the people, who always demand something founded on fact. That Christianity has recently forgotten its true significance, and has degenerated into shallow optimism, does not concern us here.

Schopenhauer wrote this in the first half of the 19th century, but he could have been writing it today, especially the part where he disdains the optimistic and degenerate Christianity so common on our streets. Cioran, on the other hand, wrote in the 20th century, and his work deals largely with the idea of ​​the fall into time. Our expulsion from the Garden of Eden symbolizes, for him, the rupture with the primordial unity of being, the separation from the nature which we were part of together with other animals, without being fully aware of the whole, just like them. Our consciousness, however, changed. It became too sharp. We are no longer just aware of the present; we have become lucid, according to Cioran. For him, lucidity is the consciousness of consciousness, it is being able to reflect and be aware of time. We know things, we know that we suffer, and we are also fully aware that one day we will die. Having consciousness to a high degree also means that we question the reason for all this and seek some answer, any answer, that will help us face the terror of our absurd situation.

For Cioran, the details of the religious mythologies we are talking about are also of little importance. Having been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, Cioran also groups certain beliefs into the same anti-cosmic camp. The idea of ​​the fall of man into time, of his separation from the primordial unconsciousness or, at least, from a less conscious consciousness that we shared with the rest of the animals, a fall that occurs after Adam's transgression in the Abrahamic myth, is perfectly compatible with Dharmic mythologies and with the belief in a cycle of birth and death without beginning that must be broken through enlightenment, which comes in the form of moksha or nirvana. In the book Anathemas and Admirations (those are the books Aveux et anathèmes and Exercices d'admiration in French), Cioran makes the following observation:

Original Sin and Transmigration: both identify destiny with an expiation, and it is of no matter whether we are talking about Adam’s sin or those we committed in our previous existences.

The important thing, once again evoking Schopenhauerian thought, is the philosophical truth that hides behind the doctrines of faith, doctrines that are filled with fictitious stories composed over time to make some truths more palatable to people and make them understand reality without the need for a more detailed explanation that is often difficult to accept. The embellishment of stories is, in a sense, a way that the doctrine of faith found to spread the truth to everyone. But there is, of course, the problem that not all doctrines of faith are interested in the truth. The so-called optimistic religions are an example of this. And even religions that were initially interested in the truth degenerate, Christianity being the best example in Schopenhauer's view.

The myth of the fall only comes close to the truth when it is not used to make a sneaky apology for the demiurge and the world he created, whether the apology is made through literal or quasi-literal interpretations, which is more common in modern churches, or through mistaken symbolic interpretations that praise the universe instead of cursing it, something that is commonly done among those who prefer to read sacred texts in an allegorical or mystical way. There is no point in reading these texts allegorically if the conclusion one reaches is an affirmation of the Will, of existence, as a supreme good. The correct interpretation is one that does not shy away from pointing out the flaws of the world without clinging to false dogmas about evil being merely the absence of good, when all reality screams the opposite: evils, pain, illness, hunger, apathy or the simple absence of something are the engines that move existence, with pleasures and contentment being fleeting and temporary. If something is absence in existence, that something is good: good is the absence of evil.

Original sin, single birth, transmigration, metempsychosis; no matter in what guise the idea that becoming is an expiation comes, the idea itself remains intact. When interpreted correctly, we understand that we are “saved” by following the example of the rejection of the world, whether of Christ or of the Buddha. To be saved here is not to go to heaven or paradise in a literal sense, but to be spared as far as possible from the afflictions intrinsic to world of becoming, afflictions that cannot be entirely avoided except through non-being before our birth or after our death. While other animals also feel pain and die, and while some may even suffer emotionally, only man knows this in a profound sense, for we “fall into time” by virtue of our capacity for understanding. The fall into time, in an allegorical sense, is ours alone. In the aptly titled book The Fall into Time (La Chute dans le temps in French), Cioran writes:

The spectacle of downfall prevails over that of death: all beings die; only man has the vocation to fall. He is on a precipice overhanging life (as life, indeed, overhangs matter). The farther from life he moves, whether up or down, the closer he comes to his ruin.

Man's situation is one of ephemerality and suffering. We are in a precarious predicament. It is no wonder that we are the only beings capable of consciously taking our own lives. In our post-fallen in time condition, we are tormented by simply existing. In the same work, Cioran writes:

If God once announced that He was "that which is," man, on the other hand, might define himself as "that which is not." And it is precisely this lack, this deficit of existence which, wakening his pride by reaction, incites man to defiance or to ferocity. Having abandoned his origins, traded eternity for becoming, mistreated life by projecting his early aberration upon it, he emerges from anonymity by a series of repudiations which make him the great deserter of being. Example of anti-nature, man's isolation is equaled only by its precariousness. The inorganic is sufficient unto itself; the organic is dependent, threatened, unstable; the conscious is the quintessence of decrepitude. Once we enjoyed everything, except consciousness; now that we possess consciousness, now that we are tormented by it, now that it figures in our eyes as the converse of primal innocence, we manage neither to assume nor to abjure it. To find elsewhere more reality than in oneself is to confess that we have taken the wrong road and that we deserve our downfall.

Given this wretched condition of man, Cioran wonders what path we should take. He writes:

Since all that has been conceived and undertaken since Adam is either suspect or dangerous or futile, what is to be done? Resign from the race? That would be to forget that one is never so much man as when one regrets being so. And such regret, once it seizes one, offers no means of escape: it becomes as inevitable and as heavy as air ...

But he himself already knows the answer. The question is rhetorical. In another passage, still in The Fall into Time, Cioran again asks:

Everything which affects us in one way or another being potentially suffering, are we to conclude from this the superiority of the mineral over the organic? In that case, the sole recourse would be to reinstate as soon as possible the imperturbability of the elements.

Time is a mistake of eternity, life is a mistake of matter and, finally, consciousness is a mistake of life, according to Cioran's thinking. In other works, he writes that we are a scandal of biology, gorillas that have lost their fur and forged false ideals in order to endure life. Schopenhauer, in turn, considers the human being as a superior manifestation of the blind Will that is behind all existence. But even this superiority is not the result of an organizing mind, but only of the need for a gradual manifestation of the Will. Both agree that we are something that should not have been and that the less consciousness, the better. According to Schopenhauer, when we see the amount of pain and suffering that occurs on Earth in a single day, we should conclude that it would be better if the Earth were as sterile as the Moon. For Cioran, everything that diminishes the reign of consciousness is welcome: it is better to be a less complex animal than a human, better to be a plant than any animal, and it would be even better if only stones and inorganic chemistry existed. According to both, each stage that ended up producing lucid beings should be regretted.

In The Fall into Time, Cioran writes:

There is something sacred in every being unaware it exists, in every form of life exempt from consciousness. He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.

The praise for sects and religious groups that practiced the refusal of procreation that we find in Schopenhauer becomes an even more central part of Cioran’s work. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer praises the antinatalist message found in the Gnostic text known as the Gospel According to the Egyptians. Cioran praises the same text in his book titled The Trouble of Being Born. The specific part to which they refer is one in which Salome asks Jesus how long the reign of death would last, to which Jesus responds that the reign of death will last as long as there is procreation. The idea here is that procreation allows our metaphysical essences to be trapped within prisons of flesh. Both individually and collectively, one of the most effective ways found by pessimistic religions—and philosophies—to halt the fall into time to which members of our species are subjected to is an ethics of refusal of reproduction. The generation of a new creature that will not only suffer and die, but know that it suffers and dies, is the most striking mark of the fall of man, of our separation from the primordial unity, from the eternal present in which other animals live and from the unconsciousness in which plants and stones exist.

In The New Gods (in French, Le mauvais démiurge), Cioran writes:

Every childbirth is suspect: the angels, luckily, are unsuited to it, the propagation of life being reserved to the fallen.

In a way, we can think of the pessimistic philosophers of the last centuries up to now as Marcionites, Bogomils or Cathars lost in the modern era. Enemies of the demiurge, they condemn the universe he created, even if they consider it all in an allegorical manner. A naturalistic view of reality, skeptical of metaphysical and supernatural principles, is in no way incompatible with the allegory of a world forged by monstrous gods. We only need to observe nature closely to understand that its beauty hides a cruel and senseless struggle for survival. We, as products of this same nature, are privileged, or perhaps cursed, with understanding. That is why the myth of the fall is so pertinent: we ate from the wrong tree, the Tree of Knowledge, when we should have eaten only from the Tree of Life, as does the rest of creation. Now, however, it is too late, and our ruin has already been decreed. It is only a question of whether we will follow the idea of Adam, maintaining the attitude that our presence in the world of becoming must be assured by us multiplying, as written in Genesis 1:28, or whether we will follow the idea of Christ and become eunuchs, in a metaphorical sense, in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as written in Matthew 19:11-12.

by Fernando Olszewski