[Serious] The Story

[Belacqua]

Growing up in the SDA church, I learned what I thought was a very common narrative on the story of the fall and subsequent redemption of mankind.

If anyone wants to answer, I'm curious what you believe the overarching biblical plot is—what is the story behind the scenes in other words—whether it's your own interpretation or the one you were taught. What led up to the creation mankind, and where is it all going after the fall?

(Or do you even process it as a fall/redemption story in the first place? Perhaps that phrasing is already too bounded for some interpretations.)

To me the most interesting story is the very old one, rooted in Neoplatonism, that has always been influential, though never mainstream.

Here the Christian God is very like the One that Plotinus wrote about. The One is complete non-division, excluding nothing. People who could, through mystical vision, encounter the One knew the truth of things by direct vision. There was no need to analyze, conceptualize, memorize, etc., because all these things are only necessary when knowledge is incomplete. 

The soul's true home is with the One. The Fall of Man is separation from the One. Separation doesn't come about through disobedience but through perceptual narrowing. The soul loses its ability to know through direct perception, fully, and becomes individual and cut off from the rest of the universe. Or I should say: it begins to APPEAR to us that we are separate from the rest of the universe. But this is an illusion caused by narrowness of vision.

Our immorality doesn't cause the Fall; the Fall causes our immorality. Because, as all Platonists know, no one chooses to do evil. We do evil because we misunderstand what's good. When we lose our direct connection to the One -- which is also the Good -- we become capable of choosing poorly and thinking we're doing right when we're not. 

Resurrection is the restoration of full perception.

There is a lot of variation among people who used this story, but for the most part they say that the Fall and Resurrection doesn't occur in historical time -- that is, there is no calendar date. It takes place in mythical time, which means that it remains a possibility for individuals at any time. 

As I say, this was a very common story used by mystics, spiritual alchemists, and people like that for centuries after Plato. 

It was common, for example, to interpret myths of katabasis as stories of fall and return to the One. So for example when Persephone is abducted and taken to Hades, the literal words of the story say that she began in our world and was taken to the underworld. But it was common to interpret the story by saying that Persephone's starting point was really the One, and the lower world was really our world of materiality. All the katabatic myths got used this way -- Hercules, Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, etc.

When metaphysics changed into the modern version, this story was revived and put to new -- but very suitable -- uses. So for example when Newton and Kant started saying that there is a noumenal world to which we do not have direct access, and we know it only by analysis of mentally-created phenomena, this new metaphysics mapped nicely onto the Neoplatonic story. The thing-in-itself, to which we never have access, is the One, and the fact that our perceptions have only limited and problematic relationships to the thing-in-itself corresponds to the limited perception of the fallen soul. 

Anyone interested in Romanticism or German Idealism is familiar with this version, which is used throughout as a kind of guide map, with varying degrees of literalness. There would be no Hegel without this foundation, for example.