Is the concept of hereditary sin identical with the concept of the first sin, Adam’s sin, the fall of man? At times it has been understood so, and then the task of explaining hereditary sin has become identical with explaining Adam’s sin. When thought met with difficulties, an expedient was seized upon. In order to explain at least something, a fantastic presupposition was introduced, the loss of which constituted the fall as the consequence. The advantage gained thereby was that everyone willingly admitted that a condition such as the one described was not found anywhere in the world, but that they forgot that as a result the doubt became a different one, namely, whether such a condition ever had existed, something that was quite necessary in order to lose it. The history of the human race acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically placed outside this history. Pious feeling and fantasy got what they demanded, a godly prelude, but thought got nothing. In a double sense, Adam was held fantastically outside. The presupposition was dialectical-fantastic, especially in Catholicism (Adam lost donum divinitus datum supranaturale [IV 298] et admirable [a supernatural and wonderful gift bestowed by God]).2 It was historical-fantastic, especially in the federal theology,3 which lost itself dramatically in a fantasy view of Adam’s appearance as a plenipotentiary for the whole race. Obviously neither explanation explains anything. The one merely explains away what it has fictitiously composed; the other merely composes fiction that explains nothing.
Does the concept of hereditary sin differ from the concept of the first sin in such a way that the particular individual participates in inherited sin only through his relation to Adam and not through his primitive relation to sin? In that case Adam is placed fantastically outside history. Adam’s sin is then more than something past (plus quam perfectum [pluperfect]). Hereditary sin is something present; it is sinfulness, and Adam is the only one in whom it was not found, since it came into being through him. Hence one would not try to explain Adam’s sin but instead would explain hereditary sin in terms of its consequences. However, the explanation is not suitable for thought. One can therefore readily understand that one of the symbolical books declares the impossibility of an explanation, and that this declaration without contradiction gives the explanation. The Smalcald Articles4 teach distinctly: peccatum haereditarium tam profunda et tetra est corruptio naturae, ut nullius hominis ratione intelligi possit, sed ex scripturae patefactione agnoscenda et credenda sit [hereditary sin is so profound and detestable a corruption in human nature that it cannot be comprehended by human understanding, but must be known and believed from the revelation of the Scriptures]. This statement is easily reconciled with the explanations, for in these it is not so much rational definitions as such that are brought forth, but a pious feeling (with an ethical tone) that gives vent to its indignation over hereditary sin. This feeling assumes the role of an accuser, who with an almost feminine passion and with the fanaticism of a girl in love is now concerned only with making sinfulness and his own participation in it more and more detestable, and in such a manner that no word can be severe enough to describe the single individual’s participation in it. If with this in mind one reviews the different confessions, a gradation appears in which the profound [IV 299] Protestant piety is victorious. The Greek Church speaks of hereditary sin as the sin of the ἁμάρτημα πρωτοπατορικόν [first father].5 It does not even have a concept, for the term is only an historical designation, which does not, like the concept, designate what is present, but only what is historically concluded. Vitium originis [vice of origin] (Tertullian)6 is indeed a concept; nevertheless, its linguistic form allows for the conception of the historical as the predominant factor. Peccatum originale [original sin], because it has been quia originaliter tradatur [transmitted from the origin] (Augustine), designates the concept, which is still more clearly defined by the distinction between peccatum originans and originatum [sin as a cause and as caused]. Protestantism rejects the Scholastic definitions, carentia imaginis dei, defectus justitiae originalis [the absence of the image of God, the loss of original righteousness],7 as well as the view that hereditary sin is poena [punishment]. Concupiscentiam poenam esse non peccatum, disputant adversarii [our adversaries contend that concupiscence is punishment and not a sin] (Apologia A.C.).8 And now begins the enthusiastic climax: vitium, peccatum, reatus, culpa [vice, sin, guilt, transgression].9 Because the only concern is the eloquence of the contrite soul, a quite contradictory thought (nunc quoque afferens iram dei iis, qui secundum exemplum Adami peccarunt [which now brings the wrath of God upon them that have sinned after the example of Adam]) can occasionally be introduced into the discussion of hereditary sin. Or a rhetorical concern, with no consideration whatever for thought, makes the most terrifying pronouncement about hereditary sin: quo fit, ut omnes propter inobedientiam Adae et Hevae in odio apud deum simus [from which it follows that all of us, because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, are hated by God]—Formula of Concord.10 The Formula is nevertheless circumspect enough to protest against thinking this, for if one were to think it, sin would become man’s substance.* As soon [IV 300] as the enthusiasm of faith and contrition disappear, one can no longer be helped by such determinations, which only make it easy for cunning prudence to escape the recognition of sin. But to need other determinations is after all a dubious proof of the perfection of our age, quite in the same sense as that of needing other than Draconian laws.11
The fantastic presentation that is evident here repeats itself consistently at another point in dogmatics, namely, in the Atonement. It is taught that Christ has made satisfaction for hereditary sin. But what then happens to Adam? Was not he the one who brought hereditary sin into the world? Was not hereditary sin an actual sin in him? Or does hereditary sin signify the same for Adam as for everyone in the race? In that case, the concept is canceled. Or was Adam’s whole life hereditary sin? Did not the first sin beget other sins in him, i.e., actual sins? The error in the preceding is here more evident, for as a result of this Adam is now so fantastically placed outside of history that he is the only one who is excluded from the Atonement.
No matter how the problem is raised, as soon as Adam is placed fantastically on the outside, everything is confused. To explain Adam’s sin is therefore to explain hereditary sin. And no explanation that explains Adam but not hereditary sin, or explains hereditary sin but not Adam, is of any help. The most profound reason for this is what is essential to human existence: that man is individuum and as such simultaneously himself and the whole race, and in such a way that the whole race participates in the individual and the individual in the whole race.* If this is not held fast, one will fall either into the Pelagian, Socinian, and philanthropic singular12 or into the fantastic. The matter-of-factness of the understanding is that the race is numerically resolved into an einmal ein [one times one]. What is fantastical is that Adam enjoys the well-meant honor of being more than the whole race or the ambiguous honor of standing outside the race.
[IV 301] At every moment, the individual is both himself and the race. This13 is man’s perfection viewed as a state. It is also a contradiction, but a contradiction is always the expression of a task, and a task is movement, but a movement that as a task is the same as that to which the task is directed is an historical movement.14 Hence the individual has a history. But if the individual has a history, then the race also has a history. Each individual has the same perfection, and precisely because of this individuals do not fall apart from one another numerically any more than the concept of race is a phantom. Every individual is essentially interested in the history of all other individuals, and just as essentially as in his own. Perfection in oneself is therefore the perfect participation in the whole. No individual is indifferent to the history of the race any more than the race is indifferent to the history of the individual. As the history of the race moves on, the individual begins constantly anew, because he is both himself and the race, and by this, in turn, the history of the race.
Adam is the first man. He is at once himself and the race. It is not by virtue of the esthetically beautiful that we hold on to him, nor is it by virtue of a magnanimous feeling that we join ourselves to him in order, as it were, not to leave him in the lurch as the one who was responsible for everything. It is not by virtue of a zealous sympathy and the persuasion of piety that we resolve to share his guilt with him the way a child wishes to be guilty along with the father. It is not by virtue of a forced compassion that teaches us to put up with that which, after all, cannot be otherwise, but it is by virtue of thought that we hold fast to him. Consequently, every attempt to explain Adam’s significance for the race as caput generis humani naturale, seminale, foederale [head of the human race by nature, by generation, by covenant],15 to recall the expression of dogmatics, confuses everything. He is not essentially different from the race, for in that case there is no race at all; he is not the race, for in that case also there would be no race. He is himself and the race. Therefore that which explains Adam also explains the race and vice versa.
According to traditional concepts, the difference between Adam’s first sin and the first sin of every other man is this: Adam’s sin conditions sinfulness as a consequence, the other first sin presupposes sinfulness as a state. Were this so, Adam would actually stand outside the race, and the race would not have begun with him but would have had a beginning outside itself, something that is contrary to every concept.
That the first sin signifies something different from a sin (i.e., a sin like many others), something different from one sin (i.e., no. 1 in relation to no. 2), is quite obvious. The first sin constitutes the nature of the quality:16 the first sin is the sin. This is the secret of the first, and is an offense to abstract common sense, which maintains that one time amounts to nothing but that many times amounts to something, which is preposterous, since many times signifies either that each particular time is just as much as the first or that all of the times, when added together, are not nearly as much. It is therefore a superstition when it is maintained in logic that through a continued quantification a new quality is brought forth. It is an unforgivable reticence when one makes no secret of the fact that things indeed do not happen quite that way in the world and yet conceals the consequence of this for the whole of logical immanence by permitting it to drift into logical movement [IV 303] as does Hegel.* The new quality appears with the first, with the leap, with the suddeness of the enigmatic.
If the first sin means one sin in the numerical sense, no history can result from it, and sin will have no history, either in the individual or in the race. For the conditionality is the same for both, although the history of the race is not that of the individual any more than the history of the individual is that of the race, except insofar as the contradiction continually expresses the task.
Through the first sin, sin came into the world.19 Precisely in the same way it is true of every subsequent man’s first sin, that through it sin comes into the world. That it was not in the world before Adam’s first sin is, in relation to sin itself, something entirely accidental and irrelevant. It is of no significance at all and cannot justify making Adam’s sin greater or the first sin of every other man lesser. It is indeed a logical and ethical heresy to wish to give the appearance that sinfulness20 in a man determines itself quantitatively until at last, through a generatio aequivoca [descent without mating], it brings forth the first sin in a man. But this does not take place any more than Trop,21 who by being a master in the service of quantitative determination, could thereby attain a degree in jurisprudence. Let mathematicians and astronomers save themselves if they can with infinitely disappearing minute magnitudes, but in life itself this does not help a man to obtain his examination papers, and much less to explain spirit. If every subsequent man’s first sin were thus brought about by sinfulness, his first sin would only in a nonessential way be qualified as the first, and be essentially qualified—if this is thinkable—by its serial number in the universal sinking fund of the race. But this is not the case. It is equally foolish, illogical, unethical, and un-Christian to court the honor of being [IV 304] the first inventor and then to shirk one’s responsibility by being unwilling to think something, by saying that one has done nothing more than what everyone else has done. The presence of sinfulness in a man, the power of the example, etc.—these are only quantitative determinations that explain nothing,* unless it be assumed that one individual is the race, whereas every individual is both himself and the race.
The Genesis story of the first sin, especially in our day, has been regarded somewhat carelessly as a myth.22 There is a good reason why it has, because what was substituted in its place was precisely a myth, and a poor one at that. When the understanding takes to the mythical, the outcome is seldom more than small talk. The Genesis story presents the only dialectically consistent view. Its whole content is really concentrated in one statement: Sin came into the world by a sin. Were this not so, sin would have come into the world as something accidental, which one would do well not to explain. The difficulty for the understanding is precisely the triumph of the explanation and its profound consequence, namely, that sin presupposes itself, that sin comes into the world in such a way that by the fact that it is, it is presupposed. Thus sin comes into the world as the sudden, i.e., by a leap; but this leap also posits the quality, and since the quality is posited, the leap in that very moment is turned into the quality and is presupposed by the quality and the quality by the leap. To the understanding, this is an offense; ergo it is a myth. As a compensation, the understanding invents its own myth, which denies the leap and explains the circle as a straight line, and now everything proceeds quite naturally. The understanding talks fantastically about man’s state prior to the fall, and, in the course of the small talk, the projected innocence is changed little by little into sinfulness, and so there it is. The lecture of the understanding may on this occasion be compared with the counting rhyme in which children delight:23 one-nis-ball, two-nis-balls, three-nis-balls, etc., up to nine-nis-balls and tennis balls. Here it is, brought about quite naturally by the preceding. Insofar as the myth of the understanding is supposed to contain anything, it would be that sinfulness precedes sin. But if this were true in the sense that sinfulness has come in by something other than sin, the concept would be canceled. But if it comes in by sin, then sin is prior to sinfulness. This contradiction is the only dialectical consequence that accommodates both the leap and the immanence (i.e., the subsequent immanence).
[IV 305] By Adam’s first sin, sin came into the world. This statement, which is the common one, nevertheless contains an altogether outward reflection that doubtless has contributed greatly to the rise of vague misunderstanding. That sin came into the world is quite true. But this does not really concern Adam. To express this precisely and accurately, one must say that by the first sin, sinfulness came into Adam. It could not occur to anyone to say about any subsequent man that by his first sin sinfulness came into the world; and yet it comes into the world by him in a similar way (i.e., in a way not essentially different), because, expressed precisely and accurately, sinfulness is in the world only insofar as it comes into the world by sin.
That this has been expressed differently in the case of Adam is only because the consequence of his fantastic relation to the race should become evident everywhere. His sin is hereditary sin. Apart from this, nothing is known about him. But hereditary sin, as seen in Adam, is only that first sin. Is Adam, then, the only individual who has no history? If so, the race has its beginning with an individual who is not an individual, and thereby the concepts of race and individual are both canceled. If any other individual in the race can by its history have significance in the history of the race, then Adam has it also. If Adam has it only by virtue of that first sin, the concept of history24 is canceled, i.e., history has come to an end in the very moment it began.*
Since the race does not begin anew with every individual,** the sinfulness of the race does indeed acquire a history. Meanwhile, this proceeds in quantitative determinations while the individual participates in it by the qualitative leap. For this reason the race does not begin anew with every individual, in which case there would be no race at all, but every individual begins anew with the race.
[IV 306] In saying that Adam’s sin brought the sin of the race into the world, one may understand this fantastically, in which case every concept is canceled, or one may be equally justified in saying this about every individual who by his own first sin brings sinfulness into the world. To let the race begin with an individual who stands outside the race is as much a myth of the understanding as is that of letting sinfulness begin in any other way than with sin. What is accomplished is merely to delay the problem, which naturally turns now to man no. 2 for the explanation or, more correctly, to man no. 1, since no. 1 has now become no. 0.
What often misleads and brings people to all kinds of fantastic imaginings is the problem of the relation of generations, as though the subsequent man were essentially different from the first by virtue of descent. Descent, however, is only the expression for the continuity in the history of the race, which always moves by quantitative determinations and therefore is incapable of bringing forth an individual. A species of animals, although it has preserved itself through thousands of generations, never brings forth an individual. If the second human being were not descended from Adam, he would never have been the second but only an empty repetition from which could have been derived neither race nor individual. Every particular Adam would have become a statue by himself, and hence qualified only by an indifferent determination, i.e., number, and in a much more imperfect sense than the “blue boys”26 who are named by number. At most, every particular man would have been himself, not himself and the race, and would never have acquired a history, just as an angel has no history but is only himself without participating in any history.
It hardly needs to be said that this view is not guilty of Pelagianism, which permits every individual to play his little history in his own private theater unconcerned about the race. For the history of the race proceeds quietly on its course, and in this no individual begins at the same place as another, but every individual begins anew, and in the same moment he is at the place where he should begin in history.
Here, as everywhere, it is true that if one wants to maintain a dogmatic definition in our day, one must begin by forgetting [IV 307] what Hegel has discovered in order to help dogmatics. One gets a queer feeling when at this point one finds in works on dogmatics,27 which otherwise propose to be somewhat orthodox, a reference to Hegel’s favored remark28 that the nature of the immediate is to be annulled, as though immediacy and innocence were exactly identical. Hegel29 has quite consistently volatilized every dogmatic concept just enough to appeal to a man of reduced existence as a clever expression for the logical. That the immediate must be annulled, we do not need Hegel to tell us, nor does he deserve immortal merit for having said it, since it is not even logically correct, for the immediate is not to be annulled, because it at no time exists [er til]. The concept of immediacy belongs in logic; the concept of innocence, on the other hand, belongs in ethics. Every concept must be dealt with by the science to which it belongs, whether the concept belongs to the science in such a way that it is developed there or is developed by being presupposed.
It is indeed unethical to say that innocence must be annulled, for even if it were annulled at the moment this is uttered, ethics forbids us to forget that it is annulled only by guilt. Therefore, if one speaks of innocence as immediacy and is logically offensive and rude enough to have let this fleeting thing vanish, or if one is esthetically sensitive about what it was and the fact that it has vanished, he is merely geistreich [clever] and forgets the point.
Just as Adam lost innocence by guilt, so every man loses it in the same way. If it was not by guilt that he lost it, then it was not innocence that he lost; and if he was not innocent before becoming guilty, he never became guilty.
As for Adam’s innocence, there has been no lack of fantastic notions, whether these attained symbolic dignity in times when the velvet on the church pulpit as well as on the origin of the race was less threadbare than now or whether they floated about more romantically like the suspicious inventions of fiction. The more fantastically Adam was arrayed, the more inexplicable became the fact that he could sin and the more appalling became his sin. As it was, he had once and for [IV 308] all forfeited all the glory, and about that, whenever it suited them, men became sentimental or witty, melancholy or frivolous, historically contrite or fantastically cheerful, but the point of it they did not grasp ethically.
As for the innocence of subsequent men (i.e., all with the exception of Adam and Eve), there has been only a faint conception. Ethical rigor overlooked the limit of the ethical and was honest enough to believe that men would not avail themselves of the opportunity to slip away from the whole thing when escape was made so easy. Light-mindedness grasped nothing at all. But innocence is lost only by guilt. Every man loses innocence essentially in the same way that Adam lost it. It is not in the interest of ethics to make all men except Adam into concerned and interested spectators of guiltiness but not participants in guiltiness, nor is it in the interest of dogmatics to make all men into interested and sympathetic spectators of the Atonement [Forsoning] but not participants in the Atonement.
That the time of dogmatics and ethics, as well as one’s own time, has often been wasted by pondering what might have happened had Adam not sinned merely proves that one brings along an incorrect mood, and consequently an incorrect concept. It would never occur to the innocent person to ask such a question, and when the guilty asks it, he sins, for in his esthetic curiosity he ignores that he himself brought guiltiness into the world and that he himself lost innocence by guilt.
Innocence, unlike immediacy, is not something that must be annulled, something whose quality is to be annulled, something that properly does not exist [er til], but rather, when it is annulled, and as a result of being annulled, it for the first time comes into existence [bliver til] as that which it was before being annulled and which now is annulled. Immediacy is not annulled by mediacy, but when mediacy appears, in that same moment it has annulled immediacy.30 The annulment of immediacy is therefore an immanent movement within immediacy, or it is an immanent movement in the opposite direction within mediacy, by which mediacy presupposes immediacy. Innocence is something that is canceled by a transcendence, precisely because innocence is something (whereas the most correct expression for immediacy is that which Hegel uses about pure being:31 it is nothing). The reason is that when innocence is canceled by transcendence, something entirely different comes out of it, whereas mediacy is just immediacy. Innocence is a quality, it is a state that may [IV 309] very well endure, and therefore the logical haste to have it annulled is meaningless, whereas in logic it should try to hurry a little more,32 for in logic it always comes too late, even when it hurries. Innocence is not a perfection that one should wish to regain, for as soon as one wishes for it, it is lost, and then it is a new guilt to waste one’s time on wishes. Innocence is not an imperfection in which one cannot remain, for it is always sufficient unto itself, and he who has lost it, that is, not in a manner in which it might have pleased him to have lost it but in the only way in which it can be lost, that is, by guilt—to him it could never occur to boast of his perfection at the expense of innocence.
The narrative in Genesis33 also gives the correct explanation of innocence. Innocence is ignorance. It is by no means the pure being of the immediate, but it is ignorance. The fact that ignorance when viewed from without is regarded as something defined in the direction of knowledge is of no concern whatever to ignorance.
Obviously this view is in no way guilty of any Pelagianism. The race has its history, within which sinfulness continues to have its quantitative determinability, but innocence is always lost only by the qualitative leap of the individual. It is no doubt true that this sinfulness, which is the progression of the race, may express itself as a greater or lesser disposition in the particular individual who by his act assumes it, but this is a more or less, a quantitative determination, which does not constitute the concept of guilt.
If innocence is ignorance, it might appear that, inasmuch as the quantitative determinability of the guiltiness of the race is present in the ignorance of the single individual and by his act manifests itself as his guiltiness, there will be a difference between Adam’s innocence and that of every subsequent person. The answer is already given: a “more” does not constitute [IV 310] a quality. It might also appear that it would be easier to explain how a subsequent person lost innocence. But this is only apparent. The greatest degree of quantitative determinability no more explains the leap than does the least degree; if I can explain guilt in a subsequent person, I can explain it in Adam as well. By habit, and especially by thoughtlessness and ethical stupidity, it has been made to appear that the first is easier than the last. We want so badly to sneak away from the sunstroke of the consequence that aims at the top of our heads. We would put up with sinfulness, go along with it, etc., etc. One need not trouble oneself; sinfulness is not an epidemic that spreads like cowpox, “and every mouth shall be stopped.”34 It is true that a person can say in profound earnestness that he was born in misery and that his mother conceived him in sin,35 but he can truly sorrow over this only if he himself brought guilt into the world and brought all this upon himself, for it is a contradiction to sorrow esthetically over sinfulness. The only one who sorrowed innocently over sinfulness was Christ, but he did not sorrow over it as a fate he had to put up with. He sorrowed as the one who freely chose to carry all the sin of the world36 and to suffer its punishment. This is no esthetic qualification, for Christ was more than an individual.
Innocence is ignorance, but how is it lost? I do not intend to repeat all the ingenious and stupid hypotheses with which thinkers and speculators have encumbered the beginning of history, men who only out of curiosity were interested in the great human concern called sin, partly because I do not wish to waste the time of others in telling what I myself wasted time in learning, and partly because the whole thing lies outside of history, in the twilight where witches and speculators race on broomsticks and sausage-pegs.
The science that deals with the explanation is psychology, but it can explain only up to the explanation and above all must guard against leaving the impression of explaining that which no science can explain and that which ethics explains further only by presupposing it by way of dogmatics. If one were to take the psychological explanation and repeat it a number of times and thereby arrive at the opinion that it is [IV 311] not improbable that sin came into the world in this way, everything would be confused. Psychology must remain within its boundary; only then can its explanation have significance.
A psychological explanation of the fall is clearly and well set forth in Usteri’s development of the Pauline doctrines.37 Now theology has become so speculative that it makes light of such things, because, after all, it is much easier to explain that the immediate must be annulled, and theology sometimes does what is still more convenient: it becomes invisible to the speculative devotees at the decisive moment of the explanation. Usteri’s explanation is to the effect that it was the prohibition itself not to eat of the tree of knowledge that gave birth to the sin of Adam. This does not at all ignore the ethical, but it admits that somehow the prohibition only predisposes that which breaks forth in Adam’s qualitative leap. It is not my intention to continue this account any further. Everyone has read it or can read it in this author’s work.*
Where this explanation falters is in its wish not to be altogether psychological, and for this it cannot be blamed, because it did not wish to be that but set itself another task, that [IV 312] of developing the doctrines of St. Paul and of attaching itself to the Bible. But in this respect the Bible has often had a harmful effect. In beginning a deliberation, a person has certain classical passages fixed in his mind, and now his explanation and knowledge consist in an arrangement of these passages, as if the whole matter were something foreign. The more natural the better, even if he is willing with all deference to refer the explanation to the verdict of the Bible, and, if it is not in accord with the Bible, to try over again. Thus a person does not bring himself into the awkward position of having to understand the explanation before he has understood what it should explain,39 nor into the subtle position of using Scripture passages as the Persian king40 in the war against the Egyptians used their sacred animals, that is, in order to shield himself.
If the prohibition is regarded as conditioning the fall, it is also regarded as conditioning concupiscentia [inordinate desire]. At this point psychology has already gone beyond its competence. Concupiscentia is a determinant of guilt and sin antecedent to guilt and sin, and yet still is not guilt and sin, that is, introduced by it. The qualitative leap is enervated; the fall becomes something successive. Nor can it be discerned how the prohibition awakens concupiscentia, even though it is certain from pagan as well as from Christian experience that man’s desire is for the forbidden. But a person cannot appeal to experience as a matter of course, for it could be asked more particularly in which period of life this is experienced. This intermediate term, concupiscentia, is not ambiguous either, from which it can be seen immediately that it is no psychological explanation. The strongest, indeed, the most positive expression the Protestant Church uses for the presence of hereditary sin in man is precisely that he is born with concupiscentia (Omnes homines secundum naturam propagati nascuntur cum peccato h.e. sine metu dei, sine fiducia erga deum et cum concupiscentia [all men begotten in a natural way are born with sin, i.e., without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence]).41 Nevertheless, the Protestant doctrine makes an essential distinction between the innocence of the subsequent person (if such a one can be spoken of) and that of Adam.42
The psychological explanation must not talk around the point but remain in its elastic ambiguity, from which guilt breaks forth in the qualitative leap.
Innocence is ignorance. In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition. The spirit in man is dreaming. This view is in full accord with that of the Bible,43 which by denying that man in his innocence has knowledge of the difference between good and evil denounces all the phantasmagoria of Catholic meritoriousness.
In this state there is peace and repose,44 but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety. Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself.
Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing.45 The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. The concept of anxiety is almost never treated in psychology. Therefore, I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.46 For this reason, anxiety is not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit.
When we consider the dialectical determinations of anxiety, it appears that exactly these have psychological ambiguity. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.47 One easily sees, I think, that this is a psychological determination in a sense entirely different from the concupiscentia [inordinate desire] of which we spoke. Linguistic usage confirms this perfectly. One speaks of a pleasing anxiety, a pleasing anxiousness [Beœngstelse], and of a strange anxiety, a bashful anxiety, etc.
[IV 314] The anxiety that is posited in innocence is in the first place no guilt, and in the second place it is no troublesome burden, no suffering that cannot be brought into harmony with the blessedness of innocence. In observing children, one will discover this anxiety intimated more particularly as a seeking for the adventurous, the monstrous, and the enigmatic. That there are children in whom this anxiety is not found proves nothing at all, for neither is it found in the beast, and the less spirit, the less anxiety. This anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that he cannot do without it. Though it causes him anxiety, it captivates him by its pleasing anxiousness [Beœngstelse]. In all cultures where the childlike is preserved as the dreaming of the spirit, this anxiety is found. The more profound the anxiety, the more profound the culture. Only a prosaic stupidity maintains that this is a disorganization. Anxiety has here the same meaning as melancholy at a much later point, when freedom, having passed through the imperfect forms of its history, in the profoundest sense will come to itself.*
Just as the relation of anxiety to its object, to something that is nothing (linguistic usage also says pregnantly: to be anxious about nothing), is altogether ambiguous, so also the transition that is to be made from innocence to guilt will be so dialectical that it can be seen that the explanation is what it must be, psychological. The qualitative leap stands outside of all ambiguity. But he who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent, for it was not he himself but anxiety, a foreign power, that laid hold of him, a power that he did not love but about which he was anxious. And yet he is guilty, for he sank in anxiety, which he nevertheless loved even as he feared it. There is nothing in the world more ambiguous; therefore this is the only psychological explanation. But, to repeat once more, it could never occur to the explanation that it should explain the qualitative leap. Every notion that suggests that the prohibition tempted him, or that the seducer deceived him, has sufficient ambiguity only for a superficial observation, but it perverts ethics, introduces a quantitative determination, and will by the help of psychology pay man a compliment at the sacrifice of the ethical, a compliment that everyone who is ethically developed must reject as a new and more profound seduction.
That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which [IV 315] everything turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit.48 In innocence, man is not merely animal, for if he were at any moment of his life merely animal, he would never become man. So spirit is present, but as immediate, as dreaming. Inasmuch as it is now present, it is in a sense a hostile power, for it constantly disturbs the relation between soul and body, a relation that indeed has persistence and yet does not have endurance, inasmuch as it first receives the latter by the spirit. On the other hand, spirit is a friendly power, since it is precisely that which constitutes the relation. What, then, is man’s relation to this ambiguous power? How does spirit relate itself to itself and to its conditionality? It relates itself as anxiety. Do away with itself, the spirit cannot; lay hold of itself, it cannot, as long as it has itself outside of itself. Nor can man sink down into the vegetative, for he is qualified as spirit; flee away from anxiety, he cannot, for he loves it; really love it, he cannot, for he flees from it. Innocence has now reached its uttermost point. It is ignorance; however, it is not an animal brutality but an ignorance qualified by spirit, and as such innocence is precisely anxiety, because its ignorance is about nothing. Here there is no knowledge of good and evil etc., but the whole actuality of knowledge projects itself in anxiety as the enormous nothing of ignorance.
Innocence still is, but only a word is required and then ignorance is concentrated. Innocence naturally cannot understand this word, but at that moment anxiety has, as it were, caught its first prey. Instead of nothing, it now has an enigmatic word. When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit?
When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire, one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had a knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing—the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise—and [IV 316] this is what usually happens—that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it.
After the word of prohibition follows the word of judgment: “You shall certainly die.”49 Naturally, Adam does not know what it means to die. On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent him from having acquired a notion of the terrifying, for even animals can understand the mimic expression and movement in the voice of a speaker without understanding the word. If the prohibition is regarded as awakening the desire, the punishment must also be regarded as awakening the notion of the deterrent. This, however, will only confuse things. In this case, the terror is simply anxiety. Because Adam has not understood what was spoken, there is nothing but the ambiguity of anxiety. The infinite possibility of being able that was awakened by the prohibition now draws closer, because this possibility points to a possibility as its sequence.
In this way, innocence is brought to its uttermost. In anxiety it is related to the forbidden and to the punishment. Innocence is not guilty, yet there is anxiety as though it were lost.
Further than this, psychology cannot go, but so far it can go, and above all, in its observation of human life, it can point to this again and again.
Here, in the conclusion, I have adhered to the Biblical narrative. I have assumed the prohibition and the voice of punishment as coming from without. Of course, this is something that has troubled many thinkers. But the difficulty is merely one to smile at. Innocence can indeed speak, inasmuch as in language it possesses the expression for everything spiritual. Accordingly, one need merely assume that Adam talked to himself. The imperfection in the story, namely, that another spoke to Adam about what he did not understand, is thus eliminated. From the fact that Adam was able to talk, it does not follow in a deeper sense that he was able to understand what was said. This applies above all to the difference between good and evil, which indeed can be expressed in language but nevertheless is only for freedom, because for innocence it can have only the meaning we have indicated in the preceding account. Innocence can indeed express this difference, but the difference is not for innocence, and for innocence it can only have the meaning that was indicated in the preceding account.
Let us now examine the narrative in Genesis more carefully as we attempt to dismiss the fixed idea that it is a myth, and as we remind ourselves that no age has been more skillful than our own in producing myths of the understanding, an age that produces myths and at the same time wants to eradicate all myths.
Adam was created; he had given names to the animals (here there is language, though in an imperfect way similar to that of children who learn by identifying animals on an A B C board)50 but had not found company for himself. Eve was created, formed from his rib. She stood in as intimate a relation to him as possible, yet it was still an external relation. Adam and Eve are merely a numerical repetition. In this respect, a thousand Adams signify no more than one. So much with regard to the descent of the race from one pair. Nature does not favor a meaningless superfluity. Therefore, if we assume that the race descended from several pairs, there would be a moment when nature had a meaningless superfluity. As soon as the relationship of generation is posited, no man is superfluous, because every individual is himself and the race.51
Now follows the prohibition and the judgment. But the serpent was more cunning52 than all the animals of the field. He seduced the woman. Even though one may call this a myth, it neither disturbs thought nor confuses the concept, as does a myth of the understanding. The myth allows something that is inward to take place outwardly.
First we must note that the woman was the first to be seduced, and that therefore she in turn seduced the man. In what sense woman is the weaker sex, as it is commonly said of her, and also that anxiety belongs to her more than to man,* I shall try to develop in another chapter.
In the foregoing, it has been said several times that the view presented in this work does not deny the propagation of sinfulness through generation, or, in other words, that sinfulness has its history through generation. Yet it is said only that sinfulness moves in quantitative categories, whereas sin constantly enters by the qualitative leap of the individual. Here already one can see one significant aspect of the quantitation that takes place in generation. Eve is a derived creature. To be sure, she is created like Adam, but she is created out of a previous creature. To be sure, she is innocent like Adam, but there is, as it were, a presentiment of a disposition that indeed is not sinfulness but may seem like a hint of the sinfulness that is posited by propagation. It is the fact of being derived that predisposes the particular individual, yet without making him guilty.
Here we must remember what was said about the prohibition and the word of judgment in §5. The imperfection in the narrative—how it could have occurred to anyone to say to Adam what he essentially could not understand—is eliminated if we bear in mind that the speaker is language, and also that it is Adam himself who speaks.**
There remains the serpent. I am no friend of cleverness and shall, volente deo [God willing], resist the temptations of the serpent, who, as at the dawn of time when he tempted Adam and Eve, has in the course of time tempted writers to be clever. Instead, I freely admit my inability to connect any definite thought with the serpent.54 Furthermore, the difficulty with the serpent is something quite different, namely, that of regarding the temptation as coming from without. This is simply contrary to the teaching of the Bible, contrary to the well-known classical passage in James,55 which says that God tempts no man and is not tempted by anyone, but each person is tempted by himself. If one indeed believes that he has rescued God by regarding man as tempted by the serpent and believes that in this way one is in accord with James, [IV 319] “that God tempts no one,” he is confronted with the second statement, that God is not tempted by anyone. For the serpent’s assault upon man is also an indirect temptation of God, since it interferes in the relation between God and man, and one is confronted by the third statement, that every man is tempted by himself.
Now follows the fall. This is something that psychology is unable to explain, because the fall is the qualitative leap. However, let us for a moment consider the consequence as it is presented in the narrative in order to fix our attention once more on anxiety as the presupposition for hereditary sin.
The consequence is a double one, that sin came into the world and that sexuality was posited; the one is to be inseparable from the other. This is of utmost importance in order to show man’s original state. If he were not a synthesis that reposed in a third, one thing could not have two consequences. If he were not a synthesis of psyche and body that is sustained by spirit, the sexual could never have come into the world with sinfulness.
We shall leave project makers56 out of consideration and simply assume the presence of the sexual difference before the fall, except that as yet it was not, because in ignorance it is not. In this respect we have support in the Scriptures.57
In innocence, Adam as spirit was a dreaming spirit. Thus the synthesis is not actual, for the combining factor is precisely the spirit, and as yet this is not posited as spirit. In animals the sexual difference can be developed instinctively, but this cannot be the case with a human being precisely because he is a synthesis. In the moment the spirit posits itself, it posits the synthesis, but in order to posit the synthesis it must first pervade it differentiatingly, and the ultimate point of the sensuous is precisely the sexual. Man can attain this ultimate point only in the moment the spirit becomes actual. Before that time he is not animal, but neither is he really man. The moment he becomes man, he becomes so by being animal as well.
So sinfulness is by no means sensuousness, but without sin there is no sexuality, and without sexuality, no history. A perfect spirit has neither the one nor the other, and therefore the sexual difference is canceled in the resurrection, and therefore an angel has no history. Even if Michael had made a record of all the errands he had been sent on and performed, this is nevertheless not his history. First in sexuality is the synthesis [IV 320] posited as a contradiction, but like every contradiction it is also a task, the history of which begins at that same moment. This is the actuality that is preceded by freedom’s possibility. However, freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. Such thoughtlessness is no more in the interest of Scriptures than in the interest of thought. The possibility is to be able. In a logical system, it is convenient to say that possibility passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is anxiety, but it no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically. Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself. If sin has come into the world by necessity (which is a contradiction), there can be no anxiety. Nor can there be any anxiety if sin came into the world by an act of an abstract liberum arbitrium58 (which no more existed in the world in the beginning than in a late period, because it is a nuisance for thought). To want to give a logical explanation of the coming of sin into the world is a stupidity that can occur only to people who are comically worried about finding an explanation.59
Were I allowed to make a wish, then I would wish that no reader would be so profound as to ask: What if Adam had not sinned? In the moment actuality is posited, possibility walks by its side as a nothing that entices every thoughtless man. If only science could make up its mind to keep men under discipline and to bridle itself! When someone asks a stupid question, care should be taken not to answer him, lest he who answers becomes just as stupid as the questioner. The foolishness of the above question consists not so much in the question itself as in the fact that it is directed to science. If one stays at home with it, and, like Clever Elsie60 with her projects, calls together like-minded friends, then he has tolerably understood his own stupidity. Science, on the contrary, cannot explain such things. Every science lies either in a logical immanence or in an immanence within a transcendence that it [IV 321] is unable to explain. Now sin is precisely that transcendence, that discrimen rerum [crisis] in which sin enters into the single individual as the single individual. Sin never enters into the world differently and has never entered differently. So when the single individual is stupid enough to inquire about sin as if it were something foreign to him, he only asks as a fool, for either he does not know at all what the question is about, and thus cannot come to know it, or he knows it and understands it, and also knows that no science can explain it to him. However, science at times has been adequately accommodating in responding to wishes with weighty hypotheses that it at last admits are inadequate as explanations. This, of course, is entirely true, yet the confusion is that science did not energetically dismiss foolish questions but instead confirmed superstitious men in their notion that one day there would come a project maker who is smart enough to come up with the right answer. That sin came into the world six thousand years ago is said in the same way that one would say about Nebuchadnezzar that it was four thousand years ago that he became an ox.61 When the case is understood in this way, it is no wonder that the explanation accords with it. What in one respect is the simplest thing in the world has been made the most difficult. What the most ordinary man understands in his own way, and quite correctly so—because he understands that it is not just six thousand years since sin came into the world—science with the art of speculators has announced as a prize subject that as yet has not been answered satisfactorily. How sin came into the world, each man understands solely by himself. If he would learn it from another, he would eo ipso misunderstand it. The only science that can help a little is psychology, yet it admits that it explains nothing, and also that it cannot and will not explain more. If any science could explain it, everything would be confused. That the man of science ought to forget himself is entirely true; nevertheless, it is therefore also very fortunate that sin is no scientific problem, and thus no man of science has an obligation (and the project maker just as little) to forget how sin came into the world. If this is what he wants to do, if he magnanimously wants to forget himself in the zeal to explain all of humanity, he will become as comical as that privy councilor who was so conscientious about leaving his calling card with every Tom, Dick, [IV 322] and Harry that in so doing he at last forgot his own name. Or his philosophical enthusiasm will make him so absent-minded that he needs a good-natured, level-headed wife whom he can ask, as Soldin asked Rebecca when in enthusiastic absent-mindedness he also lost himself in the objectivity of the chatter: “Rebecca, is it I who is speaking?”62
That the admired men of science in my most honored contemporary age, men whose concern in their search after the system is known to the whole congregation and who are concerned also to find a place for sin within it, may find the above position highly unscientific is entirely in order. But let the congregation join in the search, or at least include these profound seekers in their pious intercessions; they will find the place as surely as he who hunts for the burning tow finds it when he is unaware that it is burning in his own hand.