Inklings on the Fall

While I am a fan of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, generally, both as artists and as theologians, usually with more reservations about CSL's Protestantism, I have already noted that CSL's view on the Fall as expressed in The Problem of Pain was inadequate, because among other things it involved a collective fall. I am afraid, after confrontation with Tale of Adanel, that Tolkien was not all that much more orthodox.

the fall of humanity 5:35 goes as follows the race of men were 5:37 born into the world with the first 5:39 coming of the Sun in the Far Eastern 5:41 land of Hildórien they were bare and 5:43 primitive and their lives were free and 5:45 without burden and they felt the very 5:47 voice of God within them one day a 5:49 stranger appeared and he came to them 5:51 with gifts he increased their luxury he 5:53 housed them and he fed them and he 5:55 increased their appetite even though 5:57 they had lived without burdens before 5:59 him now that they had received his gifts 6:01 they wanted more but the stranger would 6:03 not teach them his ways he wished for 6:05 them to rely entirely upon him for these 6:08 gifts Humanity realized their dependency 6:10 on him and the race of men confronted 6:12 the stranger and asked him for knowledge 6:14 The Stranger grew angry and accused men 6:17 of ingratitude claiming that the voice 6:19 they felt within them was that of 6:21 Darkness at that the stranger left and 6:23 he did not return for a long while and 6:25 he left mankind distraught as they had 6:27 grown accustomed to the laxury he proved 6:29 divided but which they could not produce 6:31 on their own the voice of God had tried 6:33 to warn them repeatedly not to trust the 6:35 stranger but mankind did not listen in 6:38 the midst of their desperation the sky 6:39 grew dark and the sun vanished and men 6:42 were terrified that it was the darkness 6:44 from within coming to consumed them at 6:46 that thought the stranger returned and 6:48 offered them salvation the only thing 6:51 that he asked and returned was that they 6:52 worshiped him as their lord and God he 6:55 was the stranger no longer for now he 6:57 was the master the master was not as 6:59 generous as before and he only gave gift 7:02 when his orders were obeyed and his name 7:04 revered with the worship of the master 7:06 however something else also changed men 7:09 started to age and die this had never 7:11 happened before

Tolkien’s Scrapped Version of the Garden of Eden and the Original Sin
Ink and Fantasy | 23 March 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sk1eudyvlw

One good point: men are "born into the world with the first 5:39 coming of the Sun", fine. Day 4, Sun, Day 6, Adam and Eve. If Eden is East of Jerusalem (Adam dying West of Eden, where he had been created, where Calvary was), and Beleriand is supposed to be like lost parts of land West of the British Isles, it's not wrong to call the origin of man "a far eastern land" either.

The rest is less good.

Here are the corrections:

• The first two sins among men were individual ones, not collective ones. Eve was fooled, Adam wasn't, hence his sin is the actual fall. It is a momentary sin, which in a moment changed everyone originated from him in any way (including Eve, come from his side!), with exception for the redemptive rescue task force of Mary and Jesus, from originally just to original sinners.
• Mankind was created in an original couple. Not in a collective. Collective creation of mankind, that's a Babylonian error, you find echos of it in Gilgamesh, and basically a direct statement in Enuma Elish, but the Hebrew truth has one original couple. The different views have consequences, among other things in how the relation between the civic state and the Christian or even just natural marriage are viewed.
• There was no prior race of roughly speaking human shape, like Elves, appearing much earlier, under stars and before the Moon.
• The sin was a refusal to obey God, not a direct allegiance to the serpent.
• It was not slow. It did not involve getting accustomed to things.
• God was not absent. He cursed the serpent. Man did not have to seek salvation on his own. God had told Adam and Eve, in general, but sufficiently detailed, words how salvation was to come about.
• It is highly doubtful that Adam would have, before his body took on a new vulnerability at the fall, even found a house comfortable, but it is impossible to imagine that he could see a house and not be able to figure out how to build it! When the Scientific Revolution was a programme (I am not saying it started science, just that it imagined itself as doing that), part of the idea was, Adam had so much knowledge of the natural world, which was lost to us through sin and later even more by chaos like surviving a Flood, spreading from Babel, and so on, and it was a question of recovering parts of what he had known, not of bypassing it. By and large, barring some observations not available to him, this is a correct assessment.

Let's recall, despite being a Catholic, Tolkien was also an Oxford don. They are not incompatible, but Oxford as such was a source of some errors in theology.

Had the "three houses of Edain" really existed, this kind of story would have been a result from confusing the fall in Eden with the descent of the watchers, if Henoch is correct, and of overdoing rejection of "watcher connected" technology into idealising an overall technology poor society. Fair enough that houses were not needed in Eden, but after the fall, they did become an asset.

This was probably the background to some real, pre-Flood, people's attempts at avoiding Nod, as the Neanderthals and Denisovans and even some Cro-Magnon had some tribes, and the Solo men whole populations perhaps, who were in "palaeolithic" societies, hunters and gatherers. The pre-Flood part of archaeology seems to show very many of them (though not all) did succumb to devil worship in the form of cannibalism before the Flood.

One can reject Industrialism or aspects of it like Mass production, for nearly every asset, without wanting a generally technology poor society. Becoming Indians does not damn us, but it also does not save us. Christ does, and He was a carpenter.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Palm Sunday
24.III.2024

... and a Davidic King, of course!

Hosanna filio David: benedictus, qui venit in nomine Domini: hosanna in altissimis.