I. Anxiety as Hereditary Sin’s Presupposition and as Clarifying Hereditary Sin Retrogressively in Terms of its Origin
Is this concept identical with that of the first sin, Adam’s sin, the fall of man? That is how people have sometimes taken it and accordingly set themselves the task of explaining the identity of hereditary sin with Adam’s. When thought stumbled here on difficulties, they chose a way out. In order to have some kind of explanation they introduced a fanciful presupposition, the loss of which was the Fall. The advantage of this was that everyone freely admitted that the world contained no such condition as the one described, but it was forgotten that the doubt concerned something else, namely whether it had ever existed, that being rather necessary if it was to be lost. The history of the human race got a fanciful start, Adam was placed fancifully outside, pious feeling and fantasy got what they wanted, a godly prelude, but thinking got nothing. Adam was held fancifully out in two ways: the presupposition was a piece of fanciful dialectic, especially in Catholicism (Adam lost donum divinitus datum supranaturale et admirabile [a supernatural and wonderful gift bestowed by God]), and it was a historical fantasy, particularly in the federal theology that lost itself in the drama of Adam’s appearance as proxy for the whole human race. Naturally, both explanations explain nothing. The one explains away its own poetic gloss; the other merely adds one that gives no explanation.
Does the way in which the concept of hereditary sin differs from that of the first sin mean that it is only through a relation to Adam that the individual participates in it, and not through its own primitive relation to sin? If so, then Adam is again taken fancifully out of history. His sin then becomes more than past (plusquam perfectum [pluperfect]). Hereditary sin is here and now, it is sinfulness and Adam is the only one in whom it was not, since it was through him that it came into being. No attempt was made to explain Adam’s sin; what they wanted to explain was hereditary sin in what followed from it. The explanation was not however meant for thought. One can readily understand therefore that one of the symbolical scripts asserts the impossibility of an explanation, and that this assertion stands without contradicting the explanation. The Smalcald Articles expressly teach: Peccatum hæreditarium 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 assertion is perfectly compatible with the explanations, for what comes out in these are less terms of reasoned thinking than the pious feeling (with an ethical intent) that vents its indignation over hereditary sin, takes on the role of accuser, and now, in something like a feminine passion and the intoxication of a girl in love, is concerned only with making sinfulness and its own participation in it more and more detestable, itself included, so that no word is harsh enough to describe the individual’s participation.
If, bearing this in mind, we survey the various confessions, a gradation appears in which the profound piety of Protestantism wins the day. The Greek Church calls hereditary sin ἁμάρτημα προτοπατορικόν [the sin of the first father]. It lacks even a concept, since these words are in the form only of a historical statement, which unlike a concept applies not in the present but only to what has been carried to a historical conclusion. Vitium originis [the sin of the origin (i.e., the first sin)] (Tertullian) is certainly a concept, but the form of the language allows the historical aspect to be grasped as the predominant one. Peccatum originale [original sin] (quia originaliter tradatur [because it has been transmitted from the origin], Augustine) gives the concept, which is defined still more clearly through the distinction between peccatum originans and originatum [sin as a cause and as caused]. Protestantism rejects Scholastic definitions (carentia imagines dei [the absence of the image of God]); defectus justitiae originalis [loss of original righteousness]), just as it also rejects the notion that hereditary sin should be poena [punishment] (concupiscentiam poenam esse non peccatum, disputant adversarii [our adversaries contend that concupiscence is punishment and not a sin], Apologia A.C.). And then begins the fervent climax: vitium, peccatum, reatus, culpa [vice, sin, guilt, transgression]. Since the concern is only with the contrite soul’s eloquence, one occasionally comes on a quite contradictory thought (nunc quoque afferens iram de iis, qui secundum exemplum Adami peccarunt [which now brings the wrath of God upon those who have sinned following Adam’s example]) in the discussion of hereditary sin. Or, a rhetorical concern that takes no consideration whatever of thought, but makes terrifying pronouncements about hereditary sin (quo fit, ut omnes propter inobedientiam Adae et Hevae in odio apud deum simus. Form. Conc. [from which it follows that all of us, because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, are hated by God—Formula of Concord], which is nevertheless circumspect enough to protest against thinking it, otherwise sin would become man’s substance).* Once the fervor of faith and contrition disappear, there can be no help from such definitions, since they only make it easy for wily matter-of-factness to wangle itself out of the acknowledgment of sin. To need other definitions is nevertheless a dubious proof of the perfection of our age, in just the same way as the need for other than Draconian laws.
The same fanciful effect made evident here is repeated quite consistently at another point in dogmatics, in the Atonement. It is taught that Christ has rendered satisfaction for hereditary sin. But then what happens to Adam? After all it was he who brought hereditary sin into the world. So was hereditary sin not actual in him? Or does hereditary signify the same for Adam as for everyone in the human race? If that were so, the concept would be canceled. Or was Adam’s whole life hereditary sin? Did the first sin not engender other sins in him, that is, actual sins? Here the fault in the foregoing becomes more evident; for Adam now finds himself so fancifully outside that he is the only one excluded from the Atonement.
No matter how one raises the problem, once Adam comes fancifully outside, all 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 use. The deepest reason for this is, and what is essential to human existence, that the human being is individuum and, as such, at one and the same time itself and the whole human race, so that the whole race participates in the individual and the individual in the whole race.* Unless this is insisted on, one falls either into the Pelagian, Socinian, and philanthropic singular, or else into fantasy. Prosaic common sense has it that the human race is numerically resolved into an einmal ein [one times one]. What is fanciful is that Adam should enjoy the well-intended honor of being more than the whole race, or the ambiguous honor of standing outside the race.
The fact is that the individual is at every moment itself and the race. This is the human being’s perfection viewed as a state. It is at the same time a contradiction, but a contradiction always expresses a task, but a task is movement, but a movement toward that to which the task is directed is a historical movement. Hence the individual has a history. But if the individual has a history, then the race too has a history. Every individual has the same perfection; and for that very reason the individuals do not fall apart numerically, any more than the concept of the human race becomes a phantom. Every individuum is essentially interested in the history of all other individuals, yes, just as essentially as in its own. Perfection in oneself is therefore the perfect participation in the whole. No individuum is indifferent to the history of the human race, any more than is the race to that of any individual. Insofar as the history of the race advances, the individual begins constantly afresh, because it is itself and the race, and hence its history is, in turn, the history of the race.
Adam is the first human being; he is at once himself and the race. We do not stick to him on grounds of aesthetic beauty; it is not on the basis of a magnanimous sentiment that we attach ourselves to him, as though not to leave him in the lurch as the one who is to blame for everything; it is not by virtue of the fervor of sympathy and the persuasion of piety that we resolve to share guilt with him, as the child wants to share the guilt of the father; it is not on the strength of a forced compassion that teaches us to put up with whatever we must. It is on the strength of thought that we stick to him. Therefore every effort to explain Adam’s significance for the race as caput generis humani naturale, seminale, foederale [head of the human race by nature, generation, covenant], to call the phrases of dogmatics to mind, confuses everything. He does not differ essentially from the race, for otherwise there is no race at all. He is not the race, for then too there would be no race. He is himself and the race. Whatever explains Adam therefore also explains the race, and vice versa.
According to traditional concepts, the difference between Adam’s first sin and that of each person is this: As its condition, Adam’s sin has sinfulness as consequence, the other first sin presupposes sinfulness as its condition. If this were so, Adam would really be outside the human race, and the latter would have begun not with him, but with a beginning outside itself, which is at odds with every concept.
That the first sin signifies something other than a sin (i.e., a sin like any other), something other than one sin (i.e., no. 1 in relation to no. 2), is easy to see. The first sin defines the quality, it is what sin is. This is the first sin’s secret and its offense to abstract common sense, which thinks once is nothing but many times something, which is altogether preposterous since many times signifies either that each is just as much as the first or that, added together, they are not nearly as much. It is therefore a superstition in logic to think that in continuing a quantitative progression one adduces a new quality. It is an unpardonable reticence that makes no secret of the fact that things do not happen quite like that in the world, but then hides what follows from this fact for the whole of logical immanence by having it trickle into logical movement, as Hegel does.* The new quality appears with the first, with the leap, with the suddenness of the enigmatic.
If the first sin means numerically one sin, no history comes of it, and sin will then have no history, either in the individual or in the race. For they are both subject to the same condition, even though 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.
It is through the first sin that sin came into the world. In exactly the same way this is true of each later person’s first sin, that through it sin comes into the world. The fact that before Adam’s first sin it was not to be found is itself, with regard to sin, a quite accidental and irrelevant consideration of absolutely no significance and which cannot justify making Adam’s sin greater or every other person’s sin less. Wanting to make it look as though sinfulness defined itself quantitatively in a person, until at last, through a generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation], it produces the first sin in him, is indeed a logical and ethical heresy. This doesn’t happen, any more than being a master in the service of doing sums would help Trop to attain a degree in jurisprudence. Let mathematicians and astronomers help themselves out if they can with infinitely minute magnitudes; this does not help a person to obtain his examination papers in life itself, even less to explain spirit. If every subsequent person’s first sin were brought about in this way by sinfulness, his first sin would be characterized as the first only in an inessential way, and have its essential character given—if such a thing is thinkable—by its serial number in the universal sinking fund of the race. But such is not the case, and it is equally foolish, illogical, unethical, un-Christian to court the honor of being the first inventor and then slink off by not putting any meaning into one’s words, saying that one has only done what anyone else would do. The presence of sinfulness in a man, the power of the example, etc., all these are sheer quantitative attributes that explain nothing,* unless it is assumed that one individual is the race instead of that every individual is both itself and the race.
Especially in our day, the Genesis story of the first sin has in a rather offhand way been considered a myth. There is good reason for this, since what was put in its place was indeed a myth and a poor one at that, for when the understanding resorts to myth, what comes out of it is seldom more than prattle. That story is the only dialectically consistent account. Its whole substance is really concentrated in the statement: Sin came into the world through a sin. If that were not so, sin would have entered the world as something accidental, which one should no doubt refrain from explaining. The understanding’s difficulty is precisely the triumph of the explanation, its profound consistency, namely that sin is its own presupposition, that its manner of coming into the world is to be presupposed in the fact that it is. Sin then comes into the world as the sudden, that is, through the leap. But this leap also posits the quality. But the very instant in which the quality is posited, the leap has turned into the quality and is presupposed by the quality and the quality by the leap. This is an offense to the understanding, ergo [therefore] it is a myth. By way of compensation understanding invents its own myth, which denies the leap and construes the circle as a straight line, and then everything goes along naturally. It talks fancifully about the human being’s state prior to the Fall, and the projected innocence is little by little changed in the course of the chatting into sinfulness, and then—well then—there it is. Understanding’s discourse can in this event be conveniently compared with the counting rhyme in which children delight: one nis ball, two nis balls, etc., and so on until ten-nis balls. There it is, and arrived at quite naturally through what went before. If there were anything to the understanding’s myth, it would be that sinfulness comes before sin. But if this is true, in the sense that sinfulness has entered through something other than sin, then the concept cancels out. But if it enters through sin, then sin comes first. This contradiction is the only dialectically consistent result that is equal to both the leap and immanence (i.e., the later immanence).
Through Adam’s first sin sin came accordingly into the world. This statement, the common one, contains however an altogether external reflection that has without doubt contributed greatly to misty misunderstandings. That sin came into the world is quite true, but this is no concern of Adam’s. To put it quite pointedly and accurately one must say: through the first sin, sinfulness entered Adam. It would not occur to us to say about any later person that it was through his sin that sinfulness came into the world; and yet it enters the world through him in a similar (i.e., not essentially different) way, because, put pointedly and accurately, sinfulness is in the world only insofar as it enters through sin.
That people have spoken in other ways about Adam is due solely to the consequence of Adam’s fanciful relation to the human race having to manifest itself everywhere. His sin is hereditary sin. Apart from that, nothing is known about him. But hereditary sin seen in Adam is only that first sin. Is Adam then the only individual without a history? If so, the human race has its beginning with an individual that is not an individual, and the concepts of race and individual both thereby cancel out. If the history of any other individual in the human race can have significance in the history of the race, then Adam too has it. If Adam has it only by virtue of that first sin, then the concept of history cancels out, that is to say, history is over the moment it began.*
In view now of the fact that the human race does not begin over again with every individual,† the sinfulness of the race acquires a history. This however proceeds in quantitative terms, while it is in the leap of quality that the individual takes part in it. This is why the race does not begin anew with each individual, for otherwise there would be no race at all, but every individual begins anew with the race.
If it is now said that Adam’s sin brought the sin of the race into the world, this is either meant fancifully, in which case every concept cancels out, or it can be said with equal justification of every individual who, by its own first sin, brings sinfulness into the world. To have the race begin with an individual standing outside the human race is as much a myth of the understanding as letting sinfulness begin in some other way than with sin. One contrives only to postpone the problem, which turns naturally to man no. 2 for the explanation or, more correctly, to man no. 1, since really man no. 1 has now become man no. 0.
What often deceives people and helps to set all sorts of fantasies in motion is the problem of the relation of generation, as though the subsequent person differed essentially from the first by descent. Descent merely expresses the continuity in the history of the race, which always moves in quantitative terms and is therefore incapable of producing an individual, since an animal species, even if it has preserved itself through thousands of generations, never generates an individual. A second human being not descended from Adam would never have been the second human being but an empty repetition, out of which there became neither race nor individual. Every particular Adam would have become a statue on its own, and definable accordingly only by an indifferent property, that is, number, in an even more imperfect sense than when naming the “blue boys” by number. At most, every single one would have been himself, not himself and the race, and never have acquired a history, just as an angel has no history but is only himself and does not take part in any history.
It need hardly be said that this view does not incur any Pelagianism, which lets every individual play his little history in his own private theater, unconcerned with the race. For the history of the race quietly pursues its course, and in this no individual begins at the same place as another, but every individual begins anew, and in the same instant he is at the place where he should begin in history.
It is true, here as everywhere, that if one wants a dogmatic definition today, one must begin by forgetting what Hegel has come up with to help dogmatics. A strange uneasiness takes hold of one at this point when, in dogmatists who otherwise want to be somewhat orthodox, one finds Hegel’s favorite remark to the effect that it is the nature of the immediate to be annulled, as though immediacy and innocence were altogether identical. Hegel has quite consistently dispersed every dogmatic concept just enough to support a reduced existence as a clever expression of 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 even in logical terms it is not correct; for the immediate, never having been [da det aldrig er til], is not to be annulled. The concept of immediacy belongs in logic, the concept of innocence in ethics, and every concept must be referred to in the terms of the science to which it belongs, whether the concept belongs to the science as one there to be explicated, or is explicated as a presupposition [of that science].
Now it is unethical to say that innocence must be annulled; for even if it were annulled in the instant of being uttered, ethics forbids us to forget that it can be annulled only through guilt. Therefore if one speaks of innocence as of immediacy, and has the logical impudence and bravado to treat this most fleeting of things as having vanished, or is aesthetically sensitive as to what it was and over its having vanished, then one is merely geistrich [clever] and forgets the point.
Just as Adam lost his innocence through guilt, so too does every human being. If it was not through guilt that he lost it, then it was not innocence that he lost, and if he was not innocent before becoming guilty, then he never became guilty.
As for Adam’s innocence, there has been no shortage of all sorts of fanciful notions, whether these acquired a symbolic dignity in times when the velvet on the church pulpit was, as much as on the origin of the human race, less threadbare than now, or when they wandered at large, more romantically, like the suspect inventions of poetic fiction. The more fancifully Adam was arrayed, the more inexplicable it became that he could sin and the more appalling became the sin. He had, however, once and for all forfeited all the glory, and according to time and occasion one became sentimental or witty, melancholy or frivolous, historically contrite or whimsically cheerful. But one did not grasp the point of it ethically.
As for the innocence of those (i.e., all except Adam and Eve) who came after, here there were only some impoverished ideas. Ethical rigorism overlooked the limit of the ethical and was righteous enough to believe that people would not make use of the opportunity to sneak away from it all when the escape was made so easy. Thoughtlessness grasped nothing at all. But only through guilt is innocence lost. Each loses innocence in essentially the same way that Adam lost it, and it is neither in the interest of ethics to make all of us except Adam into concerned and interested spectators of guiltiness but not guilty ourselves, nor in the interest of dogmatics to make all of us into interested and sympathetic spectators of the Atonement, but not ourselves expiated.
In wasting so much of the time of dogmatics and ethics, as well as one’s own, in pondering what might have happened if Adam had not sinned, all it shows is that the right mood has not been brought along, nor consequently the right concept. It would never occur to the innocent person to ask such a question, but when the guilty person asks it, he sins, for he wants in his aesthetic curiosity to ignore the fact that he brought guilt into the world himself, and that he has lost his innocence through guilt.
Innocence is therefore not like the immediate, something that must be annulled, whose destiny it is to be annulled, something that is not really there but occurs only through being annulled, occurring as that which was before it was annulled and is now annulled. Immediacy is not annulled by mediacy, but when mediacy appears, it has in that same instant annulled immediacy. The annulment of immediacy is therefore an immanent movement within immediacy, or it is an immanent movement within mediacy in the opposite direction through which the latter presupposes immediacy. Innocence is something that is canceled by transcendence, just because innocence is something (whereas the most appropriate expression for immediacy is the one used by Hegel about pure being: it is nothing), which is also why, when innocence is canceled by transcendence, something quite different comes of it, while mediacy is precisely immediacy. Innocence is a quality, it is a state that may well endure, and therefore the logical haste to have it annulled has no point, whereas in logic itself it should try to hurry a little more, since there even at its quickest it always arrives too late. Innocence is not a perfection one should wish to regain, for as soon as one wants it, it is lost, and then to waste time on wishes is a new guilt. Innocence is not an imperfection in which one cannot remain standing, for it is always sufficient unto itself, and the person who has lost it in the only way it can be lost, that is, through guilt, and not in some way it might be pleasing to have lost it—to that person it could never occur to boast of perfection at the cost of innocence.
The Genesis story gives us now also the right explanation of innocence. Innocence is ignorance. It is by no means the pure being of the immediate, but it is ignorance. That ignorance, when viewed from outside, is seen in terms of knowledge is something that concerns ignorance not at all.
It is surely evident that this view does not incur a Pelagianism. The race has its history. Within it, sinfulness has its continual quantitatively measurable identity, but innocence is always lost solely through the individual’s qualitative leap. That this sinfulness, which is the progress of the human race, may appear as a greater or a lesser disposition in the particular individual who assumes it in its intention is indeed true, but this is a more or less, a quantitative identification which does not constitute the concept of guilt.
If innocence then is ignorance, it seems that insofar as the guiltiness of the race in its quantitative identification is present in the ignorance of the individual, and that it is in the individual’s intention that it manifests itself, then there must be a difference between Adam’s innocence and that of each later person. The answer is already given, that a more does not constitute a quality. It may also seem easier to explain how a later person lost his innocence. This however is only appearance. The highest degree of quantifying modification no more explains the qualitative leap than does the lowest. If I can explain guilt in the later person, I can equally well explain it in Adam. Through habit, and even more through thoughtlessness and ethical stupidity, it has come to look as if the former were easier than the latter. One will so much rather avoid the sunray of consistency that aims straight at the crown of one’s head. We would put up with sinfulness, go along with it, etc. We need not trouble ourselves, sinfulness is not an epidemic that spreads like foot-and-mouth disease “and every mouth shall be silenced.”* That a person can say, in deep earnest, that he was born in misery† and his mother conceived him in sin is quite true, but he can truly sorrow over this only if he has brought guilt into the world and brought all this upon himself; for it is a contradiction to want to sorrow aesthetically over sinfulness. The only one who sorrowed innocently over sinfulness was Christ, but he did not sorrow over it as a fate that he had to put up with. He sorrowed as the one who freely chose to bear all the world’s sin and suffer its punishment.‡ This is no aesthetic characterization, for Christ was more than an individual.
So innocence is ignorance. But how is it lost? I do not mean to repeat here all the ingenious and silly hypotheses with which thinkers and crackpots, interested only out of curiosity in the great human affair we call sin, have burdened the beginning of history, partly because I do not want to waste others’ time in recounting what I myself wasted time in learning, and partly because the whole thing lies outside history in that twilight where witches and crackpots outdo one another on a broomstick and a nail.
The science that has to do with the explanation is psychology, which however can explain only as far as the explanation, and must above all guard itself against appearing to explain what no science explains and only ethics explains further by presupposing it through dogmatics. Taking the psychological explanation and repeating it several times, and then thinking it not unlikely that sin came into the world in this way, would be to confuse everything. Psychology must keep within its bounds, and then its explanation can always have its significance.
A psychological explanation of the Fall can be found well and clearly presented in Usteri’s exposition of the Pauline doctrines. But theology has now become so speculative that it scorns such things, for it is after all much easier to explain that the immediate must be annulled, and what theology sometimes does is even more convenient: disappearing at the decisive moment before the eyes of its speculative devotees. Usteri’s exposition amounts to saying that it was the prohibition itself not to eat of the tree of knowledge that gave birth to sin in Adam. This by no means ignores the ethical but allows that the prohibition in some way merely predisposes for what emerges in Adam’s qualitative leap. But to propound this account as given any further is not my intention. Everyone has read it or can read it in the author’s work.*
Where this explanation is lacking is in not wanting to be thoroughly psychological. It cannot be blamed for this, since that was not its intention, but rather the different task of developing the doctrines of St. Paul and adhering to the Bible. But the Bible has often had a harmful effect in this way; one begins on a deliberation of this kind with certain classical passages fixed in mind, and the explanation then becomes no more than an arrangement of those passages, as if the whole thing were as extraneous as that. The more natural the better, even if one is willing with all deference to submit the explanation to a scriptural verdict, and if it fails the test, to try again. This at least prevents one from arriving at the preposterous position of having to understand the explanation before understanding what it is meant to explain, as well as the disingenuous position of using Bible texts in the way the Persian king, in resisting the Egyptians, used the latter’s sacred animals to protect himself.
Having the prohibition be the condition of the Fall assumes that the prohibition arouses concupiscence. Here psychology is already overstepping its bounds. A concupiscence is an attribute of guilt and sin prior to guilt and sin and yet is not guilt and sin, that is, posited through the latter. The qualitative leap is weakened, the Fall becomes something successive. Nor is it possible to grasp how the prohibition arouses concupiscence, however surely the human being’s hankering toward the forbidden is shown both in pagan and Christian experience. But appeal cannot be made to experience in this way with no further ado, seeing that the further question must be asked as to in what segment of life this experience occurs. Nor is the middle term concupiscence ambiguous, from which it can be seen straightaway that this is no psychological explanation. The strongest, really the most positive, expression that the Protestant Church uses for the presence of hereditary sin in man is precisely that he is born with concupiscence (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 fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence]). Yet the Protestant doctrine makes an essential distinction between the innocence of the later person (if there can be any question of such) and the innocence of Adam.
The psychological explanation must not talk around the point but remain in its elastic ambiguity, from which guilt emerges in the qualitative leap.
Innocence is ignorance. In innocence the human being is not characterized as spirit but is psychically characterized in immediate unity with its natural condition. Spirit is dreaming in the human being. This view fully accords with that of the Bible which, by denying that the human being in its innocence has knowledge of the difference between good and evil,* condemns all Catholicism’s fantasies concerning [Adam’s] merit.
In this state there is peace and repose, but at the same time there is something else, something that is not dissension and strife, for there is 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 at the same time it is anxiety. Dreaming, spirit projects its own actuality, yet this actuality is nothing, but innocence always sees this nothing outside itself.
Anxiety is an attribute of the dreaming spirit and belongs as such to psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other [mit Andet] is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is a nothing hinted at. Spirit’s actuality appears constantly as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it reaches out for it, and is a nothing that can only bring unease. More it cannot do as long as it merely appears. The concept of anxiety is hardly ever seen treated in psychology, so I must point out that it differs altogether from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite; whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility. For this reason anxiety will not be found in the beast, just because in its nature the beast does not possess the character of spirit.
When we consider the dialectical properties of anxiety, it appears that these possess precisely the ambiguity of the psychological. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy. I think one readily sees that this is a psychological concept in a way quite other than the concupiscence of which we spoke. Linguistic usage confirms this perfectly. We speak of sweet anxiety, a sweet anxiousness; we speak of a strange anxiety, a shy anxiety, etc.
The anxiety that is posited in innocence is, in the first place, not guilt and, in the second place, no heavy burden, not a suffering that cannot be brought into harmony with the blessedness of innocence. When we observe children, we find the anxiety more definitely intimated as a seeking after the adventurous, the prodigious, and the mysterious. That there are children in whom this anxiety is not to be found proves nothing, for neither does it exist in the beast, and the less spirit, the less anxiety. This anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that the child will not do without it; although it alarms, in its sweet anxiousness it also captivates. In all peoples where the childlike is preserved as dreaming spirit, there is this anxiety. The profounder the anxiety, the profounder the people. Only a prosaic stupidity will think of it as a disorder. Anxiety has the same meaning here as melancholy at a much later point, where freedom, having passed through the imperfect forms of its history, will in the profoundest sense come to itself.*
Just as anxiety’s relation to its object, to something, which is nothing (usage is also succinct here: to be anxious at nothing), is altogether ambiguous, so will the transition that can be made here from innocence to guilt be precisely so dialectical that it shows that the explanation is, as it must be, psychological. The qualitative leap is outside all ambiguity, but the person who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent, for it was not himself but anxiety, an alien power, that seized him, a power he did not love but about which he was anxious. And yet he is indeed guilty, for he sank down in anxiety, which he loved nevertheless in fearing it. Nothing in the world is more ambiguous than this; and that is why this is the only psychological explanation, even if, to repeat it once more, it would never take it into its head to want to explain the qualitative leap. Every notion of the prohibition having tempted him, or of the seducer having deceived him, has ambiguity enough only for a superficial observation; it distorts ethics, introduces quantitative terms and wants, with psychology’s help, to pay humankind a compliment at the ethical’s expense, a compliment that anyone who is developed ethically must decline as a new, even profounder seduction.
Everything depends on anxiety coming into view. The human being is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical, but a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit. In innocence, the human being is not merely animal, for if at any moment in his life he were merely animal, he would never become a human being. So spirit is present but as immediate, as dreaming. So far as it is now present, it is in a sense a hostile power, for it constantly upsets the relation between soul and body, a relation that does have subsistence but then doesn’t have it, because it receives it first through spirit. It is, on the other hand, a friendly power that wishes precisely to constitute the relation. What then is the human being’s relation to this ambiguous power; how does spirit relate to itself and to that which conditions it? It relates as anxiety. To do away with itself, that spirit cannot do; seize itself, so long as it has itself outside itself, it cannot do that either. Nor can the human being sink down into the vegetative, for he is characterized as spirit. Flee from anxiety he cannot, for he loves it; really love it he cannot, for he flees from it. Innocence has now reached its peak. It is ignorance, not an animal brutishness but an ignorance characterized by spirit, and it is as such 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.
There is still innocence, but to focus the ignorance needs only a word. Ignorance, naturally, cannot understand this word, but anxiety has, as it were, caught its first prey. Instead of nothing it has an enigmatic word. Thus when, according to Genesis, God said to Adam “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,”* Adam of course did not really understand these words, for how should he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction only followed with the enjoyment?
To assume now that the prohibition awakens the desire† is to substitute knowledge for ignorance; for Adam would need to have had knowledge of freedom, since the desire was the desire to use it. This explanation therefore comes too late. The prohibition makes him anxious, because it awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What innocence let slip as the nothing of anxiety now enters him, and here again it is a nothing—the anxious possibility of being able. What it is he is able to do, of this he has no idea, for if that were not so, that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would be, as is commonly the case, presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is there, 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.
Following the word of prohibition comes the word of judgment: “Then you shall surely die.”‡ Adam of course has no grasp at all of what it means to die, while on the other hand nothing prevents him, supposing that it was said to him, from acquiring a notion of the terrifying. In this respect, even the beast can understand the mimic expression and tremor in the voice of a speaker, yet without understanding the word.
Making the prohibition awaken the desire means also having the word of punishment awaken a notion of discouragement. But this confuses things. The terror here is simply anxiety, since Adam has not understood what was said, and so here again there is only the ambiguity of anxiety. The infinite possibility of “being able,” which the prohibition awakened, now draws nearer through this possibility pointing to a possibility as its accompaniment.
Innocence is brought in this way to its extremity. In anxiety, it is related to the forbidden and to the punishment. It is not guilty, and yet there is an anxiety as though innocence were lost.
Further psychology cannot go, but this far it can reach and, above all, can demonstrate again and again in its observation of human life.
I have held to the biblical story here in this conclusion; I let the prohibition and the voice of punishment come from outside. This has naturally plagued many thinkers. But we need only smile at this difficulty. Innocence can after all speak. As for that, in language it possesses the expression for all that is spiritual. We need simply assume that Adam talked to himself. This eliminates the imperfection in the story, that another speaks to Adam about what he does not understand. From Adam’s ability to talk, it does not follow that he was able in a deeper sense to understand what was said. This is true above all of the difference between good and evil, which is indeed made in language but nevertheless is only for freedom. Innocence can indeed give voice to this difference, but the difference is not one for innocence, and for innocence it has only the meaning we have indicated in the preceding account.
Let us then look more closely at the Genesis account, trying to put aside the fixed idea that it is a myth, and reminding ourselves that no age has been as quick as our own to produce myths of the understanding, producing myths while wanting at the same time to eradicate all myth.
So Adam was created, had given names to the animals (there is a language here, though an imperfect one similar to that of children who learn by identifying animals by letters on an alphabet board), but had found no company for himself.* Eve was created, formed from his rib.† She stood in as intimate as possible a relation to him but still an external one; Adam and Eve are merely a numerical repetition.‡ Even a thousand Adams in this respect would mean no more than there being one. So much with regard to the descent of the race from one pair. Nature does not favor a meaningless superfluity, so if we assumed that the race descended from several pairs, a moment would come when nature had a meaningless superfluity. Once the relationship of generation is posited, no human being is superfluous, because every human being is itself and the race.
Now follow the prohibition and the judgment. But the serpent was smarter than all the other wild animals, it enticed the woman.* Even if we call this a myth, it must not be forgotten that it in no way interferes with thought or confuses the concept, as does a myth of the understanding. The myth gives outward expression to something that is inward.
What we must note here to begin with is that the woman was seduced first, and that she then seduces the man. I shall try to explain in a later chapter in what sense woman is, as people say, the weaker sex, and that anxiety belongs to her more than to man.†
There have been several reminders in the preceding that the view presented in this work does not deny the propagation of sinfulness in generation, or in other words, that in generation sinfulness has its history. All that is said is that sinfulness moves in quantitative terms, while sin constantly enters through the individual’s qualitative leap. Already here there is meaning to be seen in the generational quantifying. Eve is the one who is derived. True, like Adam she is created, but she is created out of a previous creature. True, like Adam she is innocent, but there is as though the hint of a disposition that, although not itself sinfulness, may appear as a presentiment of the sinfulness posited by propagation, which is derived, which predisposes the particular individual though without making the individual guilty.
Here we must be reminded of what was said in §5 about prohibition and the word of judgment. The imperfection in the narrative—how it could have occurred to anyone to say to Adam something that essentially he cannot understand—drops out if we bear in mind that what speaks is language, and also that it is Adam himself who speaks.*
There remains the serpent. I am no friend of cleverness and shall deo volente [God willing] resist the serpent’s temptations, which have in the course of time, as at the beginning of time when it tempted Adam and Eve, tempted writers to be, well, yes, clever. I most freely admit to being unable to attach any definite thought to the serpent. The difficulty with the serpent is in any case something quite different, namely letting the temptation come from outside. This is directly opposed to the Bible’s teaching, to that familiar classical passage in James which says that God tempts no one, and is not tempted by anyone, but each person is tempted by himself.† If one thinks to have rescued God by having man tempted by the serpent and thinks oneself so far in agreement with James “that God tempts no one,” there is still the second statement to confront, that God is not tempted by anyone. For the serpent’s attempt on man was also an indirect temptation of God through interfering with the relation between God and man; and one comes up against that third statement, that every man is tempted by himself.
There now follows the Fall.* This is something that psychology cannot explain, because the Fall is the qualitative leap. However, let us consider for a moment the outcome as presented in that story† so as to fasten our gaze once more upon anxiety as hereditary sin’s presupposition.
The outcome was a double one, that sin entered the world and that sexuality was posited, and the one being inseparable from the other. This is of the utmost importance for showing humankind’s original state. If man were not a synthesis that rested in a third, then one thing could not have had two outcomes. If man were not a synthesis of soul and body sustained by spirit, the sexual could never have entered with sinfulness.
Leaving pointless speculations aside, we simply assume sexual differentiation before the Fall, except that it wasn’t really there, since in ignorance it is not. In this we have support in the Scriptures.‡
In innocence, Adam, as spirit, was dreaming spirit. The synthesis is thus not actual, for the combining factor is precisely spirit, and this is not as yet posited as spirit. In animals the sexual difference can develop instinctively, but that cannot be the case with the human being, just because the human being is a synthesis. The moment that spirit posits itself, it posits the synthesis; but in order to posit the synthesis it must pervade it differentially and the extremity of the sensuous is precisely the sexual. The human being can reach this point only in the instant that spirit becomes actual. Before that time, the human being is not animal but neither is it really man. The moment it becomes man, it becomes so by being animal as well.
Sinfulness is then not sensuousness, not at all; but without sin, no sensuousness and without sexuality, no history. A perfect spirit has neither the one nor the other, which is indeed why the sexual difference is canceled in the resurrection, and why no angel has a history either. Even if Michael had noted down all the missions upon which he had been sent and had accomplished, that is still not his history. It is only in the sexual that the synthesis is posited as a contradiction, but also, as with every contradiction, as a task the history of which begins at that same instant. This is the actuality that freedom’s possibility precedes. But freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. Such thoughtlessness has as little to do with the Scriptures as with thought. The possibility is to be able. It is simple enough in a logical system to say that possibility passes over into actuality. In actuality itself it is less easy and an intermediate term is required. This intermediate term is anxiety, which no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically. Anxiety is not a category of necessity, but neither is it a category of freedom; it is a hobbled freedom where freedom is not free in itself but tethered, not in necessity but in itself. If sin has entered the world by necessity (which is a contradiction) there can be no anxiety. If sin has entered through an abstract liberum arbitrium [free will] (which existed no more in the world in the beginning than it did later, since it is a conceptual monstrosity), then there is no anxiety either. To want to give a logical explanation of sin’s entry into the world is a foolishness that can only occur to people who are comically anxious to find an explanation.
Were I granted a wish here, I would wish that no reader be so profound as to ask: What if Adam had not sinned? The moment actuality is posited, possibility walks by its side as a nothing that tempts all thoughtless persons. If only science could make up its mind to keep people in check and to rein itself in! When someone asks a foolish question it is better not to answer, otherwise one becomes as foolish as the questioner. The folly of that question consists not so much in the question as in its being directed at science. If one stays at home with it and, like Clever Else with her projects, calls together like-minded friends, then one has at least understood, more or less, one’s own stupidity. Science, on the other hand, cannot explain such things. Every science lies either in a logical immanence or in this immanence within a transcendence that it cannot explain. Now sin is precisely that transcendence, that discrimen rerum [critical point], in which sin enters the single individual as the single individual. Sin never enters the world otherwise; nor has it ever done so. So when the single individual is foolish enough to inquire about sin as if it were not the individual’s concern, he asks as a fool, for either he has no idea of what the question is about and so cannot possibly acquire it, or he knows and understands the question and also knows that no science can give him the explanation.
Science has, on the other hand, been at times compliant enough in responding to sentimental wishes with deeply pondered hypotheses, which it then finally admits fail to provide adequate explanations. Which is also of course entirely true, but the confusion lies in science’s not energetically dismissing foolish questions instead, on the contrary, of confirming, superstitious people in their notion that one day a scientific theory-monger would come along who was man enough to hit on the right answer. That sin came into the world 6,000 years ago is said in just the same tone of voice as one might say about Nebuchadnezzar that it was 4,000 years ago that he became an ox.* When the matter is understood in this way, it is not to be wondered at that the explanation fits. What is in one respect the simplest thing in the world has been made into the most difficult. What the most simpleminded person understands in his own way, and quite rightly so because he understands that it is not exactly 6,000 years since sin came into the world, science has with the theory-monger’s art proclaimed as a prize problem still to be satisfactorily answered. How sin came into the world each person understands solely by himself. If he wants to learn it from someone else he eo ipso [by that very fact] misunderstands. The only science that can do a little is psychology; yet it admits that it does not explain more, that it cannot and will not. If any science were able to explain it, everything is confused. That the scientist is said to forget himself is quite true; but then how fortunate it is that sin is no scientific problem, so that no man of science, any more than any theory-monger, is obliged to forget how sin entered the world. If he wanted to do that, if he magnanimously wanted to forget himself, he would in his enthusiasm to explain all of humanity become as comical as that privy councilor who was so conscientious about parting with his calling card to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that in doing so he finally forgot his own name. Or his philosophical enthusiasm will make him so absentminded that he needs a good-natured, level-headed wife, whom he can ask, as Soldin asked Rebecca, when in enthusiastic absentmindedness he too lost himself in the objectivity of chatter: “Rebecca, is it I who am speaking?”
That my much honored age’s admired men of science, men who in their concern for the system, and in their search for it, a concern known to the whole congregation and no doubt includes finding a place within it for sin, may find all this highly unscientific is quite as it should be. 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 one who hunts the thimble and in getting warmer and warmer finds it, not realizing it has been burning in his own hand.
* That the Formula of Concord forbade thinking this concept is nevertheless to be praised precisely as proof of the energy of passion with which it could let thinking run up against the unthinkable, an energy much to be admired in contrast to modern thought, which is all too easygoing.
* For an individual to fall entirely out of the race would mean a modification of the race, whereas should an animal fall out of the species, the species would, on the contrary, be entirely unaffected.
* This proposition about the relation between quantitative definition and new quality has altogether a long history. Indeed all Greek sophistry simply consisted in affirming a quantitative definition, the height of difference hence lying in likeness and unlikeness. In modern philosophy Schelling first resorted to defining in purely quantitative terms in accounting for diversity, later blaming [Carl August von] Eschenmayer [(1768–1852), a German philosopher and physician] for doing the same (in his doctoral dissertation). Hegel laid down the leap [Science of Logic, vol. 1, bk. 1, †3, ch. 2] but in logic. Rosenkranz (in his Psychology) admires Hegel for this. In his latest publication (on Schelling), he reproves Schelling and praises Hegel. But Hegel’s misfortune is precisely in his wanting to put the new quality into effect but then not wanting to do so, since he wants to do it in logic, which, once this is admitted, must acquire another awareness of itself and of its significance.
* What significance they otherwise have as belonging to the history of the human race, as run-ups to the leap, without being able to explain the leap, is another matter.
* The problem is always to have Adam included in the race, and in exactly the same sense in which every other individual is included. This is something dogmatics should attend to, especially for the sake of the Atonement. The doctrine that Adam and Christ correspond to each other explains nothing at all and confuses everything. It may be an analogy but conceptually it is imperfect. Christ alone is an individual who is more than an individual, but for that reason neither does he come in the beginning, but in the fullness of time.
† The contrary is expressed in †1: as the history of the race proceeds, the individual continually begins anew.
* [Romans 3:19]
† [Psalms 51:5; the text has “guilty”]
‡ [Philippians 2:6–8; John 1:29]
* Anyone reflecting on this matter must of course know Franz Baader’s [see note 6 to Chapter II] typically vigorous and authoritative presentation in several works on the meaning of temptation for the consolidation of freedom, and the misunderstanding of taking temptation one-sidedly to be temptation to evil, or as that which is destined to make man fall, when it should rather be regarded as freedom’s necessary other. There is no need to repeat this here. Baader’s works are extant. Nor is it possible to pursue his thought here, since it seems to me that Baader has overlooked the intermediate terms. The transition from innocence to guilt simply through the concept of temptation tends to bring God into what is almost an experimenting relation to man. It ignores the intermediate psychology, the middle term here being only concupiscentia [inordinate desire]. In short, his account is more a dialectical consideration of the concept of temptation than a psychological explanation of the detail.
* [Genesis 3]
* On this one may consult Either/Or (Copenhagen, 1843), especially if noting that in its anguished sympathy and egotism the first part is the melancholy that is explained in the second part.
* [Genesis 2:16–17]
† [Romans 7:5,7]
‡ [Genesis 2:16–17]
* [Genesis 2:7, 18–20]
† [Genesis 2:21]
‡ [Genesis 2:23]
* [Genesis 3:1–6]
† This has no bearing on woman’s imperfection with respect to man. Although anxiety belongs to her more than to the man, anxiety is by no means a sign of imperfection. If we are to speak of imperfection, then it must be found in something else, that in anxiety she seeks beyond herself to another human being, to the man.
* If one went on to say that there is then a question of how the first human being learned to speak, my answer would be that this is very true, but also that the question is beyond this entire investigation’s scope. This must not, however, be understood in the manner of modern philosophy as though to suggest, in my evasive reply, that I could answer the question somewhere else. But this much is certain, that it will not do to have the human being itself as the inventor of language.
† [James 1:13–14]
* [Genesis 1:3]
† [Genesis 3:7–13]
‡ [Cf. Genesis 2:25]
* [Daniel 4:25–31; “made to eat grass like oxen”]