Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Was the Fall Necessary?

Karl White inquires,

Doesn't the classical doctrine of Theism as applied to Christianity require that the temptation in Eden and subsequent Fall were predestined and inescapable? I say this because if Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions. So if Adam had never sinned, then Jesus's salvific role would have been redundant, and an 'unemployable' Jesus makes no sense whatsoever. Or am I missing something?

The reasoning seems to be as follows. (1) The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead; (2) the man Jesus is essentially the savior; (3) the persons of the Godhead are necessary beings; ergo, (4) the salvific role is necessarily instantiated; (5) the salvific role is instantiated iff the Fall occurs; ergo, (6) the Fall had to happen and was therefore "inescapable."

I deny (6) by denying (1). 

As I understand the classical Christian narrative, the lapsus and subsequent ejection from paradise were contingent 'events,' ones that would not have occurred had it not been for Adam's disobedience. Adam sinned, and he sinned freely. There was no necessity that he sin and thus no necessity that the Fall occur. Of course, God foreknew what Adam would do; but divine foreknowledge is presumably compatible with human freedom in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.

That Adam possessed free will before the Fall follows, I think, from his having been created in the divine image. (So he had free will before eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.) The imago dei is of course to be taken in a spiritual, not a physical sense.  It means that man, though an animal, is a spiritual animal unlike all the other animals.  God, a free Spirit, created in Adam a little free spirit, a reflection of himself, although reflection is not quite the word. 

So the Fall need not have occurred. But it did, and man fell out of right relation to God and into his present miserable predicament which includes of course the death sentence under which man now lives as punishment for his primordial act of rebellion.  The current predicament is one from which man cannot save himself by his own efforts.  So God, having mercy on man, decides to send a Redeemer and Savior.

But the enormity of the Original Offense against God is such that only a divine being can make it good and restore man to God's good graces.  So God sends his own divine Son ("begotten not made") to suffer and die for our sins.  This is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, co-eternal with the Father, a purely spiritual necessary being like the Father. He enters the material world by being born of the virgin Mary.  This is the Incarnation.

Now just as the Fall was contingent, so is the Incarnation. It need not have occurred. It is doubly contingent: contingent on Adam's free sin and God's free decision to save humanity.

So my answer to my reader is as follows. The salvific role need never have been instantiated. God need never have become man. Humanity might still be in he prelapsarian, paradisical state, living forever with subtle indestructible bodies unlike the gross bodies we are presently equipped with. The man Jesus is not a person of the Godhead. There was no necessity that the Fall occur.

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Bill Vallicella

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7 responses to “Was the Fall Necessary?”

  1. Matthew Kirby Avatar
    Matthew Kirby

    I see a number of problems with the quoted statement.
    1. Christ’s salvific role (or lack of same in a hypothetical alternative case) does not involve any “characterisation” of his Divine Essence whatsoever, according to classical theism. All divine “roles” within Creation are relational rather than substantial/essential attributes in God, attributed by extrinsic denomination, just as the Sun’s role in warming us does not affect it or “render it such”. The formal and efficient causality is all one-way. However, these roles do correspond to essential characteristics in Him (e.g., mercy, justice, etc.). The “difference” they make to what might otherwise be, is all on our finite, contingent side.
    2. To say that “if Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change” is theologically erroneous if said without qualification. That qualification is to add the word “divine” before the word “essence”, since his human nature was undeniably subject to change. But, once this is done, then the rest of the attempted inference does not follow, since all of the contingency attributed by orthodox Christianity to Christ’s salvific roles is attributed via the instrumentality of the mutable and (considered a priori) contingent human nature.
    3. It is not universally agreed among theologians, whether ancient or modern, that without the Fall there would have been no Incarnation. Some have speculated that unfallen humanity could still have been taken to a new spiritual level by the Incarnation, without the need for the redemptive dimension.
    4. Whatever the case with the above question, with or without Incarnation, with or without Creation itself, talk of an “unemployable” Christ makes no sense, given his Divine Person is the eternal and intrinsically necessary Divine Logos.
    Regarding your response Bill, my only major reservation is your and denial of (1), when it is (2) that is problematic. The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead, if we understand “the man Jesus” to be denominative rather than descriptive. If we replace it in both (1) and (2) with “the human nature of Jesus”, then (1) can and must be denied.
    (2) is a problem because, if “the man Jesus” stands in for the whole person (divine plus human), then we have to deny it as stated simpliciter, since the divinity has the quality of being saviour by extrinsic denomination as noted above. But even if we restrict “the man Jesus” to mean “the human nature of Jesus”, I am not sure the rest of the statement follows, if we are using the word “essentially” in the technical sense, that is, to mean “without which it would not be the thing it is” or “belonging to the intrinsic nature per se“. Whereas I believe the proposition is fair enough if said according to every-day usage and connotations.

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  2. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    Fr. Kirby,
    Your comments are superb. Thank you very much.
    As for #3, does the RCC have an official position on this question?
    As for #4, I don’t think we have any real disagreement. We agree that the 2nd person of the Trinity, considered in itself, and thus apart from the Incarnation, does not have a human nature, and is therefore not a man. That is why “Jesus is a person of the Godhead” is false.

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  3. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    Matt,
    Here is something that puzzles me.
    If the Word is a necessary being, and the union of the Word with human nature is not accidental, but essential, are we to conclude that the Word has a concrete human body and human soul in every possible world, and thus at every time? It would seem so. If x is united with N essentially, then x is united with N in every possible world in which x exists. So if x is a necessary being, then x is united with N in every possible world, period, which is to say that there is no possible world in which x is not united with N. Therefore,
    1) If the Word is united to a human nature essentially, then there is no possible world in which the Word is not united to a human nature.
    But then how is this consistent with the belief that the Incarnation was an historical event that occurred at a particular time and whose occurrence was contingent, not necessary? God became man to save man from the sin he incurred with Adam’s fall, a fall that was itself contingent upon Adam’s free choice to violate the divine command. That is,
    2) There are possible worlds in which God does not create at all, and possible worlds in which God creates humans but there is no Fall, no need for Redemption, and thus no need for Incarnation.
    Therefore
    3) There are possible worlds in which the Word is not united to a human nature.
    Therefore
    4) It is not the case that the Word is united to a human nature essentially. (From 1, 3 by modus tollens)
    Therefore
    5) The Word is united to a human nature accidentally.
    But this is contrary to the orthodox view at least as explained by Fr. White who draws upon Thomas. White tells us that “the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, ‘conjoined instrument.’ The being of the man Jesus is the being of the Word.” (83) We are also told that the unity is “substantial not accidental.” (83)
    See here: https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2018/10/more-on-the-hypostatic-union-1.html

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  4. Fr Matthew Kirby Avatar
    Fr Matthew Kirby

    Bill,
    “Jesus is a person of the Godhead” is true because the name Jesus is a personal denomination, not a reference to an essence or nature. “Jesus’ humanity is a person of the Godhead” is, however false. And your preceding sentence is true, given your careful qualifications.
    Before I attempt to answer your question, allow me to quote from the article of Aquinas referenced by White and yourself.
    “Obj. 2: Further, whatever comes to a thing that is complete in being comes to it accidentally, for an accident is said to be what can come or go without the subject being corrupted. But human nature came to Christ in time, Who had perfect being from eternity. Therefore it came to Him accidentally. Obj. 3: Further, whatever does not pertain to the nature or the essence of a thing is its accident, for whatever is, is either a substance or an accident. But human nature does not pertain to the Divine Essence or Nature of the Son of God, for the union did not take place in the nature, as was said above (A. 1). Hence the human nature must have accrued accidentally to the Son of God.”
    “Reply Obj. 2: Whatever accrues after the completion of the being comes accidentally, unless it be taken into communion with the complete being, just as in the resurrection the body comes to the soul which pre-exists, yet not accidentally, because it is assumed unto the same being, so that the body has vital being through the soul; but it is not so with whiteness, for the being of whiteness is other than the being of man to which whiteness comes. But the Word of God from all eternity had complete being in hypostasis or person; while in time the human nature accrued to it, not as if it were assumed unto one being inasmuch as this is of the nature (even as the body is assumed to the being of the soul), but to one being inasmuch as this is of the hypostasis or person. Hence the human nature is not accidentally united to the Son of God. Reply Obj. 3: Accident is divided against substance. Now substance, as is plain from Metaph. v, 25, is taken in two ways: first, for essence or nature; secondly, for suppositum or hypostasis–hence the union having taken place in the hypostasis, is enough to show that it is not an accidental union, although the union did not take place in the nature.”

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  5. Fr Matthew Kirby Avatar
    Fr Matthew Kirby

    So, it is clear that when the “accidental” acquisition of the human nature is being denied by Aquinas, the denial is using a definition of accidental that is not equivalent to “non-essential to the already existing nature”, since the latter adjectival phrase is in fact affirmed implicitly.
    Instead, what is denied is the proposition that the human nature is not substantial and subsistent, but merely a quality accruing or outer garment ‘stuck on’ to the Nature of the Logos. But such a proposition would impinge upon both the reality of the humanity and the impassibility of the divinity.
    See also these 2 quotations from the same article:
    “Whatever is predicated accidentally, predicates, not substance, but quantity, or quality, or some other mode of being.”
    “Now the Catholic faith, holding the mean between the aforesaid positions, does not affirm that the union of God and man took place in the essence or nature, nor yet in something accidental, but midway, in a subsistence or hypostasis.”
    BTW, I am not a Roman Catholic priest, but belong to the Anglican Catholic Church. I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned that before or not here or in our emailed correspondence. Not that it matters in this context, but I did not want to misrepresent my jurisdictional membership. Having said that, I am pretty certain no Catholic jurisdiction, Eastern or Western, has ever pronounced dogmatically on the quite speculative question of what would have happened regarding the Incarnation without the human Fall.

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  6. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    Fr Kirby,
    It is clear that ‘Jesus’ cannot be a name for an essence or nature. When you say that ‘Jesus’ is a personal denomination, I take it you mean that ‘Jesus’ names the 2nd person of the Trinity which, after the Incarnaton, is the person of Jesus. Is that right?
    But one who does not assume the one-person-two-natures Christology would more reasonably take ‘Jesus’ to be a name for a particular man, who would not have existed had God not created a material universe, unlike the Son (Word, Logos) who exists of metaphysical necessity. Will you grant me that?

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  7. Fr Matthew Kirby Avatar
    Fr Matthew Kirby

    “When you say that ‘Jesus’ is a personal denomination, I take it you mean that ‘Jesus’ names the 2nd person of the Trinity which, after the Incarnaton, is the person of Jesus. Is that right?”
    Yes, though I would prefer to express it thusly, “Jesus names the 2nd Person of the Trinity, who acquires this personal name (from a human perspective) with and via his human nature at the time of the Incarnation”.
    “But one who does not assume the one-person-two-natures Christology would more reasonably take ‘Jesus’ to be a name for a particular man, who would not have existed had God not created a material universe, unlike the Son (Word, Logos) who exists of metaphysical necessity. Will you grant me that?”
    Not assuming the Chalcedonian Christology could mean all sorts of things, depending on whether any kind of Incarnation was assumed, and if so, which non-orthodox one was framing the judgement. However, since for every other human being the human nature as concretised substantially is subsistent in its own nature, whereas Christ’s Human Nature is anhypostatic of itself, contingency of that nature’s actualisation as concrete would indeed “more reasonably” imply contingency of the associated personal hypostasis if this enhypostatic union is denied or unknown.
    If one does work within the orthodox paradigm, the statement would become “Jesus is the name for a particular man, who would not have existed as a man with this human name had God not created a material universe, but would have existed instead only in His eternal Divine Nature as God the Son, which is metaphysically necessary.”

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