Date: August 11, 2022
Evola: No God has ever controlled man. Divine despotism is a fantasy. Man, at a given moment, wanted to be free. He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed to throw off the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him. Thereupon he was allowed to suffer all the consequences of his liberation.
My thinking is this: God gave us free will, God is omniscient, he knew what would happen in the Garden of Eden. At the very least, you have to say God permitted man to potentially rebel against him. He was at least neutral. If it was against God’s will, it would not have happened. We were tempted by Satan, and we gave in to the temptation. We did not yet know good and evil. But you can’t say it’s Satan’s fault. We could have been tempted and never acted out the temptation. There was a genuine desire for “freedom”, for the knowledge of good and evil that we did not have. We exited the rapturic state of the direct presence of God into the material World, and now took shame in our nakedness (since it now served a reproductive purpose).
Powerful hadith from Muhammad on this issue:
By the One in Whose Hand is my soul, were you not to commit sins, Allah would replace you with a people who would commit sins, and they would seek forgiveness from Allah, and Allah would forgive them. (Sahih Muslim 2749)
God, in a certain sense, wills us to sin, because it provides us a chance to seek his forgiveness, and thus improve our souls.
You can think of it like this: in Heaven, the passions of the body are removed, and the only thing remaining is the intent of the rational soul. The rational soul can consciously affirm or deny God and his commands. Those who will eternally rationally will and affirm God (those who are true believers in their hearts) go to heaven, those who will eternally deny God are estranged from him in hell. If there is external temptation in heaven (there never will be, but this is hypothetical): the true believers rationally will Good, they have knowledge of good and evil and can differentiate between the two. If they are acting on the basis of the constitution of their soul and they are true believers, they will not act out this temptation. Whereas Adam and Eve were in the same situation and they acted out the temptation. So, in a sense, the act of being born in this world paves a way for us to achieve the perfection through freedom that was denied us before the Fall.
I dislike the Christian concept of original sin and our inherent “fallenness”. The consequence of the fall is a material body in a material world; these are the consequences of being “liberated”. But man was made in God’s image, man’s innate nature is perfect; it is the world that corrupts him. With the Christian interpretation of the Fall, creation has to be a negative, our existence itself must be a punishment and we need a savior that can redeem us in the eyes of God. This is why I think Gnosticism is a more consistent Christianity. Mainstream Christianity adopted Neoplatonic concepts and had to affirm creation as something beneath higher reality but reflective of it. Gnosticism denied this in favor of a more consistent theology of the Fall.
Julius Evola Christianity Islam Muhammad Adam The Fall Gnosticism Neoplatonism God Satan