The Way of Jesus the Messiah spread within the Pagan Roman Empire.  It confronted a wide range of Pagan doctrines and philosophies.  Yet this variety had common ideas.  One common doctrine explained how each one of us came to be.  This idea is still held in the Shia branch of Islam.

It goes like this:  Before the person, her (or his) soul was an immaterial being in divine bliss high in the celestial realm.  Then her soul starts to fall, according to a spiritual gravity.  The soul runs into and accrues matter on the way down.  The descent is never smooth, leaving her soul without some capacities that other souls have.  When the descent is complete, the little tyke emerges from the womb, her soul animating her body and held there by the spirit of the descent, the fated trajectory of her tumble.

Thus, this newborn infant who looks so innocent is really a divine soul descended into material matter.

And, some would add, the “divine” is “good” and the “material” “evil”.

Now, let us apply the tool of “nestedness” to the following definition:

“Judgment is a relation between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’”.

Looks easy.  The obvious answer is:

Relation (“what is” (“what ought to be”))

This makes sense if “what ought to be” made “what is” possible, such as:

Hungry (act of eating (food will satisfy hunger))

But then, it would not make sense if “what is” made “what ought to be” possible, such as:

Earning ( making money (working))

Instead, relation (“what ought to be” (“what is”)) does the trick.

What if Person A was hiding a surprise gift for Person B, then

“So B does not find it” (hidden gift (locating a good hiding spot))

Here, “what ought to be” (“what is” (relation))

“So B does not find it” puts “hidden gift” into context.

“Locating a good hiding spot” makes the “hidden gift” possible.

So, judgment can get complicated, even though it may be expressed with such simplicity.

What does this mean?

Judgment is the most flexible three-element being.

“Nestedness” is a very useful semiotic tool for investigating judgments.

And finally, I am guessing that Original Sin has something to do with Judgment.

If the previous blog sounded too technical, rest easy.

“Nestedness” is a way to depict precission.

In precission: “Thirdness emerges from secondness and secondness emerges from firstness”

The nested form looks like this:

Thirdness (secondness (firstness))

In these blogs, I am focusing on “judgment” as a type of thirdness.

“Judgment” (thirdness) puts “a situation” (secondness) into context or relation.

And “potential” (firstness) makes “the situation” (secondness) possible.

In terms of nestedness:

Judgment (situation (potential))

This is the semiotic tool that I will use.

For the next blogs, discussing Tatha Wiley’s Original Sin (2002), I will rely on a foundational semiotic tool: “precission”.

Charles Sanders Peirce formulated precission as a way to describe a crucial relation between his three categories of being: thirdness, secondness and firstness.

The categories are both simple and difficult to comprehend.

Thirdness is the realm of sign, mediation and judgment.  Every being in thirdness brings at least two other beings into relation.  Three elements are required, hence the term: “thirdness”.  Beings in thirdness cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched.  They are purely relational.

Secondness is the realm of actuality, cause and effect, brute force, and situations.  This is the realm of the senses, plus more, since many physical processes cannot be sensed.  Consider the idea of phenomena.  “Phenomena” require “something to be observed” and “an observer”.  At least two elements are required, hence the term: “secondness”.

Firstness is the realm of possibility, potential, purpose, essence, design and implications.   Imagine walking up to someone and asking: “What is the matter?”  This “what” can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched, but that is not what the question is about.  The question is about what could happen.

Another way to say it: “Matter” makes “what is observed” possible.

Only one element is required, hence the term: “firstness”.

Precission is the relation of “emergence” between the categories:  Each category “emerges” or “precinds from” the immediate lower category.  Thirdness prescinds from secondness.  Secondness prescinds from Firstness.

I finish my thoughts on Zimmerman’s book by speculating on what “Baptism for remission of sins” might mean after An Archaeology of the Fall.

In a way, Augustine was correct.  Humans have fallen from their natural state, where words were grounded in referentiality.  Now, there is no solid earth beneath us.  We are standing in mud.  We are mud.

If a person is anima joined to caro through the spiritual principle of gravity – er, descent – then one can say we land on water.  Each of us land in a sea of symbolic orders, ever shifting, exclusive domains interpenetrating exclusive domains, each domain calling the person to swim in their waters.

Baptism gets us onto a boat.  Baptism is like learning to swim.  Baptism is like finding land.  These three metaphors constitute a “remission of Original Sin” because, without it, there is only disorientation.  In a world without Jesus the Christ, who knows which way is up?

All the universal religions tell – in their own way – which way is up.  What makes Jesus unique is that he – himself – is the way up.  The Christian tradition has always proclaimed this.  For that reason, Jesus is problematic to all other symbolic orders.  Jesus has his hand in the water, ready to pull you up.

Of course, if there are only symbolic orders, then everything is relative.  Not so. Symbolic orders inspire us to construct indexes and icons that build social constructions that are anything but relative.  That is why the Progressives have worked to empty the courts, the legislatures, the executive suites, the media and the universities of anyone who is not Progressive.  That is the only way to do what they were created to do:  Control the destructive automatons.

Do you think Progressivism is the way up?  Of course you do.  We all do. There are so many expressions, reasons, feelings, and intuitions for why this way is up.  But these interlocking symbols are all only words.  You will realize their meanings only when the social constructions are actualized.

Will Baptism become tangible then?   Will we then need a hand to save us from drowning?  Who knows?  Ask a fatherless child.

Of course, this is only speculation.  Others, greater than me, will follow.

This concludes my thoughts on Zimmerman’s book.  God bless.

The story of Pelagius and Augustine is full of intrigue.  After the Council of Diospolis (415 AD) gave Pelagius the green light, the Council of Carthage (418) disputed its findings.  Pope Zozimus issued his Tractoria (418) just as the curtain fell on the Roman Empire.

Eleven centuries later, at the Council of Trent, the question of Original Sin was raised.  Gone were the old models of the human as anima joined to caro by spiritus.  New models of the human were abounding.  It is amazing that the Council did as well as it did.  One of the two key canons of the Council of Carthage was presented. The other was disregarded.

What amazes me in reading Zimmerman’s end-of-life book is that his own work attempted the same turn as the Council of Trent.  He looked at the Council of Trent in the same way that it looked at the Council of Carthage, knowing that some of it would keep and some of it would not.  The last 450 years have been equivalent to 1100 years at the time of Trent.  Yet, Zimmerman could not do the sorting.

In a way, he did not have all the pieces of the puzzle of “where he stood”.  By 1998, when he published, details of the evolutionary trajectory of the hominids were becoming irrefutable.  When he published in 1998, it made sense that Adam – the first human – would have to be placed deep into the past, before the appearance of the first fossils of anatomically modern humans.   At this time, speech was regarded as one of Homo sapiens’ species-specific traits.  Evolutionary biologists considered the evolution of speech to be the same as the evolution of language (the biological capacity to talk).

In this, Zimmerman has been joined by a number of Christians exploring the question of “who Adam and Eve might have been”?

I write in 2012.  Details of the evolutionary trajectory of the hominids have not changed much.  Our understanding of talk has.  There has been a revolution in the field of semiotics.  Much of that is due to Thomas Sebeok and John Deely.

The evolution of talk differs from the evolution of language.  “Adam” – the first human – can now be distinguished from “Adam” – the person in the Story of Adam and Eve.  That is the premise of An Archaeology of the Fall.

Pelagius was a well-regarded British monk full of self-improvement platitudes and a “you can do it” attitude.  So he went to Rome in order to spread his good news.

His news was that he found a principle in which humans could work their way to salvation.  He had figured out that the immaterial principle that bound anima to caro could be moulded by reason and good practice, which he had by the bushel and was ready to sell to the highest bidder.

He was selling “free will without grace” or maybe, “good works without grace”.  Good works were the way to earn passage to heaven.

This upset the Bishop of Carthage, whose previous career as a scam artist – er, Manichean philosopher – allowed him to smell a rat.  He countered forcefully.  There could be no salvation without grace, no good works without grace, nothing without God’s inspiration.

But did Augustine have a model for how the person comes to be?  Drawing on the resources of his previous career, he proposed a model very similar to the pagans: The anima – created for each person by God – joined the caro – from the union of man and woman – by way of spiritual descent.

The caveat: Because of Adam’s transgression, the “landing point” was lower than Adam and Eve as they were created by sanctifying grace, lower than humans in their natural state of animalistic freedom, lower than the imaginary humans chained inside of Plato’s cave.  Every human was born into Original Sin.

Help.  I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

The only way to get up is to get baptized.  Baptism is the first, crucial installment of divine grace, the remission of Original Sin.  That remission will allow the solution: an ascent to the Father through his divine grace.  Jesus is the minister of that grace.  Jesus will lift you up.

With this caveat in mind, Augustine’s apparently stupid proposals begin to make sense.  Augustine did everything he could to make the Fall such a huge transition that, when it was coupled to the (formerly pagan) model of descent of the soul, the end point was so deep that emergency steps had to be taken to get out of the hole.

Tertullian (155-220 AD) had a clever idea that would fit the notion that Adam and Eve were the first Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  (Zimmerman was not twisted enough to imagine this possibility, thank God.)

Here is the set-up:  Adam and Eve were the first parents.  As such, they generated the potential for all the bodies and the souls of future humanity.   Both caro and anima were fallen.  Both contain evil substances.

What happens when this is put into the model of human nature as “amina joined to caro by way of spiritus”?   We can conjure “sexual intercourse” as the spiritual principle whereby the fallen soul is inseminated into the fallen body.   Consequently, sex is pernicious.  The very act is bathed in Original Sin.  Evil substances are involved.  The product is corrupt.

“The Fall” contaminates “the joining of anima to caro” and makes material the immaterial principle – the spiritus.  The spiritus becomes the principle of sexual intercourse in all its Thing-filled aspects – its monstrous carnality – its sublime overwhelming of the senses – its beautiful grossness.

So what is the solution to be?

Fortunately, the Christian tradition did not adopt Tertullian’s views as definitive.

Enter Irenaeus (125-202 AD) who saw that Genesis 2.4-on actually presented a different model for the creation of humans.  The anima is breathed into the caro by God.  The spiritual principle is “inspiration”

With this discovery, he could argue against many pagan syncretic symbolic orders – so called “heresies” – especially those who configured Adam as a gnostic angelic emanation or those who saw Adam as a piece of clay imprisoning a soul.

What about the Story of the Fall?  Adam and Eve’s disobedience showed a lack of awareness and that lack of awareness created a lack of appreciation for their circumstances.

Their fortune was to be hanging out with God in Paradise.  Their fate was what – in the USA – we could call “teen spirit”.  The modern movie plot would be something like this: Two teenagers end up sharing a house with the smartest, wisest, and most powerful person on Earth.  Then they do the one thing that he told them not to.  They have to leave.  He drops them off in east L.A.

The solution to the Fall is to gain the awareness and appreciation that comes from Jesus the Christ.  Grace is needed to do this.  Grace increases awareness and appreciation.  That is why the Sacraments make sense.  We will be judged on our awareness and appreciation.   What is the end of our awareness and appreciation?  Jesus is the Alpha and Omega.  All goodness passes through Him.

When you die, your anima is not washed of memories then recycled, it is judged then given a new caro.

No doubt, to pagans, that sounded completely nonsensical.  It did not belong to their symbolic orders.

Zimmerman’s Chapters 12, 13, 14 and 15 (titled “Irenaeus on Original Sin”, “Pioneer theology of Irenaeus:, “Pre-Augustine Fathers”, and “The Genius of St. Augustine”) turn on the previous blog.  That blog reflects the ancient model of human nature: Soul – anima – is joined to flesh – caro – through an immaterial – spiritus – principle.

After reading quite a few books by Henry Corbin (one of the first Westerners to write about Iran, the soul of Persia), I have an inkling of how the human being comes into this world:  The anima is joined to the caro through spiritus.  Sound familiar?

The question is how?

Plato had a model that reflected the pagan world.   The anima descends to the caro.  The spiritual principle is “descent”.

If you imagine a symbolic order congealing around this model, you might think that the motif of “return” or “ascent” would be prominent.  How does the anima ascend back to the source?  By ridding itself of the earthly burden – the earthly distractions – of the caro.   In the extreme, you might get the world according to Mani, where the good, beautiful, life-filled anima endeavors to escape the bad, ugly, dying caro.  Or you might get hundreds of prescriptions designed to accomplish the ascent through ritual action.  Or you might die ao your soul would get recycled.

Now, enter the Jews (and Christians) with all that Adam and Eve business.

Would it not be perfectly sensible to fit the Story of Adam and Eve into the descent model?  The pre-lapse Adam would be like anima (good, beautiful, life-filled) and the post-lapse Adam would be like the rest of us after the soul’s descent (trying to escape the bad, ugly, and dying caro).

“The Fall” would fit its billing and parallel the familiar – pagan – model of human nature.