Happy fall
Gustave Doré, Adam and Eve Driven out of Eden
It seems that Massimo Scaligero is drawing upon an old theme in The Logos and the New Mysteries, i.e. that from a fall good will come. This is the core reasoning of the Christian tradition known as felix culpa, a Latin phrase which means happy fall, a way of understanding the Fall as having a positive outcome in the redemption of mankind through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
As an anthroposophist, if not a paid-up member of the society, Scaligero would have been intimately familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s notion of the hindrances placed before man’s evolution by the Luciferic forces. In this context, to reach love one must first become light, and this is what Lucifer brought to man as the friend of man. Light can lead to evil, but it must exist if we are to become free. Leading life according to an externally given law is tantamount to evil, at least it is a sub-human existence. Law becomes grace as the law is lifted out of man’s own heart. This is the resurrection that Christ brought to man, this is the Christ impulse. After Golgotha, knowledge can be lifted up to love.
In Scaligero, dialectical thought is the external law, it is nature opposed to us. This is the state of felix culpa, the Luciferic hindrance, out of which good will come. ‘Freedom is born of our opposition to our own nature’, as he explains in The Logos and the New Mysteries.
It is legitimate to think that if the original relation had ruled dialectical thought we would have thought truth automatically. We would not have had a nature opposed to us, because within it we would have felt just as we do within our own bodies. The conflict with another person’s truth would not have been possible. Evil would not have existed upon the Earth; yet humans would not have had the possibility of freedom.
Freedom is born of our opposition to our own nature - primarily to our spiritual nature. If a paradisiacal state was the original state of human beings, it was undoubtedly a poor relation, like a transcendent virtue, which directs the processes of reality through us, Human beings had to avoid such a transcendent realm to become free. (35-6)
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
To bring a sword
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Just a thought:
We swim in the medium of liberalism. Throughout our school and working lives, the non-discriminative principles, known euphemistically as ‘political correctness’, are drilled into us. In a Hollywood-Disneyland world of media stereotypes, the ‘good’ guys always win, where the good is equated with the liberal and ‘progressive’; and the cops get the villains, leaving the world a safer place for homo economicus to pursue his nihilistic dreams. (Traditionalism: the only radicalism) John Dunn
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