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see this in the human capacity for sadism as set out in Rebelion by Ivan in
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
Although the Fall of humankind results in the terrible capacity for
spiritual evil becoming human, moral evil, this event also initiates a process of
spiritual evolution in the manner of Teilhard’s noosphere. The heroes of the
spirit are ‘spiritual mutants’, like their father Ugly (A Tale of Human Origins) who
stand out from their contemporaries more because of their strangeness than
their heroism. A dialectical ‘evolutionary’ process is initiated between moral
evil and the external influence of God’s Spirit through ‘mutants’, through
whom the spiritual quality of the human may be realised in the sanctified
natural body, even in its organic and biological aspects.
The results of the Fall described in Genesis 3 are numerous. They
include shame (v7), which involves hiding from God, and is coupled with a
pride that gradually leads towards paganism. Another result is a continual
struggle with the demonic forces of evil (Gen.3:15), and yet another –
connected with shame and pride – is a breakdown in relationships. The
experience of Exodus where humans cannot see God and live is the reality of
the Fall, and is contrasted with the direct, immediate communication of the
Garden of Eden.
The most important and conclusive effect, however, is death. What is
meant here is not physical death, but spiritual death. There is no evidence to
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suggest that natural death was not in the universe before the Fall of Genesis 3.
Neither is there any evidence to suggest that the animals created in Genesis 1
and mentioned in Gen 2:19-20 did not include predators, yet the animals
described are not capable of spiritual death as they are not spiritualised. Men,
in common with Bulgakov does not believe that humans are responsible for
death entering the world, but rather the devil. He quotes Wisdom 2:23-24 to
this effect: ‘for God created us for incorruption and made us in the image of
his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and
those who belong to his company experience it’. Spiritualised humans are,
however, capable of a new kind of death that is spiritual. God’s promise in Gen
2:17 that Adam will die the day he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil is clearly false if it refers to physical death, suggesting that the real
referent is in fact this spiritual death . The punishment that Adam ‘will return
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to dust’ (Gen 3:19) infers that humans will return to dust and that is al.
18 Men: Isagogics, p132
19 Men: Magicism and Monotheism, Appendix 8 Part 7
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