The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity

slide 10 of 17
The ‘Fall from Grace’ determines the conditions from which the Christian adherent seeks salvation. In “Delineations of Original Sin” Schuon undertakes to describe the nature of the fallen condition and original sin—one of the most important but frequently distorted teachings of Christianity—which one must understand in order to escape that condition and which cannot be ‘cured’, so to speak, by an exclusively mechanical morality, imposed from without.

If we wish to give the word “sin” its broadest and deepest meaning, we would say that it expresses above all an attitude of the heart; hence a “being” and not simply a “doing” or “not doing”.… (from “Delineations of Original Sin”, p. 56)

…Horizontality is to sin against transcendence, thus to forget God and consequently the meaning of life; and outwardness is to sin against immanence, thus to forget our immortal soul and consequently its vocation. In assuming that the original sin was an act—whatever the form given it by a particular mythology—we shall say, on the one hand, that this act had as its effect the two kinds of neglect just mentioned and, on the other hand, that this neglect predisposes to the indefinite repetition of the original transgression; every sinful action repeats the drama of the forbidden fruit. (from “Delineations of Original Sin”, p. 57)

As to The Fall itself:

Eve and Adam succumbed to the temptation to wish to be more than they could be.…The builders of the Tower of Babel, as well as the Titans, Prometheus, and Icarus, wished to put themselves improperly in God’s place; they too suffered the humiliating chastisement of a fall. According to the Bible, the forbidden tree was one of discernment between “good” and “evil”…its source could not be in the creature; to claim it for oneself is to wish to be equal to the Creator, and that is the very essence of sin—of all sin. (from “Delineations of Original Sin”, p. 58)

The Fall, however, does not describe an actual separation of our “being” from God, but rather one of our ready ability to “know” Him, and this which manifests itself in our will:

Indeed, the sinner decides what is good, counter to the objective nature of things; he willingly deludes himself about things and about himself; whence the fall, which is nothing other than the reaction of reality.…The fall was, precisely, the rupture between reason and Intellect, the ego and the Self.… (from “Delineations of Original Sin”, p. 58-9)

In the Person of the Holy Spirit, God is present— immanent— in all things: hence the possibility of Transfiguration and Return.