Fall, the

A story told by Jews, Muslims, and especially Christians. It explains why human beings no longer live in paradise close to GOD. Religious people have told many different stories to explain why the world we live in is not everything we might wish for. According to several stories told in ancient Mesopotamia, the gods created human beings to do the work they themselves did not want do (see MESOPOTAMIAN RELIGIONS). Other peoples have told stories about successive ages in which the world gets progressively worse and we, unfortunately, are living in the last age. Examples of this kind of story are Hesiod's account of the fi ve ages of the world, gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron; stories in India of the four yugas; and the Japanese Buddhist notion of MAPPO. According to Gnostics and Manichaeans, the universe and people came into being when light and goodness somehow became mixed with darkness and EVIL. In this view, it is not the fall but creation itself that disturbs the original ideal state (see GNOSTICISM and MANICHAEISM). The Hebrew BIBLE records another story, the story of the Fall. According to Christian interpretation, it tells how the serpent tempted the mother of all people, EVE. The god YHWH ("the Lord") had forbidden ADAM and Eve to eat from two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent convinced Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge. She did, and then tempted Adam to do so, too. As a result, God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden. He cursed Eve to bear children in pain, and he cursed Adam to till the ground with diffi culty. Death was also a result of the Fall. Later folklore elaborated this story. Jews, Christians, and Muslims came to identify the serpent with SATAN. They told different versions of a story in which Satan was a fallen ANGEL. Muslims also told how Adam and Eve quarreled after the Fall and how God reconciled them at the Mount of Mercy in the sacred area around MECCA. The story of the Fall is especially signifi cant in CHRISTIANITY. Traditional Christians see it as the event that made it necessary for JESUS to become incarnate and die on the cross. In the NEW TESTAMENT PAUL develops these ideas most fully. He makes Jesus into the second or new Adam, who undoes what the fi rst or old Adam had done. Later, under the infl uence of Paul, AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO formulated the idea of original SIN. In this view sin is not an act done against God's will; it is a state of life that began with the Fall. Because of the Fall, all human beings live in sin from the moment they are conceived. Augustine's views later became the basis for John CALVIN's notion that after the Fall, human beings live in a state of utter depravity. That is, without GRACE they are unable to do what pleases God. Not all of those who have told the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve have seen it as something negative. Many Gnostics believed that the god of the Jews who created the world as an evil, deluded being. For them the central religious problem was ignorance; knowledge was the means to SALVATION. Salvation began when Eve violated the commands of the evil creator and ate from the tree of knowledge. Thus, what Jews, Christians, and Muslims see as the fi rst transgression was, for Gnostics, the beginning of salvation.