Fall

The Fall is the event recounted in Genesis 3, in which the first man and woman ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, became mortal, and left the garden of Eden. Genesis never uses the name, which borrows an image of loss, a body dropping from a height. In the Latin West after Augustine the image came to signify the corruption of human nature and the transmission of Adam’s guilt to every descendant. The Easter proclamation of the Western church hails Adam’s sin as a felix culpa, a “happy fault,” for the Redeemer it occasioned. Within the framework of the Restoration the name endures, and the descent takes its place within the plan of God.

Naked and Subtle

The narrative of Genesis turns upon a pun. The man and woman “were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed,” and in the next sentence the serpent is “more subtil than any beast of the field” (Genesis 2:25; 3:1). The Hebrew ’arummim, “naked,” and ’arum, “shrewd,” differ by little more than a vowel, an echo that would hardly have escaped Hebrew hearers, setting the couple’s innocence beside the tempter’s cunning. The serpent promises that they will become as gods. Eve weighs the tree, seeing that it “was good for food,” that it “became pleasant to the eyes,” and that it was “a tree to be desired to make her wise” (Moses 4:12).

Interpreters have long dwelt upon the serpent’s deceit, yet Genesis itself confirms that his promise contained a truth. The eyes of the man and woman were opened, and the Lord God acknowledged that the man had become as one of the divine company, knowing good and evil. The word sin appears nowhere in the account, entering the biblical text only in the next chapter, with the Lord’s warning to Cain. The story records a genuine gain at a genuine cost, innocence exchanged for toil, mortality, and exile from the presence of God. Restoration scripture takes up this double inheritance and gives Eve the clearest voice in explaining it.

Transgression and the Song of Eve

Lehi reasons that had Adam not transgressed, all created things would have continued forever in their first state, and the first parents “would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery” (2 Nephi 2:22-23). The Book of Moses supplies an ending that Genesis lacks. After the expulsion Adam blesses God, and Eve, hearing him, is glad: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption” (Moses 5:11). The first recorded reflection upon the Fall in Restoration scripture is thus a hymn of praise, and Eve supplies its reasons.

The same record answers the Augustinian doctrine directly. When Adam asks why men must repent and be baptized, the Lord replies, “Behold I have forgiven thee thy transgression in the Garden of Eden,” and the text adds that “the Son of God hath atoned for original guilt, wherein the sins of the parents cannot be answered upon the heads of the children” (Moses 6:53-54). Latter-day Saint teaching accordingly distinguishes sin, an act inherently wrong, from transgression, an act wrong because formally prohibited. Elder Dallin H. Oaks called Eve’s choice “formally a transgression but eternally a glorious necessity,” and declared that Latter-day Saints “celebrate Eve’s act and honor her wisdom and courage.”

The Way of the Tree of Life

The Lord then “placed at the east of the Garden of Eden, cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life” (Moses 4:31). The garden thereby takes the shape of a sanctuary, entered from the east like the tabernacle of Israel. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, following the fourth-century poet Ephrem the Syrian, reads the tree of knowledge as the veil of that sanctuary, a curtain before the tree of life, which answers to the Holy of Holies. In this reading the fruit was good, and the Father meant Adam and Eve eventually to eat of the tree of life, once mortal experience had taught them to distinguish good from evil. Their transgression lay in partaking while unprepared.

Alma draws the consequence for the whole human condition. Because the tree of life was withheld, “there was a space granted unto man in which he might repent; therefore this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God.” Had they eaten at once, “they would have been forever miserable, having no preparatory state” (Alma 12:24, 26). From this premise it follows that the cherubim who barred the way also preserved it, holding the tree in reserve until a people could be made ready. Mortality becomes, on Alma’s account, the appointed interval in which knowledge already gained is joined to the wisdom required to bear it.

Fallen Forward

Mormon transhumanists find in this sequence the origin of humanity’s vocation to grow in knowledge and power. The Association’s Topical Guide holds that “humanity fell forward,” describing the Fall as “a deliberate descent into mortality that made knowledge, growth, suffering, joy, and exaltation possible.” On this reading the sciences continue the work Eve began with open eyes. Bioethicists wary of human enhancement read the same chapter in the opposite direction, as a warning against seizing godlike knowledge on human terms. Restoration scripture accepts the knowledge as good and still records a transgression and posts a guard, so that both readings must answer to the question of timing that the cherubim embody.

The hazard of premature knowledge has already acquired a clinical form. In November 2018 the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls whose embryonic genomes he had altered with the gene-editing tool CRISPR, disabling the gene CCR5 in an attempt to confer resistance to HIV. He proceeded without adequate evidence of safety or oversight, and the effects on the children’s immune systems remain uncertain. In December 2019 a court in Shenzhen sentenced him to three years in prison. The power to rewrite the human germline arrived in that laboratory before the wisdom and institutions needed to govern it, which is the very unpreparedness Bradshaw locates in Eden.

A fall is a drop from a height, and the first parents did descend, out of God’s presence into a world of labor and death. Restoration scripture adds what the image omits. Adam and Eve went down with opened eyes, Eve rejoiced in the descent, the Lord forgave the transgression without laying it upon their children, and the cherubim who barred the way also kept it for a later return. Humanity fell forward in the sense that this descent opened a probation of learning directed toward the tree of life. Genome editing, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology belong to that forward motion, and they repeat its peril whenever knowledge of good and evil reaches human hands faster than Alma’s preparatory state can make them ready.