Essays and Aphorisms

by Arthur Schopenhauer

Taken sensu proprio the dogma here becomes revolting, for not only does it punish the faults, or even the mere lack of faith, of a life often hardly more than twenty years long with torments which have no end, it also adds that this almost universal damnation is actually the effect of original sin, and thus the necessary consequence of man's first Fall. But this must have been foreseen by at any rate him who firstly failed to make men better than they are and then set a trap for them into which he must have known they would fall, since everything was his work and nothing was hidden from him. According to this dogma, then, he called into existence out of nothing a weak and sin-prone race in order to hand it over to endless torment. There is finally the further fact that the God who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every sin, even to the point of loving one's enemy, fails to practise it himself, but does rather the opposite: since a punishment which is introduced at the end of things, when all is over and done with for ever, can be intended neither to improve nor deter; it is nothing but revenge. Thus regarded, it seems that the entire race is in fact definitely intended and expressly created for eternal torment and damnation – all, that is, apart from those few exceptions which are rescued from this fate by divine grace, although one knows not why.

The fall