(Roughly) Daily

Paradise, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Still…

… The philosophical ideas behind the concept of Original Sin were explored in detail by St Augustine, developing the seminal thinking of St Paul, who saw Original Sin as a concept of radical equality; that no one speaks from a position of strength. All are flawed and when mankind seeks perfection, it is setting itself up, literally, for a fall.

Though fundamental to Christianity, the concept survived the Enlightenment, despite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument that man was born innocent. The rationalist philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, wrote of the ‘crooked timber of humanity’. Two centuries later, Sigmund Freud offered a secular version of Original Sin, tracing the  dark forces that lurk within the subconscious. Original Sin is a tenacious idea…

The fall of humankind and the concept of Original Sin: “Adam and Eve.”

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met  – Fran Lebowitz

* Elvis Costello, “I’m Not Angry”

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As we sort out sin, we might recall that today is The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a solemn celebration in some form in most Christian faiths, of belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.

Mary’s holy and immaculate conception, by Francisco Rizi