Before the Fall

G. K. Chesterton on the Fall of Man as a Worldview:

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds … that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, … on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans an skeptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries … out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; that we are all kings in exile.

If we were entrapped in a bad world we would not cry for what is not. We would not protest the way things are. We would surrender to what is.

If the world was messed up from the beginning, as all the pagan myths say and Darwinism implies, we would know nothing different and not differ with the way things are. When we do cry for justice and try to right the wrongs we are remembering our origins in a good creation and longing for our return there. We appeal to a lost standard that can only be recovered in Christ.