The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1270]
As long as the first Adam partook of the Fruit of the Tree of Life, he not only continued immortal, but increased in knowledge. His language was the dialect of heaven. He conversed with God. As soon as he forfeited that Ambrosial Fruit, he not only became mortal — subject to death — but ignorant. He ceased to hold communion with God. He spoke no more the dialect of heaven, but invented a dialect of his own. This he did out of remembrance of the first. This was the language which he spoke after he was driven out of Paradise. It was a corruption of the Poetry of Paradise, which was the echo of the Primeval World. This language was never spoken in its purity afterwards, except by the Second Adam. The languages of Moses, David, Solomon, Jeremiah and Isaiah, was the vernacular of the Prodigal First Adam.
St. Paul tells us that our redemption consists not only in the perfection of the soul, but of the body. He says, in First Corinthians, 6, 20; “Ye are bought with a price; therefore, glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” — thereby implying that there is a twofold nature in man which requires a twofold redemption. The personal pronoun “Ye” is divided into two parts — body and soul. It is, therefore, plain that the body, to glorify God, must be redeemed as well as the soul this redemption consists in its perfection. It is the instrument of the soul. Without a perfect instrument, how can the soul elicit its functions? This shows that a physical education is as necessary, for the glorification of God, as an intellectual one. This soul and body, perfected, constitute the beautiful person of man. It is by the glorification of God, in this twofold perfected nature, that his twofold redemption is made perfectly manifest. This twofold nature of man, of body, and soul, was taught by Pythagoras the Samian, and Plato the Divine, long before St. Paul’s time. It is this twofold nature which constitutes the person of man. Without the perfection of his compound nature, it is impossible for him to give perfect glory to God. His glorifying God through his perfected physical and intellectual nature, is not only a perfect manifestation of his twofold redemption, but the highest evidence that he can give of the truth of that sublime eulogy which was pronounced upon him by the hallowed lips of David when he said that he was created “a little lower than the Angles, and crowned with glory and honour.”
My belief in the fall of man is Pelagian. It is through the exercise of the intellectual that the corporeal is perfected. The soul is the heavenly, the body the earthly, of man. As that which is heavenly is immortal, and can never die, and, consequently, must be pure; so, that which is earthly, must be mortal, and, consequently, impure. As that which is heavenly, and, consequently, immortal, must be, like God, wholly One, and, therefore, incapable of change; so, that which is earthly, and, consequently, immortal, can never, through the simple purity of its Oneness, which makes it after the image of God, sin; so, that which is earthly, and, consequently mortal, must, through its compound nature, which makes it susceptible to change, be liable alone to sin. Therefore, sin is in the earthly, not in the heavenly, part of man. Sin is the effect of a compound — not of that which is one. It is the result of mutability. All compound things are liable to change. All changing things are alone liable to err, which is sin. All changing things, being compound, are alone liable to death. Death is the changing of that which is compound, are alone liable to death. Death is the changing of that which is compound into its original elements. It is the analysis of the synthesis of our being. It is this compound nature which fits man for this world. Without this mortal-immortal nature, he could not dwell upon a world like this. As his improvement in knowledge is the exercise of the heavenly,