The Fall as the Fall of Language







1. Language in Genesis 1: Word of God -> creation.
2. Language in Paradise as seen in Dante's Divine Comedy
Language at Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-13):
Unmediated meaning.
3. Language in Genesis 2: Perfect conjunction between signifier and signified.
4. Langage at Babel, (Gen 11:1-9): Multiple signifiers.
5. Language now: Disjunction between signifier and signified.




The Fall from innocence to experience not only divides the world but also introduces a definite structure of value: we fall from an undiffentiated knowledge of good to a differentiated and fatal knowledge of good and evil. From God's presence we pass to His absence; from immediacy to mediation; from the perfect congruence of sign and referent to the gap between word and object; from fulness of being to a lack of being; from ease and play to strain and labour; from purity to impurity; and from life to death (emphasis mine).

Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, (Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5.





Upon meeting Adam in the eighth heaven of Paradise, Dante has no need to voice his questions, for, as Adam explains, the poet's intentions are already perfectly reflected in the 'veracious Mirror' of God. Dante, >Paradiso, (London: Dente & Sons, 1965), Canto XXVI, line 106.) A redeemed soul, entirely consonant with God's will, Adam knows Dante's thoughts with far more certainty than Dante can know the most elementary truth; his perception of the poet's mind is immediate, unhindered by language; and when he begins to answer, explaining the true cause of the Fall, Adam's hermeneutic mastery is no less complete. He deftly distinguishes between signum and res significata, informing us that the eating of the fruit merely indicated what was at issue, namely 'the trespass of the sign', a failure to observe the proper limits assigned to man by God. In short, Adam offers us a model of perfect understanding, one in which language can be mastered and in which intentions can easily be recovered, whether human or divine. How ironic, then, that the ideal Adam represents is witheld from us precisely because of Adam's sin. For, as the canto explains, although Adam's trespass was chiefly moral in character it was also a trespass of the linguistic sign- a desire for unmediated knowledge- and the sign of this disobedience is none other than the mutability of all signs. In Paradise, wholly one with God who stands above language as the 'Alpha and Omega of all Scripture', Adam now enjoys immediate knowledge in the manner approved by God, and for him interpretation poses no problem. On earth, however, the consequences of the Fall are still felt: man is no longer the master of signs but is frequently mastered by them, and the Commedia shows us many who have been damned precisely because they allowed themselves to be mastered by signs. One of these is Master Adam, the Florentine counterfeiter, whose very art is a trespass of the sign, the effacing of the difference between a sign and the sign of a sign. Dante's point in the Commedia is unmistakeable: the proliferation of signs caused by Adam and increased by those such as Master Adam can be arrested only by a belief that Christ, the New Adam, is the faithful sign of God. Without the presence of God, in Paradise or on earth, there can be no hope of understanding oneself, others, or texts. One would be lost in a maze of signs, with no possibility of distinguishing true from false.

Kevin Hart,The Trespass of the Sign,(Cambrideg & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 3-4.