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Lucifer’s disordered love and the first-person perspective: an Augustinian account of primal sin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2025

Bradley N. Seeman Open the ORCID record for Bradley N. Seeman [Opens in a new window]
Bradley N. Seeman*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Program, Taylor University, Upland, IN, USA
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Augustinian accounts of ‘primal sin’ face a dilemma: either ‘Lucifer’s’ fall is arbitrary, or it results from God creating a flawed creature. Augustine and others hold that an omnipotent God faces unavoidable limits in creating creatures. In particular, creatures cannot enjoy God’s own first-person awareness of God’s goods, but must experience them second-personally. The resulting qualitative phenomenological difference between (1) the first-person awareness Lucifer had of the goods of his own being, and (2) his second-person awareness of the goods of God means that self-regarding goods would ‘light up’ for Lucifer very differently than other-regarding goods. This opens a psychologically resonant and metaphysically potent account of how the pre-Fall Lucifer could have faced a genuine value conflict – a conflict for which God is not culpable – in which Lucifer might come to love the goods presented first-personally (his own) over the goods presented second-personally (God’s).

Keywords

Augustineeviltheodicy Christianityphenomenology
Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 26
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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