Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to develop a radical empiricist, process-relational reading of St. Irenaeus of Lyons in which humanity is understood as created for growth into its fulfilment in Christ. If humanity was created not in a state of completed perfection but in infancy, called to grow into the image and likeness revealed in Christ, then neither finitude nor becoming can themselves constitute the Fall. The question is instead how created becoming becomes distorted, arrested, and finally reopened through Christ’s recapitulation of humanity.

Being as Yet and Infant: Image, Growth, and Perfection

St. Irenaeus does not begin the human story with a creature already possessing the maturity for which it was made. In the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, Adam and Eve are described as having “an innocent and infantile mind” (PA 14), while elsewhere Adam is compared explicitly to a small child who must grow towards perfection. Growth belongs to Irenaeus’ understanding of created humanity as such. Adam’s infancy is not merely inexperience but the condition of a creature whose created powers have not yet reached their fulfilment. He possesses what is necessary for mature humanity in communion with God, but that maturity remains something to be actualised rather than something already possessed. As the saint writes:

For just as it certainly is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, but the infant is not yet able to receive substantial nourishment; so also it was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this, being as yet an infant. (AH IV.38.1)

To this he adds that God “had power at the beginning to grant perfection to man,” but because humanity had only recently come into existence, it could not yet “receive,” “contain,” or “retain” what God was capable of giving (AH IV.38.2). The problem therefore cannot lie in a defect of divine power, nor does Irenaeus treat Adam’s incapacity as evidence that creation has already gone wrong. The difference lies between the uncreated God, who possesses divine perfection without becoming, and the creature who must become capable of receiving what is given. Thus, human immaturity is the starting condition of a genuinely developmental anthropology: Adam is created in the image of God with the capacity to grow into likeness, and the Holy Spirit remains involved in that movement from its beginning to its eschatological completion.

This poses a radical implication for human nature, for if Adam is genuinely human while still immature, human nature cannot be exhausted by the properties actualised in its first historical appearance. To say what humanity is requires some account of what humanity is capable of becoming. The human creature possesses a determinate identity, but that identity has a future built into it. Image names not a frozen completeness but a created form open towards fuller participation.

Thus, Eden cannot be described as a lost world of Miltonic “simplicity and spotless innocence,” from which everything subsequent is merely decline, where Adam and Eve “so passed they naked on, nor shunned the sight / Of God or Angel” (PL IV.318–320). Adam is chronologically first, but Christ is teleologically first. Adam shows humanity in its beginning, while Christ reveals the form towards which that beginning was ordered. The first human being is therefore not the normative summit from which subsequent history can only decline, nor is Christ merely the recovery of a condition already fully possessed in Eden. The garden is instead the beginning of a creaturely history whose proper movement was always forward, as humanity grows in knowledge, freedom, righteousness, and communion with God. What is present initially as created capacity reaches its mature actuality in Christ. As the Bishop of Lugdunum states:

It was necessary, at first, that nature should be exhibited; then, after that, that what was mortal should be conquered and swallowed up by immortality, and the corruptible by incorruptibility, and that man should be made after the image and likeness of God, having received the knowledge of good and evil. (AH IV.38.4)

Nature appears first – it is then carried beyond mortality and corruption towards image and likeness in their mature form. Even the knowledge of good and evil appears within this description of humanity’s fulfilment. The Genesis prohibition therefore cannot be reduced to the idea that humanity desired an end that was intrinsically alien to it. Much of what the serpent promises – knowledge, likeness to God, elevation beyond Adam’s present condition – stands disturbingly close to things Irenaeus himself expects humanity ultimately to receive. The question of the Fall must concern not whether humanity should become more than infant Adam, but how that becoming is pursued.

Finitude, immaturity, dependence and temporal becoming cannot themselves constitute the Fall, because they already belong to humanity as God creates it. Nor can the desire to become like God simply be identified with sin, since likeness to God is humanity’s intended destiny. Sin must therefore be sought within a good process of creaturely development as its deformation: a creature created to receive a future attempts to take, possess or determine that future in a manner contrary to the communion through which it was meant to mature.

Irenaeus thus leaves us with a human being whose perfection lies ahead rather than behind. Eden is not the completed form of humanity subsequently lost. It is the good beginning of an unfinished history. Christ does not merely reveal how far humanity has fallen from Adam; he reveals how far Adam himself was created to go.

Toward an Absolute Product: F.W.J. Schelling and Hans Jonas on Metamorphosis and Metabilism

If humanity is created immature and reaches its intended maturity only in Christ, the next problem concerns identity. A static conception of nature makes this difficult – if a thing is what it is by possessing a fixed set of fully actualised properties, substantial development begins to look like replacement: either Adam already contains perfected humanity in actuality, or Christ represents something different from Adam.

F. W. J. Schelling’s philosophy of organic nature offers another way of thinking about identity. His starting point is that nature cannot be treated as a collection of finished objects whose forms are externally imposed upon passive matter. “Nature should be spirit made visible, spirit the invisible nature” (Ideas, p. 42), while “the philosopher of nature treats nature as the transcendental philosopher treats the self” (FO, p. 14n). Nature is therefore formative before reflective consciousness appears: organisation, differentiation, and development belong to natural activity itself.

In Von der Weltseele, Schelling imagines the succession of organic beings as “a progressive development of one and the same organisation” (WS, AA I/6:68). Identity does not consist in remaining in one empirical configuration while accidental changes occur around it. Nor does each transformation simply destroy one identity and substitute another. The same organisation becomes actual through successive forms. The later First Outline pushes this further when Schelling writes that “all natural activity aims toward an absolute product” (FO, p. 24): organic development is not mere succession, but a formative process in which stages are intelligible through the form towards which they are directed.

Thus, Adam and Christ need not represent two competing definitions of humanity, one incomplete and the other complete. If living identity can consist in a progressive development of one and the same organisation, then the humanity present in Adam can remain genuinely the same humanity that reaches mature actuality in Christ. Infancy and maturity are not two human natures. Rather, they are different stages in the actualisation of one determinate human form.

Schelling therefore allows human nature to be understood as determinate without being static. Identity does not lie in remaining one state, but in the continuity of a form becoming actual through time. Adam and Christ can belong to one humanity because maturity does not replace the nature present in Adam, but actualises possibilities already contained within it – infancy and maturity are successive forms of one developing identity.

Hans Jonas approaches the same problem from a different direction. Whereas Schelling considers organic form through metamorphosis, Jonas begins from metabolism. A living organism does not persist like a stone by retaining the same material constituents; it remains itself precisely “by not remaining the same matter” (PL, p. 76). Its identity is therefore enacted through continual exchange and renewal. Yet this freedom from material fixity is inseparable from dependence, because the organism must continue that exchange in order to remain alive. As Jonas puts it, “Its ‘can’ is a ‘must,’ since its execution is identical with its being” (PL, p. 83). Life thus maintains itself through a relation in which freedom and necessity are inseparable.

The organism can exchange its material constituents, and this gives it a primitive freedom from material fixity; but it must do so because cessation of that exchange is death. Jonas therefore describes organic existence in terms of a “needful freedom”: the living being achieves a degree of independence only through relations upon which its existence continuously depends.

Adam’s dependence upon God cannot simply be treated as a temporary condition corresponding to immaturity, as though mature humanity ought eventually to stand on its own. If Jonas is right that even biological freedom emerges through dependence rather than by abolishing it, then greater creaturely perfection need not mean greater self-sufficiency. The more fully the creature becomes itself, the richer its capacity for sustaining the relations through which its life is received may become.

Theosis can therefore no longer be imagined as a gradual approximation to divine independence – the Creator-creature distinction forbids that conclusion in any case. A creature does not become more perfect by requiring God less. Its freedom consists increasingly in being capable of receiving, responding to and participating in the life upon which it depends. The relation between grace and freedom ceases to be zero-sum. Dependence does not automatically diminish agency; under the right conditions it makes agency possible.

Human nature can therefore be determinate without being static or exhausted by its past and present actuality – its identity includes a future. Adam is not less truly human because the mature possibilities of humanity remain unrealised; those possibilities belong to what humanity is. The Adam–Christ relation is therefore the maturation of one human nature through time, in which identity is preserved through genuine transformation rather than fixed against it.

The Higher We Rise: William James on Attention, Habit and Accustoming

Irenaeus’ Adam does not merely have to grow physically – if humanity is to mature into likeness with God, perception, desire, judgement and action must themselves become differently organised.

William James offers a psychology of self-formation in which neither consciousness nor character appears fully formed at the beginning. Mental capacities develop in degrees of increasing complexity, while within an individual life experience is selectively organised through attention and consolidated through habit. The self is therefore not a completed character standing behind its actions: what it attends to, repeatedly does, and learns to respond to becomes part of the character from which subsequent action proceeds.

The person who acts today is not simply expressing a character already complete behind the action; what is attended to and repeatedly done contributes to the character from which later action will proceed. James places this within a wider developmental picture in which “consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom” (PP, I, p. 141). A capacity need not therefore appear all at once in its mature form in order to belong genuinely to a living being. An infant can possess powers whose organisation and exercise remain undeveloped, just as Adam’s infancy need not imply the absence of human nature but the incomplete integration of capacities that belong to it.

James then makes this development selective: “My experience is what I agree to attend to” (PP, I, p. 381): attention determines which possibilities, objects, and meanings become salient enough to enter practical life. Maturation is therefore not simply the accumulation of information, but the formation of perception itself. What a person repeatedly notices shapes what they are able to respond to, and repeated response in turn becomes character.

That is why James can write that “What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of the moment” (PP, I, p. 276). An action does not disappear when it is completed but leaves a disposition behind. Repetition consolidates those dispositions into habit, so that later choices are made by a person already altered by earlier ones. Hence his warning that “every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar” (TT, p. 53). The image of the scar captures the historical character of freedom: what has been done becomes part of the conditions under which the next act is made.

For James, habit lies between passivity and activity: established habits carry conduct along established channels of response, relieving consciousness of the need to deliberate over every action, yet they never become wholly mechanical. An unexpected result, a changed circumstance, or deliberate attention can force a habitual response back into consciousness and make it available for revision. Character is therefore plastic as well as historical. The same habits that give the self continuity can be interrupted, examined, and reorganised, so that self-formation includes not only acquiring habits but acquiring the capacity to transform them. Jamesian ethics is reflexive: the person can act upon the dispositions through which they ordinarily act.

Irenaeus speaks of accustoming humanity through the patriarchs, Law, and prophets, with each stage of the economy forming capacities that make a fuller relation to God possible. With Abraham, humanity is accustomed to follow the Word; because it has become accustomed to the bonds of sin, the Law codifies and orders conduct and desire; and the prophets school Israel in obedience, expectation, and recognition of what is still to come. Irenaeus gathers this formative history together when he writes that the Word:

at that time, indeed, by means of His patriarchs and prophets, was prefiguring and declaring beforehand future things, fulfilling His part by anticipation in the dispensations of God, and accustoming His inheritance to obey God, and to pass through the world as in a state of pilgrimage, to follow His word, and to indicate beforehand things to come. For with God there is nothing without purpose or due signification. (AH IV.21.3)

Revelation therefore changes the humanity to whom it is given. The patriarchs, Law, and prophets do not simply transmit progressively more knowledge of God; through them humanity acquires habits of obedience, expectation, and receptivity that make a deeper communion possible. Irenaeus makes the end of this pedagogy explicit when he describes God as “accustoming man to bear His Spirit (within him), and to hold communion with God” (AH IV.14.2).

What develops is not merely knowledge of divine things but the human capacity for divine communion itself. The succession of covenant, command, prophecy, and obedience becomes a history in which perception, desire, and action are gradually reorganised around the Word – revelation changes the recipient as well as what the recipient knows.

It Begats Anxiety: Soren Kierkegaard on Freedom, Anxiety, and Sin

If Adam must mature through experience, the Fall can too easily become a necessary stage in that maturation, as though the transition from innocence to mature freedom required transgression. In The Concept of Anxiety, Soren Kierkegaard demonstrates how anxiety belongs to innocence because freedom first appears as possibility, but guilt does not follow from possibility by any continuous psychological process. The Fall occurs only in the qualitative leap by which a possible act becomes a sinful one. Development therefore explains why Adam can sin; it does not explain sin as something development itself had to produce.

For Kierkegaard, innocence is a condition of ignorance. Adam does not yet possess the determinate distinction between good and evil, and the prohibition not to eat the forbidden fruit confronts him instead with the more primitive awareness that he is able to act otherwise. The command therefore does not present him with a fully understood moral alternative. In hearing that he must not act, he discovers that he can act: prohibition discloses freedom before Adam possesses the knowledge required to comprehend its moral content. Kierkegaard describes innocence as “peace and repose,” yet within it there is an indeterminate “nothing” that “begets anxiety” (CA, p. 41). The command gives that indeterminacy a form by revealing Adam’s capacity to depart from his present condition.

Anxiety therefore arises not from knowledge of evil, but from the discovery of possibility. There is as yet no determinate object to fear, because nothing sinful has happened and Adam does not possess a developed conception of the evil he might choose. What confronts him is an undetermined future in which another actuality can come about through his own freedom. Hence Kierkegaard’s definition of anxiety as “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility” (CA, p. 42). Freedom first appears not as reflective choice between clearly understood moral alternatives, but as the unsettling awareness that one’s present condition is not necessary and that one can become otherwise.

Fear has a determinate object, as anxiety is directed towards the indeterminate future. What confronts Adam is not yet evil but possibility itself: the awareness that his present condition is not necessary and that another actuality may come about through his own freedom. Kierkegaard’s description of anxiety as “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy” (CA, p. 42) captures this ambiguity, since possibility both attracts and repels without determining what will actually be chosen. Adam’s immaturity therefore consists not merely in capacities still awaiting development, but in an open relation to what he may become.

Nothing in this openness is yet sinful. Rather, anxiety marks the point at which freedom becomes conscious of possibility, but guilt begins only when one possibility is made actual in the act itself. Kierkegaard therefore insists that psychological explanation must “remain in its elastic ambiguity, from which guilt breaks forth in the qualitative leap.” Anxiety can accompany the transition from innocence to guilt without causing it: “The intermediate term is anxiety, but it no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically” (CA, p. 49). If anxiety were enough to produce sin, the Fall would follow necessarily from Adam’s innocent condition. Kierkegaard insists instead that guilt begins only in the free act itself.

The qualitative leap names the discontinuity between the possibility of sin and sin actually committed. There is no cumulative process in which sufficient ignorance, immaturity, or anxiety eventually becomes guilt; as the source puts it, there is no continuous accumulation by which innocence gradually becomes guilt – the transition occurs only in the qualitative leap. Sin enters when freedom itself posits the new quality through the act, and with that act the distinction between good and evil is also posited for the individual. This preserves the point required by Irenaeus: an immature creature must develop, and a free creature must possess possibilities not already actualised, but neither condition makes the Fall necessary. Becoming belongs to Creation and sin is one possible deformation of that becoming rather than its inevitable completion.

Irenaeus had already placed humanity’s mature reception of the knowledge of good and evil within its intended development. He also understands likeness to God and participation in divine life as the goal of humanity rather than as an intrinsically forbidden aspiration. Humanity is made for deification, but deification is to be received through growth, accustoming, and communion. The temptation offers possession without maturation: seize now what is properly received through becoming.

Sin can therefore be described more precisely than either wanting to become like God or simply disobeying a command. The end itself is true: humanity is created for likeness to God and participation in divine life. What is deformed is the mode by which the creature relates to that end. The future that ought to be received through communion is grasped as though it could be possessed independently – growth is replaced by premature possession, and participation by appropriation.

Kierkegaard prevents even this developmental account from becoming deterministic. One cannot say that Adam had to disobey in order to mature, as though innocence were a thesis, sin its necessary negation, and redemption the synthesis that finally produced adulthood. Such a scheme would make evil internally necessary to God’s creative purpose. Nor does divine foreknowledge make the Fall necessary. Irenaeus affirms that God “foreknows all things” while insisting that human beings have “themselves chosen for themselves” the darkness into which they fall (AH IV.29.2), and elsewhere that God created humanity free to obey “voluntarily, and not by compulsion of God” (AH IV.37.1). God may therefore eternally know that Adam will fall, and eternally know the economy by which sin and death will be overcome, without either sin or death becoming something humanity needed in order to reach its fulfilment. Foreknowledge does not supply the necessity or compulsion by which the creature acts. Humanity requires growth into likeness and incorruption, but it does not require transgression in order to grow. Christ is therefore not an afterthought occasioned by the Fall, since humanity is already ordered towards its fulfilment in him. What the Fall changes is the actual history through which that fulfilment must now be realised: a humanity made for communion has become estranged from God, and a humanity made for incorruption has become subject to death. Christ must therefore not only bring human nature to its intended maturity but take up this damaged history, overcome the powers that have entered it, and reopen the movement towards the end for which humanity was created. Anxiety explains how sin can become possible within an innocent and unfinished creature – the qualitative leap preserves the difference between that possibility and the free act by which sin actually enters human history.

Finitude is not sin, because Adam is finite before falling. Ignorance is not yet sin, because innocence itself includes an undeveloped relation to moral knowledge. Anxiety is not sin, because possibility belongs to freedom. Even the desire for likeness to God cannot by itself be sin, because likeness is the creature’s intended end. Sin occurs when freedom actualises one possibility by deforming the way creaturely fulfilment is to be received. The creature can therefore be genuinely unfinished, genuinely free, and genuinely innocent at once. Its openness to a future beyond its present condition is what makes growth possible, but it does not make transgression necessary. The Fall belongs to the possible deformation of human development, not to development itself.

Evolution by Creative Love: C.S. Peirce on Fallibility and Developmental Teleology

Kierkegaard allows an unfinished creature to possess a genuinely open future without making sin the necessary means by which innocence becomes maturity. Yet openness creates another problem, as Irenaeus does not imagine human development as movement towards an unspecified future. Humanity is created for likeness to God, and the mature form of that vocation is disclosed in Christ. If this end determines every stage in advance, however, the history between Adam and Christ risks becoming little more than the execution of a programme. Here the evolutionary thinking of C.S. Peirce can be mobilized because it combines three things that are often separated: genuine novelty, resistance from a reality not created by the subject, and development possessing direction.

In a thought experiment, Peirce asks us to imagine a “fancy amoeba” possessing only an undifferentiated quality of sentience. It has no memory of change, no awareness of time, no distinction between self and world, and no consciousness of relations. Because nothing yet limits or opposes its feeling, Peirce can extravagantly describe it as having through its immediate sensation: “an immediate knowledge of the entire universe of being” (MS329, Copy C).

The phrase sounds like an account of superior consciousness, but Peirce intends almost the opposite. The amoeba’s “knowledge” is flawless because there is not yet a sufficiently differentiated self that could discover itself to be wrong. Its apparent immediacy lacks the very relations through which finite consciousness becomes concrete – possibility remains undifferentiated rather than having become an actual history.

Peirce then introduces the “fancy worm,” who attempts something and encounters resistance. With resistance comes the possibility of failure, and with failure comes awareness of itself as a finite being acting within a world that does not simply conform to its impulse. Peirce describes the phenomenology of this Secondness: “The experience of effort cannot exist without the experience of resistance. Effort is only effort by virtue of its being opposed” (CP 8.330).

This movement from amoeba to worm is an evolutionary advance because fallibility makes genuine selfhood possible. The worm’s encounter with what resists it does not merely reveal a previously completed self; Peirce says that “its sense of actual happening has made it a finite being” (MS 329). Possibility becomes actual through opposition, persistence and relation.

This bears directly upon the Irenaean problem of the Fall, as Peirce’s account makes it much harder to treat finitude, limitation, resistance or even fallibility as themselves signs that creation has gone wrong. A finite self becomes determinate precisely because it does not possess the world immediately and infallibly. It encounters something other than itself, discovers limits to its own expectations, and must respond to what it cannot simply assimilate.

The point should not be pushed into claiming that Adam had to sin in order to become a person – Kierkegaard has already ruled out that conclusion. Peirce instead helps distinguish the possibility of error from the actuality of culpable deformation. A finite creature must be capable of discovering that its understanding or expectation is inadequate. Nothing follows from this about the necessity of freely willing against God. Fallibility can belong to the conditions of development without guilt belonging to them. Peirce finds the corresponding form of teleology in personality. A person cannot be understood by isolating a single instant because personality exists through the continuity of a life: “It has to be lived in time; nor can any finite time embrace its fullness” (EP1, p. 331).

Personality nevertheless has direction, as existing purposes, habits, and commitments dispose the person towards some possibilities rather than others, but those possibilities are not simply executed from a finished plan. Action feeds back into character: the purposes from which a person acts help determine what they do, while what they do alters the person whose purposes will govern the next act. Peirce therefore speaks of “a developmental teleology” (EP1, p. 331), in which an end gives direction from within the process of becoming rather than standing outside it as a completed specification. This is why he insists that “Were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life; and consequently there would be no personality. The mere carrying out of predetermined purposes is mechanical” (EP1, p. 331). Personality is teleological precisely because its future is neither directionless nor already exhausted in advance: it develops towards ends that become more determinate through the very history by which they are pursued.

Irenaeus gives developmental teleology a stronger determination than Peirce is prepared to give the cosmos as a whole, because human becoming is not merely directed towards an open future: its fulfilment is already disclosed in Christ, who reveals the mature form of humanity. Yet this need not turn the human telos into a predetermined biography. Christ determines the form of humanity’s fulfilment without specifying every event, decision, failure, or transformation through which a particular creature must arrive there. Adam can therefore possess a real vocation whose completion lies ahead of him without that future being mechanically scripted – a determinate vocation does not require a predetermined trajectory.

Thus, teleology need not mean the execution of a programme already complete in every detail, as the end can be real enough to orient development while leaving the history of development genuinely creative. For Irenaeus, Christ gives human becoming its determinate end, while creaturely freedom gives the route towards that end its genuine contingency.

Christ can disclose what fulfilled humanity is while the concrete histories through which creatures participate in that fulfilment remain genuinely open. Human vocation can be determinate without every human life being predetermined. The telos tells us what maturation means – communion with God, likeness, incorruptibility, mature participation in divine life – without requiring every act, encounter, failure, repentance, or form of holiness to have been scripted from the beginning. Peirce calls this open teleology “evolution by creative love” (CP 6.302): a mode of development in which love acts “at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony” (EP1, pp. 352–53). The two movements belong together – love does not secure harmony by suppressing creaturely independence, but brings genuinely independent creatures into a communion that their freedom helps to constitute.

This provides a particularly fertile way of radicalising Irenaeus’ divine pedagogy. If humanity begins in infancy, God’s patience need not be understood as a temporary concession to an unfortunate deficiency that omnipotence might otherwise have bypassed. The time of growth belongs to the kind of perfection God is creating. A completed artefact can simply be produced in its final configuration; a mature creature capable of free communion must become capable of that communion. Divine love therefore works through the unrealised possibilities of the creature rather than replacing them with a finished result. Peirce describes love as “recognising germs of loveliness in the hateful” and gradually warming them “into life” until it “makes [them] lovely” (EP1, p. 354). Love does not merely approve what is already complete: it perceives what can become actual and patiently draws it towards fulfilment.

Peirce thus sharpens several distinctions that the Irenaean account requires if developmental Creation is not to collapse either into pessimism about finitude or determinism about history. Finitude is compatible with goodness because limitation belongs to creaturehood before it belongs to sin: to be a creature is to occupy a partial standpoint, to encounter resistance, and to possess powers that are not yet fully actualised. Fallibility likewise need not signify corruption. A being whose life unfolds through experience can misjudge, fail, revise, and learn without those possibilities themselves constituting moral evil. Indeed, resistance can contribute positively to the formation of selfhood, because a finite agent discovers its powers only in acting against what does not immediately yield to it. Creaturely development therefore requires a world in which not everything is already absorbed into the self or guaranteed in advance. The existence of limits, obstacles, and unrealised possibilities does not show that Creation has gone wrong, but provides the conditions under which a genuinely finite life can acquire form.

The same distinction applies to novelty and teleology, for if the future contains genuine novelty, it does not follow that development is directionless. Peirce allows an end to guide becoming without reducing becoming to the execution of a plan already complete in every detail. This is particularly useful for Irenaeus, because humanity can have a determinate fulfilment in Christ while the concrete history through which creatures grow towards that fulfilment remains genuinely open. The telos gives structure to development without abolishing contingency, where Adam can therefore be created for likeness to God without every act of obedience, failure, repentance, or maturation being fixed in advance. Development remains purposeful because it is ordered towards communion, likeness, and incorruptibility; it remains genuinely historical because those ends are realised through acts and relations that are not merely mechanical repetitions of a predetermined script.

Agape is the principle that holds these distinctions together, as love perfects the creature not by abolishing finitude or overriding freedom, but by allowing genuine independence to develop within relation. Peirce’s creative love therefore makes room for creaturely becoming while drawing that becoming towards communion. Divine love can call the creature into greater freedom without loosening its bond to God, and can draw it into harmony without reducing it to passive conformity. In Irenaean terms, God’s patience with immature humanity is not a temporary tolerance of an inferior state that ought ideally to have been bypassed. The time required for growth belongs to the form of the good itself, because the end is not simply a perfected object but a mature creature capable of freely receiving and participating in divine life. Agape does not merely preserve the possibility of becoming; it is the form of divine action through which becoming is sustained, directed, and brought towards communion without ceasing to be genuinely creaturely.

A State of Habitual Revenge: Friedrich Nietzche on Ressentiment and Satanic Envy

Irenaeus’ account of satanic envy turns on the fact that Adam is not yet what he is destined to become. Humanity begins in weakness and infancy, yet has already been assigned a future place within Creation that exceeds its present condition.

Adam is still infantile, yet God has already “secretly appointed him lord also of those who were servants in it” (PA 12). The Devil therefore need not envy Adam because Adam presently exceeds him. The opposite is closer to the truth: the angelic steward is already more powerful and more mature than infant humanity – what threatens him is what Adam has been promised. Humanity’s present weakness contains a future reversal of the existing relation, so that envy attaches itself not merely to what another possesses now but to what that other is permitted to become.

This is why Irenaeus describes “the angel who, becoming jealous of the man and looking on him with envy because of the great gifts of God which he had given to man,” as one who “both ruined himself and made the man a sinner” (PA 16). The order matters. The Devil’s own ruin begins in his refusal of the good God intends for another creature. Humanity’s promised elevation is experienced not simply as humanity’s good but as a diminution of himself. His identity has become comparative: another creature cannot increase without his experiencing that increase as a loss.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment develops the psychology of this reactive dependence. Ressentiment becomes “creative and gives birth to values” when the self can no longer affirm itself except through its opposition to another (GM I.10). Its valuations therefore arise reactively: the other must first be identified, condemned, or diminished before the self can know what it is. What begins as hostility towards another’s good can consequently become constitutive of identity itself. The injured or envious relation is no longer something the subject merely experiences; it becomes something the subject requires in order to sustain its own valuation of itself.

Read in these terms, satanic envy is more than a desire to possess humanity’s gifts. The Devil cannot tolerate a created order in which another being is permitted to become more than it presently is. Humanity’s development threatens the relation upon which his own superiority depends, and he therefore seeks to arrest that development. His response to the creature’s promised future is not to participate in its good but to prevent that good from becoming actual. Envy thus becomes an inversion of agape: where love wills and assists the flourishing of another, envy experiences the other’s flourishing as an injury to itself.

The important word here is “creative,” as ressentiment is not mere inactivity. Nietzsche’s reactive person can judge, interpret, remember, construct values, and reorganise an entire moral world. The pathology lies in the source and direction of that creativity. Slave morality “says No” first to what lies outside itself, and its action is therefore “fundamentally reaction” (GM I.10).

Ressentiment requires an opposing world against which the reactive self can continually define itself. The injury cannot simply pass away, because the identity formed through it depends upon preserving the offender, the grievance, and the relation between them. What begins as a response to injury can therefore settle into character, until, as Nietzsche puts it, “Those who have turned out badly in this way eventually end up in a state of habitual revenge, will to revenge” (GS 359). Revenge is habitual because the past is repeatedly reactivated in the present: the self sustains itself by returning to what was done to it.

Nietzsche repeatedly gives this failure to release the past a physiological casting, associating ressentiment with defective digestion and an inability to assimilate experience. Where Jonas’ gives us a living being that persists by taking what comes from outside itself, incorporating it, transforming it, and continuing beyond it – ressentiment performs the opposite movement psychologically. An injury enters the self but is never fully incorporated into a continuing life, but  remains recognisable as injury because the identity organised around it requires the wound to remain active. The past is therefore preserved not merely as memory but as a continuing principle of self-formation.

A developmental account of sin therefore needs a more precise category than simple stagnation. Ressentiment does not stop becoming, but deforms the direction of becoming. The reactive person continues to accumulate experiences, habits, memories, and interpretations, but each new element is drawn back into an identity organised around an earlier injury. The past does not merely influence the present, as every past inevitably does. It is continually reinstated as the principle by which the present is interpreted and the future approached. New possibilities are therefore encountered less as occasions for transformation than as opportunities to confirm the grievance, preserve the enemy, or repeat the judgement through which the self has learned to understand itself. Sin can in this sense become a way of having a past: not simply remembering what has happened, but allowing what has happened to determine repeatedly what one is still able to become.

The Devil therefore attempts to make a temporary hierarchy permanent. Humanity is tolerable only while it remains immature, because its maturation will require the Devil himself to inhabit a different relation to it. Rather than allow that relation to change, he seeks to prevent humanity from becoming what it is destined to become. In the case of Peircean creative love, one creature can will another towards greater independence without experiencing its increase as a loss. Meanwhile, envy understands value positionally, so that another’s elevation appears as one’s own diminishment. The distinction can therefore be stated developmentally: agape wills the becoming of the other, while envy requires the other’s becoming to stop.

There is a latent danger of this same active hindering within Christianity itself, one that Irenaeus confronts directly in the Gnostic systems against which much of his theological ire is directed. Salvation can be imagined as vindication through negation, in which humanity attains redemption only by repudiating the world it once inhabited. Embodiment, temporal existence, material Creation, and earthly life then become inferior realities to be escaped rather than creaturely goods to be fulfilled. In this way, Christianity begins to reproduce the structure of ressentiment: its affirmation of the higher depends upon the degradation of the lower, and heaven becomes good because earth is worthless rather than because Creation has been healed and brought to its intended fulfilment. Irenaeus cuts against this Gnostic logic at its root, with salvation culminating in the resurrection of the body and the renewal of Creation, not in escape from either. The material world over which humanity and the Devil contend is not finally abandoned as though creaturely existence had itself been the problem, but is restored and brought towards the purpose for which God created it. Redemption therefore does not overcome satanic hindering by repeating its logic at another level. It does not suppress the becoming of the creature, but releases body, world, and humanity from what has prevented them from becoming what they were created to be.

Ressentiment therefore supplies more than an external accusation against Christianity but also describes one way in which created becoming can become internally distorted. The thinking of William James shows how past actions and experiences become sedimented in habit and character. Nietzsche, meanwhile, posits a more sinister possibility: a past injury can be preserved as an organising principle of the self, so that present experience and future possibilities continue to be interpreted through it. Irenaeus’ Devil embodies the same structure cosmically: he cannot accept humanity’s future because his identity has become invested in an existing relation of superiority. Fallen becoming is not simply arrested, then, but organised around a past relation that the self continually reproduces into the future.

Redemption cannot answer this by erasing the past, since that would erase the historical creature being redeemed, nor by merely compensating for it, since compensation can leave the determining relation intact. The past must remain constitutive without remaining exhaustive.

Recapitulation is Irenaeus’ account of how Christ takes up the whole history of humanity and brings it towards the end from which sin had diverted it. The Word does not discard Adamic humanity and begin again with something new. Rather, He enters its history, passes through its conditions of birth, growth, temptation, suffering, and death, and gathers them into a new movement towards obedience, resurrection, and communion with God. Once sin is understood not only as a past act but as a history that can become sedimented in character, habit, and relation, recapitulation must therefore do more than cancel guilt or compensate for injury. Christ takes up the very history that has become determinative – Adam, temptation, disobedience, captivity, and death – without allowing any of these to dictate what humanity finally is. Ressentiment returns to the past in order to preserve its authority over the present, while recapitulation returns to the past in order to transform its direction and prevent it from exhausting the possibilities of the future.

Conclusion:

Creation is the beginning of creaturely becoming rather than the production of finished beings. Humanity is created with a determinate vocation whose fulfilment lies ahead of it in Christ. The image of God is therefore not a completed perfection possessed at the beginning and later recovered, but a created capacity ordered towards likeness, communion, and incorruptibility.

Sin deforms that becoming without revealing becoming itself to be defective. Finitude, embodiment, dependence, temporality, and freedom belong to the goodness of Creation, while the Fall bends them away from their proper relation to God and allows that allowing the deformations of sin to become sedimented in habit, character, and history. Redemption therefore cannot consist in escaping creaturehood, returning to an untouched beginning, or erasing what has happened – it must transform the relation between the creature and its own history.

Recapitulation accomplishes this by taking up a humanity already marked by disobedience, habit, suffering, and death without allowing those realities to determine what humanity can finally become. The past remains real and constitutive, but it no longer exhausts the future. Christ does not merely restore what Adam lost; he carries human nature beyond the point at which its becoming had been distorted and into the maturity for which it was created.

Through the movement of theosis, humanity becomes like God without ceasing to be creaturely, receives divine life without turning participation into possession, and reaches maturity without becoming independent of the source of its life. Perfection therefore does not abolish finitude but brings finite life into its proper form: a freedom capable of communion, an embodied existence capable of incorruption, and a creature whose dependence upon God has become the condition of its fullest agency.

We can identify the character of this fulfilled freedom a second innocence. This is not the innocence of an untested beginning but innocence after history: innocence without ignorance, freedom without alienation, and memory without captivity to the past. The redeemed creature does not become innocent by returning to what came before, but by becoming capable of carrying its history without allowing that history to close its future. Unlike Milton’s Satan they will not carry into Hell “a mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time” (PL I.253).

Salvation is therefore not a return to Adam but is the agapic recapitulation of created becoming: the release of finite, historical, embodied life from the powers that arrest and deform it, and its maturation into the inexhaustible communion for which it was made.

Sources and References

~ (PA) The Preaching of the Apostles (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987) by St. Irenaeus of Lyons.

~ (AH) Against Heresies: Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume One (Hendrickson Publishers, 2004) by St. Irenaeus of Lyons.

~ (Ideas) Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1988) by F. W. J. Schelling.

~ (FO) First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (State University of New York Press, 2004) by F. W. J. Schelling.

~ (WS) Von der Weltseele (1798) by F. W. J. Schelling.

~ (PL) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Northwestern University Press, 2001) by Hans Jonas.

~ (PP) The Principles of Psychology (Harvard University Press, 1981) by William James.

~ (TT) Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Harvard University Press, 1983) by William James.

~ (CA) The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton University Press, 1980) by Søren Kierkegaard.

~ (MS329) “Nichol’s Cosmology and Pragmaticism (Carus)” [c. 1904], MS 329, Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632 (Houghton Library, Harvard University) by Charles Sanders Peirce.

~ (CP) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes I–VIII (Harvard University Press, 1931–1958) by Charles Sanders Peirce.

~ (EP1) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume I, 1867–1893 (Indiana University Press, 1992) by Charles Sanders Peirce.

~ (GM) On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2006) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~ (GS) The Gay Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001) by Friedrich Nietzsche.