Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Fall of Man

We have fallen into the habit of seeing everything, ourselves included, as a thing to be used and consumed, and this is rightly called a fall. Indeed, this is what the 'fall of man' consists in. Eating the forbidden fruit means believing that it is for us to define the distinction between good and evil. We then rewrite the distinction in purely human terms: good and evil become benefit and cost, so that nothing is holy, nothing is consecrated, nothing is rescued from barter and exchange. We deal with the world by pricing it.

Roger Scruton, The Face of God, Bloomsbury (New York: 2015), p. 127.