The Fall of Man is recast as a divided sequence rather than a single act of disobedience: freedom opens as an anxious possibility, the subject retreats from it, and only when freedom rises again does that retreat become guilt. This distinction makes the Fall at once a loss of freedom and the first knowledge of that loss. It also unsettles the apparent opposition between divine command and human transgression, since the prohibition may both constrain freedom and covertly invite its exercise.

Innocence, Nothing, and Anxiety

In Søren Kierkegaard’s account, the primordial state is not a consciously enjoyed paradise. The spirit is still asleep and ignorant; it rests in peace because there is nothing against which it can strive. Yet that very nothing generates anxiety. The spirit projects its own actuality dreamily, without knowing what it might become, and innocence therefore contains an unrecognized disturbance within its repose. Anxiety at this stage remains a psychological condition, not yet guilt or knowledge of good and evil.

The prohibition changes the terms of this anxiety without supplying Adam with a settled knowledge of what he can do. The command awakens the possibility of freedom: Adam becomes aware that he may be able, though he does not yet know what that ability entails. Desire, on this account, is not evidence that he has already chosen evil. It is the sign that the prohibition has made a possibility present to him, while leaving its content obscure. He is drawn toward that possibility and recoils from it at once.

The Leap and the Two Withdrawals

Kierkegaard compares anxiety to dizziness at the edge of an abyss. Freedom looks into its own possibility and tries to steady itself by taking hold of something finite. In that moment it succumbs; the subject seeks support in a finite positivity rather than sustaining the vertigo of freedom. But this retreat is not yet the Fall proper. Psychology can describe the dizziness and the collapse of freedom, but it cannot explain the leap by which, when freedom rises again, the subject sees itself as guilty.

The order of these moments matters. The first withdrawal from infinity is a retreat into finitude; the second is freedom’s return, now accompanied by the recognition of guilt. In this later moment, sexuality and sensuousness appear as sinful. The religious knowledge of sin is therefore not the original cause of the Fall but a response to an earlier retreat from freedom. The Fall is a formal change in the subject’s stance toward reality: the world need not have changed for the subject to encounter it, and itself, differently.

The account also identifies a step Kierkegaard passes over. Drawing on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the book inserts a primordial contraction or self-withdrawal between repose and prohibition. This first contraction creates the subject as a creature with a sinthome; it precedes the divine command and is distinct from the later retreat that constitutes the Fall proper. On this reading, prohibition does not interrupt an otherwise complete innocence. It resolves a terrifying deadlock already present in human subjectivity by giving the subject a command around which its anxiety can gather.

Freedom as a Forced Choice

The divine gift of freedom contains a paradox: humanity is given the ability to choose, but is expected not to use that ability to break free from its Creator. The only guiltless use of freedom would be not to use it. The choice is therefore forced rather than open: the subject is permitted to choose only on condition that it makes the choice already prescribed. Freedom arrives bound to an injunction that denies the freedom to become genuinely free.

A feminist analogy clarifies why the Fall can also mark the beginning of knowledge. An awakening to an unjust and humiliating situation does not begin with a direct attack on patriarchy. It can begin with the recognition that passivity is a failure to act. That recognition does not by itself alter external circumstances, but it makes the absence of agency legible as a failure. In the same way, the Fall’s knowledge of sin can be read as a first, negative awareness of the subject’s situation, rather than simply as the punishment of a completed act of wrongdoing.

This reading neither treats the Fall straightforwardly as original sin nor celebrates it without qualification as liberation through knowledge. It proposes a more unsettling possibility: God’s explicit prohibition may contain a covert injunction to violate it, so that the command says one thing while implicitly demanding another. The shame that follows the eating from the Tree of Knowledge would then expose a division in the divine command itself, rather than merely recording humanity’s independent rebellion.

From the Fall to the Sacrifice

This divided command leads to the book’s account of Christ’s death. Christ gives up his life freely, yet humanity remains implicated in his death. The question is not resolved by saying only that the death redeems humanity: the argument also asks whether the innocent victim is made to die because those who benefit from the sacrifice wanted him dead. The logic of redemption thus risks repeating the logic of scapegoating, in which the death of one is made to secure the life of all.

The Fall’s central problem consequently extends beyond the first disobedience. It asks whether a command can be innocent when its hidden demand contradicts its stated prohibition, and whether a freely chosen sacrifice absolves those who wanted it. The concluding turn toward atheism is not framed as heroic defiance of God. Through Bertolt Brecht’s Herr Keuner, the test becomes practical: if belief or disbelief would make no difference to conduct, the question of God can be dropped; if it would make a difference, the person has already decided that God is needed. The Fall therefore ends not in a simple verdict on sin, but in an examination of the divided commands and desires through which freedom, guilt, and divine authority become entangled.