Fall, derived from the Spanish verb. FALL and from Latin. HIP, already attested in the 10th century, from which emerge DROP, But also HAPPENwhich in turn derives from Vulgar Latin ACCADERE and from Classical Latin ACCIDERE (ad-cadere), with the literal meaning of fall to the side, along with, that be the caseThis literal meaning of adjacent fall extends to figurative forms of value that point to the meaning of happen o something significant to happen to someoneThat which the Latins call an "event" in the sense of "quod cuique evenit," that which happens to someone and has value for the person involved, not in itself. This eventual occurrence is, of course, etymologically linked to the vocabulary of ACCIDENTWhile it eventually takes on the explicit meaning of misfortune, in its Greek origin (perfect participle of symbaino, symbebekos) and in its Latin translation (accidens) it means anything that can happen to someone without being part of the intentional planning of their rational action.

From an etymological perspective, another fundamental derivative for our purposes is the word EVENT and, above all, the lexical family of the term DECLINE, DECAY, DECADENCE, DOWNGRADE; DECAY, from vulgar Latin DECADERE, from which come "to decline", "decadence", "relapse", "decline", but also CADENCE, from Italian CADENZA, a word itself derived from the verb HIP which is at the base of our DROP.

In his celebrated essay "On the Classics," Jorge Luis Borges (1952) reminds us that, despite its apparent uselessness, "few disciplines are of greater interest than etymology." This fascinatingly useless discipline brings into play the notional and conceptual perimeter of the vocabulary of the fall. This perimeter opens a certain cognitive access to the experience of time (what happens and what happens to us) as a plexus of events linked to the horizon of interests of an individual for whom this set of events acquires a rhythm and cadence within the framework of a life project articulated around the design of a life worth living. When that which occurs in the order of time as a significant event for someone (quod cuique evenit) develops in the direction of exhaustion, wear and tear, or disaster, we begin to understand the meaning of the fall as decadence, degeneration, and corruption. As failure or collapse. Against the inevitable cartographic will to classify and control terminology by distinguishing fields of competence (religious in the case of "fall" or "stain(biological-physical in "corruption" and "degeneration"), the lexical family of the fall already implies a plurality of semantic levels that respond to the need to enable spaces of intelligibility for the experience of time as a meaningful event that inexorably advances toward its decay. The fall (and failure is, undoubtedly, a figure of the fall) thus delineates a very precise conceptual horizon: the question of the sense and meaning of time experienced (joyfully, but above all painfully) by human communities. From this perspective, the fall appears as a basic conceptual-figurative scheme in the West to account for the sense of time as becoming whose structure follows the rhythm or cadence of decay, collapse, exhaustion, decadence, and corruption. A typically biological scheme according to which everything that is born and develops in the order of time, as an entity subject to procedural changes, is subject to DECAY: the rhythm of life is, precisely, the fall. What lives is, insofar as I live, literally deciduous, from the Latin CADUCUS, "that falls", "perishable", again from the verb CADERE, to fall.

How can we account for the inherent transience of life, and above all, how can we inject meaning and intelligibility into the transience inherent in humanity? This question confronts us with universes of meaning enabled by metaphorical structures, and from this vantage point, the repository of failure in general, and of the fall in particular, has long responded to the diverse ways in which humankind has developed a series of figurative and conceptual strategies to examine the unavailability of life itself through a specific interpretation of the totality of time. If the question underlying the experience and vocabulary of the fall is the question of the meaning of the temporality that constitutes us, wears us down, and ultimately causes us to fail, the metaphor of decadence in which we navigate offers a kind of proposal. And this proposal is well captured in the words of one of the many fallen angels of Western literature: "All history is the story of a collapse," says Fitzgerald at the beginning of a book entitled, precisely, The Crack-Up.

The unavailability of life itself, then, as an elemental experience. This margin of unavailability, this constant threat that disrupts our existence and reveals the fragility of every form of good within the reach of an animal that knows itself to be finite, perishable, and mortal, takes on many forms throughout the West (Destiny, Moira, the will of the gods, chance, luck, God, Providence), and these are linked to a certain experience of failure, collapse, contamination, illness, fall, or corruption. If, as Borges points out in Pascal's sphereThe entire history of humanity is nothing more than the history of a few metaphors; undoubtedly one of the most unavoidable is the metaphor of the Fall as a mechanism for self-understanding of the human condition. A condition problematized from the simple, almost biological, idea of ​​corruption, disease, and... slope From a vigorous and virtuous state of health that inexorably degenerates and dies. The corruption of virtue, the stain that ruins purity, expelling us from paradise and condemning us to a state of hardship that we call history or human existence.

If, as Giorgio Manganelli suggests, the human condition can be described in terms of a glossary of decadence through a series of "verba descendendi," or verbs of descent (to incline, to sink, to lower oneself, to tumble, to precipitate, to collapse, to become aberrant), it seems no wonder that the history of culture has been—and, in many ways, continues to be—the history of an anagogic will to ascend, to Anabasis, to rise. This (beautiful and terrible) idea of ​​Manganelli's reminds us that the fall is always intertwined with decadence and corruption. A braid (fall, decadence, corruption) that operates, we insist, as a hermeneutical pattern, as an irreversible symptom that appears time and again within the most diverse cultures throughout the history of humankind.

The idea seems to be the same since Homer's poems: varied expressions for a certain contempt for the present in relation to a mythical, full, glorious, vigorous, and healthy past that we lost as a consequence of a transgression, of an excess of hybris, a fault, guilt or affront to the gods, as we read in the myth of the androgyne of Banquet from Plato (189c-193d) or in the book of Genesis of the Old Testament (Gen. 3). This transgression gives rise to our decadence, our fall into existence, as Cioran will say, and our condemnation to corruption in every sense, also constituting the origin of human history understood as "history of salvation," in the terminology of Karl Löwith.

If we consider the poetic modalities that accompany this conceptualization of human time, we find that there are many images that, throughout the centuries, account for this basic structure of understanding.

En IliadIn Book VI, lines 144-149, Glaucus and Diomedes meet on the battlefield. Diomedes asks his opponent about his origins, and Glaucus replies:

«O you, Tydeus, of the great spirit! Why of my lineage
questions?
Like the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of
men.
Some leaves are blown to the ground by the wind, and others by the forest
makes sprout
when it blooms, when spring arrives.
Such is the lineage of men, one springs up and another fades away».

This figure of the Fall is undoubtedly one of the most fertile motifs in the history of the concept we are discussing: the inherent transience of the mortal lineage resides precisely in the degenerate and degenerating rhythm of its cadence, in its constant process of withering and rebirth. That is why the vocabulary of the Fall is always linked to a certain notion of the cyclical nature of all things (like the passing of the seasons), but above all, to the nostalgia for the kingdomA most famous simile, that of human transience and the perpetual falling of leaves, which, according to Clement of Alexandria (Stromata VI 738), already appears in Musaeus and in the verses of Mimnermus (fr. 2 W. [=fr. 2 D.]) and Simonides (29 D [3] = Simon. 8 W ​​[1]); a simile which, moreover, applied to human souls, we read in Bacchylides (Epin. V 63-67), in Virgil (uhVI 305-312) and, of course, in Dante (Div. Com., Inf. III 112-120); an image that Aristophanes had already used in Birds 685 ss. as a reproach to the human race, and which Horace (Ars Poetica 60-63 and 68-72) prefers to use to refer to the life of words. The comparison transcends ancient poetic tradition and even reaches our own Antonio Machado, who writes "To a Dry Elm" thinking of Homer's verse and who, in Juan de Mairena ("Sentences, Witticisms, Notes and Recollections of an Apocryphal Professor," from 1936 (ed. cit. by O. Macrí, II, p. 1956), pays homage to both the poet and his wretched lineage of mortals. Mairena speaks to his young students:

Gentlemen, we need speak little of death. You are too young… However, it wouldn't hurt for you to begin to consider it as a frequent and, it seems, natural phenomenon, and to recite from memory Homer's immortal hexameter: Óie per phýllon gene é toié de kai andrón. In other words: “As the generation of leaves, so also that of men”… Mairena didn't want to insist, says Machado. Death—he thought—is not a topic for young people, who live toward tomorrow, imagining themselves alive indefinitely beyond the moment in which they live, and brazenly ignoring the great chasm we old folks contemplate. “Let us speak, then, gentlemen, of immortality.”.

In the Greek tradition we find another key reference point for the fall in Hesiod, Works and daysVerses 109-201, where the entire universe, and within it humankind, is governed by laws of generational decline. The present, every present moment, is already always a FALL, a degeneration, a sunset or to decline from an axiologically superior past that gradually degrades like metal or the body exposed to the elements. This Hesiodic moment is the first detailed appearance of a motif that would later become famous in the artistic sphere and that underlies modern decadent interpretations of the myth of the Ages: gold, silver, bronze, heroes, iron. The race of mortals dwells, with suffering and pain, of course, in the Iron Age.

Among the tragedians, the Homeric and Hesiodic notion of physical (corruption) or spiritual (fall) decline gives way to a naturalistic interpretation that sees in time the empire of alternation and the cyclical condemnation of the birth-death pair exemplified in the figure of Cronus who devours his children, as recalled by the paintings of Goya and Rubens on the Cannibal Father, that physical and destructive time to which Aristotle pays homage in his lectures on natural philosophy, in which, precisely, he tries to elaborate a science that endows intelligibility to the realm of what, instead of remaining, becomes:

«On the other hand, to exist in time means to be affected by time, and so it is often said that time deteriorates things, that everything ages with time, that time makes one forget, but it is not said that one learns through time, nor that through time one becomes young and beautiful; because time is, in itself, rather a cause of destruction, since it is the number of movement, and movement causes that which exists to spring forth or emerge from itself.» (Aristotle, Physics IV 221ª30ss).

Sophocles' verses also operate in this direction in Oedipus at Colonus (608-616):

«Time destroys everything; no one is safe from death except the gods. The earth decays, flesh decays, trust withers among men and suspicion is born. Friends turn against friends, and cities against cities. With time all things change: delight turns to bitterness, and hatred to love.».

The notion of rhythm or the cycle of birth-life-decline-death-birth is expressed in Greek with the term anakyklosis and it has worked well for an interpretation of the history of political regimes as a history of cyclical degeneration, as we observe in Book VIII of Republic from Plato and in Polybius (Stories(Book VI, 3 and 4), where the monarchy degenerates into tyranny and leads to aristocracy, which in turn degenerates into oligarchy. An oligarchy that leads to a democracy followed by ochlocracy, which, of course, requires a restoration and a new beginning under the monarchy. We find echoes of this same idea in Cicero's work. De re publica And in Machiavelli, who will discuss Polybius's theses in the Discourses 1, 2 and who will oppose the strength of Virtue to the untamed character of Fortune, inaugurating a way of interpreting failure that begins to be articulated more and more in the individual and in his ability to take advantage of the occasion, the circumstance or the opportune moment from a strategic point of view.

Dressed not in Greek, but in Semitic garb, we find the same fable in the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the Genesis of the Old Testament (which reappears with variations in the Quran and in Gnostic writings) and which continues to be the main scene of the fall, decadence and corruption (Genesis 3, 1-13 and 13-24).

In the Roman context, we observe the same narrative scheme in Book I of the Metamorphosis from Ovid, which describes the four ages of man (excluding the Age of Heroes included by Hesiod) (Metam(I 89-150), while in the East the same image of degenerative cadence marks the Hindu tradition of the Vedas, where we find a cyclical conception of time that engenders and destroys successive epochs of light and darkness. The Vedas describe four ages, and we are inhabitants of the last. Kali Yuga (corresponding to the "Iron Age" of Hesiod and Ovid), which is the last and, of course, the worst of human eras, when the strong, the cunning, and the reckless rule the world. This motif reappears in Confucian, Zoroastrian, Aztec, Sami, Native American, Icelandic, and Irish mythologies and extends successfully into the Renaissance.

The doctrine of revolutions or cycles would even be mentioned by John Adams in 1787, in letter XXXI ("Ancient Republics, and Opinions of Philosophers") of his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States.

In the 19th century, Nietzsche became part of a critical interpretation of modern culture that championed the need to recover the lost unity of pre-Platonic Greece to guarantee the unity and aesthetic-political identity of Germany. From this perspective, we find in the young Nietzsche a strange figure of the fall: Archaic Greece degenerates, declines, and becomes corrupted with the emergence of the enlightened rationalism of Euripides and its philosophical expression in the hands of Socrates, Plato, and Christianity. Platonism, Christianity, and Gnostic-centric modernity would be, in this sense, the present-day expression of a lost paradise, a strange tragic paradise in which life, in its truest sense, is not annihilated by the phantasmagoria of the Platonic ideal, Christian transcendence, or modern science.

As can be seen in the previous examples, the history of the concept, image, and metaphor of the Fall undeniably spans different cultures and eras. If we focus on the 16th-19th centuries, there are two illustrious examples of this description of the nature of time, history, and humankind as a process of degeneration and decline: Milton's work, Paradise Lost (1667) (which incorporates the creationist interpretation of the Fall) and Shakespeare's (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII) (written in 1599, published in 1623), where the image of the seven Ages of Man is used to express the inevitable decline of all human life. These are distinct and very different examples: Milton writes a poem with clearly theodicy-based aims, starting from the question of the compatibility between human suffering and the existence of an all-powerful God, while Shakespeare seems closer to Manganelli and to a worldview that harbors no hope or salvific meaning for the cyclical decline of mortal generations, as seen, for example, in that line from Macbeth that the pessimist Schopenhauer loved so much and which inspired the title of one of William Faulkner's most famous novels: "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Bibliography

Greek sources:
Aristotle (1950). Aristotelis Physica, recognovit brevique adnotatione critique instruxit WD Ross, Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, Clarendon Press.

Aeschylus (1995). Aeschyli septem quae supersunt tragoediae ed. G. Murray, Oxford: Clarendon Press Oxford.

Euripides (1981-1984). Euripides' fables, ed. J. Diggle, vols. I-III, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hesiod (1966). Hesiod Theogony, ed. M. L. West, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966.

Hesiod (1970). Hesiod works , ed. F. Solmsen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970.

Homer (1931), Homeri Ilias, ed. T. W. Allen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1931.

Homer (1962) Homer Odyssey, ed. von der Muhll, Basel.

Sophocles (1958-68), Sophocles, vols. I-III, ed. A. Dain-P. Mazon, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1958-1968.

Fragments and compilations:
Diehl (1925)= Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, ed. E. Diehl, Leipzig: Teubner.

Nauck (1962)= Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. A. Nauck, Hildesheim: Olms.

West (1971)= Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, ed.
M. L. West, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Translations:
Aristotle (1995). Physics. Madrid: Gredos. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Complete Works (2004), edition coordinated by E. Crespo, Cátedra, Madrid.

Ferraté, J. (2000) Archaic Greek lyric poetsBarcelona: Cliff.

Hesiod (2000). Works and fragmentsMadrid: Gredos.

Homer (1991) IliadMadrid: Gredos, Madrid.

Other works:
Borges, JL (1992). «On the classics», in Other inquisitionsComplete Works, Madrid: Círculo Readers' Review, 1992, vol. II, pp. 366-367.

Corominas, J. (1987). Brief Etymological Dictionary of the Castilian LanguageMadrid: Gredos.

Machado, A. (1936) Juan de Mairena (sayings, witticisms, notes and recollections of an apocryphal professor)Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.

Index of illustrations:

Fig. 1: Jorge Luís Borges (CBA web archive).

Fig. 2: Francisco de Goya, Saturn devouring a son, (1819–1823), oil on plaster transferred to canvas, 146 cm × 83 cm, Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.