The Dreaming Spirit and Original Sin

In the innocence that precedes the fall, spirit exists in what Kierkegaard calls a dream: not unconscious (that would be mere animality) but not yet fully awake to itself. The prohibition — "You shall not eat of the tree" — does not function as a clear command whose violation is understood; it functions as an incitement to anxiety, awakening in the dreaming spirit the awareness that it could, that there is a possibility (transgression) which now exists for it. The prohibition, paradoxically, makes possible what it forbids: it creates the very freedom it seeks to restrain, and with it, anxiety.

The fall is not explained by anxiety; it is the leap that anxiety makes possible. Anxiety does not cause the fall in any mechanical sense — it is not a sufficient condition. But it is the psychological medium through which freedom becomes aware of itself and through which the qualitative transition from innocence to guilt occurs. The leap itself — the act of sin — cannot be explained further; it is a category of its own, an absolute beginning that has no prior cause. This is Kierkegaard's decisive move against every attempt to explain away sin by appealing to heredity, environment, or psychology: the leap is always the individual's own.

What is inherited across generations is not sin itself — sin cannot be inherited, since each person's sin is their own leap — but the anxiety that makes sin possible. Each subsequent human being inherits a higher degree of anxious possibility from the accumulated history of the race. This hereditary anxiety is not guilt; it is the heightened sensitivity of freedom that each person is born with. Kierkegaard's account is both psychologically precise and theologically sophisticated: original sin is real, its effects are inherited, and yet each person is fully responsible for their own transgression.

Kierkegaard's account of Adam and the dreaming spirit is developed in Chapter I of The Concept of Anxiety. The analysis drew on and departed from the Lutheran orthodoxy of his day; it anticipates many themes in twentieth-century depth psychology and phenomenology of consciousness.