Fallen Nature

Fallen Nature (타락성본성): The Lineal Derivation of Inherited Disposition in Unification Doctrine

타락성본성 · 墮落性本性 · The Four Fallen Natures, Inherited Nature

What Is Fallen Nature?

Fallen nature (타락성본성, Tarakseong Bonseong) is the term in Unification theology for the four root-level distortions of human character that were transmitted to all of humanity through the Fall of the first ancestors. They are not individual sins, the discrete acts of disobedience a person commits, but the structural dispositions that operate before any act — the slant of desire, the pattern of relationship, the standing tilt of the will away from God.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle derives the four from the dynamics of the Fall itself, each one the inversion of a corresponding capacity of the original created nature.

Because the second element of the compound is bonseong (본성, 本性), root-nature, the term marks these as baseline dispositions present from birth rather than habits acquired later. Rev. Sun Myung Moon presses this point hard: fallen nature is what a person enacts without deciding to, beneath the threshold of conscious choice.

Fallen nature is what one commits without even knowing one is doing it.

— Sun Myung Moon (“타락성을 철저하게 추방하라”, 03/26/1992; vol. 228, sermon 4) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 228, sermon 4, delivered March 26, 1992); official English edition not yet verified on tplegacy.net.

This entry argues that the four fallen natures are not the substance of the Fall but its sediment — relational deformations whose root cause is the lineage event named original sin, so that their reversal is secured first at the level of lineage, through the Blessing, and only then completed through the moral reordering of mind over body.

Fallen nature, on this reading, is inherited, relational, and reversible by lineage; it is not an irreparable corruption of human substance. The alternative reading of the entry tests and rejects — that the four natures are themselves the essence of the Fall, co-primordial with it rather than derived from it — is taken up in the Analytical Synthesis.

The remainder of the entry traces this from the dispositions themselves, through their lineal cause, to their cure, and grounds the account in the Exposition of the Divine Principle and Rev. Sun Myung Moon's dated addresses.

Methodology Note

This entry reads the Exposition of the Divine Principle on the human Fall together with the canonical English Cheon Seong Gyeong and verified Korean sermons from the local archive of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's addresses, principally volumes 197, 228, 425, and 450. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The entry does not adjudicate the EDP's page-level wording where a verified edition is not in hand, and it leaves the full treatment of the lineage event to the entry on original sin. Passages translated from the local archive carry their verified date and Korean title in the caption; the one passage drawn verbatim from the English Cheon Seong Gyeong is dated but not paginated, since that edition supplies dates without book-and-page numbers.

Etymology: 墮落性本性 and the grammar of a root deformation

The term gathers three elements. 타락 (tarak, 墮落) is fall or descent from a proper position, used in Korean for both physical falling and moral degeneration. 성 (seong, 性) is nature, character, the intrinsic quality of a being. 본성 (bonseong, 本性) adds 본 (本, root, origin), so that the whole reads as the root-nature-as-constituted-by-the-fall: the dispositional baseline of fallen humanity, named from the inside, as distinct from the particular sins that issue from it.

The grammar matters for the thesis. A 죄 (joe, 罪), a sin, is an act; a bonseong is a standing condition.

The Exposition treats the four fallen natures as conditions, derived not by cataloguing human misdeeds but by analyzing the single relational catastrophe of the Fall and reading off, from each failure within it, a permanent tilt left in human character.

Four failures, four tilts. This is why the natures can be described before any individual has done anything: they are the terrain on which action occurs, not the sum of actions performed.

The compound also signals what fallen nature is not. It is not a corruption of substance — the Korean does not say the human essence became evil — but a deformation of 성, of disposition and relational orientation. That distinction, easy to miss, carries most of the entry's argument.

Concretely, the dispositions have names. Rev. Sun Myung Moon describes fallen nature as the character that arose, almost incidentally, in the archangel at the moment of the Fall and then passed to his human descendants intact: jealousy, envy, hot temper, arrogance, and stubbornness.

These are not the four natures themselves but their felt texture, the everyday emotional repertoire of a being whose relational orientation has been turned backward.

The four natures are the deep structure; jealousy and arrogance are how that structure surfaces in a life. A person inherits not only a tendency but a whole interior weather, and the weather is evidence of the structure beneath it.

The four fallen natures invert four relational capacities

The first claim is structural: each fallen nature is the exact inversion of an original relational capacity, so that the deformation is relational through and through. The Exposition derives the four from the failures of Lucifer, Eve, and Adam in the process of the Fall.

The first nature is failing to take God's standpoint. Lucifer did not view Adam and Eve as God viewed them, as the beloved children God most treasured, but from his own vantage, as rivals for the love he wanted. Its inversion is the capacity to see every person and event through God's love as the governing frame.

In fallen humanity, it appears as the reflex of self-centered perception — and here the doctrine touches the analysis of self-awareness directly, since this first nature is the standing disposition toward the self-entity awareness (자체 자각) that the entry on self-awareness identifies as the inner pivot of the Fall. Canonical teaching names the link plainly:

They have inherited fallen nature, which always thinks in terms of self-interest.

— Sun Myung Moon (CSG, 02/23/1977) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The second nature is leaving one's proper position. Lucifer was created as a servant and messenger, not as a child receiving God's direct love; reaching for the love that belonged to God's children, he left the orbit of the Principle. Its inversion is contentment within one's God-given role.

In fallen humanity, it is the perpetual overreach — claiming more authority than was given, refusing the discipline of process, mistaking self-will for God's will — and in providential history it is repeated by every central figure who acted as though he stood at a higher stage than he had actually reached.

The third nature is the reversal of dominion, and it carries the heaviest weight in Rev. Sun Myung Moon's preaching.

In the Fall, the one in the servant's position, the archangel, came to dominate the one in the subject's position, so that the created order was inverted at its most intimate relational level.

Its permanent signature in every fallen person is the conflict of mind and body — the experience of knowing the good and finding oneself acting against it. Rev. Sun Myung Moon makes this conflict the very seam between heaven and the self:

With mind and body at war, one cannot enter heaven.

— Sun Myung Moon (“타락의 기원과 몸 마음 통일”, 05/17/2004; vol. 450, sermon 1) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 450, sermon 1, delivered May 17, 2004); official English edition not yet verified on tplegacy.net.

The reversal of dominion is the third nature read inward: where the body, oriented by self-interest, governs the mind that should govern it.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon gives the conflict a precise mechanism. In the original design, the mind is the single positive pole, oriented to God, and the body its negative pole, made to follow; but through the Fall, a false love from Satan was implanted in the body, so that the body became a second positive pole, a rival plus.

Two positive poles repel. This is why the mind-body struggle is not a passing weakness but a structural, self-perpetuating war: not a deficiency to be supplemented but two competing centers that cannot, by their own nature, fuse.

The conflict will not resolve until one of the poles is returned to its negative position.

Read this way, the human person becomes contested ground. Rev. Sun Myung Moon describes the conscience as heaven's front-line outpost and the body as the front line of the satanic side, the two locked in a contest that, throughout fallen history, the conscience has usually lost.

The original good nature is not annihilated in this account — the mind still carries God's standard, which is why conscience keeps issuing its warnings — but it is outmatched, because the love-force that drove the Fall was stronger than the maturing conscience could withstand.

Hence, the entire apparatus of religion, which Rev. Sun Myung Moon likens to a repair shop set up for a creature that has broken down: its disciplines of fasting, sacrifice, and service are not arbitrary austerities but the deliberate striking of the body, the weakening of the rival plus until the mind can lead again.

The reach of this single nature is wide enough to explain a philosophy. Because the dialectical materialists did not know the Fall, Rev. Sun Myung Moon argues, they observed the universal war of mind and body, took conflict to be the very engine of development, and built a metaphysics of struggle on what is in fact a symptom of fallenness — concluding, reasonably enough on their premises, that there is no God.

The third fallen nature thus accounts not only for the individual's inner division but for a whole modern reading of history that mistook the wound for the law.

Its inversion is proper dominion — mind over body, conscience over impulse, the long purposes of love over the appetite of the moment — and the same dynamic, fixed by repetition, hardens into the habituality that makes fallen nature so resistant to mere resolve.

The fourth nature is the multiplication of the fallen condition. Had Eve, after her fall, returned to God in repentance rather than turning to Adam, the Exposition reasons, her restoration would have been comparatively simple; instead, she propagated the fallen relationship, widening the Fall's reach (EDP 1996). Its inversion is the multiplication of goodness — the natural tendency of one rooted in God's lineage to draw others upward.

In fallen humanity, it is the universal reflex to spread one's own disorder through families, cultures, and institutions, transmitting wounds rather than blessings.

Set together, the four describe a single relational pattern turned inside out: wrong standpoint, wrong position, wrong dominion, wrong transmission. None of them names a corrupted substance; each names a relation gone backward.

Fallen nature is the sediment of lineage, not the substance of the Fall

If the four natures are relational inversions, the question of their cause becomes decisive, and here the entry's central claim comes into focus: the natures are downstream of a lineage event, not identical with it.

In Unification doctrine, the genuinely causal category is original sin (원죄, wonjoe), defined not as a moral lapse but as the illicit love by which Satan's bloodline entered the human family.

The Cheon Seong Gyeong states the causal order with unusual directness, defining the Fall in essence as the inheriting of the wrong lineage rather than as an act of disobedience (CSG, April 2, 1969).

The four fallen natures are the structural effects of inhabiting that wrong lineage — the deformations that a life rooted in the wrong kind of love leaves in the personality.

The relationship can be put precisely: original sin is the cause, the four natures are its sediment at the level of character. This is why Rev. Sun Myung Moon grounds the whole human predicament not in disposition first but in the love-life-lineage triad that the Fall inverted:

God is the subject of love, of life, and of lineage.

— Sun Myung Moon (“신인사상의 완성”, 01/19/1990; vol. 197, sermon 4) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 197, sermon 4, delivered January 19, 1990); official English edition not yet verified on tplegacy.net.

What humanity should have inherited along that triad — God's love, life, and lineage — it inherited instead from the adulterer, and the four natures are the shape that the wrong inheritance takes in the heart.

The depth of the problem shows in what salvation, by itself, can and cannot do. Rev. Sun Myung Moon reads Paul's hope of adoption (Rom 8:23 KJV) against the grain of comfort: that the redeemed still wait to be adopted means that salvation, apart from a change of lineage, can make a person at most an adopted child of God, never a child by blood. The difference is the whole point. A behavioral or forensic salvation leaves the bloodline untouched and therefore leaves the four natures with their root intact; only a real change of lineage can make a true son or daughter rather than an adopted one. This is why the natures cannot be reached by repentance and conduct alone.

The fuller account of the lineage event itself belongs to the entry on Original Sin; the point for fallen nature is the order of dependence. The natures do not float free as a list of bad tendencies; they are anchored to, and explained by, a prior change of bloodline.

The reversal is secured by lineage before it is completed by morality

The causal order has a sharp practical consequence: if fallen nature is the sediment of lineage, then no amount of moral effort can reach its root, because moral effort operates downstream of the cause.

The root is reached only by changing the lineage itself. This is the logic of the Blessing, and of the lineage-transfer it enacts.

One must deny the root and be born anew.

— Sun Myung Moon (“사랑의 주인과 혈통전환”, 11/15/2003; vol. 425, sermon 9) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Translation from the Korean original (vol. 425, sermon 9, delivered November 15, 2003); official English edition not yet verified on tplegacy.net.

To deny the root and be born anew is to be grafted out of the satanic lineage into God's, which is what the Holy Wine and the Blessing accomplish at a level the four natures cannot themselves reach. But — and this is the second half of the practical claim — the Blessing does not erase the dispositions. It removes the cause; the sediment remains as the terrain on which the Blessed Family must still work.

Receiving the Blessing is therefore the beginning of the moral labor, not its end: the long, daily replacement of the four natures with their original counterparts, family member by family member, through prayer, jeongseong, and living for others, with the reversal of the third nature — mind brought to govern body — serving as the interior proof that the work is real.

Lineage first, then morality: the order is not incidental. It is the difference between a religion of self-improvement and a religion of re-creation.

Providential Context: from external restraint to lineal cure

Read across the three providential ages, the doctrine shows the four natures being addressed at successively deeper levels, and the dated corpus marks the final level clearly.

In the Old Testament Age, the Mosaic Law restrained the natures from the outside. The law said thou shalt not; it governed the behavioral consequences without transforming the dispositions that produced them.

In the New Testament Age, Jesus relocated the analysis inward, teaching that anger is already the seed of murder and lust already the seed of adultery (Matt 5:21-28 KJV) — a profound advance in diagnosis, identifying the natures as interior realities.

Yet because the restored family could not be established through the Blessing, the physical transmission of the wrong lineage, and with it the four natures, continued through birth.

In the Completed Testament Age, the cure is applied at the level of the cause. That the corpus foregrounds precisely this is itself evidence: across the indexed archive, the bare term 타락성 appears as a sermon title exactly once, in 1992 (vol. 228), confirming that fallen nature is a doctrinal rather than a homiletic topic — while 혈통전환 (lineage transfer), the remedy, appears in eight sermon titles between 2003 and 2009.

The disposition is rarely the headline; the change of lineage that addresses its cause becomes a sustained late-period theme. The chronology fits the thesis exactly: the era that can finally reverse the four natures is the era that can finally change the lineage from which they descend.

Inter-Religious Resonance

The world's scriptures widely attest a deep, pre-volitional distortion in human nature, and the parallels sharpen what is distinctive in the Unification account.

Christianity knows the residue of fallenness that persists after baptism. The Catholic tradition calls it concupiscence, the tinder of sin, a disposition toward evil that is not itself full sin but must be resisted lifelong; Paul gives it its classic interior voice, the law in the members at war with the law of the mind — the very mind-body conflict that Unification doctrine assigns to the third fallen nature.

I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.

Judaism names the inherited bent as the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, and reads it as present from the start of life: the imagination of the human heart is evil from its youth (Gen 8:21 JPS), an inclination over which one is nonetheless called to rule.

Islam names the lower self as an-nafs al-ammārah, the soul that incites to evil, the standing disposition that the greater struggle must master.

The (human) soul is prone to evil.

Buddhism traces suffering to three root poisons — greed, hatred, and delusion (lobha, dosa, moha) — structural defilements that operate beneath particular acts and are carried across rebirths, dissolved only by sustained practice rather than moral effort alone.

Confucianism debated whether human nature is originally good (Mencius) or in need of reshaping (Xunzi); the Neo-Confucian synthesis held the nature originally good but obscured by material desire, recoverable through self-cultivation and the subduing of self that returns one to propriety (Analects 12.1, Legge).

Across these traditions, the diagnosis converges: a deep distortion precedes and shapes specific wrongdoing. The Unification account diverges on three points. It locates the distortion not in the structure of desire (Buddhism), nor in a metaphysical corruption of will (the strongest Protestant readings), nor in obscuring material force (Neo-Confucianism), but in a concrete historical event, the Fall, that corrupted a specific relational structure, the lineage of love.

It construes the distortion as relational rather than substantial, four inverted relations rather than a poisoned essence. And it locates the cure at the level of the cause — lineage restoration through the Blessing — rather than in self-cultivation, ascetic extinction, or imputed grace standing alone. The shared diagnosis is real; the etiology and the cure are the tradition's own.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis is that the four fallen natures are the sediment of a prior lineage event, not the substance of the Fall — relational inversions caused by inheriting the wrong bloodline, and therefore reversible first at the level of lineage and only then completed by the moral reordering of mind over body.

The body sections have laid the evidence: the four natures derived as inversions of four relational capacities; the canonical statement that fallen nature, inherited, thinks always in self-interest (CSG, February 23, 1977); the lineage definition of the Fall (CSG, April 2, 1969); the love-life-lineage triad as the thing inverted (vol. 197); the Blessing as denial of the root and rebirth (vol. 425); and the corpus asymmetry by which the remedy of lineage transfer, not the disposition itself, becomes the late-period theme.

The strongest internal objection arises from the Exposition's own method. Because the EDP derives the four natures directly from the dynamics of the Fall — reading each nature off a failure within the Fall-process itself — a reader may conclude that the natures are co-primordial with the Fall, its very substance, rather than effects downstream of a separate lineage cause.

On this reading, fallen nature would be what the Fall is, and original sin merely its name; the disposition, not the bloodline, would be the root. The objection has real footing in how the doctrine is taught.

The reply turns on a distinction; the objection collapses: the difference between the shape of the natures and their cause. The EDP's derivation explains the shape — why there are these four, and why each takes the form it does — by tracing them to the four relational failures of the Fall. It does not thereby make the dispositions self-standing.

Their transmission is lineal: Rev. Sun Myung Moon defines the Fall as the inheriting of the wrong lineage and locates original sin in the bloodline, and the natures are repeatedly described as inherited through that lineage, not generated afresh in each person by imitation. And the cure confirms the order: if the natures were the root, moral and ascetic effort would suffice to remove them; that the tradition makes the Blessing — a lineage act — the precondition of the moral work shows that it locates the root one level deeper than disposition. Shape and cause are different questions; the EDP answers the first from the Fall process, the second from the bloodline.

This clarifies the entry's limits. The thesis does not claim that the dispositions are mild or optional, nor that the Blessing makes the moral struggle unnecessary; the four natures remain real, resistant, and only slowly reversed.

It claims that they are inherited rather than chosen, relational rather than substantial, and reversible by lineage rather than by effort alone — a reading that takes the Exposition's structural derivation seriously while refusing to mistake the natures' shape for their cause.

Key Takeaway

• Fallen nature (타락성본성) names four inherited dispositions — failing to take God's standpoint, leaving one's position, reversing dominion, and multiplying the fallen condition — that operate before any individual act.
• The four are relational inversions, each the exact opposite of an original relational capacity; the doctrine describes a deformation of disposition, not a corruption of human substance.
• This entry argues that the four natures are the sediment of a prior lineage event, original sin, not the substance of the Fall itself.
• Because natures are caused by inheriting the wrong lineage, their root is reached not by moral effort but by lineage change — which is the logic of the Blessing.
• The reversal of the third nature, mind brought to govern body, is the interior signature of fallen nature overcome, and Rev. Sun Myung Moon makes mind-body unity a condition of entering heaven.
• The Blessing removes the cause but not the sediment; the Blessed Family's daily life is the long replacement of the four natures with their original counterparts.
• The corpus confirms the order: 타락성 titles one sermon while 혈통전환, the lineal remedy, titles eight sermons between 2003 and 2009 — the cure, not the disposition, is the late-period theme.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1990. “신인사상의 완성.” Sermon, January 19, 1990, vol. 197, sermon 4.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1992. “타락성을 철저하게 추방하라.” Sermon, March 26, 1992, vol. 228, sermon 4.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2003. “사랑의 주인과 혈통전환.” Sermon, November 15, 2003, vol. 425, sermon 9.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2004. “타락의 기원과 몸 마음 통일.” Sermon, May 17, 2004, vol. 450, sermon 1.