This second part of the chapter focuses on what fell away from mankind: the God-given light that clothed our bodies, the closeness and warmth of living in light, the dialogue and knowledge of God, our ancestral home in the garden of Eden in the East. On earth there is a mysterious mixture now of good and evil people, fortune and misfortune, beauty and ugliness, dignity and shame in our experience of being human.
We’ve learned already that God and His goodness is personal. Likewise, evil and its consequences are very personal too, and evil is not an abstract entity, but it always has a name behind it. Man’s beginning wasn’t entirely perfected. St. Melito of Sardis wrote a poem from On Pascha that goes, “a clod of earth may receive seed of either kind, the man was susceptible by nature of good and evil.” Neither Adam or Eve ever got the idea from themselves that they should go to, look at, touch or eat from the forbidden tree. They fell into a lie about what appeared to be “fair” from the Devil by their own weakened sight and desire and inattentive as new creatures. The traditional story about Adam and Eve is that they fell out of disobedience and pride, and so God came up with a new plan that would have never been unless sin entered the world. But the fathers of the church and the scriptures describe how mankind fell out of weakness from desire and out of the Devil’s envy who saw what the plan of God was from the beginning. Just as Satan was cast down to the earth to roam about, so too the serpent was cursed and crawled on its stomach because he couldn’t handle seeing that flesh and blood would be united to the highest Light in heaven, Christ Jesus. In our genesis, it seems to be the case that the Devil envied human destiny to become like God through Christ Jesus. The Devil himself was the first-light bearer and guardian set over the earth. Without this triangulation of desirous envy and man as the last piece of creation planned to enter into God’s Light and God to enter into our nature, it would be difficult to explain how desire arises in the first place unless one of these two different creatures, man or angels, were aware one another’s plan and purpose from the beginning.
We also learn from Metropolitan Hilarion that the Devil’s lies could only be taken by mankind if they were covered with false sweetness and beauty. At the heart of humanity is our experience of nakedness and shame at all levels of development. Shame is universal to all people. Man cannot exist by knowing both evil and good because it perpetually divides and disintegrates individual lives and groups of people; knowing what is good and evil personally destroys the natural bonds of humanity and our bond to God. In Eden, our nudity was sweet with God’s grace. But by denuding that supernatural grace, we introduced shame and more shameful events in the world like a bad seed. Shame is a loss of communion with beauty through matter and spirit. St. Melito of Sardis also says that, “what was marvelously knit together was unraveled, and the beautiful body divided.” Man’s sin, then, isn’t missing the mark, as if we just needed better aim; sin imprisons us for life without any way of escaping to see light again and that experience is described well with the saying, “As deep as the roots go so high do the branches grow.” Our deepest spiritual and physical roots have been affected, as St. Gregory Palamas teaches about the governing parts of human nature we all have, namely, the appetitive (desiring/our devotion), incensive (anger/our determination), and rational (reasoning). These parts of us used to work together as one in our nature. Our desires, intellectual pursuits and anger get out of control easily, and so even our ability to make right decisions comes with struggling and our will is scattered. St. Anthony the Great teaches that we have “two minds,” meaning, one desires what is good toward God and the other is evil toward the Devil. Mankind is mixed with crooked and honest people living side by side, some are misfortunate while others are fortunate. The only way to heal our mind, body and soul is to have God become Man, and that is best followed in practice in the Holy Orthodox Church.