The second Adam is Christ, the Word Incarnate. Adam is the first man; Christ is the second man. Metropolitan Hilarion teaches that the early Christians understood that Christ was incarnate because of God’s unchangeable plan, because of the unshakeable loving-kindness of the Father to unite us all with Himself and all creation, and to free us from passions that only pull us toward doing evil things, which is slavery to the passions and the Evil One. Christ reversed our fallen nature and all creatures who had to fall with mankind unwillingly. The full lifecycle of each human being is made holy again; that’s the message of recapitulation in the second Adam. This total reversal of our direction in life is called recapitulation by the church fathers, recapitulatio in Latin, because it refers to going back to the heads of a book, or main points of a chapter. This chapter restates, as if written in stone, that we are not meant to die, creation and mankind is good, and we are meant to dwell and glorify the Holy Trinity forever. With Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, He turned our passions (pathos), our tendency to fall, around and He wholly destroyed the corruption (pthora) plaguing all of human history by His Cross. There are sinful passions and natural weaknesses. Thirst, tiredness, grief, and hunger are natural weaknesses. A passion (pathos) can be unforgiveness, lying, lust, pride, gluttony and greed. The church fathers taught that Christ took our human weaknesses listed above and even became “sin” for us so that we could conquer death through those very limited ways of life on our bodies through His strength on the Cross. Christ didn’t inherit the sinful passions, especially since no male seed was involved in conception. and He is the Word of God. As odd as it may be, the incarnation was not primarily to deal with sin, as later Latin theology tends to emphasize, but to restore our whole nature into Christ and to show His love in its fullness. Without taking love as the starting point for Christ becoming the second Adam, other theories and ideas begin to take root in our understanding of this great mystery. Why couldn’t God destroy everything and every person the moment evil and sin entered the world to start the world over, might be an hypothetical question that results from not beginning with the loving-kindness of God. St. Isaac the Syrian teaches that God’s first plan was to show His love wholly to us. Then, we begin to see that there is no divine wrath working behind the scenes against mankind, except the Evil One and our own anger from passions. The will of the Holy Trinity in “mystical coexistence” was, and is, and ever shall be unwavering in the plan of our whole salvation.