Only within Christianity is there a distinction between the essence of God and the energy of God. God created the heaven and earth and all things out of goodness, out of His energies, without communicating His essence. St. Irenaeos said that God the Father creates using “His two hands, the Son and the Holy Spirit”.[1] St. Basil refines this message and says that God the Father is the “Primordial cause” of creation; the Son of God is the “Creative Cause” of God Creation and the Holy Spirit is the “Perfecting Cause” of creation[2].
The Holy Trinity has been involved in the entire creation story even unto the present day and will continue to do so until the Lord’s Second Coming when God’s Divine Plan for the Salvation of man is fulfilled. God created man in His image and likeness with free will to choose to be with God and do God’s will, or to choose to turn away from God and do his own will. When man exercises his free will to turn away from God, then man chooses to separate himself from God and distorts God’s image and likeness within himself. Since God is Life, turning away from God is to turn away from life; that is to choose death, a spiritual death.
This tendency to turn away from God and do our own will rather than God’s Will is what man inherited from the fall of Adam. Evil in the world is what man creates when he separates himself from God and chooses spiritual death over life. Evil entered into the world through the will of man. Evil becomes real only by means of the will[3]. Adam sinned freely. His sin consisted fundamentally in his disobedience, in the violation of God’s command to him. Adam ignored God. He took not the divine path, but the demonic road. The immediate consequence of this action was the fall, that is The Fall from the living God. Humanity loses the divine gift. Human nature becomes distorted. Death comes. Our subjugation to the tyranny of the devil follows. The image of God is weakened within us. Man has chosen not to be in union with God. Adam denied the human characteristic and possibility of divinization. The potential of becoming like God disappears and becomes impossible.[4] If Adam obeyed God out of love, he would have responded to God’s will in complete self-renunciation; he would willingly have rejected the forbidden fruit and lived only in God, striving for union with Him. God gave Adam a commandment and in so doing, God showed man’s human will the path to follow to attain deification, the path of the renunciation of all that is not God. Instead, the human will of Adam chose the opposite path, separating itself from God, it submitted itself to the power of the devil. St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor viewed this more from the physical aspect of sin: that is, instead of following its natural disposition towards God, the human mind turned towards the world; instead of spiritualizing the body, it gave itself to the current of animal and sensual life, submitted itself to the material world. The fall of human nature is the direct consequence of the free self-determination of man, who voluntarily subjected himself to this condition.[5
Adam did not fulfill his vocation. He did not know how to attain union with God. From the fall of Adam until the day of Pentecost, deifying grace was estranged from human nature. Union with God through Grace, Theosis, had become impossible. But all was not destroyed: the vocation of the first Adam was fulfilled by Christ, the second Adam. St. Irenaeus of Lyons and St. Athanasius the Great, said “God became man in order that man might become god”. This work, completed by Jesus, appears to fallen mankind as the work of salvation, the redemption of a world enslaved by sin and death. Our Savior opened to us once again, the way to deification, which is the ultimate end of man[6]. In Luke 12:49 Jesus said, “I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” Fire on the earth is either the fire of judgment or the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out as tongues of fire upon the disciples on Pentecost.[7]
God did not act with anger toward Adam’s action. Adam chose the separation from God. Referring to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1:18-19) about the “wrath of God” against ungodliness, unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, one is able to gain a better understanding of what may have actually occurred at the time of the fall. God’s wrath does not involve a loss of temper in a human sense; it is actually free of emotion and is based on truth. It is calm and impartial, free from emotion, as we know it.[8] We are also reassured by St. Paul that although sin has injured the ability of humanity to relate to God, even the most terrible sin cannot destroy the image of God in us. St. Paul, throughout this Epistle, speaks clearly of the basis of God’s judgment. We learn in Roman’s 2:14 that by nature, man is inspired by God’s Grace and wants to cooperate with it. Therefore, doing what is right and good is natural to us, where doing what is evil is contrary to our nature. We also learn that “doing good” means to seek God’s glory, not one’s own glory; to seek first the Kingdom of God as stated in Matthew 6:33.
The Divine Mercy of God does not overlook the fact that Adam was deceived and because of the deceit, Adam disobeyed God. The Divine Nature of the first creation, Adam, which exists in the whole of human nature, was not totally destroyed by the first sin; it was weakened, but it was not lost.[9]
Adam is a type of pre-figurement of Christ in that both are the Head of humanity. Adam through his disobedience to God caused death and weakened the human nature as originally created by God; but Christ, through his obedience to God and God’s love for mankind, brings life and righteousness to humanity, restoring human nature. In Romans 5:15-17, St. Paul tells the faithful that the Grace of Christ far exceeds our inheritance from Adam. He says that by Grace, not only is Adam’s disobedience healed, but also mankind’s bondage to death is eliminated and all the sins of the whole world are covered. Even though God’s Saving Grace is free, the faithful receive it through the life of faith. Therefore, not all receive the Gift; some will be raised to life and others will be condemned.
In Orthodox Theology, the doctrine of man is based on the biblical view defined by the Church Fathers. The world, of which man is to partake for food in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. All that exists is God’s gift to man so he may live. God told Adam he could eat from anything in the Garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God through the food God provides to him. Divine love made food and life for man. God blesses everything He creates and makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”. Man requires food to survive. Man is a hungry being. But, he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him. All that exists lives by eating. The whole of creation depends on food. But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him. He alone is to respond to God’s blessing with his blessing. It is not accidental, therefore, that the story of the Fall is centered on food. Man ate the forbidden fruit. The fruit of that one tree was not offered as a gift to man. It was not blessed by God. It was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself. The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all. Adam disobeyed God, but that was not the primary sin; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. Scripture tells us that the Fall occurred in the cool of the day, that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic – an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God – Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness.[10] The Fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into “life in God” filled with meaning and spirit.[11]
God did not leave man in his exile. Man was living in darkness and God acted decisively: He sent light. The light God sent was his Son: the same light that had been shining unextinguished in the world’s darkness all along, seen now in full brightness.[12] Man has the potential for perfection because he was created in the image of God. Man was not created to be a slave to his passions. Even though his human nature has limitations, these limitations can be overcome by the sacramental life of the Church where man can again receive his food for life, the Holy Eucharist.
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[1] Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Vladimir Lossky, p.100
[2] Ibid.
[3] Op cit. Orthodox Theology ,p. 132
[4] Partakers of Divine Nature, Archimandrite Christoforos Stavropoulos, p. 27
[5] Op cit. Orthodox Theology, pp. 134-135
[6] Op cit., Orthodox Theology, p. 137
[7] Orthodox Study Bible, New Testament and Psalms NKJV, Footnotes, p. 174
[8] Ibid., p.339
[9] Partakers of Divine Nature, Archimandrite Christoforos Stavropoulos, p.28
[10] For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann, pp. 14-18
[11] Ibid., p.18
[12] Ibid., p. 19
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