As It Is Written . . .
Tempted from Above
by Patrick Henry Reardon
Prominent among the challenges facing early Christian theology was the temptation to trace man's Fall to the corporeal, physical components of his nature—the passions, dispositions, and frailties of the body. Man's biology was widely thought to be the source of his moral problem.
We are correct to trace this widespread "physical" explanation of the Fall to sundry dualistic cosmologies infecting the intellectual culture of the early Christian centuries. For instance, many exponents of Plato, including Origen's contemporary, Plotinus, traced the root of evil to the physical order; pure spirits, such thinkers believed, had become contaminated by physical "stuff" (hyle) or "matter" (materia). Even two generations before Plotinus, Irenaeus of Lyons had to refute kin theories held by the Gnostics, and three centuries later, Augustine of Hippo was obliged to contend with a similar dualism made popular by the Manicheans.
The appeal of this dualistic explanation was enhanced by the plain, biblically attested fact that Adam and Eve, when they did fall, fell through a physical act: they ate of the forbidden fruit.
Two lines of biblical thought—one Pauline and the other Johannine—guided the patristic refutation of this theory.
First, the Apostle Paul, in interpreting Genesis 3, attributed Adam's Fall, not to gluttony or gourmandizing, but to pride, disobedience, unbelief, and rebellion; it was as a spiritual being that man fell. Although our first parents were moved by observing that "the tree was good for food," their deeper motive for eating the fruit was the serpent's promise "that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be as God" (Gen. 3:5–6).
Adam decided to eat the fruit. It was through an act of the human will, before the act of the body, that sin and death entered the world (Rom. 5:12–19).
Second, according to the theology of the Evangelist John, Adam's was not the original rebellion, inasmuch as the defection of the rebellious spirits preceded the sad events in Genesis 3. Adam was not the original sinner. Moreover, when he ate the fruit, he did not merely die; he was murdered. It was of the Devil that Jesus declared, "He was a murderer from the beginning (ap' arches)" (John 8:44). Sinners, wrote John, imitate, not only Adam, but also the Devil: "He who sins is of the Devil, for the Devil has sinned from the beginning (ap' arches)" (1 John 3:8).
Both Paul and John, in their interpretations of the Fall, clearly follow an exegetical path traced early in the Book of Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon): "But by the envy (phthonoi) of the Devil, death came into the world" (2:24; cf. Origen, On John 32.2).
Individual church fathers, in elaborating a theology of Redemption, inserted these biblical themes into a larger cosmological framework. Notable among these was Gregory Nazianzen, in the fourth century, who distinguished three stages in the created order: God first created the spiritual world of the incorporeal angels, wrote Gregory, then the material and visible world as described in Genesis. Finally, he wrote, on the last day of Creation, God formed human beings with a composite nature, a synthesis that included both the spiritual and the material (Orations 38.11).
Without man, Gregory believed, the first two orders of Creation would be in some sense antithetical (anantios) to one another. It is the mediating human being who maintains the unity of the universe. Man keeps Creation from being dualist.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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