By Hieromonk Damascene
The Consequences of the Fall, Part II
We are all the inheritors of the death and corruption that entered into man’s nature at the Fall. St. Gregory Palamas says that, through Adam’s one spiritual death, both spiritual and physical death were passed onto all men. [10] This is because human nature is one: we are all of the family of Adam.
Orthodoxy does not accept the idea that we are guilty of Adam’s sin. No, Adam alone was guilty of his sin. However, we do share the consequences of his sin. We are born into corruption, and with an inherited tendency or inclination toward sin. All of us sin, and so we deserve the consequences of sin: spiritual and physical death, and eternal separation from God in hades.
Between the time of Adam’s fall and the coming of Christ, there were many righteous men and women, whom we read about in the Old Testament. But they, even through their godly lives, were unable to reverse the consequences of the Fall. Grace could act on them from the outside, as it did on the Prophet Moses, so much so that he had to cover his radiant face as he descended from Mount Sinai. However, this was only a temporary radiance, as the Holy Scriptures and Fathers say. [11] He and all the Old Testament prophets did not have the Grace of the Holy Spirit abiding within them, as their personal strength and power. [12] And after death, everyone, even the most righteous, went down into hades, being cut off from Paradise and heaven.
During the Old Testament period, God gave laws to the Hebrews to help them live righteous lives. He instituted animal sacrifices, which the Hebrews were to make as offerings for sin. These sacrifices were a prefiguration of Christ’s sacrifice, to prepare the people of God to understand and accept the meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross. But neither the sacrifices nor the laws were able to restore mankind to the state he had lost at the Fall.
A perfect, blameless sacrifice was needed—a man who was without sin—in order to destroy the consequences of sin. That was why Christ came. The first Adam fell from his original designation, bringing everything into ruin. Therefore Christ, Who is called the Second Adam or the New Adam, came into the world to fulfill man’s original designation and restore what was lost. But Christ did even more than that. He not only restored man to what Adam was before the Fall: He gave man the possibility to become that which Adam was supposed to become, what Adam could have become had he not fallen.
~ A talk delivered at the Annual Lenten Clergy Confession of the New Gracanica Metropolitanate and the Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Jackson, California, March 4/17, 2004. The Orthodox Word (No. 235, March-April, 2004), pp. 57-77. Posted with the blessing of Hieromonk Damascene; Orthodox Information Center, http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/christcross.aspx.
Endnotes
10. Cf. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), pp. 156-57, 443-45.
11. Cf. St. John Damascene, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 37 (1958), pp. 232-35; Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church(Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), p. 118; and Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, pp. 171, 436-40.
12. Cf. St. John Damascene, Exact Exposition, p. 235; and Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 126.
