By Hieromonk Damascene
The Consequences of the Fall, Part I
Such was the lofty original state of man and the creation, and such was man’s lofty original calling. But as we all know and experience every day, the first man, Adam, fell from this state and brought himself and all of creation into a state of corruption and death.
The whole story of the Fall and why it occurred lies outside the scope of this lecture. What concerns us here, as we contemplate the theology of redemption, is the consequences of the Fall. Just as we must understand what we fell from in order to understand what Christ restores us to, so also we must understand what we fell into in order to understand what Christ delivers us out of.
To put it another way: through His death on the Cross and through His Resurrection, Christ gives us life. In order to understand what it means to be given life, we must understand the death into which we have been born.
As you will recall, in the book of Genesis God told Adam: Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Gen. 2:17). Now, we know that Adam did not die on the day he ate from the tree: according to the Scriptures he lived to be 930 years old. But according to St. Gregory Palamas and other Fathers, God’s words were true: Adam did die on the day he ate the fruit. He died spiritually. He lost the Divine Grace in which he had been created. [7] He no longer had the Holy Spirit abiding within him. Because his nature had become corrupted, deifying Grace was now foreign to it. Before, God Himself abode within him through His Uncreated Energy. Now man became empty, devoid of Grace. He was separated from God. And, according to St. Gregory Palamas, this spiritual death made Adam subject to physical death, which in his case occurred after 930 years. [8]
At the Fall, man’s nature was changed. He still had the image of God in him, but now he had become corrupted. His spiritual corruption made his body more grossly material, subject to physical corruption or decay after death. Also, his spiritual corruption made his soul unable to partake of eternal union with God after death. Paradise had been barred to Adam during his earthly life, and both Paradise and heaven remained barred to him after death. After their death, Adam, Eve, and all their posterity went down into hades: a place of waiting, of separation from God. [9]
Also, at the Fall, all of creation fell into corruption along with man: decay and death were introduced into the creation. In Romans 5:12 St. Paul says that By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and a little later, in Romans 8:20-21, he says that the creation entered into corruption because of man’s sin.
~ 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
7. Cf. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), pp. 156-57, 443-45.
8. 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.
9. Cf. St. John Damascene, Exact Exposition, p. 235; and Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 126.
