The Condition of Man

A Catechetical lecture on Creation, Man as Icon, as Microcosm, Sin and the Corruption of Death.

Introduction

The following is the basis of a catechetical lecture I gave at our parish. It’s the lesson following the Mind of the Church article which I posted awhile back. It focuses largely on the prelapsarian state of man and his relation to God and the cosmos; man’s fall into sin; sin, death and evil, etc… The Gospel and the salvific work of Christ can only really be understood if we properly understand man’s condition before and after the fall.

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1. In the Beginning: The Blessed State of Man

“Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness: and let them have dominion…over all the earth.’ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.’” Genesis 1:26-28

I. What are the Image and Likeness?

St. Basil locates the image (Gr. εικώνa or icon) in man as a rational being, a subject, or a self-conscious, self-aware being. Being the icon of God, man was created “holy, passionless, sinless… precisely like God Who created him.”¹ St. Gregory of Nyssa tells us that God created man as His image because “It was necessary that the Light not be unseen, nor the Glory be without witness, nor all the other things seen about the divine nature to lie idle, there being no one partaking of or enjoying [them]... Therefore… man comes to genesis for… him to become a partaker of divine good things [and] is necessarily fashioned like this, so as to suitably have a participation in good things.”²

And so, Man as icon was created with the capacity to partake of God’s Energies—God’s Goodness, Love, Life, Knowledge, Dominion, and Immortality. We see this, for example, in the naming of the animals when Man shows not only his authority, but that he knew the animals in their innermost selves, in their essence and the ultimate purpose for which God created them.³

St. Basil attributes the likeness to man’s free will, by which man is able to freely accept, reciprocate, or reject the many expressions of God’s loving care for him. By freely responding in the affirmative, man ascends towards God in a dialogue of love making him ever more like God—an ever more real and perfect image.

St. Dimitru Staniloae, a recently glorified saint of the Romanian Church and one of the most profound theologians of the twentieth century, summarizes this teaching succinctly, “the divine image consists in the ontological structure of the human being that has been made to tend towards communion with the supreme Communion (namely, that of the divine persons who are the source of every communion) and with human persons, while the likeness is the activating of this structure.”⁴

Saint John of Damascus calls the First-Created Man “another angel capable of worship… surveying the visible creation and initiated into the mysteries of the realm of thought, king over the things of earth, but subject to a higher king, of the earth and of the heaven, temporal and eternal, belonging to the realm of sight and to the realm of thought, midway between greatness and lowliness, spirit and flesh.”⁵

While made an accurate image of God and created good, “unalterability and unchangingness are characteristic of the Unoriginate and Uncreated Divinity alone, therefore the created man naturally was alterable and changeable, although he had the means and the possibility, with the help of God, not to be subject to alteration and change.”⁶

II. Man as Microcosm

Man is unique of all created beings because he is a hybrid being. Being made of matter (his body) and spirit (his soul), he acts as a bridge between the two realms of creation and has a natural communion with all. Man was brought forth as the crown of creation and to rule over it, but creation was also created for man. Being a reason-endowed creature, man can manipulate the creation to learn about and interact with God, and through his own creative abilities man invents ever new means of manipulating matter to express his love for God and his fellow man. This occurs in any act, invention, or arrangement brought forth from love of God for man, but is perhaps most succinctly seen in sacred arts, be it iconography, hymnography, sacred architecture, etc…

Through the manipulation of matter man reciprocated God’s love. The First Created Man was to go out into the world and subdue it, to replenish it or reconcile the world with Paradise itself. Through this, man would ascend to the likeness of God and be rooted in the good, no longer subject to change as St. Simeon has said.

Because man is composed of the elements of the material world, is endowed with reason, has a spirit, he is a little cosmos, or microcosm as the fathers say. He also becomes, in a way, the rational subject in which all of these things are instantiated, and so the fathers sometimes speak of man as the hypostasis of creation, and for this reason his fall led to the corruption not only of himself, but the whole creation.

To invert that principle, we see that man’s salvation will lead to the salvation of the world as well. This is reflected in the Apostle's claim that “the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” [Rom. 8:19-21].

III. God made Man - Male and Female

But this was not intended to be the ascent of an autonomous “individual,” nor was man made as such. After all, God created Man male and female.

“‘Man’ transcends the male-female distinction, because the latter is initially not the separation of two individuals that are henceforth isolated from one another. On the contrary, we can state that these two aspects of man are at this point (the prelapsarian state - BD) inseparable in the mind of God, and that a human being, taken in isolation and viewed by himself, is not fully human.” —Paul Evdokimov⁷

In other words, God made man a community of persons. These were not two separate beings created from dust, but one being from dust; from the first is begotten the second—out of the very substance of the first. This consubstantiality between man and woman is itself an image of the relationship between the persons of the Holy Trinity: the love between the two is only truly fulfilled by the mutual outpouring of that love towards God, making man a triadic being.

“Woman is created from the very nature of man and is his companion. She is equal to him, while forming with him a unity of nature. But we are still a duality. One should overcome the opposition, in such a way that the thou be not only the not-me. The third term is necessary to affirm the uniqueness of each. The dyad is not overcome in procreation [but in] the relationship with God. The image of the Trinity in the personal being of man requires that one signal the third term: man the person is in relationship not only with his neighbor but also with the personal God.” —Vladimir Lossky⁸

We see then that prior to the fall, all things were in harmony, including the five major distinctions: uncreated and created, spiritual and material, heaven and earth, paradise and world, man and woman.

While there was a certain distance within these dialectics, they were not opposed to one another. Instead, Man and Woman were equal and united as one flesh; the uncreated God walked with created Man and clothed him in His glory, the Heavenly angels conversed openly with Earthly Man, Paradise was of the Earth. ”[Man’s] vocation was to overcome these divisions by a conscious action, to bring together in himself the entire created cosmos and to be deified with it.”⁹ In other words, we could say that the distance of natural differentiation was easily overcome through the mutual creative outpouring of love between God and Man.

2. The Fall and its Consequences

I. The Corruption of Death

“For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” —Genesis 2:15

The actual way in which “you shall surely die" is stated is “you shall die by death.” This is important to our understanding of the fall. Recall that man is a hybrid spiritual-material being. By God breathing life (spirit) into Man he became a living soul. Man’s bodily life is contingent upon the life of his soul; the life of his soul is contingent upon its connection to the Source of Life—God. Like a smartphone, once it is unplugged from the power grid, it slowly loses the power stored within itself, and unless it is reconnected to the power source, it will die.

When man partook of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he, by his disobedience, also disconnected himself from the Source of Life.

“For to the extent that [Adam] withdrew from life, he likewise drew near to death. For God is life, and the privation of life is death. Therefore, Adam prepared death for himself through his withdrawal from God.” (St. Basil the Great; Ref. 6)... “Thus, in soul Adam died immediately, as soon as he had tasted; and later, after nine hundred and thirty years, he died also in body. For as the death of the body is the separation from it of the soul, so the death of the soul is the separation from it of the Holy Spirit, by Whom God Who had created him had been pleased that man be overshadowed, so that he might live like the angels of God, who, being always enlightened by the Holy Spirit, remain immovable towards evil.” —St. Simeon the New Theologian¹⁰

Unlike her son, Cain, who would murder his brother out of jealousy and malice, Eve was deceived into breaking the commandment because she didn’t know the commandment of God. Not yet being firmly established in the good—and her condition therefore still changeable—she entered into dialogue with evil, and the corruption of death entered into creation. We have a tendency to see this moment, the partaking of the fruit, as “the” fall, but the Church Fathers see the fall as having happened in at least two stages.

In the Patristic interpretation, the disobedience of Adam and Eve leads to the corruption of death entering into creation, while Cain’s murder of Abel leads to the domination of sin. This is not to say that these things are not directly connected, but to show how man’s persistent disobedience (or increasing opposition) to God resulted in an ever-greater corruption of man and the world.

“And the woman said unto the serpent… God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil… She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” —Genesis 3:2-7

The serpent convinced Woman that there was a path to God’s knowledge without God and that if she partook of this fruit, she would be like God. Fr. Daniel Sysoev sees three key mistakes which led to the woman’s disobedience.

1. “[Woman] decided on her own to enter into conversation with the devil without consulting her husband.” In doing so, she acted independently, breaking the communion between herself and Man.

2. “Conversing with evil is by definition absolutely impermissible. The enemy has decisively chosen rebellion against God [and] merely conversing with the impure spirit defiles the body.”

3. “She added her own words to the Lord’s, which is a great sin. She substituted mere magic for the commandment of obedience.”¹¹

This last point is interesting, as Fr. Daniel points out that by adding the words neither shall ye touch it, Eve not only added to the commandment of God but presumed the fruit contained in and of itself a force other than God—a magical power.

According to the Fathers, the fruit didn’t contain the knowledge of good and evil in itself. Instead, it was the act of disobedience required to eat it that revealed the knowledge of good and evil to man by experience.

“[God] planted the tree of knowledge as a sort of trial, test, and exercise of man’s obedience and disobedience. It is either for this reason that it has been called the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or because it gave to them that partook of it the power to know their own nature—which, while it is good for the perfect, is bad for them that are less perfect and more given to their desires, as strong meat is to them that are tender and still in need of milk.” —St. John of Damascus¹²

II. The Origins of Evil

Evil has often been expressed as an absence of the good, similar to how cold is not an energy in itself, but the absence of heat. This is true in that evil is not a thing, more accurately it could be described as the misuse of a thing.

“Now, evil certainly has no place among the essences; but it is not merely a lack; there is an activity in it. Evil is not a nature, but a state of nature, as the Fathers said most perceptively. It thus appears as a disease, as a parasite existing only by virtue of the nature it feeds upon. More precisely, it is a state of the will of this nature; it is a false will with regard to God. Evil is a revolt against God, that is to say, a personal attitude. The exact vision of evil is thus not essentialist but personalist” —Vladimir Lossky¹³

It is for this reason that in the Lord’s Prayer, we ask to be delivered from the Evil-One, not from Evil, as it is often rendered in Heterodox translations—a result of the West’s fall into false dialectics of opposition post-schism. It is precisely for this reason that Paul can say “all is permissible to me,” because nothing God has created is evil in itself, the evil is in the misuse, which is according to the mode or state of willing.

The origin of evil then is in the rebellion of Satan against God. Another way to say this would be that “the origin of evil lies in the freedom of creatures.”¹⁴ By giving evil a place in his will, man introduced evil into the world. By activating that evil through his actions (Cain’s murder of Abel), sin spreads through the world and defiles the very earth. This defilement of the land is part of what the sacrificial system in the Law was designed to mitigate.

The question may then be raised “why give free will to man if it could cause God’s entire creation to fall into corruption and death?” Because God wants man to love Him as He loves man.

“The love of God for man is so great that it cannot coerce, for there is no love without respect… God becomes powerless before human freedom; he cannot violate the latter because freedom proceeds from His omnipotence. [And so] God risks the eternal ruin of his highest creation in order that it indeed be the highest… The divine will always submits itself to groping, to detours, even to revolts of the human will to bring it to a free consent: such is the divine providence, and the classical pedagogue will seem weak to anyone who has felt God as a beggar of love at the door of the soul, never daring to force it.” —Vladimir Lossky¹⁵

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” —Revelation 3:20

III. Pronouncements: The Fall into Dialectics of Opposition

“And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?... And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” —Genesis 3:9, 11

We often pass over this part of the narrative as if God didn’t know precisely where they were and precisely what they had done. He knew, and He immediately came to give them the chance to confess their misdeed and ask forgiveness. Nowhere do we see the “angry Father God” supposedly opposed to the nice and merciful Son of the Marcionites, David Bentley Hart, and many Protestant sects. In fact, it is precisely Christ (the Word of God) Who came looking for Adam and Eve. But having shed the super-abundant state of grace in which they previously dwelt, they did not repent, and Man even tried to implicate God in his fall. “And the man said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” (Gen. 3:12)

Seeing man’s incorrigibility, God pronounces the consequences of their actions. Man is cast out of Paradise to prevent him from partaking of the Tree of Life and being crystalized in his rebellion to God—as Satan is. Woman is subjected to Man, who will rule over her. Lastly, God gives Adam and Eve garments of skin and proclaims, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” (Gen. 3:22)

III(a). The Fall into Dialectics of Opposition; Garments of Skin & Gnomic Will

By placing himself in opposition to God, the distance between the uncreated and the created became opposition. The dialectics which man was meant to reconcile now became opposed to one another, corrupting the fabric of creation itself. The dialectic of male and female collapses into man ruling woman instead of being equal partners; the Paradise/World dialectic separates the former from the latter; the dialectic of spiritual and material (or heavenly and earthly) results in our inability to see and communicate with the spiritual realm.

The garments of skin are not our material bodies, as the Gnostics believed, but instead a barrier placed between man and the spiritual world to guard him from being permanently under the influence of the demons.

“This was a preventative measure, for our own good, because if we were to leave our bodies to enter the spirit world, who would we speak to? The demons of course. But occasionally, there are people whose garments of skin are removed [or] stretched thin by drugs, alcohol, magic, Eastern religions… often leading people to lose their minds. This is why [people using hallucinogens] have the same hallucinations: they are seeing the same reality; they are seeing the fallen spirits who are abusing them. This is why the Lord limits passage to the spirit world.” —Fr. Daniel Sysoev¹⁶

After the fall, the mind and heart were separated and disordered, man’s spiritual faculty was obscured by God to prevent his communion with demons, and as a result the sensible form of knowledge became the sole basis of man’s reasoning. Knowledge became rooted not in the Wisdom of God, but sense data and experience. Man’s ability to discern whether or not his actions would lead to what is truly good or what merely seems good and is in fact evil, was greatly hampered.

“Whereas before man’s mind had contemplated God, the will and the feelings being submissive to the mind and the body subject to the soul, now this hierarchy collapsed. The mind began reflecting the will and the feelings, and as a result was filled with a multitude of thoughts. Instead of contemplating Divine truth the mind created an entire world of imaginings, called fantasies. The will weakened and began to vacillate between various imaginary good things, not knowing truth from falsehood. The feelings began to strive for imaginary pleasures which bring real sorrows… In his heart a yearning emptiness arose, which ever since has given man an insatiable drive for happiness.. and since that time all men have been born in a state of spiritual death.” —Fr. Daniel Sysoev¹⁷

But this was not, as some have taught, the perversion of the human will at the level of nature, but its mode of operation in the human person. In other words, human will and free choice were created good and remained so in and of themselves; but at the level of the person, dominated by sin and death, the will is misused. This faulty mode of willing St. Maximus the Confessor calls the Gnomic Will.¹⁸ This term will become very important during the sixth century Christological debates, particularly in regard to the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies.

IV. Original/Ancestral Sin

Every human being comes into the world enslaved to sin and death. This is not because we are guilty of the sin of Adam and Eve, but because “the river of human nature was poisoned [by death —BD] at its source.”¹⁹ One cannot pass on what one does not possess. Just as two Japanese parents are incapable of birthing a Swedish child, So Adam and Eve were incapable of creating a child with a living soul Thus, our only hope for salvation was from the Creator Himself. And while God immediately worked to treat sin, sin expanded by the action of men. “Were it not for the Lord’s intervention, the whole universe would have been destroyed by the hurricane of evil.”²⁰

3. Sin, Death, Demonic Subjugation

“They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” —Mark 2:1

I. Sickness, Infraction, Negation of Being?

The Lord Himself often refers to Himself as a physician, and sin as an illness. This is expressed consistently throughout the writings of the Church Fathers. We can then say that sin is like a virus infecting man, his condition is terminal, and only Christ has the medicine—His Grace and Life.

We receive this medicine in the mysteries of the Church, and for this reason that St. Ignatius of Antioch (a disciple of the Apostle John) calls the Eucharist the Medicine of Immortality. Through this light, sin is not the breaking of the rule itself, but the rules exist as guardrails to prevent us from taking actions which disconnect us (through our own opposition to Him) from the one Source of Life, the One Life-Giver. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a juridical aspect to sin.

“For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.” —John 5:28-29

Sin as illness and as legal infractions are images which the Scriptures use to try to explain the underlying reality—the ontological consequences of sin on the human person and how Christ heals them. Thus, these images are descriptors and not meant to be taken in a literal, absolutist sense. This was the great error of Anselm of Canterbury and the subsequent Western tradition.

Rome was a society of jurists, and so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Western thinkers (most of them legal scholars, like Tertullien) clung on to this imagery and, in time, absolutized it. As we discussed in our last lecture, people naturally interpret texts within the framework of the society within which they live. Anselm, living in a medieval Feudal society with its legal culture, codes of chivalry, and growing obsession with causality and mechanism naturally read the story of Christ’s redemption through the lens of a legal transaction. For Anselm, our Lord, like a French of English lord, had been dishonored by man’s rebellion; His honor required Satisfaction. This was an image which resonated with Western feudal society, being both a convenient image by which the illiterate and destitute peasantry of the West could easily understand the economy of salvation while simultaneously reinforcing Rome’s recent claims to absolute temporal authority.

So, what is sin then, how does it affect man? To understand this, it will be helpful to understand the relationship between the icon and that which it is an image of—its Archetype (Gr. Αρχέτυπο).

II. Icons and Archetypes

The Church teaches us that an icon participates in its archetype and that the honor or reverence shown to the image passes to its archetype. While we sometimes struggle with this teaching because of the Protestant presuppositions we have been raised with, these are shown to be unnatural by the experience of our own lives. For example, when a loved one passes on, do we not say, “oh grandma I wish you were here, if I could only hear your voice,” addressing and embracing an image of them? Are we saying we miss the paper and ink, are we kissing the paper and ink? Of course not, those words and expressions of love are passed on to the person being imaged.

When we pledge allegiance to the flag, we’re not pledging allegiance to the cotton, nylon, and ink, but to the nation for which the flag is an image.²¹ The same is true in relation to man and his archetype. It is for this reason that Christ tells us, "inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” [Mt. 25:39]

When we mistreat our fellow man (each a unique icon of God) we are mistreating God. More explicitly, we are mistreating Christ, the Word (Gr. Λόγος or Logos) of God—man’s archetype.

If Christ is the pattern on which all men are created, then He is also the True Man. To become more like Christ then, is to become more human; by inverting that principle we see that to become less like Christ is to become less human, inhuman. Because sin makes us less like Christ, it is therefore dehumanizing, and because it is opposition to the only person who truly exists, it is a move away from existence. Thus, sin is the process of ontological exhaustion, the road from being, to non-being.

Man’s sin didn’t change God, it changed Man. Sin then, is not a God problem but a Man problem.

Man has subjected himself to the corruption of death, enslavement to sin and domination by the demonic powers. And so, this was the dilemma: Man needed to bridge the distance which he himself had placed between himself and God; but to do that he needed to overcome sin, death, and demonic subjugation; but to do these, he needed to be filled with the Energies of God; but to do this, he needed to bridge the distance between himself and God! So, man was hopeless on his own. No matter how hard to tried to live a God pleasing life, his end would be the grave (Hades).

III. Satan: Eater of the Dead

In Genesis 3 we witness the first proclamation of God’s promise to redeem mankind through the seed of the Woman, along with the punishment of Satan for his deception of man.

To the serpent (Satan) God proclaims “upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” This is not a story of how snakes lost their legs. He is to eat dust—the very dust to which Man and Woman will return to when their bodies die. In other words, he will devour the dead. Thus, Satan is relegated to dwell in the realm of the dead, Hades (Heb. Sheol or the Grave). And so, from this time until the Incarnation, man was subject to sin, death, and demonic subjugation.

We see this play out in the Old Testament and in pagan histories. The similarities between the innumerable Pagan origin myths, rites and rituals, only further prove the biblical account in which mankind falls away from God and begins to follow demons. Because man’s ontological foundations tend towards communion with God, man has an existential longing for God and sought Him through the world and rational deduction. Demonic powers used this existential longing to beguile mankind into following and worshiping them. They did this through “hidden wisdom” which they shared with man, and various rites and rituals which were, more or less, inversions of right worship of the One True God. In all of these pagan accounts of creation, the created order and rituals, are seeds of truth pointing back to Christ—who is the expectation of the nations. The Apostles, knowing the Truth of Christ, were able to use the beliefs of pagans to reveal Christ to them, not through religious syncretism, but by showing how these seeds of Truth in their beliefs were fulfilled in Christ and revealed the falsehood of their “gods.” But prior to the coming of Christ, all were destined for Hades/Sheol—including the Hebrews.

But only until the seed of the Woman comes to bruise his head. And here, at the very beginning of time and the Scriptures, we begin to see God’s plan for man’s redemption proclaimed.

As Adam was brought forth from virgin soil without seed, the New Adam would be brought forth from the fertile womb of a Virgin without seed. In the Gospels, Christ continuously calls His Mother “Woman.” On the Cross, “He said to His mother, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ Then He said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother!’” [John 19:26-27], showing her to be the New Eve, the Mother of all the living—those alive in Christ, the Church. Christ, as the Seed of the Woman, descends into Hades to crush the head of the serpent. He binds the strongman, takes power over death, and leads the captives back into Paradise.

“I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” —Revelation 1:18

In Christ, we become truly human again, regaining and even surpassing the blessed state of Paradise.

1. St. Simeon the New Theologian; First-Created Man (The Sin of Adam), St. Herman’s Press

2. St. Gregory of Nyssa; Catechetical Discourse: A Handbook for Catechists; SVS Press

3. See Telos (Gr. τέλος)

4. St. Dimitru Staniloae; Experience of God, Volume II; Holy Cross Orthodox Press

5. St. John of Damascus; The Fount of Knowledge: Exposition on the Orthodox Faith, Catholic University Press

6. St. Simeon the New Theologian; First-Created Man (The Sin of Adam), St. Herman’s Press

7. Paul Evdokimov; Sacrament of Love, SVS Press

8. Vladimir Lossky; Dogmatic Theology, SVS Press

9. Ibid.

10. St. Simeon the New Theologian; First-Created Man (The Sin of Adam), St. Herman’s Press

11. Fr. Daniel Sysoev; The Law of God

12. St. John of Damascus; The Fount of Knowledge: Exposition on the Orthodox Faith, Catholic University Press

13. Vladimir Lossky; Dogmatic Theology, SVS Press

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Fr. Daniel Sysoev; The Law of God

17. Ibid.

18. St. Maximus the Confessor; Disputation with Pyrrhus, STM Press

19. Fr. Daniel Sysoev; The Law of God

20. Ibid.

21. If you believe that pledging allegiance to a symbol of a secular government is not idolatrous, but kissing an image of God is, I’m not sure what to tell you.