Get out for your own good!

Today, the Sunday of Cheesefare is the last Sunday before we begin Great Lent tomorrow.  On this day we commemorate the Expulsion of our First Parents, Adam and Eve from Eden.  By this we mean that there was a time in ancient human history when humankind broke communion with God and suffered the consequences of this disobedience with their ongoing impact across all humanity.  Only with the Incarnation was this rupture between God and humankind undone.  But, what precisely does this expulsion from Eden mean?

In Greek, the Garden of Eden refers to paradeisos (Paradise). Therefore, we may rightly understand the Garden and indeed Heaven as a real place in space-time but removed from the fallen domain of this world. In this dimension, our first parents communed harmoniously with the world, each other and God. The Fathers, (especially Sts. Theophilus of Antioch, Ephraim the Syrian, Hilary of Poitiers and Maximus the Confessor), insist that our first parents were created neither mortal nor immortal. Until the point of his disobedience Adam was sinless but not perfect and able to sin through the exercise of his will. He was not immortal but rather capable of achieving immortality through obedience. In the west, the highly influential St. Augustine characterised the Fall as a loss of original perfection rather than a hiatus in human development.

We learn from St. Irenaeus and the Greek Fathers of the Church that Adam was like a child, fully capable of growing up in obedience to his Heavenly Father and achieving immortality. We know that he ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in disobedience to God’s Word and suffered death as a result. This is not analogous to the myth of Greek paganism in which Prometheus stole fire from the gods and paid the price for his audacity. The fruit itself was not placed in Eden surrounded by a permanent exclusion zone, leaving humanity in state of perpetual infantile innocence. God’s intention was that Adam should grow to discern between good and evil through obedience and divinisation, thereby acquiring the requisite spiritual maturity and wisdom. Like a child, he had to be taught. However, like many children and adults, he would not be taught. He wanted to be autonomous—to be God-like without God—and he thereby brought death down upon his own head through his own choice.

St. Irenaeus and the Fathers generally do not see death as a divine punishment for the disobedience of our first parents but rather as a self-imposed consequence of separation from God who is the Source of Eternal Life. God is never absent from us whether we love Him or not. It is we who hide and shamefully cover our nakedness, a disrobing of glory occasioned by disobedience. Consequently, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the angel standing guard with the flaming sword was not an act of divine retribution but rather a compassionate and merciful provision in case our First Parents had stayed and eaten of the second tree, the Tree of Life, but then dying eternally, incapable of salvation. The fruit of this tree, if we had eaten it, would have condemned us forever to the hell of separation from God. Listen to St. John Chrysostom:

Partaking of the tree, the man and woman became liable to death and subject to the future needs of the body. Adam was no longer permitted to remain in the Garden, and was bidden to leave, a move by which God showed His love for him … he had become mortal, and lest he presume to eat further from the tree which promised an endless life of continuous sinning, he was expelled from the Garden as a mark of divine solicitude, not of necessity. 

This interpretation is remarkably different from many contemporary Western views, for the Orthodox perspective here is that Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden as mortal beings, not to punish them, but to protect them from “an endless life of continuous sinning”.  We now live outside Eden but with the Incarnation of Christ and his resurrection we can move beyond death and sin into eternal life.  In short we can re-enter Paradise.  As St. Paul taught in the light of the resurrection: “O death where is thy sting …?” The sting of death is sin.  Nevertheless, there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:55-57).

The fallout of the Fall was, therefore, a self-induced hell, not inflicted upon humankind by a malign wrathful deity. Even the murderer Cain was given his mark by God as a protection. God did not cease to love and care for us even in our fallen state. He desired that the self-inflicted curse hanging over humanity should be lifted and that humans should resume their role as God’s priests in creation by growing back into spiritual maturity. This of course, He achieved through the New and Final Adam, Christ. Characteristically, the Fathers speak of God saving us by recapitulating or regathering the whole creation in Himself and redeeming it, (Ephesians 1:10). The beginning of this process was in the Incarnation: its climax, the death and resurrection of Christ, its fruition in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, the Body of Christ glorified. As St. Irenaeus proclaimed: “God the Son became Man in order to regather in Himself the ancient creation, so that He might slay sin and destroy the power of death and give life to all men.” 

The key to human regeneration lies in the intervention of God in the Incarnation to break the vicious cycle of sin and death so that the gates of Paradise might be opened once more to the whole of Creation. The final victory of this intervention was the resurrection of Christ.  By his voluntary submission to death Christ conquered death itself, emerging victorious from Hades with our humanity made perfect in Him. The voluntary obedience of a Virgin-Mother bruised the serpent’s head in the Incarnation (Gen 3:15).  The voluntary obedience of her Son unto death on a cross granted unto us victory over sin and death, waiting only on our repentance and resolution to serve God and our neighbour in love. In this manner Christ is revealed as the New Adam and the Mother of God as the New Eve. It is Christ our God who in the icon of Pascha storms into hell and liberates the captives from the grip of death and sin. A new way has thereby been opened up for us to regain Paradise; Christ being the first fruits of all those who have fallen asleep. It is this “way” that we personally now embark on afresh as we start tomorrow the Journey of Great Lent towards Great and Holy Friday and Holy Pascha.  May we talk together in the Lord’s Presence, strengthening and encouraging one another as we go.