They Had Been Images of God: II – Fall

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Human nature was initially ordered toward God. Free agency was not defined within the pathetic confines of whether or not we were to obey God’s will, but formulated with a greater freedom in mind: how best to exalt the Most High whose love for us is beyond measure. And yet, most of us do not reach that sort of relationship with God while in this life.

And this is due to the Fall. We did not find our horizons broadened by the Fall. We did not get more choices or experience better things as a result of the first act of disobedience. Rather, human nature was crippled by the act, debilitated, broken, and left to suffer an existence in contradiction to itself. The justice due to the Fall warranted the extinction of mankind—at the time, admittedly, only two people. But God’s mercy was such that annihilation was not so willingly entertained.

How did the Fall result in this? What of its aspects are most important to remember? We approach these and other questions here.

Adam’s Nature Before the Fall

The Fall, as the word indicates, was the translation of man’s nature from a higher one ordered toward God into a base one disordered toward the flesh. In order to understand what this means, it’s important to first know what Adam’s nature was when he was made—what Adam, and thus all of us, were intended to have been at the very beginning of everything.

Adam’s prelapsarian nature is and likely always will be something of a mystery to us, as the damages from sin we inherited from the Fall, although forgiven via baptism, remain with us. Our lives are much shorter than they once were. We get sick easily, our bodies are clumsy and don’t always obey our wills, injury is frequent and pain is inevitable. When it comes to understanding, our darkened intellects make it supremely difficult to comprehend what we don’t already know, as anyone tasked with teaching can attest to. The passions of the flesh must first be tamed by the Light of Christ if any progress in the spiritual life is to be expected. These are all due to the Fall.

Adam’s unblemished nature is not, however, utterly incomprehensible. In fact, we must glean what we can from Scripture and the teachings of the Church in order to understand the magnitude of his disobedience. Understanding this will put into perspective the nature of sin so we may be better aware of it in our own lives.

Bl. Emmerich gives a summary of Adam’s nature when she describes the Fall:

The first man was an image of God, he was like Heaven; all was one in him, all was one with him. His form was a reproduction of the Divine Prototype. He was destined to possess and to enjoy earth and all created things, but holding them from God and giving thanks for them.¹

Adam’s gaze was pointed always toward Heaven, toward God. All things he did, he contemplated, he named, he made or could have made, were directed with the sole purpose of glorifying and giving thanks to the Almighty. It was the perfect filial relationship between primordial, temporal, created son and heavenly, uncreated, eternal father.

We know Adam was made not just the first man, but the prototypical man—the man out of which all other men would come. What this means specifically is that in him could be found all the possibilities that would become the actual variations that we see between men today. As St. Augustine explains:

God, Who is the author of nature, and certainly not of vices, created man righteous. Man, however, depraved by his own free will, and justly condemned, produced depraved and condemned children. For we were all in that one man, since we all were that one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him before they sinned. The particular form in which we were to live as individuals had not yet been created and distributed to us, but the seminal nature from which we were to be propagated already existed. And when this was vitiated by sin and bound by the chain of death and justly condemned, man could not be born of man in any other condition.²

“The seminal nature from which we were to be propagated already existed,” he explains. The future of the entire human race existed in Adam. This includes not just ourselves as free agents and progeny of the first man, but the differences in our blood, our physiology, our ways of life, cultures, and traditions. Language differentiation would, of course, be a different matter entirely, and would itself impact these other divergences. But it would come much later, and with a firm break rather than happening by degrees.

This makes perfect sense, as we understand Adam would have been made exactly as God had intended him—and all humans—to be. He was not an ad hoc combination of randomized genetic compost; he was formed deliberately by the Almighty in order be, as Scripture implies, the king-priest over all of corporeal creation. Man as he was meant to be: the ideal person. St. John Damascene, Doctor of the Church, elaborates:

God then made man without evil, upright, virtuous, free from pain and care, glorified with every virtue, adorned with all that is good, like a sort of second microcosm within the great world, another angel capable of worship, compound, 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…

Man’s intellect was already perfected in Adam prior to the Fall. Adam was subject only to one authority: God; he was not subjected to temptations of the world or the passions of the flesh. His body obeyed him in perfect congruence with his will, which was inundated with grace. The flesh was perfectly subservient to the will.

More than that, St. John Damascene’s reference to Adam as king is not idle metaphor, either; we know from his naming of the animals and his call to be the attendant of Eden that Adam was in every sense of the word the first king. Eden’s construction, as was pointed out before, also implied Adam was called to be the first priest, as well—although what form his priestly duties would have taken remains a mystery, since beginning with the Fall, those duties have been contextualized around appeasing the wrath of God and begging His forgiveness. Our Lord’s Incarnation transformed the priesthood from top to bottom, and the institution of the Sacraments absolved the injustice of the Fall, but even still, Sacramental distribution exists to elevate man out of his sinful nature in order to better please God. There’s no easy way to frame what priesthood would have looked like without the Fall. It would have entailed an eternal thanksgiving and praise the sort we expect to find in Heaven, but more than that is difficult to guess.

So we can determine Adam was the first king and the first priest, and it goes without saying that he was also the first father. These three aspects are what define manhood, again underscoring Adam’s importance as the prototypical male. A father is called to be the head of his household in both a secular (kingly) and religious (priestly) sense. A priest is called to administer his flock in a sense that images God, which is to say out of familial love for them (fatherly), while leading them in proper moral instruction so they can perform their secular duties to their best abilities (kingly, although lesser so). A king is called to care for his subjects (fatherly) while also to see to the preservation of their religious life (priestly, although again, lesser so). All of these are united under the antediluvian patriarchate that begins with Adam. He was not merely king and priest under his own roof; he was both king and priest in their fullest capacities simultaneously as he was father.

In addition to being forerunner of the human race in role and potential, it stands to reason that he was forerunner physically as well. Evidence of genetic entropy has pointed to the mutation of the human genome resulting in decay and degradation rather than cumulative evolutionary progress:

…mutations are an inadequate evolutionary mechanism because they are seldom if ever beneficial, they involve a loss of useful genetic information, and because near-neutral but harmful mutations accumulate at an overwhelming rate when compared to the rare mutation that can be classified as beneficial. Geneticist Dr. John Sanford has termed this concept “genetic entropy” and it, along with the fossil record, constitute extremely strong arguments against Darwinism. The concept of genetic entropy means that genomes deteriorate over time and lose genetic information. This is far different from the story told in neo-Darwinian theory, which is that given enough time, beneficial mutations and added information are possible and, in fact, explain amoeba to man evolution.³

If this is true, and mutations to man’s genetic code indicate decay rather than neutral change, then it stands to reason that working backwards through history should eventually uncover a first human genome devoid the marks of this decay. Proponents of this theory say exactly this, and also indicate that the decay present in DNA mutation is a direct, tangible result of the Fall.⁴

This piece hasn’t the space to expand on matters of genetic entropy or the problems with Darwin’s theories. Rather, this is included to illustrate that Adam’s status as the first father of mankind is, again, to be taken in its most literal sense. He is not merely archetype in the abstract; he is archetypal man in every sense of the word. Whatever we have in us we can trace back to him.

The Fall

The Fall is a topic whose exploration has filled libraries worth of texts, dating all the way back to the apostolic period and even into the ancient Hebraic texts of antiquity. For this reason, our survey here will obviously not be covering the Fall in any significant detail; it will limit itself to its affect on Adam and the world, though only in brief.

The story is quite familiar: after Eve’s creation, a serpent tempts her to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, whereupon she brings the fruit to Adam. This is the only plant in the garden that the two were commanded explicitly not to eat from, “for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.”⁵ We will return to the tree and the fruit in a minute; first, the serpent.

“Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made,”⁶ Scripture tells us. With a single sentence, all we can conjure up in our imaginations is the image of a reptile wholly similar to the snakes we are familiar with today. That, however, is not necessarily the case, as the world prior to the Flood—much less that prior to the Fall—would in all likelihood have looked as alien to us as a completely different planet.

 Blessed Emmerich’s visions of the earliest days reveal a depiction of the serpent unlike any other found in fiction or tradition. She describes the serpent as such:

Among the animals was one that followed Eve more closely than the others, It was a singularly gentle and winning, though artful creature. I know of none other to which I might compare it. It was slender and glossy, and it looked as if it had no bones. It walked upright on its short hind feet, its pointed tail trailing on the ground. Near the head, which was round with a face exceedingly shrewd, it had little short paws, and its wily tongue was ever in motion. The color of the neck, breast, and under part of the body was pale yellow, and down the back it was a mottled brown very much the same as an eel. It was about as tall as a child of ten years. It was constantly around Eve, and so coaxing and intelligent, so nimble and supple that she took great delight in it. But to me there was something horrible about it. I can see it distinctly even now. I never saw it touch either Adam or Eve.⁷

She is careful to note that she “never saw the first human beings touch” any animals, as “Before the Fall, the distance between man and the lower animals was great”.⁸ This particular creature, however, the serpent, was a special case. It did not touch the first parents, but it did interact with them much more than any of the others. Also, Bl. Emmerich comments on how Eve “thought more of their actual bliss and of the things around them than of thanking for them,” mentioning that “her soul was more taken up with created things” than Adam’s was.⁹ This doesn’t conflict with Scripture, as we read that it was Eve who “saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold”, rather than Adam; it was Eve who first ate of the tree, after having the suggestion given to her by the serpent and beholding the tree with her senses.¹⁰

It’s worth mentioning also that Eve did not hear with her own ears, presumably, the command God had given Adam relating to the Tree of Knowledge. God’s exact command was this: “Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.”¹¹ But this was spoken to Adam alone, before Eve had been made. Therefore, as would be fitting for the hierarchy of family and leadership, it would have been Adam who informed Eve of this sole restriction. Clearly, Eve was aware of the restriction, as she responded to the serpent’s lies with “Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die.”¹²

And this is where the nature of the Fall begins to come into focus: it was not simply disobedience, but dereliction of duty that resulted in the Fall. Adam’s threefold social nature derived from his being a leader, but more than that, a teacher. And most specifically, as Eve’s husband, he had the obligation of both properly instructing her against eating the fruit, but also properly guarding her from eating from the tree in the first place. While his primordial innocence may account for his rapt attention in all things Godly and their relationship with this new world, his un-darkened intellect and reasoning capabilities forbid interpreting the Fall as a mere accidental mistake.

While Adam may not have had experiential knowledge of sin prior to the Fall, he most certainly had a certain abstract knowledge of disobedience to God. Innocent as he was, his agency would have meant nothing if he did not know what it meant to rebel. Experiential knowledge differing as it does from the abstract, it should go without saying that Adam would have maintained his agency even had he not engaged in the first sin. Any attempts to paint the Fall as the introduction of free will are seriously deleterious to understanding what sin is, what human nature is, and what human beings are intended to be; it’s one of the first benchmarks to modernism. Rather, sin deprives man of his agency, as it piles upon him restrictions to his will that come in the form of disordered vices and habits. A man in a state of mortal sin can only cry to God for help in order to overcome it.

What we can gather from Scripture and even more blatantly from Bl. Emmerich’s visions is that the serpent is a sort of stand-in for temptation. This isn’t merely metaphorical either, although such an interpretation is easier. Through the serpent, the Devil worked to seduce Eve’s curiosity such that it would lead her and Adam into ruin. In an allegorical sense, this is a nearly daily occurrence for most of mankind today; it is why those of us trying to adhere to the narrow path must be ever vigilant in guarding against certain curiosities that we know can lead us from temptation into sin. But Scripture speaks of this serpent quite literally, and Bl. Emmerich even more so:

I learned also at that moment what I cannot clearly repeat; namely, that the serpent was, as it were, the embodiment of Adam and Eve’s will, a being by which they could do all things, could attain all things. Here it was that Satan entered.¹³

Whether Bl. Emmerich’s visions are to be taken wholly allegorical or not remains up for some debate; for our purposes, we’ll have to assume that they carry at least the barest of historical claims. Man’s time in the garden, after all, will forever be obscured by the darkening of our intellect, the loss of records, and the mists of time. Private revelation offers the best clues we have after tradition.

In any case, the serpent’s being an “embodiment of will” underscores the metaphorical interpretation mentioned above. But supposing her account is in fact a clear depiction of that most ancient of days, then it would not be unreasonable to assume that the prelapsarian days in Paradise were a time when allegory and literalism were not actually distinct aspects of meaning that overlapped one another. Rather, it’s possible that reality itself was imbued with this meaning as seamlessly as Adam’s nature was imbued with spirit, soul and flesh—and moreover, that he was aware of it as a result of his undarkened intellect and closeness to God. We know that our first parents’ interaction with reality was unhindered by the vices that obscure truth, so is it possible that what we take to be ‘allegory’ was played out in reality in a way incomprehensible to modern sensibility? There will be more on this later.

Whatever the serpent was, it’s clear that the Enemy could only use the serpent to affect Eve if Eve was somehow disposed toward that affectation in the first place. Other temptations, such as those that move us toward lust or gluttony, or even greed, are hard to imagine in prelapsarian man, as they are temptations that come forward out of the obvious deprivation in the flesh. In prelapsarian man, the flesh remained wholly subject to the intellect, so there would be no unruly desires that needed to be guarded against—at least, not ones that stemmed from the flesh.

Pride, however, is not so easily tracked and not so easily guarded against. In Adam (and Eve) we see singularly unique creatures among all of creation—both at the time and even in retrospect. Adam was created by God to rule over Earth as its effective worldly king. He was shaped from the dust, as if worked into being in a way that the animals were not. Eve likewise was made from his rib. As they possessed the full capacities of their intellects, surely they’d have recognized their uniqueness even more fully than we can. This likely played a significant role in their departure from God’s plan in engaging with evil. St. Augustine even comments on an evilness of will in The City of God:

For they would not have arrived at the evil act had an evil will not preceded it. Moreover, what but pride can have been the beginning of their evil will?—for ‘pride is the beginning of sin’. And what is pride but an appetite for a perverse kind of elevation? For it is a perverse kind of elevation indeed to forsake the foundation upon which the mind should rest, and to become and remain, as it were, one’s own foundation. This occurs when a man is too well pleased with himself; and he is too well pleased with himself when he falls away from that immutable good with which he ought rather to have been pleased than with himself. This betrayal occurs as an act of free will.¹⁴

The exact nature of the sin of the Fall has been known since time immemorial to have been disobedience—a form of pride. But what was the nature of that pride? Clearly, the curiosity of partaking in that which was forbidden was done, at least secondarily, to spite God’s word. But did Adam and Eve partake in order to see if what the serpent said was true? How could they have, when Adam’s intellect was surely developed enough to recognize the obviousness of the serpent’s lies? Rather, it seems likely that knowing this was forbidden, the feat was undertaken anyway in order so that Adam could—in the interest of satisfying his curiosity—experience what he could only contemplate in the abstract.

Alcuin of York seems to agree, at least in part, with this assertion:

WHY WAS IT SAID, “THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL”? — Answer. Not because the tree itself was rational in its own nature or had knowledge of good and evil, but because man through it could experience and know the difference between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience.

This disobedience reflected back into them as well; by disobeying God, their flesh turned against them. St. Augustine famously writes on the degree to which sexual desire was unleashed by man’s Fall:

And so ‘they knew that they were naked’ – divested, that is, of the grace that made the nakedness of their bodies of no concern to them, so that it became a source of shame to them when the law of sin warred against their mind. Thus, they learned what they would have been happier not knowing, had they believed in God and obeyed Him, and so not committed the act which compelled them to learn by experience the harm done by infidelity and disobedience. Therefore, dismayed by the disobedience of their flesh—by punishment which bore witness, as it were, to their own disobedience—‘they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves campestria’, that is, loin-cloths…

Thus, out of a sense of shame, modesty covered that which was moved by lust to disobey a will which had itself been condemned for the guilt of disobedience.¹⁵

Sexual desire is best indicated by involuntary movements of the body. These movements are the strongest and most conscious ones we’re aware of whenever the mood strikes. What St. Augustine is commenting on here is that where there should be control, there isn’t any; where we should be able to choose to engage in this or that behavior or interest, lust is capable of exerting a dominion over the body in a manner unlike most other cardinal sins. Even for those pious men who were faithfully called to the conjugal life, vigilance against the lustful appetites of the flesh is never far away. As he explains a little earlier on, “Any friend of wisdom and holy joys who lives a married life but knows how ‘to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor’, as the apostle admonishes—surely such a one would prefer to beget children without lust of this kind”.¹⁶

Disobeying God means turning your own person against itself. That’s the short version of the story here; Adam’s disobedience not only removed the supernatural graces he had been infused with at his creation, it pitted his flesh against his will. It pitted creation against the spirit. This is how it is known that “every creature groans and travails in pain” due to sin—due to the Fall.¹⁷ As St. Thomas explains:

this seems to fit only the rational creature. But this can be explained so that groan is the same as the previous expression, not willingly. For we groan against things repugnant to our will. Therefore, inasmuch as the defects of sensible creation are contrary to the natural desire of a particular nature, the visible creature is said to groan. When he says, travails, it is the same as the previous expression, waits. For travail is part of the process of producing offspring.¹⁸

He’s saying that the world continues to continue, but it does so such that it works against itself. The world is not a well-oiled machine; on the contrary, it is a machine that works in spite of its great damage. Where could that damage have come from? What is that damage? God, being perfect, would probably not have made a damaged machine. We know where that damage came from; that damage is death, as it was death that entered the world with the first act of disobedience.

Death

“Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.”¹⁹ So said Saint Paul to the Romans. “For from the very beginning of our existence in this dying body,” as St. Augustine writes,

there is never a moment when death is not at work in us. For throughout the whole span of this life—if, indeed, it is to be called life—its mutability leads us towards death. Certainly, there is no one who is not closer to it this year than he was last year, and tomorrow than today, and today than yesterday, and a little while hence than now, and now than a little while ago. For whatever time we live is subtracted from the whole span of our life, and what remains is becoming smaller and smaller each day. Thus, the whole duration of our life is nothing but a progression towards death. During it, no one is permitted to stand still or to go a little more slowly even for a little while. Rather, all are urged onwards with the same motion and impelled with a rapidity which does not differ for anyone. […]

Again, if every man begins to die—that is, is in death—as soon as death itself has begun to do its work in him, then surely he is in death from the very beginning of his existence in this body.²⁰

God cannot lie; His Word is the Incarnate Truth. When God informed Adam that he would “die the death” when he ate of the tree, he neither lied nor meant this in a purely abstract or spiritual manner. Before Adam sinned, he did not have death in him even in its biological sense; there was no need. Death therefore can be understood as a deprivation, a physical component to sin that draws things away from God—although, unlike sin, which is wholly concerned with morality and agency, death is not intrinsically evil. Through the death of Christ were we redeemed, and it is after our own deaths—presumably, unless we are to live to see the end of days—that we meet our maker and he deals out our final judgments. Out of this evil that was done, God brings greater goodness into world.

According to Scripture, God shortened the life of men “because he is flesh,” as God’s “spirit shall not remain in man forever.” Scripture even says that man’s “days shall be a hundred and twenty years,” as it turns out the lives of the patriarchs beginning with Joseph would approximate.²¹ However, this decline would not occur until after the Flood; prior to it, the age of the patriarchs would average in the 900s.

There is reason to suspect the aforementioned phenomenon of genetic entropy coming into play here. An article published by the FMS Foundation compares the data of the various Biblical translations of early antiquity together with regards to the age of the earliest patriarchs.

If we plot the lifespan of Noah and his descendants, we see an abrupt change during Noah’s life, followed by an amazingly systematic decline, continuously going to shorter and shorter lifespans (Figure 3). This decline in lifespan began at the time of the Biblical Flood (see insert in Figure 3). This is seen in all three of the primary translations of the Old Testament. There are some variations in the data, depending on the translation (Masoretic, Septuagint, or Samaritan). However, these differences do not fundamentally change the shape of the downward curve.

[…]

Another way to say this is that the lifespans are declining in a very mathematically precise manner. There are only two ways this might have happened, as given below.

The first explanation would be that the mathematical nature of the decline arose because all these data points, scattered in various books of the Old Testament, were fabricated by a sophisticated and scheming single author. That such an author would need to be a skilled mathematician. Moreover, he or she would need to be driven by the malevolent ambition of deceiving the world into believing that, since the time of Noah, human fitness has been undergoing a very dramatic and very specific exponential decay process.

The second explanation would be that the mathematical nature of the declining lifespans arose because the Biblical accounts are true, and are actually faithfully recording the historical unfolding of some fundamental natural degenerative process.²²

Clearly, the Flood had something to do with the decline in longevity. Some, like Rev. Warkulwiz, attribute the distinction to genetics and also to diet:

First, the variety of fruits, vegetables, cereals, seeds, and herbs were available to the antediluvians, and although they no longer had access to the tree of life, there may have been other food available that contributed to longevity. The Great Flood destroyed forever many species of plants. Perhaps some that helped provide for longevity were among those destroyed; or, if they survived, were soon lost.²³

If this is true, it is only because the Fall brought death into the world. Several of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine included, were of the opinion that man was not intended to die a natural death at all; that without the Fall, men would have been assumed into heaven as Enoch and Elias were. The death that entered the world wasn’t just the loss of grace in Man, nor even the guaranteed decay of his biology; it was the decay of everything. It ensured the world’s eventual collapse.

The Lapsing World

Bl. Emmerich’s visions expound upon the very real, direct relationship between creation and man that the Fall draws attention to. We know that Adam’s Fall brought the world down with him, but it’s never directly indicated by Scripture how that is possible. Adam’s disobedience caused a turning-inward²⁴ of the soul away from God and toward the self:

Sin was not completed by eating the forbidden fruit. But that fruit from the tree which, rooting its branches in the earth thus sent out new shoots, and which continued to do the same after the Fall, conveyed the idea of a more absolute propagation, a sensual implanting in self at the cost of separation from God. So, along with disobedience, there sprang from their indulgence that severing of the creature from God, that planting in self and through self, and those selfish passions in human nature. He that uses the fruit solely for the enjoyment it affords, must accept as the consequence of his act the subversion, the debasement of nature as well as sin and death.²⁵

It’s been established that the rebellion against God turned our natures into contradictory ones, as persons divided internally in a war against ourselves. Our wills fight our flesh, our desires are in conflict, and our reason is too clouded to make its way unimpeded through the war zone. Bl. Emmerich illustrates this with even more clarity, and her visions extend this out into every corner of corporeal creation. It is not just man that was divided by the Fall, but all of the world. Where Adam trod, creation followed; as he Fell, creation Fell with him. She continues:

Adam and Eve before sin were very differently constituted from what we, poor, miserable creatures now are. With the reception of the forbidden fruit, they imbibed a material existence. Spirit became matter; flesh, an instrument, a vessel. At first they were one in God, they sought self in God; but afterward they stood apart from God in their own will. And this self-will is self-seeking, a lusting after sin and impurity. By eating the forbidden fruit, man turned away from his Creator. It was as if he drew creation into himself. All creative power, operations, and attributes, their commingling with one another and with all nature, became in man material things of different forms and functions.²⁶

When Lucifer fell, he did not drag anything with him; only those angels who chose to revolt followed, because Lucifer was not the king of anything. Adam was king over all corporeal creation; earthly creatures were to respect him, as through the line of authority, they’d be respecting God. The graces poured into the world were like a string, and woven onto that string were the beads of all earthly creatures. Adam was the highest bead. When he Fell, he cut the string above his own head and the entire line of beads fell away with him. It was only by Christ, true God and true man, that this string could be remade.

What this means is that the Fall can be understood in three parts. We know that Adam, whose un-darkened intellect could comprehend disobedience toward God abstractly, understood what he was doing before he sinned. Although he did not have experiential knowledge, he did not need that in order to recognize that disobedience would result in unimaginable horrors. Knowledge of this did not necessarily result in the temptation of gaining that experiential knowledge, however.

When Eve was tempted by the serpent, she came to Adam. Adam began to entertain disobedience. Then he disobeyed, and with him, so did Eve. This was where the Fall occurred. Disobedience is what turned Adam’s attention from God toward himself. His interior gaze then became pointed not outward, toward the light of God, but inward, in which there is no light. Disobedience had extinguished the light in his soul and blinded him to the light of God. By turning against God, Adam turned against himself, also, because it is only by glorifying God is man’s telos fulfilled. It is only by glorifying God that man’s nature can harmonize like a perfectly tuned instrument.

St. John Chrysostom points out how the Fall resulted in a complete loss of dignity, as well:

Consider, after all, how much shame they were eventually seized with after eating it and thus breaking the Lord’s command: “They stitched fig leaves together, and made themselves skirts.” See the depths of indignity into which they fell from a condition of such great glory. Those who previously passed their life like angels on earth contrive covering for themselves out of fig leaves. Such is the evil that sin is: not only does it deprive us of grace from above, but it also casts us into deep shame and abjection, strips us of goods already be longing to us, and deprives us of all confidence.²⁷

Taking the analogy of the tuned instrument a step further, the Fall resulted not merely in an untuned instrument, but one damaged to the point that it could not be repaired except by supernatural means. And to make matters worse, the man left with it still has to play his solo with the rest of the orchestra, humiliated and ashamed over how completely awful it sounds.

Adam and Eve, once clothed with the supernatural light of grace, with no need for clothes, had no need to feel any sense of shame before the Fall. With that grace removed, they say that they were indeed naked. It’s quite obvious from Scripture that Adam and Eve were not blind prior to their transgression. But the explicit note of seeing their own nakedness indicates that something had been removed; they were deprived of supernatural grace, and this then altered how they viewed the world.

The Fall therefore can be understood with the entertainment of temptation first, and the disobedience of God’s command second. This disobedience carried with it two aspects: firstly, the revolt against the order of the cosmos—as God is that logos—by Adam, king and high priest of all corporeal creatures, and as such, they Fell with him. This is the entrance into the world of death. The second aspect is the necessary injustice against God’s law that the disobedience entailed. Because God’s law and God’s order are both uniquely wrapped up in creation, it’s important not to confuse the two; disobedience was a crime against both, but only one has been fully remitted.

This injustice stayed with man after the Fall and was also passed on to all of us by virtue of our birth. Bl. Emmerich writes of how “Longinus opened in Jesus’ Side the gate of regeneration to eternal life, therefore no one entered Heaven while that gate was closed.”²⁸ The reason Christ descended to the Limbo of the Fathers after His death on the Cross was because the gates of heaven were closed since the Fall; no one who died prior to the Crucifixion saw heaven until He came for them²⁹. Even as penitential as they were, the justice due for the Fall was not fulfilled. St. Thomas writes, commenting on Paul’s Letter to the Romans,

This defect is a lack of original justice divinely conferred on the first parent not only in his role as a definite person but also as the source of human nature—a justice that was to be passed along with human nature to his descendants. Consequently, the loss of this original justice through sin was passed on to his descendants. It is this loss that has the aspect of guilt in his descendants for the reason given. That is why it is said that in the progression of original sin a person infected the nature, namely, Adam sinning vitiated human nature; but later in others the vitiated nature affects the person in the sense that to the offspring is imputed as guilt this vitiated state of nature on account of the first parent’s will, as explained above.³⁰

It is a long-accepted and well known dogma of the Church that the ‘taint’ of Original Sin is washed away by the waters of baptism, but what does that really mean? After all, baptism does not make us physically healthy, it does not usually wipe away illnesses, nor does it irrevocably confer that everlasting life that it promises. Baptism, rather, remits the due justice owed by the Fall, for so great was that first sin that it can never be completely atoned for by any measure of man’s efforts. Through baptism we come to be in Christ. The remission of sins means the forgiveness thereof. As we understand from the Catechism:

To remove further all doubt on the subject, the Council of Trent, after other Councils had defined this, declared it anew, pronouncing anathema against those who should presume to think otherwise, or should declare to assert that although sin is forgiven in Baptism, it is not entirely removed or totally eradicated, but is cut away in such a manner as to leave its roots still fixed in the soul.³¹

And again,

In Baptism not only is sin forgiven, but with it all the punishment due to sin is mercifully remitted by God. To communicate the efficacy of the Passion of Christ our Lord is an effect common to all the Sacraments; but of Baptism alone does the Apostle say, that by it we die and are buried together with Christ.³²

So what St. Thomas touches on above is the last aspect of The Fall: the justice due for violating God’s command. This demand for justice was inherited by subsequent generations of Adam because of the metaphysical change to human nature that had occurred as a result of that transgression. God is willing to forgive that wrongdoing, so long as the penitent is sincere, but that metaphysical change—the damage physically inflicted upon all members of creation—remains.

Indeed, all of the Sacraments exist in certain ways to fulfill what is needed for man to be pulled back up to the peak of the Holy Mount without depriving him of his agency. Baptism, of course, remits original sin (and all other sin prior to that point), but it can only be done once. For those of us (all) who fall into sin again, the Sacrament of Penance & Reconciliation was instituted for several reasons, but most relevantly to remit those sins so heinous that they merit eternal damnation. While all sin images the Fall, mortal sin in particular is as close to a replication of the Fall that every man is capable of, as mortal sin is the conscious indulgence in temptation into behavior or thoughts of grave matter. Engaging in mortal sin so blackens the soul as to render it unrecognizable. Like the Fall, it deprives man of the graces he receives purely out of God’s love for him. As St. John Chrysostom wrote, “Nothing is worse than sin,” as “it not merely fills us with shame but also robs of their senses people previously sensible and full of great intelligence.”³³

In receiving the grace of penance, we become again like Adam—not exactly like him, because the damage to ourselves cannot simply be undone, but similar to him in the sense that the God comes again to dwell within us. We were made, originally, to be vessels for His grace, so that our wills may better resonate with His at the most fundamental level of being. Absolution returns us to this state. The bottleneck of our souls is unclogged of filth, so that the blood and water that gushed forth from the side of Christ may again fill it; the bottle’s glass may be blemished and clouded by wear, and the light may not shine so well through it, but the light shines through it all the same.

Note On the Serpent

There is a lot to be said regarding the possible allegorical significance of the serpent. In the interests of brevity, we’ll forgo most of that as our interests here are more on understanding what we can of the historical events themselves. That said, the Jerome Biblical Commentary offers an aside regarding the serpent itself:

The serpent was chosen by J particularly because of its role in the idolatrous fertility rites of Canaan (see F. Hvidberg, VT 10 [1960] 285-94). A polemical motif is suggested. […] The serpent’s question, a distortion of the divine command, insinuates the possibility of an unwarranted restriction by God and provokes the reply necessary if the conversation is to be maintained. 2-3. The woman corrects the serpent’s distortion, but she adds her own (“…neither shall you touch it”). Sin begins with some distortion of the truth.³⁴

As noted before, modernist flaws in contemporary commentary aside, the authors do draw a connection between the serpent in Eden and the serpent imagery of Canaanite and other near-Eastern pagan fertility cults. This is not coincidental, although as is so typical of modern scholarship, the relationship is backwards. The mythologization of the Genesis narrative forces modern scholarship to construct Biblical history in reverse, presuming what is effectively a relativist understanding of early history and using external sources to substantiate early Biblical narratives—despite the earliest Biblical narratives predating nearly all external documentation available, and (as we see in the case of the Flood narrative) often being more internally consistent and reliable than any alternatives.

What this means is that, for our purposes, we should not hesitate to use the Biblical narrative as our starting point and recognize external documentation as derivatives thereof. The narrative itself is sound; documentation that seems to substantiate it is wholly unnecessary. Rather than presume the Genesis narrative was written specifically as a polemic against regional cults in the interests of evangelization (a tenuous position anyhow, given the nature of the ancient Hebraic religion), we can instead presume that the Genesis narrative was accurate independent of any possible polemical qualities. It may indeed have been the case that there was some polemical intention, but it’s safe to assume that this would have been included such that it would not have impeded or altered the historical narrative of Genesis.

With this in mind, the serpent imagery of Canaanite fertility cults likely trace their idolatry back through to the same archetypal serpent. In this sense, the authors of the Commentary touch on something true: that there is a source that both Genesis and pagan rites draw their imagery back to. The difference is that the Genesis account is a narrative that follows God’s people; pagans—particularly those of Canaan, as we understand from Scripture—idolized, at best, false or invented gods, or otherwise radically misinterpreted the angelic host of the True God. At worst, they were followers of the demonic.³⁵

The prevalence of this specific imagery among pagan cults in all likelihood draws from the demonic nature of the serpent’s corruption in Eden. As the superstitions of the antediluvian peoples were wiped away with the Flood, there’s very little chance of conscious knowledge and pagan rites and idolatry being passed on through Noah’s lineage. The serpent imagery would have had to come from somewhere not necessarily connected to human memory—especially since we have it on Scriptural authority that everything prior to the flood was completely wiped away. The only remaining option is that demonic again tempted whole groups of men back into idolatry and, due to its archetypal significance, or do simply to the serpent’s previous relationship with sin, it again took on the trappings of idolatry.

Expulsion From Eden & Life After the Fall

After their transgression, God recounts to Adam and Eve the consequences of their actions. Eve, and all women as a result, would famously bear the pains of childbirth. Adam would suffer to work the soil that had been cursed. Their marriage bond would be strained and imperfect. The serpent would be cursed to lay low to the ground.

But within this explanation, God immediately promises the coming of the redeemer, as well as the triumph of His mother. The True Man is promised to reconcile the Fall of the first man, and His mother is promised to right the wrong fruits of Eve’s curiosity and temptation. God does not abandon those two who first abandoned Him; and if He would not even abandon those who committed the very first sin, the sin that was of such magnitude that it condemned the entire human race, then we can rest assured that He would never abandon those of us that follow.

Driven out of Paradise, Adam and Eve wandered near the Holy Mount for a substantial period of time. Bl. Emmerich describes them “wandering about in great distress… as if seeking something they had lost,” being “ashamed of each other”.³⁶ She recounts them wandering extremely far from Eden, led first to a plain, and then later “to the region of Mount Olivet”, although the antediluvian landscape rendered it unfamiliar to her eyes.³⁷ While this is consistent, arguably, with the book of Jubilees³⁸, she departs from other ancient (though unsettled) Christian tradition; in such accounts, our first parents and the line of Seth dwelt upon the slopes and in the caves of the Holy Mount until the days of the Flood. For this, we will turn to early Christian apocrypha.

The First Book of Adam begins with an explanation of the landscape around Eden. For our purposes, most of its details are unnecessary, and they’d be impossible to verify anyway. What it does make note of, however, is the Cave of Treasures, a cavern that supposedly existed beneath Eden, within the mountain.³⁹ The Book of Treasures and the Book of Bee allude to the same story, though rather than a case of substantiation, it seems more likely that all three of these psuedographica drew from each other or from some lost previous source. Again, earliest Christian and ancient Hebrew tradition was never settled on these issues. Treasures departs from Adam’s text by expounding on the cave’s purpose:

And Adam took from the skirts of the mountain of Paradise, gold, and myrrh, and frankincense, and he placed them in the cave, and he blessed the cave, and consecrated it that it might be the house of prayer for himself and his sons. And he called the cave “ME`ÂRATH GAZZÊ” (i.e. “CAVE OF TREASURES”).

According to this, it was Adam himself who, acting in his priestly duty, consecrated the cave and set it up to be the location of future religious services. Bl. Emmerich notes, in recounting Noah’s life, that the ancient pre-Hebrew tradition of religious sacrifice looked an awful lot like the Mass:

The ceremonies used by Noe when offering sacrifice, reminded me of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There were alternate prayers and responses, and Noe moved from place to place at the altar and bowed reverently.⁴⁰

We see, later in Genesis, in the lives of Abraham and particularly with Jacob, the practice of erecting altars of stone to offer sacrifice, beginning the Hebrew tradition of sacrificial worship to the True God of Adam, Noah, Melchizedek, and the other patriarchs. This is also true of Job. But prior to their stories, little detail pertaining to the method of worship was ever offered. Based on what Bl. Emmerich claimed, we can assume that the practices of the ancient Hebrew tradition understandably grew out of the practices of the original Patriarchal religion of Noah, and likewise, that of Adam himself.

The apocryphal accounts of Treasures, Adam, and Bee all speak of similar rituals, expanding upon what’s provided in Genesis but making deliberate note of stone altars, consecrations, and prayers. We can deduce from this two things: first, that the true religion whose mantle Catholicism inherited from Christ is and has always been one that includes exterior sacrifice, and second, that man’s predisposition is one inclined toward worship. This was already pointed out earlier in recognizing Adam’s priestly character and the similarity in design between Eden and that of the temple.

Although the Fall bound the soul to the flesh in a way unintended, outwardly, by God’s design, the supernatural direction of man’s gaze remained. The Book of Adam spends many chapters detailing the plight of Adam and Eve after their expulsion, as they encounter despair, the Enemy, and the torture of postlasparian worldly hardships; prayer and penance remain the linchpins of their survival. Bl. Emmerich’s visions, also, note that Adam and Eve “expiatiat[ed] their fault upon the naked earth”, or did acts of penance, upon leaving Eden.⁴¹ And, as we know from Scripture, although God exiled them from Paradise, He did not abandon them—far from it, in fact, as they now required more attention than ever.

The Fallen state of Adam and Eve may have preserved some element of supernatural awareness, but it meant that they would feel hungry, be unable to fully control their passions, and would suffer death. With this in mind, we turn from Adam’s postlapsarian prayer life to his daily living conditions.

We know that men started eating meat at about this time, after the expulsion from Paradise. Although Adam is not mentioned as having hunted for food, Scripture does inform us that shepherding was one of the first professions of Fallen man.⁴² Prior to the Fall, the animals were subject to Adam as he was a king; today we still see some inkling of this in our relationship with most breeds of dogs. Many animals remain capable of some level of domestication; it’s not unreasonable to think that this is the remnant of their prelapsarian obedience to man. What this means is that although sheep or goats, herbivores, may obey man, as well as dogs, it’s obviously not the case that a lion is an appropriate target for domestication. Interestingly, Bl. Emmerich claims that flesh meat was not eaten until after Abel was murdered,⁴³ which would presumably indicate that the flock was raised specifically for sacrifice.

Far from the predictions of Hobbes and Rousseau, we can see in Scripture what the earliest, primitive life of man was really like: long-lived, shared in literal brotherhood, and knowledgeable—albeit tainted by the Fall. Disease and hardship assuaged early man on all sides after he left Eden, surely, but where Hobbes would have us believe that men turned against each other, and where Rousseau would have us believe that they were stupid, Scripture reveals that both conceptions of early men are wrong. That is, of course, until we get to Cain and Abel, when the separation of lineages occurs—what St. Augustine refers to as the worldly manifestation, for the first time, of the cities of man and of God.

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Table of Contents

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1Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 17

2Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press: 1998), 555-556.

3Wynne, John M., A Catholic Assessment of Evolutionary Theory (Restoring Truth Ministries, LLC: 2011), 433

4This presentation, as well as the rest in this series put a lot of this into perspective.

5Gen 2:17.

6Gen 3:1.

7Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 12.

8Ibid.

9Ibid, 13.

10Gen 3:6.

11Gen 2:16-17.

12Gen 3:2-3.

13Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 14

14Augustine, City of God, 608.

15Augustine, City of God, 616.

16Ibid, 614.

17Rom 8:22.

18Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, trans. F. R. Larcher, O.P., (Lander, Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Scripture: 2012),223.

19Rom 5:12.

20Augustine, City of God, 550-551.

21Gen 6:3.

22Sanford, John, Jim Pamplin & Christopher Rupe, “Genetic Entropy Recorded in the Bible?” (FMS Foundation, 2014) 3-5.

23Warkulwiz, Doctrines of Genesis, 354-355.

24This isn’t to be confused with a turning-inward in the sense used by the mystics such as St. John of the Cross or St. Teresa of Avila.

25Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 14-15

26Ibid, 16.

27Chrysostom, Homilies: Homily 16, 220.

28Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 8.

29The patriarch Enoch and the prophet Elijiah, as well as the good thief, being the sole exceptions,.

30Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans,139.

31The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. John McHugh, O.P. & Charles Callan, O.P., (New York: Trent Printing, 1947), 183.

32Ibid, 185.

33Chrysostom, Homilies: Homily 17, 225.

34Jerome Biblical Commentary, 12-13.

35Lev 12:29-31 (God warning the Israelites of the evil practices of regional/Canaanite pagan cults), 1 Kings 18 (Elias confronts the followers of Baal).

36Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 24.

37Ibid, 26.

38Jubilees 3:32 (Apocrypha).

391 Adam 1:9 (Apocrypha).

40Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 41.

41Ibid, 26.

42Gen 4:2.

43Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 29.