THE immediate effect of Adam's sin as stated in Genesis, is surprising enough. Whereas before the Fall they were both naked, to wit, Adam and his wife: and were not ashamed, now, instantly upon their eating, they were aware of each other's nakedness and proceeded to fashion themselves some sort of clothing. And as they could no longer look upon each other untroubled, so they could no longer face God without fear. Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Lord God, amidst the trees of Paradise. Nor was their fear without reason. To Eve God said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have dominion over thee. To Adam He said: Cursed is the earth in thy work: with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee and thou shalt eat the herbs of the earth. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art and into dust thou shalt return.
The rest of the story is in a couple of sentences: And the Lord God sent him out of the Paradise of pleasure, to till the earth from which he was taken. And He cast out Adam; and placed before the Paradise of pleasure cherubim, and a flaming sword, turning every way to keep the way of the tree of life.
Upon the story of the Fall of man set out with such appalling brevity in Genesis, mankind has had a long time to meditate; Christ himself came to give us a clearer knowledge of what was involved in it, and for two thousand years His Church has been thinking upon it in the light of His revelation. In the remainder of this chapter an attempt will be made to summarize the Church's teaching.
In giving Adam the order not to eat of the fruit of this one tree, God had told Adam that to eat of it would mean death. But Adam, as we remember, had two lives in him— the natural life of body and soul by which he was a man, and the supernatural life of sanctifying grace by which he was a son of God and might one day look upon the living reality of God in Heaven. To each of these lives corresponded a death, and by his sin Adam fell under both.
Consider first the death which was the loss of the supernatural life. His soul had possessed sanctifying grace, and with it faith, hope and charity, the moral virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, an extraordinary wealth of God's gifts beside. But the key to supernatural life, as to all life, is love. The vivifying element in sanctifying grace is charity, which is the love of God. Adam, setting his own will against God's, in that very fact annihilated love, thus lost the living principle in sanctifying grace, was supernaturally dead. From his soul had gone the power whose full effect was to have been the direct vision of God.
Thus he was left with natural life only, whereas before he had had both supernatural and natural life. But the natural life he was left with was not as it had been before. In losing the right relation of his own person to God by rebellion, he had lost his original integrity, the right relation of body and soul, and the harmonious working of the powers of the soul with one another; he was punished, too, by the withdrawal of freedom from suffering and death, gifts which in any event would have sat oddly upon a nature as disordered as his now was. Death had come upon man, and it had come as a penalty for sin; for though by the material element in his nature man is liable to death, yet if man had not sinned God would have stood between him and that liability.
Let us look more closely at the damage within his nature. The soul had ruled the body while the soul preserved its right relation of loving obedience to the Infinite Source of all life. But the soul in rebellion against its God had quite literally lost its rights and found the body rebellious against it. The soul's various powers had maintained harmony because all alike were directed towards God as their supreme end; but having turned aside from God, they no longer had any one end to unify them and hold them in harmony, and each must pursue its own devices, one seeking its satisfaction in one direction, one in another. So that the soul was faced at once with the rebellion of the body, and with warfare within its own powers. The splendour was most miserably and thoroughly wrecked. Adam had to struggle, as we all since have to struggle, against the insubordination of the body and a wavering in the soul's direction. In two ways Adam first and we after him are most obviously afflicted in consequence. We find it nearly impossible to control our imagination, and nearly impossible to control our passions. Upon these matters even one who does not believe men fell in Adam must still see that something has gone appallingly wrong with human nature: if man was created by God, then he could not have been created like this! If we did not know that man had fallen in Adam, we should surely know from observation that he had suffered some sort of fall.
Of the imagination and the undue place it takes in affairs which should be exclusively of the intellect or the will, we have already spoken at some length in the first part of this book. Imagination by itself is simply a picture-making power, of real utility to the intellect. As a result of the derangement of man's nature produced by the Fall, imagination has passed far beyond the condition of a useful servant. For about nine-tenths of our living activities, imagination practically runs the whole show. It might be well at this point to reread chapter 2 where this particular disorder is treated at length.
Of the passions and the emotional life generally, we can do no more than indicate the main trouble caused by the Fall, leaving every man to document the outline from his own experience. That man should have passions is natural: what is tragic is that they should escape the domination of his mind. Before the Fall they did not. Of this we have already had one clear instance. Before the Fall Adam and his wife were naked and not perturbed by the fact. They had already been given God's blessing that they were to increase and multiply and fill the earth; they had had the revelation of God that the relation of husband-wife was to be even closer than that of parents and children. They had sexual passion, but it was not their master. They could summon it up at will, use it and enjoy it and return to tranquillity. Sexual union was not a matter of frenzied and inescapable urgence. But with the Fall, the passions passed out of control of will and intellect: from now on they were to harry man perpetually. We have seen that Adam and Eve's first recorded action after their sin was to perceive their nakedness. Their first recorded action after being cast out of Paradise was sexual intercourse: Adam knew Eve his wife: who conceived and brought forth Cain—the first murderer was the first fruit of sexual passion uncontrolled. In their paradisal state they would have had the sexual intercourse when they wanted it: now they must have it when it insists.
Adam, of course, was not bound to remain as low as he had fallen. He was still a man, he was still free to make choice of worse or better, still free, in fact, to place his love anywhere between nothingness and God Himself. He had lost his innocence but not his memory. What he knew of God before the Fall he still knew after it. Knowing God's goodness he still had motive for repent-ance; and any natural movement in this direction would not have been hindered by his enormous awareness that his sin had not paid. Because he was a man and so had free will, he was not bound to repent, but he was able to repent; and it is the universal teaching of theologians that by God's grace he did repent and received the supernatural life again into his soul, though not in its former plenitude—his troubled nature was not capable of that. If he had not thus received the supernatural life and died with it, he could not have entered heaven: for, as we have seen and cannot too often remind ourselves, the supernatural life is the power to live in heaven.
But the restoration of the supernatural life did not of itself heal the damage in his nature. We may here use a somewhat crude comparison. If a jug filled with cream falls from a high shelf, there will be two results: the jug will be cracked, the cream will be spilled. Provided the jug has not been smashed to pieces, cream can be poured into it again: but this will not heal the crack. The comparison is admittedly a crude one, and will need to be refined and corrected later, because the supernatural life, here figured by the cream, can have very profound effects on our nature. But in a general way it remains true that the damage done to our nature has to be healed by an immense striving within our nature itself. So that Adam, though he regained some measure of sanctifying grace, still had the warfare of body against soul, the warfare of the soul's powers among themselves, the swollen power of imagination, the clouding of the intellect and the distorting of the will by passion, the ever-present possibility of falling again into sin.
The third effect of the Fall he could do nothing about at all, namely the broken relation between mankind and God. Man had been at one with God. He was no longer at one with God. There was a breach between God and the human race, and this was incomparably the most serious result of Adam's sin. Oddly enough it is almost invariably overlooked, because we have lost the habit of thinking of the human race. We concentrate upon individuals, specially upon ourselves, then upon others according to their closeness to us, our family or our nation, we may even say that our affections embrace all living men, though our sense of oneness with them can hardly be very strong. But we have no natural and spontaneous response to the concept of the human race itself— not only all men now living but all men who have ever lived or ever will live. It is a defect in us that we find the human race as a whole too large to love effectively or even realize. It is because of this defect that so many find the notion of the whole race being tested in one man improbable and almost grotesque. But it would be strange if God, who is equally the creator of all men, to Whom no man is more immediately present than any other, to Whom no idea is too big, did not see the race as a whole and treat it so; and it is at once an enlargement of our limitedness and a strengthening of our own relation with all men to see Him do it. In the story of the first dealing of God with man this is what we see.
It will repay a closer look. As a beginning we should realize what was involved in the original relation of oneness between God and our race. He had conferred upon us supernatural life which as we have seen lifts us from mere creatures into sons of God. The gift was to Adam, but to Adam as head of the race and so for the whole race seen by God as incorporated in him. The race of man stood in the relation of a son to God; had that relation remained unbroken, we should all have received from God the same super-natural life merely by being members of a race that had it, we should have been sons of God individually because our race stood in the relation of sonship. But by Adam's act the relation was broken. The human race was put to the test in Adam; Adam failed to pass the test. He sinned. And in that act the human race became a fallen race, a race no longer at one with God: a race to which Heaven was closed. The race had been at one with God as a son with his father: now it stood facing God as a servant his lord. There was a breach between.
It is held that Adam, and Eve, too, died in a state of sanctifying grace, personally united with God by charity, but members of a race which was no longer at one with Him. And so died many after them. They could not be damned because they had sancti-fying grace in their souls; but they could not enter Heaven because the race they belonged to was no longer at one with God. The problem for the human race was precisely the restoration of this oneness: it was the problem of at-one-ment which we disguise with the pronunciation atonement. God knew how He would solve the problem: how the human race might be reunited with Him, how sonship might be restored to it. But until God chose to act, there was nothing that man could do to remake the oneness. It is one of man's unhappier powers that he can destroy what he cannot rebuild: for instance he can kill another man but cannot restore him to life. So here. Supernatural oneness between man and God is something that only God can make: man could destroy it, but could no more re-make it once destroyed than he could have made it in the first place. Only God could re-make it.
But the re-making was complicated by an element that had not been in the first making— the element of the sin man had committed. Mankind now was not simply a zero, but a minus; or, to put it another way, mankind was not simply penniless but in debt. Whether or not God chose to exact it, in strict justice something was certainly due from man— in expiation of the sin, in payment of the debt; and by justice I mean not merely avenging justice, punishing an offence, but a just vision of things requiring that a damage to the right order of reality be repaired.
The man who commits sin violates order: sin of its nature is disorder (I Jn.iii.4).
The glory of God has been denied by an act of human nature: the glory of God is the key to reality, its denial makes everything unreal, so that by its own act human nature is set in the way of unreality; some act of human nature at least as definitive in the opposite direction would seem to be required to restore the right order of things.
Thus there was not only the problem of restoring man's broken relationship to God— how to heal the breach— at-one-ment in its original sense; but the problem of expiation— what to do about the sin which had caused the breach— atonement in the word's commoner modern sense. It was for God to decide whether expiation must be made. But if it must, how? Nothing that man— Adam, or any other man or humanity as a whole—was now in a position to offer to God in expiation of this first great crime of human nature would suffice, for man himself was too badly damaged to offer any perfect act of reparation: damaged man had nothing but damaged acts to offer. No man could offer even the whole of himself, for man was no longer in total possession of him-self, too much of him was beyond his own control. God's love desired the restoration of oneness, of the relation of sonship: but if expiation must first be made, how was expiation possible?
Thus one may muse over the problems that man had set by his sin. But it is only musing, valid enough while we are seeing what man could not do, but only hints and glimpses of probabilities when we try to see what required to be done. There is profit for the mind in speculating as to what God might have done; but it is as nothing to the profit in studying what He did do. In the event both problems were to find one solution in which love and justice were miraculously fused.
But not yet. And until God Himself remade the oneness, holy men and women could receive the supernatural life, but as a gift personal to themselves, a reward for their love, not through the human race; they could die with the supernatural life in their souls, and that meant that they had the power to live the life of Heaven; but they must wait until Heaven should be once more open to the race to which they belonged.
Let us consider in more detail the personal effect of Adam's Fall upon his descendants. For, as we have seen, we were all involved in it. St. Paul writes (Rom.v.12): It was through one man that guilt came into the world; and since death came owing to guilt, death was handed on to all mankind by one man.
There were two lives in Adam with a death corresponding to each: and we fell under both. Because he sinned, we are all born into this life without the supernatural life, with natural life only: and that natural life is a damaged life, doomed inescapably to break up in death.
Consider these two effects separately. For our natural life, we are dependent by inheritance upon Adam. Our natural life is the life of soul and body, and though our souls are a direct creation of God, yet their relation with our bodies is so close that the variously damaged bodies with which each soul is united at the beginning of each man's life are quite sufficient to ensure for each man a damaged nature. We have the same sort of disorder in the elements of our nature that Adam had: a body rebellious against the soul, warfare of the soul's powers against one another, imagination far too powerful, passions and emotions swinging us toward sin. We too must die. Further, we must live in a world which has lost the necessity of obeying us. From Adam onwards man has been fighting for his life and his rights in a universe which no longer acknowledges him as its lord. The greatest conqueror can be brought down to death by a snake, or more humiliatingly by a microbe. Nor does man treat the animals any better than they treat him. The harmony is wrecked. To man in his perfection God gave "dominion" over the animals: but when He comes to bless Noah after the Flood, there is a new note: Let the fear and dread of you be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the fowls of the air, and all that move upon the earth: all the fishes of the sea are delivered into your hand. And everything that moveth and liveth shall be meat for you: even as the green herbs have I delivered them all to you. (Gen.ix.1-3.)
There remains in the natural order one most mysterious result of Adam's sin. The order of the material universe was damaged by it. God said to Adam: The earth is cursed in thy work.
At the creation, God had looked upon all that He had made and seen that it was very good. But now there was a curse upon it. It was still good, but there was a disorder in it, all the same, which was not part of God's design or the result of material causes only, but resulted from Adam's sin. The material universe is so closely inter-linked, inter-balanced, that the catastrophe in its highest part spreads damage downward through all its parts. We have fallen into the naive habit of thinking of matter as wholly self-contained, affected only by material causes. But it is created by Spirit, pre-served in being by Spirit, wholly under the control of Spirit; and there is no reason to think that what happens to spirit at any level leaves it unaffected. And quite apart from such possible direct effects, the action of man in the perverseness of his will and the darkness of his mind can produce the most appalling destructions of the equilibrium of the material order. We do not know what damage the earth took from Adam's sin, but there is some new element of perversity in it as a result.
So much, though it is sketchy enough, for the natural effects upon us of Adam's sin. The supernatural effect is immeasurably more serious. We are born without the supernatural life— not because Adam, having lost it, could not transmit to us what he did not have himself (as we have seen, Adam almost certainly regained it for himself). The supernatural life is not transmitted by inheritance as our bodies are. It is a free gift of God. But God had decreed that it should be hereditary in this other sense, that it should accompany the nature men were to inherit from Adam, if Adam had not sinned. We are born without it, not because Adam did not have it to give to us, but because the condition on which God would have given it to us at the first moment of our existence was that Adam should not fail; and he failed.
Here we come to one of the most mysterious of the doctrines that treat directly of man, the doctrine of Original Sin, which is bound up with the truth that Adam's sin involved the whole race. In some profoundly dark way Adam's sin is in his descendants as real sin: they are not only affected by the results of his sin, they are somehow involved in the guilt of it: a multitude, through one man's disobedience, became guilty. (Rom.v.19).
It is in us not as an actual sin, a personal sin, as it was in Adam who actually committed it, but as a habitual sin, a state of un-righteousness, which most theologians equate with the absence of the supernatural life which should, had Adam not sinned, have been there. Thus the Council of Trent says that unrighteousness follows natural birth precisely as righteousness follows re-generation— in other words we are born into unrighteousness (absence of sanctifying grace) just as we should have been born into sanctifying grace but for Adam's sin, just as (to anticipate things to come) we are reborn into sanctifying grace by baptism.
But wherein lies our guilt? That this privation of grace should be in us as an effect of sin, we can see. But how is it sin? It is, as we have seen, not a personal sin. But if it is not personal, how is it ours? Because of that other element in us, our nature. It was a state of sinfulness in Adam's nature, and Adam's nature was the source of our nature. Theologians teach that it is transmitted by the natural way of sexual generation: it comes to us because we are "ex semine Adae ", of Adam's seed. If we could see more clearly into the relation of person and nature within ourselves, and into the relation of each man's nature with the nature of those through whom and ultimately from whom it comes to him, there would be no mystery. Lacking that clear vision, we find it darkly mysterious. To me it seems that the twelfth century writer Odo of Cambrai came very close to the limit of lucidity in his work De Peccato Originall.
The sin wherewith we sinned in Adam is natural in me, personal in Adam. In Adam it is graver, in me less grave; for in him I sinned not as who I am but as what I am. It was not I that sinned in him, but what I am; I sinned in him as man not as Odo, as substance not as person. Because the substance does not exist save in the person, the sin of the substance is the sin of the person, yet not personal. That sin is personal which I commit as who I am not as what I am, by which I sin as Odo not as man, by which I sin as person not as nature.
Our first reaction is quite likely to be a sense that we are being treated unfairly in thus being started off in life with a damaged nature and with no supernatural life at all, because of something done by someone else unmeasured ages ago. The unbeliever finds it matter for mockery— Eve, he says, ate the apple; we get the stomach-ache— and even the believer can be troubled by a seeming want of fairness in God. But if such a reaction is spontaneous, it should not survive a little reflection. The accusation of unfairness is peculiarly fragile. We have no right to supernatural life at all, because as men our nature is fully constituted without it; if God chooses to give it to us, it is an entirely free gift on His part, a gift, therefore, which He can give or withhold or give conditionally entirely as He pleases, with no question of right upon our part arising. As to our nature, we and all our ancestors owe it to Adam, and we cannot complain if he had only a damaged nature to transmit to us: it is still better than no nature at all. We had done nothing to earn a nature. Before we existed we were not entitled even to a human nature; once we exist we are not entitled to a super-nature. We cannot say that we have earned and been cheated out of a better nature than we were conceived with: we had not earned any nature at all and there was nothing to cheat us out of.
As I have said the accusation of unfairness will not stand a moment's consideration. But even the complaint at our being thus bound up with Adam's disaster shows a failure to grasp the organic solidarity of the human race. We are not isolated units, but even in the natural order members of one thing: it would be no advantage to us to be separated out, cut off, from the consequences of other men's ill deeds, but cut off, too, from a sharing in the fruits of other men's virtues: One man, so St. Paul writes to the Romans (v.18), commits a fault, and it brings condemnation upon all; one man makes amends, and it brings to all justification, that is, life. A multitude will become acceptable to God through one man's obedience, just as a multitude, through one man's disobedience, became guilty.
The same solidarity of the race by which we receive the effects of Adam's defeat enables us to receive the fruits of Christ's victory. But of that more, much more, later.
There remains to consider one of the personages taking part in the tragedy of the Fall—the Devil. The account in Genesis tells us that Eve was tempted by the serpent. It tells us no more about the tempter than that. It does not say that it was the Devil. That it was no ordinary serpent as known to zoology we realize as clearly as that the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was no ordinary tree as known to botany. So much we shall scarcely need to be told. If we did not guess for ourselves that it was the Devil, we should find it in later passages of scripture. In the Book of Wisdom we read: God created man incorruptible and to the image of His own likeness He made him. But by the envy of the Devil, death came into the world. (ii.4); and in Apocalypse we read of that old serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who seduced the whole world. (.9).
From now onwards the Devil is to play a continuing part in the affairs of men. What he gained by this first and most resounding defeat of man it is hard to say with absolute precision, or any precision. But the general result is only too clear. Man has been established by God as lord of the world, and some sort of lordship passed to his conqueror. Again and again (e.g., John xiv.30) the Devil is referred to as the Prince of this world. It is obvious enough that he became lord of the world in fact, in the sense that alcohol can become lord of a man, for as an angel he was superior in power to man, and he had found a weakness in man and could play on it with murderous effect. The world had him for its lord much as Scripture speaks of the man whose god is his belly. But did he gain some sort of rights over the world? It is hard to see how he could, for his own action in tempting Adam was sinful, and no rights can be acquired by sin. He could say to Our Lord (Luke iv.6): The Kingdoms of this world have been made over to me and could offer them to Our Lord on a condition; nor does Our Lord say that it is not so. But what exactly does "made over to me" signify? Anyhow, the Devil's power over fallen humanity was a horrifying fact. Individuals might resist, but the race looked as if it had sold out to the Devil.
Whatever his "lordship" involved, it is clear that following upon the success of this first effort to tempt man, he continues as tempter and adversary. We find Satan moving King David to make a census of Israel against the command of God; and there are scores of other instances. St. Paul tells us: Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against Principalities and Powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. (Eph.vi.12).
There is an extraordinarily full working out of this special relation of Satan to the human race in the Book of Job. Satan brings every kind of evil upon Job to try his faith in God: but we are especially told that he could do so only by God's permission. To say that Satan gained the right to tempt mankind by his victory over Adam would be too strong. Satan's action was sinful, and, as has been said, one can gain no rights by sin. But it would seem that God saw a certain fittingness in allowing Satan to tempt man: the human race, in Adam, had chosen to listen to Satan; very well, let them go on listening to Satan. God was there to help them, as He was there to help Adam. All the sins of all men since Adam have followed the pattern of Adam's sin, and made a sort of solidarity in sin between us and him that is a horrid parody of the solidarity in nature. We all have some sort of replica of Adam's experience in this matter. And on the whole our record is not very glorious. Nor is this surprising. If Satan could win a victory so resounding over unfallen man, his task would not necessarily be harder over fallen man. But strife against so powerful an enemy is very maturing to the soul if we stand firm; and this also God may have had in mind in allowing Satan to tempt us.
As we have already indicated, there was to be Atonement. God knew what He would do that the race of man might return to His friendship: otherwise there would have been no point in giving sanctifying grace to individual men. For the ultimate object of sanctifying grace is to enable men to live the life of heaven; and this they could do only if Heaven were once more to be opened to the race to which they belong. In other words there was to be for men a second chance. The nature of this second chance we shall discuss more thoroughly later; note here that it did not remove the need of testing, but involved that each man should be tested individually. That, now, is what man's life upon earth is. And just as Adam's representative testing involved temptation by the Devil, so likewise for our individual testing.
Fundamentally this testing is of the will. The will is free to choose God or to choose self as against God: and this latter choice is seldom a direct choice of self, but develops by way of seeking for happiness according to one's own desires— which may be directed to anything whatever that is— against the will of God. Given that the created order is so full of things capable of attracting us, and our nature so damaged, one might wonder why anything more should be needed to make the test severe. In other words we can so easily choose some lesser thing by our own momentum, so to speak, that one wonders why the Devil should bother with us. Certain elements in the answer must wait till we come to a more detailed treatment of our own nature, as we have received it damaged and have damaged it further; but there is one element which must be stated here. With every man simply following his own tendency to damage and diminish himself by making this or that choice against the will of God, evil might very well have a carnival, but it would be a somewhat chaotic carnival. It is hard to look upon this world without coming to a sense that evil is not simply chaotic, that there is a drive and a direction in it which suggests a living intelligence co-ordinating what would otherwise be only scattered and unrelated plunges of the human will— though the uncoercible will of man sets the Devil problems too.
The modern mood, out of touch with the very notion of religion as a statement of the reality of things, will have none of this notion of a personal Devil. It does not deny that evil is abroad: but it prefers to talk offerees and tendencies. In one sense this refusal to see the Devil as a person is a natural piece of wishful thinking: for if there is such a person, he is rather a terrifying person: it is more comfortable to believe that there is no such person: if one has to be terrified in the dark it is better to be terrified of a tendency than of Someone. But in a profounder sense the refusal of personality to the Devil is part of the general modern attack upon personality. We have already seen it in operation denying personality to God. All about us we see it in operation denying personality to man. Why should the Devil be treated any better?
At any rate you must tear out a vast amount of Christianity if you will reduce the Devil to a tendency. From end to end of the story of man the Devil appears as Someone, as a being of intelligence and will. We have said that God knew what He would do to undo the catastrophe of man's Fall. It is not for nothing that the very first statement God made of what He would do. He made not to Adam and Eve but to the Devil, and He made it in terms of victory over the Devil: his head was to be crushed.