How did sin pass from the devil to humanity?
The devil deceived Eve and Adam by first slandering the love of God. Note carefully his opening word: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Gen 3:1; see Q537), a deliberate caricature. God’s first word to man had been one of overflowing generosity: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat” (Gen 2:16; see Q159); the serpent recasts the Giver of all as a withholder. Upon this insinuation, he builds the direct accusation: God has kept something good from you, because he does not truly love you:
The serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. (Gen 3:4–7)
Here is the ultimate root of evil in the human heart: to doubt the love of God, to believe that God withholds something good from us, and that we must therefore seize it for ourselves. Eve and Adam sinned in act only after they had sinned in trust: they accepted the serpent’s portrait of a grudging God. St John Chrysostom lays bare the strategy: the devil’s words were contrived to persuade the woman that the commandment was given out of envy (phthonos), “to portray God as jealous” of his creature’s advancement (St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, 16; see Q011, Q017).
St Gregory the Theologian, expounding Paradise, answers the slander directly: the tree “was not planted with evil intent, nor was it forbidden out of envy; let not the enemies of God wag their tongues!”, but was reserved for man’s good, until he should be ready (St Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38.12; see Q094, Q095). The book of Wisdom supplies the devastating inversion: the envier was never God, but the accuser himself, “through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wis 2:24; see Q107, Q157). Thus, Adam and Eve lost the divine vision of trusting unknowing, exchanging it for an experience of creation founded on the sensual and the visible, the quest for a false wisdom (see the Study: The Serpent as Symbol of Wisdom). The immediate fruit betrays the root: where trust in love died, fear was born, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid” (Gen 3:10; see Q118), for “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1Jo 4:18).
Concerning the necessity of undoing this primordial fall by God’s grace, the return, through purification, to the blessed “unknowing” that is above knowledge, St Dionysius the Areopagite writes:
Leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual… that you may arise by unknowing toward union, as far as is attainable, with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and of all things… you shall be borne on high to the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness. (St Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, 1)
By losing the state of divine communion and contemplation, man experienced spiritual death, the first death, and fear; and this in turn led at last to physical death.
