How could Adam and Eve listen to the devil against the will of God?
Love implies freedom and self-determination, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2Co 3:17; see Q107, Q233), and freedom, in turn, lives by trust. Adam and Eve could listen to the devil against the will of God only because they first allowed the devil to redefine God in their hearts: from the Father who had given them everything, life, Paradise, each other, his own presence and communion, into a rival who was withholding the best from them. Once God’s love was doubted, his commandment could no longer be heard as protection, but only as deprivation; and freedom, cut loose from trust, turned to grasping. This is why the tradition sees in every subsequent sin a repetition of Eden: sin is always, at root, the suspicion that God is not good enough to us, and that we must secure for ourselves what he will not give. St Basil the Great traces evil to precisely this ingratitude of the sated heart, which despised the delight already given in its reach for more (St Basil the Great, Homily That God Is Not the Cause of Evils, 7; see Q017, Q024); and the whole remedy of the Gospel answers the primal doubt at its root: “He who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all, how would he not also give us all things with him freely?” (Rom 8:32). The Cross is God’s final refutation of the serpent’s slander. The possibility of the Fall is the shadow of the possibility of love.
The serpent appears as the instrument and symbol of the devil’s temptation. Clement of Alexandria suggested that the serpent signifies pleasure, one face of earthly, demonic wisdom:
The first man, when in Paradise, was free, for he was the child of God. But when he succumbed to pleasure (for the serpent allegorically signifies pleasure crawling on its belly), he was as a child seduced by lusts and grew old in disobedience. By disobeying his Father, he dishonored God. Such was the influence of pleasure. (Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks, 11).
In Paradise, Eve met the serpent, who assured her that if they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would not die but would know good and evil and become as gods. Eve was deceived by this promise and by the fairness of the fruit, “pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise”, and ate; and Adam followed her example and ate (Gen 3:4–6; see Q108). The deceit succeeded because the accusation beneath it had already been admitted: that God begrudged them godlikeness. Yet, the irony is complete, for godlikeness was never withheld, it was their calling and destiny, to be received as a gift in due season (see St Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38.12; see Q094, Q095): they grasped at what God was already giving.
The threefold shape of the temptation, the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life (1Jo 2:16), is the same that the New Adam repelled in the wilderness (Mat 4:1–11; see Q237, Q537); and he repelled it precisely by unbroken trust in the Father’s love, answering every insinuation with the Father’s word, and at the last committing even his dying breath into the Father’s hands (Luk 23:46). Where Eden fell by doubting Love, Gethsemane and Golgotha stood by trusting it.
This original, primordial sin resulted in false knowledge, a distorted apprehension of reality, and fear. From this spiritual and bodily condition came a curse upon mankind: spiritual death, issuing also in physical death.
For God created us for incorruption and made us in the image of his own eternity; but through the devil’s envy, death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it. (Wis 2:23–24; see Q114)
A curse is the opposite of a blessing: a spiritual reality with real consequences in our world. In the story of the Fall, the curse names the consequences of sin according to God’s just judgment, the evil which through sin came upon the earth itself: “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Gen 3:17; see Q012, Q551).
