Christianity 012: "Ye are my friends..." (John 15:14)

Much has been written about original sin. The Scripture is quite laconic about what happened. Adam and Eve stole a piece of fruit - a pomegranate, perhaps. Surely, the original sin was not theft, or was it? Some say that it was. The language of the Bible, they say, employs a certain literary device to mean ‘all’ or ‘everything.’ Phrases like ‘heaven and earth’ (Gen. 1:1), ‘alpha and omega’ (Rev. 1:8), ‘beginning and end’ (ibid.), ‘the first and the last’ (Rev. 22:13), among other things, mean just that - all, everything. Thus, when Christ says: “I am the Alpha and the Omega” (ibid.), He means that He is all things. (Compare this with the prayer at the consecration of the Holy Gifts during the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great: “Be Thou Thyself all things to all men.” Only God Himself can be all things.) Creatures have limitations and can be only some things; God alone is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient - He is all things. It is in this way, some say, that the term ‘good and evil’ is to be understood. The cursed fruit of the Tree (Gal. 3:13), the One who is up-borne by the Tree (Acts 5:30), the One by partaking of whose Flesh we have eternal life (John 6:54), are deified and “become like gods” (Gen. 3:5) - He is the Christ who offered “Himself as food to the faithful” (hymn on Great and Holy Saturday). Adam and Eve were to partake of this fruit by becoming Christ-like - that is to say, by offering themselves in a sacrifice of love to the One who first offered Himself to them. But instead of approaching “with the fear of God and faith,” they snuck into the altar when no one was watching - and this too was their delusion, for they were the ones who should have been watching, tending, and keeping (Gen. 2:15). They stole the Gift, and in their madness did not recognize it for what it was. They thought “that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6) - the communion bread was soft and tasty; the wine was full-bodied, with notes of leather and blackcurrants, and nicely-developed tannins. They thought that they could treat as an object Him, who is always the subject. Some say, that this was the original sin.

Others say that the original sin was disobedience - and perhaps, it was. But there has to be more to the story. Making a rule just for its own sake, for the sake of obeying or disobeying it, seems petty. Perhaps, it was meant as an exercise in self-control - a daily reminder to get a willpower workout. But to what end? Adam, it seems, forgot all about it and had as little interest in pomegranates as he did in going for walks with his wife. Eve, on the other hand, may have purposefully designed her hiking trail to pass right by the Tree. Pomegranates, it turns out, just happened to be her favorite fruit. The Good Book does not say how many times Eve walked past the Tree without reaching for the fruit or even touching it. God did not forbid them from touching the Tree (Gen. 2:17), but Eve seems to have made up this commandment for herself - just to be safe. In time, perhaps, she would have forbidden herself even from coming near the Tree during the monthly niddah after the “manner of women” (Gen. 18:11). It is impossible to know what Eve would have done, of course, but daughters of Eve did just that - do not eat, do not touch, do not even enter. There is a tradition that treats God’s punishment not as retaliation but as medicine. Thus, by the type of medicine prescribed to Adam and Eve, one can guess about the type of illness it is supposed to address. Nonetheless, disobedience is certainly an obvious aspect of the original sin, yet it was the most profound form of disobedience, for the commandment was not passed to them in fragments of copies of musty manuscripts in obscure ancient languages, but spoken directly by the Lawgiver Himself.