Episode Three: Children in Paradise

If God created man in his own image, and placed him in a garden so touched by the divine that the Lord himself would walk there in the cool of the day, how could sin enter? Whence cometh the Fall?

Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the early Church Fathers:

Therefore, having made the man lord of the earth and of everything that is in it, [God] secretly appointed him as lord over those [angels] who were servants in it. They, however, were in their full development, while the lord, that is, the man, was very little, for he was an infant…..

While later tradition tended to depict Adam and Eve as created in their full maturity, Irenaeus thinks of them as emotionally and spiritually childlike at the time of the Fall, not yet grown into the fullness of the destiny intended for them. Perhaps he even thinks of them as children in both body and mind, unaware of and unready for sexuality and reproduction, as the literal sense of his Greek in other passages would seem to imply.

In answer to the logical next question - could not God have created them in the fullness of their wisdom, thus avoiding the Fall, Irenaeus gives a lengthy answer:

If, then, anyone say, “What then? Was not God able to have made man perfect from the beginning?” let him know that, as far as God is concerned, inasmuch as He is always the same and ingenerate, all things are possible to Him. But those things made by Him, because they have a later beginning of creation, must for this reason be inferior to Him who created them. For it was not possible for things recently created to be uncreated; and since they are not uncreated, on this account do they fall short of the perfect. And since these things are of a more recent origin, so are they infantile; and since they are infantile, so are they unaccustomed to and unexercised in perfect discipline. For certainly it is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, yet [she does not do so, since] the child is not yet able to receive stronger nourishment. So too, it was in the power of God Himself to grant perfection to man from the beginning; but the man, on the contrary, was unable to receive it, since he was still an infant.

Irenaeus, it seems, thinks that the architecture of Creation itself puts necessary, logical constraints on even the creative power of God. Just as God cannot create a rock so heavy He cannot lift it, so likewise Irenaeus seems to be arguing that the union of man with the divine cannot be created ex nihilo: it can only be achieved after a period of growth and maturation. Education is a prerequisite for perfection, not a consequence of the Fall, and even for Adam, set in Eden and intimate with God, there remained room for error.

A modern-day guileless heroine, compelled by fate to leave her Eden and acquire knowledge of good and evil.

The childlike nature of Adam may be contrasted against the maturity of Christ. Almost alone amongst the Fathers, Irenaeus interprets John 8:57 as indicating that Jesus was well into his forties, or perhaps even older, at the time of the Passion, and so had passed through all the ages of man. His evidence is not just exegesis, but also personal testimony: in his youth Irenaeus had been a student of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, himself a pupil of the shadowy figure of “John the Elder”, a disciple of the Lord. The childhood cut short in Adam is lived out to its fullness in the Last Adam, the child’s guileless blunder into sin and death redeemed by the self-conscious self-offering of the aged God-man.

That was the Fall was ultimately beneficial to Man, a felix culpa, is an ancient enough theological motif, expressed in various forms in Ambrose, Augustine, and the great Exsultet hymn, sung at the beginning of the Easter Vigil. The notion that the Fall was in some way inevitable or necessary is less common, but would perhaps have been quite comprehensible to the pagan philosophers of antiquity who viewed the cosmos as a great procession from (exitus) and return (reditus) to the One. While the Neoplatonic exitus-reditus frameworkwas often creatively reused by Christian theologians to form a sacramental cosmology (as by Aquinas), it can also surely be applied to the expulsion from Eden. The agony of the departure from the Garden, into a world increasingly corrupted, surely has resonances with the Plotinian view of the soul, falling from the heavenly realm into the treacherous body.

Eden, then, contained the seeds of its own destruction: not the apple and the serpent, but the original act of Creation itself.