To the history of the first people

The original state of man and his fall Contents Chapter I. The original state of man Chapter II. The Fall of the First People Christianity is the teaching of the salvation of the human race from sin and its disastrous consequences through the atoning death of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever, following fashionable historical theories of an anti-religious trend, rejects the fact of the Fall in the human race, who in the primitive life of people sees not the holy blissful state of our first parents, adorned with the image and likeness of God, endowed with the high advantages of the spirit - reason and freedom, appointed kings on earth, but a state of religious and moral savagery, infantile ignorant barbarism, he does not see the need to save the human race from sin and promptings on the part of God to prepare him for the adoption of Christianity, through which he not only returns to primitive holiness, but is also elevated to the highest degree of perfection in the future afterlife. Therefore, to recall the facts of the primitive state of innocence and then the fall of the first people, and to consider the main objections of unbelief against them, will, it seems, not be superfluous in view of the currently spreading spirit of doubt and denial in matters of faith and morality. Chapter I. The Initial State of Man From the first book of the Bible we learn that God created man in his own image and likeness: “And God created man, in the image of God created him: husband and wife created he them. And God bless them, saying: Grow and multiply, and fill the earth, and rule over it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the wild beasts, and the birds of the air, and all the livestock, and all the earth, and every creeping thing that moves on the earth. And God said: “Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing herb that yields seed, which is on the top of the earth, and every tree that has fruit in it, the seed of the seed, it will be food for you” (Gen. 1:27-29). The creation of man in the image and likeness of God and the preservation of this image and likeness in all their purity is the most important advantage of created man and the highest feature in his primitive existence. All his other advantages compared to other creatures and all the high gifts with which he is showered by his Creator are the consequences of the reflection in man of the image and likeness of God. So, if we take the advantage of the first-created man, by virtue of which he was made the master of the whole earth, then from everyday life we ​​learn that man’s dominion over visible creation is a consequence of the reflection in man of the image of God, who is the King and Lord not only of visible nature, but also of the entire universe, the visible and invisible world. Already on the basis of the fact that the story about making man master of the earth follows directly after the biblical story about the creation of man in the image and likeness of God, we can look at the first as a consequence of the second; and we are finally convinced of this from the writings of the fathers and teachers of the Church, who understood this biblical legend in exactly this way and not otherwise. So our famous interpreter of Holy Scripture, the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret, in agreement with the understanding of St. Chrysostom and Blessed Theodoret, speaks about this feature of the image of God in man as follows: “God is the Lord of everything: and man is made the ruler of the visible world. Man is adorned with the image of God so that visible creatures are created for him, and he for God: for nothing can be so kind to the Supreme Being as the image of His highest perfection; and there can be no greater power to possess creatures than the image of the Creator” 1 . Let us take such high advantages of man over all other creatures of the earth as the spirituality of his soul, its immortality, free will, as the ability to spontaneously determine oneself for good or evil, his heart, the source of holy love and pure pleasures, its rationality, the high gift of speech and other high aspects of his spiritual nature - and we will immediately notice that they are nothing more than a weak reflection of the most perfect properties of the Supreme Being. Thus, the spirituality of the human soul, created in the image of God, reflects the spirituality of the purest Spirit, God; her immortality is the eternity of God; freedom of human will - endless freedom and independence of the most perfect Being; the human heart, as an organ of feeling, is the boundless love of God; the limited mind of man serves as a reflection of the most perfect mind of God; finally, the gift of speech, with the help of which a person expresses his thoughts, points to the Hypostatic Word in His relation to God the Father. “The Son is called the Word because He is related to the Father as the word is to the mind; not only by dispassionate birth, but also by union with the Father, and because He reveals Him,” teaches St. Gregory the Theologian. Let us, further, pay attention to the blissful paradise state of the first people before their fall, alien to any illness and death, to their innocence and holiness, to their perfection, and we will inevitably come to the conclusion that all this is a consequence of the image and likeness of God, in which they were created. Since God is the source of all bliss and is in Himself an all-blessed and all-satisfied Being, then the spiritual-physical being of man, created in the image of God, was destined for the possible bliss for him, which, like the bliss of God, should be, according to creative thought, uninterrupted and not disturbed by anything - illnesses, deprivations, sorrows and death - and should, according to the same creative plan, go on forever. And so, after the creation of man, God introduced him into a beautiful garden called paradise, where everything necessary for human life and bliss was in abundance; In order for the human body, created from earth and in itself capable of destruction, not to experience disease and death, the all-wise and all-good God plants a special tree under the name of the tree of life, the fruits of which impart miraculous power - to protect the human body from disease and death, to maintain and revive in it constant youth and freshness of organic forces. Being Himself holy and the author of all holiness, the Lord created man as a saint. He was created upright (Eccl.7:29), in righteousness and perfection of truth (Eph.4:24). The innocent soul of the first people did not know what sin was and did not experience painful states of conscience and division in the soul; their whole being was directed towards God and in Him alone they saw their bliss. But the holiness of the first people was not unconditional, like the holiness of the God who created them. They received this gift of holiness from God, and did not achieve it through their own efforts; therefore they could not value him properly; they needed to earn this high gift in order to achieve a state in which it would become impossible for them to change holiness and truth, both as a result of the consciousness of their great significance for them, and as a result of a moral habit that would finally strengthen them in goodness. Being the most perfect being, the Lord God created man perfect in his kind and rank, as a being placed by Him on the border of the spiritual and sensory world. This perfection of the nature of primitive man consisted in the purity and freshness of his powers, in the harmonious relationship between his physical and spiritual nature, in the constant turning to God as his beginning, in an easy, quick and error-free way of acquiring knowledge, excluding the difficult, slow and error-prone path of knowledge that fell to man after his fall with his spiritual forces frustrated and weakened by sin. But the biblical view of the perfection of primitive man is by no means of such a kind that it considers this perfection an ideal beyond which one cannot go. Such a view would contradict the concept of the historical development of rational human moral life. And in the Bible one can find clear evidence that created man, with all the perfection of his primitive innocent state, is not considered to have achieved such perfection that would exclude further development and improvement of his being. Thus, having introduced created man into paradise, the Lord gives him the commandment to cultivate and maintain paradise, through which, without a doubt, he would develop his spiritual and physical strength; further, he gives him a commandment about not eating the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for the development of his moral powers, his free will, which, through exercise in fulfilling the commandments of God, could gradually achieve such a degree of perfection at which it would become impossible for it to evade God; Further, the very fact that man was created in the image and likeness of God shows that he can both liken the high gifts that he received in the image of God to God, constantly turning them to him, as to his Prototype, and, with his freedom, he can direct them in the opposite direction to himself and to the world and lose this likeness of God; finally, in the New Testament, our Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles taught about the need for a Christian, this man recreated and brought to the state of innocence of the first people, to achieve holiness and perfection, similar to the holiness and perfection of the Heavenly Father. “You will be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). “By the Saint who called you,” writes St. Peter, be holy in all your lives" (1 Pet. 1:15). Revealing the mystery of the salvation of the human race through Jesus Christ, St. Paul says: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love” (Eph. 1:4). This was the state of our first parents before their fall, through which the image of God was distorted and darkened in them. Amazed by the wondrous structure of human nature, the king and prophet David exclaims: “I praise You because I am wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14). For what purpose was man created, so richly showered with the gifts of the all-wise and all-good God? What is its purpose? According to the teaching of Holy Scripture, the fathers and teachers of the Church, the ultimate goal of the creation of man is the glory of God, so that he reflects the glory of his Creator. “The Lord did everything for his own sake” (Prov. 16:4). “The kings of the zemstia and all the people, the princes and all the judges of the zemstia; young men and virgins, old men with young men, let them praise the name of the Lord: for the name of him alone is exalted: his confession is on earth and in heaven” (Ps. 149:11-13). “To set His eye on their (people’s) hearts, showing them the majesty of His deeds: let them praise the name of His Holiness, and let them tell the majesty of His deeds” (Sir.17:7-8). And in the New Testament the Savior and the apostles reveal this truth. Thus, in the Lord’s Prayer, which is the model of all prayer for all times and peoples, Jesus Christ teaches us to pray to the Heavenly Father that His name may be sanctified throughout the world, so that His kingdom, the kingdom of grace and glory, may come sooner. Teaching people through the apostles to make the glory of God the main goal of all deeds, the Lord Jesus Christ says: “So let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The greatest providential act of God, which had the goal of restoring and saving fallen man, was performed by the Son of God for the glory of God the Father. Just before the onset of his redemptive sufferings for the human race, contemplating them as if already accomplished, Jesus Christ says: “Father, the hour has come: glorify Your Son, that Your Son also will glorify You. I will glorify You on earth, to complete the work that you have given Me, that I may do it” (John 17:1,4). Among the Church Fathers, the idea of ​​the creation of man for the glory of God is perfectly explained by St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Chrysostom. The first says: “It was necessary that the worship of God should not be limited to those on high, but there should also be some worshipers below, and everything would be filled with the glory of God: for this purpose man is created, honored by the handiwork and image of God” 2. St. Chrysostom expresses the same thought even more clearly: “God gave us sight, lips and hearing so that all our members would serve Him, so that we would say and do what was pleasing to Him, sing unceasing songs to Him, and send thanks to Him.” 3 So, there is no doubt that man was created to glorify his Creator. And a person will only realize the purpose of his existence when he glorifies the God who created him. But when will he glorify Him? Firstly, when he strives for his Creator and Prototype with all the powers of his nature, that is, to cognize Him with his mind, to bring Him praise and thanks in words, to love Him with his heart, and with his will to carry out those deeds that serve to glorify Him. (Sir.27:6–10; Lev.11:44, 19:2, 20:7; Matt.5:16; 1 Cor.6:20, 10:30). Knowing God with the mind, a person would be amazed at the manifestation of His wisdom and omnipotence and through this would be led to the desire to glorify Him; loving Him with his heart for the wonderful gifts with which he was showered, he would learn to thank Him; fulfilling the holy will of the Creator, a person would glorify, love and thank Him not only with words and heart, but with his whole life. Secondly, when he develops all the powers of his being to the level of perfection and God-likeness possible for them (Matthew 5:48). In the nature of man, his Creator contains such a wealth of spiritual and physical forces, with the help of which an immense field of development and improvement is made possible for him. What enormous difference exists between the humanity of the present 19th century and that which existed in the first millennia from the creation of the world? How many periods of development between generations of the human race have modern science discovered? And does anyone have the right to predict and accurately determine the limit beyond which the development of mankind should not go? If this limit is difficult, or, better said, impossible, to assign to a sinful person whose spiritual faculties have been greatly damaged by sin, then what can we say about the primitive state of a holy, innocent person with a wealth of holy and pure powers, not weakened or delayed by sin? What brilliant future would lie ahead of him on this path of limitless improvement of human nature, on this constant holy striving for his Prototype? Thirdly, man created by God, fulfilling his purpose - to glorify God, would at the same time achieve the highest bliss (Matt. 5:16; 1 Tim. 4:8; Eph. 2:10). The spiritual-physical being of man, receiving life and bliss from God, is happier the closer he is to God, the Source of his life, the more blessed he is, the more he strives for God, the Source of all bliss and joy. “The good God did not create us to punish us, but so that we might be partakers of His goodness,” says John of Damascus 4 . Can the all-good God, who is the most perfect love, be the culprit of illness and death, as physical evil, which not only reduces human bliss, but also makes it ultimately impossible, ending human life itself? If a person had not sinned, then he would not have known not only death, but also no disorder in his health, no infirmities and diseases. And indeed, illness and death were not intended by the Creator for primitive people and through them for the entire human race. We have already said that in order to eliminate them, the Lord gave our first parents the fruits of the tree of life, the eating of which made them painless and immortal in body (Gen. 2:17). Painful disorders in the body and death itself are presented in the word of God as a direct consequence of sin, as a violation of the commandment of God: death will immediately follow the violation of the commandment: “If you take away one day from it, you will die by death” (Gen. 2:27 fn. Rom. 5). But at the same time, the direct meaning of God’s commandment gives every right to conclude that if there had not been a violation of it on the part of our ancestors, there would, without a doubt, have been the punishment prescribed for its crime. And since, further, a person had the opportunity not to sin, then, consequently, he had the opportunity at the same time not to die, remaining immortal in body. And for the natural, unprejudiced mind there is no difficulty in recognizing a person as immortal in body, if we assume the sinless development of his spiritual-physical being. What is the body in relation to the spirit? An obedient instrument of its manifestation in the external world, that organ subordinate to the human spirit through which it enters into direct relationship with the material world. Is it now possible to assume that God, having created man as a mediator between spirit and matter, and having assigned man a body to perform this mediation, subsequently deprived him, without his fault, of an organ so necessary for him, or more precisely, would have broken through death the close union between soul and body, a union established by Himself at the beginning? If such a break occurred, then it occurred, of course, not by the will of the all-good and unchangeable God in his determinations, but through the fault of man, who, by abusing his freedom, thereby violated his normal relationship with his Creator and through this lost the power that made his normal existence possible. Just as a plant, deprived of life-giving sunlight, dies precisely because the living and close connection between it and the sun is interrupted, so man, having interrupted his union with God, the Source of all his spiritual and physical life, had to perish, i.e. first destroy the harmony of spiritual-physical nature in himself, experience physical death, and then die a spiritual death, which would have happened if the merciful God had not wanted to save him by returning him again to Himself, into the kingdom of His divine light and eternal life. This is one side of the matter: that is, we must therefore already admit the possibility of human immortality in the body, because the body for a person is not something superfluous, transitory, but a permanent and necessary property of his human nature, created according to the creative plan from two natures - lifeless matter and the soul that animates it, the direct breath of God. But peering deeper into the nature of spirit and body and noticing the mutual relations between them, we find another basis, indicated and accepted by sound reason, the basis of the immortality of man not only in spirit, but also in body, arising from the influence of the spirit on the body. The human soul, as created by the direct breath of God and, moreover, in the image and likeness of God, is immortal, just as God is not only immortal, but also eternal; the human body, created from earthen dust, is material and lifeless. What brought this material and lifeless body into existence? The inhalation by God into the inside of the body of a life-giving soul, which in an internal and essential way penetrates and enlivens the whole body, and now, as soon as God has established this close union between body and spirit, a living spiritual-physical person appears. Now let's look further. Let us assume that a person would never sin. What relationship would his spirit have to his body? Receiving the help of Divine grace, constantly walking in its activities along the right path - towards God, the Source of all spiritual life, the human spirit would gradually develop and improve and, finally, would reach that degree of perfection that is designated as the extreme limit for it, as a spiritual-physical being of a certain rank among other creatures of the world. Having reached this highest point of his development, he would have acquired qualities that he did not have at his creation. His vision would be immeasurably broader and more complete now than before, his will would be capable of such desires and actions that a person did not even think about at an early age; his heart would burn with such a fiery love for his Creator that it was likened to the love of cherubim and seraphim; his body would be an obedient instrument of the spirit. Would the bodily shell in which he recognized himself as a human being in the first minutes of his creation be sufficient for such a development of the spirit? Without a doubt, no. The tool must be fully consistent with the purpose for which it was created; the human body must fully meet the strengths and needs of the spirit; Therefore, it should be assumed that along with the improvement of the spirit, the body would also develop and would be a completely suitable instrument for expressing the needs of the spirit, if sin had not interrupted the normal development of human nature. Therefore, the teaching of the Christian religion about the glorified body, which the soul of each person will receive after the general judgment and resurrection from the dead, when the power of sin is finally destroyed, meets all the demands of the mind, which wants to see complete correspondence between spirit and body, complete adaptation of the body as a sensory organ to the spirit, which, due to the redemptive merits of the Son of God, assimilated by him (of course, if only they are assimilated by him), again reaches not only the primitive state interrupted by sin holiness, but even greater perfection. The Christian Church teaches that after the general resurrection from the dead, human bodies will receive different, more perfect properties than they had in their earthly sinful existence, that they will become glorified bodies, an example of which we can see in the glorified body of Jesus Christ after His resurrection from the dead. His glorified body needed neither food, nor drink, nor clothing; it was not limited by either space or time; it is instantly transported by the will of the spirit to the desired spaces and does not encounter material obstacles on its way; it was not material and rough, on the contrary, it was light, spiritual, invisible, although again, at the desire of the spirit, it could take on a form in which it was visible and accessible to touch. And such a perfect body, according to the teachings of the Christian religion and philosophy, goes to a person after his death, or more precisely, after the general judgment and resurrection from the dead, and, moreover, not the same for everyone, but different in perfection, depending on the degree of holiness of souls (see 1 Cor. 15). But even in this life, the Lord sometimes shows in one or another holy people examples of how our earthly body can change and improve in accordance with the height of the holiness of one or another saint of God. It is enough to recall here the life of St. Mary of Egypt, who, from a great sinner, with the help of God, achieved the highest degree of holiness and at the same time the amazing perfection of her spiritual and physical nature. Thus, she could predict the future and call by name the person she met for the first time; could remain without food for a long time; Having made the sign of the cross, she could walk on the waters of the Jordan, cross in a few hours the space that the Venerable Elder Zosima used for up to 20 days, and even during prayer, as a state during which the human soul enters into closest communication with God - renounce the earth and stay in the air. It is not in vain that our St. The Church, as a wise educator of Christians, remembers in the 5th week of Lent the life of St. Mary of Egypt and solemnly offers the most important events from it to the religious consciousness of Christians in order to remind them to what holiness and perfection a person can achieve through repentance, prayer, constant deeds of Christian life and the help of God. If Adam had not sinned, if his spirit, through constant fidelity to God and continuous development, had reached the highest degree of perfection, then at the same time his body, as the material shell of his spirit, would have developed and improved until it reached the limit of perfection set for it by the Creator. And this perfection of the body would occur under the direct influence of the spirit on it, which, as a result of the forces imparted to it during its creation, would gradually transform its body in accordance with its new needs and aspirations and little by little would create for itself a higher bodily organization - a spiritual body. His spirit itself would not only be a living soul, but would become a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:44–46), which degree of perfection it reached in the second Adam, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:45–47). And if such a sad event as the Fall had not occurred in the lives of the first people, they would not have known what death meant, and would have passed directly through earthly life to heavenly, spiritual life, where they would have achieved the highest organization of their spiritual-physical being. There, in close proximity to God, they would find such bliss, about which at present we can hardly form even an approximate concept. The greatest, undisturbed joy from closeness to God, as the Source of all life and joy, the endless development of all spiritual abilities, drawing an inexplicable source of bliss from the knowledge of the Divine, which we will then contemplate not as if through a dark glass, as now, but directly, face to face, living communication with all the holy angels and souls of righteous people, eternal blissful life in paradise, uninterrupted and undisturbed, where God has prepared for those who love Him what the ear has not heard, and the eye has not seen, and what has not entered the heart of man (1 Cor. 2:9), and which even in the poor tongue of man cannot be retold (2 Cor. 12:4), - these are the most general features with which the future bliss of the righteous is described in the word of God. Now we achieve this bliss through the assimilation of the redemptive merits of the Son of God, through earthly life, strewn with illnesses, suffering, sorrows, all kinds of misfortunes, all kinds of losses and deprivations and, finally, death, in which a violent separation of soul and body occurs, which a rare Christian is able not to fear, despite the fact that he has every reason to boldly face death, all the remedies against the fear of death. For the first people, if they had not sinned, and for the entire human race, if it had sinless ancestors, this difficult and painful path, ending in death, could not have existed. They would move directly from earthly life to heavenly life, as the highest form of existence. So, the primitive state of man was the happiest. He was adorned with great perfections, of which his creation in the image and likeness of God was the greatest perfection of his nature. His purpose also fully corresponded to the structure of his spiritual-physical organization; he was created for the glory of God, and, serving on earth as an exponent of the glory of God, he himself took part in its light and bliss; constantly striving for his prototype, man would thereby achieve his highest bliss and at the same time fulfill his destiny - to be an expression of the glory of God on the border of the spiritual and sensory world, the earthly and heavenly world. Here we allow ourselves to quote Professor Rozhdestvensky’s wonderful words about the primitive state of man. The biblical teaching about the state of the first people “bears the imprint of noble simplicity, alien to fantastic exaggerations and excessive idealization in the depiction of the primitive state. According to the book of Genesis, the first people before the Fall were in a very favorable position - physically, mentally, and especially in religious and moral relations. Physically, they were free from sorrows, illnesses and death, which they were only later subjected to as punishment for sin (Gen. 3:16-17). They were to cultivate the Garden of Eden in which they were inhabited (Gen. 2:15); but this did not require hard, exhausting labor from them, given the natural abundance of fruits with which the earth was distinguished in the beginning (Gen. 2:9). Mentally, they had excellent abilities, since they were created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26); The high mental insight of the first man was expressed in his naming of names for all animals (Gen. 2:19–20). But the Bible gives no basis for the assumption that the first people were at a high level of so-called cultural development. Although they possessed excellent spiritual abilities, they had to develop these abilities in themselves in order to use them to achieve the purpose indicated to them by the Creator - to rule over the whole earth (Gen. 1:28). The Bible says nothing about any works of art or inventions of the first people. Their dwelling was open nature - a garden (Gen. 2:8); at first they did not wear any clothing (Gen. 2:25); subsequently, broad fig leaves were their first necessary covering, which was later replaced by skins (Gen. 3:7–21). Neither they nor the generations closest to them apparently used metal processing. Only in the seventh generation from Adam is Tobel, who is called in the Bible an ark of tools made of copper and iron (Gen. 4:22)... As for the religious and moral state of the first people, according to the Bible, before the fall it was a highly blessed state.... Their worship had the character of childish devotion to God; their virtue initially consisted in faithfully keeping the commandments of God (Gen. 2:16–17); in relation to each other they lived in the most sincere communication of mutual love, as one flesh (Gen. 2:23–24). The initial moral state of man is called the “state of innocence,” the characteristic feature of which is that it reflected more the objective than the amateurish personal moral perfection of the first people, more the perfection of God’s pure creation than the perfection developed by the first people’s own experience of the moral life” 5 . The biblical teaching we have set forth about the state of the first people is opposed by unbelief in the form of pantheists and materialists. Both of them agree in general terms in their views on the primitive state of the human race and the purpose of its life, which is why we will not present separately pantheistic and materialistic views. They, in the person of Hume, an English thinker of the end of the 18th century, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, German philosophers, the positivist Comte, the materialist Feuerbach and others - claim, each with a slight difference, in accordance with their philosophical system, that the original state of man was wild, crude, and, so to speak, semi-animal - that man initially stood at the lowest degree of mental, moral and religious development, that the original religion was the grossest idolatry and polytheism, that only through the slow development of the absolute idea, which, according to pantheists, gradually passing through the inorganic, organic and animal world in human consciousness reaches its highest development, or that man came to the highest modern state, according to the hypothesis of materialists, through slow development and struggle with the surrounding historical circumstances. Is it possible to agree with this anti-biblical and anti-Christian view of the original destiny of man? No way. The stated opinion is based on the denial of faith in God and miracles, on the unwillingness to admit a supernatural element in the nature and history of the human race. If the inconsistency of pantheistic and materialistic views on God is proven in general, then at the same time the inconsistency of their views on the primitive state of man will be shown and proven in particular. Without taking upon ourselves this task, which has already been solved in many special works, especially since it does not strictly relate to the main subject of our research, we will point out only the most important facts, which, proving the truth of the biblical story about the primitive state of man, thereby refute pantheistic and materialistic views on the same subject. Firstly. The testimony of the Bible, as the true word of God, as the oldest and most reliable written document, about the blissful state of the first people before their fall and about their high purpose is the first and strongest proof of the truth of the biblical story about the first period in the life of people that we have set forth. Despite all the attacks of unbelief on the Bible, none of its opponents has been able to prove that it is a simple product of the human mind, or that the events it tells did not happen. Philosophy, natural science, history, archeology, especially since the famous excavations in Assyria, all truly scientific research only confirms biblical legends. Until the truth of the Bible, as the revealed word of God to people, is refuted - and this will never happen - until then, all the legends contained in it, including the legend about the primitive state of people, will stand above all doubts. Secondly. The traditions of most peoples know nothing about such an infant period in the life of people, when they were in a wild, semi-animal state, from which they only little by little developed to the state of true humanity. They always imagine the first period of human life as mature and happy, they see in it the closest communication of the Divine with man and even call it the golden age. In the legends of peoples, the first person appears without parents, he descends to earth in all perfection, like the son of God, or appears in all armor, like Minerva, who emerged from the head of Jupiter in full armor. So in the ancient tales of Persian mythology, before it acquired a dualistic character, it is said that physical evil never existed on earth and people were blissful. But when people began to suffer from cold, winter cold and crop failure, then a certain Ima, by the will of Ormuzd, built a paradise, where he transplanted the seeds of all plants and resettled the most chosen of people; there was neither cold nor hot wind in it, there was neither death nor decay; Eternal light shone there, and people lived a blissful life 6 . Hindu legends mention the heavenly Mount Meru, on which beautiful trees grow, bright streams flow, and where birds fill the air with beautiful songs. At the top of the mountain, near the home of Shiva and Indra, saints live and the tree of immortality grows. Nothing harmed people; they were innocent and enjoying bliss 7 . In the recently published book, a major work on Christian apologetics, by Professor Rozhdestvensky of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, which we have already quoted, folk legends about the primitive state of man are collected with special care. Thus, the legends about the so-called “golden age” among the Egyptians, Chinese and Greeks were as follows: “According to one ancient Egyptian saga, paradise or the golden age lasted on earth until Osiris and Isis reigned over a beautiful country in Arabia, surrounded by the Triton tributary, dotted with flowers and ever-greening trees, sending refreshing streams of water to all 4 countries of the world. But the evil demon Set-Typhon, through the killing of Osiris, put an end to this golden age (Diodorus. Sic. 1:15; 3:68; "Book of the Dead" 1:18. See Lykken Traditionen .. S. 115-158 and Fischer Heidenthum, S. 323 et al.) The Chinese traditions regarding the original state of man are not without significant agreement with the Bible. And according to these legends, the initial state of the world and man was a state of “great harmony.” Heaven, earth and man, the three main creatures of the world, were in complete harmony; man's sin disrupted this harmony. At first man lived among animals as their king and master; on earth all the birds grew by themselves; virtue flourished without the help of science, lived in innocence, not knowing carnal desires. Only an immoderate thirst for knowledge plunged man into the abyss of fall. After man fell, all animals became alien to him; wild animals, birds, insects, snakes began to wage war against him; in a little less than three or five hours the sky changed and the man was no longer the same as he was. The Chinese also have preserved legends about the first man Fo-gi, about paradise in the east, about a dragon who crawled out of the abyss and initiated the first man into the secret of knowledge of the male and female sex, about a wife as the first culprit of the Fall, etc. (Lücken, Traditionen... 2 Aufl. 1869 S. 96 et al. Cf. Delitsch, Apologetik, 1869, S. 151) 8. The legends of the Greeks about the innocent state of the first people are set out quite clearly in Hesiod 9 and Plato 10. The first spans several centuries in the life of mankind: the first century, when people lived like gods and knew neither care, nor need, nor illness, nor death, is called golden; the second - silver is characterized by the fact that people at that time showed disobedience to the immortal gods and for this they were subjected to various disasters and began to experience death in the underworld, where Zeus in his anger began to bring down godless people; the Silver Age was followed by the Copper Age, etc., where in each the ancient service to the gods fell more and more and brought upon people greater and greater disasters, which finally concluded, according to mythical legends, with a worldwide flood, from which only two pious people were saved: Deucalion and Pyrrha. According to the legend conveyed by Plato, the first people knew neither care, nor exhausting labor, nor need, because luxurious and rich nature itself supplied them with everything they needed in abundance; neither savagery nor devouring each other in the animal kingdom was previously unknown on earth, there was neither discord nor war between people; God was their guardian and protector. These examples of folk tradition about the primitive state of the human race, a tradition that is repeated with various variations in the religious legends of almost all peoples, are enough to see in them a decisive confirmation of the truth of the biblical narrative about the innocent state of our first parents and their blissful life in paradise. The assumption that this is simple self-delusion or a poetic personification of a person’s subjective desires does not stand up to the slightest criticism. How can we explain that the ideas about the Golden Age among all peoples, despite the different options, are in general terms the same? Is it possible that people so stubbornly believe in the creation of their imagination? The matter is explained simply: once upon a time the human race constituted one family and subsequently one people, in which the traditions of its patriarchs were alive, many of whom could hear directly from the first people about what their original history was, how close God was to them and what happiness they enjoyed until they sinned. After the great event of confusion of languages ​​and their scattering across the face of the earth, which was part of the wise plans of Divine Providence, people, having lost various details over time, retained the main features from the tradition of the patriarchs and preserved them in their mythological systems, religious hymns and inscriptions. “Clay tablets, inscriptions and bricks of Assyria and Babylonia have already proven that the most important biblical tales were preserved in the memories of peoples in the form of epics and religious inscriptions in the Kufi and Semitic kingdoms of Mesopotamia, just as they were preserved in the hymns of the Aryans, in the Vedas, in the Zoroaster teachings” 11. Here we take the opportunity to present a very apt and thorough judgment by Professor Rozhdestvensky about the inconsistency of the materialistic explanation of the remarkable agreement that exists in the religious traditions of different peoples about the original state and the fall of the first people. Having said that for a materialistic explanation of the legends about paradise and the golden age found in the most ancient monuments of peoples, the pessimistic motive, as a product of the sad mood of the spirit in view of the reality that dissatisfied it, is not entirely suitable, he further develops this idea as follows. “In the period of youth of peoples, which is distinguished more by a bright view of the present and trust in the future than by a pessimistic mood in relation to the present and passion for hoary antiquity, pessimism could not play too big a role in the spiritual structure of peoples. If we admit that all the ancient legends about primitive times are nothing more than the product of the imagination of different peoples about better past times, then this explanation does not explain anything to us regarding where the remarkable agreement of these legends with each other came from, which is expressed not only in general terms, but also in many particulars (as for example, in the legends of different peoples about the tree of life, about the tempting serpent, about the wife as the first culprit sin, etc.). It cannot be allowed that, under the influence of only one common motive - dissatisfaction with the present - the imagination of different peoples everywhere created the same images, the same, sometimes strikingly similar, pictures of primitive times. Although fantasy is undoubtedly a universal human ability, it is not without justice that every person, and also every nation, has its own fantasy... In order to explain their mutual agreement, which despite all the differences still remains striking, it is necessary to assume that they all have an objective primary source for themselves, that they reproduce, although not in all details, equally accurately, the original true tradition of the primitive state, which in its pure form is preserved in the Bible 12. We now proceed to consider further data in favor of the idea that the original state of people was innocent, blissful and perfect in mental, moral and religious respects. Thirdly. The history of the religions of the human race presents facts that also decisively confirm the biblical truth about the innocent and blessed state of the first people. Thus, it first of all shows that the myths became more complex gradually, that the ancient pagan polytheistic religion is the closer to monotheism, the older it is in origin; testifies that in all the most imperfect pagan religions one can find fragmentary traces of the true concept of God. This can be confirmed by the fact that in the most ancient religions - Indian, Persian (Zoroaster), Egyptian and later, for example, Greek, at the head of the host of gods in the first period of the formation of myths there is a single supreme deity: Parabrama in Indian, Zaruana Akkarana - limitless space in Persian, Ammun - mystery in Egyptian, Diy or Zeus - god of the sky in Greek religion. Only in the later period of the development of mythology, as man deviates from God and immerses himself in crude objective naturalism, or subjective adoration of man, do other minor deities appear, in addition to the supreme deities, either as their opponents (systems of dualism), or as executors of the will of the supreme gods, as in the Egyptian and Indian religions, or minor deities who are related to the supreme god - sons and daughters, as in Greek mythology. Further, traces of true concepts of God are found not only in the religions of ancient historical cultural peoples, but also among savage and uncivilized tribes. Thus, the black tribes of central Africa, the Hottentots, the inhabitants of the islands of the southern ocean, the Kamchadals, the Samoyeds, the wild tribes of America and other peoples at the lowest level of culture have true concepts of the one, highest God, the almighty Creator of heaven and earth, who created both gods (fetishes) and everything that exists. This fact is inexplicable if we assume that people gradually developed, both mentally and religiously. The gradual course of human development presupposes a movement from imperfect to perfect, or, applying this law to the field of religion, from crude naturalism to spiritual monotheism. Meanwhile, the history of religions shows that the older the pagan religion, the more elements of a monotheistic nature it contains, i.e. it shows the opposite phenomenon, opposite to the concept of progress. This is explained by the fact that at the beginning humanity, being in close communication with God, had a true concept of Him, which, after the fall of people, as they moved away from God, was distorted and obscured. And the more uneducated a people is, the less gifted it is with imagination and the ability for mental productivity, the more pure and inviolable it maintains the religious ideas inherited from its fathers, according to legend. Having cited a lot of facts from the history of religions to confirm the idea that monotheism was the original form of religion, which in turn presupposes the innocent and blissful state of the first people, our famous theologian, historian of religions of the ancient world, ep. Chrysanthus says: “The idea of ​​a single supreme Deity among wild and semi-wild tribes, obviously, can no longer be explained as the result of complex combinations, as an abstract philosophical unification of ideas about various gods under the form of a single supreme God - just as it was in the religious systems of educated paganism. The savage fetishist could neither reach such an abstract idea nor be convinced of the falsity of polytheism. Where does this idea of ​​​​a single God, so inconsistently mixed with the general crude religious view of the savage, come from? And what does it mean in this case that especially outstanding phenomenon that among uncivilized tribes the idea of ​​a single God is apparently more noticeable and even purer in its content than among the educated peoples of paganism, among whom it is often completely obscured by polytheism and often has a pantheistic character? And this is so.... Doesn’t all this mean that educated paganism, by further developing its religious views of a naturalistic nature, more changed the primitive tradition, which was once the common property of mankind, and that the latter was more preserved among uncivilized tribes due to their underdevelopment and lack of any mental productivity? 13. Fourthly. The opinions of Darwinists and other materialists, who, with the help of their cunningly invented hypotheses, are trying to explain the original origin of man from animals and therefore look at the primitive state of people as a state of savagery and ignorance, have long been refuted by all true scientists. In view of this, we will not touch upon this side of the issue here, but will only point out the complete inconsistency of materialists’ references to various legends they find in certain folk beliefs and superstitions, which, according to materialists, supposedly give the right to conclude about the animal savagery of the first people. Thus, scientists of this direction refer to legends about autochthons (by which are meant people who allegedly arose through spontaneous generation), about people who grew from the earth, from trees, from stones, descended from certain animals, birds, fish, etc. Refuting all such references to folk traditions made by some materialistic scientists, our famous apologist, Prof. Rozhdestvensky says the following: “a) Such myths, in comparison with the much more widespread other legends about the initial state of man, are of less than secondary importance; b) for the most part, they are discovered by Darwinists in the dark superstitions and beliefs of some savage peoples, and nothing vouches for the antiquity of their origin among these peoples; c) myths of this kind, found among the myths of some ancient peoples (such as the Persian myths about the origin of a human couple from a bisexual tree, from the seed of a bull, or the Greek myth about the origin of people from stones after Deucalion’s flood), do not mean the very original origin of man, but the later, post-flood origin. The first people in the legends of the Persians and Greeks are descended from the gods; It is known that the Athenians St. ap. Paul, in his speech delivered in the Athens Areopagus, recalled the teaching of their ancient poets about the origin of people from God: “For this is also the generation of us” (Acts 17:28). As for the later private opinions about the original state of man of some Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, mainly from the materialistic and skeptical schools - opinions more or less similar to the views of the latest Darwinists on this question; then this unanimity of people of homogeneous schools does not prove anything in favor of materialism. From time immemorial, materialism has strived to bring man closer to animals; but popular faith, based on ancient legends, and moral self-consciousness were everywhere against this wild rapprochement 14. Having then pointed to some ancient philosophers and poets (Anaximander, Empedocles, Lucretius and Virgil), who considered birds, fish, animals and even bush plants to be the ancestors of people, the apologist we mentioned continues: “But some of the pagan writers, who treated ancient legends with great respect and greater objectivity, did not approve of this arbitrary distortion of the meaning of ancient legends. Plutarch, for example, sharply ridiculed Empedocles' opinion about the origin of man from fish (Sympos. VII). If the newest materialists willingly adhere to such opinions and partly base their hypotheses about the primitive state of man on them, then this only indicates a lack of impartiality in their research. They ignore the whole mass of unanimous legends of ancient peoples about a different state of primitive humanity and dwell only on those fragmentary opinions and distorted legends about this state that they find among their like-minded people” 15. These facts and considerations are quite sufficient, in our opinion, to reveal the inconsistency of those pantheistic and materialistic views on the primitive state of the human race, according to which it is considered the lowest in terms of development. Having shown what the primitive state of the human race was and what its purpose was, we must now move on to the presentation of the fact of the fall of the first people in order to see what the fault of the first people was, what the consequences were of their fall, why the salvation of the human race was necessary and what character the preparatory actions of Divine Providence should have taken for the adoption of Christianity, through which people could again regain the bliss they had lost, not completely, partly in this temporary life upset by sin, but mainly way and completely in the future afterlife. Chapter II. The Fall of the First People To understand the importance of the crime of our ancestors, which so sadly affected all humanity descended from them, we must remember here what the commandment of God given in paradise was, and try to understand what significance its violation had. This is necessary because the importance of any crime and the resulting punishment and corrective measures is always measured by the nature and importance of the law violated. The writer of everyday life conveys this commandment this way: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying: You shall eat of every tree of the garden; But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat from it; for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:16–17). Anyone who reflects on this commandment naturally has questions: what is the purpose of this commandment? Is there a correspondence between the crime of the first commandment and the punishment? Answering the first question regarding the purpose of the commandment, we must first of all say that every manifestation of God’s will to people has, without any doubt, a wise and all-good purpose. According to the guidance of the fathers and teachers of the Church and the direction of common sense, the following purpose of this commandment can be indicated: by giving man the commandment, the Lord wanted to place the man He created in a normal relationship with Himself, his Creator. The first normal relationship of a person to God should consist in the love of the former for the Last, as the Author of his existence and bliss. Having received from God a commandment that allowed a person to eat from all the fruits of paradise, with the exception of only the fruits from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he had to, in the easiest and most visual way, come to the idea that God is the Source of his bliss, and be imbued with a feeling of gratitude towards Him and, as a natural consequence of it, love. The second correct attitude of man towards God consisted in the unconditional obedience of the first to the Last, as his Lawgiver. The first people, as we saw above, were endowed with high spiritual gifts, among which the gift of free will, as the ability for one or another activity - holy or sinful, takes first place. But this ability of self-determination, like any spiritual power, needed exercise in order to grow and strengthen. This explains the necessity of the first commandment, which provided the most appropriate material for exercise for human freedom. In it he received an object, through the handling of which, or through this or that determination of himself towards it, he exercised his precious gift of freedom. By always placing himself in the same correct relationship to the commandment, a person could little by little acquire the skills of obedience to the will of God. And this skill was supposed to serve as the basis on which it was possible to exist and continue the further development and improvement of man to the limit assigned for created rational and moral beings. Only then could man, under the guidance of the Divine Being, develop and strive for his prototype, if he had learned to obey the will of God, to unconditionally follow all the dictates of the Divine mind, even if they exceeded his limited mind. The third normal relationship of man to God, which the commandment established between them, required recognition on the part of man of his limitations and dependence on God as his Creator and Master. All external nature was subordinate to man; he was appointed king of the earth by God; his will found no obstacles in anything; its creator and Lord was a spiritual, invisible Being, who only at times condescended to appear to man in one or another visible form. With such a royal attitude towards human nature, was there not a danger for him to develop the greatest spiritual vice - pride, to indulge in selfishness and reach the point of denying his creator and falling into self-delusion - a danger that undoubtedly exists in the spiritual world, which once destroyed a bright angel, adorned with high spiritual gifts, who fell away from God through pride and became the devil? Only one commandment, which demanded from a person unconditional obedience to God, under the terrible threat of turning into insignificance - death, could reject this danger and keep a person within the proper boundaries and correct relationship with God. Let us now proceed to consider the second question we raised about the correspondence between the violation of a commandment and the punishment for it. We have already seen that by fulfilling the first commandment, a person thereby showed that he loves God, is obedient to His holy will, is always ready to follow Divine guidance, is aware of his dependence on God and recognizes Him as the author of his existence and bliss. And vice versa, violation of the commandment given to the first people in paradise would prove that they love themselves, and not God, are obedient to their selfish will, and not God’s, consider themselves, and not God, the center of their life and bliss, in a word, consider themselves independent and equal to God. Thus, the force of the crime of the first people, if they violated the first commandment, would be that through eating from the forbidden tree, with which the will of God was directly connected, they would fall away from God, doubting His omnipotence and goodness, and would place themselves instead of God as the center of life. Therefore, the punishment prescribed by God for a possible violation of the commandment is fully consistent with this latter. “God threatens man with death not as revenge, but as a natural consequence of crime and falling away. The life and light of man were in God (John 1:4), deviation from the will of God was alienation from the life of God. (Eph.4:18): What remained for man but death?” 16 Of course, if after the fall of man there followed repentance and turning to God, then the Lord, in His goodness, would either forgive the person without punishment, or after one or another punishment, which would be indicated by His wisdom, would again return the sinner to Himself. But since man did not repent of his sin, as happened, since he even stubbornly refused to return to the Source of life after God disposed him to repentance, what else should have been the consequence of Adam’s sin, if not death, which in turn is the inevitable consequence of his removal from the Source of life? This was the first commandment given by God to our first parents. In both attitudes towards her there was for them the possibility of sin. But the very fact of the Fall is far from being explained by the existence of the positive commandment of paradise: it only gives one possibility of a fall, but it is still far from possibility to reality. What inclined the will of the first people, innocent and holy, to violate such an easy and natural commandment of God? Holy Scripture points to the devil as the tempter of the first people. He begins with the fact that with his demonically cunning question, did God truly say: do not eat the fruit of any tree in the garden? (Genesis 3:1) It instills in Eve’s soul a sinful doubt about whether, for some reason, her husband had distorted the meaning of God’s commandment. The devil chose a moment when Eve (as one might guess based on her answer: “and do not touch them” (Gen. 3:3), in which the displeasure arising in the depths of her heart at the prohibition clearly comes out) began to be burdened by the difficulty of the commandment. Sinful doubt about the will of God, since it was allowed by the free will of man, developed in him to such an extent that only the fear of great punishment could keep him from breaking the commandment. This shows the great power of sin and its rapid growth in a person’s soul, as soon as he allowed it to come to him. The devil notices this dangerous state of the soul of our ancestor and uses it with success when, with his daring lie: “no, you will not die” (Gen. 3:4), he takes away the last support of a doubting soul - the fear of punishment. After these words, a strong struggle undoubtedly began in Eve’s soul, the sad outcome of which could now hardly be avoided. But in order to finally ensure success for himself and persuade Eve to commit a crime, the devil begins to slander God, who, as if out of envy of people, forbade them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so as not to make them partakers of his Being and not to impart to them the highest divine knowledge - to know good and evil. (Gen. 3:5) Thus the mind of Eve, to whom the devil promised an immeasurable horizon of knowledge good and evil, was shaken about the validity of the commandment; her will, which was promised complete impunity, was weakened, and her heart, to which the devil promised a God-like future: “you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5), was poisoned by distrust of God. Thus, all spiritual abilities were weakened and undermined by the demonic cunning of Satan. One more step, and the fatal step will be taken. The seed of sin, which originated in the spiritual sphere of the human being, very soon grew and reached the other sensory side of the human makeup - the flesh: the forbidden fruit seemed good for food and pleasing to the eye. When in this lower region there was indignation and rebellion against the moral law given in the commandment, a great sad event occurred that had such disastrous universal significance; Eve sinned; she tasted the forbidden fruit and offered to do the same to her husband, who, encouraged by the example of his wife and her apparent impunity, agreed to this insane proposal. (Gen. 3:6) The first people fell from the height of holiness at which they were; have lost the bliss that they had hitherto enjoyed; broke the close union in which they had previously been with God. Let us now see how great the fall of our ancestors was. Holy Scripture already sees the triple lust in Eve’s sinful desire to taste the forbidden fruit and calls it the root of all lawlessness. (1 John 2:16). It seemed to the wife that this tree was good for food - this expressed her carnal lust, abuse of the sensual side of nature. Many vices are rooted in this desire to please the flesh - immoderation in food and drink, that is, gluttony, drunkenness, then fornication, adultery, etc. vices and abominations before God, about which the apostle. Paul does not even advise speaking. The tree seemed pleasant to the eyes - this expressed the lust of the hair. What are eyes? This is the main organ through which a spiritual-sensual being, such as man, obtains the most important knowledge about the visible world, about the diverse and numerous forms of plant and animal life; through this organ a person places himself in one or another relationship to the world and its phenomena. Numerous and varied vices are rooted in this love for the world, as a foundation, ranging from the abuse of objects of the external world to decorate oneself and ending with the gross deification of forces and phenomena. Based on the biblical words about Eve’s sinful desire: “desired for that which gives knowledge” (Gen. 3:6) - one can unmistakably conclude about the third sinful lust - the pride of life. Man’s desire for knowledge, and a proud one at that, denying the existence of God and the spiritual world, ends in conceit, pride of mind and heart, which recognize only the physical world and place the center of this life, its crown, as a person who, in pantheistic and materialistic systems, deifies himself. When the fall itself took place through eating the forbidden fruit, when man, instead of God, put himself as the center of life and happiness, and transferred his love, which should have exclusively related to God, to himself and the world. In addition, here not only direct disobedience to the will of God was committed, but His very will was denied as something hostile to man. Having fallen into the sin of disobedience to God or disobedience (Rom. 5:19), our first parents violated the entire moral law, which in its essence is nothing other than the will of God. We will understand even more the importance of the sin of our forefathers if we pay attention, in the words of our famous theologian, His Eminence Metropolitan Macarius, “to the number of private sins contained in the sin of our forefathers. Here were: a) pride, because the ancestors were first of all carried away by the promises of the serpent: you will be like gods; b) unbelief, because they did not believe the words of God: you will die c) apostasy from God and going over to the side of His enemy, the devil, because they did not obey God, but listened to the seducer and believed his daring slander, as if God, out of envy or ill will, forbade them to eat from a certain tree; d) the greatest ingratitude to God for all His extraordinary mercies and bounties.” Thus, the first people committed a sin and thereby exposed themselves and their offspring to all its sad consequences. About sin, as the greatest moral crime against God, we find an extremely thoughtful and apt judgment of one Russian apologist, which we allow ourselves to cite here. “Sin, according to the Christian view, is not only a violation of the divine law or lawlessness, although, without a doubt, it is this too; but he is not only this - he is not only, so to speak, legal evil. Sin is not only an insult to divine truth, but also a betrayal of divine love on the part of man, a violation of his fidelity to God, an arbitrary violation of the sacred union with God. Through sin, humanity, in the depths of its free will, rebelled against God, its Creator, who endowed man with all the blessings and the most important of them - the image and likeness of God. From this view of sin follows the biblical teaching about the extreme criminality of sin and the extreme severity of its consequences for the fate of mankind. In this respect, the biblical view of sin presents a remarkable contrast with the more or less lenient, apologetic and indulgent views of ancient philosophy and morality on it, where it is defined for the most part as a moral vice arising from the imperfections of human nature. According to the biblical view, sin is not just a vice or a moral, even grave, crime, but also a religious atrocity, since it is an insult to divine truth and love. The greatness of this crime increases to an infinite degree when we remember to what height of communication with God the first man was elevated by grace and how infinitely he was obliged to God. Through sin, man lost his God-given dignity to such an extent that a “second birth” or spiritual rebirth was necessary for him to restore the rights due to him as a member of his dissolved union with God (Rom. 7:8; cf. 1 Peter 4:3–4) With this understanding of sin, the biblical view of it as the primary cause of not only moral, but also so-called physical evil is completely understandable. The world, as the creation of God, as an expression of divine thought, in itself represents a complete and harmonious harmony of beauty and goodness. A spirit that violates the law of divine truth and treacherously falls away from divine love, necessarily becomes in a state of enmity with God’s thought, with the logic and harmony of the universe and, therefore, descends into a state of suffering. The highest or complete expression of this suffering, passing through the entire earthly life of a person from the slightest trouble to unbearable grief, is death. Each person, as a debtor of sin, is necessarily a debtor of suffering... Evil necessarily punishes itself according to the irresistible law of logic. Suffering and death are the logical consequences of sin, by which man voluntarily perverted the logic of his normal relations to God’s world” 17. Now let us ask in the words of another of our theologians: “hasn’t the story that has just begun ended? No. The will of man deviated from the plan of the Creator and from the law of creativity, but the Creator did not abandon the work of His hands. Man’s sin was foreseen before the creation of the world, and has been overcome from eternity” 18. Already fallen man was revealed the saving hope of the Seed of the Woman, or the future Savior of the world. Then, through the entire long period of religious and moral life before the Christian world, there comes, almost without interruption, a series of divine revelations and various educational measures, with the help of which humanity slowly but surely, without violating human freedom, prepared to accept salvation in Christianity 19. We have presented the biblical teaching about the Fall of our first parents. Every impartial researcher will recognize in it full compliance with the requirements of his mind and heart. But despite this, there are interpreters of Holy Scripture who, being strongly influenced by one or another philosophical hypothesis, look at sin and its origin differently and express their bewilderment about the biblical teaching about the Fall, reinterpret it or even completely reject it. Let us take a brief look at these perplexities, reinterpretations and denials. So, regarding the biblical story of the Fall, some ask: why did God create man with the possibility of falling? In other words: why didn’t God create him in such a way that he could not be subject to sin? If God created man with the possibility of avoiding sin, then is He not guilty of it, at least indirectly? We boldly answer: no. For in order to create a person who could not fall, it was necessary either to create a person as an unfree being, or as a free one, but immediately achieving that perfection of freedom in which it would be impossible to abuse it, or, finally, as an all-perfect being. As for the first assumption, it is no longer tenable because it places limits on the creative will of a loving and all-good God. “Moved by boundless love, God wished that there should be not only unconscious admirers of divine perfections, but that there should be conscious and intelligent participants in His life and bliss. He wanted to see in the creature not only slavish and unconscious service to Himself out of necessity, but rational and free service out of love. Loving, He wants, as much as possible, to bring creation closer to Himself: He creates creatures capable of such a high union; by creating them in His image, He enables them to become like Him and to be united with Him in a blessed and holy communion of love. The image of God contains both the highest love of God for those created after Him and the highest greatness and bliss of the created ones themselves. The essential features of the image of God are reason and freedom. They are the highest manifestations of creative life. Therefore, if God had not created rationally free beings, then His creative love would not have manifested itself in all its strength and the world would not have been the most beautiful. Goodness prompted God to create the best, and the best in the world is spiritual life, the highest manifestations of which are reason and freedom. This life is something godlike, something divine in the world. Who would dare to accuse God of lack of love and goodness because He created beings with such a life?” 20 As for the second assumption, according to which the creation of free beings without the possibility of their fall is conceivable only if they immediately, at the moment of their creation, achieve the highest degree of freedom, then this too cannot withstand sound judgment. Freedom is a moral force, which, as such, is achieved by the own and independent efforts and activity of a created being endowed with freedom. To reach the final limiting degree of development, a rationally free being must go through intermediate stages of development: lower and middle. And this passage must be done through one’s own efforts. Otherwise freedom will turn into necessity; there will be no life or development in it; A rationally free being itself cannot appreciate such perfection of freedom, which is given to it as something ready-made and external; it will look upon such freedom as slavery. That is why even the freedom of such higher spiritual beings as angels was and is limited and subject to the law of spiritual growth. And the word of God reveals to us that during this period of development and achievement of that stage of perfection at which a fall is no longer possible and on which angels currently stand, there was an abuse of freedom among disembodied spirits, a mysterious fall of some angels took place, who formed the kingdom of dark spirits, the kingdom of Satan. Finally, the assumption made that God could then have created man without the possibility of sin, when they had created him as an all-perfect being, already contains a contradiction in itself and should be rejected as untenable: if man was created by God, then he cannot be an all-perfect being. Thus, the bewilderment: why God created man with the possibility of falling into sin is resolved by the fact that it was so pleasing to God - that to create a man endowed with reason and freedom and to deprive him of the opportunity to sin is an impossible task, contrary to the laws of reason by which the all-wise God, as the highest mind, is guided in His creative activity. The second bewilderment that arises regarding the biblical story of the Fall is this: what was the purpose of allowing the first people to be tempted by the devil, who, as the highest spirit, could seduce people, which, no doubt, the omniscient God foresaw? Isn’t it therefore, although indirectly, God who is responsible for the fall of people? First of all, let us note that even if our weak mind does not understand the purpose of this or that action of God, we should not, on this basis, reject the event reported in the Word of God, or reinterpret its meaning, or demand from God an account of His actions. With deep humility, we must, in cases of our bewilderment, recall the words of St. ap. Paul: “Oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are His destinies and unsearchable His ways!” (Rom.11:33). In the light of the same Word of God, we will try to eliminate, as far as possible, the misunderstanding about the purpose of temptation that God allowed in relation to our first parents. God, as an omniscient Being, as the Creator of the world and man, could not help but know how the creation of His hand would act in one case or another: He has known from time immemorial in every detail the life and activity of each of His creations. Consequently, it is impossible to allow God to subject a person to temptation in order to make sure how a person will react to this temptation: whether he will withstand it or fall under its power. If He allows a person to be tested, then, as the Bible shows, this is done either for the moral benefit of the person himself, who, through temptation in the form of the disasters sent, is cleansed from various vices and strengthened even more in his love for God (multiple examples of which can be seen in the life of the chosen people of God, both during his forty-year wandering in the desert, and during the time of judges and kings), - or for the whole human race, which in one or another righteous person has emerged the winner after temptation must see an example to follow - an example of firm faith in God. Such is Abraham, who sacrificed his son Isaac and thereby became the father of believers; or for the shame and final defeat of the dark kingdom of fallen spirits, as is clearly revealed from the story of the long-suffering and righteous Job, where Satan, who dared to prove to God that there is no true, pure and completely selfless love for God on earth, even in such a righteous man as Job, suffered complete defeat in the person of this righteous man, who, being subjected to the greatest disasters, both external and internal, remained faithful to God. The temptation of the first people had, one must think, a threefold deep meaning both for themselves, and for the human race that came from them, and for the devil. For our first parents, it was allowed, as it seems to us, for the purpose of encouraging them to discover themselves in one way or another in relation to the moral law, expressed in the commandment about not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so that they began to live an active life as moral beings, so that it would become clear to them: what they are, what they want, what they strive for and what they are able to achieve. Created as a moral being, that is, free and rational, man could not be indifferent to the moral law: from the very first minutes of his existence he had to determine himself to it one way or another, that is, to fulfill it or transgress it; the average state cannot be imagined; Only a being inanimate or not gifted with freedom and reason, an animal, cannot place itself in one or another relationship to the moral law. Man is not like that: if he can fulfill the requirements of the moral law, he must fulfill it. That is why the temptation of the first people, as a means that prompted them to consciously and freely relate to the moral law, was allowed by their all-wise and omnipotent Educator - God. But it, as we said, had significance not only in relation to the first people, but also to the entire human race that came from them. In Adam and Eve all humanity was tested; this test decided the fate of all the countless millions who seemed to already exist in the eyes of God. The victory of the first parents over temptation would have been a victory for all mankind, and their defeat would have been a defeat for him as well. Therefore, humanity must see in its ancestors the basis of its current situation, which appeared as a consequence of their defeat. As for the devil, who, tempting our first parents, had the intention of destroying them, his tempting action was allowed by divine providence so that in it and through it he would experience not only his own shame, but also final defeat and death. We know that the devil’s intention to destroy people became futile through the all-wise and all-good plan of redemption, and the Seed of the Woman, that is, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was to finally destroy the power of the devil. Summarizing everything that has been said about the purpose of God allowing the temptation of the first people, we can say that this ultimate goal was for the wisdom, goodness and justice of God - in a word, the glory of God - to be revealed and realized in the world created by God. For in the wondrous plan of saving people from sin by the death of the Son of God, divine wisdom was revealed to the world to the highest degree, in finding such a means that no created mind could have thought of - and the love of God, crucifying and being crucified, according to which the Only Begotten Son of God was delivered to death for the sins of people in order to save them from their disastrous consequences - and justice, for through victory over the sin to which the devil inclined a person with his temptations. eternal condemnation of the author of sin and his entire kingdom is pronounced. We must now turn to consider the opinions of those rationalistic exegetes who completely reject the history of temptation and the fall of the first people. So Strauss says about the story of the Fall: “This narrative is subject to important difficulties. The main difficulty lies in the extremely inappropriate test to which God subjected man. To the question: why did God completely arbitrarily forbid the first parents from eating the fruit, which was harmless in itself, the Church answers: man had to immediately begin his moral education in paradise, therefore, he also had to have an object through handling of which he could develop his moral nature. But the question arises: didn’t Adam already live in community with Eve? Could there really be a lack of opportunities here for the fulfillment of mutual duties? And why was God not content with these natural duties, or did he not give better one duty about holiness, the basis of which people could clearly see, than a prohibition, which had absolutely no basis except arbitrariness, and could only serve as a temptation for people to commit a crime, which, with satanic inspiration from outside, was almost inevitably bound to lead a person to his fall? What can be said against the inconsistency of such an objection? We have already proven earlier that the test appointed by God to the first people and consisting in the commandment given to them not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was extremely expedient: it placed man from the first minutes of his existence in a normal relationship with God, whom he had to love, whom he had to unconditionally obey and on whom he had to depend. The first commandment, being quite easy and accessible in its specificity to the first people, in the surest way contributed to the awakening in people of a sense of love, obedience and dependence. This is the purpose of this commandment or this test of the first people. If Strauss and thinkers like him do not see and do not recognize this goal, then they themselves are to blame for their error, and not the commandment, the purpose of which the Christian Church has long spoken out in the most definite way. Regarding that part of Strauss’s objection that the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was based on the pure will of God and that it would be much better and more expedient if God, instead of this commandment, the reasons for which were not indicated to people, assigned them the fulfillment of one or another moral obligation arising from their mutual relations to each other, we must note the following. Firstly. Do we have the right from the Creator of the world, the all-perfect Being, to demand that He always indicate the foundations of His holy will? Is a person always capable of understanding these foundations? To demand this means to desire that the limited, insignificant mind of man comprehend all the secrets of the mind of the Divine? If the Lord, the Creator of man, gives a well-known commandment, then man can and must fulfill this commandment. Having created man Himself, He introduced into this rational-moral being an irresistible desire for Himself and His moral law, a desire that is expressed in the voice of human reason and conscience. A person is given, for example, the commandment: “Thou shalt not steal,” but it is not shown why he should not deprive his neighbor of his property. However, even without this, a person, with the help of reason and conscience, knows that the appropriation of someone else’s property should not be allowed, and precisely on such and not other grounds. For the first people, the entire moral law was concentrated in one paradise commandment about not eating the fruits of the forbidden tree. All the faculties of their mind, will and heart told them that they should love God, thank and glorify Him; that it is their direct duty to unconditionally acknowledge His holy will. And if they had these feelings for their Creator, was it necessary to give them reasons why they had to fulfill the commandment given to them? Only where there is no trust, love, gratitude, and in general manifestations of moral life between two beings, there really is a need to indicate every time the reasons, to give reasons for this or that order or order. Where true moral relations exist, the existence of which we must without any doubt assume between God and man in his innocent state, there should be no explanations of causes and foundations. For the feeling of love and gratitude that the first people undoubtedly had for God excluded the feeling of mistrust that could cause the need to indicate the reasons for the will of God. In addition, the first people unconditionally recognized the divine authority of their Creator and Lord, and with such recognition of Him, could they have a need to know the reason for this and not another will of God? Only where there is no respect for authority is it possible to assume the need to know the reason for this or that order coming from a known authority figure. Secondly. As for Strauss’s opinion that it would be much more expedient if God, instead of the appointed commandment, pointed people to one or another obligation arising from the mutual relations of the first people, then it is as untenable as everything else. First of all, it should be noted that it is impossible to imagine another commandment for the first man: the prohibition against eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was given at a time when there was no wife yet, therefore, it was impossible to apply the commandment to the fulfillment of certain moral relations between the first people, as Strauss fantasizes extremely strangely. Yes, if we were to assume, taking the point of view of some unbelievers, that the commandment was given after the creation of woman, then in this case there would not be a need to assign a commandment that would have an application to the moral relations of the first people? These relationships, even without any special commandment, should be and have been holy. In addition, we should not lose sight of the deeply significant biblical story of the creation of the first wife from her husband's rib. This meant that between them, by nature, naturally, instinctively, the most moral relationships based on mutual love existed. More complex relationships between people in a family, society, with their responsibilities and morals, have not yet existed on earth. That is why the commandment given to the first people in paradise could be borrowed from one sphere of relations available to them - from their relationship to external nature - to the fruits of the tree of paradise. Moreover, it was quite specific and accessible to the first people and was fully consistent with the wise educational plans of the Creator. Let us now proceed to consider other objections to the biblical account of the temptation and fall of the first people. Thus, some rationalists, such as Bauer 22, Eichorn 23 and others, with a few exceptions, consider everything told in the Bible about the temptation and fall of the first parents to be a myth created by the Israelites to explain the origin of sin in the human race. So, for example, they say that an evil spirit could not have participated in the temptation of Eve, since before the Babylonian captivity the Israelites allegedly had no concept of a demon, and the teaching about which they borrowed from the Chaldean sages. This objection exposes an extremely superficial acquaintance with the Bible and is completely unfounded. It is undoubtedly known that the Jews had the concept of a demon much earlier than the Babylonian captivity. Thus, in the book of Job, written long before the Babylonian captivity, all the various calamities that this righteous man suffered seem to have been allowed by the Almighty at the intercession of the devil, who had the audacity to assert before God that Job’s piety was external, that as soon as calamities befell him, he would apostatize from God. The Lord, in order to shame the spirit of evil, allows him to tempt his righteous man with all the disasters. And righteous Job puts the devil to shame: he remains faithful to God. Likewise, many centuries before the Babylonian captivity, at the beginning of the period of kings, the Jewish people already knew about the existence of a demon. Thus, in the first book of Kings it is narrated that “the evil spirit pressed upon Saul” when “the Spirit of the Lord departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:14). We find the same clear evidence of the existence of faith in evil demons among the Israelites before the Babylonian captivity in 1 book. Chronicles, where in chapter 21, verse 1 we read: “And Satan rose up against Israel and stirred up David to number the Israelites.” In the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, the devil is called the cause of the death of the first parents (Wis. 2:23–24). One could also point out several places (Zech. 3:1) in the sacred books of the Old Testament, written long before the Babylonian captivity, which clearly indicate that the Israelites, much earlier than their acquaintance with the religious traditions of Eastern religions, had the concept of evil demons. But the presented places are quite enough for our purpose. Then some rationalists go so far as to consider the entire biblical narrative of the Fall from beginning to end to be a Jewish myth that has no historical basis. What can I say against this? The fact that, due to its lack of foundation, it does not even deserve a serious refutation. Even one indication that it contradicts the entire Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments and the entire religious and moral history of the human race would be enough. If the history of the Fall is considered a fictitious event, then one must not recognize the entire Bible, which testifies to the Fall of the ancestors, as a historical event that happened at the very beginning of the life of the human race, as an event that, due to its disastrous consequences on the human race, causes the highest revelation of divine love, in obedience to which the Only Begotten Son of God descends to earth, becomes man, without ceasing to be God, sheds light on the earth His Divine teaching, performs the greatest miracles, then suffers and dies on the cross, so that by this, having satisfied the Divine truth and destroying to the ground the disastrous consequences of sin, he can save from it and its consequences His beloved, His highest creation on earth - man. It is enough, for example, to point out that all Old Testament legislation, worship, sacrifices and other provisions of the Mosaic Law are based on the recognition of the fall of our first parents, on the recognition of the resulting moral corruption of the entire human race, from which the Old Testament law tries to free man, by awakening a sense of contrition for his sins, faith in the future Savior and messianic desires, hopes and aspirations. Many places in the Old Testament books directly point to the story of the Fall as an event that actually happened. These are, for example. Proverbs 3:18, 11:30,13,12,15; Prem. 2:24; Sire. 25:27; Isa.43:27. In the New Testament, the following passages clearly speak of the historical nature of the Fall: Matthew 19:4–5; Rom.5:12, 21, 6:23; 1 Cor.6:16, 7:4, 11:7–9, 15:21; Eph.5:24, 28:31; Acts 17:26; Jude 1:14–15; Rev.2:7; 12:9; 22:2,4. Finally, without the fact of the Fall of our first parents and the hereditary transfer of their sin to all humanity descended from them, it is absolutely impossible to explain the fact of the universality of sin in the human race. God Himself testifies that “the intent of man’s heart is evil from youth” (Gen. 8:21). There is no person who would not sin, who would be clean from sin; all are conceived in iniquity and born in sin (Prov. 20:9; cf. Is. 13:3, 50:7). Depicting the disasters of human life, Job indicates their cause in defilement, that is, in the moral corruption of man, which makes him guilty of the judgment of God and from which no one is clean: “Who can be clean from defilement? No one has lived even one day on earth” (Job 14:3–5). In the New Testament of St. Ap. Paul testifies to himself that sin lives in him, which is strong to such an extent that it forces him to sin against his will: “I do not understand what I do: because I do not do what I want, but what I hate, I do” (Rom. 7:15); in another place he clearly and decisively testifies: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Another apostle says that the whole world lies in evil (1 John 5:19). This is the testimony of Holy Scripture about the universality of sin. But even the most cursory review of the religious and moral life of the human race convinces us of the truth of the universal sinful damage to the human race. The history of this life shows us the existence of false polytheistic religions, sometimes in the form of the crudest objective naturalism, where man deified the crudest objects of nature instead of the one true God; either in the form of Sabeanism, where the heavenly bodies were deified, or symbolism, where the mysterious forces of nature were recognized as gods, manifesting themselves in certain objects and phenomena of external nature, then in the form of religious systems of pantheism, where the deity appears to man as the world soul, spread throughout the entire universe, penetrating and enlivening everything; sometimes in the form of subjective naturalism, which finds its highest expression in the anthropomorphic religions of Greece and Rome. Is it necessary to talk about the vile customs and rituals that accompanied some pagan religions and consisted of manifestations of the most shameless debauchery and the offering of bloody human sacrifices? Is it necessary to remind here of moral systems that justify human vices and crimes; about a whole series of violations of the moral law among the most perfect people; about the statistics of crimes (and, moreover, the most terrible, inhuman and therefore unnatural), which so eloquently speaks of the general moral corruption of human nature? All paganism was entirely a great sin and an abomination before God. As for the chosen Jewish people, we have already seen how the Holy Scriptures clearly and positively testify to the sinfulness of human nature. The entire history of the chosen people of God, who had true religion and moral revealed law, and were under the special guidance of Divine Providence, is filled with various kinds of external and internal disasters, which are the result of punishments for the sins of the Israelites. So, where does the universal sinfulness of the human race come from? What explains it? Rationalists who reject the biblical account of the Fall of our first parents will not be able to explain it. But Holy Scripture, which knows and conveys the history of the fall of the first people, sees in it a completely sufficient reason for explaining universal sin. Presenting the doctrine of the fall of our first parents and the hereditary transmission of their sin to the entire human race, it completely satisfies the mind seeking an explanation for the universality of sin in the human race. So the Savior, in a conversation with Nicodemus about rebirth, says: “Amen, amen, I say to you: unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:5, 6). Without revealing the full breadth of the Savior’s teaching on spiritual rebirth, in this case we will only pay attention to the fact that these words contain a clear teaching about the transfer of ancestral sin to the entire human race. This transition takes place through birth from the flesh or the ordinary carnal descent of one person from another. But what does flesh mean here? The whole man is sinful, deprived of the grace of God, living and acting under sin, and not according to God (Rom. 7:5, 8:1, 4, 8, 9; 2 Cor. 10:2; cf. Gen. 6:12; Acts 2:17; Gal. 5:25). Since from such a person infected with sin another is born, then this latter is also flesh - of the same nature as the first. The Apostle Paul clearly and in detail teaches that universal sinfulness comes from the sin of the first man - Adam: “as by one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; so death spread to all men, because all sinned in him” (Rom. 5:12,14). “If through the crime of one many were put to death, much more will the grace of God and the gift by the grace of one man Jesus Christ abound for many” (Rom. 5:15). “If through the crime of one, death reigned through one: much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17). “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall live” (1 Cor. 15:22). From these places it is clearly clear: a) that the sin of the first man and the punishment assigned to him for it - death - passed on to all the descendants descended from him; b) that all humanity rightly suffered death, because it all sinned before God in its ancestor, which is why it can be called “a child of the wrath of God” (Eph. 2:3); c) that there is a close relationship between the first man, his sin and its inevitable consequence - death and Jesus Christ, righteousness and the consequence of this righteousness - life in Christ: the first Adam is the ancestor of sinful humanity, the second is a saint, and the head of holy humanity; the sin of the former brought death upon mankind, the righteousness of the latter brought the gift of eternal life in Christ; sin and death pass from the first Adam through carnal birth, the righteousness of Christ and the gift of life in Him are acquired by faith - by voluntary acceptance of them. Thus, regarding the method of transferring original sin to St. Scripture reveals to us three truths: 1) the original sin of the first parents passes on to all humanity, 2) along with sin, its consequence is death, 3) this transition is accomplished through carnal birth. We cannot obtain more knowledge about the method of propagation of original sin from Holy Scripture. But the theological and philosophizing thought of man does not stop there and tries to explain to itself the very way of transmitting sinfulness through the carnal birth of one person from another. In this regard, there are several hypotheses that explain the origin of the human soul along with its inclination towards evil. A critical review of these hypotheses, which explain the origin of the human soul along with its sinful state, does not directly relate to the subject of our essay and therefore we will not present them. Concluding a critical review of the main objections of rationalists to the biblical story of the fall of the first people, we cannot help but stop at considering another rationalistic view of the fact we are considering. Schleiermacher 24, Ewald 25 and some others (for example, Hegel) want to understand the fall of the first parents as an inevitable and necessary natural act in the development of human nature, without which the rational life of man could not begin. Thus, in their view, the fall of the first people is a transition from a lower degree of development to a higher one, it is a step towards progress from primitive rudeness to freedom and humanity, it is, as it were, the elevation of man to deity (“you will be like gods” (Gen. 3:5)). But the falsity of such an opinion is proven first of all by the simple biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve, which by no means allows for such a misunderstanding. How did it happen that the entire Christian Church, all the fathers and teachers of the Eastern and Western Churches always understood this story differently than the theologians we mentioned? But in addition, the very biblical story about the sin of our first parents is undoubted proof that they themselves considered their fall as a great disaster to which they were subjected as a result of the temptation of the spirit of evil. Having transgressed the commandment of God, they saw that they were deceived by an evil spirit, that “the serpent deceived them” (Gen. 3-13), as they say before God in their justification. If soon after the Fall they felt shame and fear, then obviously, through violation of the commandment of paradise, they fell into a disastrous state in which they experienced these painful feelings, whereas before they were blissful and not ashamed. Then, for their disobedience to the will of God, they had to be subjected to various kinds of disasters from God, such as expulsion from paradise, illness, exhausting labor and, finally, death. But they had never known anything like this before. It is clear that through the Fall, people did not move into a better state, the concept of which is always connected with the idea of ​​progress, but undoubtedly into a worse and more unfortunate state than the one in which they had previously been. Then, both the forefathers themselves and almost all the people who descended from them always looked at the devil as an evil spirit hostile to people. But this common view of all peoples on the spirit of darkness would be incomprehensible if he were not in fact their enemy, having plunged them through the deception of their ancestors into the abyss of physical and moral evil. In addition, almost all peoples, as we have seen, have legends about the golden age, under which the primitive happy state of the ancestors of people is represented. And this universal tradition, in turn, would be incomprehensible if, indeed, at the dawn of the history of the human race there had not been a happy state, from which people shied away and fell into an unhappy, disastrous state. Further, this teaching about the fall of our first parents, as a necessary condition for the moral development of human nature, is accompanied by such disastrous consequences for the religious and moral life of Christians that one indication of them should convince every Christian of its absolute falsity. So this rationalistic interpretation of the fact of the Fall considers God himself to be the author of evil, does not recognize punishment for sin, does not see the need for the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God for the sins of the world and, undermining all the basic tenets of Christianity, leads directly to materialism and complete unbelief. Then, “the view of evil as a natural phenomenon, shared by all worldviews generally opposed to the Christian one - both materialistic and pantheistic - raises natural questions: if evil is a natural phenomenon, then why does human moral feeling rebel against this phenomenon? What is natural by nature could provoke protest against itself from our moral nature? Why, finally, cannot humanity make peace with evil, if it is the same natural and necessary phenomenon in the world order, as for example. movement, cohesion, extension, etc.? Without any doubt, if an individual, if an entire society treats one phenomenon with sympathy, another with censure, one approvingly, another negatively, there must be sufficient reason for this. Society could neither approve nor condemn certain phenomena of its life if all of them - both good and evil - were equally natural phenomena. Consequently, there can be no talk of justifying the view of evil as a natural phenomenon, regardless of any preconceived theory.” 26 Finally, that evil is not a natural phenomenon in the course of developed human nature, that the fall of the ancestors of mankind is not an inevitable and necessary natural act in the development of human nature, but, on the contrary, a completely abnormal phenomenon - the result of a sinful, self-loving will that rebelled against the omnipotence, wisdom and love of God, the history of the vicious and evil actions of the human will can decisively convince anyone of this. It shows that a person, violating the requirements of the moral law, committing certain misdeeds and crimes, acts not in accordance with the suggestions of his own nature, but against them, against the best voice of his aspirations and instincts. There are so many facts in the history of human life that show that man is capable of the most unnatural anti-human actions, that is, vices and crimes. It is enough here to point out the terrible distortion of the religious and moral feeling innate to man, when man, instead of adoring the one, true, holy, omnipresent, all-good, wise and spiritual Being, deified disgusting animals and reptiles, worshiped soulless idols, revered the sun, moon and stars - they sacrificed their own children, throwing them inside, red-hot in the flames, of their terrible and disgusting gods, - indulged in debauchery and all sorts of lewdness in honor of his gods, - surrendered to the passion of immoderation in the pursuit of all kinds of sensual pleasures, perished soul and body from drunkenness, gluttony (let us remember here the Lucullus dinners, at which those present took emetic powders, so that, having lightened the stomach, burdened with exquisite dishes, they would be able to again satiate themselves with delicacies dishes worth the income of several provinces) debauchery and the most unnatural vices, which one cannot even talk about without disgust, - stained himself with such atrocities, from which a good Christian heart shudders and bleeds - exterminated tens and hundreds of thousands of his neighbors, just like himself (let us recall here the eastern conquerors, especially Tamerlane, who built hundreds of huge pyramids from the human heads of the people he killed, buried whole thousands of people alive in the grave, let us also recall the latest wars, where the brutal, savage and incredible inhumanity of not only the Turks, but also other peoples was manifested, to the greatest shame of man, this image and likeness of God, endowed with reason, freedom, love for God and neighbors, - he burned tens and hundreds of thousands of his best and noblest brothers at the stake and gave them over to be torn to pieces by wild animals (the history of martyrdom in the first centuries of Christianity), - blew up entire hundreds and thousands of people on ships and railways to achieve his own selfish goals, or fantastic utopias in the field of political life, - stained himself with such atrocities, before which brutal bloodthirstiness pales, hundreds and thousands of times he raised his hands against himself and indulged in suicide - this greatest unnatural crime... But is it possible to count all the atrocities and vices of people in which their unnatural character is most clearly revealed?... There can hardly be any person with normal powers of soul who could argue that all such vices and crimes are completely natural to man and are inevitable, although sad, manifestations of his natural development. To say this means to slander the all-good God, Who could not, when creating man, instill in him the desire for such a monstrous violation of the holy moral law, imbued and inspired by love, as the main property of all his commands, - this means contradicting the reason and conscience of people who, no matter how spoiled their psychophysical nature is by hereditary and their own sin, will never agree to admit that evil is normal. a natural phenomenon and an inevitable path of development. Thus, everything forces us to recognize the truth of the biblical narrative about the fall of the first people, as a result of which they introduced into their nature a terrible sinful disorder with all the countless disastrous consequences for both their spiritual and physical nature - a disorder that was hereditarily transmitted to the entire human race that descended from them. Only the saving power of Christianity, in which a person is born to a new spiritual life, only that grace-filled power that is given in the sacraments of Christ’s Church, can and does give a Christian the necessary strength to fight the terrible power of sinful attraction in himself and in the rest of the world; Only Christ alone, deep faith in Him, and His saving teaching, and following him can remove a person from sin, save him from its destructive influence, cleanse him from his infection and unite him with God in eternal blissful life. How unreasonable are those who, desiring all sorts of good for humanity and surrendering to their philanthropic aspirations, remove themselves and others from the Christian religion, the only true one and capable of alleviating the misfortunes of the human race, undermine its dogmas, and, among other things, the dogma of the primitive state and the fall of the ancestors, mock its holy and highly educational rites and its ministers, call them ignoramuses and obscurantists all who in thought, word and life declare themselves to be true Christians? Notes on the book of Genesis ed., 2, pp. 36–37. Creation of St. Fathers III, 262 pp. Conversations on Ev. Matt. page 38. An accurate exposition of the Orthodox faith, book. 11 chapters. 29. "Christian Apologetics" Prof. Rozhdestvensky, vol. 2 p. 304. Heidenthum und Judenthum, Vorhalle zur Geschichte des Christenthums. Döliinger. S. 368. Hie Traditionen des Menschengeschlechts, von H. Lücken. S. 90. See “Christ. apol." vol. II, p. 296. Ἔργα καὶ ἡμέραι, 109–201. Sacred Chronicle, Vlastova, vol. I, page 44. “Christ. apologist." Rozhdestvensky, vol. II, 301 pp. "Religion of the Ancient World", Bishop Chrysanthos, book. I, page 59. “Christ. apologetics" Rozhdestvensky, vol. I, p. 301. Notes on the book. Life page 44. “Christ. apologetics", prof. Rozhdestvensky, vol. II, pp. 311–12. "Creation of the world and man." Protopresbyter I. Sergievsky. We publish in the spiritual book about the preparation of the human race for the acceptance of Christianity. magazine “Right. Review." for 1884, a special detailed study, where, in the light of Holy Scripture, domestic works, general history and philosophy, we make an attempt to scientifically present this important and chronicle. theology question. "Divine love that saves." A. Belyaev, p. 268. Glaubenslehre, Strauss II, 27. II ehr. Mytholog. Bauer I, 5, 85, etc. Urgeschichte. Eichoni III, § 114. Die Lehre der Bibel von Gott III § 150–155. “Christ. apologetics", prof. Rozhdestvensky, T. II, p. 322.