Let's begin by reading the beginning of the scene of temptation:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:1-5)

Today I would like to consider the temptation from only one of the many possible points of view. I will not look, for example, at the role of temptation (and our overcoming of it) in the development of human freedom, but only at the disconnection of the human being from the moral and spiritual world brought about by the temptation. We need to be aware of this disconnection if we are to have any hope of overcoming it.

We spoke last time about the character of the serpent, and I would like to elaborate a little on that discussion. The first sentence of the temptation narrative tells us that the serpent was more crafty (more "subtil" in the King James version) than any other beast of the field. Even before reckoning with the specific quality of craftiness, we face here the fact that Adam and Eve were subjected to an element from a lower realm — from the animal kingdom. We saw before how Adam was created a pure, radiating spirit, and a pure, receptive soul. But now something new enters his life, something from a different order of being. The encounter will in a sense diminish his distinctively human nature, opening a space for something that comes from the lower beasts.

Of course, Adam had already encountered the animal kingdom. Insofar as he had given names to the various creatures, he had participated along with the wise, archetypal, creative powers that brought forth the animals, each according to its kind. Even today we can glimpse these creative powers at work in the wisdom of instinct and the beauty of animal forms. But now, for Adam, there was something further. In the serpent he encountered, not the spiritual forces behind the creation of animals and their instincts, but instinct itself as an expression of egotism. Our further discussion should make this clearer.

As for the serpent's character: to be crafty and cunning is to rely on the power of one's own calculated thought to achieve one's purposes. The crafty person will always value his thoughts as his own, not as a gift he receives from a place of higher wisdom. And the source of everything we claim as our own in this way is pride. In the field of consciousness, whenever I emphasize what is mine, whether it's in science or art or any other discipline, I can be sure that pride is at work. Pride is in fact the origin of all temptation. Christ refused the invitation to pride when, for example, the devil offered him "all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them" (Matthew 4:8). His answer that he had come to serve God demonstrated the very opposite of a will to glorify himself through the proud exercise of his own power.

The gesture of pride is that of taking. We claim something for ourselves, based on our own powers and skills. We do not wait to receive in the natural order of things, but take and use for our own ends. The opposite gesture, characteristic of Adam from the beginning, is that of openness to the larger world and receptiveness for what comes from that world. What the temptation offered, then, was the replacement of this open, receptive gesture by a grasping, self-directed gesture — that is, by what is essentially a gesture of stealing. The devil teaches us how to steal. That's why in Christian tradition the devil is called a robber and a thief. Here in Genesis he wants to steal divine wisdom. It is not really possible to grasp wisdom in this way, but the illusion of pride makes it seem possible.

We see in the serpent, then, an inner pride, a grasping, possessing gesture toward the world, and, in the end, illusion. On the one hand, we traditionally ascribe to the devil a sharp, clever mind — and this is true enough. But on the other hand this makes no sense at all, because the devil is aiming for something he will never succeed in getting. It cannot be gotten or stolen in that way, but can only be given as a free gift. What can be seized for oneself is illusion. This illusion has none of the creative power of formative light and Logos. It lacks reality.

In the conversation between Eve and the serpent, Eve acknowledges Yahweh's warning to her and Adam that if they eat the forbidden fruit, they will die. But the serpent turns the warning around: No, your eyes will be opened and, like gods, you will know good and evil. Both claims were true. They simply described the same consequence from different sides. But the devil's truth was nevertheless guileful. Certainly Adam and Eve did not die, at least in an outward sense, and we are all in fact still here today. But our moral and spiritual state, seen from a higher, or divine, perspective, can rightly be considered a state of death.

From Jahweh's point of view, "you will surely die" means you will no longer possess an objective wisdom emanating from the starry heavens. You will no longer have the ability to give things their true names as you could before. Life in its wholeness — the life that, in John's gospel, becomes "the light of men" — will no longer instruct you. From Lucifer's point of view, by contrast, this means that you will have your own subjective wisdom and a name that is your own — the name of your own limited personality — and this subjective personality will make its own moral judgments about good and evil in the world. The death spoken of by Jahweh is welcomed by the serpent as a disconnection of human judgment from the divine.

But there's something else. Adam's soul, as we saw earlier, was completely interwoven with the larger universe. The powers of love and life and light, of antipathy and sympathy, not only lay behind the created universe, but also were present and active in Adam's soul. They were the same forces of beauty responsible for this beautiful and artistically fashioned world. Adam knew no disconnection between the activity of these forces in the world and their activity within himself. But now the serpent is saying, "What you previously experienced within yourself as an inner world will become an outer world — and so you will see it with your new, outward-directed eyes. Things will not touch you from within, but will stand before you externally. They won't be able to reach into you without your own willful effort."

On the one hand (Yahweh): Your soul will become empty and dead. On the other hand (serpent): No, you will become independent and will find your place in a new, outwardly experienced world that does not disturb or penetrate you. So not only do the serpent's words foretell a disconnection from wisdom, they also promise a disconnection from life, or from the living powers of soul at work in the universe.

The third, deepest level of disconnection occurs at the level of will, and is indicated by the serpent's words, "You will know good and evil." In a time like our own, when "knowing" is often taken in an abstract way — when knowing touches only the surface of things and can be a matter of mere intellectual play — it's easy to forget that knowing once involved intimate participation in that which one knew. The same word "know" used in reference to knowing good and evil is also used in Genesis 4:1 where it says that "Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived." To know evil is to be in real connection to it, to be intimate with it, to have its potentials within you. This in turn implies a disconnection from God's will, because in His will no evil is possible. To have the powers of good and evil within us — to have the power of will at our own disposal — is already a state of evil. At least it remains so until we can overcome it by saying, "Not my will, but Thine, be done."

Most of us know what it is to be angry. When we are angry we can often restrain ourselves to one degree or another with the help of moral maxims, a proper education, and so on. But if you imagine such anger without any restriction — a pure, willful energy of anger, which always has a seed of hatred in it — you will recognize the same energy that is at work when one person kills another. This is one example of the kind of energy that has already entered us when we have gained the power to do either good or evil according to our own will. We can't truly have the power to do evil unless the evil is available within us. Where before there was a pure, sacrificial love, an ability to give oneself for others, there is now also felt an impulse to take the life from others. All the horrors we know from modern history, including even the deriving of pleasure from the torture of human beings, follow from the choice to know and be intimate with both good and evil.

It is clear that the connection with evil — and even with the mere possibility of evil — is more binding upon us than the connection with good. Good demands our free struggling; it doesn't simply hand us, for example, the easy power to morally elevate a large group of people. Evil, by contrast, offers itself easily, and by this offering it communicates to our personality the readily available force of evil — a force that can prove infectious in crowds.

The sense of power often accompanying evil is pictured vividly in the sacrifice of children by the Aztecs of Mexico. They removed the still throbbing heart, and it is said that the priest derived a kind of occult power from it. Even the torturer may feel like a god when power over human life is in his hands. And in this feeling we see how the highest good — self-sacrificial divine creation — can be transformed into its opposite, devouring the life of others.

Now let's continue reading the Genesis text.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. (Genesis 3:6-13)

These lines enable us to see the essence of temptation and its psychological consequences for Adam and Eve's inner life. The consequences, of course, follow directly from the character of the temptation, and are a fulfillment of God's forewarning and the serpent's promise. Now we can watch how these consequences played out in the life of Adam and Eve.

The tree was "pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise." As Adam and Eve stood before this tree and the serpent, something entered into their souls that wasn't there before: desire. (We can think of the image of the serpent as an image of incarnated desire.) Desire builds up a foundation for egotism. To desire something is to want to make it mine. This profound shift — this falling away from God — happens step-wise:

First there is the violation of the divine commandment. Disobedience, in both Russian and English — and in fact in many Indo-European languages, if not others as well — is connected to the idea of not listening. One loses the voice of God and instead hears the whisper of the snake in the shape of various desires. This leads to a struggle between our wishes on the one hand, and the clear light of objective consciousness on the other — a struggle that began with the temptation and continues to develop ever further into our own day. Schiller looked for a harmony between these two poles so as to transform desires rather than either suppress them or allow them to rule over consciousness. He found this harmony in the state of play, where images of consciousness and impulses of will are merged in a free interaction. Our conscience shows another possibility for harmony, since conscience presents us not just with abstract commandments but with objective moral feelings. The word conscience (con-science, or "knowing together with"), as also German ge-wissen and russian so-v^yest^y, all point to an objective, communal aspect of our moral feelings. So the promptings of conscience not only can warm our souls from inside, but also carry a pure light of objective awareness.

The second step in falling away from God is expressed where it says, "And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked." The opening of their eyes led directly to a feeling of shame. In paradise they were naked, without shame; but now, with their eyes opened, shame overtook them.

When do we feel shame? One case is when there is a temporary disharmony or ugliness or unhealthiness in our appearance, and we are ashamed to disturb the perception of others. But perhaps more fundamentally, we feel ashamed when we do something immoral — something expressing an ugliness of soul. Goodness and truth are revealed in beauty, whereas evil and falseness are revealed in ugliness, making us ashamed. In external ugliness we sense, if only unconsciously, a sin against the beauty and harmony of the world; inner ugliness (egotism), on the other hand, speaks of sin against the moral foundation of the world, and we feel ashamed when we become aware of it.

Presumably, at this point in paradise, even in their shape and nakedness, Adam and Eve were beautiful. Their shame would not have been connected with their outward appearance. The ugliness they became aware of lay inside, in a changed attitude toward the world. Where before they were able to embrace all things — they were connected to all things from the inside, so to speak — now they found these things outside themselves, which is also to say that they found themselves in an indifferent relation to the things. Whatever is outside us does not have the same claim on us as what is inside; we do not participate in it in the same way. It doesn't touch us morally. Or perhaps we could reverse our terms and say: the world is outside us precisely because we are indifferent to it. But either way, inner ugliness shows itself as an inability to encompass the world or our neighbor with our moral concern.

The third step is expressed in the fact that Adam and Eve felt fear. Fear entered the human soul. When we are afraid, something in our will is frozen and cannot act. We lose our trust in life, our sense of rootedness in the divine ground of our existence. We no longer experience ourselves as founded upon the goodness of the divine will. In fearing punishment, Adam and Eve no longer experienced a God of love and mercy, but only a God of might, wielding the power of punishment.

When fear conceals God's true nature from us, we no longer experience Him deeply within as a moral source of healing, forgiveness, and consolation, but rather as an outward, punishing power. This is much the same as saying that we look at God through the eyes of evil. In this sense fear can be seen as a betrayal of God and his goodness. The will becomes frozen when it lacks the foundation of all existence — that is, when it lacks the original fire of divine, sacrificial love, which is always prepared to give of itself to the very end.

In every fear there is the sting of death, the fear of our own disappearance. Whenever we fear, we are in one way or another touching death. Or, putting it the other way around: death is objectivized or materialized fear. And so we have the progression: as fear is frozen will, death is frozen life, where the warmth of life has yielded to cold matter. Death can be conquered only when it is consumed in the fire of sacrifice, which happened in the deed of Christ.

When evil came into Adam's life, fear and death came with it. There is always that connection between evil, fear, and death. In this direction we find increasing moral coldness. Earlier or later the soul that performs evil deeds will experience fear as a consequence — either on earth or in purgatory. Many tyrants, such as Stalin, who had almost total power over millions of other human beings, were gripped by fear.

We have, then, three stages of the Fall. First, the thinking consciousness is darkened through unconscious desires, and we fall away from the divine light. Then the feeling soul becomes empty through egotism and indifference; creative forces of the world step back, disappear, and the world of beings hardens into the world of things. And finally the creative will freezes as a result of evil. Deprived of the life of God and removed from his presence, we become fearful.

These were the psychological aspects of the temptation. In order to understand the objective consequences, which usually are known as "punishments," we might want to think along the following lines. As we have already noted, at the foundation of desire and egotism is something like a grasping gesture. We may think that, in grasping, we are gaining something — more possessions, more pleasure (which many seek through drugs or entertainment), or even an enhanced or extended physical life, through cosmetic surgery, genetic engineering, and the like. But all this is illusion because it can be realized only in a world of death. In that spiritual world which is the source of all life, things cannot be grasped for oneself, but only given by another.

Therefore we have to say that the devil, for all his cunning, is, in the end, stupid. Desire doesn't really extend the soul, but only contracts it, empties it, destroys it. And together with the soul, it destroys the entire world. That is, because Adam in Paradise was spiritually connected to the whole world, his fall brought about a change in the state of that world, a change in its forces and processes. If we want to understand the "punishments" consequent upon the Fall, we need only look for the gesture of contraction in the different aspects of Paradise: its life, its light, and the very substance of its being. I will emphasize three "main" punishments: labor and sweat; birth and pain; and the return to dust.

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:14-19)

We have seen that creative, formative powers of light are at work in all of nature. These forces were available to Adam and Eve in paradise as they tended to the world around them. The Greeks may have retained a memory of that time in their myth of Orpheus, whose creative forces, as expressed in his music, were able to bring all things, even the stones, into movement. But when this creative, light-filled will becomes frozen and contracted and when we exchange a beneficent, giving gesture for a grasping, selfish one, our inner, spiritual power over nature disappears, and the only thing remaining is to work with nature physically and outwardly ("In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread").

Or again: in paradise the life of the soul was inseparable from the surrounding world; it participated in the life of the world. The soul was open and the world was soft and warm. In this way two could become one through their openness to each other. This, however, is a law of the spirit, not of the external, physical world, where two things cannot occupy the same place. Through the constriction of their inner life, Adam and Eve experienced themselves cut off from the spiritual dimensions of the world; they knew things only externally, in a sphere where one thing has to compete with another. No one could penetrate their being without it being painful, because the place was already occupied. So it was that the woman was told that she could bear another life within herself only in pain. It became woman's destiny, and we can also say that this is the redeeming mission of the woman: she has to give place in her life for her child, becoming intimately connected in this way to another — and bearing the resultant pain.

Actually, the same rule governs all creativity and social life: to get a new idea or make something new or give place in ourselves to the Other, we have to let something else die. We have to empty a space. And this is painful so far as we have become hardened and cut off from the life of the world.

A third consequence of Adam's new state is death ("dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"). This comes, as we have seen, through the contraction and freezing of the soul in fear. Instead of eternal, spiritual life, there is now a material, cold death.

So these are the three primary consequences of the fall: free, light-filled, creative activity becomes laborious physical work; the connection to other beings becomes painful; and, through fear, the divine ground of our existence is exchanged for a transient material foundation (dust). But we will look very briefly at some other consequences.

Regarding the punishment of the serpent ("upon thy belly shalt thou go"): can you imagine a more fitting punishment for pride than to be made to crawl in the dust, without any possibility of lifting your head? It could be felt by a proud being only as absolute humiliation. But it could also be the basis for a new start and for the crushing of pride. Probably all of us, on our way from pride to humility and faith, must at some time or other experience utter helplessness.

As for the serpent's relation to the human being (the seed of the woman "shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel"), we can see in the serpent's biting of the heel an injection of desire and egotism into our will. The temptation in Eden, after all, was not a one-time thing, but is always present. And to bruise the head of the serpent recalls the image of St. Michael doing combat with the dragon. The life of our highest consciousness needs to crush the source of this poisonous, unconscious egotism entering our life from below. It's a fight we carry out every day, and the battle can go in either of two directions, with the serpent biting and injecting a fiery venom into our will, or with the human being standing erect, his foot upon the head of the serpent.

One other thing about the punishment. It affected not only Adam and Eve, but the world itself. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake....Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." Adam brought down the whole of nature with himself. Nature is only half-alive now. Instead of a radiant, abundant, giving nature, the Fall led to a continual struggle to survive. The moral law yielded to a nature "red in tooth and claw," where the strongest survives.

It has often been shown how, in most ancient cultures, there was a strong tendency to want to return to a previous paradisal era, a lost Golden Age. With Christ, however, a new possibility entered the world. He reversed the original gesture of the temptation. Instead of grasping in order to gain more and more in an outward sense, he diminished Himself, humbled himself. And in this gesture there lies a potential to regain the spiritual world. "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." What does it mean to become meek? It is to be humble, to listen and be open to what is in nature — and by this means to hear again what speaks in nature. Those who travel this path will "inherit the earth"; through humility and willing attention to the creative forces of nature previously lost from human consciousness, they will gain access to those forces. The divine word, or Logos, will resound not only in their scientific understanding but also in their artistic creation and their work upon the world. Christ brings redemption by changing the gesture of grasping for one of letting go, of giving, and of patiently waiting for the gifts that will come.