But man could fall, he could relinquish the divine image and descend toward formlessness. Though bolstered by the grace of God he was not totally secure, and the possibility of descent attended to him as a creature corruptible and free. He could disobey the law of his nature and the divine law that would lift that nature to incorruption, abdicating his purpose as the prize of God’s creation. A necessity intrinsic to both his finitude and his capability for communion with God, man’s freedom is the limit upon the law of his nature in which he, as a spiritual being, encounters the formlessness of possibility. There lies his mutability and, as that mutability annuls its contingency in acquiescence to law, the affirmation of God as a merciful lord and man as a blessed slave. Man’s freedom is embedded in the law of his nature and is meant to validate it in his active reception of the divine love, but in freedom also lies the threat, the chance that man could abdicate the image and fulfillment in which soul and body are married in God. There were therefore in the first man’s nature these three aspects: the physical body as the lower element, created without sin but capable of death by physical disintegration; the soul as a higher element beyond disintegration other than its alienation from God; and the mutability attendant to both, the possibility of a life in incorruptible form or its opposite, the life tending toward corruption and death.
The devil seized upon man’s mutability, tempting and deceiving him with the knowledge of good and evil. In the tree of the knowledge of good and evil man encountered his soul’s upper limit, acknowledging the lordship of God and the right order of creation as well as the penalty for breaching that order. Should he eat of the tree or even touch it man would die, rending the fullness of the image of God from his nature at the same time that nature grows despoiled. “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw . . . that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.”
In eating the fruit the soul acquired a wisdom beyond its limit just as it turned from God, abandoning the orientation that is its life. Deceived by the serpent, the soul misunderstands the defect that upends the peace of nature by grasping emptiness as though it were fullness, as though the life apart from God possessed significance because the soul had ascended toward the place of God. The soul does not see, it is fooled in the belief that it can rise beyond its limit without simultaneously falling, as though the illegitimate ascent did not entail descent. The serpent says, “Rise without falling!” So it conceals the essentially dialectical character of the demonic, of the disobedience with which it entices the soul. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is a delight to the eyes and desirable for wisdom, but that wisdom belongs only to God and to those spiritual beings to whom he deems fit to grant it. For man to embark upon the rise, to arrogate a wisdom beyond the form of his nature in the hope that it will elevate his capacities and augment his fullness, is the deception. It begins the alienation of man from both God and his neighbor, and from his life as a man.
The soul abdicates its law when it eats of the tree, forfeiting the solidity and rule of its being as shaped according to God’s will. Simultaneously rising above and falling below the measure of its integrity, the soul grows more like God with respect to the content of the mind but farther from him in the loss of the ontological knowledge of God’s presence. In the fall man trades the knowledge of God for God’s knowledge, appropriating a modicum of infinity as though he could contain an illicit likeness to God within his finitude. The soul expands but it also contracts, transgressing its created form from both directions, surging beyond its limit in the knowledge that would judge good and evil at the same time that man feels this knowledge as a loss of being and as distance from the divine love. In the divorce from its nature the soul relinquishes what abides for the dialectical transition between greater and lesser, jettisoning the stability of being that is according to its law for being which is both itself and its opposite, an ascent that approximates divinity necessarily accompanied by the descent which recognizes the upward reach as a crime. The soul’s new existence is finally punishment, tending toward nothing inasmuch as the finite’s theft of the infinite results in its dissolution qua finite, the death of distance from God. Sin therefore means the diminution of being in which man no longer looks to God, no longer trusts, obeys, loves, and worships God, replacing God with a nature divided and estranged, an object at once of love and of hatred, a life he cherishes and despises and which he wants to imbue with meaning despite its despair. Man would think that he has become like the God who is immutable Form, but he has sacrificed what form he possessed. He thinks that he has risen in the likeness of He who Is, but this very rising portends his descent toward what is not.
The descent corrupts the whole creation, turning birth into a cry of pain and the search for sustenance into combat against thistles and thorns, demanding that the body return to the dust from which God shaped it. But the curse thundered upon the body means more than physical demise; it means the body’s release for a life of rebellion as well. Once the good and God-pleasing instrument for the soul’s acquisition of life, the body remains that good and God-pleasing instrument, but at the fall the reins change hands and it is redirected under a law unto death. In its sin the soul oriented the whole man away from God, carrying the bodily nature with it into the rise that falls, entangling the body in the dialectic in which the appearance of divinity achieved and form grasped whispers the penalty of humanity lost and form dissolved. The body draws its life from the soul and imitates its habit, embarking after the fall upon the dialectical greater-lesser by scoffing at the soul’s governance and rising in annulment of bodily limits. The lower element pursues the pleasures of this world as though possessed of its own mind, hoping for meaning in worldly delights, but every grasping inasmuch as it implies the surpassing of the body’s limit cannot but evaporate in the hand that seizes it. Food rots in the mouth that chews, comforts leave man stale and vapid, and should he come to the remarkable place where he knows no bodily inconvenience, gratifying every desire with ease, man there finds his body reduced to invisibility and no longer relaying the meaning stamped upon his being. The rise of the body foreshadows its fall, the ascent dialectically mediates erosion, the unhindered bodily appropriation of this world facilitates the liberation of man from both body and world.
The soul enraptured by the semblance of divinity and the body enslaved to lust, both married to the dialectic of finitude disintegrated through infinity seized, means that each loses the solidity of its measure. Rightly formed, body and soul interpenetrate as grounded in the integrity of definition, each element fortified within its limit and bearing out that fortification in the mutually supporting harmony of grace. The infinitizing dialectic dissolves the limit of both body and soul, undermining the internal stability of the elements and poisoning their intermarriage. That which reaches out toward the infinity of an impervious form suffers toward the infinity of form annulled, the endless possibility of form without its achievement. What was solid, distinct, and particular devolves into what is liquid, amorphous, and obscure. The union that was without confusion yields to the indistinguishable permeability of fluid with fluid. Man melts down so that he can no longer endure, no longer withstand the forces that would drag him to the pit, no longer counter the temptations that exploit the malleability of his being.
Man experiences the confusion of body and soul as an alienation in which each part illicitly communicates its properties to the other. The body desires rule over man and would live as though immortal, seeking pleasure without end, undermining the soul as if the latter were the element destined to die. The soul unwittingly authorizes this venture, for in grasping the infinite it turns away from both God who is its life and the body that lives through it, willing a world apart from finitude, without physical feeling, a world in which the body forgets death. This confusion of properties entails separation between body and soul as two elements so distorted by infinity that they lack the cohesion necessary for fellowship. Body and soul know nothing each of its own limit and thereby of its complement, and though they flow freely into one another their nearness only exacerbates the distance between them. That nearness, that joining in division, is the war of soul against body or spirit against flesh. In this combat the infinity sought by the soul alienates it from the finitude of the body and puts the body to death, while the infinity sought by the body means its revolt against the soul and the relegation of the latter to despair. The mortality