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The biblical account of “the forbidden fruit” stresses the power of suggestion. It arouses desires by its aspect that is at the same time sensual and aesthetic. “The tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable.” The arrow of temptation that wounded human freedom and perverted its choice went beyond the formal disobedience. We can see the essential of the fall: the desirable fruit, sensually coveted, immerses man in his life of the senses chosen in preference to a spiritual deepening of his communion with God. Man appears guilty not so much negatively by disobedience, but positively by not enriching himself by nearness to God. “If he had attached himself to God from the very first movement of his being, he would have immediately attained his perfection,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa.19.1
Under the appearance of charms that attract, the fruit symbolizes a secret covetousness of the attributes of God. The love of the human heart, originally directed toward the being of God, is no longer centered on its object, but deviating, has oriented itself only to his attributes, the source of enjoyment. The grace of “resemblance” gives place to the magic of equality. “You will be as God.”
The mystic image of a fruit consumed is not a chance one; it is clearly of a eucharistic nature. Evil, a principle initially exterior to innocent man, is introduced, by this consuming, within a human being. Evil thus becomes interior to man; on the other hand, it is God who has become exterior to him. The order is perverted; the biological animal seems foreign to the true nature of man, for the animal was assumed before its spiritualization, before man had arrived at the mastery of the spiritual over the material. Communion with nature, good in itself, proved to be bad since it was precocious. The error came from a premature identification. Clement of Alexandria sees original sin in the fact that “our ancestors gave themselves to procreation before the appointed time”.19.2
Good in itself, animal nature, on account of the perversion of the hierarchy of values, now constitutes a permanent threat of causing the downfall of man. It was the axiological faculty of appreciation, the spirit of discernment, that was wounded. “Outside God, reason became like the beasts and the demons, and estranged from its nature, it desires what is foreign to it.”19.3 Illegitimate concupiscence is against nature, and then the human being is dominated by his passions, by the life of the senses. That is why the ascesis before all else neutralizes the passions in order to objectify and exteriorize these deifugal tendencies that withdraw man from God.
We can see this remedy at work in studying the sacrament of confession. “A hidden thought destroys the heart,” remarks St. Cassian.19.4 The action of evil can be traced to the redoubtable philautia, the self-love that encloses a man within himself. On the contrary, the opening up of the soul hinders the formation of complexes, denounces them and cures morbid scruples.19.5 This is why confession entails the avowal of guilt, followed by absolution. For Clement of Alexandria, the confessor is like “an angel of penance”, capable of penetrating and opening the souls of sinners; he is a “physician of God”. “You have come to the doctor, do not return without being cured,” says the prayer before confession. Likewise the Council of Trullo (692) defines that “those who have received from God the power of binding and loosening behave as physicians attentive to find the particular remedy that is required by each penitent and each fault of the penitent”.19.6
An age-old experience clearly shows the danger of repressions and the liberating power of confession. “Many passions are hidden in our soul, but they escape our attention,” says Evagrius.19.7 This is because the fault is rooted in the soul and poisons man's whole interior. It calls for a surgical operation that will cut the roots and exteriorize the fault. This necessitates the presence of a witness who will listen, and by thus destroying the solitude, will bring the penitent into the communion of the body. Psychoanalysis has rediscovered the value of confession. It tries in its own way to lead the patient to accept a dialogue, to go beyond his very inaptitude to dialogue and his anguish that hinders him from going toward others.
Sozomen (5th century) declares forcefully: “To ask pardon one must necessarily confess his sins.”19.8 The soul is unburdened of the sin, but how can this sin be made non-existent? A bad conscience comes not only from remorse for the fault committed but also from a nostalgia for lost innocence. Man seeks pardon, but in the utmost depths of his heart he craves for the annihilation of the evil; for this desired abolition, sacramental absolution is required. The fault has been exteriorized, even recounted and thus made objective, projected, so to speak, to the outside; yet it can plague him from the exterior. Sacramental absolution alone can destroy it and bring a total cure. Psychiatrists who are believers know the liberation accomplished by the action of the sacrament, and they often complete their treatment by sending their patients to an “ecclesial clinic”. The immense importance of confession is in this final liberation. For a man to become free again, he must know how to utilize his past, even if it has been a guilty one, in order to create a present that is more innocent. He must transcend the passive receptivity of his soul and its behavior, subject to automatic causes, and go toward the creations of his spirit that has become again unsullied after absolution. To escape henceforth from these causes means that he has become master of his destiny, leaving himself open to the liberating action of the divine forces.
The act of pardon places us in the heart of the relationship between God who is holy and man who is the sinner, and we must grasp the infinite gravity of this act. It is not the almighty power of God to efface and to make non-existent that is involved here; it is a question of Christ, who, according to St. Paul, canceled “the decree against us, nailing it to the cross”.19.9 If “the lamb is immolated from the foundation of the world”, this means that the creation of the world was already rooted in the immolation of the creator, and that is why the power to pardon comes from the price of the blood shed by the crucified lamb. This is because Christ takes on himself all the transgressions and all the crimes of the world, and for this remains in agony until its end. Because he thus responds to the love of his Father by his ineffable love in our stead, he has the moral power to efface and pardon and to make us innocent children of the Father. The Lord's Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive”, conditions the pardon of ourselves by an “imitation” of God on our part; we are invited to descend, in Christ's footsteps, to the hell of universal guilt where all are culpable. Every faithful member of the Orthodox Church confesses before communion: “Of all sinners, I am the first.”
The prayer before confession, accompanied by the reading of Psalm 50 [51], has an immense significance; it testifies to the reattachment, the preliminary reunion of the sinner with the Church. Through the prayers of the priest, the penitent is taken in charge, as it were, by the Church. It is by her that he is brought and presented before the face of God. It is in finding himself in the maternal bosom of the Church that a man can truly confess his sins and receive the cure, for each sin exteriorizes man in regard to the body of Christ, Reintegrated into the Church, man can weep the tears of repentance. These tears, says Symeon the New Theologian, “purify and confer the second baptism of which the Lord speaks, the rebirth in water and in the Spirit; the baptism of tears is no longer a figure of the truth, it is truth itself”.19.10 Every automatic effect of the sacrament is excluded; the rebirth by the Spirit requires full consciousness on the part of the one who crosses the abysses “in shuddering”.
The ascesis of the spiritual life follows the road traced out by repentance and penance. It aspires above all to free man from the ascendancy of his passions. In order to attain this end, it fosters spiritual attention, a guard over the heart. “I sleep but my heart watches.” Even in a state of sleep it is watchful. Vigilance thus practiced permits a man to recognize evil before being tempted to commit it.
The ascetics give a minute description of the progression of evil, laying bare the technique or the mechanism, on the whole rather simplistic, of temptation.
The first movement of “contamination” comes from a representation, image, idea, desire crossing our mind; something very fleeting that arises abruptly and solicits our attention. From the subconscious the appeal rises to consciousness and makes an effort to be kept there. This is not yet sin, far from it, but it is the presence of a suggestion. It is in this first moment that the immediate reaction of the attention on the watch is decisive. The temptation is going to go away or it is going to remain. Spiritual writers make use of an image that was familiar in the desert: “Strike the serpent on the head” before he enters the cell. If the whole serpent enters, the struggle will be much more laborious.
If the attention does not react, the following phase passes to pleasure. A willing attention to the tempting solicitation causes a certain pleasure, becoming an equivocal attitude that is already cooperating. St. Ephrem speaks of the “pleasant conversation” of the soul with a persistent suggestion.
An enjoyment by anticipation, imaginary at the moment, marks the third stage. A tacit agreement, an unavowed consent, orients one toward an accomplishment judged possible, for it is passionately desirable. In principle, the decision has indeed been taken; in the effective coveting of the object, the sin has been committed mentally. This is the judgment of the Gospel on the impure look in which adultery has already been pre-consummated.
The fourth stage effectively consummates the act. It forms the beginning of a
passion, of a thirst henceforth unquenchable. When it has become a habit, the
passion neutralizes every resistance. The person disintegrates in the avowal of
his powerlessness; he is bewitched and tends toward his implacable end:
despair, the fearful acedia, disgust or anxiety of heart, madness or suicide,
in all cases, spiritual death.