Chapter 2. Fallen Man

Man, created in the image and likeness of God, with an immortal, rational, and free soul, exalted immeasurably above every irrational creature, and, together with this, destined for eternal blessedness for keeping the commandment of God and subjecting his own imperfect, limited will to the infinitely perfect, all-wise, heavenly will of God—through inattention, self-love, and ingratitude, fell into the sin of disobedience, pride, and self-will, being deceived by the forbidden fruit. From that time mankind fell into the captivity of the first apostate from God, the devil, who turned the thoughts and hearts of people away from the one Author of being and of every good—from God—and turned their thoughts and hearts to earthly, perishable goods, themselves created by God for man’s benefit and enjoyment, and sowed in their hearts cunning, unbelief, ingratitude, malice, envy, a striving after the earthly and the perishable. The human soul is spiritual and simple. It cannot serve two masters: God and the world, incorruption and corruption, good and evil; if it loves the world, it is at enmity with God: for love of this world is enmity with God (Jac 4:4). To turn man away from love for God, for holiness, and for righteousness, the enemy cunningly and forcibly directs the thoughts and heart of the thoughtless, passion-ridden person toward the world—toward earthly, unclean love, toward earthly glitter, toward earthly, especially feminine, pleasure, toward earthly beauty. Therefore those who sincerely wish to serve and please God must despise worldly pleasures, worldly wealth, worldly adornments, and turn their whole heart to heavenly, higher pleasures, to heavenly, incorruptible beauty, to the light that never sets.

Immeasurably precious is the human soul, as created in the image and likeness of God, with the inalienable gift of reason, freedom, and immortality, destined to attain a free, firm striving toward the good and toward the Source of all good, truth, and righteousness—God—toward perfect devotion to Him and unending blessedness. But it did not keep the image of God whole, distorted it, and lost the likeness of God through the delusion of sin, self-will, and disobedience to God, and gave itself over to the seducing serpent, who disfigured it and made it like himself. Man fell deeply and became estranged from God, his Creator, fell into idolatry and into every passion of flesh and spirit, merged with the world, became a slave of corruption and sin, turned his gaze away from heaven, for which he was destined, and brought upon himself a curse, every sickness, misfortune, sorrow, and, in the end, temporal and eternal death.

The Lord, who made man in His own holy, sinless image and likeness, wished him, through his obedience to the Creator and his faithfulness in small things, to be strengthened in a good disposition, and to attain a perfection and an unshakable firmness, and to become unyielding toward sin. But the devil, having grown proud against God and having plotted against his own Creator, made the human race a partaker in his own pride and malice, and strives to embitter it and to make it foul in thought, feeling, word, and deed, and to tear it away from God forever.

1) The devil as the chief cause of the Fall. The devil’s relation to man: the enemy’s temptations and his defilement of the whole of human nature

The devil pursues us with persistence, constancy, and violence—with every kind of sin and with foul, cunning, and blasphemous thoughts—and with pride, and haughtiness, and bitterness, and hatred of neighbor, or contempt and loathing, cunning, malicious joy at others’ misfortune, envy, hardheartedness, stinginess and love of money, intemperance, drunkenness and theft, base flattery, indulgence and connivance at sin, laziness, despondency, unbelief, little faith, murmuring, despair, unfaithfulness, treachery, betrayal, slander and false witness, reviling and abuse, foul speech, blasphemy, mockery. How much must a Christian struggle against every sin, come to hate it, and strive to love God, to whom he has become a stranger through the repetition of sin—and to love virtue, which he once disregarded, despised, and mocked in those who did good. Turn away from evil, and do good.

All the intentions of the adversary, the enemy, tend toward this: to corrupt human nature with various lusts and passions, to defile it, to remove it from God, the Source of life, to put it to death, and to make it an eternal prey of hell, just as he himself became its first inhabitant. So, take note, the enemy corrupted mankind already at the beginning, before the flood, with every kind of fornication, with every kind of sin, and God brought the flood upon the earth to deliver future generations from a still greater overflowing of fornication and every sin. So too, even now, the devil corrupts people chiefly through fornication of every kind.

The holy people of God, having renounced the world and every attachment, thereby mocked the world and the prince of this world, the devil, who reigns in the hearts of people given over to the passion-ridden flesh and to the adulterous and sinful world; for people have turned aside from the path leading to the eternal kingdom, through the passions. «Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God» (Jac 4:4), says the Apostle. Even during our own prayer, the enemy often brings people down with thoughts and desires of money, of pleasures, or of the honors of this world, breaks up their prayer, and mocks both man and God.

The devil strives ceaselessly, in our thoughts and in sinful desires, to blaspheme every work of God, to pervert our whole life, to overturn it, to turn it, so to speak, upside down—and to prevent every saving intention of God concerning us from being fulfilled, and, in general, to corrupt our whole life, to debase it, and to make it worthless, foul, worthy not of God the Creator, but of the devil. What diligence a person must apply to himself and to the commandments of God, every day and every hour, to overthrow the wiles of the man-slaying serpent, to do the will of God diligently, and to attain his own great destiny—union with God through righteousness and holiness, and eternal blessedness! For this reason the way is narrow that leads to life, and few there are who find it; and, on the contrary, the way is broad and the gate wide that leads to destruction (Mt. 7:13-14). And which thoughtful, sensible person will not weep over this, and lament his own life? How much unrighteousness there is on earth, how much hardheartedness, unmercifulness, love of gain, pride, ambition, luxury, vanity, contempt, indifference to grief, need, sickness, misfortune; how much cunning, how much scheming against one’s neighbor, to crush him, to destroy him, and to take his place; how much intemperance, drunkenness, marital infidelity, fornication, extortion, cunning, unbelief, little faith, murmuring, despair, extreme poverty and want, suicide, murder, plunder, theft, strife, and every sin! Earthly life sometimes seems a very hell. This is what sin has done, and does; how the devil, and those who obey him, do mischief in the world! The kingdom of God suffers violence, and the violent take it by force (Mt 11:12). Seek out, then, these violent seekers! How few, how few of them there are!

Our cunning adversary has fearfully perverted our own nature through sin, giving man his own unclean mind, an unclean heart and unclean desires, a cunning and evil will, cunning eyes, cunning hearing, and every sense, and has clothed the whole soul in his own unclean, foul-smelling garment of sin. How much labor upon himself a person needs, how much constant attention to himself, unceasing prayer, tears and the most sincere weeping, and sighs from the depth of the soul, and fervent cries, to be delivered from such a state of soul! And meanwhile the enemy strives, by every means, to darken, to blind the eyes of a person’s soul, so that he may not see his own fearsome, lamentable condition, and may continue carelessly to commit every kind of lawlessness, in which a sinful person often dies without repentance, thus becoming the prey of the enemy and of the eternal fire.

The property of sin (by the devil’s own intention) is to pervert everything, to make one understand, picture, imagine, undertake, speak, and act in a distorted way—in general, to pervert, as far as possible, the moral order, or the laws established by God, the Maker of all things. So the devil has perverted people’s concept of God, and taught them a senseless idolatry, which still exists among many peoples to this day; so he has contrived, through cunning and proud people, to pervert the God-revealed faith of Christ, giving birth to many heresies and schisms, dividing Christians into many discordant camps, hating the one true Christian, Orthodox faith in the world, and, even among the Orthodox themselves, has produced, and continues to produce, little faith, unbelief, schisms, and absurd teachings, of the kind of Tolstoyism, Pashkovism, Stundism, or coldness toward the faith and the Church. He, the devil, has perverted the concept of the purpose and goal of life, has turned the gaze of many Christians away from heaven and eternal life, and has fixed their gaze and hearts only on this temporal, testing, preparatory life, which many count as the only life, as though the life to come did not exist; and from this he has bound people’s gaze and hearts to temporal goods—perishable and swiftly passing—to food, drink, clothing, to earthly distinctions, to perishable wealth, to material, bodily beauty; he has perverted, in man, the purpose and goal of the five bodily senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; he has taught them to look with temptation upon the organs and members of the body and upon the senses: he has perverted sight, to look tempted and adulterously upon many things; he has taught taste excessive delicacy and drunkenness, or senseless, harmful tobacco-smoking; he has made touch passionate, unclean; he has accustomed hearing to indulge itself with light, worldly musical sounds that weaken the soul; he has perverted people’s relations with one another, making many stingy toward their neighbors, greedy for gain, hardhearted, lustful, evil, cunning, ill-wishing, malicious. And from this it is the holy duty of every Christian to attend ceaselessly to his own thoughts and feelings—to bridle ceaselessly his own vain and sinful thoughts, desires, and intentions, to bridle his hearing, touch, taste, sight, smell, his own passions, and to use all his senses to the glory of God and for his own good.

By what means, by what creature, does our bodiless enemy—the enemy of God—not strive to tempt us and to present every creature of God, pure and beautiful, in a perverted, unclean, and senseless form! He mocks even the bright sun, all-joyous, all-quickening; he blasphemes the saints of God who are in heaven, as is said in the Apocalypse—and he perverts human thoughts, not infrequently, to the point of monstrosity and ugliness—as, for instance, in Leo Tolstoy, who has utterly perverted the sense of the Gospel; he mocks every animal: bird, fish, four-footed beast, insect, creeping thing, every plant, heaven and earth; but how he mocks the living temple of God—man, his soul and his body—in countless lusts and whims, especially those committed in secret, of which it is shameful even to speak! How he mocks in thoughts, in feelings, in desires, in memories, in imagination, in senseless outpourings of words and every senseless and foolish act, in every kind of corruption, in murder and suicide! And after all this, you sin, you make a jest of sin, you love sin, you give yourself over to it with your whole being! See how sin has perverted the whole meaning of our life, the purpose of everything in the world, turning means into ends, natural impulses and strivings into a goal in themselves! What a thing sin is! How monstrous, how senseless, how death-dealing; how can one not hate it, not abhor it, not turn away from it with every power of soul and body—how can one not love and not fulfill, with one’s whole heart, the law of God, the whole word of God, and strive to fulfill it to the very letter, with all exactness, and to die for it if need be, as the martyrs and all the saints did!

The bodiless enemies ceaselessly teach people sinful corruption, that they may defile the soul and body without ceasing—they do everything that removes us from God, from heaven, from heavenly blessings and eternal life. The holy servants of God, being wise, discerning, and attentive to the Lord’s teaching, despised the passions of their own flesh, and all fleshly, earthly reasoning, and all fleshly passions—and turned all their attention, all their contemplation, toward God and toward heavenly, eternal blessings—and made their mind and heart and will heavenly, and made their body serve fully their rational and immortal soul and God, their Maker. To take the human soul captive to sin, the devil uses, as his means to this, delusion, temptation, sinful daydreaming, a strong drawing, a violence toward sin. A person must look to God, the Savior, repent, pray, and overcome these drawings from the very first touch of sin upon the heart.

There is no absurdity, no abomination, no vile monstrosity, no madness, no depravity, no blasphemy, no perversion of the natural order, that Satan would not put into the mind and heart of man, in order to trouble him, to defile him, to terrify him, to strike him with despondency and despair, or to drive him to commit some sin, however senseless and murderous. Many are compelled to weep from his blasphemies, which insistently force their way into mind and heart. He who understands what is happening blows and spits upon the cunning spirits who whisper such absurdities to him, and overcomes them by the name of Jesus and the power of the Cross.

There is nothing in human thought, in the heart and will or free choice of man—nothing so unclean, foul, cunning, monstrous, senseless, foolish, evil, envious, proud, insolent, deadly to the soul—that the devil, maddened by malice, pride, and cunning, would not suggest and instill; there is nothing most holy that he would not blaspheme; there is not a single member of the human body over which he would not mock, or about which he would not instill the most senseless, foul, blasphemous thoughts; there is no object, animal, plant, fabric, metal, or mineral to which he would not give birth to the most senseless attachment, only to distract, estrange, and remove the thought and heart of man from God and draw them to himself—to defile, to corrupt the soul and body of man! An example of this is found in ancient and modern idolatry, and in the various idolatrous forms of modern Christianity, with its spectacles, its fine arts, in which human, especially feminine, plastic nudity plays the leading role—and the richer, the higher, the more distinguished a person stands in civil rank, the more he sets before his own eyes and those of his companions, friends, and household servants these idols of the beautiful, and worships them. O fornicating mankind, using the elegance, beauty, and perfection of God’s creation as an occasion for satisfying its own passions, and not for the glory of God! Alas for human shortsightedness, seeing nothing beyond its own nose! For what will become, if not today, then tomorrow, of this beauty of the human body? It will become a foul-smelling, monstrous corpse and food for worms, earth and dust. And where, then, is the soul, which served this delusion, which defiled itself with this delusion? For nothing unclean and impure shall enter the kingdom of God.

With what sins has the enemy of the human race not corrupted, dishonored, and defiled our own nature, created in the image of God, holy, beautiful, fitting, pure, undefiled, worthy of every wonder? And behold, he continues, even now, to corrupt it, to disfigure it, to distort it with every kind of sin, with foul thoughts, with intemperance, drunkenness, fornication, to infect it with countless sicknesses, and to make our souls and bodies instruments of his own impurity, abomination, malice, envy, and mockery! Blessed is he who has come to know the wiles of the enemy against himself, and resists him by every means, struggling against every passion and overcoming them by the grace of God!

In place of mutual love, the enemy has sown in people ill will, hatred, malice, envy, malicious joy at another’s misfortune, the harboring of grudges; or, in place of pure love, he has planted in people an unclean, fleshly love, passionate, corrupted, hostile to God; he has made every faculty an instrument of sin, and not of righteousness—of evil, and not of good—of cunning, and not of simplicity and truth; and therefore all of us must strive to become like the good God, and not like His, and our own, evil adversary.

The bodiless enemy, in his ruinous actions against people, strives cunningly to imitate the Lord and to replace His actions and His blessings with his own counterfeits; so, in place of the sweetness of God’s grace, he has devised his own pleasures—fleshly pleasures in their most intensified form, or a surfeit of worldly delights; in place of the divine, sweetest, incorruptible, spiritual love, he has devised a fleshly, unclean love, corrupting soul and body, separating from God, cooling toward God—such is the passion of fornication—and thus he has perverted everything without limit, in order to oppose God in everything and to hold people continually in his own delusion and darkness.

The destroyer-enemy, having taken man captive by fleshly desire, by the desire of the belly and of divine knowledge, has planted in his soul and body countless seeds of the passions, having taken the human heart captive by attachment to the visible world, having turned its heart’s eyes away from God and from the contemplation of the beauty of the unseen world and of the various virtues, so that man is, as it were, bound to this present world by a thousand strong ropes, or chains, which he cannot break without the special assistance of the grace of God, which is obtained through repentance, the prayer of faith, and many tears.

The bodiless evildoer, the most cunning, foul, and evil-smelling Satan, strives to present every thing in the world—man, every animal, bird, fish, insect, and creeping thing—in a perverted, tempting, seductive, blasphemous, abominable, repulsive form, whereas all creation is perfect, pure, beautiful, fitting, and blameless.

Devilish malice is extremely cunning, quarrelsome, and invents countless false, senseless pretexts for hating one’s neighbor. Here anything serves as a pretext: an unattractive face, and, in particular, a nose, cheeks, or a chin—or crooked eyes; or a manner of speech (a lisp), for instance, the incorrect pronunciation of certain letters—«r,» «l,» and others—or a nasal way of speaking; or poverty, and frequent requests for help; an incorrect tone of voice; or nationality, for instance, Jewish. In general, the enemy invents a multitude of pretexts, none of which can serve as a real cause for hatred, but only an imagined, fanciful one. O, how senseless and hateful to God is sin, how disturbing, how ruinous! Deliver me, O Lord, from every devilish malice, and grant me to love without partiality, in a manner pleasing to God, without passion!

How cunningly, unnoticed by very many, continually, forcibly, and ruinously the devil works within us, drawing us into various passions, covering his own trunk and his own tail with our self-love, our love of pleasure, our self-pity, our self-preservation, our providing for the future, our thriftiness against a rainy day, for our family, for our old age, for infirmities and various contingencies! So it is that we see an unattractive, or a sick, or a crudely dressed person, and turn away from him; or we see a well-dressed, handsome, young person, with regular, elegant features, and are drawn to him, are favorably disposed toward him. What is this, if not a deception of ourselves, if not a crying injustice of ours toward our neighbor, whose soul is equally honorable with our own soul, by creation, by redemption, by the image of God traced in it by the Creator? Or we see a poor man, a beggar, one hungry, naked, in need of a place of employment, and we pass him by, are cold toward his poverty, his deprivations, his sorrows and griefs, though we have the material means to help him, or to find him a place of employment—and we do not help him, we grudge him money, food, clothing, and payment for lodging? Is this normal, is this just? If we are one body of Christ, and, individually, members of the body of Christ, how is it that we do not sympathize with one another, but grudge material means, which are nothing in comparison with the person himself!

All of us must understand the designs against us of the bodiless enemies, wise in evil and in leading us into temptation. These designs, and the whole purpose of the enemy’s unceasing wiles against us, are as follows: to defile man, to corrupt soul and body, to cool his love toward God and neighbor, or to estrange him from God and from one another, to turn him away from holy love and every virtue, to trouble the soul, to bind it and take it captive; to set it against God and the Church, to make it like himself, and to cast it forever into hell, into the eternal torment prepared for himself and his angels. Do Christians know this, and do they remember it?

Extremely cunning and subtle are the wiles of the all-destroying spirits of malice and cunning. With every effort, and with cunning, they strive, before all else, to destroy in us love and respect for our neighbors, suggesting to us cunning, unworthy, contemptuous, and blasphemous thoughts concerning our neighbors, with whom we have some manner of dealing; they present in a neighbor some outward or inward, spiritual, defect, and, on the basis of it, suggest to us a feeling of ill will or aversion toward him; and if the person with whom we speak or have business is a woman, young and beautiful, they arouse fleshly lust toward her and bring her down to the level of a delectable object, to be enjoyed; they suggest that we notice, in our subordinates or fellow workers, every failing, with the utmost strictness and captiousness toward them; but toward our superiors and the powerful, they suggest flattery and servility. Deliver, O Lord, all of us from the enemy’s delusion, and teach us to overcome all the wiles of the bodiless enemies.

How many pretexts, imagined or real, the bodiless enemy presents in our thoughts, for ill will against our neighbor—there is no numbering them; and, by every means, with insolent persistence, he compels us toward vexation, bitterness, and hatred; he strives to present, in a gloomy and hateful light, everything in another—his voice, his gait, the expression of his face, his physical shortcomings. Christian love covers all things, looks upon all things indulgently, with a good disposition of heart; but enmity and pride find fault with everything, pervert everything in a person, and present it in a repulsive light.

In sinners given over to various passions, the effort and striving of the enemy, the devil, to bring them down into the depths of evil is very noticeable, so that afterward it becomes extremely difficult for them to come up out of this depth into the light of God. And every one of us, in sinning, has noticed that the enemy strives to cast us too into the very depth of evil; and the abyss of malice is boundlessly great. The devil cast the apostle of Christ, Judas, one of the Twelve, into the abyss of malice. Such is the cunning, guile, and malice of the enemy! So too, even now, he casts thousands of people, in every walk of life, into every kind of evil. Watch how carefully you walk (Eph 5:15).

The devil attacks nothing so much, blasphemes nothing so much, defiles nothing so much, mocks nothing so much as the generative members of man and woman; for this purpose there exist, in human speech, special foul, abusive, unprintable names, by which these members are reviled; for this purpose there are every kind of foul, cunning, unclean thought, desire, insolent, cunning, unclean glance; for this purpose there are novels and every sort of light reading; for this purpose there are tempting pictures and statues, portraying naked women; for this purpose there is the theater, the ballet; for this purpose there is dancing with a bared bosom.

O most holy law of childbearing, manifesting the boundless wisdom and goodness of God! How worthy of honor you are, how deserving of reverence, of wonder, of thanksgiving, and of strict care toward oneself! And yet the enemy, who corrupted the human race in the beginning through the eating of the forbidden fruit, strives from earliest youth, almost from infancy, to corrupt us precisely through the members of generation, and how many unfortunate people, who have tasted this sin in their earliest youth and suffer for it their whole life long, perish through it!

A small tree is easily pulled up out of the ground, but a large one with difficulty. The devil, in a certain demon-possessed man, at the moment of his expulsion, cried out: I cannot go out, I have grown, I have become large—yet at the persistent prayers he did go out. You see: even the evil spirits who take up residence in a person grow and become strong with time and habit.

2) The world and the flesh as the devil’s instruments for the temptation and enslavement of man

A. The World: Attachment to the Vain and Perishable World

To root out of the human heart the love of God and the expectation of the blessed and endless life to come, the enemy strives ceaselessly to wound our heart with love of the world and its allurements, especially with the pleasure of the loins, the pleasures of the belly, with earthly treasures, with earthly glitter, or with a fond love for one’s own flesh, with self-pity, self-sparing, self-indulgence—thus is the love of God, who alone is worthy of all our love, trampled underfoot by people in every way. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength… So did the holy servants of God love Him, having renounced every worldly, sinful, material, fleshly, swiftly passing love, corrupting to soul and body.

God draws our souls upward, while the enemy draws them downward, to the earth; every human pleasure and passion, every sinful drawing, is directed toward the earth; and by the passionate strivings of the soul toward earthly, so-called goods, or by its indifference to them, it is easy to know whether our soul is attached to God or to the earth, to good or to evil. So, for instance, the theater, for all the praise given it by worldly people, is an earthly and sinful pleasure, a pagan one, because it has as its object and its purpose purely earthly pleasures, and leads no one to God, except negatively, through the recognition of the entire vanity of theatrical performances and play-acting. The Holy Church is God’s own institution on earth, for heaven, and heavenly. Every worldly writer has as his subject only the satisfaction of earthly feelings and impulses, and rarely has as his subject Christian morality, Christian teaching—this is, for them, a foreign realm; they, like actors and actresses, speak from the world, and the world listens to them. The whole delusion of sin, the whole delusion of the devil, consists in this: to draw away the minds and hearts of Christians from heaven and their heavenly homeland, from the holiness and incorruption of the blessings prepared for us, and to bind and chain them to the earth, to earthly joys and amusements, to earthly love, to earthly corruption.

On the senseless and blind attachment of people to this temporal life, and their disregard of the life eternal. By the soul’s passionate attachment to this present life, its wholeness, its peace, its freedom, its health are broken—the soul which by nature strives toward its own First Principle, God; sorrows, griefs, and wounds are caused by it; the soul falls into endless vanity and falls away from God. The love of this world is enmity with God. If anyone loves the world, the Father’s love is not in him. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1Cor 6:12).

Remember firmly that the love of this world is enmity, a strong enmity, against God: for this love is unclean, adulterous, passionate, false, devilish, separating from God and delivering us over to the enemy, the cunning spirit. A single moment of worldly attachment to someone or something—and the soul is taken captive and separated from God. See how dangerous it is to attach oneself passionately to anyone or anything, even for a moment. How watchful the Christian ought to be! And rightly so: for what does the Christian owe to Christ God? Everything—every blessing, the greatest, the priceless, both eternal and temporal; eternal redemption from sin, from the curse, and from death; eternal blessedness.

Solomon, having tasted every earthly pleasure of health, beauty, power, wealth, luxury, earthly splendor, and sensual delight, came at last to the conviction that everything on earth is vanity—youth, beauty, wealth, greatness, and glory—and that the whole good of man consists in the fear of God and the keeping of His commandments.

No sooner does an attachment to earthly goods begin in the soul—or, more accurately, to a brilliant or beautiful corruption, whether it be a beautiful woman’s face, a gleaming metal, a mineral, gleaming clothing, or a head ornament—than a secret falling away from God, the Source of life, takes place; a coldness, an indifference toward Him begins, a debasing and an offense against Him, and the soul begins to feel confusion, sorrow, anguish, death; but as soon as it sincerely and deeply recognizes its own madness in this attachment, and the perishability of all earthly beauty, of all glitter, of all earthly glory, and becomes convinced that our life is in God alone, that He alone is the true good, that toward Him alone every desire of the heart and all love must be directed, as toward the eternal, living good, as toward the first and unfading, eternal, holy beauty—then it will revive, will feel within itself peace, freedom, boldness, and a full spiritual satisfaction. What is there for me in heaven? And what have I desired from You on earth? My heart and my flesh have given out; God of my heart, and my portion is God forever (Ps 72:25-26).

How many temptations there are from attachment to feminine beauty, to money, to costly clothing, to head ornaments, to every person and thing to which the heart becomes attached. But nothing perishable in the world gives the heart peace and life! The Lord alone is our life and our rest, our blessedness, our freedom and our breadth, our strength, our light, our boldness, our protection and our deliverance.

Glory to You, O Lord!

Why are we so often deluded by earthly things? Because we love the flesh and the world very much, and take no care for the immortal soul; because we love to eat sweetly, to drink, to dress elegantly, and do not occupy ourselves with the contemplation of God and spiritual reflection.

He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters (Lk 11:23). You read novels, newspapers, and in them you read a good deal of empty talk. Are you with God at that time, or not? Certainly not with God, for God is not present in earthly vanity; which means you are against God, and this is sin. Do you gather the grace of God as you read the empty chatter of light books? No—you squander the grace which you have acquired, if indeed you have acquired any, in prayer, in the contemplation of God, or in reading the word of God and soul-saving books, or in pious conversation, or in good deeds. And this is sin. For every idle word that men speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment (Mt 12:36).

The energy of a person’s heart ought to be directed wholly toward God, toward love for Him, toward the fulfillment of His holy commandments, toward the struggle against evil, or sins, of every kind, toward the preservation of the soul’s peace, meekness, humility, and freedom of spirit, toward sympathy for mankind in its weaknesses, its errors, its losses, its failures, its sorrows and sicknesses—and not toward self-love, not toward the love of money and sensual delight, toward gluttony and immoderate pleasures, toward games, spectacles, horse races, bicycle riding. Meanwhile the enemy strives to direct the whole energy of our heart and will toward vanity, toward the passions of flesh and spirit, toward the love of the world and everything in the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1Jn 2:16), and thus continually steals from man the most precious good of all—the salvation of the soul. God alone is worthy of all our love, of a total submission to His holy and life-giving commandments. A thousandfold, without number, sin deceives us, casting us into senseless sins and into ruin—and we, like powerless captives, continually labor for it, through fleshly sensual delight and attachment to the world. Look at the saints, how they lived and pleased God and saved their souls!

It is not well, it is unwise, of me, to search for a long time for some object, laid down somewhere and forgotten, grieving in my heart over its loss or my failure to find it, while at the same time abandoning the Lord in thought and heart. A lost and unfound object becomes, for a time, an idol of the heart, an object of attachment and regret. Everything in the world is vanity and a vexation of the spirit; one thing alone is needful: God, and everything holy. The Lord alone is our life, our sustenance; to Him be glory and honor and dominion.

Today there is need of strong and fervent-souled Chrysostoms, Gregories, Basils, for worldly, weed-like speech has gained great strength in print, since who does not write, print, and read today? Everyone is literate, educated; literally, a whole sea of words pours out onto paper, and, besides, is illustrated with pictures—and sometimes with what kind! One reader gazes in fascination, while another turns away, or tears out a page.

B. The Flesh: The Involuntary Bondage of Fallen Man before the Sinful Law of the Passion-Ridden Flesh

Why do we not amend ourselves, why do we lie to ourselves and to God? From sinful self-love, and especially from a love for our own passion-ridden flesh, from attachment to the visible, the tangible, the perishable, the temporal, and from unbelief in the unseen. Why does the enemy overcome people, making them slaves of senseless lusts? From attachment to that same flesh, from little faith, and from an inability to pray.

Our passion-ridden flesh has its own sinful, senseless, ruinous, devilish law; it wants, and strives, to fulfill everything contrary to the spirit, to God, to righteousness, to reason, to truth. The spirit demands service to God and neighbor in spirit and in truth; the flesh demands service to itself, to its own self-love, to its own lusts, to laziness, gluttony, love of gain, sensual delight or fornication, pride, ambition, vanity, and the rest; and yet it is necessary to fulfill the works of virtue, to serve the sick without seeking reward, to bring them into communion with God through partaking of the Holy Mysteries or through prayer for them to God. One must become more spiritual and indulge the flesh less, eat and drink less, not be stingy in spending one’s substance on works of charity, and grow rich toward God, rather than lay up treasure for oneself (Lk 12:21).

All our sins arise chiefly from self-love, pride, self-pity, self-indulgence, love of the flesh; in the flesh nests the cause of every evil, just as it arose there in the first humans. And therefore, to begin and continue our own self-formation for God, self-denial is needed above all; the crucifixion of the flesh, with its passions and lusts, is needed. So did all our own venerable fathers do; they trained themselves, first of all, in self-restraint, vigilance, prayer, obedience, labor, meekness, humility; the martyrs did not spare even their own life for Christ’s sake.

«My daughter is severely demon-possessed» (Mt. 15:22). Our flesh is possessed by countless passions: fornication, drunkenness, malice, envy, self-will, stubbornness, freethinking, willfulness, laziness, love of gain, self-conceit, pride, base flattery, faintheartedness, hardheartedness.

The dogs—this is us, barking at our own Lord, at the Church of God, with our own murmuring, our various blasphemies, like the schismatics, the Tolstoyans, the Pashkovites, and their like.

I notice every day that the flesh, or the old man, within me is very strong and tenacious of life, to the extreme detriment of my own soul, enslaved by the flesh. I am inclined, every day and every hour, to self-pity, self-indulgence, laziness, sleep, delicacies, gluttony and overeating, cunning, pride, contempt for my neighbors, disgust toward the sick and the unattractive, the crooked, the blind, the lame, those with skin diseases or blemishes, the deformed, the coarse, the mad; I am inclined to vexation, bitterness, irritation, malice, the harboring of grudges, vindictiveness, malicious joy at another’s misfortune, ill will, to secret and open fornication, to lustful thoughts and desires, to senseless, blasphemous, tempting, cunning thoughts, to envy and ill will, to murmuring, impatience, disobedience, insubordination, willfulness, greed, stinginess, despondency, faintheartedness, fear, despair, the condemning of others. One must crucify the flesh daily, with its passions and lusts, and train the soul, created in the image of God. How, then, must it be restored, cleansed, and adorned, enlightened, strengthened in virtue?

The strongest obstacle for man to the love of God lies in our self-love and in the sensual delight and love of possessions of our own flesh, our old man; and this is why the Gospel teaches us to crucify our own flesh with its passions and lusts, and to hold the flesh in contempt, as passing away, and to give diligence to the immortal soul. If people knew and remembered how our enemy the devil is driven, and hastens, to destroy us at every moment, they would not slumber and grow lazy, and neglect their own amendment and salvation, but would watch, pray, repent, and hasten to do good deeds at every hour.

The strongest obstacle for man to the love of God lies in our self-love and in the sensual delight and love of possessions of our own flesh, our old man; and this is why the Apostles teach us to crucify our own flesh with its passions and lusts (Gal 5:24), to hold the flesh in contempt, as passing away, and to give diligence to the soul—a thing immortal—as did the holy strugglers, for instance, the venerable Alexis, Man of God, John the Hut-Dweller, Paul of Thebes, and all the martyrs, the venerable ones, and the fools for Christ’s sake.

A person given over to fleshly pleasures seeks an occasion to satisfy himself with them through sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste, memory, imagination; his whole soul, his whole heart, gives itself over to earthly, fleshly, coarse, corrupting pleasure, and he departs entirely from God, grows cold toward Him, despises Him, counts Him, His holiness, His righteousness, His peace, His breadth, and life of heart, as nothing, giving himself over entirely to the enchantment of this delusion, fulfilling wholly the will of the enemy, the devil, entwining himself with him, becoming one spirit with him. He then loses the character of a rational being—a man, a Christian—and becomes brutish, irrational, unfit, wild, having perverted his own nature from a rational one into an irrational one, from a reasoning one into an unreasoning one. So harmful and so contrary to God, to common sense, and to Christian truth and righteousness, is attachment to earthly pleasures! Deliver, O God, every person from such a manner of life!

First, man, created in the image of God, degrades both himself and another to an extreme degree, making another person the object of his sensual delight, as a soulless thing, and himself the same; second, this love is absurd, because it is passionate and idle, lifeless, perverted, contrary to the intentions of the Creator; third, it is self-centered, narrow, and blind, for it concerns only one particular person, and only the lower part of that person’s being—the body—while the immortal soul is despised, and its true purpose of being—to glorify the Lord in every way, in righteousness and holiness—is perverted; it excludes every right love—love for God and for mankind, especially for the person in distress: the sick, the sorrowful, one in need of our sympathy, our love, our help. Further, it is always accompanied by sorrow and anguish, and not infrequently by death.

Through attachment to visible, fleshly, material beauty and sweetness, stirred up by the enemy in our minds and hearts, he strives, every day, to deprive us of the eternal, incorruptible, holy beauty and sweetness of God, and of communion with all the saints in the life to come. And therefore let a person here forsake fleshly sensual delight, and even the pleasure of looking upon fleshly beauty, which has corrupted the hearts of many and driven them out of their minds, turning their whole life upside down.

Where fleshly love begins, there true spiritual love ends, and real enmity toward God and toward people begins, even toward those closest to us; a husband who has fallen in love with another woman becomes an enemy and an adversary of his own family, and, indeed, loves even the guilty woman only in a brutish way, for the sake of vile pleasure.

Gluttony and love of pleasure produce bitter roots of ill will, pride, and contempt toward all who do not further, or who hinder, our own love of pleasure, or deprive us of it; toward those from whom there is no benefit, no advantage, or who do not attract us by their good looks and beauty; who suffer from sores and wounds, or give off a foul smell from them; who are crooked or lame, or who cause us trouble without giving us reward; the glutton would wish to turn everyone and everything into instruments, means, and objects of his own love of pleasure.

What was it that utterly depraved and brutalized the people before the flood, and the inhabitants of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and made them forget God? An excess in food and drink. What is it that depraves people today, brutalizes them morally, and makes them fall away from God and the Church? An excess in food and drink, the raging madness of the belly and the loins. Do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation (Eph 5:18).

Every excess in food and drink is accompanied by a weakening of the soul and a moral decline in its powers, a coldness toward God, toward prayer, toward every good deed, a decline of love for one’s neighbor, a loss of meekness, humility, sympathy for people, hardheartedness, a coarse manner toward the poor, an inclination to sleep, to fornication, and so forth. Much labor of prayer, many sighs and tears, are needed to restore a good relationship with God and neighbor, and to make the soul once again tender, sensitive toward God and neighbor. So does the soul fall through intemperance. Oh, how necessary is self-restraint for the Christian at every time! How harmful is intemperance!

The dominion of the belly, to which a person has grown accustomed to bringing rich offerings every day, is noticeable in all a person’s actions, and everywhere the belly contradicts him—in good deeds, in pious exercises, not infrequently in prayers, in visits to one’s neighbors; everyone and everything that does not serve the belly is, for a person given over to the belly, repugnant; and whoever and whatever satisfies it is pleasant. Such is the perversion of life that arises from the demands of an insatiable belly.

Wine, taken immoderately and at the wrong time, makes the soul powerless in its struggle with inward temptations; the soul then becomes easily subject to disturbance, to demonic fear—where there is no cause for fear; it is ashamed, where there is no cause for shame.

1) Fallen human nature and its properties

II. The Essence of the Fall, as the Perversion of Human Nature through Sin

Our fallen nature is most often inclined to sin through self-love, love of gain, gluttony, impatience, irritation, bitterness, insubordination, willfulness, pride, contempt, fornication, despondency, faintheartedness. Let each of us attend to himself, and continually hold his own thoughts, feelings, and impulses on a tight rein, and test his own inward and outward life against the Gospel of the Lord God.

Do you know what you yourselves are, in fact? You do not know. Here is what the Lord, who searches hearts and inward parts, says of you, and of all of us: «You do not know that you are wretched and pitiable, poor, blind, and naked» (Apok 3:17).

Our old man is utterly opposed to the new man: the old man has his own cunning sight, his own cunning hearing, a cunning and unclean touch, an unclean smell and taste, an imagination and memory that are cunning and unclean; a mind that is unclean, an unclean heart, and an unclean will; unclean intentions and undertakings; his whole activity is hostile to God, because it is full of self-love, self-indulgence, and self-interest.

Does not the Apostle Paul’s description of the morals of the people living in his own time apply also to our own time and to the people of today? He wrote of the people of that time as follows: they are filled with every unrighteousness—fornication, cunning, greed for gain, malice, hatred, envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are slanderers, backbiters, insolent, boastful, proud, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, treacherous, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful (Rom 1:29-31).

Every work of God in the world bears the mark of an inimitable wisdom, perfection, and beauty—especially the crown of God’s creation, man, of the male sex and the female. Every artist among men, distinguished by a high style of his own art, finds it extremely grievous and offensive when his own works are disregarded by others like himself, especially when they are distorted, disfigured, made to take on a wholly undesired appearance and coloring. What, then, must it be for the highest, the sole, the inimitable Artist—God—to see His own best creation, man, disfigured, distorted, defiled, corrupted in soul and body! What indignation, what righteous anger, do those people deserve who disfigure themselves, by their own sins and passions! The higher, the more gracious, the wiser the purpose and meaning the Creator has appointed for man, the more culpable is man, the more worthy is he of a righteous and great punishment from God, who has granted to all and to everything His own laws and rules, by which every creature must attain the purpose appointed by the Creator and Provider. Therefore man, created in the image of God and destined to be made like his Creator and to attain eternal, blessed life, must attain perfection in reason and in knowledge, keeping the commandments of God; and, since he is a being fallen through his own will, he must without fail repent of his own falls into sin, and amend himself, with God’s help, through his own diligence and zeal in doing good deeds. The devil, knowing well the purpose of man and the beauty of man’s God-formed soul and body, resists with all his might God’s own intention for man and his own purpose, and strives to defile, to disfigure, to corrupt him with every kind of sin—especially fornication and intemperance, unbelief, freethinking, false belief, cunning, every kind of worldly attachment, in general an attachment to perishable things, envy, luxury, love of gain, hardheartedness, and a heart turned to stone, insensible to everything! Let each of us, then, understand that we must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling! For it is God who works in us both to will and to do, of His own good pleasure, according to the good will of God (Phil 2:13).

Senseless sinners have put out their own lamps, given them by God—reason and conscience—and trampled underfoot, like unreasoning beasts, every gift of nature, the whole wealth of God’s grace.

In every earthly and fleshly deprivation, people grieve, sometimes beyond measure; but when they are plainly deprived of the grace of God through their own sins, few then grieve, and they often count this loss as nothing. What extreme blindness, what a delusion, in fallen man! Which is more important: the soul or the body, a fleshly loss or a loss of soul? The loss of dust, or the loss of eternal life, the loss of the soul’s peace, of righteousness, of light, of freedom, of the mercy of God? O foolish and blind people, who, through their own madness and thoughtlessness, lose the one thing needful, out of a mad attachment to the flesh and to the world! Come to your senses at last, and cast off your attachment to the world—for the world will soon abandon you, if you do not abandon it first. Cling to the Lord with your whole heart, and He will never abandon you. This is the eternal and unalterable truth: «If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. Whoever wishes to save his own soul will lose it, but whoever loses his own soul for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it» (Mt 8:34-35).

I am struck, on the one hand, by the greatness of God’s gifts to mankind, in the immortalizing, the cleansing, the sanctifying, the renewing, and the deifying of its nature; and, on the other hand, by the cunning of man, his pride, his unbelief, his ingratitude before God, his frivolity, his deliberate religious ignorance, his mockery of faith and of miracles; his immersion in sensuality, drunkenness, and the impurity of fornication; malice, envy, disobedience to parents and to authorities, disrespect and contempt toward his elders. A decisive change is needed, a rebirth, a renewal, another manner of thought, of belief, of feeling, of deed.

Is there any thought, however senseless, foolish, mad, unclean, wild, is there any feeling, however senseless, mad, dishonest, cunning, corrupted, and any impulse of the will, however senseless, unreasonable, harmful, and ruinous, of which our fallen soul has not been a partaker, even for a minute, even for a single instant? Our soul has experienced every kind of spiritual wind, storm, and stench, on account of the natural corruption reigning in our hearts, and from the influence of evil, unclean, senseless, cunning spirits. And the holy Fathers, too, grieved bitterly and suffered, in their own life and in their own writings, over the delusions, the floods of every foul, cunning, and blasphemous thought, and the demonic storms they experienced in life: for, because of our sins, the demons are permitted to tempt us by every means, so that the true dispositions and impulses of our souls might be revealed, and a firm hope in God might appear and be formed in us, and every virtue be established in us.

The divine principle in man—the soul—is utterly suppressed in one given over to the passions, for instance, to drunkenness, fornication, pride, envy, hatred, love of gain, laziness, despondency, despair, vanity, ambition, cunning, falsehood.

O sinful soul, blind, corrupted, defiled! How cunning you are, how unrighteous, how lustful! You gaze at the beauty of a face and desire it sensually, paying no attention to the image of God, with which the soul is adorned and by which the human countenance too is made beautiful, and thereby you mock God, our own Archetype. You see a person who is crooked, blind, or lame, or sick, or unattractive of face—and you turn away from him, despise him, do not love him. O disciple of the devil! Why do you do the will of this deceiver and murderer of mankind? Why do you mock the image of God? Look not on the outward appearance, but on the inward, on the immortal soul, and honor every person equally, without regard to your own greedy, sensual flesh, as God has commanded you. Every soul, as the image of God, is beautiful; but the perishable body receives every kind of deformity as a punishment, or a lesson, or for the salvation of the soul.

You are a majestic and proud being, smoking with your own mind and your own various talents, or with your own beauty and strength, your arts, your knowledge, your undertakings and important affairs; reflect on what your frail body consists of: earth, water, air, fire, and a small amount of light, and a countless multitude of tiny worms and infusoria; indeed, you are a worm, and consist entirely of worms, which, if you wish, you can see with the naked eye, or through a magnifying glass; and after death you become, in your whole body, a prey to worms. This is your physical side, which you flatter so, which you preserve beyond measure, which you cherish, pamper, and satisfy in its every whim. Cease to be proud, humble yourself before the incorruptible, eternal Creator, and be not deceived by the visible, but strive, with mind and heart and your whole being, toward the incorruptible, the unseen, the eternal, and stand in reverence before Him who made you a twofold being, spiritual and material, incorruptible and perishable, and give diligence to your immortal soul, and cut off the body—that is, its whims.

2) Sin, its essence and origin

Sin is a senseless, mad monster, flattering, enticing, hostile to God, disgracing and killing the soul. Every Christian must know its qualities firmly, and struggle against it, turn away from it, not yield to it. «For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand» (Eph 6:12-13).

«Rust destroys» (Mt. 6:19). By rust is understood sin—attachment to visible goods: beauty, sweetness, glory, wealth, luxury. Let us not cling to the creature in place of the Creator. «The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are not seen are eternal» (2Cor 4:18).

Sin is lawlessness, a rebellion against God, a refusal to submit to Him, and a separation from God; sin is senselessness, madness, absurdity, monstrousness, darkness, the corruption and enfeeblement of soul and body, a deceptive sweetness, a demonic stench, a raging madness, depravity, shame, disgrace, confusion, a hostile storm, a chill bringing the soul into numbness; a devilish wave, a demonic violence; bonds that bind the soul, captivity to the enemy, demonic darkening, a torment of soul, temporal and eternal death. If sin is so senseless, so mad, so death-dealing, why do we not abhor it, why do we not cease to obey it, to do its will? Because of its great delusion, its enchantment, its ceaseless deceit, because of the temporary sweetness and temporary satisfaction it gives to the self-love of sinful man, because of the darkening cast over us by sin. So there is a delusion of pride, a delusion of malice, a delusion of drunkenness, a delusion of the belly, a delusion of the loins, or of fornication, a delusion of laziness and idleness, a delusion of sleep, a delusion of willfulness and disobedience, a delusion of the love of money and gold, a delusion of hardheartedness, a delusion of vanity, of luxury, a delusion of the horse races, a delusion of spectacles, a delusion of art—especially of genre painting, when it puts on display the nakedness of one of the two sexes of the human race. Against such a manifold delusion of sin, the Christian faith requires a constant, unremitting, unrelenting struggle—and, to overcome it, a special, gracious help from God, called upon by the one being tempted; but to receive this help from God, a firm faith in Him is needed, in His swift, all-powerful help; only in Him can every sinful delusion be overcome; and after victory over sin, the soul receives peace from God, a feeling of inward satisfaction, and is filled with gratitude to God for the victory and for having stood firm in His righteousness.

The one who overcomes will inherit all things, and I will be God to him, and he will be a son to Me, says the Lord, the Author of our contest (Apok 21:7). To the one who overcomes I will give to sit on My throne, just as I overcame and sat with My Father on His throne (Apok 3:21)

Sin is an inveterate sickness, a wound, an impurity, a corruption, a separation from God; it has sent its countless roots deep into the whole of human nature; and no one can heal this fearsome sickness, this corruption, except the Lord Himself, who came down from heaven, clothed Himself in our body, lived on earth, suffered for us, and died, giving us His own most pure Body and Blood as food and drink, as the All-wise Physician.

By what does sin take us captive every day? By our own excessive love for ourselves, and our contempt, pride, and lack of love for our neighbor; by delusion, darkening, blinding, and violence, for in itself sin is monstrousness, senselessness, extreme harm and ruin, torment, a shameful captivity, slavery to the most inhuman and cruel tyrant, the devil, a separation from God, the Source of life; and, as such, it is repulsive; before our own self-denial it is powerless. Therefore let the Christian deny himself. In our flesh there nests, lives, and works an eternal enmity toward God, and the more we indulge it, the more it grows and gains strength; and therefore, to please God, it is necessary and imperative to abandon every friendship with it, and to crucify it with its passions and lusts. Those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts (Gal 5:24); the love of this world is enmity with God (Jac 4:4). You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve two masters (Mt 6:24). To the lusts of the flesh belong: self-love, love of the flesh, gluttony, drowsiness, love of gain, love of money, fornication with all its lustful thoughts, hardheartedness, laziness in prayer, a passion for finery, for luxury in everything; envy, hatred, hypocrisy, partiality, the reading of worldly books, dancing, the theater, clubs, masquerades, the singing of worldly songs, card-playing, kisses, passionate embraces, flattering speech, cunning, deceit.

Between God and man, sin strives ceaselessly to stand, in countless forms of earthly lust and passion; our own passion-ridden flesh, or the enemy working through the flesh, is continually at enmity with God and with our own soul, with its closeness to God and its love for Him, and strives, with all his strength, to extinguish love for God—through love of the world and its allurements and temptations. Therefore, to love God, we must hate our own flesh, in the sense of its lusts and passions, and hate the world, in the sense of its customs hostile to God and corrupted; a ceaseless watchfulness is needed over oneself, over one’s own five senses, over one’s own heel (the flesh), lest one be drawn into sin, into the temptations of the flesh, whether by a sensual picture, or by the beauty of a woman’s face, or by some garment, or by the glitter of precious stones, gold, silver, the beauty of buildings, the adornment of rooms, the elegance of printed type, the binding of books, or of sculptured statues—everything that flatters the eye, the taste, the touch, or that, through hearing, weakens and softens the soul and the flesh. Everywhere in the world, through sin, an enmity toward God reigns, through everything and in everything. This is why His servants despised the world and its allurements, as they did their own passion-ridden flesh, hostile to God, and did not spare it, wearing it down with labor, fasting, vigil, prayer, spiritual contemplation, and obedience in everything to their elders, and thus attained a perfect love for God.

Sin gains strength and victory over people through its own delusion, its violence, its persistence in pursuing its prey; the corruption of sin, at the beginning, is often very sweet to the pleasure-loving flesh, and a person not wounded by a lofty, incorruptible, pure love for virtue and for his own Creator easily falls for the hook of the delusion of fleshly indulgence and love of pleasure, or of a false satisfaction of soul and body. And so sinful sweetness must be overcome by a spiritual, incorruptible, peaceful, eternal, more excellent sweetness, and the drawing toward earthly, perishable beauty by a drawing toward heavenly, incorruptible, unfading beauty.

By what does sin tempt, and, so to speak, bribe man? By an imagined sweetness, by the satisfaction of self-love, ambition, pride, envy, greed; by a passion for possession, for contentment, for rest: you have much goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry (Lk 12:19), says the lover of the world and the flesh.

Every sin gains the upper hand over people given over to this present world, by its own delusion, its own cunning, its own violence and compulsion, its own persistence and constancy, working both waking and in sleep. And this is why the Christian needs a constant attention to himself, repentance, humility, prayer, self-restraint; for the demonic kind, which troubles us ceaselessly with various sins, goes out only by prayer and fasting.

O Lord, help us, for Your name’s sake!

Sin hastens ceaselessly to translate itself into action in every person, especially one not enlightened by Christianity—it strives to translate itself into deed in every sinful form and passion: in laziness, overeating, delicacies, drunkenness with wine, in self-love, a lack of brotherly love, ill will, malice, envy, pride, the belittling of one’s neighbor, disobedience and unruliness, in murmuring and impatience, in malicious joy at others’ misfortune, ill will, evil-mindedness, in cunning, coldness. A person must be ceaselessly on guard over his own heart and his own thoughts, and in the labor of secret prayer, in unceasing repentance and self-condemnation, and in tears, to wash away, by them, the continually accumulating defilements of sin. If sin so hastens to translate itself into action, then righteousness too must ceaselessly translate itself into deed in a person, and not remain only in thoughts and good intentions; for faith without works is dead (Jac 2:20); and a Christian must ceaselessly manifest his own meekness, freedom from malice, patience, chastity, love for all, obedience, simplicity, humility, goodwill.

The delusion of sin is sometimes so great that the most ordinary things—for instance, eyes, a face, a nose, eyebrows, any movement of the body, a gait, a glance—become a temptation to a sinful person, with an unclean disposition of heart, thoughts, and impulses; every animal becomes a temptation; the holy icons, at home and in church, become a temptation; the life-giving cross—everything, everything the enemy wraps in his own unclean, foul-smelling mist, and imparts to a person with an unclean heart his own unclean, false, dark, blasphemous way of seeing; he presents everything to a person in a perverted, unclean, blasphemous form. Such is the cunning of sin; how full of delusion are the enemy’s actions in our souls! For this reason many, having been deluded, have clung with their whole heart to empty things—for instance, to money, to household furnishings, to cards, to statues, to animals—and have defiled themselves by mingling with them; have ceased to pray before the icons at home and in church; while those who did not know the true God in ancient times defiled themselves, by the working of demons, with idolatry, as do today’s idolaters: the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, and others.

The very air is infected by our sins, and the earth has come to stink from our lawlessness, and the fire waits, with fury and zeal, for the time when it will be permitted to consume the adversaries of God’s righteousness. In us everything is infected with sin: flesh and blood, eyes, ears, tongue, smell, taste, touch; the whole brain; mind, memory, imagination, desires, will, our whole being—so that we neither see, nor hear, nor taste, nor touch anything without sin.

To the pure, all things are pure; but to the impure, all things are impure—for his own mind and conscience have been defiled; everything is a temptation to him, and even holy things seem unclean to him. See how sin has infected the heart and the whole being of man. Cleanse, then, O man, your own heart, day and night, with prayer and tearful repentance, while the time of trial and labor still continues.

How great and how deep is the corruption of our nature by sin, in its countless forms and directions! This I recognize and feel every day, every hour. Every minute, like a hurricane, it is ready to seize and stir it up, to trouble it suddenly, at the least inattention or indulgence of my own sensuality—to shake me now with anger, irritability, bitterness against a neighbor, especially a lowly and poor one, wearisome with his daily begging; now with lustful thoughts and desires, and a flattering remembrance and imagining of the sweetness of sin; now with envy in the most empty and trivial things, now with partiality and man-pleasing, now with love of gain, with worldly love of possessions; now with vanity and self-importance; now with disobedience, obstinacy, and laziness, now with drowsiness and yawning; now with faintheartedness, pride, despondency, and an enfeebling of soul and body—and, by every kind of sin, it strives to push me away from God, the Source of our life, our light, our peace, and our blessedness. Ceaseless watchfulness, attention, are needed; ceaseless prayer is needed, ceaseless repentance, ceaseless struggle with sin, faith in God, hope in His help and mercy, an unfailing, firm love for God.

And the Lord, seeing our weakness, our inclination to sin, and our recourse to His all-powerful help, will help us, defend us, have mercy on us, and save us without ceasing. Glory to His mercy! Only a ceaseless struggle with sin strengthens our soul in patience and in love for God.

It is better to hasten to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting. We, slaves of flesh and blood and of every sin, usually hasten to the house of feasting, and flee from the house of mourning and sorrow, or go there unwillingly, and often with vexation and annoyance, at another’s invitation. Sin has perverted all our relations toward our neighbors and toward ourselves. We are selfish, given to the flesh, greedy for gain, lazy, cunning, evil, given to malicious joy at others’ misfortune, partial—vilely valuing, only by outward appearance and dress, the priceless being of man, created in the image of God, redeemed by the death of Christ God upon the cross.

The Lord God is the most desirable Being, is goodness itself, love, incorruptible beauty, an ineffable fragrance, a most joyous light, sanctifying the faithful, simplicity and most holy righteousness; every rational creature is drawn to Him by nature, but the sin that has entered our nature has perverted the whole order, and has turned the minds and hearts of people away from God.

Love covers all things—every sin of the repentant, and every physical and moral shortcoming; but enmity and hatred invent every kind of shortcoming, physical or spiritual, real or imagined, finds fault with everything, exacts a harsh reckoning for everything; and, in relation to God and the saints, it forces upon us foul, cunning, and blasphemous thoughts. O sin, living and working in man! How fierce you are, how accursed, how evil, how quarrelsome, how restless, how death-dealing!

III. The Consequences of the Fall: Calamities, Sicknesses, and Death

The whole of mankind is ceaselessly and strongly drawn toward sin in every form, and experiences its consequences—confusion, distress, sorrow and anguish, and every kind of calamity, with death at the end. There is only one Deliverer from this all-ruinous sin—the Lord Jesus Christ. But how little faith people have in Him! How many mockers there are of His holiness and His righteousness! How many teachings contrary to His own teaching!

In the beginning man stepped down from the firm foundation of the will of God and the commandments of God, as though from firm rails, to speak figuratively and in today’s language, and turned aside onto the ruinous path of self-will and the will of the devil, the enemy and apostate from God, and therefore his calamities have neither end nor measure.

You are a creature; God is your Creator, your Sculptor, your Maker, who formed your soul and your body; you are entirely in His power—a good, righteous, all-powerful, perfect power. As a good, righteous, all-wise, perfect, eternal Creator, He gave you a law equally perfect, good, righteous, and blessed, by keeping which you would be holy, righteous, and blessed forever without end. As Creator, He has subjected to His laws every creature too, rational and irrational, animate and inanimate; thanks to these all-wise laws, creatures prosper, exist in well-being, in a right, fitting, beautiful interaction, order, harmony, and beauty. But when man brought into his own life disobedience to the Creator, self-will, and self-rule, then the whole life of man was turned upside down, inside out, and became disordered, monstrous, calamitous, lamentable, through man’s countless passions—pride, self-love, love of gain, ambition, love of money, intemperance, drunkenness, fornication, every kind of depravity, hardheartedness, malice, envy, laziness, disobedience, impatience, self-will, and the rest of the passions—and the human race was subjected to countless calamities. Only then does it begin to prosper, when it comes to its senses, repents, amends itself, and submits itself entirely to the laws of the Creator, and lives by them exactly.

In the world, as in some magnificent house, we see a wondrous order and reason in everything—in the movement of the heavenly bodies and the earth, in the movement of the winds, in the changes of the year, in the development of plants, in their wondrous beauty, in the plant and animal kingdoms; in the wise Builder and Master, in everything—in small things and great—wise laws are seen, order, harmony, inimitable beauty. But in the human race—countless disorders, lawlessness, monstrous deeds, calamities, incongruities, disorders: in some, poverty; in others, luxury in everything and excess, stinginess, hardheartedness toward their fellows, envy, intemperance, murders, suicides, the disobedience of the young toward their elders. This is what sin has done, and does. Strive, then, to do righteousness in everything.

The Lord God is the most desirable Being, is goodness itself, love, incorruptible beauty, an ineffable fragrance, an infinite sweetness, an ineffable wisdom, a most joyous light, shining upon the faithful, simplicity and most holy righteousness, and every rational creature is drawn to Him by nature; but the sin that has entered our nature has perverted the whole moral order, and the devil has devised, for man, deluded by him, his own foul desires—desires of love of money, laziness, malice, envy, thievery, ambition, love of power, and the rest—and by these he tempts people, and through them removes them from God, and casts them into death and torment, into sorrow, anguish, darkness, and shame.

«The love of this world is enmity with God. Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God» (Jac 4:4). See what a duality reigns in our own nature, on account of sin! There is your struggle, day and night, with yourself!

Man, living on earth, lives for the most part in delusion, in vanity, and in corruption, in attachment to the flesh and to perishable things, and not in God, not in truth, not in righteousness, not in spirit and incorruption; and therefore, in the end, if he does not repent, he inherits not life but corruption and death: «He who sows to the flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the spirit will of the spirit reap everlasting life» (Gal 6:8).

Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire (Mt 3:10). This is a parable: by the tree is understood man; by the fruit, the good deeds for which we were created; by the cutting down is meant a sentence of death, or the deprivation of temporal life; by the fire is understood the fire of Gehenna, or eternal torment; the unquenchable fire, to which every evil, cunning, abominable spirit—every demon—is condemned.