Myrrh wrote:Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
The Whole Human Person: Body, Spirit and Soul"...
At that moment it is one undivided being in two persons, because the Fall has not yet divided mankind from God and one human being from another. And it is only after the Fall that Adam and Eve look at one another and see themselves divided and different one from another." http://www.metropolit-anthony.orc.ru/eng/eng_09.htm
This is where I see Augustinian influence creeping in, to view this description of events in Gen II as 'the fall' as if they were in a perfect state before and imperfect after - they haven't fallen from anything because there was not a total separation from God - God continued taking care, clothing them, and interacting with them. It's a story of development, from God to us, from a single human being into male and female and from ignorance to knowledge. And this is division in perception as much as separation into male and female, the separation in seeing themselves other than each other and other than God in whose image they were first made the human person Adam. And of coming to understand their free will, of learning the difference between good and evil and consequences of their acts.
They didn't fall, they rose - they became "God like us" knowing good and evil, but in knowing this they tasted also evil in the fruit as well as good and this is what led to their eventual physical deaths, the consequence of sin is death ("if you would enter into life, keep the commandments" is eating of the fruit of eternal life). In Orthodox this is what is meant by "ancestral sin", by which the world became what it is and now as then we are capable of doing good and evil in a world affected by the acts and consequences of all the good and evil done in it.
Myrrh
