How Man Fell Away

So then, as we have said, the Creator formed the human race, and this is how he meant it to stay. But people made light of better things and held back from grasping them, and began instead to seek things nearer to themselves. But nearer to themselves were the body and its senses. So, while they took their minds away from the things known by thought, they began to look at themselves. In doing so, holding to the body and the other things of the senses, and deceived, as it were, by what was close around them, they fell into craving for themselves, preferring what was their own to the contemplation of what belonged to God. Having made themselves at home in these things, then, and not willing to leave what was so near to them, they tangled their soul in bodily pleasures, troubled and muddied by every kind of craving, while they wholly forgot the power they had from God at the beginning. [a]

The truth of this can be seen in the first man who was made, from what the Holy Scriptures tell us about him. He too, as long as he kept his mind on God and on the contemplation of God, turned away from the contemplation of the body. But when, on the serpent’s advice, he gave up thinking on God and began to look at himself, then they not only fell into bodily craving, but knew that they were naked, and knowing it, were ashamed. They knew that they were naked, not so much of clothing as because they had been stripped of the contemplation of divine things, and had turned their understanding to the opposite. For having left the thought of the one true God, and the desire for him, they had from then on set out on all kinds of cravings, the cravings of each of the bodily senses.

Next, as tends to happen, having formed a desire for each of these things, one after another, they began to grow used to these desires, so that they were even afraid to leave them. That is how the soul became subject to cowardice and fears, to pleasures and to thoughts of death. Because she is not willing to leave her cravings, she fears death and her separation from the body. And again, by craving and not getting what she craved, she learned to commit murder and wrong. So we are led naturally to show, as well as we can, how she does this.