The Saving of Adam

So those who claim that he took nothing from the Virgin are badly mistaken. In order to throw away the inheritance that belongs to the flesh, they throw away the correspondence between Christ and Adam as well. For if the man who came from the earth had both his shaping and his substance from God’s own hand and God’s own making, while the other did not, then the one who was made according to the image and likeness of the first did not keep the correspondence with man at all; God’s work would look like an inconsistent piece of workmanship, leaving him nothing in which to show his wisdom. But to say that is to say that he only seemed to be a man when he was not one, and that he became man while taking nothing from man. For if he did not receive the substance of flesh from a human being, then he was not made man and was not the Son of Man; and if he was not made what we are, then he did nothing great in what he suffered and endured. [a]

But everyone will grant that we are a body taken from the earth and a soul that receives spirit from God. That, then, is what the Word of God was made, gathering up his own handiwork into himself. That is why he calls himself the Son of Man, and why he blesses “the meek, because they will inherit the earth.” Paul, too, says plainly in his letter to the Galatians: “God sent his Son, made from a woman.” And again in Romans: “Concerning his Son, who was made from the seed of David according to the flesh, who was marked out beforehand as the Son of God in power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead — Jesus Christ our Lord.”

On their account, too, his coming down into Mary was pointless. Why come down into her if he was to take nothing from her? And if he had taken nothing from Mary, he would never have made use of foods that come from the earth, the foods by which a body taken from the earth is fed. He would not have gone hungry after fasting those forty days, as Moses and Elijah did, unless his body was craving the nourishment that belonged to it. His disciple John would not have written of him, “But Jesus, worn out from the journey, was sitting there.” David would not have announced beforehand, “They added to the pain of my wounds.” He would not have wept over Lazarus, or sweated great drops of blood, or said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow”; and when his side was pierced, blood and water would not have come out. All these are marks of the flesh that had been taken from the earth — the flesh he had gathered up into himself, carrying salvation to his own handiwork.

That is why Luke shows that the family line tracing our Lord’s descent back to Adam contains seventy-two generations. He ties the end to the beginning, and shows that it is Christ who has gathered up into himself all the nations scattered since Adam, and all the languages and generations of the human race, and Adam himself along with them. That is also why Paul calls Adam “a figure of the one who was to come”: the Word, the maker of all things, had shaped in advance for himself the ordering of the human race that was to come, an ordering bound up with the Son of God. God had determined beforehand that the first man should be a creature of soul, so that he might be saved by the spiritual one. Since he already existed as one who saves, what could be saved had to be brought into being as well, so that the one who saves would not exist for nothing.

In keeping with this plan, Mary the virgin is found obedient. She says: “Here is the Lord’s servant girl; let it happen to me as you have said.” Eve, on the other hand, was disobedient: she did not obey while she was still a virgin. She had a husband, Adam, and yet she was still a virgin. (In the garden “the two of them were naked and were not ashamed,” because they had been made only a short while before and had no notion of how children are conceived; they had first to grow up, and only then to multiply from that time on.) Being disobedient, she became the cause of death, both for herself and for the whole human race. In the same way Mary, who had a man betrothed to her and was still a virgin, became by her obedience the cause of salvation, both for herself and for the whole human race.

This is why the law calls a woman betrothed to a man the wife of the man who betrothed her, though she is still a virgin — pointing to the way the line runs back from Mary to Eve. For what has been tied together cannot be untied except by running backwards the very process that tied it: the earlier ties are cancelled by the later ones, so that the later ones may set the earlier free again. And in fact what has happened is this: the first bond is released by the second tie, while the second tie takes the place of the first, now cancelled. That is why the Lord said that the first would in truth be last, and the last first. The prophet points to the same thing when he says, “In place of fathers, children have been born to you.” For the Lord was born “the firstborn from the dead,” and taking the ancient fathers into his arms he gave them new birth into the life of God, becoming himself the beginning of the living, as Adam became the beginning of the dying. That is also why Luke began the genealogy with the Lord and carried it back to Adam, showing that it was he who gave them new birth into the good news of life, and not they who gave it to him. And so the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by the obedience of Mary. What the virgin Eve had bound fast by her unbelief, the virgin Mary set free by her faith.

So it had to be that the Lord, coming to the lost sheep, gathering up into himself so vast an ordering of things, and searching out his own handiwork, should save the very man who had been made in his image and likeness — that is, Adam — filling out the time of the sentence Adam had brought on himself by disobedience, the times “which the Father has set within his own authority.” This had to be, too, since the whole ordering of man’s salvation came about by the good pleasure of the Father, so that God should not be defeated and his wisdom not be found wanting. For man was created by God in order to live. If, after losing life through the harm done him by the serpent that ruined him, he were never to return to life but were handed over to death altogether and forever, then God would have been defeated, and the serpent’s malice would have prevailed over the will of God. [m]

But God cannot be defeated, and he is patient. He showed his patience in the correcting of man and the testing of everyone, as I have already said. And through the second man he bound the strong man, carried off his goods, and did away with death, bringing to life the man who had been in death. For at the beginning Adam became a vessel in Satan’s possession, and Satan held him under his power — bringing sin on him wrongfully, and under cover of immortality fastening death on him. By promising them that they would be like gods, which he had no power whatever to bring about, he worked death in them. So the one who had led man away captive was himself justly taken captive by God, and man, who had been led away captive, was released from the chains of his sentence.

And this, to tell the truth, is Adam — the first man formed, the one about whom Scripture says that the Lord spoke: “Let us make man after our own image and likeness.” We are all from him; and since we are from him, we have all inherited his name. But since man is saved, it is fitting that the one who was created the original man should be saved. It is far too absurd to maintain that the man who was so badly hurt by the enemy, and was the first to be taken captive, was not rescued by the one who defeated the enemy — but that his children were, the ones he had fathered in that same captivity. Nor would the enemy look defeated yet, if he still kept the oldest of his plunder.

Take an illustration. Suppose an enemy force overran a people, tied them up, carried them off, and held them in slavery for a long time, so that they had children while among them. Then suppose someone took pity on the enslaved and defeated that same enemy force. He would certainly not be acting fairly if he set free the children of those who had been carried off, out of the power of the men who had enslaved their fathers, but left the fathers themselves — the men who had actually suffered the capture, and for whose sake he had come to take vengeance in the first place — still subject to their enemies. The children come into freedom through the avenging of their fathers’ cause; but not so that the fathers, who suffered the capture itself, should be left behind. For God, who came to man’s help and restored him to his own freedom, lacks neither power nor justice.

This is also why, as Scripture tells it, God pronounced no curse on Adam himself as soon as he had broken the command, but cursed the ground instead, with reference to his work. As one of the ancients put it: “God transferred the curse to the earth, so that it would not remain on man.” What man received as the penalty for his offense was the hard labor of working the ground, eating his bread in the sweat of his face, and returning to the dust he was taken from. The woman likewise received toil and labor and groaning and the pains of childbirth, and a place under her husband — that is, that she should serve him. The point was that they should neither be destroyed outright under God’s curse, nor, going unrebuked, be led into contempt for God.

But the full weight of the curse fell on the serpent that had deceived them. “And God,” it says, “said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, you are cursed above all livestock and above all the wild animals of the earth.” The Lord says the same thing in the Gospel to those found on his left hand: “Go away from me, you who are cursed, into the everlasting fire that my Father has prepared for the devil and his angels.” This shows that the eternal fire was not prepared for man in the first place, but for the one who deceived man and made him offend — for him, I mean, who is the head of the apostasy, and for the angels who went into apostasy along with him. And that fire will justly be felt by those as well who, like him, keep on in works of wickedness without repentance and without retracing their steps.

They behave as Cain did. God advised him to keep still, because he had not made a fair division of the share his brother had a right to, but out of envy and malice thought he could lord it over him. Cain not only refused to accept the advice; he even added sin to sin, showing what was in his mind by what he did. What he had planned, that he also carried out: he overpowered his brother and killed him. God let the righteous man fall under the unrighteous one, so that the first might be proved the righteous one by what he suffered, and the second exposed as the unrighteous one by what he did. Even this did not soften him, and he did not stop at that evil deed. Asked where his brother was, he said: “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” — stretching his wickedness further and making it worse by his answer. For if it is wicked to kill a brother, it is far worse to answer the God who knows everything so insolently and irreverently, as though a man could get the better of him. And for this he carried a curse about with him, because for no reason he brought an offering of sin, having no reverence for God and no shame at the killing of his brother.

Adam’s case, however, had nothing in common with this; it was altogether different. He had been deceived by someone else under the pretext of immortality, and he is seized with terror at once and hides — not as though he could escape from God, but because, in his confusion at having broken God’s command, he felt unworthy to come before God and speak with him. Now “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The sense of sin leads to repentance, and God gives his compassion to those who repent. Adam showed his repentance by what he did — by the belt he made, covering himself with fig leaves, when there were plenty of other leaves that would have chafed his body less. He chose clothing that matched his disobedience, standing in awe of the fear of God. Resisting the wandering, lustful bent of his flesh — for he had lost the disposition that was natural to him and his childlike mind, and had come to the knowledge of evil things — he tied a bridle of self-control on himself and on his wife, in fear of God and waiting for God to come. It was as if he were saying: “Since by disobedience I have lost the robe of holiness that I had from the Spirit, I now admit that I deserve a covering of this kind, which gives no pleasure but gnaws and frets the body.” And no doubt he would have kept that clothing forever, humbling himself in it, if God, who is merciful, had not clothed them in tunics of skin instead of fig leaves.

This is also why God questions them — so that the blame might fall on the woman; and then questions her, so that she might pass the blame to the serpent. For she told what had happened: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” But he put no question to the serpent, for he knew that the serpent had set the whole guilty business in motion. He pronounced the curse on him first, so that it might reach man only as a softened rebuke. God detested the one who had led man astray; but toward the one who had been deceived he showed compassion, by stages and little by little.

This is also why he drove him out of the garden and set him far from the tree of life — not because he grudged him the tree of life, as some dare to say, but because he pitied him, and did not want him to go on being a sinner forever, or the sin that surrounded him to be immortal, or evil to be endless and past cure. So he set a limit to man’s sin by putting death in the way, and made sin stop — putting an end to it by the breaking up of the flesh, which was to happen in the earth — so that man, ceasing at last to live to sin and dying to it, might begin to live to God.

This is why he set hostility between the serpent and the woman and her offspring, the two of them keeping it up against each other: the one whose heel was to be bitten had the power also to tread on the enemy’s head, while the other kept biting, killing, and blocking the steps of man — until the offspring came who was appointed to tread that head down, the one born of Mary, of whom the prophet says: “You will tread on the asp and the basilisk; you will trample down the lion and the dragon.” This shows that sin, which was set up and spread out against man and made him subject to death, would be stripped of its power, along with the death that rules over people. It shows that the lion — that is, the antichrist, rampant against the human race in the last days — would be trampled down by him; and that he would bind “the dragon, that ancient serpent,” and put him under the power of the man who had been defeated, so that all the dragon’s strength should be trodden underfoot.

Now Adam had been defeated, with all life taken away from him. So when the enemy was defeated in his turn, Adam received life again; and the last enemy, death, is destroyed — the death that had taken possession of man at the beginning. So when man has been set free, “what is written will come true: Death is swallowed up in victory. Death, where is your sting?” That could not be said justly if the very man over whom death first gained mastery were not set free. His salvation is death’s destruction. So when the Lord brings man — that is, Adam — to life, death is destroyed at the same moment.

So everyone who denies Adam’s salvation is speaking falsely, and shuts himself out of life forever, since he does not believe that the sheep which had been lost has been found. For if it has not been found, the whole human race is still held in ruin. False, then, is the man who first started this notion — or rather, this ignorance and blindness: Tatian. As I have already pointed out, this man tangled himself up with all the heretics. But this particular teaching he invented himself. He wanted to bring in something new, on his own, apart from the rest of them, and by talking nonsense to gather hearers with no faith — putting on the airs of a teacher, and trying now and then to use sayings of the kind Paul often used: “In Adam we all die.” He does not know that “where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”

Since all this has been made plain, let his followers be ashamed of themselves — and let them go on wrangling about Adam, as if some great gain were coming to them if he is not saved. They gain nothing more by it than the serpent gained when he talked man into sin: he only proved him a lawbreaker, getting man as the firstfruits of his own apostasy. But he did not know God’s power. In the same way, those who deny Adam’s salvation gain nothing at all, except that they make themselves heretics and apostates from the truth, and show themselves the patrons of the serpent and of death.