In the beginning evil did not exist. Indeed, it does not exist even now among the saints, nor does it belong to their nature at all. Human beings later began to conceive it and to give it shape to their own harm. From this they also fashioned for themselves the invention of idols, reckoning things that do not exist as though they did.
For God, the Creator of all and universal King, who exists beyond all essence and human conception, being good and surpassingly beautiful, made the human race in His own image through His own Word, our Savior Jesus Christ. Through this likeness to Himself He made the human being able to contemplate and know reality, giving him also a conception and knowledge of His own eternity, so that, by preserving his proper state, he might never turn away from his conception of God or withdraw from fellowship with the holy ones. Instead, possessing the grace of the One who gave it and also the power that was his from the Father’s Word, he might rejoice and commune with the Divine, living the unharmed and truly blessed immortal life.
With nothing to hinder his knowledge of the Divine, through his purity he always contemplates the Image of the Father, God the Word, in whose image he himself was made. He is filled with wonder as he considers the providence that extends through Him to the whole universe, rising above sensory things and every bodily appearance and joining himself, by the power of his mind, to the divine intelligible realities in heaven. For when the human mind does not associate with bodies or have any desire arising from them mixed into it from outside, but is wholly above them and remains with itself as it was made from the beginning, then, passing beyond sensory things and everything human, it is lifted on high. Seeing the Word, it sees in Him also the Father of the Word, delights in contemplating Him, and is renewed by its desire for Him.
Thus the sacred Scriptures say of the first human being to be created, who in the Hebrew language was called Adam, that at the beginning he kept his mind directed toward God with unashamed confidence and lived with the holy ones in the contemplation of intelligible things, which he enjoyed in that place that holy Moses figuratively called Paradise. Purity of soul is sufficient even to reflect God through itself, as the Lord also says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
In the beginning evil did not exist. Indeed, it does not exist even now among the saints, nor does it belong to their nature at all. Human beings later began to conceive it and to give it shape to their own harm. From this they also fashioned for themselves the invention of idols, reckoning things that do not exist as though they did.
For God, the Creator of all and universal King, who exists beyond all essence and human conception, being good and surpassingly beautiful, made the human race in His own image through His own Word, our Savior Jesus Christ. Through this likeness to Himself He made the human being able to contemplate and know reality, giving him also a conception and knowledge of His own eternity, so that, by preserving his proper state, he might never turn away from his conception of God or withdraw from fellowship with the holy ones. Instead, possessing the grace of the One who gave it and also the power that was his from the Father’s Word, he might rejoice and commune with the Divine, living the unharmed and truly blessed immortal life.
With nothing to hinder his knowledge of the Divine, through his purity he always contemplates the Image of the Father, God the Word, in whose image he himself was made. He is filled with wonder as he considers the providence that extends through Him to the whole universe, rising above sensory things and every bodily appearance and joining himself, by the power of his mind, to the divine intelligible realities in heaven.
For when the human mind does not associate with bodies or have any desire arising from them mixed into it from outside, but is wholly above them and remains with itself as it was made from the beginning, then, passing beyond sensory things and everything human, it is lifted on high. Seeing the Word, it sees in Him also the Father of the Word, delights in contemplating Him, and is renewed by its desire for Him.
Thus the sacred Scriptures say of the first human being to be created, who in the Hebrew language was called Adam, that at the beginning he kept his mind directed toward God with unashamed confidence and lived with the holy ones in the contemplation of intelligible things, which he enjoyed in that place that holy Moses figuratively called Paradise. Purity of soul is sufficient even to reflect God through itself, as the Lord also says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”