Thus, as we have said, the Creator fashioned the human race and intended it to remain so. But human beings, disregarding better things and shrinking from grasping them, sought instead the things nearer to themselves; and nearer to them were the body and its senses.
So they withdrew their mind from intelligible things and began to look at themselves. Looking at themselves, attaching themselves to the body and the other sensory things, and being deceived by what was their own, they fell into desire for themselves, preferring their own things to the contemplation of divine things. Remaining occupied with these and unwilling to leave what was near, they shut their soul within bodily pleasures, disturbed and muddied by every desire, and completely forgot the power they had received from God from the beginning.
One can see this to be true from the first-formed human being, as the sacred Scriptures say of him. As long as he kept his mind directed toward God and contemplation of Him, he turned away from contemplating the body. But when, on the serpent’s advice, he turned away from thinking about God and began to look at himself, then they fell into desire for the body and knew that they were naked; and when they knew it, they were ashamed. They knew themselves to be naked not so much because they lacked clothing, but because they had become stripped of the contemplation of divine things and had transferred their mind to their opposites.
For after turning away from contemplation of the One who truly is—I mean God—and from desire for Him, they entered into diverse and particular desires of the body. Then, as often happens, after acquiring desire for each and many things, they also began to form an attachment to these desires, so that they even became afraid to leave them. Hence cowardice, fears, pleasures, and thoughts of mortality came upon the soul. Since it does not want to leave its desires, it fears death and separation from the body. And again, because it desires but fails to obtain what it longs for, it learned to murder and do wrong. It is reasonable, as far as we can, to show how it does these things.
Thus, as we have said, the Creator fashioned the human race and intended it to remain so. But human beings, disregarding better things and shrinking from grasping them, sought instead the things nearer to themselves; and nearer to them were the body and its senses.
So they withdrew their mind from intelligible things and began to look at themselves. Looking at themselves, attaching themselves to the body and the other sensory things, and being deceived by what was their own, they fell into desire for themselves, preferring their own things to the contemplation of divine things. Remaining occupied with these and unwilling to leave what was near, they shut their soul within bodily pleasures, disturbed and muddied by every desire, and completely forgot the power they had received from God from the beginning.
One can see this to be true from the first-formed human being, as the sacred Scriptures say of him. As long as he kept his mind directed toward God and contemplation of Him, he turned away from contemplating the body. But when, on the serpent’s advice, he turned away from thinking about God and began to look at himself, then they fell into desire for the body and knew that they were naked; and when they knew it, they were ashamed. They knew themselves to be naked not so much because they lacked clothing, but because they had become stripped of the contemplation of divine things and had transferred their mind to their opposites.
For after turning away from contemplation of the One who truly is—I mean God—and from desire for Him, they entered into diverse and particular desires of the body.
Then, as often happens, after acquiring desire for each and many things, they also began to form an attachment to these desires, so that they even became afraid to leave them. Hence cowardice, fears, pleasures, and thoughts of mortality came upon the soul. Since it does not want to leave its desires, it fears death and separation from the body. And again, because it desires but fails to obtain what it longs for, it learned to murder and do wrong. It is reasonable, as far as we can, to show how it does these things.