Six Homilies on the Creation 6.6–6.9

Those events and these are sisters, for both belong to one God. Did any other come to the passion than the one who came down in paradise? Adam hid; he became aware after eating. “For their eyes were opened, [and they knew that they were naked].” Since the devil said, “In the day you eat, your eyes will be opened,” someone says, “See, Satan told the truth.” It befits Paul to say: “For we are not ignorant of his designs.” The saints know the devil's devices. See his wickedness. How did the devil know that after eating their eyes would be opened? Were they blind? Scripture says, before they ate from the tree, “The woman saw the tree.” So she was not blind. “The woman saw,” it says, “that the tree was lovely to see.” First she saw, and then she ate. How, then, were their eyes opened? Attend, I beg you; here is the question. The devil came from a fall, that is, from a transgression; and he knew what the transgressor had suffered and what transgressors suffer. The experience is common to all. For today too, when we sin, we sin as if blind; and when we have sinned, then we see what we have done. For example, if someone is accused, “Why did you do this?”, he pleads compulsion: “Truly, I did not see what I was doing”; not that he is blind, but in sin the reasoning is maimed, wholly given over to the deed, and it is blinded in the act. Afterward, by his conscience, he sees what he has done. Let me put a case. Someone goes in to rob a house, and he goes in as if blind; he does not reckon with the one who will meet him, the one who will seize him, the fear of the judges, the danger hanging over him; for he has been blinded by the disease. When he has gone in, taken what he wants, and gone out having stolen, with no one there, he is filled with fear, he perceives what he has done, and he reckons that if there is a search, they will know whose work it is. And what he did not reckon while acting, he reckons after acting. So too the adulterer, throwing himself into another man's fire, goes in and does not reckon that there are laws, courts, accusations, sharpened swords; but when he has done it, he is afraid, he suspects the slave boy, the slave girl, the neighbor, the kinsman; and what he did not see in the act, he sees after the act. Again, someone urges another to keep away from evils; and if he is disobedient, common speech says, “I told him often, and he did not hear,” not that he did not hear with his ears. Then, giving him blows, he says, “I am teaching you to hear,” not that he gives him hearing, but because the blow corrects his prejudice and brings him to understanding. So too the prophet: “The discipline of the Lord opens my ears.” Since, then, the devil had fallen (for I have not forgotten our subject), he knew where he was after falling, and then he came to perceive what he had done. So he learned from what he suffered, and says: “If you eat, your eyes will be opened,” that is, as mine were: “I know, since I transgressed, what I suffered; I know what I suffered, I know what I lost.” Then they ate, and their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked. For before this they were naked and were not ashamed. They put off immortality; the robe of glory was taken from them; the body was stripped bare, and from then on it was clay. At once the invention of the arts springs up. Adam's first art was sewing. Before any other art he took fig leaves and sewed them. Who taught him? Who trained him? He had once received understanding from God; he was God's image; and do you doubt about his knowledge? When you consider by yourself how man first made a plow, who showed him how to shape wood and set iron in the middle and bind it fast and put a yoke on the oxen; how woman discovered the art of weaving, to take a fleece, wash it, card it, spin it, thin what is joined and join again what is split, where did this come from? Who taught the embroiderers embroidery? The loom stands; one thread is passed through; it is not the hand that works, but the design that works; the design produces the figures. The craftsman does not lay hands on it, and the design of the art shapes the garment, and the craftsman's intention rises in visible figures. Then the embroiderer does not move a hand, and raises figures; and if you hear that God works, do you think he works by moving a hand? And if you inquire into every art and every invention and say, “How did they think of this or that?”, remember the first voice, which says, “Let us make man according to our image,” and you have the solution of the difficulty. God's image, and it does not think? God's image, and it does not imitate its Master? “He sewed fig leaves.”

Let those who allegorize be ashamed, who say that paradise is in heaven and is spiritual. What is a fig tree doing in heaven? But suppose paradise is in heaven: where do the rivers come from? Not from the earth? If paradise is above, clearly the rivers too flow from above. Did Scripture say, “A river comes down from Eden”? But see the sophism. The allegorists laugh at us. “For God clothed them,” it says, “with tunics of skin.” Did he sacrifice oxen or sheep, then, and open a tannery, and carry out the tanner's craft? We say: he brought forth whole animals without coupling, without mating. He made what did not exist; could he not make part of what exists? Then they press their point: “But God never makes part of an animal; God makes nothing incomplete.” He hears “skin” and asks where it came from. Then I too hear of blood in Egypt and ask where it came from; but when, because Pharaoh did not obey, God changed the Nile into blood, what animals did he sacrifice? The river became blood, and no animal was slaughtered; two skins came into being, and he asks what animals they came from. But there too there was skin without an animal. Attend to the sequence, even if my voice is weary, and we are too. But so that the discourse may not be cut off, I will say a few things quietly and then end the discourse. “He sewed fig leaves.” Would that the heretics had learned this art! Adam, having transgressed, learned to sew; the heretics, having turned aside, learned to tear, so as to strip the holy things bare. We often hear the things done at the cross and marvel that soldiers took Christ's garments and divided them, and at once our mind says: “Great is God's patience, that no thunderbolt came down, that no sword came down. The Holy One was insulted, and were the profane hands not cut off?” Do you marvel that those soldiers dared to divide his garments? Marvel that these men have torn the garment of the Church. The soldiers saw Christ's tunic, seamless, woven from the top throughout, and spared the garment; but the heretics […] the clothing of Christ, the robe of […]. Let us return to our subject. “He sewed fig leaves.” They heard God walking, as far as one can hear; they heard and hid. Nature is fair-minded; even if we are ten thousand times sinners, our conscience is free. Sometimes the face is shameless, and the conscience convicts. Sometimes the tongue says, “What have I done wrong?”, and the conscience convicts from within. Adam and Eve were most simple and guileless; they confessed freely. God says, “Where are you?” Many have contemplated this with piety; but we must attend to exactness. For I accept their interpretations too, since they are pious; and I say these things, since they are true. “Adam, where are you?” From where? To where have you come down? From what glory have you fallen? Truly I accept this sense as pious, for it has both dignity and compassion. But I seek the sequence. “Adam, where are you?” God asks. As maker, he knew the nature of his creature: that everyone who has sinned is without confidence, and that the mouths of sinners are sewn shut. He perceived that Adam had fled for lack of confidence. A slave is most anxious when he perceives that his master has learned what has happened; but as long as the master does not know, he consoles himself that he may escape notice. Adam fled as one found out; God feigned ignorance to dissolve his fear; as we say about a friend, “I pretended not to know, so as not to grieve him.” Such things often happen among us. And if such things happen among us, much more with God, who loves mankind. “Adam, where are you?” That is, “I do not know.” Then, since God feigned ignorance, the fair-minded and free soul did not hide: “I heard your voice, and I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid.” Why were you afraid? Why did you hide? “I was afraid because of the transgression; I hid because of the nakedness.” Truly one may weep at the transgressor's words. “I heard your voice,” that longed-for voice, that voice that gave me everything, that voice […]; “I perceived […] that I am naked.” Then God persists in encouraging him: “Who told you that you are naked, unless you ate from the tree of which I commanded you that from this one alone you should not eat?” That is, “unless you have surely done what I forbade.” See how he asks as one who does not know: “Unless you ate from that tree of which I commanded you not to eat.” And see God's love for mankind: “Who told you?” That is why he lengthens the conversation, to dissolve his fear and raise his confidence. For Adam perceived that there was nothing harsh, nothing severe, no insult, no blows. You have common experience as your teacher. A slave who has sinned, when he comes to his master, takes either courage or fear from the first word. If the master begins to be angry and to call him thief and deceiver and worthy of ten thousand deaths, he collapses; if he hears him reproaching him, “What happened to you? Why did you sin?”, at once he is equipped and takes courage for the moment, for the master is not punishing as a master but admonishing as a teacher. So too God: “Who told you that you are naked, unless you ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Did I forbid many things? I forbade only one, and that not out of hatred, but out of providence. “Who told you that you are naked?” He said nothing shameless, like “I did not know”; but what? “The woman whom you gave me, she gave to me, and I ate”; that is, “the one given me as a help.” For I heard, when I had been formed and she not yet, God saying, “Let us make him a helper fit for him.” “Whom you gave me, she gave to me.” He did not say, “She deceived me,” nor, “She lied”: “She gave to me, and I ate.” [8] Then God says: “And should you have believed a woman and not me? Is the woman more trustworthy than I? I gave you the good things and honored you with deeds; she enticed you with words.” And see: just as when a judge accepts the defense of the accused and examines him no further, but passes on to another, the man at once takes courage and says, “For now my examination is over,” so too God passes on from Adam to dissolve his fear, and says to the woman, “What is this you have done?” She says, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Since she spoke the whole truth, he does not insult the defense of truth, but leaves it unexamined. He did not say, “And was he, the serpent, believed above me? He promised equality with God and procured death.” He does not pass judgment at once, but rather spared her as the weaker vessel, and goes on to the serpent, to persuade both him and her, since he now goes to the cause; and he says, “Because you have done this.” Do you see a wonderful judge? He questions the deceived; he does not question the deceiver. He does not say to it, “What have you done?” but, “Because you have done this.” In keeping with this image David says, “The ungodly will not rise up in judgment”; not that they are not raised, but that they are not examined. “Because you have done this.” The threat against the serpent lightened the blows on those who were deceived. If, he says, God had not laid everything to its account, he would not have judged it without examination. “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the wild animals of the earth. On your breast and belly you shall go.” “Because you have done this; since you deceived the heart and persuaded the belly to touch food, on your breast and belly you shall go.” God now pronounces this walking on the belly not because the serpent had used feet before, but because it had stood upright to converse with the woman. For otherwise it could not have conversed with Eve. The very posture of the conversation by which it deceived Eve he punishes by going on the breast; and […] had been formed from the beginning, but it rode on its breast in fierce coils. That is why even now the serpent, when it is angry, often raises itself and runs in coils; but having risen just enough to show the memory of its old gait, it is cast down again by the law of the sentence. “And you shall eat earth all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman.” What is “You shall eat earth”? What you made Adam become, eat that. For he is going to hear, “You are earth, and to earth you will depart.” “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” Since you deceived as a friend, you are cast out as an enemy. That word became law. Attend, then: “You shall eat earth all the days of your life.” See: he does not say this of the serpent, “Earth will be your food”; for serpents do not always eat earth, but they also feed on meat, feast on fruits, touch seeds, and hunt plants. But by saying, “You shall eat earth,” he means this: “You will wear away the earth,” he says, “rubbing yourself along it.” But some say: “If the devil deceived, why did the serpent receive the curse?” The invisible demon he scourges with an invisible blow; the visible instrument he subjects to a visible punishment. Why? Just as God, being invisible, gave the tree as a visible reminder, so the devil, being invisible, speaks to men through the serpent. So God subjects the serpent to a curse, so that whoever has suffered something from the devil, always seeing the serpent dragging itself along that once stood upright, may take it as a reminder: if the servant of wickedness is so punished, how much more its author? Attend, then. You find things akin to this in the Gospel. For just as in the visible serpent he condemned the speaker along with the visible creature, so too in the Gospel, when the demons asked Christ not to be sent into the abyss, they said, “Permit us to go into the swine”; he permitted them to go in, so that he might drown the invisible ones together with the visible bodies. […] “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” He changed the friendship into enmity, and the word became law. Men are eager to tame other wild animals; but if anyone sees a serpent, he shudders. For the boundary remains: “I will put enmity between you.” If he sees one in a house, he wants to kill it; if he sees one on the road, he is wild to kill it. For the ancient word pricks him. Even if he gives the serpent ten thousand blows, if he sees that the head is not wounded, he at once urges the one standing by, “You have not struck the serpent's head; strike at the head”; since God said, “He will watch your head, and you will watch his heel.” What does this mean? He does not say, “I will make man use no blows against the other members of your body, and punish only the head.” For man strikes the serpent on all its members, punishing the whole wherever he hits it. And what the Master said to the serpent, “You will watch his heel,” does not proclaim that serpents are allowed to attack only the heel; for sometimes they attack even sleepers, often seize the belly, inject venom, and bite hands and other members; and in general no human member that falls in their way remains unharmed. But the meaning of the sentence is this: “No longer,” he says, “will the serpent be bold to plot against man; but staying inside, you will have this much from men: to peep out from holes barely and with fear, watching only for men's passing so as to come out safely.” “But man,” he says, “will walk in security, while your head is kept in holes, as of an enemy in hiding, not speaking to him as to a friend.”

But since time presses, let us too complete our discourse. He questioned the woman who was deceived; he passes on to the deceiver. The sentence then began from the root, the deceiver. Then he came to the woman who was deceived, and threatens. The first word to the serpent was “Cursed.” “And God said to the woman: [I will greatly multiply your griefs and] your groanings.” He does not curse her, lest […], since he had blessed them, saying, “And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth.” And Paul says, “The gifts of God are irrevocable.” So he does not curse those he had blessed; but what? He applies a strange remedy to the wound, griefs and groaning. It has the form of a sentence that strikes, but it promises release from the fault. “I will greatly multiply,” he says, “your griefs and your groaning.” These are remedies of repentance. Attend: just as physicians with the same remedy both sting and heal, and the same cutting, the same iron, and the same pain that comes with the cutting bring forth health, so God gives the woman who sinned two provisions for repentance, grief and groaning. What does grief profit? Hear Paul saying, “For grief according to God produces repentance.” And what does groaning work? Hear Isaiah: “When you turn and groan, then you will be saved.” “I will greatly multiply your griefs and your groaning.” Grief disfigures the outward face and makes it gloomy; [groaning] saddens the heart. Since the eye saw the tree and the mind reckoned on equality with God, God gives groaning to the heart and grief to the face, so that she might be punished in the things by which she sinned, and so that this punishment, or rather salvation, might persuade the woman that he had not gone back on the ancient blessing. For having said to them, “[Increase and multiply and fill] the earth,” he says, “In griefs you shall bear children.” “I do not take away childbearing, for I blessed it once; but you will be in pain, in labors, in troubles.” That grief is the heaviest. And the Savior testifies: “[A woman, when she is in labor, has grief].” [Even afterward the] woman worries while she is nursing; if the child is grown, she worries lest he be foolish; if he goes abroad, lest he die, lest he fall sick, lest he suffer. The man does not have this; for even if the father worries, it is not as the mother does, but he consoles himself, saying, “He is a man; he knows how to look after himself,” and he does not worry. Why? Because he himself did not hear, “In griefs you shall bear children.” It is a strange kind of judgment; experience is witness. When labor pains take hold of a woman, not even in the pains themselves does she renounce her husband. She does not say, “Would that there were no marriage, would that there were no childbearing!” God does not allow her to hate her husband even after the experience; but she knows what she has suffered and what she has undergone, and she loves her husband. That is why: “In griefs you shall bear children, and your turning will be toward your husband, and he will rule over you.” “Since you have just now ruled badly, and he became the slave of your choice, I reverse the order: let him who was deceived be master.” That is why Paul says, “I do not permit a woman to teach, nor to have authority over a man.” For she taught badly the first time, in paradise. “Nor to have authority over a man”: for she exercised authority badly. So it is in this sense that Paul directs that a woman not teach, because of what happened in paradise. Lest we seem to be inventing, hear him: “I do not permit a woman to teach, nor to have authority over a man.” And to show that it is because of the first events, he adds, “For Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and came into transgression.” What then? Has the race of women been subjected to condemnation, and does it remain in griefs, and is the bond not loosed? Christ came, who looses the bond; the Mother of the Lord came forward, making defense for her race, the holy Virgin in place of the virgin (for Eve too was a virgin when she sinned); she loosed the grief and groaning of the condemned woman. For just as someone called to the palace is eager to honor his own people, and to release them if they are in distress, so the holy Virgin, called to the palace to minister to the divine birth, coming to a strange childbirth, asks, or rather receives, this as her first grace. Since it was not fitting for a condemned woman to bear the guiltless one, the one comes who first looses Eve's grief through joy. The angel comes, saying to the Virgin, “Rejoice, favored one.” Then by “Rejoice” he looses the bond of grief. “Rejoice”: the one who looses grief has come. “Rejoice, favored one,” since until now womankind was under a curse. Here attend to the grace of God. “Rejoice, favored one; the Lord is with you.” Since with that woman was the serpent, in grief; “rejoice,” since with you is God. And see the angel's words, how they set out the whole dispensation of Christ. “Rejoice, favored one.” Since that woman received a double curse, grief and groaning in childbirth, he brings in the birth that undoes that bearing: “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus; for he will save his people from their sins.” The fruit that springs from you looses the sins of your forefathers. From then on the matter was reversed. To this day those who hear of Eve call her wretched: “Woe to the wretched woman, from what glory she fell! Woe to the wretched woman, what she suffered!” Mary hears every day from everyone, “Blessed,” since indeed she was filled with the Holy Spirit. And this Virgin, prophesying, what does she say? “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked upon the lowliness of his handmaid; for from now on all generations will call me blessed.” To show that she bears the person of Eve, she says, as it were, “Insulted until now; from now on all generations will call me blessed.” “And what does it profit her,” someone says, “if she does not hear it?” Indeed she does hear it, from being in a place of light, in the land of the living, the mother of salvation, the source of the light that is perceived: perceived through the flesh, understood through the Godhead. So she is called blessed throughout. But even while she still lived in the flesh she was called blessed, for she heard the blessing while she was still in the flesh. Eve first saw, and then tasted the tree; Mary first spoke, and then heard the blessing. For when the Savior was teaching, “a woman raised her voice from the crowd and said to him,” with everyone listening, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that you sucked.” But God completed the sentence against Adam, or rather the healing of repentance, and says: “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the earth in your works.” Again, the one who had been blessed does not receive the curse, but the earth does: one sinned, and another is beaten. Just as Eve's curse, or rather rebuke (for it was not a curse but correction), just as Eve's rebuke, “In griefs you shall bear” (for every woman bears in griefs), has remained until now, so also Adam's: “Cursed is the earth in your works.” Our works are lawless, and the earth is scourged; we sin, and the earth receives the curse. God spares his creature as a well-born child and beats the earth as its tutor. “Cursed is the earth in your works.” Do not look at nature, but at the grace of God. He did not say, “Cursed is the earth,” for then it would have remained cursed and borne no fruit, just as he said to the fig tree, “May no fruit come from you any more,” and it withered; so the earth would have become. But he says, “in your works.” When I sin, the earth is beaten; when I do well, he blesses it. And see the wonder. When God created the earth, the sea, the birds, the creeping things, the wild animals, and man, he blessed them all; the fruits he did not bless, since he knew that this punishment was reserved for the earth: that when men sin it should receive barrenness, and when they do right, fruitfulness. He did not bless the fruits, for the gift was irrevocable. “Thorns and thistles it will bring forth for you.” “You despised the great things,” he says; “be beaten by the small.” See how the chastisements too are measured: a thorn cannot kill; it can draw blood. “And you shall eat of the earth in griefs.” She bears in griefs; you eat in griefs. For the ancient sentence remains until now. And show me a rich man, a poor man, a ruler, a subject, and see whether it is possible to find one whose life is free from grief or care. Why? Because of this: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread.” You did not want to eat at ease; eat in sweat. He does not punish him with famine, but subjects him to punishment and toil. Now you, the faithful, consider this: if Adam […], who does not eat bread without sweat, how shall we receive the kingdom of heaven without labors and sweat? “Until,” he says, “you return to the earth from which you were taken.” O sentence! O fear full of love for mankind! O sentence full of recall! He has not yet banished him, and he says, “Until you return to the earth from which you were taken.” He did not say, “Until you are destroyed, until you are dissolved,” but, “Until you return to the earth from which you were taken,” so that you may set before yourself the hope of the resurrection. “I send you back to where I took you from; as I took you then, I can take you again.” “For you are earth, and to earth you will depart.” You will not be destroyed, but […]. As far, then, as lay within our power, by the supply of the Holy Spirit, we have gone through paradise with you, we have read the royal records, we have seen the freedom of the accused and the love for mankind of the judge; through it may we also receive the salvation that comes from Christ, so that we may enjoy those heavenly and eternal goods, in Christ Jesus our Lord; for to him be glory and power, now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.