Talks on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by Vladislav Rozentuller
Part 4 (From session of November 1, 2007)

Last time we considered the creation as the result of a certain communion: the Father God spoke His divine Word and this Word was received by a feminine being we might think of as Wisdom or Sophia or the Mother. Through such giving and receiving -- not merely giving and receiving, but giving with one's entire being and receiving with one's entire being -- something new can arise. And so the universe was created. We can think of this as a communication from spirit (the Father), through soul (the Mother), to the body (created nature).

Adam, who was created in the image of God, participated in a similar creative process. God commanded Adam, "Be fruitful, and multiply." We should remember that the name "Adam" refers not so much to a particular individual as to the paradisal state of mankind -- a state of union with God (the creative spirit) and with nature (created world). And we can imagine that the Adamic human beings did indeed multiply, doing so in the image of God: the creative process proceeded from the spirit, through the soul, to the body. New bodies were begotten out of the inner moral forces of eternal spirit and pure soul. In this way the Adamic race continued God's work of creation.

This giving and receiving with one's entire being is love. Try to imagine what it means to give with your entire being. It can only be an act of love toward the person to whom you are giving yourself. Likewise, to receive with your entire being can only be an expression of love toward what is received, which is the very being of another. So we can truly think of a creation as a gift of love.

In Adam, at least to begin with, the creative spirit, the pure, receptive soul, and the body transparent to higher impulses were in complete harmony. What this means is that each higher part served the lower part, and each lower part received what came from the higher. In our usual life we see the higher demanding obedience from the lower, and the lower submitting to the authority and power of the higher. But in moral reality, the higher serves the lower, and the lower is transparent to the higher. As an image of this, we see Christ washing the feet of His disciples and telling them that to be united with Him is to become a servant. Serving and receiving service are the driving forces of all evolution! When one or the other is lacking, evolution cannot occur. At Christ's coming, it was necessary that John the Baptist and the disciples should receive what He had to offer; without them, the entire living stream of Christian tradition would not exist. The only alternative would have been for Christ to become the Antichrist, and force His will upon the world.

I know a priest who was once very concerned about a friend of hers who was suffering deep difficulty. But he refused every attempt by her and others to help him. Seeing him spiral downward in a destructive way, she was in near despair when, during prayer, she heard a voice as if of Christ saying, "I experience this every day, because people don't allow Me to help them." Giving is never enough for our progress; there must also be receiving.

With that preface, we come to the temptation in paradise. We can think of the temptation as a process of separation -- separation of humans from the spiritual world, and descent into a physical realm of separate things. But it is important to realize that this process was an ongoing one, and that we see evidence of it already before the temptation as well as afterward. The temptation, however, is a culminating point of the entire process; the state of Adam's consciousness and of his entire nature changes radically as a result of it. We need only recognize that, as in stage dramas we are familiar with, the primary culminating point issues from and leads to secondary climaxes.

A particularly salient moment occurs before the temptation, when a division of genders occurs and Eve is separated out of Adam's wholeness. Let's read the relevant passage:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord god caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:18-25)

"It's not good that the man should be alone." At a certain moment of evolution Adam began to feel alone. What is the state of loneliness? When we are connected to people and the world, when we are in community, when we are among friends, we usually do not feel lonely. Loneliness arises, rather, when we withdraw from such connections. Not being satisfactorily related to the world, we feel shut up in ourselves. The withdrawal, however, may serve a positive purpose, as when we need to gain new friendships, new activities, a new relation to the world. We have to be in a certain way shut up within ourselves in order to change our own way of life and open up new possibilities of relationship.

In general, this applies to all creative processes. We cannot create something when we're in a crowd. To sing, write a poem, make a painting, we have to concentrate on our own activity. It's a moment when we are alone. More generally still, we cannot approach the spiritual world except by withdrawing our senses from created nature, so loneliness may be a condition for our making such an approach. You'll remember how, in Pushkin's "The Prophet", the poet had to come into a desert before the seraph appeared to him. When we experience crises in our lives, we find that our previous relationships to people and the world do not work for our current problem -- that's why we're in crisis. Loneliness can be a spur toward higher things. And it seems that for some people this problem of loneliness constitutes the core problem of their lives, making it necessary to seek a new connection to the spiritual world.

All this is to look at the problem of loneliness from our standpoint today: we live in this world of senses, but we need to withdraw from it on occasion in order to drink from new springs of spiritual life. For Adam, however, the problem was opposite to ours. He was fully united with the divine, and the process of individualization required a separation from the spiritual world. As the spiritual world became gradually closed to him, he opened himself to what he did not know before, or did not know in the same way: the world of created nature. The movement for him was from above to below. As he fell asleep to the spirit ("the Lord god caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept"), he awoke to nature and to flesh ("And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh").

We can ask ourselves, then: what happens when the soul, having lived in intimate communion with everything divine, finds itself descending progressively toward the created realm? The soul no longer receives enough warmth of love -- enough of that fiery, creative, loving warmth that was able to bring worlds into being. And so the creative activity of Adam was not sufficiently fed by an inner fire, and it needed to be replaced by outer influences. The result was Adam's division into two separate beings, male and female.

We can experience this separation as a process of gradual inner cooling that makes the act of giving oneself -- the pure fire of sacrifice -- ever more difficult to kindle. The center of the soul shifts from the inner moral world of spirit, wholeness, and union, to the outer, created world of nature, difference, and separateness; from the refined and subtle to the more condensed and less flexible; from union in fire to the separateness of what is already formed. Forming is always a process of differentiation, of separation. For example, the inner warmth of the bud gives rise to an outward elaboration of shoots and flowers. And just as a new shoot will not grow out of a bud if it is gripped by frost and not warm enough inside, Adam's soul lost its ability to create a body of flesh from inside.

We all know something of this difficulty, as when, lacking enough inner blood-warmth, we have to warm outselves from outside. Or, on the soul level, we may be depressed and held in a state of inner frozenness, weakness, or fear: cut off from spiritual potentials, we need soul help from outside -- we need a friend and the warmth of love. In the Adamic race this transition from inner need to outer need happened archetypically. What earlier was a unity of spirit and soul was now split into two separate beings -- Adam and Eve. Whereas the earlier unity was in a sense independent of the outer world of nature -- and in fact created nature -- now it became dependent upon the body and was conditioned by it. For the first time one could speak of the masculine and feminine genders, not as a spirit-soul distinction, but as a distinction within the world of nature and flesh.

Genesis makes it clear that it was the fleshly pole of Adam, not the soul-spiritual pole, that God separated in two. "And he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man." What earlier was a unity of body reflecting a soul-spiritual unity now became two bodies, two genders, masculine and feminine. As a result, the soul-spiritual unity could express itself less harmoniously, more one-sidedly, in a gender-dependent manner. The spiritual capacity of giving is more reflected in the male, and the soul capacity to receive is more on the female side. While we all have both spirit and soul, we have them in different degrees. Some people may be more harmonious, while others are inclined more sharply toward the masculine or feminine pole. It depends on how the soul is constituted: if it is drawn more strongly to the universal qualities of the spirit, it may seek greater harmony, while if it is connected more to the flesh, it may gravitate toward one gender or the other.

All this helps us to understand why Genesis says about marriage:

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Now only together can they constitute the unity of giving and receiving through which evolution occurs. New human beings can be born only through the union by which the two become one flesh. Union happens on the level of the flesh -- on the "horizontal" level (between two enfleshed beings) instead of vertically (spirit-soul-body) as when Adam was begotten through the Word of God. This perhaps accounts for the widespread traditions honoring the holiness of the family. Our highest divine capacity is "hidden" in the activity of procreation, whereby spirit descends into the flesh. It's important to see this double aspect of gender: it mediates the highest sort of creation (the begetting of a new human body), but it does so through the flesh, not directly out of the Word.

The separation of male and female presents us with two tasks. First, we all need to develop a vertical connection with the divine world so as to develop the child of spirit within ourselves. The gospel expresses this through the words, "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:12-13). This has to do with the individual's own destiny and requires a restoration of the unity and harmony of one's own spirit, soul, and body. Then, in the second place, there is the need for a renewal of the horizontal connection between persons. Before the creation of Eve from Adam there was no such need; because of the perfect vertical relation to the divine, there could be no separation between human beings, who were united by virtue of residing in harmony with the one Spirit. But now that they are two, there is an attraction between them, and this attraction is rooted in an archetype of divine love. The full realization of this archetype in human existence is not possible through the flesh -- the egotism attached to sexual attraction is too strong -- but is achieved only through divine communion.

(We're not considering here the perfectly normal and proper process of procreation. But the limits of what can be achieved on a physical level are depicted in the story of Don Juan, who longed for a perfection of communion, and whose dreams of such communion were ruined after the attempt to realize them on the level of the flesh. It's interesting that in Genesis God creates Eve as a helper for Adam -- we could say, as a friend or companion. This points to the spiritual foundation of their union.)

We have one expression of divine communion in Christ's saying, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). This horizontal communion did not exist in paradise before the separation of Eve from Adam. (Communion can't occur -- and isn't needed -- where there is no separation.) There is also the moment during the crucifixion when Christ says to his mother, "Woman, behold thy son!" and to John, "Behold thy mother!" A spiritual connection replaces natural connections.

These two dimensions, vertical and horizontal -- love of God and love of the human being -- are joined together in the admonition: Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Recover unity and harmony with the spiritual realm from which you descended, and with the human beings from whom you have been separated.

So we come to the serpent:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:1-5)

The serpent was "subtil" -- crafty or cunning -- which suggests a mind whose sharp cleverness is used in order to advance its own purposes. Such a mind doesn't perceive the world as it is, but only as it presents an advantage to oneself. Mind is at the service of egotism. When the ego seizes the mind as its own possession, then we have a crafty mind, receiving its wisdom not from God but through its own calculations.

A serpent presents us with a physical image. Compare the image of a snake to that, say, of a horse. In a horse we see a powerful will radiating through its legs. Similarly, following the so-called threefold organization of the animal kingdom, we can recognize the rhythmical balance of the lion, or the winged, perceptual acuity of the eagle. But what of the serpent? It is, you might say, nothing but a long intestinal tract -- the shape of digestion alone. We can see it as an image of desire, of the egotistic power to grasp, devour, possess, and digest. And the head emerges more or less at the same level as, and directly out of, the digestive organs, which poison its thoughts. Its mind is obsessed by the fire of desire coming from below, in the service of egotism.

Such is the image of a cunning mind. We find its opposite in the image of St. Michael and the dragon: with his spear (the light of consciousness) he pins the dragon, holding it down. Whereas the lower elements seize and darken the upper pole of the snake, the upper pole in Michael tames the lower elements.

(Please remember that every image of nature can be viewed from different angles. The context in which a text employs an image is crucial for its interpretation. For a different side of the serpent, see our discussion of Pushkin's poem, "The Prophet".)

A crafty mind cannot attain to reality or to the divine life within all things. It grasps and holds only what is close to itself and therefore creates its own world as a substitute for reality. Real knowledge can be granted or given, but never grasped. Therefore the serpent lives in a world of illusion -- which is why the devil is called "the father of lies." His cunning wisdom lies outside the moral-spiritual world. Moreover, we can recognize in this grasping for one's own wisdom the working of pride. A cunning mind can be proud of its subtle ability to reach its goals by itself, without blessing from above. Pride is the psychological foundation of the egotistic mind.

So the crafty serpent brought both pride and a world of illusion to its encounter with Eve. And we should note that it was only Eve, not Adam, with whom the serpent spoke. It could gain access only to the more changeable world of the soul, stronger in Eve, and not to the element of the eternal spirit, which was stronger in Adam. Soul, not spirit, can be tempted.

The actual content of the conversation between the serpent and Eve is extremely important. Earlier, God, or Yahweh, had said, "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). But now the serpent says to Eve: No, you will not die, but your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing both good and evil. Notice that the serpent does not simply say, "No, nothing at all will happen; everything will be fine, just as it was." Rather, he acknowledges that something will happen, but says it won't be death, and then assures Eve of new powers she will gain.

Now, we know that Adam was connected to the universe through his understanding, through his soul life, and through his creative will rooted in his physical existence. The separation from the divine he has been experiencing affects all three levels of his being. We can, therefore, read Yahweh's prohibition in three senses. First: If you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will die because your understanding will be disconnected from the moral light of conscience which you have been receiving from the divine spirit; you will find yourself in the world of lies and illusion. And Lucifer's response (which always contains truth, even if not timely or complete truth): You will be disconnected from this light, but it will not mean death for you. You will gain your own light in place of God's, and you will form your own judgments. Then again (Yahweh): If you eat the forbidden fruit, your soul will be cut off from the currents of life now flowing to it from the entire universe, and you will die. Lucifer: No, you won't die, but your eyes will be opened and you will see a different world, a world of separateness where the divine being will no longer fill your soul. You will have space to keep your own personality. All other objects and beings in the world will be outside you. And again (Yahweh): You will die because the divine power of creation, which comes through openness to God, will be lost to you. Lucifer: This isn't true; you won't die. But you will receive as your own a creative power that now lies only in the hands of God. You will gain a power of good and evil, and so become like a god. God will not create through you, but you will create according to your own will.

The serpent's words were not outright lies, but they omitted something vitally important. To be as gods is not merely to have a great power of creation and destruction; it also requires an ability to use these powers -- the cosmic powers of "love" and "hatred" -- in a harmonious and unified manner for the creation of good rather than for destruction. And this requires us to retain a proper connection to the moral universe. Otherwise we're like children playing with weapons of mass destruction. Such an appropriation of divinity is a caricature; it is not to become a god, but to become like a god. Lucifer's promise was that the human being would gain freedom from the moral life of the universe, receiving instead his own life as a life of separation and illusion, capable of creating illusory worlds. Certainly the illusion is evident in our civilization -- in war, in atomic weapons, in the pollution of nature, in genetic engineering, and so on.

Since the temptation we have only two choices: to become gods, full of wisdom, life, and love, by allowing the divine power of Christ to work through us and so to become a divine humanity; or else to become like gods -- antichrists living in an illusory, artificial world as instruments of destruction.