Introduction

The little essay below is one I wrote back in 2015, an account of St. Ephraim the Syrian's interpretation of Genesis 3, drawing on his Hymns on Paradise and his Commentary on Genesis. It is not much more than a synopsis of St. Ephraim's views, but it at least makes those interesting views a little more accessible.

The Battle for Paradise

According to St. Ephraim the Syrian

“Joyfully did I embark on the tale of Paradise—a tale that is short to read but rich to explore”: thus did St. Ephraim declare (Hymns on Paradise 1.3 in Sebastian Brock’s translation), and so it is. In the text of Scripture, men spend little time in the true Paradise (though in Greek a garden like Susannah’s is called “paradise”), yet those few verses are flowing with spiritual milk and honey. Many have explored these passages (as did St. John Paul II in his monumental Theology of the Body), but here we explain the reading of Ephraim, the Harp of the Holy Spirit.

Paradise was that glorious garden God planted on the third day of creation and then placed Adam therein (Ephraim’s Commentary on Genesis II.5 in Edward Mathews Jr.’s translation). This garden was on a high mountain, and it had a spring excelling all earthy waters bursting forth. There were no thieves to sneak in and rob its fruits, and there was no bramble to clear, and yet Adam was told to guard it and till it. Ephraim reminds us that “Adam had nothing to guard then except the law that had been set down for him. Nor was any other ‘tilling’ entrusted to him but to fulfill the commandment that had been commanded him” (Commentary on Genesis II.7.3). This one commandment was to avoid a single tree, just one: this was truly a “gentle and pleasant boundary” (Hymns on Paradise 4.1). Out of love of the Lord, Adam was to keep this commandment. Yet as an additional protection, the Lord even placed death around the tree, that Adam might keep the commandment out of fear, if not out of love (Commentary on Genesis II.8.3). It was the obedience or disobedience to this commandment that would determine whether Adam became a mortal or an immortal (II.17.3). While he kept that single, simple, pleasant commandment, God made him lord over creation, giving him all creatures to name, and he clothed him with glory (II.10.3).

When Adam felt lonely, the Lord did not deprive him of companionship, but He raised up for him, from his own side, a help-mate like unto him, and they were both so clothed with glory that they were not aware they were naked. Yet the carefree life of these two was not long, for the serpent approached, he who was the cleverest of animals and yet a fool in comparison to man (II.15.2). He entered into a battle with Eve, and he tempted her, inflaming her native avarice for the rich fruit. She did not discern the import of his words, nor did she fight against him, but she was entranced by her avarice for the divinity the serpent promised, and she ate of the forbidden fruit before giving it to Adam, “that she might become head over her head…and that she might be older in divinity than that one who was older than she in humanity” (II.20.3). She then offered the fruit to Adam, and he succumbed to her temptation, and thus the serpent “in a momentary battle took from [Adam and Eve] those things they ought not to have lost even in a great battle” (II.22.2).

They lost all they could have gained had they kept the commandment of God: for if they had kept it, they would have experienced both immortal life and infallible knowledge; yet they believed the tempter’s lie that they would receive divinity from transgressing the commandment, while the path to divinity truly lies in keeping the Lord’s decrees (II.23.1). Yet God, in His great mercy and loving-kindness, did not want His children to be deprived of all these goods from the sake of one sin, and so He gave them the chance to repent, that they might then regain some of what they had lost. For He first delayed in visiting them, to give them time to repent, and yet they did not; and then He made unnecessary noise in walking through Paradise in order to alert them so that they might supplicate Him, and yet they did not; and then He broke forth in a question, that they might respond in confession and a plea for mercy, and yet they did not (II.23.2-24.1). Instead of confessing, they gave blame, Adam to Eve and his God, Eve to the serpent. So the despondent Lord first turned to the serpent and—not asking repentance, since “where there is opportunity for repentance, it would be right to inquire, but to one who is a stranger to repentance judgment is fitting”—proclaimed His punishment upon the beast (II.29.1). This, too, was an opportunity for repentance on the part of Adam and Eve, and yet they did not respond; and so, finally, God punished them as well and rendered judgment against them. How many, countless opportunities did the Lord give them for repentance, and yet they squandered them all and were justly punished—may we not be so cavalier with the Lord’s times for our own repentance, for we never know when we may at once appear before His fearsome judgment to render an account for our deeds. Yet if we repent, as Adam and Eve should have, we can receive the everlasting life promised through Christ.

After announcing all their punishments—birthpangs, subordination, cursed earth, toil of labour, humiliation—the Lord bestowed on them garments of skin, the death of the animals foretelling their own mortality (II.33). Now they were in the estate of sinful man; now “they were clothed with a curse” (II.35.1). Before they had known only good and heard of evil only by hearsay, now they taste only evil and hear of good only by hearsay; before they had glory and were without pain and disease, now they were clothed in the sway of pain and disease and were stripped of glory (II.34.2). Yet there was more the Lord had to do to them: for they still had access to the tree of life. Whereas the tree of knowledge gave them temporal pains, this tree would give them pains eternal; that one allows death to free them of pain, while this one would cause them to live “as if buried alive,” eternally tormented. Thus, God “withheld from them the tree of life. It was not right either that a life of delights be allowed in the land of curses or that eternal life be found in a transitory world” (II.35.2). For eating of the tree of life would have either caused something to lie: either death’s decree or the tree’s life-giving ability; that no such lie would occur, and so that Adam and Eve were not further harmed by this tree as by the other, the Lord expelled them from Paradise, locking the gates with a living fence, the sword-wielding cherubim. Since “Adam had trampled down that gentle and pleasant boundary, so instead God made for him a boundary guarded by force. The mere words of the commandment had been the boundary to the Tree, but now the cherub and the sharp sword provided the fence of Paradise” (Hymns on Paradise 4.1).

So man, by his sin, was expelled from Paradise; because Adam did not fight the cunning serpent but was rather routed by passion, all men were barred from eternal life, though they longed for it so. Yet God, in His goodness, did not leave man in this predicament; rather, in the fullness of time, He sent His Son to become man, the second Adam. When He willingly suffered death on the Cross, He went down to Hades, and Satan, seeing only His humanity, believed he had conquered the Lord and that now the Christ would be forever chained within the abyss of Hades. Yet Satan was tricked, for the Christ’s humanity was like rusted armor concealing a mighty king, or like the bait covering the hook of His divinity, and when Hades swallowed this hook, the Lord burst open the gates from the inside. “When the adversary beheld the armor of conquering Adam, he rejoiced, not perceiving that he was being taken by surprise; He who was within the armor would have terrified him, but His exterior gave him courage. The evil one came to conquer, but he was conquered and could not hold his ground” (Hymns on Paradise 12.6).

The Lord Christ, the second Adam, fettered the ancient serpent and shattered the locks of Hades; He preached to the captives enchained there—who had heard a foretaste of this preaching when John the Forerunner came down to the realm of the dead—and those who followed Him He led out of the pit, and He led them into His Father’s Kingdom in Heaven, the greater Paradise. And now all who strive to follow the one Way—the Way of Him “who taught us to repent so that we too may return to Paradise”—and war against the passions and the demons and are victorious through God’s grace may enter Paradise, “the haven of the victorious” (Hymns 13.6, 6.25). We could give great and glorious account of those victorious and their exploits, those “who adorned themselves with the very likeness of Paradise; in them is depicted the beauty of the Garden”; and yet it is time to end this reflection (Hymns 6.14). Let us rejoice with St. Ephraim, “Blessed is the sinner who has received mercy there and is deemed worthy to be given access to the environs of Paradise,” and let us pray with him, “As I have been held worthy to receive [Paradise], so make me worthy to enter it!” (Hymns 10.14, 6.25).

Sources:

St. Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns on Paradise. Tr. Sebastian Brock. Popular Patristics Series 10. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1990.

St. Ephrem the Syrian. Selected Prose Works: Commentary on Genesis, Commentary on Exodus, Homily on Our Lord, Letter to Publius. Tr. Edward G. Mathews, Jr. and Joseph P. Amar. Ed. Kathleen McVey. The Fathers of the Church 91. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994.

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