Meanwhile their freedom, secure and unknowing of coming misfortune, makes use of good things and enjoys the blessed abundance of the place. Here the ready earth extends to them lavish food; indeed, from the nurturer of rich fruit an unfailing produce is taken from the tender turf. But if the boughs, bent with fruitful weight, let down mild apples from the lofty tree, at once the emptied branch begins to swell into blossom and to promise its fruit in fresh buds. Now if it delights them to snatch the sweetest sleep, they recline upon soft meadows and painted grass. And though the sacred grove offers to their every wish all delights, and shows itself generous with ever-new riches, yet they take their feasts and seek their food in such a way that no hunger compels them, nor does the needy belly, weary of nourishing, urge that their entrails be filled.
And unless it had pleased them to know the permitted food, though hungering they would seek no unknown fare, and no nourishment would sustain their steadfast life. They see their naked bodies, and are not ashamed to behold each other's limbs, and their untutored virtue feels nothing foul. It is not man's nature, but the fault, that is the cause of shame; for whatever limbs the good Creator formed, it was the use of the flesh that afterwards compelled them to be a cause of shame. Then their pure minds preserved unspotted their gaze, such as is told of the glory of the angels that inhabit the starry homes; and such as Christ promises shall be restored to the redeemed after the time of death: for these there shall be no care of marriage, nor shall carnal union in a base bond mingle the hot sexes.
Groaning shall cease—excess, fear, anger, lust, fraud, grief, deceit, sorrow, discord, envy. None shall be in want, none shall covet, but in the one peace of them all, Christ, the glory of the saints, shall suffice for all. In these good things the sacred first-beginnings held fast the mind of the first-formed pair, until in the first contest sin should overcome the overthrown through the deceiving enemy. This one had once been an angel, but after, kindled by his own crime, he blazed into swollen enterprises, thinking that he had made himself, that he had been his own Creator; and in his raging heart he conceived a fury, and, denying his Author, said: 'I shall attain the Divine name, and set my everlasting throne above the heavens, like unto the Most High, not unequal to the highest powers.'
As he vaunted such things, the exalted Power hurled him from heaven, and, once cast out, stripped him of his ancient honour. He who had shone first in the order of creation now, as the first, awaits his penalties beneath the coming Judge. Since a heavier sentence punishes such a one, whom would you think it strange to have fallen? For the doer aggravates the crime; in one who sins in ignorance the guilt is less, and the evil that a greater being has done is held the harsher. But because he directs his living faculties into hidden things, and because he foresees the future and unseals the secrets of things, the fervent nature of his angelic vigour still survives—a thing dreadful to tell, and a portent marked by its signs. For whatever direful deed is committed throughout the whole world, this one teaches it, and governs the hands and weapons of crimes, and, a hidden robber, wars through public misdeeds.
And now often into the shapes of men, now into the savage jaws of wild beasts he is turned, varying his deceits with ever-new faces. Sometimes he feigns the sudden appearance of a light bird in flight, and again fashions honourable disguises; appearing too as a maiden in a fair body, he drags burning eyes into obscene joys. Often too for the covetous he flashes forth vast silver, and kindles their spirit with the love of deceiving gold, then, fleeing, mocks the deluded touch with an empty phantom. To none does sure faith remain, nor the grace of a fixed form; but in whatever way he may capture and hold each one, doing harm—opportune for his deceits and suited to his concealed fraud—there is assumed an outward figure with a feigned face. Greater power still has been permitted to the savage one, that he might overcome the holy.
Thus the nature once bestowed upon the creature holds its power—that upright nature which the Author established, but which the subverter afterwards transferred to depraved uses. When this one saw the new men leading a happy life in the quiet abode with no peril, serving the Lord of the world under the law they had received, and enjoying the subjected things amid tranquil joys, a spark of zeal stirred up in him a sudden vapour, and blazing envy grew into savage conflagrations. Perchance then he was near the place from which, high up, he had fallen when he slipped, and dragged an interwoven throng along the downward slope. Recalling this, and pressing the recent fall upon his heart, he grieved the more that another possesses what he has lost. Then shame, mingled with gall, thus unfolds its complaints from his breast, and in such a voice releases its sighs:
'Alas for grief, that this creature should suddenly rise up for us, and that a hateful race should have grown from our ruin! Virtue held me exalted; now, behold, cast down, I am driven forth, and mere clay succeeds to angelic honour. Earth holds heaven; the ground, raised from a vile frame, reigns, and power, transferred, is lost to us. Yet not wholly is it lost: a great part retains its own strength, and is renowned in the highest power of doing harm. Nor does it profit to delay; even now I shall meet them in soft combat, while their first innocence, tried by no deceits and unaware of all guiles, lies open to my darts. And better shall they be caught by fraud alone, before they send forth their fruitful offspring into the eternal ages. Nothing immortal must be allowed to spring from earth: let the fountain of the race perish; the casting-down of the smitten head shall be the seed of death;'
'let the beginning of life bring forth the perils of death; let all be struck down in one; the slain root shall not make its summit live. These consolations at last remain to me, cast down as I am. If I cannot climb again into the closed heavens, from these too they shall be shut out: it is to be reckoned a lighter fall if a new substance be lost by a like ruin, if it undergo, as companion of my downfall, a partnership in punishment, and share with us those fires which I foresee. But lest the means of deceiving be thought difficult, this way must be shown—the way down which I long ago of my own accord ran headlong in my fall: the vaunting which drove me from my kingdom, this same shall drive man from the threshold of paradise.' So he spoke, and groans closed off the voice of the grieving one. There chanced to be one loftier in cunning than all living things, the rival that grows crafty with sharp-tongued breast—the serpent:
the transgressor chooses to take his shape from among all creatures, wrapping his airy body in a covering, and, changed into a sudden serpent, is stretched out: he becomes a dragon with a long neck, paints his gleaming coils with spots, roughens the folds of his rounded back, and arms his flanks with stiffened scales. Just as in early spring, when in the first months summer sends ahead glad warmths after the sluggish colds, escaping the old year with renewed masses; and, unloosing the dry sheath from its glittering body, the serpent comes forth, and, leaving the hidden places of the earth, terrible, displays a dread splendour in its form. Its eyes flash with dire fire; then with keen light its sight, grown gladder, learns to grow accustomed to the longed-for sun.
Now it feigns a soothing manner, as its jaws play with frequent song, and its throat darts out its forked tongue. Therefore, when with ill-persuading fraud he had put on the viperine shape, and, deceitful, had wholly passed into the serpent, he flew swiftly toward the light; for by chance the glad young pair were plucking ruddy apples from a green branch. Then the serpent, fearing lest with steadfast manly resolve he might not be able to subvert their hearts by the injected venom, was stretched forth along the coils that climbed the upright tree, and, matching his trailing length to the lofty boughs, thus with gentle voice bit at their easy hearing: 'O happy one, ornament of the world, most beautiful maiden, whom a form gleaming with rosy modesty adorns, you who shall be the coming mother of the race—the mightiest world awaits you as its mother: you are the first and sure delight and comfort of your husband, without whom he himself would not live,'
'so that, being the greater, your most sweet spouse, by his own right subject to your love, will render you offspring by wedlock. To you both is given a worthy seat on the height of paradise; before you the servant substance of the world trembles in subjection: whatever heaven creates, whatever earth creates, whatever the sea in its great gulf produces, is conferred to your uses. Nature denies nothing; behold, power is given over all things. Indeed I do not envy, I rather marvel: yet that one free touch upon the sweet tree should be kept from you, I would fain know who commands such dire things, who begrudges such gifts, and mixes fasts amid rich things.' These things his hisses feigned with ill-flattering voice. 'What stupor, O woman, has closed your mind in darkness, that you speak with a serpent?'
'Are you not ashamed to commit speech to a brute, that a beast should presume upon your tongue, and do you suffer the monster, and moreover add a reply?' Therefore, when the seducible Eve, receiving in her ears the deadly venom, consented to the wicked calamity, then to the serpent she thus spoke with empty mouth: 'O snake, mighty in sweet and dire things, most sweet one, not, as you suppose, has God urged fasts upon us, nor does he forbid our bodies to be tended with lavish nourishment. Behold, you see the feasts which the whole world extends; a most ready progenitor has granted us to use all these lawfully, and has loosed all the reins of life. This alone is the tree of the mid-grove which you behold forbidden as food; these apples alone it is not permitted to touch, while our rich sustenance takes freely of the rest.'
'For if our harmful liberty should violate the law, the Creator foretold, swearing by his own dread voice, that we should straightway pay the penalty by a certain death. What death may be, do you now, most learned serpent, freely disclose, since the matter is unknown to us untaught ones.' Then the cunning dragon, and, of his own will, the master of death, teaches destruction, and thus speaks to her captured ears: 'You fear, O woman, the empty name of terror. The sentence of swift death shall not come upon you; but your hateful Father has not allotted a fair lot, nor granted that you should know what he reserves as supreme for himself alone. What does it profit to be enclosed and to behold the adorned world, and for wretched minds to be shut in a blind prison?'
'Nature creates bodily senses likewise for the brutes, and open eyes; one sun serves all, and the beast differs not from human sight. Rather take my counsel, and graft your mind onto heavenly things, and stretch your upraised senses toward heaven. For this fruit, which you dread to touch as forbidden, will grant you to know whatever secrets your Father lays up. Only restrain not your suspended touch so long, lest your pleasure be too long curbed, a captive under the law. For as soon as you have tasted the divine savour with your mouth, straightway your eyes, cleansed in their sight, will make you equal to the gods, so as to know things holy as things harmful, to discern the unjust from the right, the false from the true.' As he promised such gifts with deceitful hisses, the credulous woman marvels with downcast face.
And now more and more she begins to hesitate and to bend her judgement, and to add her doubting mind further toward death. He, when he perceived her overcome by the nearby peril, and again recalling the name and the citadel of the gods, drew down one apple from among all upon the deadly tree, and suffused the beautiful thing with sweet fragrance; he wins over its appearance, and moreover offers it to her as she wavers. Nor does the ill-credulous woman spurn the wretched gift, but, taking the deadly apple in her hands, she handles it again and again. Now and then she brings it, of her own accord, to her nostrils and parted lips, and, unknowing, makes sport of her coming death. O how often, pricked in conscience, she drew back the fruit brought near her mouth, and, wavering under the weight of the bold evil, her right hand yielded, and, trembling, she recoiled from accomplishing the crime! Yet she desires to be like the gods, and the venom creeps in, harmful through ambition;
opposing forces seize her mind—on this side love, on that fear; vaunting assails the law, and yet at times the law comes to her aid. The wave of her divided heart surges in doubt amid the hard battles. Nor yet does the tempting serpent cease to deceive; he displays the food to the wavering woman, and complains of her delay, and it delights him that she is bent forward toward the fall of impending ruin. When at last the heavier sentence settled upon the vanquished woman—to attempt eternal hunger through the food of crime, to sate with food the serpent whom she herself would receive within—she assented to the snares, and, devouring, bit the apple. The sweet poison steals in; horrid death is caught by the taste. Here first the cunning snake contains his joys, and the savage victory dissembles its fierce triumph.
Unaware of the deed, returning from another quarter, Adam, glad through the grasses of the wide field, was seeking his wife's embraces and chaste kisses. The woman ran to meet him, in whose heart then for the first time boldness breathed feminine furies into her spirited soul. And thus she began to speak—for she was carrying, keeping in store for her wretched husband, the half-eaten deadly apple: 'Take the food, sweet spouse, from this life-giving shoot, which perchance shall make you like the supreme Thunderer, and equal to the deities; not unknowing do I bring you this gift, but now learned; the first taste has touched my inmost being, dissolving the covenant by a bold peril. Believe willingly; it were a crime for a manly mind to have doubted what I, a woman, was able to do; perchance you feared to go before; at least follow, and lift up your downcast spirits. Why do you avert your eyes? Why do you delay your prosperous desires?'
'And do you long defraud the coming honour of its due time?' Having said these things, she offered the banquet of death he would live by, while the crimes fed his death, his soul perishing the while. The unhappy man receives the words of the ill-persuading whisper, and cast back his bent senses to the uttermost. No care of trembling dread shook him, nor did he delay as much as the woman had at the first taste; but he follows swiftly, and steadfastly, from his wretched wife's mouth, the inconstant one snatches the dowry-venom, and to his own gaping jaws extends the hostile food. Scarcely had the moist gullet tasted the apple with a single bite, and scarcely was the food yielding its first savour, when behold, a sudden brightness stood about their faces, and besprinkled their new-seeing eyes with a light meant for mourning. Nature did not make them blind, nor did the perfection of their form bring forth a face deprived of the use of light.
'Now you shall be the more blind,' [it might be said,] 'for whom it no longer suffices to know that which so great a Creator willed you to know.' The faculty of discerning things was made for you unto life; but you also behold death, and that by your own will. Then they groan that their eyes had been opened; for rebellious guilt shone forth, and their bodies felt obscene stirrings. Then first, around their naked limbs (I cannot say for certain whether shame was extinguished or newly born) it looked about. The mind, now conscious to itself of its own fault, blushed, and the law of the flesh, implanted in its members, reigned. For from this posterity, with corrupted seed, drew the wish to know the future by unlawful arts, to send their sluggish minds into secret sacred rites, to search out things published in heaven or sunk in the deep earth, and to break in upon the cautious laws of nature.
Now they seek from the stars under which constellation each man is born, what prosperous seasons of the remaining life it may bring, and to learn from like signs an unlike outcome. And also to mark, with adverse motions and under varied fate, twins poured forth at one and the same time, whom one undivided rising brought forth to the light. To ascribe as gods to the stars certain native heroes, whom a later age preferred to the ancient stars; and to those long since buried in infernal night to distribute empty names throughout the boundless heaven. Now who could worthily tell the magic fraud, which tempts hidden powers with a silent breast, and desires to be joined to divine virtues?
As once the lawgiving prophet, under a proud king, while he displayed the new marvels of the commanded sign, stirred the magicians with envy to attempt such things, and heap up their own ruins with fervent zeal. If perchance upright power had been available to them, they would hasten to remove monsters, not also to add them. But, rivalling only in signs, not equal in strength, what it could not remove, more justly did their anger double. Hence it is that by their vaunted incantation the wonder-workers can, when with silent art they bring forth savage dragons, and often command them, though absent, to fight with them. Then, as each one has sensed a grievous serpent in the fray, or has learned the closed ears of a stubborn asp, he shakes within the weapons of his secret song:
Straightway, with the poisons wearied and struggling against his word, soon the serpent is handled with impunity by an unarmed hand, and only the bite, not the venom, is feared in the snake. Sometimes the enchanter perishes, if the crafty serpent, deaf, has scorned the murmurs of the adjurer. Since they draw this from their mother, and from their first origin, that thus, skilled in serpentine fraud and in tongue, they render mutual commerce of speech through likeness. Nor less does the contrary care of salvation assail these men; anguish grips those whose foreknown end of their appointed life leads them—when, however, they suppose that shades led out from the infernal abodes mingle in colloquy and report things known. But the spirit of error, which raves in them, prepares answers to their consultations through empty shapes.
And lest each thing be told at length in extended speech—deluded by the present, that one shall be condemned by perpetual judgement, whoever attempts to know the forbidden. Nor was Eve alone the searcher-out of evils: I shall now tell of another woman who, labouring under such a plague, though joined to a man, did not surpass her own Adam. A fervour of sinning had kindled certain cities, allowing civic crimes with loosened reins. Incest stood in place of law, and lust held all right; pleasure, having measured out for itself the seat of a kingdom, held the native peoples under its ruling flesh. And through zeal for crimes—what the loyal commonwealth had once, with a compliant populace, by ready obedience ordained as established—all whom the single misdeed had joined believed it a sin to have abstained, and a shame not to have sinned.
Offended by such things, the Judge and Arbiter of the world, when he raged, and prepared flames and an end for the place, addressed thus a certain man unlike all others, hidden from the chosen ranks, who then chanced to be a stranger in his own city, and alone among many—Lot: 'The towns, long since full of wanton fury, bespatter heaven with their stains, and weary my ears—though barred—with the clamours of their crimes. Destruction is at hand; the land, set ablaze by guilt, shall burn with fires; a shower of lightning shall quench the fervent crimes which the flood did not extinguish. The very earth shall be dissolved into perpetual embers, which, keeping living ashes even after the fires, and thus licking the ground, if it be lightly trodden with the heel, fleeing, pale, shall depart at the least touch.'
'Now leave your home, forsake the lands about to perish, and let the guilty fields sink down together with their deserving inhabitants. Nor let impending death join to them any whom life did not join. Let your wife afford you comfort; content with this companion alone, depart. Hasten your flight, let it be stretched by a straight path, nor let anyone look back at the cities about to be overthrown. Know not the evil; let whoever shall undergo the punishments look upon it, and let those who have deserved it carry with them the spectacle of their own death: let terror be far from those to be saved.' Thus the Father; but they hasten to depart from the land, and cut short delays, and leave the cruel fields. The vanquished sky had begun to be covered with dense mist, and to send down murmurs unknown before. Not as when the ether, struck by frequent thunder, shows harmless lightnings to the frightened lands.
But utterly, with menacing hiss, they were sending forth the final evil, foul signs through the airy tumults. Warned, they pressed on together, and, holding to their commands, went with faces set straight toward the granted abode. But the cunning serpent, seeking the heights, who had overthrown Eve, accustomed to touch the feminine mind, here too, fearing to tempt the manly spirit, breathes into the wife's desires that she should wish to know the ruins, and to detect with her sight the calamities escaped: 'O mad of soul, for whom it no longer suffices to have once succumbed to guile: she has lost part of the goods who has known evils; if the examples of your forebears do not deter you, you shall become an example; and let the dire desire of the secret perish even after you, for our fear's sake. You shall only look upon what was unlawful to know and forbidden to gaze at, and you shall see it, though you shall never tell it.'
Therefore, when the woman received a greater tumult from the neighbouring city, she bent back her twisted face, and scarcely at the first sight, with her movements restrained, she paused, ceasing to look when she had begun; then, her blood congealed, a marble torpor suffused her entrails; her cheeks grew rigid, a strange pallor stains her face. She did not close her eyes, nor even fall with that weight with which cast-down corpses strike the earth; but she stood, a mass gleaming translucent with dread lustre, and the deceived form preserved its own figure. Nor could you easily tell whether it was glass, stone, or metal succeeding to the human, were the salt not marked upon the palate. From then, the woman, forestalled by insipid guilt, tastes more salty without a mind, she who can prick the senses and season with the salt of example those who look on.
Yet this here is a great thing, that this man is not bent, nor follows his companion, and, brave, Adam is not overcome. Indeed I believe it better that the wife did not meet him to recount it to the man; for if she had reported what she had learned, perhaps she would have persuaded even him, by the sight, to scorn the commands, just as the primeval woman did to her own by the taste: she who, after she had deceived both herself and her companion alike, and had struck with a wound the offspring not yet born—then the victorious serpent, glad from the very contest, curling its scarlet crest upon its scaly head, now no longer dissembling the triumph it had won by craft, more fiercely insults the vanquished, and thus begins: 'Behold, the divine glory of the promised praise abides.'
'Whatever my knowledge was able to attain, now believe it yours; I have shown all things, and led your sense through hidden things, and whatever evil skilful nature denied, I have established, and given you to join the left hand to the right. From this I have dedicated you to myself by perpetual lot. Nor has God, though he formed you before, any longer more right over you; let him hold what he himself created; what I have taught is with me: the greater portion remains to me. Much you owe to the Creator, but more to the master.' He spoke, and, leaving the trembling pair in the midst of the mist, he perished, leaving through the clouds the counterfeit body he had feigned.