1. But now let us see, if you please, in what manner those first men committed so great a sin, which both cast them out of paradise into this penal exile, and in them condemned originally the whole human race. And to me indeed it seems that they would not have eaten of the forbidden tree unless they had coveted; nor would they have coveted unless tempted; nor would they have been tempted unless forsaken; nor would they have been forsaken by God unless they themselves first forsook God; nor would they have forsaken God unless they had grown proud, and damnably desired the likeness of God: to which they would have come, without bodily death, if, living under their God, they had kept the precept which they had received; so that those who had received in nature the power not to die, might attain in glory the inability to die;
and there they would have received the reward of not being able to sin, if here their merit had been to have been unwilling to sin. Open concupiscence, therefore, would not have moved them, fallen from their Creator into creation by an affectation of divinity, unless hidden pride had first corrupted them; nor would the devil through the serpent have held out to them so deadly a counsel, unless he had first caught their appetite. 'If,' he says, 'you taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil' (Gen. 3:5). These are those three things which the holy apostle John testifies are in the world and ought not to be loved by lovers of God, saying: 'Love not the world, neither the things which are in the world;'
because all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world' (1 John 2:15-16). And unless those who had already fallen away from the love of God had begun to love these things, they would never, ill-persuaded, have believed the counsel of the serpent. 2. And so the lust of the flesh was fulfilled in them, in that they tasted of the forbidden tree; the lust of the eyes, in that they desired their eyes to be opened to them; and the pride of life, in that they believed they could become what God is. Therefore, corrupted by the delight of the flesh, and the curiosity of the eyes, and the ambition of pride, they were cut off from the tree of life, by which the grace of warding off death and of continuing salvation was bestowed upon them;
and their bodies contracted a diseased quality, so that, according to the sentence of God, they are believed to have died on that day on which there was wrought in them, as a penalty, the necessity of dying; and through that tree, which from its cause received the name of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17)—from which, though they could have abstained, the wretches neglected to do so—they might, by their very punishment, discern what difference there was between the good which they had lost and the evil which they had incurred: for if, having lost so great a good, they had incurred no evil, perhaps they would not have known what manner of good they had lost. For salvation becomes sweeter when sorrow torments; and the bitterness of sickness commends the sweetness of health once lost: and thus, not by learning but by experiencing that evil, they began to feel what it were better they should not know;
so that from their very misery they might feel how great a blessedness they had lost, and thus those whom perhaps the loss of a natural good had not moved might at least be moved by the just suffering of a penal evil. These things have been said by us about the first men by a necessary digression; so that those who are unwilling to undergo the punishment of their damnation may beware of the example of their downfall.