The Second Adam

The first Adam, progenitor of the human race, was unable to fulfil the vocation laid before him: to achieve deification and bring to God the visible world by means of spiritual and moral perfection. Having broken the commandment and fallen away from the sweetness of Paradise, he had closed the way to deification. Yet everything that the first man left undone was accomplished in his stead by God Incarnate, the Word-become-flesh, the Lord Jesus Christ. He trod that path to us which we were meant to tread towards him. And if this would have been the way of humanity’s ascent, for God it was the way of humble condescension, of self-emptying (kenosis).

St Paul calls Christ the ‘second Adam’. Contrasting him with the first, he says: ‘The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven’ (I Cor. 15:47). This parallelism was developed by St John Chrysostom, who referred to Adam as the prototype of Christ:

Adam is the image of Christ … as the man for those who came from him, even though they did not eat of the tree, became the cause of death, then Christ for those who were born of him, although they have done no good, became the bearer of righteousness, which he gave to all of us through the Cross.

Gregory the Theologian makes a detailed comparison between Christ’s sufferings and Adam’s fall:

For each of our debts we are given to in a special way … The tree of the Cross has been given for the tree we tasted of; for our hand stretched out greedily, we have been given arms courageously extended; for our hands following their own inclination, we have been given hands nailed to the Cross; for the hand that has driven out Adam, we have been given arms uniting the ends of the earth into one. For our fall we have been given his raising up on a Cross; for our tasting of the forbidden fruit, we have been given his tasting of bile; for our death, his death; for our return to the earth, his burial.

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to the Teaching and Spirituality of the Orthodox Church, 79-80.

 

“Thou hast raised up Adam and the whole of fallen nature”

In recent weeks, on the weekends before and after the feast of the Elevation of the Cross, my priest has made a point of noting that Orthodox devotion to the Cross of Christ can jar somewhat for those of us who grew up in western, and more particularly Protestant, contexts. If we were brought up to see the Cross as the punishment meted out on Christ by the Father for our sins, then we may have an instinctive aversion to the Cross, seeing it as something terrible and offensive and hardly as something to be venerated.

His words reminded me of the Bible I had as a child and at the revulsion that I had felt at the image of the crucifixion that was in it. I did everything I could to avoid looking at it, for it was a depressing, dark painting, totally devoid of hope. As a child I felt rather guilty that I always turned the pages on it as quickly as possible, but it was an image of dread and certainly not one that spoke to me of a loving God.

Now, a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and I have discovered that what was then presented to me as the Gospel was rather a distorted version of it. And I have discovered that it is not for nothing that we refer to the Feast of the Cross as the “Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-giving Cross.”

But I was reminded of that picture again yesterday. I have been restoring a Dutch Statenbijbel which was the official Dutch Calvinist translation. I’m really enjoying the work although it is a huge and heavy book. I discovered that part of the reason it is so thick is that it has fairly substantial Psalms, hymns, prayers and a catechism at the back. And, glancing at the catechism and hymns, I was reminded of what a miserable and depressing vision such a theological context portrays of the human person.

That in itself was nothing new, although it is something I try not to focus on. But yesterday I came across a picture of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise which is placed opposite the beginning of Genesis. That this is the image chosen to mark the beginning of the Bible could perhaps be seen as making a theological statement – and no doubt the likes of Matthew Fox would have something to say about its prioritising of sin and redemption over the goodness of creation, but I do not really want to give credence to such simplistic polarities. And I suspect that the differences go deeper than simply the acceptance or rejection of certain imagery, but lie rather in the understanding of such images.

Indeed, I have become increasingly aware in recent months just how central the imagery of the loss of Paradise and of our identification with the fall of Adam and Eve is in Orthodox theology. Indeed, the more I read the liturgical texts of the Church, the more central this seems to become. But the point of such texts is not to remind us of our hopeless situation and to foster gloom and doom. It is rather that God goes in search of fallen Adam, that Adam (i.e. all humanity) is made new again in Christ who Himself descends into hell to conquer death.

In this context, then, the Cross of Christ is not about God meting out death but it is about God in Christ destroying death and the power of death in order to bring life. On the Cross, God “hast raised up Adam and the whole of fallen nature” (Small Vespers for the Feast). This is why we venerate the Cross, not as a symbol of torture or punishment, but as a symbol of victory.

 

In compassion call me back again

The Lord my Creator took me as dust from the earth and formed me into a living creature, breathing into me the breath of life and giving me a living soul; He honoured me, setting me as ruler upon earth over all things visible, and making me companion of the angels. But Satan, the deceiver, using the serpent as his instrument, enticed me by food; he parted me from the glory of God and gave me over to the earth and to the lowest depths of death. But, Master, in compassion call me back again. (Vespers for Forgiveness Sunday, 168)

…

One of the primary images in the Triodion is that of the return to Paradise. Lent is a time when we weep with Adam and Eve before the closed gate of Eden, repenting with them for the sins that have deprived us of our free communion with God. Lent is also a time when we are preparing to celebrate the saving even of Christ’s death and rising, which has reopened Paradise to us once more (Luke 23:43) So sorrow for our exile in sin is tempered by the hope of our re-entry into Paradise …

Note that the Triodion speaks here not of ‘Adam’ but of ‘me’ : ‘May He open unto me the gates which I closed’. Here, as throughout the Triodion, the events of sacred history are not treated as happenings in the distant past or future, but as experiences undergone by me now within the dimensions of sacred time. (46)

Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Fast” in Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, The Lenten Triodion (Faber & Faber, 1978).