This article is from The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation 

Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,

Glory to Jesus Christ!

According to Psalm One:

Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence.

But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he shall meditate day and night.

The very beginning and foundation of the Law is the sacred history of Genesis, and meditation on Genesis has been profoundly fruitful in the lives of the saints and doctors of the Church.  Meditation on the first chapters of the sacred history of Genesis has brought home to me the many salutary lessons that can be drawn from the Mosaic account of the fall of St. Adam from the heights of holiness.   In this newsletter, I would like to share some of those lessons with you.

 

Is Character What You Are in the Dark?

The American evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody is often credited with saying that “Character is what you are in the dark.”  At first glance, this saying seems to hold true.  History and our own experience confirm that people are often tempted to do wrong when no one is watching them or when they are not accountable for their actions. But does this saying line up with the experience of St. Adam as recorded in the sacred history of Genesis?

No, it does not.

According to all of the Fathers, Doctors and approved mystics of the Church, when St. Adam was alone “in the dark” with God, He walked in the light of God’s love and grace.  According to St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church:

When God created Adam, divine radiance surrounded the clay substance of which he was formed. That way this lump of clay appeared on the outside as an outline of its parts, after its shape had been given to it, but inside it was hollow. Then, from the same mass of clay God created inside of the figure the heart, the liver, the lung, the stomach, the intestines, and the brain, as well as the eyes and the tongue together with all the remaining organs . . . When he awoke afterward he was a prophet of heavenly things, knowledgeable of all powers of the creature and of all arts . . . God gave over to him all creatures, that he might make them his own by his manly power because he knew of them and about them. For man represents all creatures, and the breath of life, which never ceases to live, is in him.

God spoke to Adam in the language of angels, whom Adam understood and knew well. Through God-given wisdom and the spirit of prophecy he knew then about all languages that would later be invented by men, and he thoroughly knew the nature of all creatures. For the Lord appeared to him in inconceivable splendor, more beautiful than any creature.

The Blessed Mother bore witness to the exalted character of Adam’s original human nature and told Venerable Maria of Agreda that from the moment of his creation:

Adam in regard to the body was so like unto Christ that scarcely any difference existed.  According to the soul, Adam was similar to Christ.

According to Moses, St. Adam did God’s Will regarding the naming of the animals and was so perfectly docile to His Will that God was able to fashion for him from his side a perfect help-mate and present her to him, without requiring St. Adam to exert himself in any way.  In short, St. Adam “in the dark” walked in a most intimate union with God, and does not appear to have been susceptible to Satan’s temptations as long as he remained alone with God.  So, it would appear that St. Adam’s character cannot be reduced to what he was “in the dark.”

What, then, was the source of the weakness that led to his Fall?

“You shall not have other gods beside Me”

The sacred history of Genesis and the writings of the approved mystics, like St. Hildegard of Bingen, who were shown the first-created world, confirm that St. Adam’s Fall resulted when he prized a creature above His Creator—when he put pleasing his wife above obedience to his God.  That is why In a homily on Genesis 3, St. John Chrysostom has God addressing Adam after the Fall in these words:

Even if your wife prepared the way for your transgressing My command, you were not without guilt.  You should have regarded My command as more worthy of trust. And, beyond dissuading yourself alone from eating, you should have demonstrated the gravity of the sin to your wife as well.  After all, you are head of your wife, and she has been created for your sake; but you have inverted the proper order: not only have you failed to keep her on the straight and narrow but you have been dragged down with her, and whereas the rest of the body should follow the head, the contrary has in fact occurred, the head following the rest of the body, turning things upside down (St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, Homily 17).

In His Church-approved private revelations to St. Bridget of Sweden, Our Lord elaborated on the magnificence of His plan for mankind and on His sorrow over man’s ingratitude and disobedience.  He told her:

You honor Me worthily for every created creature. But, tell me, why do you praise Me for mankind which has provoked Me to wrath more than any other creature? I created him more superior and dignified than all the lower creatures under the sky, and for none else did I suffer such indignities as for mankind and none was redeemed at so great a cost. Or what creature does not abide by its created order other than man? He inflicts me more with sorrow than any other creature. For just as I created you to praise and honor me, so I made man to honor Me. I gave him a body like a spiritual temple, and I made and placed the soul in it like a beautiful angel, for the human soul has power and strength like an angel. In this temple, I, the God and Creator of mankind, wished to be like the third so that he would enjoy Me and find delight in Me. Then I made him another temple, similar to himself, out of his rib.

Our Lord showed St. Bridget that man’s dominion over the original creation was so complete that his Fall brought misery not only to his human descendants but to the lower animals.  In answer to a question about animal suffering, He told her:

You ask why animals suffer infirmities. This is because there exists a disorder in them as in the rest of creation. I am the Maker of every nature and have given to each its own temperament and order in which each one moves and lives. However, after man, for whose sake all things were made, set himself against his lover, that is, against Me his God, then disorder entered all the rest of creation, and all the things that should have been afraid of man began to set themselves against him and oppose him. Because of this defective disorder many troubles and difficulties befall humankind as well as animals.

Besides, sometimes animals also suffer because of their own natural immoderation or as a curb to their ferocity, or as a cleansing of nature itself, or sometimes because of human sins in order that human beings, who have a greater use of reason, might consider how much punishment they deserve, when the creatures they love are plagued and taken away. But if human sins did not demand it, animals, which are under human charge, would not suffer in so singular a manner.

But not even they suffer without great justice. Their suffering occurs either to put a quicker end to their lives and lessen their wretched toils that consume their strength or on account of a change in seasons or out of human carelessness during the process of work. People should therefore fear me, their God, above all things, and treat my creatures and animals more mildly, having mercy on them for the sake of me, their Creator. I, God, accordingly decreed the Sabbath rest, because I care for all My creation.

. . . As to why everything is born in pain, I answer: When humankind rejected the fairest pleasure, they immediately incurred a life of toil. And because the disorder began in and through humankind, My justice causes there to be some bitterness even for other creatures, which exist for the sake of humans, so as to temper their pleasure and foster their means of nourishment. For this reason, people are born with pain and make toilsome progress in order to render them eager to hurry to their true rest. They die naked and poor in order to make them restrain their disorderly behavior and fear the coming examination.

Likewise animals, too, give birth in pain in order for bitterness to temper their excesses, and so that they may be participants in human toil and sorrow. For this reason, insofar as humankind is so much nobler than are animals, people should love Me, the Lord God, their Creator, all that much more fervently

The Fall and Its Aftermath

The children of the Enlightenment based their rejection of Divine Revelation on a new faith in naturalism.  It was more “reasonable,” they argued, with Descartes, that the same natural processes occurring today produced the present order of nature than that the creative action of God produced the order of nature in the beginning.  It followed from this article of their creed that there had not been an original state of perfection in the beginning of creation.  Instead of an exalted human nature, which fell into the present state of corruption through Original Sin, they imagined a primitive state, followed by a long history of progress, not through the assistance of God’s grace, but through man’s unaided efforts to acquire knowledge and to master the material world. From her bed of suffering, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich gave the lie to these arrogant speculations by bearing witness to the violent contrast between the world before and after the Fall, as she beheld it in her visions.  She told Clemens Brentano:

Adam and Eve before sin were very differently constituted from what we, poor, miserable creatures now are.  With the reception of the forbidden fruit, they imbibed a material existence.  Spirit became matter; flesh, an instrument, a vessel.  At first they were one in God, they sought self in God; but afterward they stood apart from God in their own will.  And this self-will is self-seeking, a lusting after sin and impurity.  By eating the forbidden fruit, man turned away from his Creator.  It was as if he drew creation into himself.  All creative power, operations, and attributes, their commingling with one another and with all nature, became in man material things of different forms and functions. Once man was endowed with kingship of nature, but now all in him has become nature.  He is now one of its slaves, a master conquered and fettered.  He must now struggle and fight with nature—but I cannot clearly express it.  It was as if man once possessed all things in God, their Creator and their Center; but now he made himself their center, and they became his master.

I saw the interior, the organs of man as if in the flesh, in corporeal, corruptible images of creatures as well as their relations with one another, from the stars down to the tiniest living thing.  All exert an influence on man.  He is connected with all of them; he must act and struggle against them, and from them suffer.  But I cannot express it clearly since, I, too, am a member of the fallen race . . .

The first man was an image of God, he was like Heaven; all was one in him, all was one with him.  His form was a reproduction of the Divine Prototype.  He was destined to possess and to enjoy earth and all created things, but holding them from God and giving thanks for them.  Man was, however, free; therefore was he subjected to trial, therefore was he forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.  In the beginning, all was smooth and level.  When the little mound, the shining hill upon which Adam stood arose, when the white blooming vale by which I saw Eve standing was hollowed out, the corruptor was near.

After the Fall, all was changed.  All forms of creation were produced in self, dissipated in self.  What had been one became many, creatures no longer looked to God alone, each was concentrated in self.

Mankind at first numbered two, then three, and at last they became innumerable.  They had been images of God; but after the Fall, they became images of self, which images originated in sin.  Sin placed them in communication with the fallen angels.  They sought all their good in self and the creatures around them with all of whom the fallen angels had connection; and from that interminable blending, that sinking of his noble faculties in self and in fallen nature, sprang manifold wickedness and misery.

While Enlightenment savants spun fantasies about man’s original happiness in a state of nature, Blessed Anne was shown heart-breaking visions of Adam and Eve’s misery in their fallen condition:

After some time, I saw Adam and Eve wandering about in great distress.  They were no longer beaming with light, and they went about, one here, the other there, as if seeking something they had lost.  They were ashamed of each other.  Every step they took led them downward, as if the ground gave way beneath their feet.  They carried gloom wherever they went; the plants lost their bright colors and turned gray, and the animals fled before them.  They sought large leaves and wove them into a cincture for their loins.  They always wandered about separate.

So What Is Holiness?

In the light of the sacred history of Genesis, we can see that a person’s character cannot be reduced to what he or she is and does “in the dark.”  A person’s character can only be judged according to what he or she does “in the dark” and “in the light”—“alone” and “in a crowd.”  In the light of this truth, the words of Psalm One shine forth with resplendent simplicity, teaching that the “righteous person” meditates on the Law of the Lord, “day and night”—that is to say, when he is alone “in the dark,” and when, like St. Adam, being offered the forbidden fruit from St. Eve, he stands in the presence of creatures who tempt him to exalt “the creature above the Creator.”

Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, may the Holy Ghost unite us to Jesus in every moment, in the night of solitude and in the day of company with creatures, and guide us into all the Truth!

In Domino,

Hugh Owen

P.S. Today is a First Saturday. Please be sure to answer Our Lady’s appeal for the First Saturday devotions as described by the Fatima Center at this link.

P.P.S. The 2025 Kolbe leadership retreat will take place at the Catholic Conference Center in Hickory, North Carolina, from July 31 to August 6. The retreat will equip attendees to defend and promote the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation in their spheres of influence as the foundation of our Faith and as the only firm foundation for a culture of life. For more information and to register for the retreat, please contact Hugh Owen at [email protected].

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Immaculata South Africa