The whole world was given by God as food to man, with the exception of one forbidden fruit. And it is precisely this fruit that man eats, refusing to believe and to obey God. What is the meaning of this story, which greets us like a child’s fable? It means that the fruit of this one tree, in contrast to all others, was not given as a gift to man. It did not bear God s blessing. This means that if man ate this fruit, he did not eat it in order to have life with God, as a means of transforming it into life, but rather as a goal in itself, and thus, having consumed it, man subjected himself to food. He desired to have life not from God or for God but rather for himself. The very fall of man consists in the fact that he desired life for himself and in himself, and not for God and in God. 

God made this very world a means of communion with himself, but man desired the world purely for him self alone. Instead of returning God’s love with love for him, man fell in love with the world, as a goal in itself. But herein lies the whole problem, that the world cannot be an end in and of itself, just as food has no purpose unless it is transformed into life. 

So too, the world, having ceased to be transparent to God, has become an endless commotion, a senseless cycle of time in which everything is constantly in flux, constantly vanishing, and, in the final analysis, dying. In the divine conception of humanity, dependence on the world was overcome by the transformation o f the world itself into life. Life means possessing God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men”— so we read in the Gospel of John (1:4). 

But if the world is no longer transformed into anything, if life ceases to be a transformation into communion with Absolute Meaning, with Absolute Beauty, with Absolute Goodness, then this world becomes not only meaningless, it becomes death. Nothing has life in and by itself, everything vanishes, everything dissolves. Cut off from its roots, a flower can live for a short time in water and even decorate a room, but we realize that it is dying, that it is already subject to corruption. 

Man ate the forbidden fruit, thinking that it would give him life. But life itself outside of and without God is simply communion with death. It is no accident that what we eat already needs to be dead in order to become our life. We eat in order to live, but since we eat something that is already deprived of life, food itself inevitably leads us to death. And in death there neither is nor can be any life. 

“Man is what he eats” There it is, he eats...death— dead animals, dead vegetation, rot and dissolution. He himself dies and, perhaps, the enormity of his fall consists precisely in the fact that this very death-filled and corrupt life, this life defined from the very beginning by corruption, this life that flows and irrevocably vanishes—this life he considers absolutely normal. And he is confirmed in this attitude by those who dare to blame Christianity as being pessimistic and as destructive toward man. But when Christ approached the grave of his friend Lazarus, and they said to him, “Do not come near, for he already stinks” (Jn 11:39), Christ did not consider this normal— he wept. 

“I am the image of your ineffable glory”—and yet they remove him and hide him so that he would not smell and disrupt their routines— this Man, this image and likeness of God, this hing and crown of creation! Indeed, this horrible meaninglessness of the world, this constant commotion of mankind within a cosmic cemetery, these pathetic attempts to build something for those who are dying, for those already dead, and finally, the affirmation of all of this as normal and natural— this is what Christianity declares as the Fall, as the falsification by man of The Nature of Man himself and of his divine and eternal calling. It refuses to come to term s with such a worldview, and firmly and clearly proclaims: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:26). 

Fr Alexander Alexander Schmemann, 'O Death, Where is Thy Sting?'