The First-Created Man, by St. Symeon the New Theologian, offers an essential exposition of Genesis that leads the reader toward a fuller understanding of the beginning, the Fall, and the Resurrection. By the end of these homilies, creation and redemption are revealed as a single, coherent mystery rather than isolated doctrines.
Symeon opens up by being careful to distinguish the double death that follows the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: the immediate death of the soul and the later death of the body. This distinction is crucial, as it frames the Fall not merely as moral failure, but as an ontological rupture that unfolds in stages.
In his description of the Blessed State, one gains a deeper appreciation of what Christ’s redemptive work truly accomplishes — it restores something real. The Image of God was bestowed at creation, but the Likeness was meant to be continuously actualized, endlessly and eternally. Adam was not created as static perfection; rather, he was made good, dynamic, and capable of ascent. The Fall interrupts this trajectory, darkens the intellect, and fragments desire.
Several important conclusions emerge from this vision.
First, Christ’s Resurrection is understood as the raising of human nature itself, the restoration of our fallen condition and the healing of our ontology. Christ assumes what is fallen in order to heal it. Redemption is not about appeasing divine wrath, satisfying abstract justice, or altering God’s disposition toward man.
Second, Symeon locates the origin of the Fall in pride: “being clothed with glory, not after humility and disgrace” (68). Lacking any knowledge of humility or disgrace, Adam and Eve were overcome by pride, and thus fell from grace.
Symeon’s observation that Paradise was planted after the seven days, pointing toward the Eighth Day, the eternal day, brings Orthodox cosmology into full clarity. Once Genesis is understood in this light, the entirety of salvific history appears as a mirror of the creation narrative itself: from church architecture (Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life reflected in altar and veil) to the Eucharist as the true Medicine of Life.
Symeon further teaches that before the Fall, all creation was incorruptible. Only after the exile from Paradise did humanity’s relationship with the animal world change, as survival through toil became necessary. This chronology underscores a foundational Orthodox conviction: in the original Blessed State there was neither death nor corruption. Death enters only outside the walls of Eden. This same understanding is later taken up and expanded in Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, particularly in his critique of evolutionary theory through this patristic lens.
One of the most humbling homilies concerns God’s offer of forgiveness to Adam and Eve, if only they would repent. Had they done so, the Fall itself would not have occurred. Crucially, Symeon insists that this would not have prevented the Incarnation. The union of God and man was always intended. Humanity was always meant to attain full communion in the Image and Likeness of God, and the Logos was always destined to come as the perfect revelation of that Image and Likeness. This point alone makes the work profoundly important.
Finally, Symeon’s account of Adam and Eve’s lamentations after their exile is deeply moving. The sheer devastation of their loss, the cosmic weight of their decision, is almost unbearable to contemplate. And yet, this sorrow only magnifies the hope of their eventual restoration by Christ. Their being brought into the heaven of heavens by the Second Adam stands as a promise to all of us: that we too may be resurrected in Christ, returned to the Blessed State, and clothed once more in robes of glory (113).
