But the Lord commanded: "Do not touch! Do not eat!" Because good and evil are known differently.

If you think about it, good was fully available to Adam in paradise: the whole world, of which the Lord said that it was good (in Church Slavonic, good zelo) (Gen. 1:31), was before his eyes. God Himself was with man, spoke to him, giving him the opportunity to know Him, to move towards Him, to finally become like God, having fulfilled the highest destiny of man to become like God, to become God himself. God's plan for man, for his personality, freedom and dignity, was for man to know the height and power of good, to be filled with it, to feel it in himself, and in gradual communion with it he would receive the strength and power to defeat evil, remaining completely unconnected from it.

The ban was imposed precisely on participation in evil, that is, on complicity in it. Thou shalt know, and thou shalt die of death (Gen. 2:17), the Lord warned, protecting His immature creation from mortal danger. Revealing the Divine image in himself through communion with God, man had to overcome evil in good, without communing with it, to conquer with love and goodness. Adam, who had not yet tasted good, who had not known it in its entirety, could not know evil in any of its forms, and even more so through eating it.

This is the law, unchanged from Adam to the present day: if a person knows evil, partaking of it, he immediately takes it into himself, unites with it and is overcome by it. The prohibition of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a prototype of fasting, revealing its deep meaning. The tree of knowledge is the tree of discernment, the tree of the victory of good over evil. Not having established himself in the good, man cannot enter into the struggle, because he himself is not yet good. Fasting was imposed for the sole purpose of a person, having joined the good with his free will, to be able to defeat evil.

Paradise is closed, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of their distinction, is embedded in every person, this is his conscience, which, in the words of Abba Dorotheus, is the natural law that reveals to man what is good and what is evil, protects from evil, and unites him with good. Communion with good enlightens a person and warms his heart, while it darkens and freezes the retreat and choice of evil.

And now the same temptation comes from the world: "Everything must be tried, everything must be experienced... How can you live without knowing both..." The evil that is happening around us is constantly advertised and presented to us as a tempting dish that we must eat. And man again eats the forbidden fruit, neglecting the first commandment given to him by God: "Thou shalt not eat, thou shalt surely die" (Gen. 2:17).

Evil in itself is nothing, for it is not a being and has no composition.

Abba Dorotheus

From the tradition of the Church we know that man came into a world in which evil already existed. What is evil? Where did it come from? How should a Christian relate to him? Different religious systems resolve the question of the correlation between good and evil in different ways.

In dualistic models of perceiving the world, good and evil exist on an equal footing, and they are interpenetrating: in good there is evil, and vice versa. Such a model is very popular, and by accepting it, a person recognizes the original existence of evil and the lack of the possibility of a precise definition of what is good and what is evil, because they are equal to each other, can pass from one to the other, and have no external criteria for differentiation. Therefore, in many Eastern cults and religions, posthumous existence and salvation is not a dwelling in good, but a state that takes a person beyond the boundaries of good and evil. Nirvana, a very popular word in the modern world, is not being, but a way out of the painful circle of reincarnations and ideas about good and evil. And for a Christian, the meaning of salvation lies in uniting with God as the source of love and goodness, to enter into the fullness of being, into eternal life. But what is evil in the Christian understanding and what does it have to do with good?

The Church calls Satan the bearer of evil. The chapter in the book of the prophet Isaiah and the Apocalypse of John the Theologian lift the veil on the prehistoric catastrophe, the first rebellion of the creature against the Creator. Lucifer, the "first light-bearer," the most beautiful angel, created bright and good, became the personal representative of evil when, seeing that the world belonged to man, he became proud and fell away from God, did not want to submit to the law of God and recognize in man a creature higher than himself. From now on, the rebellious creature seeks to destroy everything that the Lord has created beautiful and sublime, and first of all the one whom He was meant to serve, man.

From the very history of the origin of evil, it becomes clear that evil is a falling away, a negation that does not carry a creative principle in itself. Perhaps that is why it is difficult to give an accurate definition to it. It is easier to draw such an analogy. What is darkness? The absence of light, it has no existence of its own: God is light, and there is no darkness in Him (1 John 1:5). But where there is no light, darkness takes its place. In the same way, evil is the absence of good or its distortion, it is good that has fallen away from God, has distorted its being, but it does not have its own ontological existence. Existence has only that to which the Lord said: Let it be! He did not create evil, nor did He say: Let it be! Sin. And what God did not create, strictly speaking, does not exist.

This means that absolute evil does not exist, there is absolute good. Therefore, evil is powerless: it has neither existence itself (the very nature of creation lies in God's plan for its goodness), nor its own continuation (its existence is limited by time), nor its own power (it uses only what it can seize and parasitize on).

Even the utterly disfigured bearer of evil is not absolute evil. The bright cherub, whom we call Satan, came out of the hands of the Lord full of goodness and power. It was then that his good nature was distorted to such an extent that it dared to oppose itself to God, to become anti-nature.