Dragon! You are the beginning of all evil for people and the end, Thou art the deception of the blind, which beareth heavy evil, A leader to recklessness, you find joy In the tears of life, in the lamentations of death; Consanguineous to criminal offense Fratricidally you raised your hands; You have persuaded Cain to be stained with blood streams Earth for the first time; And thou hast deceived the forefather, So that he fell from his incorruptible life to the earth.

Chapter 18.

Such is the devil. Death is introduced for punishment, just as children who are beginning to learn to read and write are given blows for correction. Death is nothing but the separation and separation of the soul from the body. "You say, 'Well?' then God is the author of death? "Again we meet the same speech. Let it not be, because teachers are not the main culprits for the fact that children experience pain from blows. And so it is a good thing to die, if it is introduced, like blows, for the punishment of children, not a sinful death, wise men, but death, which consists in the separation and separation of the soul from the body. For man, being free and autocratic, and having received a sovereign will and free will to choose good, as I said when I heard, "Of every tree of the garden thou shalt eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that you eat of it you will die a death (Gen. 2:17), inclining yourself to eat, with the help of the devil, who persuaded you to disobey by various kinds of seductive cunning, you violated the commandment of God; and this became for him a stumbling-block, a snare, and a stumbling-block. For God did not create evil, and in no way is He the author of evil. But everything that He created free for the preservation and observance of the law, which He righteously ordained, if it did not keep it, is called evil. And the most grievous harm is to disobey God, spontaneously transgressing the boundaries of truth. Therefore, when man, having departed from the command of God, stained himself and defiled himself, and impressed upon himself the filth of manifold evil, which the prince and father of delusion had begotten, having conceived unrighteousness, according to the Scriptures (Psalm 7:15), in order to be able to constantly carry away and incite man to unrighteousness: then God Almighty, seeing that man, created immortal, had suffered bitterness to the point of humiliation from the deceit of the devil, did not allow him to eat of the tree of life, but he clothed him and his wife Eve in garments of skins, and drove them out of paradise, having ordained death for them, and saying, "For dust thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return" (Gen. 3:19), so that by resurrection he might deliver them from humiliation, as is proper to the best artist, and restore them again in their own body without humiliation.

Chapter 19.

Doubt has already been examined, and it has been proved that leather garments are not bodies. Nevertheless, we will speak again (since it is necessary to say this more than once). For even before the construction of these garments, the first-created one acknowledges that he has bones and flesh, when he sees the woman brought to him, he exclaims: "Behold, this is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called a woman: for she was taken from her husband. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall be one flesh (Gen. 2:24). I cannot tolerate some idle talkers and shameless violators of the Scriptures, who, in order to convey the opinion that there is no resurrection of the flesh, presuppose both spiritual bones and spiritual flesh, and rush hither and thither, up and down, with allegories. And that this must be accepted as it is written, is confirmed by the Scriptures. Christ answers the Pharisees, who asked about the release of his wife: "Do you not know that he who created man and woman in the beginning created them? And He said, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, etc." (Matt. 19:45). Further, how can one accept the words only in the reasoning of souls: be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth? (Gen. 1:28) And again: "And the Lord God created man from the dust of the ground" (2:7), which is evident about the body itself; for it was not from dust or from heavy matter that the soul received its being. From all this, therefore, it justly follows that man was created with a body before the garments of skins, because all these things are spoken of before his fall, and of the garments after his fall. Let us, therefore, proceed again to consider what is before us, having sufficiently proved that the garments of leather are not bodies, but a mortal appurtenance prepared for the intelligent. Now it remains to consider what causes a person to be evicted from the boundaries of paradise. God did not cast him out, because he did not want him to pluck from the tree of life and eat (for if he had eaten of the tree of life again, he might live forever), but lest, as we have supposed, evil should become immortal. Otherwise, why did He send Christ from heaven to earth, if He resolutely wanted man to die completely, without tasting life? If the disputant says that God did this out of repentance, then this reasoning is weak, since it admits of changes of thought in God. No, God is not ignorant of the future and is not the creator of evil, but is supremely good and knows the future in advance. Thus He expelled man from paradise, not so that he might not live forever eating of the tree of life, but that sin might first be put to death by death, so that in this way, after the destruction of sin, having risen pure after death, man might taste life.

Chapter 20.

No one would be so foolhardy as to presume to claim that it was said in a different sense. For in general, he who asserts that this flesh is incapable of immortality, as truly subject to the disease of insanity, blasphemes. Why, then, is Adam expelled after the garments of leather, having received a prohibition to eat of the tree of life and to live, if it were absolutely impossible for a man to live forever with a body? But the prohibition is made because he could not die if he had taken and eaten of the tree of life. For it is said, "And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them." And the Lord God said, Behold, Adam became as one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now lest he stretch out his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever. And the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden, to till the land from which he was taken. And he expelled Adam (Gen. 3:21-24). And so the body (of a person) could live forever and be immortal, if he had not received a ban on eating from life. And he received a ban so that sin would also be destroyed, slain together with the body, and the body would rise after the destruction of sin. And so that man may not be immortal, as I have said, evil, or eternally living, containing in himself the predominant sin, as it were vegetating in an immortal body and having immortal nourishment, — for this reason God made him mortal, clothed him with deadness. Such was the purpose of the garments of leather, so that through the destruction and disintegration of the body all sin would perish to its foundations, as if uprooted, so that not the slightest part of the root would remain, from which new branches of sins would again sprang.

Chapter 21.

Just as the wild fig tree, having grown on the building of a beautiful temple, having grown in breadth and height, and having spread by its many-branched roots through all the connections of the stones, does not cease to grow until it is completely torn off by the breaking of the stones in the places where it grew (for when the fig tree is cut off, the stones may be again piled up in their places, so that the temple may be preserved, having no longer with him any of the unfavorable conditions that destroy it, and meanwhile the fig tree, which has fallen off all by the roots, dries up): in the same way the artist God destroyed his temple, the man who brought forth sin, like a wild fig tree, putting to death with temporary attachments of death, as it is written, and giving life, so that after the drying up and mortification of sin, the flesh with the same members, like the renewed temple, rose immortal and undamaged, after the complete and final destruction of sin. For while the body still lives until death, sin necessarily lives with it, which hides its roots within us, even though it is struck by sound thoughts and suggestions from without; otherwise, after baptism, after the complete removal of sin from us, no unrighteousness would occur. And now, even after we have believed and come to the water of baptism, we are often found in sins. For no one can boast that he is so far apart from sin that he does not even think of unrighteousness at all. From this it follows that now sin is restrained and put to sleep by faith, so as not to bring forth pernicious fruits, and is not destroyed to the root. Now in this life we restrain its vegetative habits, such as evil desires, so that we may not be disturbed by any bitter root and caused no harm when it arises (Hebrews 12:15), and we do not allow ourselves to open our eyes and open our clenched lips to these vegetations, while the mind, like an axe, cuts the bitter roots born below. In the future, the very thought of evil will be destroyed.

Chapter 22.

Those who wish to speak the truth sincerely have no lack of the testifying word of the Scriptures; thus the Apostle knew that the root of sin was not yet wholly destroyed in men, when he said in one place: "For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh: for the desire for good is in me, but I do not find it to do it." I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I do not want. But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me. And again: for according to the inner man I find pleasure in the law of God: but in my members I see another law, which is contrary to the law of my mind, and makes me (perfect) a prisoner of the law of sin, which is in my members (Romans 7:18-20, 22-23). Thus it has not yet happened that sin has been cut off, having been uprooted (for it has not died completely), but is still alive (for how can this be before a man is subjected to death?), so that, withered and withered like a plant, it may perish and be destroyed by the destruction of that on which, as I have said, it was secretly rooted; but man will be resurrected, no longer having the bitter root penetrating into him again. For this reason, in order to eradicate and destroy sin, our true Intercessor and Physician, our God, like an antidote, permitted death, so that evil, having arisen in us as immortals, would not be eternally immortal, and we ourselves, crippled and, like the sick, deprived of our own strength, would not remain in this state for a long time, nourishing the great disease of sin in constantly abiding and immortal bodies. Therefore it is beautiful that for the salvation of both, soul and body, God invented death, as it were a medical purification, so that we might become truly blameless and unharmed.

Chapter 23.

And since many examples are necessary for this, we shall here set them forth in particular, without ceasing to speak until we have reached the clearest interpretation and proof. Let us imagine an example of a skilful artist, who melted down a beautiful statue, made of gold or some other substance, and decorated proportionately in all parts to elegance, when he suddenly saw that it had been damaged by some most wicked person, who, out of envy, could not endure that the statue was magnificent, and defaced it, enjoying the vain pleasure of envy. Observe, most wise Aglaophon, that if an artist wishes that the statue on which he has labored with such diligence and care should not be completely decayed and disfigured, he will again try to melt it and make it the same as it was before. And if he does not melt and renew it, but leaves it as it is, repairing and correcting it, then the statue cannot of necessity remain the same from tempering in fire and forging, but will be changed and distorted. Therefore, if he wants it to be a beautiful and irreproachable work, he must melt it down and reunite it, so that by alteration and recasting the ugliness and all the changes that have happened to it through deceit and envy will be destroyed, and that the statue may be restored to its intact and pure form, which is most similar to its former appearance. With the statue, this is done not so that it would perish for the artist himself, even if it was again converted into its original substance, but so that it would be restored. It is necessary that ugliness and damage should be destroyed (for they disappear with the overflow), and not that they should reappear; for an excellent artist in any art has in mind not ugliness or irregularity, but the proportionality and correctness of the work. In the same way does God's dispensation for us appear to me. Seeing that man is the most beautiful work of God, damaged by the evil slanders of envy, God, out of love for mankind, did not wish to leave him in such a way that, bearing within himself the stain indelible by death, he would not be subjected to eternal shame, but would resolve it again into the original substance, so that through recreation all that is shameful in him would be destroyed and destroyed. For as there is the melting of the statue, there is death and the dissolution of the body; that there is a new form or alteration of matter, here is the resurrection after death, as the prophet Jeremiah also says; for he declares in agreement with this, when he says, "And the vessel which the potter made of clay fell apart in his hand; and he again made of it another vessel, such as the potter thought to make. And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Can I not deal with you, O house of Israel, like this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel" (Jeremiah 18:4-7).

Chapter 24.