From this it becomes quite clear what exactly was the first crime of people. It consisted in the fact that by superstitious eating of tree fruits, people destroyed the truth of the divine idea of existence and made completely aimless both their personal existence and the existence of all material nature. For the essence of the first crime, therefore, the main significance is not that men ate of the forbidden fruit, but that they superstitiously ate the fruit of the tree in order to thereby become more perfect. They would have been criminals in the same way, and exactly the same criminals as they have become, if they had not transgressed God's commandment, but had used some other material object for this purpose, if, for example, for the sake of acquiring higher knowledge, they had decided to moisten their heads with water from the Euphrates, or to carry on their heads some branches of paradise. But by themselves they probably would never have created a superstitious attitude towards material things. This attitude appeared in them only under the influence of deception on the part of the devil, and it was necessary for the devil to tempt them not with any other material object, but only with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because he undoubtedly intended to make them not superstitions, but deliberate transgressors of God's commandment for the sake of deliberate resistance to God out of a sense of hostility towards Him. Therefore, it is quite understandable that people have created a superstitious attitude towards the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and from this it is quite clear why it was precisely the first crime of people that turned out to be at the same time the transgression of God's commandment, and from this it is finally completely clear why it was precisely the transgression of God's commandment, although people had no intention of transgressing it, that was, however, an undoubted crime of people.

Deceived by the false idea of the forbidden tree, people have perverted the normal relationship between the world and the individual and have taken a completely different position in the world in which they were actually placed by God. This violation of the divine world order naturally had to entail their inevitable death. But since, in all the circumstances of the case, this crime was only an unfortunate mistake on their part, because they themselves were afraid of their crime and condemned it as inexcusable, the great message of biblical history is deeply understandable, that God did not abandon criminal people and did not change his attitude towards them. Great in power and infinite in love, He immediately came to the aid of people as soon as they realized their crime. This consciousness clearly showed that in relation to people the devil had not achieved his goal, that fallen people, although they turned out to be unworthy of God, nevertheless they still wanted to belong to Him alone, and they recognized Him alone as the eternal Lord of existence. From this, of course, the sad history of human suffering naturally arose, and the omniscient God foresaw this history: He saw that in the person of their powerful tempter people had acquired for themselves an implacable enemy, and that this enemy would not rest until he had destroyed in them the last spark of their reverent love for God; and at the same time He saw that fallen men are capable of good and desire to be good, and that therefore those of them who do not wish to become enemies of God will suffer deeply for their love of good, and suffer in vain: and so He was pleased to warn men beforehand of the moral struggle that inevitably awaits them, "I will put enmity," He said to the serpent, "between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed" (Gen. 3:15). This does not mean, of course, that God wanted to create enmity between the kingdom of good and the kingdom of evil. Such enmity had already appeared, and there was nothing to create it. The word of God, obviously, speaks only about the object of enmity, that God Himself will constitute the object of enmity between good people and evil spirits, that people will fight for their belonging to God, and fallen spirits for the destruction of God's power over people. Consequently, God's speech to the serpent contains a direct statement that, despite the fall of people, God nevertheless recognizes them as His people and makes them His champions in the world of crime.

The Bible does not tell us exactly how the unfortunate criminals felt when they heard God's clear will that they were still His people. And yet divine love was not yet limited to this condescension towards people, it was also manifested by positive solicitude for them. Along with the benevolent warning of people that they would certainly have to fight for Him, God also revealed to them a rich source of moral strength for the struggle. He gave people a positive hope that their struggle with evil would not be endless, because they would have such a Descendant who would crush the proud head of the serpent. When this will happen and how it will be, God did not say; but in order that people would not form any false thought about the future defeat of evil, He warned them beforehand that they themselves would not see this event, that, on the contrary, they would now be overtaken by labor and sickness, and they would have to return to the ground from which they were taken (Gen. 3:16-19). With this warning, He protected people from possible deception and disappointment, and at the same time strengthened them for a courageous struggle against evil. After this warning, people could not be tempted by the various calamities of life, and even in the most difficult moment of suffering, they could not doubt and could not think of God that He had betrayed His eternal word and renounced them. God told them everything that should be and what really will be, and it was no longer God's foreknowledge, of course, that was the reason why it was God's warning about their sufferings that began to be justified in the first place.

People have made themselves dependent on the external world, and therefore it is quite natural that they should find themselves in exactly the position in which they themselves voluntarily placed themselves. First of all, they saw that both paradise and the tree of life did not really belong to the earth per se, but only to the order of life on earth that God had established from the beginning; so that in the order of life which they themselves had introduced by their superstitious act, neither paradise nor the tree of life was any longer on earth. As a result, they saw that the real dependence on the world was not at all what they would like to be in. In fact, this dependence required of them much hard and persistent labor for the mere procuring of bread, and gave them much painful sorrow on account of the mere loss of labor. They learned that it is possible to sow grain, but only "thorns and thistles" will grow; they knew toil and sorrow and sickness, and at last they had to experience the last expression of their dependence on the world – to return to the land from which they had once been taken. As physical beings, they have always, of course, been subject to the physical law of life, and therefore have always lived only by destroying the physical basis of life. But until the time of their fall, they had at their disposal the blessed tree of life, with the help of which it was not difficult for them to replenish their reserves of physical energy, and therefore they could observe the phenomenon of death only in the nature around them, and they themselves could exist forever. After their fall, this possibility of immortality ceased to exist for them. They have subordinated their psychic life to the physical law of mechanical causality, and thus have introduced their spirit into the general chain of world things. Consequently, they could naturally now live only that life which is possible and exists by the nature of the physical world, and under these conditions death is inevitable. This means that death did not come to people from somewhere, as, for example, God's punishment for sin; it came to them by itself, as a natural and necessary consequence of the crime that people had committed. In fact, the world in which people wished to live and into which they actually entered by the fact of their crime, God did not create and did not want to create, and all the phenomena that exist in this world as in the world of crime do not exist according to the creative will of God, but only according to the mechanical forces of physical nature. The same world that was really created by God, man destroyed by his crime.

4.

The study and determination of the necessary conditions under which the liberation of the world from evil could take place.

Material nature, of course, has not changed because people have not maintained the truth of their destiny. The Bible only tells us that, due to the fall of people, all creation has been subordinated to vanity (Rom. 8:20, i.e. to vain, aimless existence – meaninglessness), i.e. it has lost the rational purpose of its existence, has ceased to correspond to the rational basis of being. In its content, however, the world has undoubtedly remained the same as it was before the fall of man; and he is undoubtedly governed by the same laws which from the beginning belong to his nature as the active forces of the creative divine will. In fact, only man has changed, but he, too, has changed not in the essence of his nature, but only in the proportion of its elements. He did not lose his mind, feeling, or free will, and retained the same physical organization with which the all-wise will of God realized him in being. And yet he really became a completely different person, because his fall brought about in him that fatal contradiction between body and spirit, which, as the present law of his sinful nature, subordinated him to the physical law of sin (Rom. 7:18-23; 8:5-8; Gal. 5:17) and at the same time placed him in an abnormal relationship both to God and to the world.

Sinfulness destroyed in man that high spiritual mood which filled his life with a clear vision of God and excluded the possibility for him to be dissatisfied with nature. For sinful man, on the contrary, it was difficult to feel God's nearness, and as a result, many natural phenomena that had previously delighted him with a sense of religious rapture, now began to evoke in him a feeling of religious fear, and he naturally had to avoid what he had previously sought and desired—to avoid the opportunity to meet God in nature. And yet another, non-religious, contemplation of nature could only be the contemplation of his own position in nature, i.e., the contemplation of that true dependence on it, which he had not previously noticed and did not know. Such contemplation of nature, therefore, was bound to arouse in him a new feeling of fear, namely, physical fear, because many natural phenomena were now necessarily unpleasant or harmful to him, and consequently he naturally had to avoid these phenomena and avoid even the possibility of meeting them. Under such circumstances, it was evident that two different tasks of life arose in his mind. He had to make the fact of his fall the only one in his life, i.e., in spite of all the inevitable consequences of this fact, he had to establish such an attitude towards God that would fully correspond to God's recognition of man as a champion of truth and goodness on earth. At the same time, in view of the inevitable consequences of the fall, it was necessary for him to protect himself, i.e., to establish such an attitude towards nature that no unforeseen accidents could disturb his peaceful peace, much less threaten his existence on earth. But to combine such tasks, one of which necessarily requires a person not to look at what he needs to keep in mind about the other, means to inevitably cause in human life a fatal collision of duty and necessity.

From the point of view of his purpose in the world, man, of course, is obliged to see in himself only the free bearer of the rational spirit, and therefore he is obliged to follow his moral goal so unswervingly that no illnesses of his mortal body and even the direct danger of imminent death can suppress his moral personality. But if it really ceased to exist, then, of course, there would still be no one to fulfill its purpose in the world, which means that its destruction could in fact confirm not the truth of divine creation, but only the undoubted meaninglessness of world existence. Therefore, without in the least rejecting the religious basis of life, man can, however, justify all his concerns for the preservation of his life, and can even affirm these concerns positively as one of his moral duties. Yet this imaginary duty in reality does not arise from man's religious self-determination, but only from his knowledge of his necessary dependence on the world, and therefore it in fact determines such external activity of man as has absolutely nothing to do with his moral consciousness and cannot even be subject to any moral evaluation at all. In order to protect his life, for example, a man can kill predatory beasts that attack him, and in general he can exterminate all predatory animals dangerous to him, and he can even exterminate any and all animals, even if they can only indirectly harm him, for example, by destroying a field he has sown and threatening him with future famine. And in the same ways of preserving his life, man may need the labour-power of animals, or their wool, or their milk and flesh, and in consequence of this he can not only tame various animals useful to him, but also directly enslave them to himself to the point of autocratically disposing of their life and death. Can it be said of this activity of man that it constitutes the fulfillment of his moral duty towards himself? It is clear to everyone that it is not. Everyone understands that man is not obliged to exterminate animals and enslave them to himself, but is only compelled to do so by force of circumstances, and therefore all this cultural activity of his lies outside the sphere of the purpose given to him and characterizes only the abnormal position of man as a thing. After all, in this activity there is not and cannot be a place for religious contemplation of nature and for a moral attitude towards it.

Consequently, to give this activity religious sanction would be an obvious mistake, but at the same time to deny this activity in the name of the religious basis of life would obviously be no less a mistake, because it exists not because of man's desire to deny the truth of the religious worldview, but only because of his desire to preserve his life and avoid the involuntary sufferings of life.

It is clear that after the fall of men, when their position in the world had changed considerably, they could no longer restore in themselves the normal correlation between the thing and the person, because the direct interests of their existence irresistibly confronted them with the purely physical aims of life and inevitably subordinated their activity to the purely animal law of the struggle for existence. Under such circumstances, in order to fully harmonize life with the truth of religious and moral consciousness, people should obviously reflect in such a way that it is better for them not to exist than to exist, if only in everything that surrounds them they see the rational power of God and in everything that happens to them, they see the holy will of God. But, bearing in mind their inevitable fate, they had to think that the religious-moral attitude towards nature was of no importance to them at all, because every development of life for them could have only one end – they would die, and all their activity would be finished. It is therefore quite natural that the moral personality, who formerly knew how to subjugate the animal individual for the sake of a spiritually perfect life, could no longer subordinate it to himself, when this subordination required the complete annihilation of man. And because of this, it is quite natural that people should find themselves in the circle of the contradictions of life; Because, forced to live according to the law of physical needs, they still had to judge their lives according to the moral law of spiritual perfection. In consequence of this, they had to condemn and justify themselves at the same time, to condemn themselves for every act which was contrary to the truth of their eternal destiny, and to justify themselves in every action which was fully in accordance with their actual position in the world.

We do not know exactly how this contradiction was experienced in the thought and life of the first criminals. But the biblical history of mankind, in any case, leaves no doubt that people soon learned about the decisive impossibility for them to free themselves from this contradiction, and that this impossibility quite soon defined human life as the history of man's voluntary and involuntary sojourn in the darkness of error. According to the Book of Genesis 3:22-23, there was such an event in the life of the first man that "the Lord God said of him: 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 ground from which he was taken." This event, according to the biblical context, is not at all connected with the so-called God's judgment on people. After the Biblical account of the recognition of people as champions of good on earth, and of the promise given to them concerning the future victory over evil, and of warning them concerning labors, sickness, and death, there follows a Biblical account of the new relationship between husband and wife (Gen. 3:20), and then another second Biblical account of a remarkable event in their new life, what the Lord God did to Adam and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them (v. 21). This means that people have already managed to live for some time in new conditions of life, and, in any case, they have already managed to see the need, in order to preserve their lives, to put to death innocent animals before them. And suddenly after that they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. It is quite natural to ask the question: what caused this expulsion? Is it not God's desire to punish people for transgressing His commandment? The biblical text, in the expressions we have underlined, answers this question quite clearly. It is obvious that people were ready to forget that the Garden of Eden was only a paradise for them, and that in itself it was not a paradise at all, and that therefore, although the tree of life still continued to grow in this garden, it could no longer protect them from death; And because they were ready to forget this circumstance, they were ready to repeat their crime, i.e., they were ready to superstitiously eat the fruit of the tree of life, in order to acquire eternal life for themselves, and thus save themselves from the sad necessity of necessarily fighting with nature for their existence. In order to prevent this crime, God sent them out of the Garden of Eden and, by fear of seeing a cherubim with a flaming sword, forced them to stay away from the former tree of life (Gen. 3:24). It is clear that the contradiction between consciousness and life was deeply burdened even by the first people, and they would undoubtedly have wished to resolve this contradiction in favor of a moral attitude towards nature, but they were unable to invent any other means for the realization of this desire than an unsuccessful attempt at a new crime. As for the descendants of Adam and Eve, the biblical information directly indicates that the obvious discrepancy between the truth of religious and moral consciousness and the reality of the existing situation of people has consistently led to the complete suppression of the moral personality in people.

Of course, the children of Adam and Eve were not at all guilty of the crime of their parents, but since they were born into the world of crime, they naturally had to live the very life that exists only according to the laws of the material world, i.e. is determined only by the physical nature of life. Consequently, from the first day of their birth, they must have felt the heavy burden of physical need, and with the first awakening of conscious thought in them they must have learned the fatal necessity of struggling at all costs against want. Yielding to the force of this necessity, the eldest son of Adam completely rejected the universal goal of man and subordinated all his relations to nature and to God to the material interests of his struggle with want alone. According to the Biblical account of the first fratricide (Gen. 4:3-8), the only basis for this crime was, as is known, the unequal attitude of God to the sacrifices of Cain and Abel. By some signs that the Bible does not mention, the brothers guessed that Abel's sacrifice was accepted by God, and Cain's sacrifice was rejected, and as a result, "Cain was greatly grieved, and his face drooped." He simply had a feeling of hatred for his brother. For some time he apparently still tried to struggle with this feeling, but since the religious-moral motives in him were much weaker than the animal-egoistic instincts, then, finding himself alone with his brother in the field, he finally could not refrain from the evil act – "he rose up against Abel his brother, and killed him." This crime clearly shows that Cain was grieved, in fact, not because his gift was rejected by God, but only because his brother's gift was accepted at the same time. Consequently, the fact that he was unworthy of God did not bother him in the least, and, therefore, he offered his sacrifice to God not as a pure gift of his reverent worship before Him, but as an imaginary bribe, for which he hoped to receive a special favor from God. Otherwise, his grief would undoubtedly have been expressed only in his awareness of his spiritual imperfection, and therefore, instead of hating his brother, he would have seen in him only an example to be imitated.