Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XXV.—God Was Justified in Forbidding Man to Eat of the Tree of Knowledge.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XXV.—God Was Justified in Forbidding Man to Eat of the Tree of Knowledge.
The tree of knowledge itself was good, and its fruit
was good. For it was not the tree, as some think, but the disobedience,
which had death in it. For there was nothing else in the fruit than
only knowledge; but knowledge is good when one uses it discreetly.601
| 601 [“Pulchra, si quis ea
recte utatur,” is the rendering of the Paris translators. A noble
motto for a college.] | But Adam, being yet an infant in age,
was on this account as yet unable to receive knowledge worthily. For
now, also, when a child is born it is not at once able to eat bread,
but is nourished first with milk, and then, with the increment of years,
it advances to solid food. Thus, too, would it have been with Adam; for
not as one who grudged him, as some suppose, did God command him not to
eat of knowledge. But He wished also to make proof of him, whether he was
submissive to His commandment. And at the same time He wished man, infant
as he was,602
| 602 [No need of a
long argument here, to show, as some editors have done, that our author
calls Adam an infant, only with reference to time, not physical
development. He was but a few days old.] | to remain for some
time longer simple and sincere. For this is holy, not only with God, but
also with men, that in simplicity and guilelessness subjection be yielded
to parents. But if it is right that children be subject to parents, how
much more to the God and Father of all things? Besides, it is unseemly
that children in infancy be wise beyond their years; for as in stature
one increases in an orderly progress, so also in wisdom. But as when a
law has commanded abstinence from anything, and some one has not obeyed,
it is obviously not the law which causes punishment, but the disobedience
and transgression;—for a father sometimes enjoins on his own child
abstinence from certain things, and when he does not obey the paternal
order, he is flogged and punished on account of the disobedience; and in
this case the actions themselves are not the [cause of] stripes, but the
disobedience procures punishment for him who disobeys;—so also for
the first man, disobedience procured his expulsion from Paradise. Not,
therefore, as if there were any evil in the tree of knowledge; but from
his disobedience did man draw, as from a fountain, labour, pain, grief,
and at last fall a prey to death.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
