Breath of life; the woman as type of pleasure

Cyril went on: For that is the breath of life, since God is life by nature.

Palladius said: Did the divine Spirit then become soul for the man?

Cyril: And how is it not wholly absurd to think this way? For the soul would itself also have remained unchangeable; but as it is, it is changeable. And the Spirit is not changeable at all. Or if it suffers change, will the blame run up upon the divine nature itself — if the Spirit is of God and Father, and also of the Son, the one essentially from both, or rather from the Father through the Son, poured out? It is ignorant, then, to think the Spirit has been recast into a soul and has passed over into a man's nature. But what was molded was ensouled by an unspeakable power; and it was at once made beautiful by the gift of the Spirit. For there was no other way for us to be rich in the divine image.

Palladius: You speak well.

Cyril: So then, having adorned the craft-work, God granted the dwelling in paradise. And since the one so made splendid, and crowned with the plenty of the goods from above, had to be kept from being easily carried toward arrogance, not knowing the slavery, and that there is a measure of things proper to servants (for what is too wide toward glory, and freedom without measure, carries toward the proud and accursed passion), a law of self-control was given him as an occasion of not being ignorant of the Master, so that through it he might always be called to a remembrance of the one who had commanded with authority, and might know clearly that he is yoked under the statutes of the one who rules. But that unholy and God-hated beast was not still.

Palladius: You would mean, I think, Satan, who was hurled down from the heavenly vaults like lightning; for it seemed to him, in a boyish sickness, to wish to be God, and he imagined things beyond his own nature.

Cyril: You guess well. For being inventor and father of envy and of sin, he did not wish to be idle about the living being on earth, that is, the man. Then, coming under him by craft and deceits, he carried him aside into disobedience, using the woman as an instrument of villainy. For the pleasures with us and in us always somehow shake us toward what is not fair, that is, into sin; and the woman is a type of pleasure; and the mind is often run down by the flatteries from pleasures toward what it did not wish. What then is seen to have happened in Adam as in a narrative of events and perceptibly, this one may see fulfilled in each of us also, in the mind and hiddenly. For pleasure, rising beforehand, bewitches the mind, and little by little draws it under toward thinking at last that a transgression of the divine law is nothing at all. And the disciple of Christ will confirm it.