Driven from paradise: Adam, the prodigal, and Babylon

This is truly a paradise of delight; this is true gladness and delight, the delight we have enjoyed in this time now completed. It has been no short time already, and yet it is short altogether, if it is to stop here, now that we are leaving and withdrawing from this place. For I do not know what has happened to me, or what sin I have committed again, that I am going out, that I am being driven out. What I ought to say I do not know, except that I am a second Adam out of paradise (Genesis 3:23–24), and I have begun to talk. How well off I was while I listened to my teacher speaking and kept silent! Would that I were keeping quiet even now! I was learning while I kept silent. If only I had not put on this novel spectacle, making my teacher the listener! What need did I have of these words? Why should I address such things to you at all? What was needed was not to go away, but to stay on. But these faults seem to belong to the ancient deception, and these penalties for the ancient wrongs still await me. Or else I seem to myself to be disobeying once more, daring to go beyond the words of God, when I ought to remain in them and beside them.

And I am going away, fleeing from this blessed life no less than that man of old fled from the face of God (Genesis 3:8), and returning to the earth from which I was taken (Genesis 3:19). So I shall eat earth all the days of my life (Genesis 3:17), and I work the earth (Genesis 3:23), an earth that brings forth thorns and thistles for me (Genesis 3:18): my own griefs and shameful cares, now that I have let go of noble and good cares. And I am turning back again to the things I had left behind: to the land from which I came out, to my kindred here below, and to the house of my father (Genesis 12:1). I am leaving the good land, where my good homeland lay, though for a long time I did not know it; and the kinsmen whom I had as kindred of my soul, though only later did I begin to know them; and the house of him who is truly our father, where he abides and where the father is reverently honored and revered by the true sons who wish to remain in it. But I, without reverence and unworthy, go out from these things, turning back toward what lies behind and running back the way I came.

There is a story of a son who received from his father the share of the inheritance that fell to him, as against his other brother, and went abroad from his father into a far country, by his own choice. Living wastefully, he scattered his father's property and used it up. At last, in his want, he hired himself out to feed swine. Driven by hunger, he longed even to share the swine's food, yet he could not get even this (Luke 15:12–16). So he paid the penalty for his wasteful table: in exchange for his father's table, which was a royal one, he received what he had not foreseen, the food of swine and the food of a hired laborer. Something like this, it seems, we too shall suffer in going away, and not even with the whole share that falls to us. For we have not even received what we ought, and yet we are going all the same. We leave the good and dear things with you and beside you, and take the worse in exchange.

For in their place everything gloomy will come upon us: uproar and confusion after peace, and after a quiet and orderly life, a disordered one; after this freedom, a harsh slavery: market-places and lawsuits, crowds and luxury. We shall no longer have the least leisure for better things. We shall not speak the divine oracles; we shall speak the works of men (Psalm 17:4). (A prophet held this to be nothing less than a curse.) And in our case it will be the works of wicked men. Truly, for us night will follow day, darkness will follow shining light, mourning will follow festival, and a hostile country will follow our homeland, where I may not sing a sacred song. For how could I sing in a land foreign to my soul (Psalm 137:4)? There, while we stay, we cannot sing to God; we can only weep and groan as we remember what is here (Psalm 137:1), if anyone will grant me even this.

Enemies, we are told, once came against a great and holy city in which God was worshipped, and dragged off its inhabitants as captives, singers of hymns and those who spoke of God, to their own country, which was Babylon. And those who were carried there were not willing to hymn God, even when their masters asked them (Psalm 137:3), or to sing psalms in a profane land. Instead, now idle, they hung their musical instruments on the willows, and they themselves wept by the rivers of Babylon (Psalm 137:1–2). I seem to be one of them, driven out of a city, out of this sacred homeland of mine. Here by day and night the sacred laws are declared, and hymns and songs and mystical words. Here there is the light of the sun and an unbroken waking vision by day, as we converse with the divine mysteries, and by night we are held by the images of what the soul saw and did by day. In short, this is where the inspiration of God holds us at every moment; from this I am driven out, carried off a captive into a foreign land. There I shall not even be allowed to play the flute, for I shall have hung my instrument on the willows as they did (Psalm 137:2). I shall be by the rivers and shall work in clay, and I shall not wish to recite hymns, though I remember them; and perhaps, through long labor at other things, I shall even forget, robbed of my memories.

And if only, in going, I went merely against my will, like a captive! But I go willingly too, driven out not by anyone else but by my own warfare against myself, when perhaps I could stay. And once I leave here, I shall not travel in safety, as one who has gone out from a city that is safe and at peace. It is likely that on the road I shall fall in with robbers and be seized, and be stripped and wounded with many wounds, and lie somewhere, thrown down half dead (Luke 10:30).