Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/231

 attaining his ends. The command about not eating the fruit was also a coöperation.

86. The command given by God to the first man,—its necessity and meaning. Of the command about not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the Theology says (1) that this command was very necessary, (2) that in this command the whole law is contained, (3) that the command was an easy one and that it was guarded by a terrible threat. And, in spite of it all, man fell and did not reach his destination. One would think that it would be necessary to clear up this contradiction, and one involuntarily waits for some interpretation of this whole remarkable event. But, on the contrary, the Theology bars the way to all interpretation and carefully preserves it in all its coarseness. It proves that it is not possible and not allowable to understand the meaning of the second chapter of Genesis, about the Paradise and the trees planted in it, in any explanatory way, but that it is necessary to understand it as Theodoret understood it:

“‘The Divine Scripture says,’ asserts the blessed Theodoret, ‘that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil grew out from the ground; consequently they are by their natures like any other plants. Just as the rood is a common tree, but receives the name of a saving cross on account of the salvation which we receive through faith in him who was crucified upon it; even thus these trees are common plants that grew out from the ground, but, by God’s determination, one of them is called the tree of life, and the other,—since it has served as a tool for the knowledge of sin,—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The latter was proposed to Adam as an opportunity for an exploit, and the tree of life as a certain reward for the keeping of the command.’ (b) This tree is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, not because it had the power of imparting to our first parents the knowledge of good and