and the first of both let Him down
In the beginning – before the beginning – God in His perfection created angels, archetype of the soul, immortal spirits “stamped with the seal of perfection, of complete wisdom and perfect beauty” [Ez 28:12]. God who is all good and beyond all perfection, brought them into existence and gave them gifts beyond imagining and placed them on His holy mountain, “in Eden, the garden of God” [Ez 28:13]. And the first of these was the morning star, Lucifer, son of the dawn.
God created them
For all his power and favor with God, Lucifer was dissatisfied, and he said “I will scale the heavens; above the stars of God I will set up my throne; I will take my seat on the Mount of Assembly, in the recesses of the North. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will be like the Most High!” [Is 14:13-14] Thus, God’s magnificent creation fell to the temptation of desiring more, of being more than he was and God reduced Lucifer and his followers to dust on the earth and transformed them into ghastly horrors eternally devoured by fire [Ez 28:18-19].
Then God, in His omnipotence and wisdom, desired into being a new and temporal universe and filled it with natural beauty and wondrous creatures. And then God created man – like angels, only more – for God said “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” [Gn 1:26] and so God “formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” [Gn 2:7]. But God’s new creation was more than living clay for God breathed into man a soul, an immortal spirit, as are angels. And God “planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed” [Gn 2:8] and the man was called Adam, which in Hebrew means ‘man’.
God created a kindred soul, woman, for Adam and gave them dominion over all living things and gave them this order: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and bad” [Gn 2:16-17]. And yet, despite God’s largesse, man was dissatisfied and easily tempted by the serpent who said “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad” [Gn 3:4-5] and so filled with the desire for more, of being more than he was, man and woman ate it and “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked” [Gn 3:7].
As Thomas Merton once noted “There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him.” God created both angels and men out of His inestimable and unquenchable love and because of His love, He endowed them with free will, the ability to make their own decisions, knowing fully that some would choose unwisely and even wrongly. Yet God could do no less for He desired only love in return and knew that forced love was no love at all.
