Could you explain the Eastern Orthodox view on this subject, just a sentence or two, on the concept of the Fall/original sin. I realize they are different, but never researched the difference. I promise I will just listen and not irritate!
Brother in Christ
How is this from +Maximos the Confessor:
"Man failed in achieving the purpose of his creation; he failed to achieve his destiny, his theosis. He tried to become a 'god without God.' This is his sin; this is the cause of his fall."
In some more detail, this from His Eminence Met. Maximos of Pittsburg:
"Unlike St. Augustine's doctrine of "original justice," which attributes to the first man several excessive perfections, perfect knowledge of God and God's creation, for example, that make the fall impossible, the doctrine of the Greek Fathers of the image of God in man as a potential to be actualized, allows the possibility of a deterioration, as well. St. Irenaeos speaks of the first man (Adam) as an infant (nepios), who had to grow up to adulthood. Instead, man failed himself, by not "passing the test" of maturity given to him by God.
In spite of God's prohibition, man chose to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Genesis). Being "good by nature" man had to also become "good by choice." Unfortunately, it did not happen that way. Following the "snake's" advice (the devil's, that is), man also tried to do what the fallen angels did: to "become a god without God." Man's imperfection and innocence, or, better, naiveté, and his relative pride, cultivated by the "accuser," became the cause of man's fall from God's communion, due to his disobedience and rejection of God. Man put his purpose in himself, instead of putting it in God. Man's free will is responsible for his own decline.
The consequences of this revolt against God, which the West calls "original" and the East "ancestral" (propatorikon) sin, are that man lost his original innocence; the image of God in him was tarnished, and even became distorted; man's reason was obscured, his will weakened, the desires and passions of the flesh grew wild; man suffered separation from God, the author and source of life. He put himself in an inauthentic kind of existence, close to death. The Fathers speak of "spiritual death" which is the cause of the physical one, and which may lead to the "eschatological," eternal death: for "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6: 23).