Pt. 6: Chiastic Garden

 

Beginning with the curse laid upon fallen man in Eden, the Scriptures describe that the order of the world requires a perfect balance. Cain kills his own brother then is himself made a curse; the initial unjust action requires an opposite reaction toward justice. Inherent to the order of the world and to all notions of justice and mercy is a structure of cosmic balance that must be maintained.

+

St Maximus the Confessor in Ad Thallasium 61 expands this concept further, demonstrating that the actions of Adam were mirrored perfectly by Christ toward the aim of redemption:

"In order for unrighteous pleasure, and the thoroughly just death which is its consequence, to be abolished...and in order for suffering human nature to be set right, it was necessary for an unjust and likewise uncaused suffering and death to be conceived."

St Maximus draws a series of mirroring correlations between Adam and Christ, he emphasizes however that the nature and purpose of both men are on opposing polarities. Both men give life, but Adam only through pleasure while Christ was born from a pire virgin. Both men die, but Adam through willful sin, while Christ willfully submits to death without sin. And while death was the condemnation of Adam's nature, Christ's death condemns sin, recovering the true nature of man in Himself which He then bestows upon mankind once again through grace.

+

In the brief treatise, Maximus shows that the relationship between Adam and Christ is chiastic in kind. The reversal of Christ's work upon Adam's legacy is both total and particular, from the sweeping themes of Eden and Gethsemane, the tree and the cross, the two archetypal men, even seeping deeply into minute details. In this vein, we can address the particularly strange passage in the garden of Gethsemane only accounted in the gospel of Mark, where an unnamed man is seized by his cloak and flees away naked. This detail too is a mirror to the Edenic story, for while Adam flees the garden clothed after pleasure, this man flees away naked just as Christ's suffering began. Even in the garden, the work of the Second Adam already begins shifting the world toward glory.