Section two Chapter one, Article 1 paragraph 6 Man and 7 The Fall

"Paragraph 6: Man

I. In the Image of God
Of all the visible creatures, man is able to know and love his creator. Being in the image of God, the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons. And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer Him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his stead. God created everything for man, but man in turn was created to serve and love God and to offer all creation back to Him. In reality, it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man becomes clear. This law of human solidarity and clarity,without excluding the rich variety of persons, cultures, and peoples, assures us that all men are truly brethren.

II. Body and Soul but Truly One
In Sacred Scripture, the term soul often refers to human life or the entire human person. But soul also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value to him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: soul signifies the spiritual principle of man. The human body shares in the dignity of the image of God: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit. The unity of the soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the form of the body. It is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united but rather their union forms a single nature. The Church teaches that every spiritual soul created immediately by God it is not produced by the parents and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death and it will not be reunited to the body at the final Resurrection. Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul. Spirit signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God. The spiritual tradition of the Church also emphasizes the heart, in the biblical sense of the depths of one's being, where the person decides for or against God.

III. Male and Female he Created Them
Man and Women have been created, which is to say, willed by God: on the one hand, in perfect equality as human persons; on the other hand in their respective beings  as man and women. Being man or being woman is a reality which is good and willed by God: man and women posses an inalienable dignity which comes immediately from God their Creator. Man and woman are both with one and the same dignity in the image of God. In their being-man and being-women, they reflect the Creator's wisdom and goodness.  In no way is God in man's image. He is neither man nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes. But the respective perfections of man and woman reflect something of the infinite perfection of God: those of a mother and those of a father and a husband.
God created man and women together and willed each other. The Word of God gives us understanding through various features of the sacred text. Man discovers women as another I sharing the same humanity. Man and women were made for each other not that God left them half-made and incomplete he created them to be a communion of  persons,  in which each can be helpmate to the other for they are equal persons and complementary as masculine and feminine. In marriage God  united them in such a way that, by forming  one flesh they can transmit human life. By transmitting human life to their decedents, man and women are spouses and parents cooperate in a unique way in the Creator's work. In God's plan man and women have the vocation of subduing the earth as stewards of God. God calls man and women, made in the image of the Creator who loves everything that exists to share in his providence toward other creatures; hence their responsibility for the world God has entrusted to them.

IV. Man in Paradise
The first man was bot only created good, but was also established in friendship with his Creator and  in harmony with himself and with creation around him, in a state that would be surprised only by the glory of the new creation in Christ. The Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an authentic way, in the light of the New Testament and Tradition, teaches that our first parents Adam and Eve, were constituted in the original state of holiness and justice. This grace of original holiness was to share in ... divine life. By the radiance of his grace all dimensions of man's life were confirmed. As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die. The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and women, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation, comprised the state called original justice. The mastery over the world that God offered from the beginning was realized above all within man himself: mastery of self. The first man was unimpaired and ordered in his whole being because he was free from the triple concupiscence that subjugates him to the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and self-assertion, contrary to the dictates of reason. The sin of man's familiarity with God is that God places him in the garden. Work is not yet  a burden, but rather the collaboration of man and women with God in perfecting the visible creation. This entire harmony of original justice, foreseen for man in God's plan, will be lost by the sin of our first parents.

Paragraph 7 The Fall

The Fall
God is infinity good and all his works are good. Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil

I. Where Sin Abounded, Grace Abounded All the More
Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it. Or to give this dark reality other names would be futile To try to understand what sin is , one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God , for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in it's true identity as humanities rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life and history. Only the light of divine Revelation clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin commuted at mankind's origins. Without the knowledge Revelation gives of God we cannot recognize son clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness , a mistake , or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure , etc . Only in the knowledge of God's plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another. With the process of Revelation the reality of sin is also illuminated. Although to some extent the People of God in the Old Testament had tried to understand the pathos of the human condition in the light of the history of the fall narrated in Genesis, they could not grasp this story's ultimate meaning, which is revealed only in the light of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of original sin, so to speak, the reverse side of the Good News that Jesus is the Savior of all men, that all men need salvation, and that salvation is offered to all through Christ. The Church, which has the mind of Christ, knows very well that we cannot temper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ . The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.





II The Fall of the Angles
Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the Church's Tradition see in this being a fallen angle called Satan or the devil. The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angle, made by God: The devil and other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing. Scripture speaks of sin of these angles. THis fall consists in the free choice of these created spirits who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. The devil has sinned from the beginning he is a liar ant the father of lies.It is irrevocable character of their choices and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angles' sin unforgivable. There is no redemption for the angles after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death. In its consequences the gravest of these works was the mendacious seduction that led  man to disobey God. The power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite. He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature. He cannot prevent the building up of God's reign. Although Satan may act in the world out of hatred for God and his kingdom in Christ Jesus, and although his action may cause grave physical nature to each man and to society, the action and gentleness guides human and cosmic history,

III. Original Sin
God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The tree of knowledge of good and evil symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom. Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command.  All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness. In that sin preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him.  He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Created in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully divinized by God in glory.Seduced by the devil, he wanted to be like God, but without God, before God, and not in accordance with God. Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of his first disobedience. The harmony in which they had found themselves,thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and women becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with the creation is broken; visible creation has become alien and hostile to man.Because of man creation is now subject to its bondage of decay. Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true:man will return to the ground, for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history. After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated by sin. There is Cain's murder of his brother Abel and the universal corruption which follows in the wake of sin. Likewise,sin frequently manifests itself in the history of Israel, especially as infidelity to the God of the Covenant and as transgression of the Law of Moses. And even after Christ's atonement, sin raises its head in countless ways among Christians. Scripture and the Church's Tradition continually recall the presence and universality of sin in man's history: For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn toward what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator. Often refusing to acknowledge God as his source, man has also upset the relationship which should link him to his last end; and at the same time he has broken the right order that should reign within himself as well as between himself and other men and all creatures. All men are implicated in Adams sin. Following St.Paul the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination toward evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted. a sin which is the death of the soul. Because of this certainty of faith, the Church baptizes for the remission of sins even tiny infants who have not committed personal sin. The whole human race is in Adam as one body of one man. By this unity of the human race all men are implicated in Adam's sin, as well as all are implicated in Christ's justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter , Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would the transmit to a fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is by the transmission of human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called sin only in an analogical sense: it is a sin contracted and not committed  a state and not an act. Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it;subject to ignorance,suffering, and the domination of death; and  inclined to sin an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence. Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back toward God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle. The Church's teaching on transmission of original sin was articulated more precisely by the fifth century, especially under the impulse of St. Augustine's reflections against Pelgianism, and in sixteenth century, in opposition to the Protestant Reformation. Pelagius held that man could, by natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God's grace, lead a morally good life; he thus reduced the influence of Adam's fault to bad example.The first Protestant reformers, on the contrary, taught that the origin of sin has radically perverted man and destroyed his freedom; they identified the sin inherited by each man with the tendency to evil, which would be insurmountable. The Church pronounced on the meaning of the data of Revelation on original sin especial at the second Council of Orange and at the Council of Trent. The doctrine of original sin, closely connected with that of redemption by Christ's provides lucid discernment of man's  situation and activity in the world. By our first parent's sin, the devil acquired a certain domination over man,even though man remains free. Original sin entails captivity under the power of him who therefore has the power of death, that is the devil. Ignorance of the fact that man has wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education,polices, social action, and mortals. The consequences of original sin and of all men's personal sins put the world as a whole in the sinful condition.

IV. You Did Not Abandon Him to The Power of Death
After the fall, man was not abandoned by God. On the contrary, God calls him and in a mysterious way heralds the coming victory over evil and his restoration from his fall. The Christian tradition sees in this passage an announcement of the New Adam who, because he became obedient unto death on a cross, makes amends for the disobedience of Adam. Furthermore many Fathers and Doctors of the Church  have seen the woman announcement in the Protoevangelium as Mary, the mother of Christ, the new Eve. Mary benefited first of all and uniquely from Christ's victory over sin: she was preserved from all stain of original sin and by special grace of God committed no sin of any kind during her whole earthly life. But why did God not prevent the first man from sinning? St. Leo the Great responds" Christ's inexpressible grace gave us blessings better than those the demon's envy had taken away. There is nothing to prevent human nature's being raised up to something greater, even after sin; God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good.

God did not make death and he does not delight in the death of the living.It was through the devil's envy that death entered the world. Satan or the devil and the other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God and his plan.Their choice against God is definitive.They try to associate man in their revolt against God."