NOTES for Gen 3:19

So what is a human being: dust or the image of God? Or do the two not contradict each other at all? God directly calls fallen humanity dust, pointing out that its destiny is to return to the dust from which it was made. Is this humiliation, a punishment for the fall? It does not look that way: after all, the human being really was created from dust, just as, according to the sacred writer, the whole universe is made up of "the tiniest specks of dust."

What, then, changed for humanity after the fall? First of all, a certain fatalism in everything that is happening stands out. A person's lot is to return to dust; now nothing else is given. Was it always so? The biblical story, if not directly then indirectly by its context, lets us understand that it was not always so, that returning to dust was not previously inevitable for the human being.

What changed? Dust is merely nature, no more and no less. The cycle of deaths and births is the distinctive feature of natural cycles. And now the human being is simply a part of nature, the same as any other, or almost the same. And before? Before, probably, everything was different: the spiritual principle in the human being prevailed over the natural, and returning "to dust" was not inevitable for him. Now, as we can see, the natural in him prevails over the spiritual.

That is probably why the earth no longer wants to give him its fruits: the subordination of nature to spirit is understandable and natural, but why should nature submit to nature? This is how the human being changes after the fall. Before the fall he was, first and foremost and above all, spirit, and only then an animal. Now, after the fall, he has become first and foremost and above all an animal, and he remains spirit only to the extent that his animal nature allows him to be.