This is how the ingenuity of a thinker like St Maximus the Confessor perceives the fall: “The first human being,” he writes, “having deprived (ἐλλείψας) the movement of its natural power of the energy toward the end (τῆς πρὸς τὸ τέλος ἐνεργείας) was diseased with the ignorance of its own cause.” Evil, therefore, is nothing else but “the deprivation (ἔλλειψις) of the energy toward the end.”42 The human being has fallen not from its past but from its future; it refused to move to the end to which it was called, or for which it was created.
