The Fall consisted in Disobedience. All idea of a magic apple has fallen out of sight. The apple was ‘not bad nor harmful except in so far as it was forbidden’ and the only point of forbidding it was to instil obedience, ‘which virtue in a rational creature (the emphasis is on creature; that which though rational, is merely a creature, not self-existent being) is, as it were, the mother and guardian of all virtues’ (De Civ. Dei, XIV, 12).
