In the biblical account of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the fall of man, the progenitors thought the serpent to be benign. But, the pope warned, the devil is a master tactician and shapeshifter who was able to instill doubt, which was veiled as “wicked gossip.”
At the same time Pope Francis noted that we ought to think of the tree of knowledge not as a “prohibition” imposed by God on “the use of reason” but rather as his way of introducing a “measure of wisdom.” In this way God is signaling to us to be cognizant of our limits so we do not falsely believe that we “are the master[s] of everything, because pride is the beginning of all evil.”
The pope noted that in the biblical account, the prohibition imposed on Adam and Eve of eating from that tree was God’s way of “preserv[ing] them from the presumption of omnipotence, of making themselves masters of good and evil, which is temptation, a bad temptation even now. This is the most dangerous threat to the human heart.”
“The Bible explains to us that evil does not begin in man in a clamorous way, when an act is already manifest, but much earlier, when one begins to fantasize about it, to nurse it in the imagination and in thoughts, and ends up being ensnared by its enticements,” the pope cautioned.
The pope offered the example of Jesus as a way to counter this innate tendency of succumbing to hubris, noting that Christ “never conversed with the devil; he chased him away.”
