Angels and human beings are created to love and to communicate with God and with each other. Like connected vessels they must, as they get replenished, communicate their contents to each other. Life itself is communication in love; and, first of all, communication with its source -- God.
Because of an inexplicable whim, the first person to be created by God and the closest to Him -- Daystar or Lucifer [the bearer of light] -- conceived a desire to have all for himself and to give nothing to anyone else. In the words of Holy Fathers, he fell in love with himself and became a self-enclosed but empty vessel. This original sin is called sometimes pride and sometimes self-love and now is best-known as egoism. Its defining essence lies in the selfish turning of one's attention towards oneself until the self becomes the center of the universe. It becomes its own idol, and everything else has a place simply as an instrument of the worship of this idol, losing its own intrinsic value. For this reason, any self-less interest in God and in the world withers, and the self-enclosed person becomes increasingly arid. Of course, a person, just like nature, cannot tolerate a vacuum, and a person begins to fill himself with imaginings. Thus are born passion and fascination with many strange idols. Having lost its link with God, the fallen spirit seeks oblivion in whatever comes to hand.
The creator of evil uses envy to cover up the emptiness and coldness of loneliness.. The steady desire of any living being for love and union with another becomes in this self-enclosed personality, a force of hatred and destruction. The inability ever again to achieve unity in the fullness of being gives birth to the desire to achieve it through universal destruction. But such extreme evil cannot easily find a willing hand among those who bear the seal of the Creator. And so, in order to seduce its victim, evil must show itself as good; that is to say, it resorts to deception and lies. The Lord says that Satan is a murderer from the beginning, a liar and the father of lies (John 8,44).
It was probably by deceit that the devil carried other spirits into the abyss with him. Through lies and slander, he caused the fall of the first human beings.
Archpriest Victor Potapov
November, 1985