He is a creature who can literally scale the most sublime heights and almost in the same instant sink to the lowest depths. He is capable of great poetry, music, and art, of scientific achievements that bespeak a mind of subtlety and depth, of selfless acts that ennoble him while he is ennobling others. He is also capable of the utmost in degradation, of acts more vile than any brute beast could perform, of complete degeneracy of soul. Others have been no less wrong, in adopting a completely pessimistic attitude, a despair of any good in mankind at all, which has been obviously contradicted by many facts of human history. A great convert to the Catholic Faith, the late Gilbert K. Chesterton, wrote that when he first heard of the doctrine of original sin it was then that all the apparently discordant facts that he knew about man began to click into place like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle.
Several questions remain.
One of them, though perhaps it is not too important, is with regard to the figure of the serpent in the story of the Fall of man. The serpent in this story appears to be much more clever than the man and woman he is dealing with. Yet in the story of Genesis no intelligent creatures have been spoken of other than man. The Genesis story does not dwell on the creation or the existence of angels, for it is concerned only with the visible creation of which man is a part and which has been placed under man's dominion. Furthermore, the Old Testament learned of the existence of an angelic order only by degrees, as God saw fit to reveal this knowledge.