The natural needs of the individual beng, such as nourishment, self-perpetuation and self-preservation, become an end in themselves: they dominate man, and end up as “passions,” causes of anguish and the utmost pain, and ultimately the cause of death…As St. Maximus puts it: it means an existence which does not come to fruition, which shuts itself off from the “end” for which it was made–life as love and communion…

The fall arises out of man’s free decision to reject personal communion with God and restrict himself to the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his own nature…’In the day you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall be as gods’ (Gen. 3:5). This provocation places before man the existential possibility for nature on its own to determine and exhaust the fact of existence. This kind of “deification” of human nature goes against its very truth: it is an “existential life,” a fictitious possibility of life. Man’s nature is created and mortal. It partakes in being, in true life, only to the extent that it transcends itself, as an existential fact of personal distinctiveness. ~Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality