I shall put enmity between
you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will watch for your
head, and you will watch for his heel (v. 15). When a naïve person associates with a villain, he suffers no
little harm; the villain makes an approach and suggests what is harmful, and
the naïve soul accepts it as something beneficial. A separation between them is
therefore advisable, and a state of enmity and absence of communication, so
that the naïve person is “wise” in response to the saving exhortation and says
of the devil, “We are not ignorant of his designs.” We frequently witness, for
example, a woman’s friendship with a man arising with naïveté, and from this
deception such people proceed to shameful behavior; so our anxiety is the
result not of a hatred of the peace that is the fruit of the Spirit, but of a
dissipation of that peace against which the Savior said he came to bring a sword,
“I have come to bring not peace but a sword”52 that divides and
separates those longing for something helpful from those endeavoring to harm
them. So in his goodness God plants enmity
in those with whom peace and union are at war; when some in ignorance of (232)
evil fall foul of it and learn that it is ruinous and damaging, they reap no
little benefit. (Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis [trans.
Robert C. Hills; The Fathers of the Church 132; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2016], 97)
Now, it is logical that he puts enmity between one seed and the other, and between the
serpent and her. And since reference is not being made to a material serpent,
its seed is not to be taken as
something material, either, but as people bearing its stamp, form, and genesis,
or thoughts that are at variance with the truth, and teachings foreign to it.
Likewise, the seed of the woman is to
be taken as virtuous people issuing from her, as she is a type of the Church,
or the tenets of divine teaching, against which the malice of the adversary
directs his endeavors. Now, in the Gospels as well there is a difference
between seed and “child”: when the
Jews said, “We are seed of Abraham,” the Savior conceded that, but denied their
being children of Abraham when he said, “If you are children of Abraham, do
what Abraham did”—in other words, whereas the one who is a child is also seed, it is out of the question for a seed to become a child if aborted and
not brought to term. This could also be taken anagogically; many people who
made a beginning in the faith met with shipwreck, like Hymenaeus and Alexander,
and were stillborn children. (Didymus the Blind, Commentary on
Genesis [trans. Robert C. Hills; The Fathers of the Church 132; Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016], 97-98)
