Cyril interprets this “breath of life” to be the Holy Spirit, and argues that God’s breathing of the Spirit into the first human demonstrates that we were created to exist in intimacy with God. We were created to partake of the divine nature, to participate in the divine, and so to attain the beauty of likeness with God.
Sin disrupted this intimacy. Cyril describes the fall, not as a descent into depravity and sinfulness, but as a loss of the Holy Spirit. Through the exercise of the freedom God gave us, humankind shrank from intimacy with the divine and so lost the Holy Spirit.
Cyril argues that one of the central purposes of the Incarnation was our recovery of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit, and it is this recovery that Jesus’ baptism accomplishes. Through the Incarnation, the Son of God made man becomes the Second Adam, and at his baptism, the Second Adam receives the Holy Spirit, not for his own sake, but for the sake of all humanity.
The Baptism of Jesus by the John the Baptist
Herrad of Landsberg pic.twitter.com/6iRnm11DD5— Mirella Czajkowska-T (@MirellaTurek) September 22, 2016
“Cyril describes the fall, not as a descent into depravity and sinfulness, but as a loss of the Holy Spirit.”
Which is interesting, but I don’t think the scriptures ever suggest that the fall of man resulted in the loss of the Holy Spirit. Rather, they suggest pretty clearly that it resulted in sin and death: “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.” [Romans 5:18-19]
The Book of Common Prayer of course refers to baptism as marking the coming of the Holy Spirit, but relates this integrally to our sin, and our need to be delivered from it:
“…that thou wilt mercifully look upon these thy servants; wash them and sanctify them with the Holy Ghost, that they, being delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the ark of Christ’s Church; and being stedfast in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in charity, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world, that finally they may come to the land of everlasting life”.
Baptism is indeed a renewal. But one cannot take the references to sin out of it, at least not if we want to be true to Christian teaching.