We at ABE Ministry are too perplexed to try and figure-out what that all means and so ABS will just post some teachings about Adam from a different Saint, Saint Thomas Aquinas from a great source; one that puts the theology of that great Saint into words more easily apprehended by the common man.
Written for those aspiring-to-middle-brow status (that is, for men like ABS), here is a copy and paste from the great Companion to the Summa.
We at ABE Ministry thought it necessary to reproduce it here especially insight of some of the captious and calamitous claims made in the text of the Theology of the Body that ABS took a look at yesterday.
Without further ado, Adam as he really was.
O, and doesn't the truth about Adam turn on its head the entirety of the macro-evolution lie in which the first human was sort of like a glorified monkey and modern man has ascended to his modern secular humanist perfection; that is, that the accent of man is a proven fact?
Pffffft
That is just so insane on its face. The fact is, everything has descended since Adam. Just look around....
The modern world of mud
With the advent of a thoroughly materialistic modern philosophy, the happy memory of an original state of perfection of man was doomed. What perfection man can claim must find its source in a purely material universe that certainly did not produce effects above the material. Man was an integral part of a completely material world, to be explained, examined and evaluated as any other part of that universe. Thus man is pictured as a product of an evolving process within that material universe, a purely material product whose original state was at worst a primeval slime, at best a brute animality; his present position is not due to a degeneration or a fall, but to centuries of a steady climb that has left him qualitatively the same as his animal ancestors.
Sin, faith, justice, morality had no part to play in the origins of man, as they have no serious part to play in his present life. The change (for the better) that has taken place in man explains itself; for it was the very process of change that brought about the improvement. Man is the result of a blind necessity, of the interaction of natural forces that need no explanation. No credit can be given him for his present or past condition; no hope can be held out for his personal future. He is caught in a relentless tide of progress without a goal and without a beginning; in that progress he is an unimportant phase.
Principles for the investigation of the original state of man
St. Thomas was familiar with the ancestors of the renaissance philosophers; he knew materialism in its earliest forms; the dreams and memories of the pagans were packed away on the shelves of his memory. But when he came to treat of the original state of man, he resorted to none of these; rather he was content to go to the factual account in the Book of Genesis, examine it, analyst draw out its implications, fill in its blank spots with reasonable hypotheses to give us a full picture of man in his first home.
The integrity of nature
Before plunging into the story itself, St. Thomas lays down some fundamental principles that give his whole treatment a unity which makes its rational character stand out strikingly. The first principle he insists on is that nothing that was natural to man was lost by man’s sin. When we speak of fallen nature or of the wounds suffered by nature through the sin of Adam, we do not mean that human nature suffered a bad smash-up and was condemned to hobble through the ages a hopeless cripple. True enough, human nature was injured, but in the same sense that a man is injured when he is left naked by the roadside. Objectively, he is in the same condition as a man who has never had any clothes, though he certainly feels a great deal worse. So human nature now is in the same condition it would have been had Adam never received any extraordinary gifts; but it has been stripped of those gifts which Adam did receive. This is not a gratuitous assumption. There are sins enough in the world to give us material for a thorough check on the fact that sin, in itself, does nothing to destroy the integrity of human nature.
Cause and essential notion of superiority of the original state
By way of a second principle, St. Thomas points out that the cause of the original perfection of man was his original justice. That is, man was created in sanctifying grace with his soul completely subject to God; this subjection extended right on down so that man’s sensible appetite was subject to his reason, and the physical world was subject to man. These two, original justice and original perfection, went hand in hand in Adam. They were, however, quite capable of separation, for one was within the order of nature, though not of human nature, while the other was above all nature. So, in the Blessed Virgin Mary, there was the same supernatural perfection and perfect justice as in Adam, with the same complete subjection of her soul to God; but without the accompanying extraordinary gifts of Adam’s original perfection.
The individual in the Garden of Eden
The extraordinary gifts that went to make up the original perfection of Adam were not supernatural but preternatural; that is, they were not entirely above the powers of all created nature but they did not belong to man by the principles of his nature. The immortality given to Adam, for example, was quite different from the immortality to be enjoyed after the general resurrection; this latter is something intrinsic, flowing from the body’s participation in the spiritual qualities of the soul. While that of Adam was an extrinsic thing, supplied to the first man from an outside source. His immunity from suffering, or impassibility, was not that incapacity for injury which the blessed in heaven will enjoy because of the penetration of the body by the spiritual qualities of the soul; it was rather an escape from harm through prudence and providential care, an extrinsic rather than an intrinsic gift. Man’s dominion over the created world followed the lines of his dominion over himself: as his sense appetite obeyed his reason, so did the animals obey his command; but, as he had no power of command over his vegetative powers, so neither could he command the vegetative and physical powers of the world, but he could use their help without impediment.
In other words, while the individual man in the Garden of Eden had considerable advantages over the individual man or woman of today, he was not in any way essentially different.
His intellectual equipment and progress: That of Adam
Adam started off the human race on its long life; as its proper starting point, he represented that race in its perfection. Just as he began with physical perfection — without the bother of being born, growing up, developing his muscles and so on — so he also started off with an intellectual perfection. In fact, this latter perfection was quite necessary in view of his position as head of the race and, consequently, as teacher of all who should come after him.
As the first human teacher, Adam brought an equipment to his task that has never been equalled since by any member of that noble profession. He did not see God directly, seeing the divine essence, for that is quite super natural and, once had, cannot be lost; that is, if Adam knew God in this way, he could not have sinned. Rather, he knew God as we know Him, but more perfectly. After all, he had none of the worries about bread and butter clothing and housing, not to speaks of the family’s future, that distracts the mind of man today. Moreover, the clarity of his insight was not the least bit clouded by passion. From the effects of God, particularly from the act of the human intellect and the nature of the human soul, Adam’s mind rose quickly and easily to a knowledge of God. His knowledge of the angels was had in the same way. But it is important to notice that Adam knew these things and all others as we know them, through intelligible species.
As for his knowledge of other things, well, Adam had to teach and govern the human family and, obviously, he could not teach what he did not know. His natural knowledge extended to all those, things that men are intended to know, that is, all those things implicitly contained in the first natural principles of knowledge. St. Thomas inclined to the belief that this knowledge — an extraordinary gift not to the individual Adam but to Adam as head of the human race — was an explicit, complete and perfect knowledge. Not that Adam knew every singular thing: that this stone would fall into this river at such a time, and so on. Nor did he know future free things, like the thoughts of men. His supernatural knowledge (his knowledge of the mysteries of faith) was limited to those things necessary for the correct government and guidance of human life in that original state of existence.
We do not have a full grasp of the intellectual stature of Adam unless we look beyond the rich deposit of knowledge given him to the use he could make of it. Many a deeply learned man is the answer to a swindler’s fondest hopes; many an expert in one line is a simpleton in another. We make our mistakes through haste, prejudice, passion, insufficient evidence, in a word, because our reason is not in complete command of the situation. Adam’s reason was in absolute command, command of his own kingdom and of the world; he was incapable of mistakes in judgment and reasoning. He was, then, a deeply learned, very wise and exceedingly clever man.
That of his children
If we were born in paradise, eve would have had all the advantages of reason in full command; but we could not have looked forward to such equipment as was given to Adam as head of the race. There would still have been school days, and plenty of them. We would have acquired our knowledge through the senses, we would have had to discover things for ourselves, be taught by others and so, bit by bit, pick up full knowledge. It would have been a much easier job, it is true, than it is today: or nothing, either in ourselves or in the outside world, would have interfered with the process of learning — no day dreaming, no laziness, no heat, cold, hunger, thirst or stomach-ache.
His will, his justice and his peace
For all his cleverness, Adam might have been a very unpleasant person, even a holy terror in the Garden of Eden, if he were not also a very holy man. As he was created, his will was good. Moreover, there would have been no point to God’s delaying the gift of supernatural life, keeping Adam cooling his heels as he dawdled about the meaningless tasks of a purely natural life; Adam was created in sanctifying grace and, as he was destined to glory as the angels were, there was no reason why he should not have started off earning his reward immediately. In fact, this sanctifying grace and consequent total subjection to God were the foundation of the whole perfection of Adam’s state.
With sanctifying grace, he had all the virtues, though, indeed, those that implied some imperfection never flowered into action until after he had sinned. How could he be penitent who had committed no sin; or what field was there for mercy in a place that knew no misery? The virtues that did bloom into acts produced acts that, considered in themselves, were much more worthy of merit than ours are; for the perfection of his nature removed all obstacles to grace and all possible imperfection in his works, whereas with us there is the constant pull of the sensible world, the difficulty of attention, the flabbiness of our will. Still, because our acts are sometimes so difficult to place, the very doing of them indicates a much greater willingness, even eagerness, than if they were produced with an ease that made close attention entirely unnecessary.
It might seem difficult to understand how a man as intellectually and morally perfect as Adam could have sinned if we did not know that the sublime perfection of the angels was not proof against sin, and if we could scrape up any sufficient cause of our own sins other than our own free will. The sin of Adam will be treated at length in the second volume of this work under its proper title of original sin. Here it is enough to notice that we are in no position to sneer at Adam. If we had been born in paradise we too would have been born in sanctifying grace, for that original justice of Adam’s was a gift to the whole human species, it was not a personal thing for Adam alone; and grace was the foundation of original justice. We, too, would have had the fullness of virtue, as Adam had; and, like him, we could have lost it if we made up our minds to lose it. Heaven would not have been guaranteed, nor would hell have been an impossibility for us; such complete security comes only from the vision of God which is the end, not the beginning, of human life. Indeed, the odds are that some of us would have sinned even if Adam had never offended God; and our sin would have had the same tragic consequences for our children that Adam’s had for his. We would have lost the extraordinary gifts for ourselves; of course we could not give to our children what we ourselves no longer possessed.
His physical nature: His passions
During their short stay in the Garden, Adam and Eve got on very well together. Of course they had human passions; they were human, after all, and passion is an integral part of human nature. That they were buoyant with hope, alight with desire, urged on by love was entirely a matter of their own free will, for these passions were under the complete control of reason. It must be admitted, though, that only some of the passions of the milder or concupiscible appetite — love, desire, hope and joy — had any place in Eden; the other passions — anger, despair, hate, fear and all the rest — presuppose evil and there was no evil in paradise. The battle between flesh and spirit, then, did not get started until the reign of peace that was a part of paradise had come to an end. There were no gluttons or drunkards in Eden, no one cowered in fear or boiled with anger, men were not beside themselves with passion, their intellects clouded, their lives swayed by the sensitive appetite. This was not the way men were started off on their earthly life by God.