St. Thomas taught that the sin of Adam and Eve was pride.
I don’t know what St. Thomas Aquinas said, but this statement of “pride” as the sin confused me for a long time. I tried to read Genesis and see where the pride was.
I would intuitively accept it, if Aquinas’ remark is based on Eve eating the fruit of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and bad. That would be the simplistic and traditional meaning, of Eve trying to be like the gods – which is to say, deciding for herself what is right and wrong.
There is a biblical sense of inclusion, in which Adam and Eve and all their descendents inherit the fault of that original sin, because we were excluded from the garden as they were.
Another example of biblical inheritance is that the covenant of Sinai pertained to all the Israelites living that time and to their descendents. So, the idea of inheritance is not at all foreign to our understanding of the events in Genesis.
A book called Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine each Other (A National Jewish Bookclub Annual Award Winner, by Judy Klitsner) delves a lot deeper into Eve’s motivation and sin – and other matters.
One example which is easier to demonstrate than anything about Eve is this: Consider in the condemnation of Adam after the sin in the garden, God says that he will make a living by tilling the soil by the sweat of his brow – and all that. But, no sooner do we read on and find out that one of Adam’s immediate descendents, Abel, is tending flocks. So, that is the subversive thing, where Abel’s work “subverts” or overturns what had come earlier.
So, Eve (or H a v v a h) in the first chapter of Genesis is made equal to Adam in all respects. But, in the second chapter, she seems to have lost footing and Klitsner starts putting motivation in her to regain the status she had in Chapter One. So, if I understand her correctly from my first reading of the book, Havvah is trying to regain the lost ground of her status – which would be a subversive sequel to the status she seems to have quickly lost in Chapter Two. The upshot of which Klitsner might maintain is not based on pride, but based on the desire to return to the blissful condition of Chapter One of Genesis. – the spiritual and physical freedom and innocence of creation.
I am too old to resolve if pride itself was the first sin or whether it could even BE the first sin. The “fault” is described as the eating of the fruit which might have been the RESULT of the pride as a motivation. I wonder if Aquinas clarifies this distinction, as much as he said anything else about this.
