Continued from post 885.
There is one more way that the ancient epics became a source of information to be used in examining the nature of Adam pre-Fall. It follows from the first part of CCC, 28.
**28 **In many ways, throughout history down to the present day, men have given expression to their quest for God in their religious beliefs and behavior: in their prayers, sacrifices, rituals, meditations, and so forth. These forms of religious expression, despite the ambiguities they often bring with them, are so universal that one may well call man a religious being:
Checking the cross-references in the margin, I found this CCC paragraph.
**2566 **Man is in search of God. In the act of creation, God calls every being from nothingness into existence. “Crowned with glory and honor,” man is, after the angels, capable of acknowledging “how majestic is the name of the Lord in all the earth.” Even after losing through his sin his likeness to God, man remains an image of his Creator, and retains the desire for the one who calls him into existence. All religions bear witness to men’s essential search for God.
When reading these two valuable paragraphs, we need to keep in mind that frail humanity’s search for God does not mean that every search and every action is pure, good, and beautiful. For the purposes of the Adam & Logic thread, the take home message is that an awareness of the super-natural is inherent in human nature both
pre-Fall and post-Fall.
The following from the Wikipedia article on the* Epic of Gilgamesh* is evidence that Epic writers were interested in spiritual issues such as eternal life and the source of life and death due to gods who created man. The probing back to the dawn of human history occurs because the desire for super-natural information was natural to them.
Again, it is not the content of the epics that we use in relation to Adam, it is the fact that all human nature has the ability to search out what is beyond the confines of our material environment.
From the Wikipedia link in post 885. In the second half of the epic, Gilgamesh’s distress at Enkidu’s death causes him to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He eventually learns that “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands”.
There is always the question asking why one couple. The above is mainly about the human’s inherent ability to go above and beyond what we normally consider blood and guts, skin and bones. Genesis 2: 15-17 describes human’s inherent freedom to be master over his acts. In spite of a wounded nature, the human person, post-Fall, can still seek his Creator and freely share in His life. (information source.
CCC, 1730-1732: CCC, 356; CCC, 2258)
We do know by Revelation that Adam’s original state of living in harmony with God was meant for all human nature. (CCC, 404) All Adam’s descendants would receive by propagation his original nature which includes the freedom of rational thought and the freedom to shape one’s own life.
Depending on Adam’s response to the temptation of Satan, all descendants would receive the extraordinary gift of immortality or not receive it . (CCC, 376) In order to maintain the truth of “all”, there could not be another human who had Adam’s same individual responsibility. Recall that all mankind is in Adam as one body of one man. (St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo 4, l; CCC, 404)
The second man, like Adam, would have a free intellect and will and could choose to deny God. Therefore, if Adam chose to remain faithful to God’s law, it would not be possible for all humanity to receive Adam’s gift of immortality at the same time that all humanity was contracting the second man’s state of separation from God which results in the loss of immortality. If both men made the same choice, then Occam’s razor or parsimony would apply. The creation of Adam’s “clone” would not be necessary.
