No, I don’t think they could have.
(red text = most relevant)
And I’m sure St. Thomas has some excellent insights in this regard, but I haven’t been able to check the Summa yet.
** IV. MAN IN PARADISE **
375 The Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an authentic way, in the light of the New Testament and Tradition, teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were constituted in an original “state of holiness and justice”. This grace of original holiness was “to share in. . .divine life”.
376 By the radiance of this grace all dimensions of man’s life were confirmed. As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die. The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and woman, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation, comprised the state called “original justice”.
http://javascript<b></b>:openWindow('cr/377.htm');
377 The “mastery” over the world that God offered man from the beginning was realized above all within man himself:
mastery of self. The first man was unimpaired and ordered in his whole being because he was free from the triple concupiscence that subjugates him to the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and self-assertion, contrary to the dictates of reason.
scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p6.htm
** III. ORIGINAL SIN**
400 The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”. Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”, for out of it he was taken.
Death makes its entrance into human history.
scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm
I’ve always wondered, actually, if there’s a distinction to be made between suffering and pain.
Suffering is clearly off the table (and I tend to think that “emotional pain” would certainly count as suffering)… but I mean, it’s not like Adam and Eve lacked functioning nervous systems or anything, so I assume they
could feel pain. And the ability to feel pain is good in some sense, since it can help us identify problems with our body and avoid greater injuries. There’s also the whole “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth” text from Genesis, for whatever that’s worth. But I guess I wonder if it’s possible that there could have been
pain on some (mild) level before the fall, even though there was no
suffering (and I would certainly count prolonged or excruciating pain as suffering). In all seriousness, if Adam pinched himself, would it hurt? I doubt pain on that level would really qualify as
suffering in any definition. Or if he scraped his knee, maybe it would hurt normally for a little while, but maybe the increased control that his soul had over his body would have enabled him to simply block out the pain, and avoid any kind of suffering. I don’t know for sure, of course… but I think it’s worth thinking about.
