seashell:
I don’t think Adam and Eve would have ever died at all if they didn’t cause the fall. I think everything on earth would have just lived forever. (I might be wrong) This is what I base this idea on. I don’t know if the Catholic Church teaches this or not.
The Catholic Church teaches that Adam and Eve were born with the preternatural gift of bodily immortality. So yes, if Adam and Eve had never sinned, they would have never died. But Adam and Eve were also destined by God to grow in holiness in the terrestrial paradise, and to eventually become fully divinized beings.**Catechism of the Catholic Church
398** In that sin [original sin] man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good.
Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully “divinized” by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to “be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”.
Theosis, also called divinization or deification, is the process of becoming more like God and more united with God. This “becoming more like God” is to be understood as becoming more like Jesus Christ (who is God), not as the wish for power and knowledge that motivated Adam and Eve to sin. Theosis is the goal of the Christian life. It means becoming all that people were originally created to be. It is not something to wait for passively, but something to be taken by force, by hard work done in one’s soul.
Wikipedia
I don’t think Adam and Eve would have ever died at all if they didn’t cause the fall. I think everything on earth would have just lived forever.
If Adam and Eve had not fallen, their progeny would have also possessed the preternatural gift of bodily immortality.
ORIGINAL SIN. Either the sin committed by Adam as the head of the human race, or the sin he passed onto his posterity with which every human being, with the certain exception of Christ and his Mother, is conceived and born. The sin of Adam is called originating original sin (
originale originans); that of his descendents is originated original sin (
originale originatum). Adam’s sin was personal and grave, and it affected human nature. It was personal because he freely committed it; it was grave because God imposed a serious obligation; and
it affected the whole human race by depriving his progeny of the supernatural life and preternatural gifts they would have possessed on entering the world had Adam not sinned. Original sin in his descendants is personal only in the sense that the children of Adam are each personally affected, but not personal as though they had voluntarily chosen to commit the sin; it is grave in the sense that it debars a person from the beatific vision, but not grave in condemning one to hell; and it is natural only in that all human nature, except for divine intervention, has it and can have it removed only by supernatural means.
PRETERNATURAL GIFTS. Favors granted by God above and beyond the powers or capacities of the nature that receives them but not beyond those of all created nature. Such gifts perfect nature but do not carry it beyond the limits of created nature. They include three great privileges to which human beings have no title:
infused knowledge
absence of concupiscence
bodily immortality. Adam and Eve possessed these gifts before the Fall.
*Pocket Catholic Dictionary * - John A. Hardon, S.J.
