- The key thing to understand is the concept of “deprivation of grace”, as you phrase it. Our first parents were created in a state where they had the gift of sanctifying grace in their souls, which is a created participation in God’s Divine life, such that the Blessed Trinity truly lives and abides in their souls. Please note that sanctifying grace and human nature are not one and the same. In other words, grace is a gift in addition to human nature. God could have created Adam and Eve perfectly human (i.e.: humanity coming from the body-soul composite in which human nature consists), but without sanctifying grace. Grace is a gift from God, which man cannot merit, nor is God obligated to offer this gift. As a result of Adam’s rebellion, he lost this gift, not only for himself, but for his descendants, who are born fully ‘human’, but without this gift of God. Thus suffering from the consequences of Adam’s sin is in no way God being unjust — He owes grace to nobody.
Or, put another way:
God is eternal. Human beings are not, and cannot be. Even God cannot create something which is eternal, because to be eternal is the very essence of what makes God God. In other words, God has no beginning or end - He simply exists, which is why He said His name is “I Am.” That’s the truth! God simply
is.
Now how can a temporal thing - a thing in time - relate to an eternal thing? In other words, how can temporal human beings experience an eternal God and see Him in Heaven? We can’t, any more than a human being can breathe under water. We don’t have what it takes to survive under water, and we don’t have what it takes to experience the eternal.
Just as men have created scuba tanks to permit us to survive underwater, God has given us a way to experience Him in Heaven, and that is His Grace. God gave Adam that Grace, but Adam rejected it. Now each of us are born without Grace as well, but God freely offers it to each and every person. We cannot discount the reality that our situation is the result of Adam’s sin, but at the same time we can recognize that in a certain sense we are now being granted the opportunity to accept or reject God’s Grace rather than having that decision made for us by God at our creation as it was for Adam.
Now the man who wants to swim in the sea certainly suffers a sort of sadness over not being able to be in the sea, but he doesn’t suffer terrible torment and agony as though a punishment would bring. He is simply living in the way his natural abilities permit him to - walking around on the land. Similarly, a man who is without Grace suffers a sadness over not experiencing God, but he doesn’t suffer the torments and anguish of Hell. He exists in the way his natural abilities permit him to.
That is the situation into which we are all born, not one of terrible suffering in flames or any such thing. Actual, personal sin brings that. In other words, the real torment in the flames of hell that we think about isn’t something we are deserving of upon birth merely due to original sin. Our lack of Grace simply relegates us to our natural state of existence, sortof like what we experience now on earth. Now we would suffer from not getting to experience God, and this is technically Hell, but we wouldn’t suffer the flames and all that. The difference is that as we grow up, we all sin, and
that brings the torments and whatnot that we think about when we think about Hell.
