What “perfect harmony” exists between a couple who disobeys God? This seems quite a disharmony, honestly.
What “acceptance” do you mean? That is an interesting idea, but I don’t understand it yet. Do you mean accepting that their bodies would in fact die while their spirit lives on? Do you mean that Adam and Eve were made mortal (in body) but had no grief/awareness over it? If so, I am intrigued also by that idea. But it sounds like heresy!
I didn’t claim to be a theologian, but I can speculate concerning things no one knows. So, if it’s heresy, let’s condemn it.
I don’t see a problem with the notion that a couple may be in perfect harmony, say, with each other or, for that matter, with God, and then do something that breaks the harmony. That happens all the time in the human realm, and there’s nothing odd about it as long as people have free wills.
Let’s look at it this way. Are cattle, for example, discontented because they are obliged to eat grass? No, they’re not, though we certainly would be. Canines will eat things we find incredibly disgusting, yet it doesn’t bother them to do it, because it’s their nature to do it and they have no quarrel with that nature. They don’t aspire to anything else. I have observed animals all my life, having been raised on a ranch, and it is plain to me that their way of viewing many things is utterly different from ours. They readily accept what we would not tolerate. They don’t “regret”, for example. If you take a cow away from a better pasture and put it in a poorer one, it might remember and attempt to return to the better one. But if it finds it can’t, it doesn’t stand around bemoaning the fact that it can’t. It simply accepts the worse pasture. It could be said that they are in “perfect harmony” with their own natures, understanding, of course, that their natures are different from ours.
I believe there truly are (and have been) people who were more in harmony with their own natures than most of us are. An example would be, say, a saint who absolutely did not fear his own death and, in fact, welcomed it. On a more everyday sort of way, Da Vinci observed an old man who, it appeared, died with absolutely no regrets and with perfect equanimity. That old man was not a “recognized” saint, and seemed ordinary in every way to Da Vinci except for that acceptance. Da Vinci tried to discover a physical reason for it, but never did.
I am saying, then, (since we don’t actually know) that prior to the fall, Adam and Eve might have been perfectly accepting of their lives as God ordained them. Possibly Eden was a garden of delights and possibly their bodies would never die. But the bible does not make those things certain. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Eden was a very ordinary place and Adam and Eve saw the transition from this life to the next as seamless; simply “a part of life”. Was Eden, then, a paradise objectively, or only subjectively? We don’t actually know.
But they did elect to “know good and evil”. There are different interpretations of that, and not the Church or anyone else claims to know exactly what that meant. Did they not know the difference? Or perhaps does “know” mean “experience”? What was the temptation? Was it perhaps the act of people having free will to depart from total trust in God because they thought somehow to elevate themselves by knowing first-hand what departing from it was? Was the true nature of their sin non-acceptance?
When one thinks about Jesus’ injunctions to “see the lilies of the field” that neither toil nor spin, and to “regard the ravens” whom the Father feeds, what is He addressing in humanity that needs correction? What’s the message? “Trust Providence” is the message. “Do not unduly concern yourself with controlling your world. Accept what comes. You will still be okay, though perhaps not in the way you thought.” might be another way of putting it.
Now, going back from that to Adam and Eve, is it possible that “knowing” included “knowing” in the sense of “determining one’s own ultimate good for oneself”; the thing we do that bedevils us the very most; the cause of all wars, all murders, all thefts, all discontents? Is our fundamental failure non-acceptance of the path laid out before us? Was “knowing” an act of the intellect, as we usually think, or an act of the will?
Shakepeare, I think, had it right in his development of MacBeth. What was MacBeth’s “sin”? MacBeth was, by birth, Thane of Glamis. By merit and the beneficence of the king, he also became Thane of Cawdor. So far, so good. Then the witches told him he was to be “king hereafter”. It was true in the outcome, but in reaching that goal, in grasping at something he, himself, rather than Providence decreed, MacBeth became a murderer. Not only a murderer, but intensely unhappy and ultimately unrepentent and brought to disaster of his own making. He insisted, at the witches’ deceptive encouragement, in creating his own universe; in “forcing Providence”.
I’m not saying any of this is the proper explanation of the Eden narrative. I’m only saying it’s possible. I doubt it’s heretical, but if it is, then let it be condemned. If someone who really is a theologian faithful to the teachings of the Church tells me it’s heretical, I will abandon the notion instantly and never speak of it again. Acceptance has more than one application.
