An insight into life before sin can be gained not only from descriptions of the way of knowing the world and the proper formation of the will (rectitude) but also from questions concerning Adam’s imperfection, which seems to be at odds with the account of the perfection of creation, whereby there was no sin that would have been responsible for any weakness, including death (Rosenberg 2006; Roszak 2022; Sánchez-Palencia-Martí & Jordana 2021). In his Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas calls Adam’s perfection a ‘personal perfection’ – one that he needed in order to act as the principium of humankind, because ‘human nature was not as yet wholly perfect in point of numbers’ (ScG IV, cap. 83). In addition, he notes that ‘no creature outside himself could harm him against his own will’ (ST II-II 165.1c.); therefore, God’s intent was not for humanity to attain the beatitude in a way where it would have been necessary to struggle with sin or experience any suffering (Platovnjak 2022). Consequently, humanity would have had infantile defects but no senile defects.

In the context of Adam’s perfection, Aquinas also considers the question of venial sin. He emphasises that such sin would not have been possible if Adam had not previously committed a cardinal sin. Therefore, Adam and Eve could not have spontaneously suffered any irrational fears, anger or desire, which means that they could only have sinned in a fully deliberate manner. And even if they had sinned, they would still have been able to seek help – a possibility of which Adam did not avail himself because, in Aquinas view, his sin of pride consisted in a complacency in his own goodness and thus contemplation of that goodness without relating it to its source, severing the relationship with God and losing the ability to see the world ‘through God’ (Roszak 2020:73). And yet, this was precisely what made Adam distinct in Paradise: his unique manner of knowledge and state of being well ordered. Consequently, we are dealing with a certain kind of arrogance of mind, a disordered desire for greatness that brought confusion into the sphere of desires and upset humanity’s internal balance. While Adam could have regained his personal graces lost as a result of sin if he had undertaken his penance, the harm done to nature would not have been reversed (Smith 2020). It is also important to note that Adam in Paradise had knowledge of sin as a possibility, but did not have it per experientiam. In summary, the subordination of the lower powers to reason means that Adam and Eve could not have spontaneously suffered any irrational fears, anger or desire, and therefore could only have sinned in a fully deliberate manner (Mrozek 2013:342).

There is a noticeable realism in the treatment of the situation in which Adam could have experienced hardship and imperfection in connection with his development, a realism that is not precluded by the grace present in his life (McCoy 2018:160).

In one of his biblical commentaries, namely the commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Aquinas compares the sin of the first people to loss of taste: not a molecular change but the fact that a person begins to approve the disgusting and recoil from the tasty. To overcome this problem, one needs to return to ‘eating good food’. So it was not enough for God to say to the man after he had sinned: ‘do it’, because rather than affecting physical development itself, the damage upset the thing that guided such development – rectitude.

In his discussion of original sin, Aquinas observes that there is a difference between us and our falls on the one hand and Adam and his Fall on the other (Hofmann 2020). In us, corruption takes place in an opposite manner to that in Adam, because in him, the soul corrupted the body and the person corrupted nature, whereas in us, the process is the reverse (Kemp 2020). In other words, Adam’s sin belonged to the irascible power, while our sins today belong to the concupiscible power.

On account of the fact that innocence is treated as being in the state of a wayfarer (in statu viatoris) rather than among the saved in Heaven, Aquinas is convinced that Adam in Paradise had faith, because:

This claim concerning Adam’s faith is founded on the fundamental conviction that before the Fall, he also needed grace in the same manner as we do after original sin (DiNoia 2017; Vijgen 2018). The difference between him and us is not the fact that we need grace more than he did, as if it were about increasing its intensity today, but that we now need it for a greater number of things. Even before sin, Adam ‘required grace to obtain eternal life, which is the chief reason for the need of grace’ (ST I 95.4 ad 1). This, however, does not mean that he was able to behold the essence of God immediately, in the first moment of his existence, as explained in the following passage:

Although Adam desired to see God in his essence, he did not suffer at not having seen him in that state because his desire was well ordered. Instead, he calmly awaited the right time to do so. However, Aquinas admits in his De Veritate that Adam’s mind in the state of innocence was not sufficiently perfect for God to be present to it in an intelligible form.

With the gift of grace, however, came the ‘anticipation’ of the happiness that emerges in the intellect through the virtue of faith (which is the onset of eternal life as further explained by Aquinas). Therefore, Adam was happy, but not in an absolute sense; he was happy to the degree appropriate for his state – as, for example, blessed are the poor in spirit, that is, those who do not possess all the riches of the world. So how did he progress in his knowledge of God in the Garden of Eden?

In view of the realities of Adam’s life in the state of original justice, his manner of knowing God and the graces he had received, one should not be surprised with Aquinas’s statements that Adam lived in statu viatoris rather than in a state of eternal happiness (Houck 2020; Murray 2008:112). Paradise as the place in which the state of innocence prevailed was an intermediate ‘station’ rather than the final destination, and Adam had the road from Paradise to Heaven ahead of him just as we do after sin. As Aquinas notes, ‘the promised reward of the immortality of glory differs from the immortality which was bestowed on man in the state of innocence’ (ST I 97.1 ad 4.). Therefore, the difference between the two states also concerns the manner in which freedom is experienced: while freedom in Heaven consists in not being able to sin (non posse peccare), freedom in Paradise consisted in being able not to sin (posse non pecare). Importantly, both cases are expressions of freedom!

By pointing to the difference between Paradise and Heaven, one also invites questions about the meaning of the time spent by Adam in the state of innocence and the meaning of all natural history. While Aquinas does not ask this question explicitly, it appears that his answer would direct our attention to the good that would not have emerged if original justice had not existed. After all, the time of original justice had its purpose (telos), and because Aquinas believes that there was no dysteleological suffering in the time of innocence, this must have been a time of the attainment of virtues and the development of a freedom that needed to be affirmed by Adam’s further decisions as he gained awareness of what he was learning (McLeish 2020). The attainment of perfection is good and would not have come into existence if Adam had been created in Heaven.

If we sometimes say that the purpose of life is to attain Paradise, as was the case with Christ, who spoke the following words to one of the criminals on the cross: ‘today you will be with me in Paradise’ (Lk 23:43), then the transposition of the term ‘Paradise’ to Heaven refers to the suavitas that characterises the future glory. This is an analogy with the earthly Paradise, which was governed by moderation and the ability to conquer difficulties. The terminology concerning Heaven – with the distinction between different ‘heavens’ such as the third heaven to which Saint Paul was ‘taken’ by way of special grace – can be vague. A ‘spiritual paradise’ in the sense of perfect delight in God consists in seeing God, but in a broader sense, it may mean any contemplation of God. Aquinas ordered such ‘paradises’ as early as in his Commentary on the Sentences:

It was fitting for Adam that ‘he was not placed from the beginning in the empyrean heaven’, which is synonymous to being face to face with God for eternity – as was the case with angels by reason of their nature – but rather ‘destined to be transferred thither’ after a certain period of time. As Aquinas notes, the material experience of Paradise was appropriate for humans (and even their deprivation of Paradise occurred for a reason), because it corresponded to their nature. And after sin, through the memory of that Paradise, humanity could be ‘instructed in things pertaining to the heavenly paradise, the way to which is prepared for man by Christ’ (ST II-II 164.2 ad 4).

The differences between the two states are summarised in Table 1.

One of the themes addressed by Professor Johan Buitendag, to whom I dedicate this text, is the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences (Buitendag 2020; Buitendag & Simut 2021; Puglisi & Buitendag 2020). It is not, however, a question of one discourse being replaced by another, nor of two discourses existing in parallel with each other, but of one relating to the other, a question of integrations or consonances. The theological meaning of Paradise as a Heaven-oriented state rather than an end in itself provides a good framework for understanding the history of human development. The path to full perfection in cooperation with grace is disrupted by sin, which does not so much introduce new elements that were not there before as it shatters the rectitude that prevailed at the time. The result is a different approach of humans to their environment, to death, which – thanks to grace – is no longer connected to the purpose inscribed by the Creator. Humanity’s harmony with nature, as described in the Bible in the language of Paradise and original justice, is the articulation of the effect of the action of grace, which for Aquinas elevates nature, leading it to a supernatural goal (Platovnjak & Svetelj 2021). Only from the perspective of the eschatological goal is this possible (Peters 2018). The differences pointed out by Aquinas are indicated in Table 2.

The issue of Adam’s faith in Eden and the manner in which he came to know God is thus a case study that may prove relevant to the religion–science dialogue (Karwasz 2019). At the same time, it reminds us of what changes sin has made in history and builds a coherent theological narrative that is ready to be integrated into a scientific approach to reality (García-Alandete 2022; Horvat 2020).

It is this integration of the theological (biblical) approach with the discoveries of the natural sciences that is an important field of dialogue between religion and science today: it is not a matter of simply (or even more forcibly) fitting one field to the other, for example, subordinating religion to science or vice versa. As Neil Messer pointed out in proposing an interesting scale for the relationship between religion and science (Messer 2020), scientism and fideism are extremes, absolutising its solutions. The key is to discover that, as in music, a melodic line can run in parallel, on the principle of counterpoint, but interplay must exist so that there is no cacophony. Aquinas’s proposal for a ‘theological’ Adam, with its realism, allows for an honest dialogue between theology and science to discover the possibility of consonance between the two modes of narration. The message that Aquinas leaves in his reflections on the life of the first humans before sin reveals at the same time the presence of science in Edenic reality. Science appeared not after sin, as a kind of ‘punishment’, but Aquinas even speaks of Adam’s advancement of knowledge, and therefore of a specific kind of doing science in that situation, thanks to the cognitive abilities of the first humans based on rectitudo and grace. Therefore, the dialogue between religion and science is not new and unexpected from the perspective of Christian theology, but it has a history even before the sin of the first people.