Our First Parents

THE BATTERED HULK of a ship limping home from stormy seas gives but a poor estimate of the proud strength and sure swiftness of it at its launching. If we are to appreciate to the full the wonder of man, it is not to what man has made of himself but what God made of him originally that we must look. As the first human couple came from the hand of God, they were the product of omnipotent genius working directly and unimpeded at the high point of physical creation. It is not hard to see something of the complete physical perfection of Adam and Eve; they were as physically perfect as it can ever be given to a man and a woman to be. Our dreams of human strength, beauty, and grace are more than wishful thinking; they have about them the flavor of huanting memories of an earthly paradise, of a man and a woman not as they should be, but as they were.

The intellectual perfection of man and woman in this first beginning of the race was even more stupendous than the physical fullness. Adam and Eve came into being as adults. They had no time to learn through the slow formative years of childhood; in their first moments they were already long past the pliability and elasticity of childhood. Moreoever there was no one from whom they could learn. Rather than a disciple of a master, Adam was to be the teacher of the human race, the source of its intellectual completeness as well as its physical being. In all fairness, he could not be started off on such a life empty-headed; in justice, he would have to be given the perfection of mind proper to an adult, to a teacher, indeed to the master-teacher of the whole race. His ideas, and the equipment of imagination necessary for their use, would have to be given him immediately by God; and with that absence of stinginess characterisitic of divine action. We see Adam, then, as the wisest, most learned of all men of all ages, short of the man Jesus Christ Who also was God; he possessed all natural knowledge, surely in its principles, and all the supernatural knowledge necessary for himself and his children.

The father of the race had his physical and intellectual gifts directly from the fullness of God's justice, without personal effort or dependence on any creature; and, consequently, without the least shadow of defect. Still, he was no more than a man; the human limitations on knowledge were to be found in him as they are in every man. He did not see God face to face, for he was not God; he had no direct knowledge of the angels, for he was not an angel. The object of his knowing, as of our own, was the sensible world, the natures of sensible things, and all the rich harvest of truth that can be garnered from such humble, earthy roots.

On the side of appetite, Adam was no less sound. He was a man of good will in the fullest sense of those words. His heart did not run down blind alleys, through devious ways, or in secret sorties to dark places; it was not crooked, twisted, nor blinded by the glaring appeal of lesser things, least of all artificial things which are the world that a man makes. He was a man of great passion; which is to say that he had strong, healthy sense appetites, appetites which were not weakenes by abuse, not distorted by ignorance of his humanity, not dehumanized or brutalized by the loss of man's mastery over himself.

Since Adam, no mere man has ever stepped into the arena of his living so powerfully armed and splendidly arrayed by nature. With no more than this much of the story told, we have the picture of the superbly perfect man within the limits of human perfection. Yet to stop here is to miss the sublimity of divine ingenuity in the production of this divine masterpiece. With no more than this Adam had within him positive guarentees of constant civil war and ultimate disintegration. Such a man, perfect as he was, would ultimately have to die; his body, like every body, would wear down and its capacity for rebuilding be gradually weakened until death overtook it. This man, with no more than all that nature could give him would be subject to violence, disease and senescence. Such a man would necessarily be a man of battle within his own kingdom. No matter how perfect the work of the divine artisan, a perfect body and a perfect soul mean distinct appetites answering to proper objects of desire - and inevitably clashing in the kind of battle we know as the war of the spirit and the flesh. To maintain human control, i.e., the supremacy of the spiritual appetite or will, demands a constant lesson of subordination to be drilled into the passions; and that means war.

Mortality and conflict are deficiencies inherent in human nature; they are not to be corrected through any tinkering with nature , not even the tinekering of a divine mechanic. They can, however, be supplied for by drawing on the divine treasury for gifts to which human nature has no claim; man can be given preternatural and supernatural gifts to be more than a man, and so to escape the defects of humanity through the omnipotent generosity of divinity.

The first human couple were loaded down with such gifts from the divine Giver. They were protected from fatigue, discouragement and defeat of conflicting appetites by the gift of order, of perfect subordination of the body to the soul, and the whole of the world to man. Against disease and senescence, there was the gift of external immortality, a gift that held death at bay through the renewing nourishment of the tree of life. Against violence and its threats they were secured by the gift of impassibility, a gift that gave them so alert a prudence and far-sighted a wisdom as to make the avoidance of injury mere routine.

Adam and Eve looked out on their days to a life of profound internal peace and complete security from all external threats. They would be forever stangers to injury and disease, and death was powerless to inflict its violent termination of living and loving. They could live their life vigorously, heartily; in it there would be no dark corners of ignorance or malice; passion would not extinguish the guiding light of reason. The shutters of their minds were thrown wide open to the sunshine of truth, the paths to all goodness lay clear and level for their eager hearts; their days well filled with the stimulation of labor's challenge to the strength and skill of their hands.

All this was still not enough for man in the eyes of the Creator. Exhaustive natural perfection and abundant supplementing of humanity's defects were hardly more than the foundation stones of the edifice planned by the divine Architect. It was not enough to make man a little more than man. God lifted Adam and Eve above themselves to such heights as to enable them to share in divine life, divine living, divine knowing, and divine loving. Like the angels, Adam and Eve were created in sanctifying grace, created, in other words, sharing the divine life. They were given all the supernatural habits of virtue that make divine living possible to men even on earth: faith to see through the eyes of God, hope to share in His strength and fidelity, charity to walk into the heart of God; and all the moral virtues that let the fire of charity sweep through the whole life of a man in a roaring conflagration. Their souls were made perfectly subject to God, and that subjection to their Maker was the foundation of the perfect order running through man's nature, the subordination of body to soul and of the world to man; indeed it was the foundation of all the gifts that had been given to man.

As the final divine touch, all these gifts correcting nature's defects and lifting it to divine levels were not limited to the purely personal area; they were given by way of family traits. Every father possessing these gifts from Adam on down would pass them on to his children. As Adam and Eve looked about their earthly Paradise, their eyes searched horizons of happiness that would never again fall under human eyes. All these things were theirs, to be possessed in peace for themselves, their children, and their children's children. There was no dimming of truth's bright beauty, no flickering of love's fire, not an instant interruption to the reign of happiness and joy. One day, at God's good pleasure and without death, they would be transported to eternal living face to face with God in heaven. Such were we as God made us.

But the splendor of that first perfection was shattered before ever it was passed on to a child.

My Way of Life
- Confraternity of the Precious Blood