Here is an eye-opening fact with deep implications for the spiritual life: our first parents were created or constituted by God in sanctifying grace! The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way:

The Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an authentic way, in the light of the New Testament and Tradition, teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were constituted in an original “state of holiness and justice.” This grace of original holiness was “to share in. . .divine life” (CCC 375).

Dr. Ludwigg Ott, in his well regarded and classic work, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma,  states that it is a De Fide proposition [of our Catholic faith] that “Our first parents, before the Fall, were endowed with sanctifying grace,” (p.103) “not merely for himself [Adam], but for all of us” (p. 105, Sent. certa.). 

The tremendous significance of this revelation – that Adam and Eve were constituted in the grace of original holiness – is what it tells us about God’s design for the human person: –  God created us to be united to Him in intimate fellowship! God created us for Himself! God created us to share in the Infinite Happiness of His Infinitely Blessed Life! Now I understand why I was created; now I understand the meaning of life: it is this: to grow closer and closer to God! Father Faber magnifies this point:

“It was to have been expected beforehand, that God would have created [the first man] in a state of perfect nature. It is a surprise that it is not so. On the very threshold of theology, we are arrested by this mysterious fact, that rational creatures came from their Creator’s hands in a supernatural state….This one fact seems to us the great fact of the whole of theology….” (The Creator and the Creature, p.43).

So what happened to Adam and Eve in the garden? What caused them to trust more in the serpent than in God? Simply this: they forgot that God was near; they forgot to turn to God – their only help – for help. And when they realized what they had done, and how they had sinned, they tried to hide from God. This forgetfulness of God is what caused the need for our redemption.

One of the Church’s greatest mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila, says that “ALL HARM COMES TO US WHEN WE FAIL TO REALIZE THAT GOD IS NEAR.” This is one of those great spiritual principles that can be so helpful to us. We are like Adam and Eve: we have forgotten that God is near, so “unspeakably near,” as Father Faber says. When we panic, when we cower in fear, when we seek refuge in the world, when we consent to sin, what has happened?: – yes, it is regrettably true, we have forgotten that God is “closer to us than we are to ourselves,” especially because we have been constituted by our baptism in a life of sanctifying grace – in a shared life of intimate fellowship with God. How was it that Saint Maximilian Kolbe could volunteer to enter into a starvation bunker in a German Concentration camp? Only because he knew God would be with him. We must become, as Faber says, more and more conscious of the presence of God.

Saint Augustine is a very useful example. He says, speaking to God, “Late have I loved Thee.” Why did it take Augustine so long to find God? The Saint explains that he had been looking for God on the outside, failing to see that God was inside! In very famous verses from his Confessions (chapter 27) Augustine sighs: