1. But if the first man had willed to keep himself in that blessedness of paradise, so as to fast from the fruit of one forbidden tree, he would neither have lost that state of so great felicity, nor would a voluntary transgression of the saving precept have consigned him to the necessity of corruption and mortality: so that he would either, being corrupted, corrupt by sin those so great benefits of his God which he had received in the nature of his condition, or else lose them. For who could sufficiently enumerate what and how great goods the contempt of that abstinence took from him? That, endowed with the dignity of an intellectual mind, he received the image of his Creator; that, subject to his God alone, he beheld all visible things subjected to himself;
that, by divine command, the fruitfulness of all the trees that were in paradise (Gen. 2:9) abundantly served him for the uses of living; that the tree of life, by the gift of his Creator, ministered a mystical food, not whereby he might live, but whereby he might not bring his bodily life to an end; which food, so long as it was partaken, would, by the figured signification of a certain hidden sacrament, keep the partaker in one and the same state; so that it permitted him to be corrupted by no infirmity, nor to be changed and to grow old with age, nor to be dissolved by death. No troublesome anxiety disquieted him as he rested, no anxious labor wearied him as he was at ease, no sleep oppressed him against his will, no fear of losing life increased upon him who was secure of his immortality.
He had easy nourishment, a body sound in every part, a tranquil mind, a pure heart; ignorant of penal woe, an inhabitant of paradise, free from sin, capable of God. 2. In short, what was happier than he, to whom the world was subject, none hostile, the mind free, and God visible? Since, unless before sin he had been wont to see God in the assumption of a visible creature, how would he, now made a sinner, have hidden himself from the face of the Lord, whom he had never seen? Adam, therefore, could see God before he sinned, just as the patriarchs saw Him; but when he said: 'I heard Thy voice, and I was afraid' (Gen. 3:10), he had already fallen from that holiness of seeing God, had already rendered himself unworthy of seeing God.
'I heard,' he says, 'Thy voice, and I was afraid; because I was naked, and I hid myself' (Ibid.). O how great security have those who are well conscious to themselves of good! and how greatly the shameful perpetration of sin humbles the troubled, like those who hid themselves from the face of the Lord, confounded by their own baseness, not by their nakedness! who did not blush because they were outwardly bare of clothing, but because they were inwardly stripped of the divine protection. For even before sin they were naked, and were not ashamed, because they had committed nothing against the will of God for which they should be confounded.