How should we properly understand Adam and Eve before the Fall? There’s a useful post on Taylor Marshall’s blog:
How should we properly understand Adam and Eve before the Fall? This is a tough question and almost everything hinges on it - how we understand grace, nature, salvation, merit, the incarnation of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and eternity. . . .
We should be careful not to think of grace as something that is only necessary to “correct sin”. This is a temptation among Calvinistic theology. These thinkers wrongly presume that the the pre-fallen state was “graceless”. The Catholic Church teaches that Adam and Eve were constituted in grace prior to the Fall (cf. Council of Trent (Session V, 1). The Catholic Church teaches that Adam “fell from grace”; where as some Protestants teach “Adam did not fall from grace, because he wasn’t sinful and was therefore not in a state of grace.” This begs the question: If Adam “fell”, then from what did he fall? It seems that the answer is that Adam fell from nature. This is the Catholic heresy of Baianism - that Adam did not possess grace before the fall and that Adam “fell from nature”. . . .