The Question of Freedom

“...death would follow ...Since that was the case, and couldn’t be changed, they [Adam and Eve] had two possible types of freedom open to them: either to assert their autonomy, live in illusion, and find out in the end that it was no autonomy; or to assent to the way things, alas, were, and see if the matter of freedom weren’t something vastly different from what they might have supposed it to be. It was, according to that story, the way things are that the being called man exists as creature; the most noble creature, to be sure, but still creature; the lord of creation, yes, but holding that creation in vassalage to the great Lord of it all. That was the picture of human existence in the story, so that the question of freedom was one of discovering the conditions of that lordship and vassalage and assenting to them, rather than an idea of self-determination. The joker was, however, that they tried the latter idea. Like Pandora and the rest of us, they were convinced that it was worth doing what they inclined at the moment to do, and the devil take the consequences. Which is precisely what he did.

...The implication ...of the Adam and Eve story is that if they had bowed to the interdict placed on the forbidden fruit, life and not death would have been the guerdon. That is, paradoxically, if they had knuckled under to what looked emphatically like a denial of their freedom (‘Thou shalt not’ is not a very convincing corollary to the ‘Have dominion’ charge), they would have discovered something unimaginable to them—something that, according to the story, was at that very point lost to them and us for the duration of human time.”
~Thomas Howard