The Revelation of God, through the Bible and the Tradition of the Church, teaches us that because of the sin of disobedience to the Creator, our first parents lost the “sanctifying grace” that gave them intimate communion with God, and they also lost the state of “original justice” that guaranteed the harmony of the man with God, with the woman, and even with nature. If one were to remain faithful to God and the way of life proposed by God (symbolized by the prohibition of the fruit fo the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil, cf Gen 2:16ff) he would not lose these gifts.
But the man did not want to obey God and through self-sufficiency refused his model of life. They sinned through pride and disobedience, they said NO to God, and yes to the Temptor. Therefore, they lost self control and remained subject to the disordered passions; and the world that, as gift of God, was harmoniously subject to men, now was no more; broken was the servitude of the irrational creatures to men; now they maltreated him and crushed them, denied him the fruits of the earth and, at times conditions of survival. The Earth passed, then produced thorns and thistles and now the man will have to cast them out with his sweat and his sustenance. The woman, on her part, will give birth in birth pains. The suffering entered into the world through sin.
“To the woman he said:
“I will intensify your toil in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
“To the man he said: Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, You shall not eat from it, Cursed is the ground* because of you! In toil you shall at its yield all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you, and you shall eat the grass of the field.
“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken;For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
“The man gave his wife the name “Eve,” because she was the mother of all the living.* The LORD God made for the man and his wife garments of skin, with which he clothed them. Then the LORD God said: See! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil! Now, what if he also reaches out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life, and eats of it and lives forever? The LORD God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken. He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life.”
New American Bible. (2011). (Revised Edition., Ge 3:16–Ge 4). Washington, DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
(Gn 3,17-23).
In the origins of the human history there is a Sin that is responsible for the physical and moral misery that humans suffer through the centuries. As St. Paul teaches”
“Therefore, as through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, so death passed to all human generations. . .” (Romans 5:12).
Pope John Paul II affirmed without hesitation that:
“One cannot renounce the criteria according to which, in the base of human suffering, there exist the multiple implications with sin.
“ For evil remains bound to sin and death. And even if we must use great caution in judging man’s suffering as a consequence of concrete sins (this is shown precisely by the example of the just man Job), nevertheless suffering cannot be divorced from the sin of the beginnings, from what Saint John calls ‘the sin of the world’ ” (Jo 1,29)” (SD, nº 15).
So conforming to Sacred Scripture and the doctrine of faith, the origin of evil in the world is in sin, in the moral plane. And this made physical evil rise (pains, death, catastrophes, calamities. . .)
To explain all the suffering that there is in the world St. Paul says that: The wages of sin is death.” (Roman 6:23)
It is through sin, both original and personal, ,that the demon enslaves humanity and takes him away from God, making him suffer. It is therefore that Jesus comes, is incarnated, in order to “take away the sin of the world” (John 1:19) Not for any other thing. He accepted pouring out all His Blood and suffering all that he suffered to rip from the world the root of all evil: sin.
Prof. Felipe Aquino