Lionel Trilling (1963):
How far from our imagination is the idea of “peace” as the crown of spiritual struggle! The idea of bliss is even further removed. The two words propose to us a state of virtually infantile passivity which is the negation of the "more life" that we crave, the "more life" of spiritual militancy. We dread Eden, and of all the Christian concepts there is none which we understand so well as the felix culpa and the "fortunate fall"; not, of course, for the reason on which these Christian paradoxes were based, but because by means of sin and the fall we managed to get ourselves expelled from that place.