The “tree of life” (i.e., of life eternal or eschatological), from which Adam refused to eat, was also a tree of knowledge (John 8:28,32; 14:7,20; 16:3 etc.), not, however, of the world as it was when Adam was created (and as it still is because this was the tree from which he ate) but as it will be when it is freed from the antinomies of good and evil, of life and death in the eschata. The knowledge which Adam obtained by eating from the forbidden tree was the knowledge of the “real” world with its existential antinomies.
