Theodoret of Cyrus: Tree Provided Experience of Evil

How could those endowed with reason and made in the divine image be unable to distinguish good and evil? How could the Depths of Righteousness impose a law on those who were naturally unprovided with this knowledge and unaware that it was good to keep the commandment and fatal to break it? So it follows that they had the knowledge, and what they gained later was experience.

- Theodoret of Cyrus (around A.D. 393 to around A.D. 457), Questions on the Octateuch, Question 27 on Genesis, p. 65 (2007), Robert C. Hill translator.