Reflections continued – The Fall

[Thomas]

Prior to the Fall 1 –

There was a common belief in Antiquity that souls, dwelling in the eternal contemplation of the Divine, became satiated, turned away and thus began to fall and, by so doing, to fall along a trajectory which, if not arrested, would lead from eternal being to its antithesis, non-being; to nothingness, to an eventual and inevitable extinction.

Maximus took what was then a governing philosophical schema: of stasis-kinesis-genesis ('rest-movement-beginning/becoming'); the idea of the soul at rest (stasis), falling away (kinesis) and coming into the flesh (genesis), and reversed it, to align with Scripture: genesis-kinesis-stasis.

Genesis 1:27: "So God created adam (הָאָדָם‬) in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

Maximus, like others before him, understands this adam not as an individual person, but as human personhood per se. So this adam, created in the timeless aevum, is at the root of human personhood, understood as the true reflection of that which the Divine wills in and for creation.

This adam was created to have "dominion" (1:26 & 28) over creation, and this Maximus saw as methorios (μεθόριος), as the 'boundary' between the physical and spiritual realms. Not merely between the two, but rather to unite them, a priesthood of creation who offer the material world to God and simultaneously draw divine grace into it – to integrate both sensible and intelligible realities in one mode of being.

This 'first creation' is a creature prior to all distinction and separation, such as evidenced by the reference to gender. Some schools speak of 'a body of light', others to a body that is similar to the soma psychikon (σῶμα ψυχικόν), the 'natural body' of 1 Corinthians 15:44, although more essence than substance – a body not the same as ours, but a body nonetheless. The Fathers and others mused on how such a body might exist ... but in the absence of knowledge we can speculate at our leisure.

 

[Thomas]

Prior to the Fall 2 –

Maximus introduces another triad: that of Being, Well-being and Ever-being. The first pertains to adam's origin in God, a becoming-into-being, the last to adam's end, the 'eternal reward' to which adam is called. Between is Well-being, which pertains to adam's act-of-being, adam's being-ness, which properly in accord with the Divine will, is adam's natural movement towards its good.

What Maximus did assert however, was that even this perfect world would nevertheless necessitate the Incarnation, that is, for God to take on the join Himself to adamic nature in a hypostatic union (henosis kath hypostasin ἕνωσις καθ’ ὑπόστασιν), so that through that union He could bring that nature to its ordained end, and rest, in Himself.

Maximus distinguishes between the 'natural will' (thelema physikon θέλημα φυσικόν) and the 'gnomic will' (thelema gnomikon θέλησι γνωμική).

Briefly, in Antiquity, the natural will is rooted in nature, whereas the gnomic will is rooted in the exercise of the natural will.

Maximus draws out this distinction – we might say that the natural will is rooted in adamic nature, whereas the gnomic will is rooted in the Adamic person. The natural will is the capacity to will, whereas the gnomic will is the exercise of the will.

The term 'gnomic' derives from the Greek 'inclination' or 'intention'. Natural will is the desire, the movement of a creature in accordance with the principle (logos λόγος) of its nature (phusis φύσις) towards the fulfilment (telos stasis τέλος στάσις) of its being. Gnomic willing, on the other hand, designates that form of willing in which a person engages in a process of deliberation with regard to an end.

The relation between the gnomic and natural will is one in which the nature wills, and the person chooses, with a given end in view. This autonomy, this freedom of choice, derives from our being made in the divine image and likeness, but is also evidence of our adamic imperfection and limitation.

The gnomic will then is a mode (tropos τρόπος) of the employment of the natural will. Maximus says, "the mode of willing... is a mode of the use of the will... and as such it exists only in the person using it." (St Maximus, Disputations with Pyrrhus, PG91:292D-293A.)

This is key, because this then implies that the misuse of the will, in its being directed towards a lesser good or no good at all, is a sin, and as such sin arises not from the desire or will of God, but in the desire and will in the individual contra to the Divine will.

 

[Thomas]

Prior to the Fall 3 –

The aevum comes from the Greek aion (αἰών) and infer a mode of existence not quite the timelessness of God but not the temporal experience of the material world.

To cite Aquinas:
"I answer that Aeviternity (aevum) differs from time, and from eternity, as the mean between them both. This difference is explained by some to consist in the fact that eternity has neither beginning nor end, aeviternity, a beginning but no end, and time both beginning and end." (ST Prima Pars, Q10 a5).

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The Philosophers saw three kinds of time. Chronos, which for Platonism is the moving image of the Aevum, the Aevum being the fullness of time in the spiritual dimension, sometimes called the Angelic Age, or the Angelic Aevum, and the Aevum participates in the third kind, which is the Eternity of God beyond all time and all ages.

For Gregory, Maximus and others, the Fall is something that happens not 'in time' as we know it, but in the aevum, and there Maximus speaks of adam's fall as simultaneous with adam's coming-into-being. This simultaneity is from our perspective of time, not from that of the aevum, in which there is no before or after, but a different frame of time.

The Fall speaks of a happening before time as we know it came to be. And in that sense this world is fallen from the moment of its creation. It's not the case of creation happening, of the primordial couple enjoying paradise until a serpent happened along – Gregory and Mximus and others, even Augustine – hint at the fall happening 'before time', the fall being an ahistorical or meta-historical event. We live in the after effect, the world is a consequence of the fall, not the theatre in which the fall occurs.

And, by extension then, the Fallen World is in a similar sense a duration in chronos, in time that moves from one moment to the next, an inexorable succession, leading to death and dissolution.

When God says, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17) He's speaking to adam in the aevum to adam in a different frame of time. A time beyond our history.

 

[Thomas]

The Fall 1 –

The Fall is essentially our fall from another time

A recent study: The Whole Mystery of Christ – Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor by Jordan Daniel Wood has brought the teachings of Maximus to the fore, and as the title suggests, put forward an interesting hypothesis.

From as early as Origen, the idea of a pre-temporal fall, a fall that happened before time began, has rested in Christian theological circles. Gregory of Nyssa touches on it. Maximus made the most profound and compelling advances on it. Johannes Scottus Eriugena treated it as a given, and it crops up continually ever since, notably in recent times in the work of the Russian Orthodox Sergius Bulgakov and another drinker at the same well, David Bentley Hart.

Hart has ploughed this furrow for over twenty years.

That of a fall before time, an atemporal or meta-historical fall within which our entire cosmos is bound for death.

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"Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the cosmos; whoever follows me most surely will not walk in darkness, but rather will possess the light of life." (8:12)
"... I know where I come from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from or where I am going." (8:14)
"... I am going and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin; where I am going you are not able to come." (8:21)
"You are from that which is below, I am from that which is above; you are from this cosmos, I am not from this cosmos. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins, for if you do not have faith that I AM, you will die in your sins." (8:23-24)
"... and what I have heard from him, this I speak to the cosmos." (8:26)
"But now I am coming to you, and in the cosmos I speak these things so that they might have the joy that is mine made full within them." (17:13)
"I pray not that you should take them out of the cosmos, but that you should keep them away from the wicked one. They are not of the cosmos, just as I am not of the cosmos." (17:15-16)
"Just as you sent me forth into the cosmos, I sent them also forth into the cosmos." (17:18)
"My Kingdom is not of this cosmos .... but as it happens my Kingdom is not from here." (18:36)
"I was born for this, and for this have I come into the cosmos: that I might testify to the truth; everyone who belongs to the truth hearkens to my voice." (18:37)

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I labour the point, but if we read 'cosmos' not as 'world' as we understand it today, but as 'cosmos' implied in the context of the Ancient World, then we read something quite remarkably different for our cultural habit of moral rationalisation.

We fell in adam, that is in our nature as it was created in the aevum, and were exiled from that aevum by our own free choice.

Time in that aevum is not as we experience it now. There, all we can say is that in some manner it participates in the Timelessness of the Divine. Quite how is open – even Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians offer a view of such a time, when all time is present now (whereas in the Timeless, there is no time at all).

If we speak of an origin of a fall, we can naturally speak of its end, and left to our own devices, much as the Gnostics speculated, that 'fall' continues away from the Divine to the antithesis of the Divine; away from the All to nothingness, away from Eternal Life to Extinction in Death.

Time here is chronos, not aevum. Paul Griffiths has spoken of aevum time as 'systolic', from the Greek, συστολή (sustolē), 'drawing together' or 'contraction'. By extension one can think of the common cardiac understanding, as the movement in the heart, the expansion and contraction, and think about the divine inbreath and outbreath ...

Chronus for us is metronomic – calculated according to creaturely movements of various kinds. Years and days, minutes and seconds, time is a measurable duration. In the monotonous beat of the metronome, we measure the decay and dissolution that characterizes the cosmos, which Griffiths refers to as "the metronomic countdown to death" (Paul J Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures, Baylor University Press, 2014, p.91)

This world, our world, from the moment of the Big Bang, is the world of death, under "The Prince of this Cosmos" (ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου τούτου ho archōn toutou kosmos, John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11; 2 or Corinthians 4:4 "the god of this age" θεός του αἰῶνος τούτου ho theos τούτου aiōn.)

In one of his lectures Australia (2023) Hart says:
"So it certainly wouldn’t be in conflict with rigorous science. In terms of scientific fact, the world, the best we can say, is 4.5 billion years old. Human beings evolved from lower primates. That clearly is where we come from in terms of the physical history of natural beings, but our spiritual history lies elsewhere... From Maximus, the fall is instantaneous. The moment of creation is when the fall happens. Because of course, sub specie aeternitatis, time is a succession for us, but from the vantage of eternity all things are at one moment. So for Maximus the fall and creation are simultaneous... our spiritual nature at once already rebels even in freely assenting to its own creation. But that’s all speculative. It’s true, but speculative... "

 

[Thomas]

The Fall 2 –

St Gregory of Nyssa, in a book recently translated by John Behr: On the Human Image of God—Gregory argues that 'adam' in the first chapter of Genesis refers not to a particular person but to the fullness of humanity across all of history (hence my using italics without the capital).

Gregory understands the image of God as being made up of every human person understood as belonging to one body, ultimately the body of Christ. And this one body is the adam referred to in Genesis 1 which includes every human from across all time.

In his book, Jordan Daniel Wood says:
"The Fall appears coeval with this world’s generation because, in an absurd yet real sense, it is this world’s generation. Adam introduced "another beginning of becoming," recall, which means that creation as it seems to us is not yet creation. We drive "the nature of all created things away from existence," away from true creation. The Fall does not merely happen at the moment of creation; it is itself the falling away from creation. The Fall is false incarnation, anticreation. Adam errs in ignorance of God, the world, and himself. The portrait of the world for whose existence he lends his very person imagines pure finitude as the ultimate object of rational desire. He eats of the Tree, and "by partaking of this fruit he set in motion the whole cycle of bodily nourishment, thereby exchanging life for death, having created a living death in himself for the whole temporal duration of the present age." (p.168-169, Italics are quotes from Maximus)

In translating Eriugena, Dermot Moran explains this 'other', fallen, time:
"That is not to say that time is unreal, rather there are two kinds of time. Eriugena holds that God proceeds into time in the creation of all things (Ill. 678c-d), so that creation is a self-manifestation of the eternal in time. This means that God really did intend to generate the temporal domain. Yet Eriugena speaks as if there is a 'true' or special time in which creatures are truly themselves. Another corrupting, 'deviant', time is introduced by the fall of human nature. Strictly speaking, there are not two times, but the one time seen in two different ways."
(Dermot Moran, “Time, Space and Matter in John Scottus Eriugena: An Examination of Eriugena’s Account of the Physical World,” in At The Heart of the Real (1992), p.93)

Russian paleontologist Alexander V. Khramov argued that all of the Fathers, up through the early Augustine, subscribed to what he calls 'alterism' – they all agreed that the physical laws of the universe were altered by the human fall. That the fall left the physical laws of the world unchanged, he terms 'perseverism'. Appearing in Augustine late in his career, it eventually became the default assumption of most later (Western) theology. Khramov argues that we should return to alterism and regard the Big Bang not as the first creative act of God, but as the first cognizable manifestation of the human Fall; "it ruined primordial creation in a catastrophic manner."
(Alexander V. Khramov, "Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach," International Journal of Orthodox Theology 8:1 (2017): pps.75-105).

Khramov again:
"But if our world is not the true world, if it is just a result of the tragic fall away from God’s creation, then what should be our attitude toward it? Can it—and should it—be accepted and loved, or should it be rejected as completely evil and the dwelling place of the prince of this world?

"... 'This' world and 'that' world are one and the same, but of a different quality... The world is not only interesting, the world is endlessly beautiful and one must love its beauty, its development, its evolution towards perfection and goodness, one must love mankind as well as all of God’s lower creatures—everything and everybody—struggling with evil both in oneself and outside." (Ibid.)

Sergius Bulgakov again:
"An event is described that lies beyond our history, although at its boundary. Being connected with our history, this event inwardly permeates it. But this event cannot be perceived in the chain of empirical events, for it is not there. It took place, but beyond the limits of this world: After the expulsion of our progenitors from Eden, its gates were locked, and an angel with a fiery sword protects this boundary of being that has become transcendent for us. But this event took place precisely in this world, or at least for this world."
(Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (2001), p.170-171)

Bulgakov alludes to the fact that all of cosmic history, as we know it currently, is the actual ongoing outworking of the collective human fall. We are participating, each of us, in adam’s collective and meta-historical fall, but the very world in which we are each coming to be is shaped from its start to finish by the collective fall—a fall in which we both contribute and suffer alongside the entire universe.