A Human Fall From Out of Another Kind of Time

by Jesse Hake

David Bentley Hart on the Meta-Historical Fall

From time to time, over two decades, David Bentley Hart has advanced the idea of an atemporal or meta-historical fall of humanity (and other powers) within which our entire cosmos is enslaved to death and fragmentation. When talking about this concept at a public lecture in Australia during the summer of 2023, Hart stated that he does not “know of any other version of Christianity.”¹ And in an interview with Kevin Gregorio earlier that year, Hart commented that “this world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.”² Hart’s readers first encountered this notion in his 2005 book The Doors of the Sea, where he references the astonishing concept of “fallen time” and makes striking claims about how we humans have “enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God.”³ He describes “the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends”⁴ as our universe was estranged from “something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield.”⁵ Hart spells this out most fully as a basic category of patristic theology:

It is a patristic notion (developed with extraordinary profundity by Maximus the Confessor) that humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death. To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master—to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand—is not to say that God’s ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.⁶

During the two decades since The Doors of the Sea, Hart has clearly maintained the same thinking on this topic. In his 2017 essay “The Devil’s March,” he writes:

The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. . . . It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.⁷

Hart elaborates in the Gregorio interview:

According to tradition, even natural evil is the result of a world that’s fallen into death. Somehow, that too follows from the creation of moral evil. So in Christian tradition, you don’t just accept ‘the world as it is.’ You take ‘the world as it is’ as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been. But obviously wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn’t happen within terrestrial history. . . . This world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.

In his Australia lecture, Hart avers that “the claim has always been, for Christians,” that “this cosmos . . . under the archon of this cosmos is not creation as God intended it but creation as enslaved to death” which Hart says must be understood as “an ontological condition.” He goes on to claim that “everything is shattered and torn asunder and involved in mortality which is pain and suffering and estrangement” and that it is simply “the Christian story” that “spiritual creation actually determines the reality of physical, of natural creation” and that this is “why Paul says the glorification of creation comes through the creation that’s revealed in the sons of glory” which is “the restoration of the human and of all the powers.” Saying that “for Paul the whole [of creation] has been deranged and disordered and in Christ has been restored,” Hart concludes: “I don’t know of any other version of Christianity.”

During the questions following this lecture, Hart explains that the human fall takes place within a higher form of time, and he outlines several kinds of time:

There’s chronos which, of course, for Platonism, is the moving image of the aeon [which is] the second level. The aeon is the fullness of time in a kind of spiritual dimension or what we would call the angelic age or the angelic aevum. Then there’s the eternity of God beyond all ages. And I think that it’s clear that for, say, Gregory and many of the church fathers—certainly for Maximus—the fall is something that happens not in time as we know it. The time as we know it is the result of a fall in the spiritual realm of the aeon. That’s how, if there was a fall, that’s where [and] when: there, not before or after, but in a different frame of time altogether—time not as a shadowy succession of momentary reflections of the fullness that can never be fully embodied at any given instant—that’s chronos, the moving image of the aeon, which is the fullness. 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. You know, 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. . . . But whatever the case, if the language of the fall has any meaning, it’s not about something that happened in [empirical] time. It’s something about how time as we know it came to be.

While Hart is clear that this meta-historical fall centers on humanity (as the methorios or hinge-point that Maximus describes), this fall involves all of physical creation as we know it and all of cosmic history. This human fall also drags various other spiritual powers along with it, some of whom are maliciously and manipulatively involved in the entire history of our fallen cosmos. As some were clearly surprised by Hart’s references to the reality of other spiritual beings, Hart unequivocally declares:

I do believe there are spiritual powers and principalities and things like that. . . . Do I believe that there are fallen spirits other than human beings? Yeah, I do. I don’t understand them; I don’t know much about them; but I find that very plausible.

While Hart has refrained from publicly speculating further on this topic, I am tempted to ruminate about other kinds of falls. One conjecture: when humanity fell out of a higher form of angelic time into the impoverished or flattened time that we currently experience, perhaps some but not all angelic powers were drawn into some degree of temptation and confusion by our fall in order to take advantage of humanity within our degenerate form of time and our corruptible embodiment. So there is a little personal surmising for what it’s worth.

All of this provides a remarkably complete and consistent concept maintained by Hart for two decades. He clearly has in view a human fall from one form of time into another where an initial moment of angelic time is experienced by us in the fallen cosmos as billions of years starting with the Big Bang and including the entire history of space-time in which we find ourselves. However, despite providing all of these details over so many years, Hart has not lectured or written about an atemporal human fall in any sustained or focused way. When asked by a reader of his Leaves in the Wind newsletter (August 31, 2022) if we should then “favor the ‘atemporal fall’ view,” Hart replies, “Well, I certainly do,” but, when asked if he could “briefly describe what you understand or hold the ‘atemporal fall’ to be,” he responds, “no, not briefly.” Finally, with a request “for any particularly good reflections on it,” Hart points to Sergius Bulgakov’s book The Bride of the Lamb. Although Hart insists that “I don’t know of any other version of Christianity,” when asked to give the best sources for his understanding of the matter, he turns to some of Christian history’s most challenging thinkers, such as Bulgakov and Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximus the Confessor.

Patristic Witness to the Meta-Historical Fall

During the summer 2023 Australia visit mentioned above, as Hart fielded multiple questions on this topic, he declares, “Okay, I’m an Origenist” and then explains how “church fathers like Maximus . . . tended to think in three kinds of time.”

In his great work On the Making of Man—recently translated by John Behr under what he maintains is the correct title, On the Human Image of God—Gregory of Nyssa 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:

When the account says that God made the human being, all humankind is indicated by the indefinite character of the term; for the creature was not here also called ‘Adam’, as the narrative that follows relates, but the name given to the created human is not the particular but of the universal. Thus, we are led by the universal name of the nature to suppose something such as this, that by divine foreknowledge and power all humanity is included in the first formation. . . . The entire plenitude of humanity was included by the God of all, by the power of his foreknowledge, as in one body. . . . For this reason the whole was called one human being, because to the power of God nothing has either passed or is to come, but even that which is looked for is embraced equally with the present by his all-embracing activity.⁸

Here and elsewhere, 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 (all that has “passed or is to come” and “even that which is looked for”). As Behr points out, such an idea was widespread, and “Origen understood Paul to assert that ‘Adam is Christ’ (Princ. 4.3.7).”

It is not clear whether Gregory believed this universal Adam was a subject that can be said to have fallen, or if he only thought of the fall in terms of the particular or historical Adam of the subsequent chapters in Genesis. Consider this passage from Gregory’s On the Inscriptions of the Psalms:

There was a time when the dance of the rational nature was one, and looked to the one leader of the chorus, and, in its movement in relation to his command, interpreted the choral song in relation to the harmony exhibited thence. But later, when sin occurred, it put an end to that divine concord of the chorus, when it poured the slipperiness of deceit at the feet of the first humans who used to sing in chorus with the angelic powers and caused the Fall, wherefore man was separated from the angels.⁹

Johannes Zachhuber notes the intimations of creaturely pre-existence in this passage and comments:

It is perhaps not too much to say that, in spite of his reference to the first human beings, Gregory’s argument in this passage presupposes a quasi-Origenist conception of pre-existent rational beings. Evidently, the Genesis story is understood allegorically when, a little later in the same context, Gregory writes that ‘the one who has fallen might again be restored’ (ibid. 11.23–4) thus equating Adam with ‘man’ in general. At the same time, however, it is clear that Gregory (deliberately, I assume) stops short of committing himself expressly to this interpretation.¹⁰

While Gregory may not explicitly state the specific concept of a meta-historical human fall, it is certainly the case that he understood the day-to-day functions and physical laws of the entire cosmos to have been altered by the human fall or at least in preparation for the fall. All of this becomes definite in Maximus the Confessor.

Jordan Wood has recently defended the conclusion of Hans Urs Von Balthasar that Maximus considers the human fall “a prehistorical or meta­historical reality.”¹¹ As we heard from Hart above, “for Maximus the fall and creation are simultaneous” because, while “time is a succession for us,” when considered “from the vantage of eternity all things are at one moment.” Wood devotes an extended section in his book The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor covering this question and defending Balthasar’s reading, which is clearly also shared by Hart. (Some of this is summarized by Wood in this post as well.) Wood argues that Maximus understood this fallen world as a distorted or false creation that was the result both of God’s true creation and of the human fall:

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.” . . .

And so we become counterfeit creators of a world of bare phenomena, of absolute limit, of false beginnings (merely corporeal birth) and ends (death, “the corruption of becoming”). For Maximus as for Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, nature’s hideous “mutation” in the direction of merely finite phenomena—whence come passion, corruption, death—was not something God created in Adam; “It was rather man who made it and knew it, creating the freely chosen sin through his disobedience.”¹²

Finally, a supramundane fall is clearly asserted by John Scottus Eriugena, who cites both Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus extensively in his own writings. For Eriugena, “time itself is a function of our fallen state and the perfected state is timeless so there is a sense in which perfected human nature already is one with God and always has been one with God.”¹³ Properly speaking, this human fall for is not from outside of time but from a higher form of time from which fallen time is a kind of reduction. Dermot Moran explains:

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 fan of human nature. Strictly speaking, there are not two times, but the one time seen in two different ways.¹⁴

With all this, what do we say to Hart’s insistence on a meta-historical human fall? Is it some kind of esoteric belief, or is it simply the only version of the Christian faith that has existed from the start and “not a claim that Christians are free to surrender” as Hart has written? Clearly, a case can be made that Origen, Gregory Nyssen, and Maximus the Confessor would have recognized the concept of a meta-historical or pre-cosmic human fall as the clear teaching of the Apostle Paul. If this is the case, why does it sound so exotic and foreign to most contemporary Christians, and why is there so little written about it that is available in English?

Contemporary Advocacy of the Meta-Historical Fall

One reason is that modern Christians are not very good at seeing points of contact or alignment between pre-modern categories of thought and the theories of modern science. We tend to assume that the categories of thought brought to us by modern science have simply replaced any pre-modern ways of seeing and understanding reality and that they two cannot be compatible. Another part of the challenge here is that this concept of a meta-historical human fall has always been conveyed in poetic, mythological, and metaphysical language that has become increasingly foreign to any of us in the modern world and increasingly confusing to imagine as compatible with modern science and its findings about cosmology and the biological origins of life. Surprisingly little writing on the topic exists in English unless one turns to the mythopoetic. Some such references should be very familiar to most Christian readers. In the “The Ballad of the White Horse,” G.K. Chesterton writes:

For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.

C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity and several other places about the ache of joy as a sign to us that we are all clearly “made for another world.” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote stories of a “Straight Road” kept open only for the Elves so that they could continue to sail their ships along the pathway of the once-flat sea and into what is now our sky. The bending of our world into its current reduced shape took place in Tolkien’s stories at the downfall of Númenor. This shrinking of our world into its current shape cut us off from Aman and the realm of the Valar (see Akallabêth: The Downfall of Númenor in The Silmarillion for one depiction of this by Tolkien).

What we do not have in English, however, is material that unpacks the connections between such a mythopoetic theology of a cosmic fall with modern science. For his own part, Hart clearly favors Bulgakov as the most recent thinker to have addressed the topic at any length in formal scholarly terms. However, in some brief email correspondence, he has also recommended other sources, including Christopher C. Knight’s 2022 book Eastern Orthodoxy and the Science-Theology Dialogue. Knight writes:

One example of this aspect of patristic thinking is related to the way in which, as we have seen, some in that era believed, with Gregory of Nyssa, that our present body has become coarse and solid through the Fall but will, at the general resurrection, recover its ‘prelapsarian’ state. This was understood, according to [Panayiotis] Nellas, in terms of the way in which our existence in the paradisal state should not be identified with our current biological make-up, which is an aspect of the ‘garments of skin’ given to us by God. Rather, as he puts it, God, by ‘allowing man to dress himself in biological life, the fruit of sin . . . redirected death, which was also the fruit of sin, against biological life, and thus by death is put to death not man but the corruption which clothes him’. In a related way, the Fall was often seen, in the patristic era, as being a transition not only into our present biological state but also into time as we now experience it. As Philip Sherrard has put it, it was a lapse ‘into a materialized space-time universe’. In this perspective, the expulsion from Paradise involved much more of a discontinuity than is often appreciated, since not only was our ‘original’ life not biological life but it was, in addition, not even a temporal existence in the usual sense of that term.

This kind of understanding of the character of our unfallen state has been explored by modern Orthodox scholars like Sergius Bulgakov, who have suggested that the Fall should be seen not as a historical event but as a ‘meta-historical’ one.¹⁵

In another email, Hart notes that a 2017 article by Russian paleontologist Alexander V. Khramov¹⁶ was “on the right path.” Khramov argues that all of the church 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. In contrast, the view that the human fall left the physical laws of the world unchanged, which he terms “perseverism,” was invented by Augustine late in his career and eventually became the default assumption of most later theology. Khramov argues that we should return to alterism and that, in fact, “the Big Bang should be interpreted 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.”¹⁷

In correspondence with Khramov over the past couple of years, I have learned that, following a successful career as a paleontologist and author in Russia, he has started work on a second Ph.D. in intellectual history and focusing on the development of evolutionary theory within the sciences. (I’ve also learned that Khramov has started work, with some partners, on an English translation of his book in Russian about human origins, and that he is seeking a publisher for this English translation. If you know of any publishing options, I would be glad to put you in contact with Khramov so that I can eventually read more of his work in English.) Khramov notes that one existing book on this topic that makes a similar argument to his 2017 article is the 1996 book by Bishop Basil Rodzianko called The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers. This was written after six months that Basil Rodzianko spent studying and lecturing on this topic at the Holy Trinity Sergius Monastery in Russian near the end of his career. However, although the last part of Basil’s career was as a bishop in the United States, this book has also never been translated into English. (As an aside with my personal opinion, the failure to translate such a book strikes me as a shame on American Orthodoxy which tends to be profoundly ignorant of the depth of the intellectual and theological inheritance of which it, nonetheless, loves to boast.)

Using a combination of three automated translation tools (Google, ChatGPT, and DeepL) on the Russian text, I translated the entire text three times and read through it laboriously (and very much wishing for a translation based on good human scholarship). This, however, is a sample from my own unscholarly labors using automated tools:

This world, with the “second” universe, with the heavens . . . arose as a result of a catastrophic separation from God’s world—as a result of the “big bang.” . . . We know from Holy Scripture about the Fall and the exile of the first people from Paradise. This tragic event can be understood today from a natural and scientific point of view as part of the “Big Bang” theory that is accepted by modern science as a model of the universe. . . . I am often asked: 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.

Turning, finally then, to Bulgakov’s writing on this topic in The Bride of the Lamb, his case is very much in line with the summaries that Hart has given over the past couple of decades. Bulgakov says of the human fall:

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.¹⁸

When Bulgakov writes that the human fall “took place precisely in this world” and “for this world,” he is pointing 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.

In another key point of common ground between Hart and Bulgakov, we see Bulgakov maintaining that there are various modes of time:

Time is the abstract measure of temporal being; however, it is not the unique measure. . . . There can be several times, as different modes of creaturely or temporal being. There is angelic time (perhaps with differentiation of orders in the assembly of angels) and human time (with differentiation of times into epochs). What is fundamental here is the determination of temporality as becoming, for which time is the form or measure. Therefore, in general, one must speak not of the beginning of time (which is what is usually done) but of the emergence of temporality, where time appears in a derivative manner, by a kind of reflex as it were. Should one speak of God’s creation of the world in time or of his creation of time itself?¹⁹

Clearly, the doctrine of a meta-historical human fall involves topics that require vast interdisciplinary considerations across the realms of science, cosmology, philosophy, metaphysics, poetry, and theology. In a day and age when Ph.D. studies involve more and more hyper-specialization and when very few scholars are left alive who can or will work across disciplines at high levels, we should not be surprised that very few thinkers and writers are willing to address such a topic. Moreover, outside the halls of academia, our shared imaginative vision and our categories of thought simply do not give us the means to engage with this topic. Even if Hart is correct that this is the only kind of Christianity that time has given to us, we are no longer capable of receiving this faith or of articulating it to the world in which we live. Christianity, in some real sense, may be lost to all of us. As Christians, this should not be a great shock or surprise, and I would expect it to be true of every age of fallen time in some sense or another. What age of this world has ever been capable of receiving and articulating the Christian faith? If we, who live long after God has been proclaimed dead, have our blind spots, should that surprise us?

Conclusion

But I should try to conclude. I’ll do so by seeking to summarize my understanding of what is meant by the meta-historical human fall. It depends on the teaching that God’s omnipotence is the perfect offer of free and creative participation in God’s own infinite life. A corollary to this is that, just as God cannot create a square circle, God cannot create free rational spirits without the possibility of these spirits choosing (within the contingent limits of creaturely finitude) to make horrible and distorted lives apart from God. Finally, this teaching about a meta-historical human fall depends on the idea that all humans are connected in one body across time, while still remaining individual persons. Humanity as a whole has collectively made this fallen world as we chose, at the moment of our collective creation, to find a life apart from God, and as we each currently act upon this collective choice by attempting to find and shape a life separate from God within this world that we received as a result of our collective flight from God. Our broken and twisted cosmos is not created by God but is a false and powerless distortion of God’s creation that we have made out of incomplete and warped fragments of the good creation that we are still capable of making with God as we participate in God’s life. Hart hates any variation on “the best of all possible worlds” kind of thinking, and insists that the world of empirical history is not created by God but is a realm of broken, incomplete, and flattened distortions of God’s creation.

Such claims raise many questions of course. Is there anything created without God? Is this world evil and separated from God? Does this mean that embodiment and matter are inherently evil? How can humans be responsible for any suffering and evil that happened before any humans existed within empirical time (i.e. how can we be responsible for animal suffering before we had even shown up within evolutionary history)? Why would God make creatures who could make such a terrible and smashed distortion of God’s creation, and why would God not stop such creatures once they start to try to do something so terrible? Does this require a belief in the pre-existence of human souls? All of these understandable questions have answers, but we don’t have time to go through them.

In short, nothing good or lasting is created without God but only terrible deceptions and dead-ends made out of unfinished and broken pieces of God’s good creation. Nonetheless, every event and creature within fallen time has some seed of divine reason and purpose deep within it so that nothing is ever fully separated from God but is from God and participates in God’s creation to some degree. Every detail of fallen history is connected from within to God’s life and will ultimately be made complete and connected again by all of those creatures who are involved. Several of these questions come from a failure to understand the true nature of goodness, power, and freedom. Again, omnipotence is when God goes willingly into the grave to extend the offer of participation in God’s infinite life from within our rejection of it. A tyrant has no power at all. If Christ on the cross simply called down fire on those killing him, nothing would have been accomplished at all. One simple way to consider the nature of true power is to ask what kind of power makes an enemy into a friend.

Humans (and all free rational spirits to some degree) participate freely in God’s life and creation. Our shared human capacities form a methorios (a point of contact and connection, like a hinge) that touches and connects all aspects and realms of creation. (Note here that human nature overlaps with various angelic natures in a wide variety of ways and that human nature also overlaps with the nature of the entire world that we perceive and which sustains our physical bodies with sunlight and with the movements of the elements.) Therefore, when humanity was created (as a new kind of free rational spirit), our response to the invitation to participate in the life of God and creation was a pivotal moment in the story of creation. All of the other angelic powers were attentive to our collective first steps as creatures (and evidently responded in a wild variety of ways). Sadly, as a unified and whole body of human souls, we collectively resisted God’s invitation to become ourselves and sought after other modes of being that did not require participation in God’s life and creation. This corporate human resistance, then, is the contingent and confused state of being into which we each are born within empirical history. Our resistance as sub-creators created a flattened out form of space and time and distorted the true creation of God for a limited period in which everything connected to us is coming to be within a state of misery and fragmentation. This does not mean that embodiment is evil but simply that embodiment subject to decay is not true and substantive embodiment. As Paul writes:

For the earnest expectation of creation anxiously awaits the revelation of the sons of God. For creation was made subordinate to pointlessness, not willingly but because of the one who subordinated it, in the hope that creation itself will also be liberated from decay into the freedom of the glory of God’s children. For we know that all creation groans together and labors together in birth pangs, up to this moment. (Rom 8:19-22; Hart translation)

Our fall together into a simply chronological kind of time was from out of a fuller and more interconnected kind of time with even more potential for becoming ourselves together than what is offered to us in the flattened time that we now know. However, even fallen time is a gift that allows us each to enter into and take up our own existences within a sequence of connections no matter how broken and disjointed these connections might be. Moreover, God remains with us in this world of bodily decay and death, and announces to us that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21; Hart translation). We are called, therefore, to live and act in accordance with God’s presence in every moment of fallen time, and we can do so in the hope that, even in this lifetime, our service and repentance and thanksgiving might begin to make complete all that we have left unnoticed as well as all that we have actively sought to hurt and destroy in our own pain, selfishness, and confusion.

End Notes

[1] From “David Bentley Hart on Suffering,” Gospel Conversations Conference, first talk (posted on August 28, 2023).

[2] From an interview recorded with Kevin Gregorio, “‘That Thou Art’ with Dr David Bentley Hart” (posted on February 6, 2023).

[3] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea (2005), 22.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 68-69. Cf. Paul Griffiths’ discussion of fallen time in his book Decreation (2014), 89-93. Griffiths, following St Augustine, places the responsibility for the corruption of time on the angelic rebellion (131-135). Before the fall of the angels, cosmic time was systolic; afterwards metronomic. This move forces Griffiths to posit Eden as an unfallen utopia surrounded by fallen time yet, by God’s grace, immune to its ravages and damage: “Eden: the paradise in which human creatures and some others are at first located, and from which they are ejected consequent upon the human fall. Eden is distinct from the cosmos because it is not the place of the angels, and because it is a paradisial enclave within a cosmos-become-world already devastated by the angelic fall” (4). Adamic sin resulted in the expulsion of humanity from its idyllic systolic existence into the metronomic time of the fallen cosmos, now determined by corruption and death. Also see “Thralls of the Metronome.”

[6] Ibid., 62-63.

[7] David Bentley Hart, “The Devil’s March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations,” in Creation Ex Nihilo (2017). A revised version of the essay is available in Hart’s book Theological Territories (2020).

[8] Op. hom. 16.16-18.

[9] Inscrip. II.6.60.

[10] Johannes Zachhuber, Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa (2014), 181.

[11] Jordan Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (2022), 155; quoting Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, 186.

[12] Wood, 168-169. Quotes are from Maximus.

[13] Dermot Moran and Adrian Guiu, “John Scottus Eriugena,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021).

[14] 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), 93.

[15] Christopher C. Knight, Eastern Orthodoxy and the Science-Theology Dialogue (2022), 54-55.

“If it is understood that it is not the fallen state of nature and of man which is natural, but their pre-fallen and paradisaical state, and that it is this state which expresses the will of God, then a quite different attitude to the relationship between the moral and natural law will prevail, and quite different conclusions may be drawn from it as a consequence. According to this latter attitude, which is that of the eastern Christian tradition, what is regarded as man’s natural life, and so as the norm providing the basis for the moral law, is that of the original creation. Man’s life as it is now, in this world, and the biological processes to which he is subject, are not regarded as natural, but as a consequence of a breach in nature, a declension from the natural state, and an entering into conditions that are abnormal and corrupt. And, it is understood, this breach and dislocation in man’s natural state—this fall into a materialized space-time universe—has not only resulted in a loss of spiritual vision and in the contracting of the human mind to the perspectives of a fundamentally unreal world; it has also introduced a corresponding alteration in the laws of nature itself, so that these too are now tainted by something of the abnormality and corruption which vitiates human life itself. They are not these laws as they are ordained by God. They are these laws deformed and denaturalized by the fall of Adam—a fall which itself is profoundly ‘unnatural’ and contrary to the will of God.” Philip Sherrard, “The Sexual Relationship in Christian Thought,” Studies in Comparative Religion, 5 (1971): 12.

“Holy fathers, delving into the biblical texts, showed that the Fall represented a cosmic catastrophe, an eclipse of the paradisiacal mode of being and emergence of a new mode of existence in the whole universe.” Olivier Clément, “Le sens de la terre (Notes de cosmologie orthodoxe),” Contacts 19 (1967): 252-323; quoted by Khramov (below).

[16] Alexander V. Khramov, “Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 8:1 (2017): 75-105. For numerous quotations from the Eastern fathers that support the alterist position, see Hieromonk Damascene, “Created in Incorruption,” The Orthodox Word (2008).

[17] Ibid, 88.

[18] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (2001), 170-171.

[19] Ibid., 70-71. Also see Charles Andrew Gottshall, “Sergius Bulgakov on Evolution and the Fall.”

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Jesse Hake grew up in Taiwan, earned an M.Litt. in history from the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. He is married with three children and is currently a director of ClassicalU.com. He and his family attend the Holy Apostles Orthodox Church parish in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. His personal reflections on theology and other topics can be found on his substack Copious Flowers.