The Meta-Historical Fall of the Cosmos: Intriguing but Is It True?

Jesse Hake’s stimulating article “From Out of Another Kind of Time” has forced me to ask, “What do I really think about the hypothesis of a meta-historical Fall of humanity?” Not that I haven’t thought about the question before. It’s been quietly tenanting in my sub­con­sciousness ever since I read David Hart’s The Doors of the Sea almost two decades ago. At the time I thought David was alluding to a pre-cosmic angelic Fall, but a few years ago he corrected me on that point. No, he explained, his own view is closer to that of Sergius Bulgakov. So I dipped into The Bride of the Lamb (specifically chapter 3) and read the Russian theologian’s ruminations on the pre-cosmic Fall. That was a mistake! I found myself in Wonderland, right along with Alice, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the Caterpillar smoking his hookah on a mushroom.

I exaggerate. In fact, I found Bulgakov’s analysis of why Genesis 1-3 requires a mythological form quite agreeable. “A myth, in the positive sense of this concept,” he explains, “is a story, expressed in a language not proper to the empirical domain, about what lies beyond this domain, about what belongs to the meta-empirical domain and meta-history.”¹ I admit I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by meta-history, but I assimilated the term to my own Tolkien-informed understanding of myth. But then Bulgakov goes on to say about Genesis 1-3:

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.²

What kind of event, I began to wonder, is Bulgakov really talking about? And then he began discussing—with absolute seriousness—the world soul, creaturely and divine Sophia, the proto-Adam, the pre-temporal Fall, etc. I was clueless and remain clueless. I knew that my tiny brain would never ever comprehend this aspect of Bulgakov’s theology. In 2021 I published on Eclectic Orthodoxy an article by George Repper titled “Bulgakov and the Foundations of Creaturely Freedom.” In this fascinating piece Repper summarizes the Russian theologian’s view that God’s creation of the world required the pre-temporal consent of the creation. What‽ I found, and continue to find, this claim unfathomable. At that point, if not before, I concluded that Bulgakov had been smoking the same hallu­cin­o­gen as Lewis Carrol’s caterpillar. And so I ceased to ponder any more about his meta-historical thesis. It’s too exotic, too abstruse and esoteric. Most critically, it just doesn’t seem relevant to my core Christian convictions. As my seminary professor Robert Cooper liked to whimsically remark, “Interesting, if true.”

But I cannot simply dismiss the Bulgakovian-Hartian hypothesis. Those who have read my series on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ainulindalë know how fascinated I am by the topic, at least when expressed in mythopoeic form. Mythology and fairy tales, I have long believed, communicate reality that transcends empirical apprehension. Contrary to the pre-Christian C. S. Lewis, they are not “lies breathed through silver.” Myths speak deep and profound truths and disclose reality in startling ways. So if the author of the Silmarillion can entertain a pre-cosmic Fall of the Ainur, how can I ignore, much less deride, the intuitions of Bulgakov and Hart that the fall of humanity took place not in historical time but in a “time” before time? Why could the Fall not be a mysterious event metaphysically antecedent to the Big Bang, a happening that “ruined primordial creation in a catastrophic manner”?³ Would not a meta-historical Fall offer a superior explanation for the evil of animal predation and suffering which predates the Adamic sin? And would it not better explain human wickedness, suffering, and death? Yes it would, I have to conclude. Consi­der how much simpler our lives would be if we did not have to defend a historical fall of humanity. But still I ask, is it true?

Six years ago, I read Paul Griffith’s book Decreation. I found it illuminating, provocative, challenging. Griffiths proposes that when angels refused grace creaturely, the fabric of cosmic temporality was grievously damaged. He calls it the devastation. There are now two kinds of time: fallen, metronomic time and unfallen, systolic time. The former comes first in Giffiths’ analysis, as it is the form of temporality that shapes our daily lives. Simply stated, metronomic time is time measured by the clock:

Metronomic time, as the name suggests, is regular and measurable: its law (nomos) is measure (metron). The means of measuring it are various, and include the movements of the sun or other heavenly bodies relative to the earth, and the rates of growth and decay of material substances. The former give us days and nights and months and years; the latter provide smaller intervals, down to and beyond the zeptosecond or the ictus. But all these means of measure are derived from—or just are—kinds of creaturely motion. The constellations wheel; the moon circles the earth; the tides surge; the shadow of night’s darkness moves westward across the planet’s globe; the human body ages and changes and moves; atoms of carbon decay; the gluon and the lepton and the hadron and the boson orbit and connect and disconnect, forming and reforming; the sand sifts softly through the hourglass’ throat; the psalm-syllables are chanted with tongue and lips and vocal chords and intakings and expellings of breath; diges­tion’s peristaltic rhythm proceeds, making nourishment possible; the pulse beats and the eyes blink—all these are creaturely movements in space that are also, or may also be, means of measuring duration.⁴

The defining mark of metronomic time is decay in movement toward nothingness. Its weight, says Griffiths, “bears all creatures that labor under it down into death.” It is “the heartbeat of a damaged but still beautiful cosmos, the hammer that knocks all coffin-nails firmly and finally home.”⁵ 

Tick-tock.
Tick-tock.
Tick-tock.

Boredom and dread rule our lives. We are prisoners waiting on death row for our inevitable expiry. In the words of John Donne: “All our life is but a going out to the place of Execution.”

Systolic time, on the other hand, is time as healed by the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus—temporality in eschatological wholeness. Griffiths invokes the contracting heart-beat to describe it:

The systole, physiologically speaking, is the regular contraction of the heart as necessary prelude to the driving of blood outward from itself; it is a contraction that prepares the organism for a movement essential to the sustaining of its life. To call time “systolic,” then, is to suggest that it is contracted, gathered, tensed, ready for life-giving action.⁶

It may seem that the death of Jesus changed nothing. The tick-tock continues as it always has. The alarm clock awakens us at 5:30; we grab a cup of coffee and drive to work; eight hours later we begin our journey home; we eat dinner, watch a little TV, and are back in bed by 11:00. And so it drearily goes, day after day. Yet in the Holy Eucharist of the Church, the baptized proleptically participate in the systolic time of the Kingdom:

The crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus lie at the heart of time. That time is contracted by those events, pleated and folded around them, gathered by them into a tensely dense possibility. By and in those events, the events of the passion, metronomic duration, the regularly measurable fabric of timespace, is systolated: it has folds or gatherings in it because of its contraction. The principal fold is exactly that provided by the passion: there, time is folded most thickly, pleated most delicately and intricately, contracted—systolated—most tightly; there (then) eternity’s relation to the devastation’s metronomic death hammer is most intense and most trans­formative; it is that death hammer that drives the nails through the flesh of Jesus and the spear into his side, and it is the hyperdurational events that follow (death, deposition, burial, descent ad inferos, hell’s harrowing, resurrection, ascension) that remove them, and provide the necessary conditions for the casting of Christ’s blood out into the cosmos and into our hearts. The passion is to the fabric of timespace just as the heart’s systole is to our bodies. Time receives its proper order in the passion, and it is an order opposed in every significant way to the time of the metronome.⁷

In heaven the tick-tock is no more. There is only life eternal, blessedness and joy within the eschatological movement that transcends all measurement:

Heaven’s time, by contrast, maintains and intensifies to the maximum the signs of temporal grace evident in the devastation, and removes all unen­durability. This is to say that heaven’s time is exclusively nonmetronomic; all that, an artifact of the fall as it is, has been burned away. What remains is the systole perfected, the tensive, gathered time of the liturgy now extended to infinity. Just as the passion-centered liturgical calendar is cyclical and repetitive here in the devastation, so too is systolic time in heaven: it is the indrawn breath of the LORD, which concentrates time around the sacred heart, the beating heart of Jesus, and which is drawn in again and again, gathering and folding the temporal into itself. But the systole implies, as well, a diastole: the heart’s contraction, as preparation for forcing blood through the arteries, is followed by a dilation or relax­ation, which is what does the forcing. Systole and diastole go together, and together they form a repeated, life-giving cycle. My account of the systole so far was in terms of the healing of time in the devastation. There—here—time was contracted or folded or gathered, but not yet expanded. The church was encouraged by Paul to live as if time had been folded, but not yet opened out. . . .

In heaven that has happened. The annihilation there of metronomic time is coincident with the full expansion of the systole into the diastole. The indrawn breath is exhaled; the resurrected and ascended flesh of Christ sits now, fully present, at the center of the faithful; and the time of heaven is a constant, endless, back-and-forth of praise and love between the saints and the LORD, an inbreath and outbreath of gift-given and gift- received-by-being-returned. This endlessly repeated but temporally structured cycle is the temporal form of the beatific vision: it is how temporal creatures see the LORD, the maximal extent of creaturely participation in the LORD’s eternity.⁸

But what caused this drastic distortion of creaturely temporality? Following St Augustine and the Latin tradition, Griffths identifies the pre-cosmic rebellion of the spiritual beings we call angels. At the moment of their creation, the angels are granted vision of the uncreated Light, but some immediately avert their gaze. They turn to the darkness, the void of which the Vulgate translation of Genesis 1:2 speaks. “As they do this,” explains Griffiths, “they fall, interlacing their light with darkness, losing intimacy, though never completely, with the LORD, and beginning to seek, vainly of course, for a mode of existence independent of the LORD’s.”⁹ And as they seek the nothingness, they inflict maximal damage upon God’s good creation. Systolic time shatters, and a disfigured, metronomic cosmos is born.

Chaos.
Entropy.
Death.
Tick-tock.

If we take the fall of the angels seriously, says Griffiths, then we must say that timespace was corrupted immediately upon its creation. All other beings, therefore, issue from and into an already damaged cosmos. “The angelic fall,” comments Griffiths, “provides the context and the frame for everything that is to follow.”¹⁰

But what about the biblical account of the human fall of which Genesis mythologically speaks? What about Eden? Griffiths takes the biblical account with the utmost gravity and proposes that God created Eden as a systolic paradise immune to the ravages of fallen time, immune to death. Imagine, if you will, an island in the ocean of the metronome surrounded by a supernatural force field. Within this protected space, humanity is created, exempt from the suffering and death that afflicts the animals that live under the metro­nome. Within this enclosure the first humans are tempted by Satan (“Eat and you shall become gods, knowing good and evil”). They yield to the temptation, fall from grace, and are expelled from the Garden. The rest is metronomic history.

Griffiths notes one significant advantage of his account of the Fall: it does not conflict with the scientific account of the origin and formation of our present universe. Specifically:

• It does not pose any problems for the creation of nonhuman animals long before the creation of human beings.
• It does not pose any problems for the reality of suffering and death among the various species of nonhuman animals.
• It does not pose any problems for the manifest chaos and entropy of the inanimate created order.

Modern science, of course, cannot confirm Griffiths’ speculative hypothesis; but neither can it disconfirm it, no more than it can confirm or disconfirm God’s creation, con­ser­vation, and providential direction of the universe. As the eminent Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément, appealing to the Eastern Fathers, writes:

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. . . . Geology and paleontology, with all their achievements, stop at the gate of paradise, for it is a different state of existence. Science cannot reach beyond the Fall, because it itself is a part of the fallen state of the world, being inseparable from spatial, temporal and material conditions that arose from the destruction of paradisiacal state.¹¹

I have spent this lengthy amount of metronomic time summarizing Paul Griffiths account of the Fall because it offers an alternative to the views of Bulgakov and Hart. Is it true? I do not know, but I find it plausible—and it’s preachable.

But let’s now return to the meta-historical thesis advanced by Bulgakov and Hart. Their account shares the strengths of Griffiths’ proposal. Both provide a narrative of the Fall that is consonant with the reigning cosmological theory of the origin of the universe, thus committing the physicists to a reluctant silence. But their thesis offers one advantage over Griffith’s: it does not need to posit an historical Eden miraculously protected by divine grace from the destructive power of devastated time. In the meta-historical account, the fall of humanity occurs (logically, not temporally) in the Edenic time before time, before the advent of our empirical universe. As Hart puts it:

Thus we may say, as fantastic as it seems—and as fantastic as it truly is when reduced to fundamentalist literalism regarding the myth of Eden—that all suffering, sadness, and death, however deeply woven into the fabric of earthly existence, is the consequence of the depravities of rational creatures, not of God’s intentions. Not that we can locate the time, the place, or the conditions of that event. That ours is a fallen world is not a truth demonstrable to those who do not believe; Christians can see it only within the story of Christ, in the light cast back from his saving action in history upon the whole of time. 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—perhaps the divine or angelic aeon beyond the corrup­ti­ble subsidereal world of chronos, or perhaps the Dreamtime or the super­celes­tial realm of the pure forms or the Origenist heaven of the primordial intelligences, or what have you.¹²

Perhaps, for the sake of unsophisticated minds like my own, we may simplify the meta-historical thesis in this way: the fall of mankind occurred “before” the appearance of the empirical universe 13.82 billion years ago, and by the will and transcedent action of God, it also initiated, or triggered, the explosive event of the Big Bang. As with Griffiths’ hypo­the­sis, modern science can neither disprove or prove these claims. Physicists, after all, acknowledge that they cannot get behind the original singularity that births the universe, just as they acknowledge that the hypothesis of the multiverse cannot be experimentally demonstrated. Yes, the meta-historical hypothesis is speculative but no more so than the many theological attempts advanced to reconcile traditional Christian accounts of the Fall with evolution.¹³

Theologians may well ask, Does the supramundane thesis enjoy the support of Holy Scripture and the theological tradition. As far as the latter, Church Fathers like St Gregory of Nyssa, St Maximus the Confessor, and John Scottus Eriugena can be constructively invoked for support. As to the former, while the biblical support may be meager (and many would say nonexistent), the very fact that Genesis 2-3 is articulated in mythological form means that it can be interpreted as pointing to a pre-temporal event. And if the apocalyptic reading of St Paul should prove valid, then even he might be enlisted as a possible supporter. As Hart has repeatedly reminded us, the Apostle is remarkably dualistic, even gnostic, in his apprehension of the cosmos in need of radical rescue.¹⁴

But is it true? I honestly do not know. I am sympathetic to the theodicial concerns and moral intuitions that drive the meta-historical thesis. I have genuine reservations regarding the claim that the present cosmos, as it has developed since day one, reflects God’s original intention. Putting to the side the human dimension, the violence, suffering, and death of animals troubles me greatly. Given what we know from science about the origin and formation of the universe and the evolutionary emergence of rational human beings, how can the Adamic sin as an event in history be held responsible for animal suffering over the eons that preceded it? And when human suffering, horrific evil, and death are brought back into the equation, my concerns increase exponentially. The God of absolute love and goodness should have done better. Nor do I feel comfortable retreating to the Thomist answer (espoused, e.g., by Herbert McCabe and Brian Davies) that because of the divine transcendence we are not in a position to judge the Almighty by our moral standards. It is precisely the revelation of God’s infinite goodness in Jesus Christ that confronts me with the question of theodicy. What I cannot in conscience do is employ a literalistic reading of Holy Scripture or fideistically assert a fallible patristic opinion. Biblical and patristic fundamentalism is an intellectual dead-end.

Ultimately I come back to my identity as a (retired) pastor, preacher, and catechist. In my judgment, the purpose of theology is to guide the preaching of the gospel. Do the specu­la­tive proposals of Paul Griffiths, Sergius Bulgakov, Alexander Khramov, and David Bentley Hart aid in that task? Perhaps. Perhaps more than perhaps.

Footnotes

[1] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (2002), 170.

[2] Ibid., 170-171; emphasis mine.

[3] Alexander V. Khramov, “Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology, 8 (2017): 8.

[4] Paul Griffiths, Decreation (2014), 90.

[5] Ibid., 91.

[6] Ibid., 95. Griffiths borrows the image of the systole from St Paul: “In his First Letter to the Corinthians, as part of a discussion of what the marriage practices of Christians should be now, since the ascension of Jesus, Paul writes that it is good for Christians to remain as they are with respect to marriage (if married, then married; if not, then not); and that there should also be changes in the way those states of life are lived—those who are married, for example, should live as if they were not. The reason for these changes is that time, now, is systolated (sunestalmenos)—ruched, pleated, tensed, furled, crouched like a cat for the spring, tight-wrapped in grave-clothes like a corpse prepared for resurrection, swaddled like a newborn being carried toward the baptismal font (1 Cor 7:29). The Greek verb here, sustellein, lies at the root of the English “systole,” which is among the reasons for choosing that English equivalent” (ibid. 95-96).

[7] Ibid., 96. If you’re still confused (I am), I can only recommend that you read and reread chap. 16 of Decreation.

[8] Ibid., 107-108.

[9] Ibid., 132. Also see “Thralls of the Metronome.” Dom Illtyd Trethowan writes: “Sin, then, started with the angels. They refused to accept grace—that is, the supernatural knowledge and love of God for which they were created. They preferred to remain as they were—God was not allowed to come into the foreground of the intelligences, to encroach on their self-sufficiency. Some of the Fathers put it like this: that the angels wouldn’t stand for the Incarnation, for the putting of human nature above themselves. . . . Anyhow, the sin which the angels committed must have been a sin of pride—a refusal to toe the line. . . . One of the results, we may suppose, was a disorganization of the material universe over which, according to a reasonable theory, the angels had charge. It is a reasonable theory, because it seems to be a general law that the lower orders should be governed by the higher ones, that God’s creatures should be arranged in a hierarchy, with a certain dependence of those below on those above.” An Essay in Christian Philosophy (1954), 128; quoted by Michael J. Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008), 98.

[10] Ibid., 134.

[11] Quoted by Khramov, 104.

[12] David Bentley Hart, “The Devil’s March,” Theological Territories (2020), 79.

[13] Cf. Paul Ladoceur, “Evolution and Genesis 2–3: The Decline and Fall of Adam and Eve,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 57 (2013): 135-176. Ladoceur rejects meta-historical proposals, including Bulgakov’s, precisely because they are speculative and non-scientific: “Even though these theories may be theologically satisfying, scientifically they are non-starters, since they require divine intervention (a no-no in science—“no miracles are allowed”) and because they elevate modern humans to a sort of homo super-sapiens, something other than the humans resulting from biological evolution” (148).

[14] “For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension—heavenly or terrestrial, spiritual or physical—is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all.” David Bentley Hart, “Everything You Know About the Gospel of Paul Is Likely Wrong,” Aeon (8 January 2018). Also see “Whose Orthodoxy? Which Gnosticism?” Leaves in the Wind (17 September 2021).