the Big Bang should be interpreted not as the first creative act of God but as the first cognizable manifestation of the human Fall

Excerpts from an article “Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach” by Alexander V. Khramov (International Journal of Orthodox Theology. 8:1. 2017. Pages 75-105.):

St. Maximus is definitive in stressing “the difference between the temperament of the human body in our forefather Adam before the fall, and that which is now observed within us and predominates, because then the temperament of man’s body was obviously not torn apart by mutually opposed and corrupting qualities, but was in a state of equilibrium devoid of flux and reflux.” Of course, this is not to be understood as stating that before the Fall humans existed as souls separated from the bodies. St. Maximus lets to know clearly that he follows the refutation of this Evagrian doctrine by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. What he wants to say is that the bodily nature of humans has changed dramatically after we went astray from God.

These teachings cannot be dismissed as extreme and untypical cases of spiritualism. For example, St. John of Damascus, sometimes called “the Thomas Aquinas of the Greeks”, who synthesized the doctrines of the Eastern Fathers and tried to find a balance between extremes, was of the same opinion.

…Remarkably, the early Augustine also held [these] views which were in contradiction to his later position. In his “Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees” (388-389), Augustine underscored that great changes had occurred in the ontology of humans because of their sin. Before the Fall, the lot of human beings was to bear “the spiritual offspring of intelligible and immortal joys”, but this propensity “changed into carnal fecundity after sin”. Augustine in this treatise understood the life in the Paradise in highly spiritualistic terms – according to him, the man plunged into this world of flesh and blood, being “drawn down by the weight of his own sins to a place that suits him.”

…God did not create humans in their present bodily condition; rather prelapsarian human beings had spiritual bodies and lived a kind of angelic life. Humans turned to the organismic life only after the Fall.

…We come to the conclusion that evolution with all suffering intrinsic is not the means by which God created the world, but a consequence of the Fall, which happened before the beginning of the empirically known universe. Indeed, since angel-like humans changed into the biological organisms because ofthe Fall, and, as science tells us, such biological organisms have been produced by evolution, it is entirely reasonable to suppose that evolution itself started in the fallen world after the first sin had been committed. So we can speak of humans in a twofold sense. Humans as a part of the empirical realm are the result of evolution, but, as those who belong to the primeval and now unattainable order of things, they are its cause.

…Following this logic, 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. On such a view, the basic properties of matter that made evolution possible are in fact no other than corruption brought by sin to the “very good” world which preceded our observable Universe.

The Eastern theology traditionally viewed the human act of disobedience in paradise not as an isolated event, but as a trigger for the global transformation of the whole creation: “cursed is the ground because of you” Gen. 3:17). For example, Origen taught that the change of humans from the angel-like state to the animal one were accompanied by the recasting of the entire natural order because the world designed for spiritual beings is different from the world necessary to sustain biological life. So “descent from higher to lower conditions” has been experienced not only by fallen souls but by the whole of nature as well.

…[This] understanding of evolution by no means assumes in a gnostic style that the animals, human bodies, and the whole material realm have not been created by God. What it claims is that all these things were created in a different state from one in which they are now. The beauty of the present world is just a pale imitation of the primordial creation originally made to be “very good”. Since the cognitive faculties offallen humans have been impaired, we are shielded from any certain knowledge about the prelapsarian world by a kind of “veil of ignorance” [let me borrow this term from john Rawls]. The Big Bang is the first event on our side of the veil, but we cannot know anything about what was behind the veil, except what is revealed in the Scripture. After all, how can a brain shaped by cruel natural selection learn about life in paradise? We do not know how we ourselves, stars, rivers, plants and other realities of our world looked like before the Fall. Certainly, at that time, the laws of nature worked in different ways from the ways in which they do now since such things as maintaining body power without food were possible. There was no entropy and struggle for existence.

…According to John Polkinghorne, “if the world to come is to be free from death and suffering, its ‘matter-energy’ will have to be given a different character. There will have to discontinuous change of physical law”. Christopher Southgate supposes that resurrected animals will live in the special “pelican heaven”, “without competition or frustration on the part of predator or prey.”

If the world after the resurrection of the dead is going to be so dissimilar to what we see, why cannot we assume the same for prelapsarian creation, keeping in mind Origen’s principle “the end is like the beginning”?

…More successful and more philosophically sophisticated attempt in this direction was made by Russian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948). He was well aware of Eastern theology, often citing St. Gregory of Nyssa and especially St. Symeon the New Theologian. Berdyaev combined insights from them with a Kantian philosophy to interpret the Fall as objectification (or self- estrangement) of the human spirit, as a result of which primary reality has been fallen apart into subject and object, mutually impenetrable realms of phenomena and noumena (things-in-themselves).

“Man is the supreme center of the cosmic life, it fell through him, and through him it must rise,” Berdyaev writes. God did not create the current world order with universal laws of nature. What he did create is concrete beings or “existential centers” which on account of the sin have been turned into phenomena in space and time, subjected to a rigid principle of causation. “The world is the servitude, the enchainment of existences, not only of men but of animals of plants, even of minerals and stars…. The enslavement, the enslaving state of the world, the determinism of nature are the outcome of objectification. Everything is turned into object. …Evolution belongs to the system of objectification,” it is related only to humans in the phenomenal sense, that is, to humans as fallen beings, and cannot be regarded as an expression of God’s creativity.

In the eschatological consummation, God will reverse objectification to return all created things to themselves. “The end of the world will be an end of that world of objects.” Like Moltmann and his followers, Berdyaev links the resurrection of the dead with the global transformation of the whole natural order: “my salvation is bound up with that not only of other men but also of animals, plants, minerals, of every blade of grass—all must be transfigured and brought into the Kingdom of God.” By this the core structure of reality, now distorted by the Fall, will be restored. But until it happens, we have to remain objects among objects: “man as a noumenon is at the beginning, and as a noumenon, he is at the end, but he lives out his destiny in the phenomenal world.”

…Olivier Clément, strongly influenced by Berdyaev, also took theology of St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor as his starting point. “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.” If science cannot find any trace of paradise in our past, it does not follow that paradise has never existed at all, but rather that it is not within the sphere of competence of scientific inquiry. “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.” Since events described in Gen. 1-3 pertain to the realm of unknown, evolution studied by science is not a synonym of six days of creation. “What science calls ‘evolution’ from the spiritual point of view is a process of objectification of primeval Adam or universal Man, which involves all humanity and all the world.”

Iconographer Christina DeMichele. Commissioned for St. Andrew Orthodox Church, Riverside, CA.

he again becomes a child in the womb of our soul

Jesus the Christ who was born in the flesh once for all of us, desires to be born again in the spirit in those who desire Him. In each of us, he again becomes a child in the womb of our soul and forms himself from the virtues. He reveals as much of Himself as He knows each of us can accept. Let us contemplate the mystery of the incarnation and in simplicity praise Him who became man for us.

Saint Maximus the Confessor (quoted in the Philokalia).

when I came forth out of Egypt

This extended passage about a prayer from the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (“a little book with prayers for the Eucharist, baptism, ordination, and other rites reflecting practice in Rome at the end of the second century”) is again from Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (32-36). Although Wilken defends a Catholic conception of Christ’s re-sacrifice that I do not espouse, there is great value in his overarching insight that God’s redemptive acts, recorded in scripture and remembered in the sacraments, are a true and present reality to us.

Although it is a prayer of adoration, thanksgiving, and supplication, it has a distinct narrative structure.

…[This imitates] the psalmists [who] do not simply praise the majesty and goodness and power of God, they identify God by his actions, “his mighty deeds.” To praise God is to narrate what he has done.

…Yet it is apparent from the wording of the prayers that something more is at work here than recalling ancient history. After reciting the history of salvation leading up to the “night on which he was betrayed,” the prayer continues as follows: “And we sinners make remembrance of his life-giving sufferings, his death, and resurrection on the third day from the dead and ascension to the right hand of You, his God and Father, and his second glorious and fearful coming.” The key term here is the Greek word anamnesis, usually translated “remembrance,” which in this context means “recall by making present.”

There are parallels between this sense of remembrance and the way the Exodus out of Egypt is remembered in the Jewish Passover. In the Mishnah, the collection of Jewish law from the early third century, it is reported that Rabbi Gamaliel used to say, …”In every generation a man must so regard himself as if he came forth himself out of Egypt, for it is written, ‘And you shall tell your son on that day saying, “It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt.”‘” Those who celebrate Pesach are not spectators, they are participants. “It is I who came forth out of Egypt,” says Rabbi Gamaliel. Remembrance is more than mental recall, and in the Eucharist the life-giving events of Christ’s death and Resurrection escape the restrictions of time and become what the early church called mysteries, ritual actions by which Christ’s saving work is re-presented under the veil of the consecrated bread and wine. Speaking of the Christian paschal celebration Origen wrote, “The Passover still takes place today” and “Those who sacrifice Christ come out of Egypt, cross the Red Sea, and see Pharaoh engulfed.” What was once accomplished in Palestine is now made present in the action of the liturgy, as the prayers indicate: “We offer to You 0 Lord, this awesome and unbloody sacrifice, beseeching You to deal with us not according to our sins.”” Liturgy is always in the present tense. The past becomes a present presence that opens a new future.

…The repeated celebration of the liturgy worked powerfully on the imagination of early Christian thinkers. It brought them into intimate relation with the mystery of the Christ, not as a historical memory, but as an indisputable and incontrovertible fact of experience. Leo the Great, bishop of Rome in the fifth century, put it this way: “Everything that the Son of God did and taught for the reconciliation of the world, we know not only as an historical account of things now past, but we also experience them in the power of the works that are present.” Before there were treatises on the Trinity, before there were learned commentaries on the Bible, before there were disputes about the teaching on grace, or essays on the moral life, there was awe and adoration before the exalted Son of God alive and present in the church’s offering of the Eucharist. This truth preceded every effort to understand and nourished every attempt to express in words and concepts what Christians believed.

cruel inhumanity

“No degree of cruel inhumanity can destroy the religion founded on the mystery of the cross of Christ.” ~Leo the Great

a cornucopia of scenes and images

Another one of “the most distinctive features of Christian intellectual life” is the influence of God’s word. However, Wilken stresses that the scriptures provided far more than an intellectual basis for the early church.

Christian thinkers were not in the business of establishing something; their task was to understand and explain something. The desire to understand is as much part of believing as is the drive to act on what one believes. …Christian thought arose in response to the facts of revelation, how its idiom was set by the language and imagery of the Bible, and how the life and worship of the Christian community gave Christian thinking a social dimension that was absent from ancient philosophy. (p. 3)

And from his introduction:

The intellectual effort of the early church was at the service of a much loftier goal than giving conceptual form to Christian belief. Its mission was to win the hearts and minds of men and women and to change their lives. Christian thinkers appealed to a much deeper level of human experience than had the religious institutions of society or the doctrines of the philosophers. In this endeavor the Bible was a central factor. It narrated a history that reached back into antiquity even to the beginning of the world, it was filled with stories of unforgettable men and women (not all admirable) who were actual historical persons rather than mythical figures, and it poured forth a thesaurus of words that created a new religious vocabulary and a cornucopia of scenes and images that stirred literary and artistic imagination as well as theological thought. God, the self, human community, the beginning and ending of things became interwoven with biblical history, biblical language, and biblical imagery. (pp. xiv-xv)

Fresco of Adam and Eve in the catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter (Rome, A.D. 300-350).

quiet confidence in those who have gone before

My wife and I got a Kindle for Christmas form her family and often find ourselves reaching for it at the same time. One book that I particularly enjoyed reading recently was Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. I’ve cited it once already and will post several more passages as I go back through the long page of highlights that I generated. Here’s a short one from midway that touches upon many of the others.

One of the most distinctive features of Christian intellectual life is a kind of quiet confidence in the faithfulness and integrity of those who have gone before. (p. 175)

Early Protestants (from the first generation of Reformers through the America Puritans of the colonial period at least) had a wide-spread, intimate and appreciative knowledge of the church fathers. This basic conservative (and biblical) instinct is something that we easily loose sight of in a fast-paced and entertainment-driven age. We survive and mature by receiving from our fathers (with thankful hearts) all that we can bear. Protestants need not feel threatened by this.

More worthwhile still might be to ask whether or not this really is among “the most distinctive features of Christian intellectual life.” What other contenders are there, and do they conflict? Wilken raises several others himself in the course of his own efforts to conjure the thought life of early Christians.

freedom is as much a matter of seeing

I need to read Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor directly, but these passages from Robert Louis Wilken’s study of Early Christian Thought illuminated human nature for me in some fresh, clear and simple ways. Yesterday’s post reminded me of these passages.

Gregory speaks of human freedom as moral freedom, the freedom to become what we were made to be. Freedom, as he puts it, is the “royal exercise of the will,” but will is much more than choice, than deciding to do one thing in preference to another. It is an affair of ordering one’s life in terms of its end, freedom oriented toward excellence (the original meaning of virtue) and human flourishing. As we gorw in virtue we delight in the good that is God. Hence freedom is never set forth in its own terms, but rather is always seen in relation to God. Because human beings were made in the image of God, our lives will be fully human only as our face is turned toward God and our actions formed by his love. Freedom is as much a matter of seeing, of vision, as it is of doing. (location 1676)

…The human will is not less human but more human because it is in harmony with the divine will. Like Cyril, Maximus wishes to say that Christ showed us a “wholly new way of being human.” Christ’s life, writes Maximus, was “new, not only because it was strange and wondrous to those on earth, and was unfamiliar in comparison to things as they are, but also because it carried within itself a new energy of one who lived in a new way.” (location 1454)

From The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God by Robert Louis Wilken (Yale UP, 2003, Kindle Edition)