Falling at the First Instant

Part 2, A Speculative Creation Theology

As I described in the prior post, I had a lot of comments and questions about Maximus the Confessor's notion that creation fell "the instant" of its creation. This, as you know, isn't the typical view. In the Biblical story Adam and Eve spend a season in Paradise, walking with God in the garden. How long this season lasted we don't know. But it presumes some "interval" between creation and fall. How, then, to reconcile this "interval" with falling at the "instant" of creation?

To start, the first thing I'd like to say concerns the degree an interlocutor is reading Genesis 1-3 literally and historically. If one is trying to reconcile Maximus' vision with a literal and historical reading of Genesis then, yes, that would be difficult. But a person holding to a literal and historical reading of Genesis has their own difficulties. In my estimation, they have more significant issues to deal with. All that to say, I won't be attempting to make my view fit a literal, historical reading of Genesis as I think doing so onboards a greater set of problems.

Let's then turn our attention to theological readings of Genesis.

What is being asserted in the biblical depiction of Paradise prior to the fall? A few things, but one of the most critical is that evil was not created by God. That's a central Christian claim that the depiction of Paradise is communicating. Creation is primordially good. We "fall" from this prior goodness.

In short, when it comes to how to treat the sojourn of Paradise in Genesis 1-3 a critical issue, theologically speaking, isn't trying to imagine a historical situation at a geographical location but protecting a theological claim about the primordial goodness of creation and that God did not create evil.

With that clarification some room opens up for speculation, ways to envision creation that protects this central Christian belief.

Now, the pinch comes when we consider the nature of material reality. Given its finite, contingent nature, material reality is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical systems are subject to entropy. Things tend toward disorder. Finite creatures name the effects of entropy as "evil," "natural evil" in theological discussions as "natural evil" is what causes the disintegration and dissolution of life. Basically, entropy implies disease, damage, decay, and death and creatures name these things as "evil."

Hopefully, you can see the tensions here. If physical systems are intrinsically and "naturally" prone to entropy, then if God creates a physical system then a proneness to "evil" is baked into the physical system's makeup. And yet, that's the very notion, "evil" as an inherent property of creation, that Christian creation theology must resist.

Now, if you're a wild-eyed heretic, you might just bite the bullet here. You might assert that creaturely existence, being finite existence, is inherently prone to death and not due to a "fall." Such a contention would move you toward a more Buddhist view of material existence, where change and impermanence are inherent aspects of our existence and that suffering is caused by willing this change and impermanence to be otherwise. In this view, our relation to finitude should be non-grasping non-attachment. The attraction of this view is that it jibes with a scientific, materialistic vision of the cosmos which views entropy as baked into the equation from the very start.

But the Christian account of Paradise cuts across this view and contends that entropy and impermanence were not created by God but are, rather, consequences of a primordial "fall." As the Book of Wisdom states:

God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. (Wisdom 1.13-14)

In contrast to an Eastern non-attachment, the Christian posture toward “evil,” therefore, is existential protest and the moral work of repair. The world should be otherwise.

So, God did not create or make death. How, then, to reconcile this belief with the contention that entropy just is a part of physical systems? Let me state this even more sharply. Creaturely existence, being creaturely existence, in inherently finite. And being finite prone to entropy. This is definitional. And yet, the Christian view of creation has to posit something that is seemingly contradictory--a finite creature not prone to entropy.

Christians resolve the paradox by positing an ontological connection with God. A finite, physical system can fend off entropy if it takes in energy from another source. God is this source. God is like the sun, the source of "outside" energy that allows physical systems on earth to achieve order and structure for a season in the face of entropic decline. In short, finite and physical creatures can persist in the face of entropy as long as their being is connected to God. This union is what we call the primordial Paradise. Created being that is immune to death because it is connected to God.

When severed from God created being becomes subject to entropy and begins its slide into non-existence. The creature names this slide as "evil." Death was not created by God but death becomes the destiny of created being when it drops away from God and suffers the fate of finitude.

What causes this drop into finitude? This is a second theological assertion from Genesis 1-3. The ontological connection with God is severed because of human volition. A choice is made "away" from God. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. The tradition describes this primordial sin as ontological pride, a rejection of our radical dependence, trying to stand and exist autonomously from God. And as we've seen, any finite, physical system that tries to exist autonomously from God will suffer the forces of entropy. Thus, the sin of pride brings about the consequences of death. This is why, in the Biblical account, the "fall" is both moral and ontological. Sin and death are two sides of the same coin.

Now, back to the "timing" of this drop into finitude. We could imagine that the original ontological connection with God persisted for a season, God's life sustaining the physical lives of Adam and Eve. We might even imagine the walls surrounding the Garden of Eden as protecting a finite ecosystem from the encroachments of entropy. Perhaps outside the Garden entropy and evolution were at work, maybe for millions of years. Again, we can try to get all this fitted into a literal and historical reading of Genesis 1-3. But like I said, this seems to me to create more problems than it solves. For my part, I find Maximus' notion of creation falling "the instant" it was created more straightforward and simple. God creates finite existence which is, by definition, intrinsically prone to entropy. Insofar as created existence comes from God it is primordially good and is protected from death due to its connection to God. Creation, however, upon stepping into existence moves away from God. It suffers an "ontological drop" into its creaturely finitude. Entropy begins to erode creaturely being.

Perhaps a simple, theological way to describe the connection between our "ontological drop" and the onset of time is to deploy a contrast between kairos time and chronos time. When human existence was connected to God we participated in kairos time. Existence in kairos time is called "Paradise." Being linked to God in Paradise we existed outside of chronos time which is directed by the arrow of entropy. Upon the Fall came the onset of entropy and the start of chronos time.

Deploying this contrast between kairos and chronos time we can say that creation fell "at the first instant" of chronos time since the onset of contingency defines, via entropy, the start of measurable, observable time. Simply, the Fall was the first tick of the clock and everything before that tick existed in the kairos time of Paradise. (Such a view could described as a "meta-historical fall" given that Paradise exists outside of chronos time.)

The advantage of this view, if there is any, is its simplicity and the ease in which it can be reconciled with scientific and historical accounts of the cosmos. From the perspective of science, contingency and entropy "were always there." And we don't need to shoehorn a historical Garden of Eden into the middle of a long cosmological and evolutionary account of the universe. Contingency and time begin together.

Of course, the problem here is if we assume a serial historical sequence for the creation of the universe, like a Big Bang cosmology. If creation drops into its finitude "at the first tick of the clock" then what human will was present at the time of the Big Bang to effect the fall? If human choice arrived very late in the cosmological sequence what accounts for the presence of entropy at the start of cosmic evolution?

The first thing to point out is that this same question bedevils literal readings of Genesis, how to account for cosmological and evolutionary history prior to human origins. So this is a general problem, and not just an issue with a Maximus-inspired account of creation. That said, here's my speculation, something I hinted at in my prior "Theology of Everything" Series.

First, if creation exists ex Deo, and is rooted and founded in the Logos, then creation isn't piecemeal but a ontological whole. This seems to be Paul's view in Romans 8. Humanity, in this view, represents the responsive and erotic aspect of creation. That is to say, humans desire God and seek union with God. Humanity is created being longing for the Creator. And given that humans are connected as a whole to God, through the Logos, the entire human race represents the single, interconnected erotic longing of creation for God. This is why my vision implies apokatastasis. Creation comes to God whole, or not at all. No created bit or piece of the Logos is left behind. The Logos doesn't sit half in heaven and half in hell for all eternity. So, humanity comes to God whole, or not at all. Phrased differently, Adam is an ontological whole. Adam is collective humanity. Thus, all of Adam is saved, or not at all. God won't just save bits and pieces of Adam, an arm here or a leg there, but the whole.

I'd add here, to circle back to Romans 8, how Adam includes the whole of creation. Adam is made from adamah. There is an ontological connection, via the Logos (see Col 1.7), between humanity and the cosmos. Adam is, therefore, the whole of created material reality, all of creation, existing ex Deo in the Logos.

Regarding the cosmic timing of humanity's movement away from God, I see this from God's perspective. God's relation to creation is atemporal and not governed by a serial sequence. All of history is present before God. God's creative act is not in the distant past but is, rather, sustaining and ongoing. As the Creator of time, God didn't have to "wait" for humans to fall. God created the whole of space time and in that first instant of creation humanity moved away from the Source of Being dropping the whole of interconnected creation into contingency. From our perspective, this story unfolds in chronos time as a serial sequence, but from God's atemporal kairos-time perspective humanity's fall is simultaneous with every event on the cosmic timeline, its effects rippling both "forward" and "backward" in time. And if all this seems wildly speculative, let me just suggest that a good imagination for science-fiction can help you with some of these theological puzzles.

A final comment.

If we aren't imagining Eve eating an apple then what's going on, from a volitional standpoint, with the primordial sin? Again borrowing from Maximus, when creation steps into consciousness with human awareness our first sensations are of the created world. We look upon the world and desire it. Like Eve desiring the apple. In directing our erotic desires toward created being we take our eyes off of the Creator. In that first desire we take a step away from our Source. When that happens, created being becomes shadowed by finitude, which triggers fear. That fear drives the creature further away from God as it seeks to protect and preserve its life from the threat of death. A survival instinct takes hold as the creature tries to secure its own life. A whirlpool of desire and fear drags the creature further and further away from God. I'll share more about this in the next post.

Sin, therefore, is rooted in a delusion, the lie that the creature can sustain itself as a creature. Or that life can be secured though another created things. But finitude cannot save finitude. All creatures tend toward death. There is no escape. Radical autonomy, in the end, is a death wish.

The creature's only hope is to turn away from created being to reconnect with the Creator. The pride of radical autonomy must be exchanged for the humility of radical dependence. This radical dependence is called "trust" or, more commonly, "faith." Which is why “faith” in God—humble, radical dependence—is salvific for finite creatures.