The question of the “fall of man” in Christian mythology and theology vexes, especially today because of the centuries of revelations about the very long history of the universe and the universality of death as a constant throughout its history. Even the Stars die. The universe might too, or at least it might come very close to it (we are using “death” very loosely to refer to the disintegration of existent complex objects, which includes biological systems).
Obviously, if Christianity is dependent on a modern historical view of the myths (the view of many Christian fundamentalists), then Christianity is false, or at least requires false beliefs in a morally damning sense. This is why said fundamentalists reject modern scientific ideas, theories, and conclusions. In contrast to this view, there are many attempts to reconcile these myths with our knowledge systems, including more allegorical views, symbolic readings, and the centre of our discussion: the notion of a supratemporal fall.
You can find this view espoused by learned theologians like David Bentley Hart, who takes inspiration from some church fathers and particularly the brilliant mind of Sergei Bulgakov. Jesse Hake writes:
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.”
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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.1
The whole thing is worth reading. I think you get a decent introduction to the major players in the revival of this reading, and its historical precedents. I rather like the interpretation, as it seems very familiar. One cannot but sense Hart’s platonism when he talks about these things.
To summarize the view, “the fall” describes the descent of humans/humanity qua spirit into the world of serial, “chronos” time from a higher “aionic” time. It does not occur at any point within our “chronian” time, but the very establishment and existence of “chronian” time that is the result of this fall, whether this is the big bang, or even if time is endless in both directions (if the big bang is replaced by something else like this). The advantages are obvious: You can maintain the centrality of humanity as divine microcosm in the fall of even the divine powers, maintain the numinousness of the higher worlds, the truth of the myth, and our modern knowledge systems, in one stroke. I think this is immediately superior to allegorical readings that place it within history and far superior to the fundamentalist reading, as it at least takes the myth seriously as myth, in the ideality that it manifests, and the strange “other temporality” myths require to function. Indeed, as it is said, the myth is always happening now.
That said, I find that due to the idiosyncrasies of Christianity, this view tends to repeat the same problems Plotinus criticizes in the Gnostics. Ironically, this is due to the way the myths involved are read. Although the myth is read as happening in “supratemporally”, it is also read morally, which is a problem due to the way supratemporality works.
The supratemporal fall is co-ordinate with the salvation from it. It’s pretty much the same thing in reverse:
“The images of the Gospel indicate that the end will not be encompassed by our time with its seasons. The net of time is torn, and a supertime suddenly shines through it - not as a calendar event but as something that transcends our time. … This does not mean that the second coming will nonetheless take place in one of the hours of life of this world, or on one of its calendar dates, even if an unknown one. … This hour will not enter into the series of historical events, such as the fall of Rome, the Crusades, the Great War. It is not in history, because it lies beyond history.
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The appearance of Christ in the parousia does not know any limits. It is universal, omnipresent, and omnitemporal. He is seen by those who rejoice in Him and by those who tremble in fear of Him, by those who love Him and by those who hate Him. This universality has an absolutely compelling evidentness, analogous to that of the existence of God and of the whole spiritual world in the afterlife. This appearance of Christ is described, in anthropomorphic symbols, as His coming on the clouds of heaven. All of these expressions that link His appearance with a definite place and time are obviously inadequate, since this temporality and this spatiality are other than our own, if indeed it is at all appropriate to speak of temporality and spatiality here. Christ's appearance in the parousia takes us, in general, beyond the limits of this world: it is metaphysical or metacosmic. This "meta" eliminates the threshold between the two states of the world's being. In the parousia, Christ will not appear within the limits of this world; He will not appear beneath this sky and upon this earth and before this humankind. Humankind will see Him in a new world, and this appearance will already constitute a radical change in the relation between God and the world.”2
Bulgakov is here hammering on a very important fact: This universe will run its course in “chronian” time. The earth will most likely be consumed by the Sun. The Sun will die. The universe will likely expand forever (or whatever its fate in indefinite time). There is no-when in this endless history that the Parousia will happen. The Parousia is the dissolution of the entire timeline and its “resurrection” into another. But problems arise in the cosmology this intimates. The bridge between the two “temporalities” is humanity, namely Adam and Christ, for fall and redemption respectively3. The bridge is not time itself, but more properly an eternity, insofar as this bridge encompasses and unites both temporalities. This brings up the question of whether the fall was preventable. However, I find that this question is meaningless in the metaphysics of supratemporality and the fall it reveals. Not being a choice in a field of possibilities in the same way our frail choices are, questions about preventability distract from the heart of the theology.
However, this metaphysics also calls into question the moral reading of this “fall”. If it is out of ignorance that human spirits fell, then ignorance is a possibility for perfect spirits qua perfect, which makes no sense to me. If it is out of knowing maliciousness, then evil is attributable to perfect spirits, which again makes no sense. Ignorance and malice are ontological defects, but these spirits, if they were perfect as generated, created, or whatever, would have to be pushed into defective states. Who does this “pushing”, I shudder to think about.
The unity of the mediator(s) between these states of being instead seems to indicate that, unity being goodness4, this act is a positive activity of a God, their positive act of providence, where the God says “It is I: You are mine”5; and we join in that activity, claiming the world as ours, ideally not in an oppressive manner.
The phenomenal world of “chronian” time is not eliminated by its supratemporal counterpart. Even if, in the extreme, we say that this universe is “illusory” compared to that “higher” one, it is still the case that the illusion has to exist, and has to have an individuality of its own, for both being capable of distinguish it from higher realities, and for its own proper existence. The “translation” of the universe in “resurrection” is the ascension to the higher one, which does indeed contain this universe insofar as it is the source of its essences and substance. Thus a translation to that world is always happening, just as the fall is always happening. This emphasis on the ontological reading of this mythological theology rules out reading this fall as a moral failing. Ontological descent can be and has been couched in moral and judicial terms6, but the common practice is to read this symbolically, as “a question of physics, of the emergence of some structure whose incorporated energy will have to be ‘paid back’.”7
Why is this generation of a conflictual plane of being necessary? It is because “some things have to be in conflict sometimes in order to fully manifest themselves according to their peculiar destiny and find their niche in a complex world”8. This is my unargued justification (a topic for a different post, I guess), but I believe that if one is to have the kind of Cosmopolitan Christianity and Pluralism David Armstrong talks about, the gnosticism has to be attenuated and reinterpreted. This is also not to say the perceived errors of the view are held by theologians like Hart. Hart is incredibly subtle about what he believes on this topic, and in some ways I think he (or Roland9 at least) is closer to my view than the moral reading on some aspects. However, I do see this tendency and possibility within attempts to adopt the view. I think it can be refined further, and with a bit of henological reasoning, made to conform more to the reality of unlimited and unoriginate multiplicity that is the world, for as Damascius states, “the unique system that consists of all things (which we designate by the term “all things”) is without a first principle and uncaused, lest we continue [the series] ad infinitum."10
Jesse Hake, ‘A Human Fall From Out of Another Kind of Time’, Eclectic Orthodoxy (blog), 3 March 2024, https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2024/03/03/a-human-fall-from-out-of-another-kind-of-time/.
Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (Wm. B. Eerdmans-Lightning Source, 2001), Pg 440-441, 450-451
See Jordan Daniel Wood, ‘Creation Is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity Of The Logoi In Maximus Confessor’, Modern Theology 7177 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12382.https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12382.
“Two of the three generic attributes of the Gods from the Phaedrus, namely the beautiful and the wise, have thus been seen to yield daimonic strivings peculiar to them. Is there such a striving corre- sponding to the third attribute, the Good? To the good which is beyond being and source of being and essence to beings (Rep., 509 b 5-9) must correspond the most elemental of strivings, the striving to exist. For Neoplatonists the good becomes the principle of individuation par excellence, the σωστικὸν ἑκάστου, that which «conserves and holds together the being of each several thing», (Proclus, Elements of Theology, prop. 13; trans. E. R. Dodds). In desiring the One or the Good, entities desire their individual integrity. The striv- ing after the One is individuative, just as the striving after wisdom makes one a philosopher and the striving after beauty makes one a lover. The striving after the Good makes one whatever and whoev- er one is. The quality, therefore, which it is most natural to identify as that quality in the Gods denoted by the generic divine attribute «the good» (Phaedr., 246 e 2) is the attribute of perfect, integral individuality.” - Edward P. Butler, ‘Plato’s Gods and the Way of Ideas’, Diotima 39 (2011): 73–87.
Antonio Vargas, ‘Proclus on the Vocation of Humanity’, Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), 15 February 2023, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/proclus-on-the-vocation-of-humanity.
“One should get used to reading any ‘injustice’ in myth through the lens of Anaximander’s fragment, which states that “the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time’,” (Simplicius, In Phys. 24, 17; trans. in Kirk, Raven & Schofield, p. 118). ‘Injustice’ in myths is almost always a question of physics, of the emergence of some structure whose incorporated energy will have to be ‘paid back’. One might compare the modern concept of negative entropy, according to which living systems need to ‘export’ their disorder. This structure is the key, I think, to unlocking so much of the symbolic richness in narrative itself.” - E.P. Butler ‘Endymions_bower | More on Hera’, accessed 22 January 2023,
‘Endymions_bower | More on Hera’.
Butler, Edward P. ‘“Queen of Kinêsis: Understanding Hera”; Pp. 126-148 in Queen of Olympos: A Devotional Anthology for Hera and Iuno, Ed. Lykeia (Asheville, NC: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2013).’ Queen of Olympos: A Devotional Anthology for Hera and Iuno. Accessed 17 March 2024. https://www.academia.edu/5098733/_Queen_of_Kin%C3%AAsis_Understanding_Hera_pp_126_148_in_Queen_of_Olympos_A_Devotional_Anthology_for_Hera_and_Iuno_ed_Lykeia_Asheville_NC_Bibliotheca_Alexandrina_2013_.
Hart, David Bentley. Roland in Moonlight. Angelico Press, 2021.
Damascius le Diadoque. Damascius’ ‘Problems and Solutions Regarding First Principles’. Translated by Sara Ahbel-Rappe. Religion in Translation Series. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2010.
I believe that this can be resolved if we stop seeing “things” as fixed substances or essences, Buddhist schools such as the Madhyamaka or the Yagācāra already warn us about this. Precisely the foundation of a “world of death” is the belief that there are fixed things that go away forever at some point, the concept of fixed essence has implicit the concept of limit, finitude, etc… I think it is logical to say That this vision of the world that we somehow have (fallen) makes reality “a death”, we throw a mental blanket over reality. What's more, I dare to speculate that all the Platonism that is used here is a theory that explains the functioning of this mind that we have, which creates (and that is why we see it) fixed essences, useful at some moments but not forever, causing us not to see the essence of reality. This mind that I am referring to is not any consciousness in a brain, nor is it an “energy that emanates from the Source”, nor is it a dimension of a subject, but it is literally reality, exactly the same as the mobile or stone that we see in the street.
Good essay!!!!
Wow! The supratemporal fall makes so much sense! This is the first time I heard about this. Do you have any recommendations for where I could learn more about this? Preferably something not too complicated as I am kind of new to theology. Thanks!