The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart argues for an atemporal, meta-historical fall of humanity, within which our entire cosmos is enslaved to death and fragmentation. In an 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 ... (my emphasis)
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 (of Nyssa) 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 ... 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.”
“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 ... (my emphasis)
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 (of Nyssa) 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 ... 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.”