David Bentley Hart has advanced the idea of an atemporal or meta-historical fall of humanity (and other powers) within which our entire cosmos is enslaved to death and fragmentation. When talking about this concept at a public lecture in Australia during the summer of 2023, Hart stated that he does not “know of any other version of Christianity.” (From “David Bentley Hart on Suffering,” Gospel Conversations Conference, 28.8.2023)
In The Doors of the Sea (2005) he references “fallen time” and claims we humans have “enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God.” He describes “the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends” as our universe was estranged from “something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield.” Hart spells this out most fully as a basic category of patristic theology:
It is a patristic notion (developed with extraordinary profundity by Maximus the Confessor) that humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death. To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master—to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand—is not to say that God’s ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.
(David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, (2005), p62-63).
Paul Griffiths’ discussion of fallen time in his book Decreation (2014), following St Augustine, places the responsibility for the corruption of time on the angelic rebellion. Before the fall of the angels, cosmic time was systolic; afterwards metronomic. Griffiths posits Eden as an unfallen utopia surrounded by fallen time yet, by God’s grace, immune to its ravages and damage. "Eden is distinct from the cosmos because it is not the place of the angels, and because it is a paradisial enclave within a cosmos-become-world already devastated by the angelic fall”. Adamic sin resulted in the expulsion of humanity from its idyllic systolic existence into the metronomic time of the fallen cosmos, now determined by corruption and death.
(For more, see Eclectic Orthodox)
In The Doors of the Sea (2005) he references “fallen time” and claims we humans have “enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God.” He describes “the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends” as our universe was estranged from “something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield.” Hart spells this out most fully as a basic category of patristic theology:
It is a patristic notion (developed with extraordinary profundity by Maximus the Confessor) that humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death. To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master—to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand—is not to say that God’s ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.
(David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, (2005), p62-63).
Paul Griffiths’ discussion of fallen time in his book Decreation (2014), following St Augustine, places the responsibility for the corruption of time on the angelic rebellion. Before the fall of the angels, cosmic time was systolic; afterwards metronomic. Griffiths posits Eden as an unfallen utopia surrounded by fallen time yet, by God’s grace, immune to its ravages and damage. "Eden is distinct from the cosmos because it is not the place of the angels, and because it is a paradisial enclave within a cosmos-become-world already devastated by the angelic fall”. Adamic sin resulted in the expulsion of humanity from its idyllic systolic existence into the metronomic time of the fallen cosmos, now determined by corruption and death.
(For more, see Eclectic Orthodox)
