The Fathers, by detailed study of the Bible, have demonstrated that the Fall was a truly cosmic catastrophe, eclipsing the paradisal state with a new state of universal existence. Man, the son of God, wished to kill the divine Father and take possession of Mother Earth. ‘Man,’ says Maximus the Confessor, ‘wished to lay hold on the things of God without God, before God and not according to God’s will.’ And so ‘he delivered the whole of nature as a prey to death’ (PG,91,1156 C).
So it is that humankind can no longer see the world as it really is, upheld by God in his glory, for the creation does not impose itself on us any more than the Creator. Instead, we see the universe in the likeness of our own decay, coloured by our covetousness and disgust, and thus we tarnish it, harden it and break it in pieces. Thus come into being the murderous categories of time, space and materiality – time that brings exhaustion and death, space that separates and imprisons, and materiality, opaque, delimited, the mirror of our spiritual death. The ravished earth becomes a tomb for Man, this Oedipus with bloodshot eyes.
Meanwhile God, being shut out from the human heart, i.e. the heart of the world, nevertheless maintains it from outside, imposing enough order to keep it from totally disintegrating, and to make history possible, and in the end salvation. By their assurance of continuity, the laws of nature witness to the universal Covenant that God made with human beings the day after the Flood, after the waters had washed over the wicked human race but had failed to dissolve away the original sin of creation: ‘While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease’ (Genesis 8.22). However, that Covenant, made not only with humanity but with ‘every living creature’, was henceforth to include death, a bond of exteriority and violence between human beings and the universe. Human beings are reminded of their duty in the world, but they must perform it in ‘fear and trembling’; and they will kill to eat, something which had no place in the state of paradise. However, as a pledge of redemption, God reserves to himself the blood, the vital essence in which he is present, which he pervades and quickens with his Breath. The wholly good creation groans, waiting to be delivered from the forces of evil which transform its worshipful transparence into the ‘wall’ that from the time of Sartre has haunted the modern mind.
It is from this point of view, it seems to me, that Christians ought to think about evolution. Geological and paleontological investigations are necessarily stopped at the gates of Paradise, where life was of a different order. Science, itself a product of our fallen state, cannot go back before the Fall. What science calls ‘evolution’ is, in spiritual terms, the progressive objectification or externalization of the place that the first Adam had in the universe, and lost. Being no longer the ‘mystical body’ of Adam, the world collapses into separation and death, in which state God holds it steady, keeps it safe, and directs it towards the incarnation of Christ,· the new Adam. In 1924 Teilhard de Chardin, in a short essay entitled My Universe, wrote this (in view of his later works, remarkably traditional) account of creation:
From whence did the universe acquire its original stain? Is it not likely that the original multiple was born, as the Bible seems to indicate, from the disintegration of an already unified being, the first Adam; so that, in the present period, the world is not ascending, but climbing back towards Christ, the second Adam? If that is the case, then this present stage of evolution (of spirit out of matter) must have been preceded by a stage of involution (of spirit into matter), a process, of course, not verifiable by experience, since it would have taken place in another dimension of reality.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
