On the Progress of Man

In the development of mankind, both in the individual and in society, progress necessarily carries with it possibilities both of good and of new evil. Thus, the child, first learning to speak, opens upon a whole new world of evil which until now lay dormant within him, as a seed. So also the nation, awakening to its individual genius, its role in human history and significance to the progress of mankind, thereby opens upon the projection onto the world of its native vices, which are now only given new and horrible possibilities of expression. The coming of age, it turns out, is often an experience not only of anticipation but of disappointment and regret. Having one’s eyes opened, as the story of Genesis 3 demonstrates, might well be experienced as a fall.

This law of human development can be understood in at least two ways. It may be understood entropically, as an example of order tending toward chaos. On the other hand, and I take this to be the broadly Christian understanding, it may be taken as a law of the gathering up of evil. As Jesus himself indicates, the rationale of his coming is two-fold: to finally reveal the Father, and in so doing, reveal also the hearts of men. “For judgement I have come into the world, that they who see not, may see; and those who see, may become blind” (Jn 9:39), and “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no cloak for their sin” (Jn 15:22). Origen’s exegesis of this latter passage bears out my thesis. Christ is Reason, and it is the coming of Reason which makes one guilty of sin. There is a double development of all things, progressing not only along the line of the good but also along the line of evil, leading to an eschatological reckoning. “Let the weeds come up with the wheat,” says the Lord. And perhaps this latter view can incorporate the former, insofar as the apparent entropic movement of the world can be seen as apocalyptic, approaching an age when the last vestiges of chaos are revealed—“for nothing is hidden which will not be revealed” (Lk. 8:17)—in order to be conquered.

This requires a metaphysical exposition of creation which, because it deals with the eschaton and origin of the world, resides on the supratemporal borders of time, and therefore cannot help but be presented in terms of what Bulgakov called “ontological myth.” Bearing that in mind, it can rightly be said that in the making of things out of nothing, nothing itself is reified— that is, nothing becomes in some sense objectified, and has an effect in the world. Here lies the transformation of nothingness simpliciter into evil as a deficient cause in the world. Paradoxically, it is precisely the creatio ex nihilo which virtually reifies nothingness into evil. It is only when something emerges out of nothingness that that which is nothingness in it (which is in fact the distinctive note of creatures whose being is given from without) becomes, by this very movement, abysmal.

Thus, from the first instant, creation is an act of cosmic war; God’s first rebuke of the abyss (see Psalm 104:7, which strikingly treats the creation and deluge as if they were the same event). But does not the Psalmist say also that it was God who covered the world, as in a garment, with the abyss? Indeed. Yet can it not be answered that simply making the world in the midst of the abyss is to clothe it with the abyss? The world is made from within. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” Might it not be correct to say of the creation itself that it is “like a leaven hidden in three measures of meal?” History, then, is recast as the war on the abyss which will only be complete when every last trace of that protean deep is gone, and Being and Light pervade all. “And I saw a new heaven and new earth: and there was no more sea” (Rev. 21:1). The initial divisions of the world, outlined in the creation narrative of Genesis, are revealed to be not the terminus ad quem of the creative act, but rather a cosmic divide-and-conquer maneuver, an expression of that deeper art by which the art of the betrayer is undone, as goes a verse in the 6th century Pange lingua gloriosi:

Hoc opus nostrae salutis ordo depoposcerat, / multiformis proditoris ars ut artem falleret, / et medelam ferret inde, hostis unde laeserat.

This work of our salvation, for this arrangement did cry out, / that the multiform traitor’s art, by art might be unwound, / and the cure be borne from there, where the enemy’s strike was found.

And this is perhaps precisely how Christ shall become all in all, when finally, through the branch and the stem, that abysmal root of the world is found and torn out. The scandal of the Cross serves first and foremost as the occasion of the making full of sin (Mt. 23:32; cf 1 Thess. 2:16, and also in the Old Testament, Gen. 15:16, Dan. 8:23), in order that it might gathered all together and swallowed up. Or better, as Maximus put it, the flesh of Christ is as a worm on the hook of the cross (interpreting the text of Ps. 22:6), by which the Leviathan of old is baited and caught. He surrounds himself with the power of the deep in order to burst it asunder. Augustine writes along similar lines concerning the golden calf of Exodus: “Therefore perhaps that calf, being ground to powder, was cast into the water and given to the children of Israel to drink, that so the body of ungodliness might be swallowed up by Israel,” (Exposition, Ps. 35:25) which means, as he writes further on, to “pass into the Body of Christ” (Expositions, Ps. 89:23). For the calf, the fruition and reification of Israel’s sin in the desert, is itself ground up and sprinkled in the water from the Rock, which, as Paul says, is Christ.

In summation, my thesis is that the whole of creation and its duration as we experience it, is nothing other than the single creative act of God, taking beings out of the primordial abyss, and that the abyss, by virtue of God’s act, becomes in some sense an agent (in that it becomes a negation of within creation). The culmination of this creation is when every shadow of the abyss has been swallowed up in being, when the entire universe is joined together in one Body of Christ. The following questions present themselves in light of this. (1) Is God, then, responsible for evil? (2) Is evil then a substance and a principle of the created order? (that is, does this thesis imply a kind of Manicheaism?) (3) Where and when does the Fall factor in to this picture? In order to answer this last question especially, an analysis of created freedom must be provided. If there is a created freedom, then it too must undergo the process of being brought out of the abyss, and not only that, but this must happen in the mode of freedom, in a determined indeterminacy, where being and the abyss co-mingle most violently. The free creature must be responsible (even if not exclusively responsible) for determining himself outside the abyss, must bring out and expose every last trace of that abyss in order that he also conquer it. In a word, the free creature must create himself, and this act of the free creature will in the final analysis have to be concluded within the one, unique divine act of creation.

I will do my best to address each of these questions in follow up posts. Along the way, I greatly appreciate readers comments and critiques.