The Fall of Wisdom
The Fall of Wisdom
rethinking time, evil, sin, and freedom
In 2019, I gave a lecture, “The Fall of Wisdom,” which was my first serious attempt at articulating an “antitheology” of evil—a term borrowed from Rowan Williams’ description of Julian of Norwich’s writings). In the lecture, I argued the following nine theses:
We cannot speak of evil.
Evil asserts itself right from the beginning of everything.
Evil does not emerge from a choice but as context-determining reality for all
choices.
Because of what evil does to wisdom and wisdom does to nature, nature cannot be trusted as an always-reliable witness to God’s will.
The cross is unnatural, and the cross judges everything; so, we need to radically rework our natural theologies and all the doctrines and practices rooted in our natural theologies.
.God is not opposed to nature, but God is opposed to evil always and entirely in all of its manifestations.
Eschatologically, God ends evil in such a way that all created realities, including historical experiences, are transfigured.
God sometimes allows us to continue in sins in order to expose and resist evil and evils in our own and others’ lives.
God’s resistance to evil is experienced by us now always only as futility.
I returned to this lecture and these theses today after reading Jesse Hake’s article at Eclectic Orthodoxy, which I highly recommend to you. I’d perhaps say some of what I said in 2019 a bit differently now, but the core claims and arguments hold true, I believe, and what Jesse has brought forth (not only from Origen, Nyssen, Maximus, and Eriugena, but also Bulgakov, Clément, and Hart) serves to bring what I wanted to say into even sharper focus. This passage from Jesse’s article—the final paragraph, in fact—has really left its mark:
Our fall together into a simply chronological kind of time was from out of a fuller and more interconnected kind of time with even more potential for becoming ourselves together than what is offered to us in the flattened time that we now know. However, even fallen time is a gift that allows us each to enter into and take up our own existences within a sequence of connections no matter how broken and disjointed these connections might be. Moreover, God remains with us in this world of bodily decay and death, and announces to us that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21; Hart translation). We are called, therefore, to live and act in accordance with God’s presence in every moment of fallen time, and we can do so in the hope that, even in this lifetime, our service and repentance and thanksgiving might begin to make complete all that we have left unnoticed as well as all that we have actively sought to hurt and destroy in our own pain, selfishness, and confusion.
Is this not what it would mean to be wise, doing the will of God, enlightened with the light of Christ, “redeeming the time” though the days are evil (Eph. 5.15-16)?
If you’re interested, you can read my lecture or watch it (per ush, I went wildly off script at a few points). UPDATE: I had uploaded the wrong version of the original lecture. Here’s the correct one:
You know I appreciate this so much
Is the ‘fuller and more interconnected time’ of which Hake speaks what is being glimpsed in the Transfiguration (And which looks to me to be very similar to the regular stories i hear from Australian Aboriginal people about seeing and hearing the ancestors speaking)? Or is that something else entirely? In any case, I’m not sure I want to spend eternity experiencing time as i do now (memory of the past and anticipation of future) - which would be a form of torture.