The Redemption of Evolution

Maximus the Confessor, The Incarnation, and Modern Science

MARK CHENOWETH

Although some Orthodox Christians are skeptical that biological evolution is compatible with our faith tradition, evolution may actually provide us with a deeper understanding of the doctrine most at Orthodoxy’s heart: the Incarnation. When brought to bear on modern science, the thought of Maximus the Confessor offers us a dazzlingly beautiful vision of what it means for God to become a human so that all of creation might be redeemed, glorified, and deified. In what follows, we will look at how Maximus viewed the creation accounts in the first few chapters of Genesis, and how his concept of the logoi (the plural for logos, which in this context means something like a “teleological code,” or a code for the purpose of a thing) might map onto modern-day evolutionary theory. As we will see, the theory of common ancestry and Maximus’ conception of the human being as a “little universe” actually complement one another in surprising ways. 

We can start with Maximus’ understanding of the beginning of the cosmos. However, as with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, what Maximus means by the “beginning” is not very straightforward. As Maximus says in at least two places in his writings, we can only know our beginning by “investigating” our end. As for how “literally” we should understand him, the answer is probably more literally than makes us logically comfortable. Maximus says that the end has already “properly and truly been created.” This may sound puzzling, but it echoes the portion of the Divine Liturgy where we “remember…the second and glorious coming” of Christ— even though, for us, it hasn’t yet occurred. For God, in his timelessness, all these events have already occurred. This makes cause and effect much more difficult to parse out, since causes and effects don’t have to work chronologically. As patristic scholar Fr. John Behr is fond of saying, from God’s timeless perspective, the future can determine the past. 

This brings us to Maximus’ understanding of what is traditionally known as the fall. Could the fall, for Maximus, be caused by what hasn’t (for us) yet occurred? In one sense, yes. Fr. John, in summarizing his novel interpretation of Origen, happens to give an insightful summary of how we can understand the fall from Maximus’ point of view as well: “our beginning in this world and its time,” he writes, “can only be thought of as a falling away from that eternal and heavenly reality, to which we are called.” Maximus also repeats three times throughout his works that humanity’s fall from that heavenly reality took place “simultaneously with its coming into existence.” For Maximus, our end, or telos, is currently rejected; and time, as we now experience it, is “fallen time.” 

The fall, then, is humanity’s momentary glimpse, and immediate rejection, of its true creation and deification in Christ. In a sense, our true creation has yet to take place, and it is when we are divinized that we are truly created—or as Maximus dares to say, this is when we become “uncreated,” without beginning or end. The great Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov brings out what is implicit in Maximus when he speaks of us giving consent to our own creation. This can only be given at our divinization, in the eschaton; but nevertheless, in God’s foreknowledge, it has already occurred. 

It should be clear that Maximus didn’t interpret the creation story in Genesis 1-3 in a straightforward manner, especially since an instantaneous fall (as he says, humanity “fell together with its coming into being”) is in no way compatible with Adam’s naming of all the animals, his being put to sleep, the creation of Eve from his side, and the entrance of the snake into the garden, all of which took place before the first human sin. Maximus’ non-literal interpretation is not at all surprising, given his general preference for the spiritual interpretation of scripture. For Maximus, the literal level of the texts contains “erroneous opinions,” and anyone who interprets scripture only according to “the letter” will be “concerned only with the enjoyment of the flesh.” Similar statements are scattered throughout his writings. He also believes that certain events have been woven into accounts in scripture “that [have] no real existence whatsoever, thereby rousing our sluggish minds to an investigation of the truth.” 

Although Maximus does seem to believe Adam was a literal human being, in one of his interpretations of the fall, he nevertheless writes that “Adam” symbolizes “the common nature of human beings, and in himself, he mystically figures our nature, which slipped away from the good things of God.” Given that Maximus believed the allegorical or typological interpretation of scripture was legitimate, whether or not the events being allegorized happened historically, it’s reasonable to assume that he would not be opposed today to a more non-literal reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. On our proposed symbolic reading inspired by Maximus, “Adam” symbolizes, as Maximus already said, humanity as a whole and its immediate rejection of its ultimate destiny— or, put more properly, its “true beginning” in Christ. 

Such a symbolic interpretation of Adam and Eve leaves room for what most scientists tell us about the long history of the cosmos and humanity’s common ancestry with the animals (provided that certain discontinuities are maintained between ourselves and our ape-like ancestors). For example, both C.S. Lewis and Sergius Bulgakov suggested that at some point in the evolutionary process, humanity received a “spirit” which set it apart from the rest of the animals. A “Maximian” symbolic interpretation can also accommodate the substantial amount of evidence that homo sapiens most likely did not come from one human pair, but evolved as a population. If Adam symbolizes humanity at large, and its rejection of its final destiny in Christ, locating one individual “historical Adam” in history is no longer essential to the doctrine of the fall.

Even if we can allow for a symbolic interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis, some still believe there are too many hurdles to get over for evolution to be a viable option for Christians. For example, some of us find it hard to accept that there were millions of years of animal death before humans arrived on the earth. If it was human sin that brought evil and death into the world, how is it that animals were dying for millions of years before we arrived on the scene? Maximus offers one possible explanation: that because God had foreseen humanity’s fall “in advance,” he created matter with its inherent disorder and capacity for suffering. Although Maximus offers this proposal as one possibility among others, given what we know today about the history of the natural world, opting for Maximus’s notion of a disordered creation in advance makes good sense. This should not be seen as a punishment, but as the creation of the only type of world that could support a fallen and mortal humanity. Even though we arrived on the earth after the animals, perhaps God had to create a world with our laws of physics so it would support a mortal and fallen humanity, not a perfected one. 

Yet, another question arises: why, if God foreknew the fall, did he create a world that actually helped facilitate it? As Maximus says, humanity became obsessed with the creation rather than the Creator. One possible answer, again, comes from looking to our deification in Christ, rather than our beginning “in Adam.” If, as I’ve said before, our true “creation” comes at the end, then perhaps God looks to our end in deification to decide how to best create a beginning that would eventually help us reach that end. If God’s providence is “perfect,” as Gregory of Nyssa says, or as Maximus says, God’s providence and punishments do “not fail to do what [is] required,” then perhaps it was only by creating the universe in the way that we find it, with all of its death and suffering, that God could eventually lead and educate the community of humans He created back to their end or true creation in Christ. Although there is no “time” involved in God’s decision making, we can crudely speak of our end in Christ being established by God first. Then, God must decide how He will providentially get us to that end. Perhaps it was only in a world of intense natural suffering, with the long and winding road of biological evolution, that God could eventually lead and educate free human beings back to Himself. As Maximus says, God’s “aim was that, by experiencing pain we might learn that we have fallen in love with what is not real, and so be taught to redirect our power to what really exists.”

But what of the randomness of evolution? Is it not a completely directionless process, incompatible with a personal God? This concern brings us to Maximus’ concept of the logoi. The logoi can be thought of as God’s “teleological codes” for everything that exists, or codes for the essence or purpose of a thing. “Before” God created the world, Maximus tells us that in God’s “mind,” “a logos preceded the creation of everything that has received its being from God.” We don’t need to think of this “creation” according to the logos of a thing as God’s making certain animals poof into existence out of thin air. There is no need to envision God causing full-grown zebras and lions to suddenly pop into existence on the savanna, as if they were “beamed down” from above. As Maximus says, God “continues to create all things…at the appropriate time,” which means God is still creating today through perfectly natural causes. What is striking about this concept is how well it seems to accord with the findings of evolutionary science. Evolutionary biology is now full of examples of what is known as “convergence,” which is when separate evolutionary lineages arrive at the same end. In other words, different species of animals tend to evolve in similar ways, according to patterns. One of the most striking examples of convergence can be seen in the separate but parallel evolution of mammals in South America and Australia. As biochemist Michael Denton points out, there is (or was; some are now extinct) an Australian version of “the lion, cat, wolf, mole, anteater, jerboa, and flying squirrel. There was even a giant wombat equivalent of the placental rhino. Only the kangaroo is moderately unique, although it could be thought of as a giant jumping rat!” 

In addition to these examples, the two most prevalent types of eyes in animals have evolved separately on more than 40 occasions, while echolocation—the animal equivalent to sonar— has evolved separately in at least four different species. There are many more examples of this all throughout the animal and plant kingdom. Given evolution’s surprisingly repetitive nature, it makes sense to think of separate logoi for the lion, the cat, and the wolf existing in God’s mind before they were actualized more than once through the evolutionary process. For all the talk of randomness in biology, a good deal of the evolutionary process is quite directional.

It should be clear at this point that Maximus’ vision of the cosmos was not overly centered on humanity, though it is humanity that holds the logoi of all the other creatures together. As Maximus says in one of his most famous texts, Ambiguum 41, the human being is a microcosm of the universe, or a little universe in and of itself. Following and expanding upon Gregory of Nyssa, and other thinkers, Maximus writes that humanity is “like a most capacious workshop containing all things,” “naturally mediating through itself all the divided extremes,” and “manifestly possessing by nature the full potential to draw all the extremes into unity.” Through this potential, he goes on,

humanity was called to … bring to light the great mystery of the divine plan, realizing in God the union of the extremes which exist among beings, by harmoniously advancing in an ascending sequence from the proximate to the remote and from the inferior to the superior.

“Adam,” or the first human beings, obviously failed at this task of uniting all creation— though Christ, as the perfect human being, did not. Maximus is clear that all creatures benefit from the union that Christ’s Incarnation brings about, not just human beings. As he says, not even “the most ignoble among beings [is] completely destitute or devoid of a natural share in the general relationship to the most honored beings.” It is through God’s becoming the perfect human being that all of creation is brought to unity; and from our perspective, the long, and sometimes tragic, process of evolution is healed of all its suffering and death. The majority of biologists today believe humans share a common ancestry with all life on earth, which, from a Maximian perspective, can make sense: Maximus believed the human, in a way, contained within itself the entire universe. It is because Christ, as the perfect human being, contains within Himself the history of the cosmos that he can bring it to its glorious participation in the life of God. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware writes in The Orthodox Way, 

in the ‘new earth’ of the Age to come there is surely a place not only for man but for the animals: in and through man, they too will share in immortality, and so will rocks, trees and plants, fire and water. 

Put in Maximian terms, in the Incarnation, Christ redeems and will redeem every death, disease, and sickness that took place through the evolutionary process, so that “not even one of the logoi of creatures will be found falsified.”

Mark Chenoweth is an adjunct instructor of theology at St. John’s University in Jamaica Estates, New York, and is writing his PhD dissertation on the eschatology of Maximus the Confessor. He is a parishioner at St. Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church in Jamaica Estates.