The problem I shall address is that while the theological category of the fall of creation entails a deformation of nature from an initial ideal state, there are no traces in the biological record of such a prior state nor of such a change. All we can see is the ongoing interaction of creation and destruction, life and death, as the phylogenetic process grinds on. There is currently no evidence of a stage of evolution that was without competition and cruelty, no Golden Age of nature, and no evidence of a sudden fall into pain and relative disorder. The phylogenetic process appears always to have been clumsy and cruel. How are we to understand this?

There are three obvious options: We could say that the period of initial perfection was so brief that its traces are undiscoverable to us at this stage of our knowledge. Since our knowledge of the universe is incomplete we might assume that the signs of a pre-fall state are there but we cannot yet see them. Secondly, we could confine the category of the fall to the moral corruption of the human race and treat the idea of the involvement of the natural world as an imaginative and poetic extension of the moral. This option is most attractive since we can now see the terrifying effect of human depravity on the deformed face of nature’s ecology. Human greed and the lust for power flowing from the original human sin is inflicting deep wounds on the natural world. Thirdly, we could jettison the idea of a fall altogether and regard the creation as simply unfinished, an ongoing process on the way to perfection but not yet there. Human action then might be seen either to cooperate with the creative process or hinder it, and these options might be defined as virtue or vice respectively. In this paper I recommend a fourth option that combines features of all three and also honors the biblical and dogmatic authority of the Christian church.

This subject is appropriate to our conference because we begin our investigation of the possibility of controlling and reducing violence with the primates, our closest relatives in the evolutionary process, and if theology has something to say about the evolutionary process it might help to guide us to a proper antidote. Given the continuity between the natural and the human, if violence in creation is also a theological category then we are justified in supporting the theological prescriptions for the antidote, namely, repentance and openness to the redeeming power of Christ and the Holy Spirit. If violence in creation is not at all a theological category then the case for a theological solution is no longer essential but merely optional. Since, however, the Bible and the high tradition of theology insist that moral and natural negativity are mutually entailed we might look briefly at the contours of the case.

There are two biblical accounts of the fall of creation, one that connects it with the sin of Adam and Eve and the other that connects it with the fall of angels. The Adamic account is based chiefly on three salient passages from the Bible, one from the Old Testament and two from the New, concerning the first and the last Adam. In the Genesis account of the first human sin, God curses the serpent, the woman, and the man respectively: the serpent is "accursed beyond all cattle" (Gen. 3:14-15), the woman will have complex pain in childbirth and be subject to her husband (Gen. 3:16), and the man will have to struggle with a reluctant soil for his daily bread: "Accursed be the soil because of you. With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return (Gen. 3:17-19)."

In 1Corinthians 15:42-49 the Apostle shows that his theology is built on the foundation of the historical and ontological counterpoint of Adam and Christ, the first and last Adams respectively. In Romans 8:18-25 he places the curse on sin within the context of the blessing on faith, the first Adam within the ambiance of the Last. Christ the last Adam has cured the curse on the first Adam and the sufferings of the present time are like the birth pangs of a new and blessed creation (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:6; 5:17). Just as the first Adam is linked negatively with the earth, "dust to dust, ashes to ashes" so the last Adam is linked positively with the earth, "..the creation itself shall be set free from bondage to decay for the sake of the liberty of the glory of the children of God" (8:21). The transformation of the children of God will be the integral event in the transformation of the whole creation. The creation groans as in childbirth, and the believers groan too, but it is the groaning of a new birth, a discontent of hope.

What is it that the creation, led by the human race, is to be rescued from? Paul calls it "futility" (mataiotêti; cf.1 Corinthians 15:42b) and says that God subjected the creation to this futility because of Adam’s sin (8:20). Futility is synonymous with bondage to decay, (douleia tes pthoras) and its opposite is "the liberty of the glory of the children of God." Paul, like all of the New Testament and the Fathers reads the Old Testament through the lens of the death and Resurrection of Christ, so that the transformation of the body of Christ the last Adam in the Resurrection towards life means that there was a transformation in the body of the first Adam in sin towards death. The remarkable thing is that both Testaments link the body so closely to creation that what affects it affects all. That is the brief and to be sure inadequate account of the first theological category of the Fall of Creation.

We Girardians have often discussed the question whether the mimetic theory of hominization does not equate the Creation with the Fall, in the sense that the outbreak of unanimous violence against the surrogate victim, which creates the cultural world, in as much as "all culture proceeds from the victim," is spontaneous and not willed and therefore determined and not free. Was there a moment when the hominids had a free choice to interpret the death of the victim as either a murder or a sacrifice? If there were, the sin of fratricide might have been confessed, forgiven and expunged, if there were not it would be institutionalized and concealed like a foundation sacrifice beneath the cornerstone of civilization, the lamb slain as the foundation of the world. We know that the decision was the latter, but we do not know that it was a free decision, and if it were not it could not be reckoned as sin, and the emergence of the sacrificially based differentiations that make culture possible would be as automatic as the initial appearance of the scapegoating mechanism itself, a spontaneous self-correction of a social system that had become catastrophically unstable. The origin of humanity and human culture as currently constituted would then have been a natural process like the emergence of prior stages in the phylogenetic process; and human consciousness, developing only after the myth-interpretation of the first murder, would willy nilly have the deep structure of a denial of complicity in any violence at all. Culture would have been perverse from its origin, the creation and fall of the human world would be synchronous and synonymous.

This surrogate victimage and its deep rooted denial in the myths, rituals and prohibitions of culture, is the original sin according to one possible Girardian reading. The divine revelation through the history of Israel culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus, is a gradual drawing back of the veil of denial and the disclosure of the foundation sacrifice of culture. The Cross discloses the lamb slain from the foundation of the world and the human violence that springs from mimetic rivalry and scapegoating, and in the light of that disclosure offers repentance and forgiveness. Original sin is mimetic rivalry institutionalized as the structural differentiations of culture and society. In this sense sin is a more fundamental category than the traditional Christian categories of pride (Libido dominandi), lust (libido concupiscendi) and greed (libido possedendi), it is the libido common to all three, desire distorted by mimesis to violence.

This is a convincing account of what Christian theology means by original sin, but it suffers from a potentially fatal flaw, namely that it excludes the element of free choice and so appears to be a natural phenomenon. An evolutionary account might find it quite acceptable; the competition amongst the genes to replicate themselves under optimal conditions entails the expulsion of losers, and this might occur automatically at the moments when the system risks malfunctioning because of a critical level of competition. The mimetic libido is easily identifiable as the driving energy of a gene’s urgent need to replicate, the energy of evolutionary psychology’s explanation of things. Humanity is the ultimately passive instrument of the gene’s urge to replicate, the author of the human urge to dominate, procreate and confiscate, and since that author is selfish, as Richard Dawkins tells us, human consciousness should simply acknowledge that fact and act accordingly. Like those original hominids we call a murder a sacrifice but now we know why, because we are constitutionally selfish organisms driven to replicate by blind forces of desire that are ultimately as natural as the wind and the rain. The Girardian insistence on the automatic nature of the founding process, so well appreciated by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, invites a deterministic interpretation.

Schwager takes up the discussion at this point and criticizes his fellow Jesuit, the late, great Teilhard de Chardin, for interpreting original sin naturalistically. Ever since reading Teilhard as a young man I have been captivated by the lyrical elegance of his view of the creation, and I owe my most consoling insight on this subject, which I shall introduce in due course, to him. According to Teilhard original sin is the element of violence and destruction in the evolutionary process, but it is necessary and therefore to be viewed positively. Holmes Ralston, in a recent, thoughtful essay on whether nature needs to be redeemed, ultimately does nothing but reaffirm Teilhard’s argument by saying that every significant advance in the process seems to entail a "struggling through to something new." Development entails an ineluctable suffering; suffering is positively integral to the creation.

This positive view of suffering is deeply lodged in Christian spirituality. The equally famous Ronald Knox approaches Teilhard when he writes, "Why is it that Jesus will not keep his sufferings to himself? .....because that would be avarice in one who was so prodigal of pain. As he covets suffering for himself, so he will allow his best friends to share it; their watchfulness, their sighs, their tears shall be privileged to co-operate with him in the work of the world’s redemption."Such a view does not ultimately support Teilhard because it belongs in the category of redemption not of creation; it looks forward to the elimination of suffering as a result of the sufferings of Christ rather than an ongoing process of creation through suffering; Christ bears the sin of the world in order to bear it away.

Teilhard’s view is that suffering and violence are an integral part of the big picture, to be accepted as the darkness that makes evident the light, the shadow cast by the sun of progress. To this Schwager rightly objects that this process cannot be regarded as sinful because there is not freedom in it. Teilhard nuances his position by saying that the negativity of creation is not sin as such but the precursor and possibility of sin, like the fomes peccati of Tridentine theology, the tinder of sin that ignites when the spark of a free will chooses it. Schwager argues that while this is an accurate description of the interface between human consciousness and natural negativity, nature is not merely deterministic; there is a freedom in nature itself, as Quantum and Chaos theory tell us. If there is freedom in nature then in principle there could be sin, and one can imagine a continuity between human freedom and natural freedom, between human sin and natural sin. On such a view how shall we imagine the driving force of evolution? Is it a necessary process unfolding according to strict rational laws? Is it a random process groping ahead and able to be summarized only in retrospect and in terms of the much looser laws of statistics? Or is it a combination of order and randomness, determinism and freedom, a wrangle between stasis and fluidity? By accepting the third position Schwager tells us, we can understand how humans are innocently embedded in their animal context (determinism) and nevertheless culpable if they do not rise above that context, morally and spiritually (freedom). However, this conclusion is too timid. Since there is freedom in the natural process, there can also be sin, and thus the human choice to misinterpret the founding murder and conceal its violence is an expression of the system’s own dynamics and takes place apparently but not really spontaneously at the point of the emergence of consciousness into culture. The wrong choice at that moment of hominization had been prepared by the sin already in the system; humans merely acquiesce in it, take the line of least resistance. Sin in nature is not merely fomes peccati by sin as such. Where it originates we have yet to discover, but it was in creation before the sin of Adam.

I want now to introduce the insight I first got from Teilhard: it is that human consciousness, with its freedom and its limits, is a direct emergence of the evolutionary process itself and therefore the process must always have had in it the developing seeds of such a consciousness. This is a position beyond both materialism and idealism, a panpsychism that Teilhard talks of in terms of the "spiritual underside of matter" and of the emergence of this spiritual underside pari passu with the growth in complexity of matter both inorganic and organic, until it reaches the present limit of material complexity, namely the human brain. The brain-mind interface is the place of a radically new emergence within the system, comparable to the emergence of the organic from the inorganic, the point at which for the first time the system transcends itself, and is able to reflect on itself and intervene purposefully in itself. The brain-mind interface is where the freedom that has always been part of the system comes into its own, breaks free, as it were, consciously to choose sides in the contest between life and death that comprises the whole system.

Robert Wright a journalistic spokesperson for evolutionary psychology, puts the matter well in a tart epigram; "The first man to have known his creator hated him." Darwin hated the cruelty of the creator he had discovered, hated its clumsy, wasteful, prodigality with life and with pain. He ultimately recoiled from his researches and spent the last decades of his life investing in the stock market, where he again proved his genius and died immensely rich. Darwin was of course himself a product of the phylogenetic system and so in him and the others who have disclosed the process of our creation to us, that process comes to self-consciousness and self-expression. The most remarkable thing here is how determinedly the system criticizes itself, intervenes in itself, and tries to change itself. The whole of medical science might be interpreted as an intervention by the system in itself in order to eliminate as far as possible the pain, death and waste of it. If it were purely a naturalistic system one would expect it to acquiesce in itself even at the stage of self-consciousness, and produce only untroubled psychopaths who magnify their own power at the expense of others, but rather it produces a consciousness capable of reflecting critically on itself and then determinedly setting out to change the process that produced it.

From a theological point of view, one of the most significant recent instances of this reflexive intervention is the biotech research into the process of aging in humans. I read it as the evolutionary process challenging its own inability to function without the element of death, a repudiation of death by the system of death.

There are essentially two tracks along which this research is running. The first is the research on chromosomes and the role of the telomeres. The telomeres guard the ends of the forty six chromosomes in the normal human cell from harm, like the hard bits at the end of a shoelace that keep it from unraveling. In vivo the telomeres become smaller with every division of the cell and when they reach a critical size the cell causes itself to die rather than risk the genetic instability that might result from a naked chromosomal end. In vitro, however, it has been observed that cells can go on dividing without limit as long as the telomeres are renewed, and this artificial renewal is now possible. The step from in vitro to in vivo remains to be taken, but here is a possibility of preventing the aging of cells altogether. A recent discovery announced on 5/14/99, reveals that the telomeres function to draw the ends of the chromosomes into loops, presenting to the outside world as it were "the perfect topological continuum of a circle." The potential danger of such artificial renewal of the telomeres is that the cells will become cancerous, since the self-destructive behavior of cells usually happens to prevent the genetic instability that leads to cancer, but there are now good reasons to discount this possibility.The second research track in this reflexive assault on death by the system of death attempts to use human stem cells to grow new organs to replace defective ones, or more simply to produce cells that might be injected into morbid organs and rejuvenate them by growing fresh tissue from within. This opens up a possible future of modular immortality. Since these cells come initially from blastocysts the ethical question of research using human fetal material has to be faced.

Both tracks together promise a conquest of death or at least the prospect of rivaling Methuselah. Perhaps the P source of the Pentateuch was not merely fanciful when it represented the effect of sin by means of the gradual reduction of the human life span as attested by the genealogy lists in the early chapters of Genesis. I read the development of this technology as an attempt to remedy the pitiful shortness of the human life span, which is not natural but the result of a catastrophe within the evolutionary system that is now beginning to repair itself by using itself, in the form of research scientists and biotechnology, for this purpose. Death is unnatural in the system of life.

So I recommend that we accept as fact the presence of a personal/spiritual energy in the creative process of evolution, which suffers in the pain and waste of it all but eventually comes into its own and is able reflexively to begin to do something to mitigate and eventually eradicate this evil element. This personal/spiritual power is, by the hypostatic union, the same one that came to unique expression as Jesus Christ. He is the purest instantiation of the good power of creation and his death and Resurrection are the determinative events in the history of creation, because in them the creative power faces the pain of it all and redirects the system decisively from death to life.

So as we face the question whether there is any evidence in the evolutionary record of the Fall, any indication of an age without pain and death, we must look not at the fossil record, or the conjectures about the big bang; the real evidence for a time without pain and death is in the process’ memory that emerges in our human self-consciousness, in the determined hostility we show towards what Wright calls our creator, in our instinctual resistance to death. This hostile resistance to death is also a hope for life that is a recovered memory, not just of individuals but of the phylogenetic system itself, registered at last in the self-consciousness of human beings, which is the system’s most advanced stage to date. Where else would the sense of moral indignation at the waste and cruelty of evolution come from, the determination to change it by eradicating pain and death, if not from a systemic memory of another state of reality? The fall of creation is registered on the human heart, which is itself merely a stage of the creation, a moment when at last it can remember that it was abused as a child. Yes, this model has much in common with the recently popular "repressed memories" contagion, with SRA, Satanic Ritual Abuse, that wreaked such havoc in pre-schools in the eighties and early nineties, provoking witch hunts that were classically Girardian in nature. The vision of deathless perfection that drives our intervention in our own creation is a recovered memory of the phylogenetic system and evidence of the fall of creation.

The mention of Satanic abuse brings us to the second theological category of the Fall, namely the fall of the angels. In order to give this explanation logical rigor we must accept the scriptural teaching that the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" of creation when it was a child took place not in the Garden of Eden but before that, in the realms of the angels, when by mimetic rivalry with God, Lucifer the "light bearer" and angel of the dawn, became Satan the rival of God. This move is analogous to a move from biology to physics, from the saga of life on earth to the drama of galactic explosions, big bangs, multiple universes and inflation theory. The extent of the effects of the fall is not only the earth but the whole creation, of which the earth is merely one instance. The one who would "rather rule in Hell than serve in heaven"(Milton), wounded this earthly part of the creation along with the whole universe by his initial rebellion and then frustrated its healing by enlisting the human will in his rebellious mimetic rivalry with God. He was created ruler of this world; as the archon tou kosmou toutou (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11) he should have cared for it, but his mimetic rivalry with the creator plunged him into envy, and when he fell to earth he took all of his fiefdom with him into corruption. The curse on Eve, "I will multiply your pains in childbearing, you shall give birth to your children in pain" (Genesis 3:16), is the form the general curse on creation takes upon earth. Earthly creation became a long, clumsy, process that gives birth to its children in pain. For this reason there is no physical evidence in the earthly record of a Golden Age of Nature and a Fall into relative disorder and death, because the Fall took place elsewhere and affected the earth ab initio . Thus from an earthly point of view the creation and the fall seem to have taken place at the same time, but that is only apparently not really the case, because in the very beginning everything God created was purely good.

The fall of the angels is logically necessary to the argument that there has been a fall of creation in general and of earth in particular, and it is also commensurate with the biblical witness. The prior question in Eden is, " Where does the serpent come from?"- a clear indication that there is a person hostile to God and to humanity already there when humans come upon the stage. Eden was already corrupt when humans arrived, outwardly benign but hiding the serpent of mimetic desire. Furthermore, in Genesis 6 we read that there was a fall of the sons of god. "...the sons of God, looking at the daughters of men, saw they were pleasing, so they married as many as they chose. Yahweh said, ‘My spirit must not forever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh; his life shall last no more than a hundred and twenty years’" (Genesis 6:2-3). Here is an indication that the human lifespan shrinks because of sin; and the offspring of these unions are identified as the demi-gods of old, a category profoundly unacceptable to Hebrew monotheism. In all of the accounts of the fall the essential tort is lése-majeste, in this case the emergence of a race of semi-divine monsters that compromises the sole divinity of Yahweh. It is also an instance of mimetic crisis from whose confusion monsters emerge, neither human nor divine, a blasphemous hybrid. These lascivious angels are fallen before their fornication with the daughters of men; before this sortie into human sexuality. Before they craved human women they were already, like their leader the Serpent-Satan, intent on destroying the human creation, by fornication and monstrosity, both of which are still painfully with us.

I am more or less following the French theologian of a previous generation, Louis Bouyer, in this meditation on the angels. He suggests that since the creation was already corrupt and subject to negativity before the coming of humankind, the advent of humanity was a divine initiative for the healing of creation, a bridgehead into the fallen cosmos. From the first God intended to undo the work of Satan through the emergent human consciousness, which would be the source of life and immortality if it remained in its initially perfect connection with the divine creative power from which it emerged. However, Satan seduced the first man and woman and spoiled this divine initiative. The first Adam therefore turned out to be merely a living soul, who participated in the Satanic corruption of the earth and all the human world; it is the last Adam who is the life-giving spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45), and who did the work the first Adam failed to do.

Bouyer speaks of the three kenoseis of the divine, the first in creation when God initially allows the freedom of created beings, the angels, as a potential resistance to his will, a freedom that was exercised by the bad angels to damage the divine project. There remained, however, legions of faithful angels who led by Michael- who very name means, "Who is like unto God?"- cast down the one who claimed to be like God. From that moment the creation was a field of battle between the good and bad angels, the forces of life and the forces of death, a battle that is endemic to the creative process. The second kenosis is the creation of humanity, the emergence of human self-consciousness from the earthly process of creation. This constitutes a new creative initiative, a triumph of life over death, an opportunity to change the process from a battle ground into an Eden of peace. Through Adam, made in the divine image, God hoped to reverse the damage done by Satan and restore the pristine perfection of the creation. Satan, however, succeeded in exploiting human freedom to frustrate the divine plan. The third and great kenosis is the incarnation of God himself, wherein the divine freedom thwarts the tempter’s power and begins the restoration of all things.

Have I not compounded the problem by explaining an obscure category, the fall of creation, by an even more obscure category, the fall of the angels? Possibly, but there is so much we thought we knew scientifically that turns out almost every day to be less than half of the truth, and there is so much about nature yet to be disclosed, that I have become respectful even of the doctrine of angels, which I simply ignored as irrelevant for most of my life. The traditional doctrine of angels views them analogously with the spermatikoi logoi of the Stoic doctrine of the Logos and its ramification into all reality to bring order to the cosmos. There are the angels of the wind, and the rain, of the sun and the moon, of the nations and of each individual. The characteristic mark of the angels by comparison with the logoi is that they are personal; they are the thoughts of God in the form of free persons. Thus we express by means of the doctrine of angels the twofold conviction that the even the material aspect of the creative process includes an element of freedom and that that freedom is susceptible to deformation and to restoration. The restoration has begun in the Last Adam, the Hypostatic Union begins the process of the return of all things, led by humanity, to the perfection life possessed before the Fall of the angels.

I believe that theology must engage with the external world as it is unfolding for us through the best science and technology. The time for existentialist subjectivism in theology is past. In order to speak of the physical world we must engage again with categories like "angels;" they are the traditional way we have spoken about the divine impingement upon the physical world. Once we decide that there is a spiritual underside to matter, that human self-consciousness emerges from the phylogenetic system and that that entails a spiritual presence in all of the system, then talk of angels makes sense. There is a way between materialism on the one hand and idealism on the other, it is the Christian doctrine of creation and redemption, the mystery of the incarnation of the divine in his own creation, the three kenoseis, the hypostatic union, and the perichoresis by which the material is taken up into the spiritual and the human made divine.