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Chapter Five: Eschatology and Liturgical Time
lem of existence? If the fall is not the necessary context and condition of time, then is it true to say that time, in an ultimate sense, consti- tutes a problem for being?
Here we must make an observation in order to clarify the posi- tion we are going to take in this study. We often tend to think of the fall as having introduced something new to creation. Under the in- fluence of Augustine, for example, we tend to understand death as a penalty imposed by God because of the human being’s disobedience to his law. This juridical imagery carries with it the false assumption that a new thing called “death” was now added, so to say, to creation through the fall. Death then becomes a problem for existence only as long as sin exists, and the ultimate ontological connections be- tween death and being are thus obscured. If we, however, follow the approach which seems to have been the mainstream of the Greek fathers, we must understand the fall as doing nothing more than unveiling, uncovering, and realizing what was already there as a pos- sibility inherent in creation, namely death. Death is a problem which ultimately goes back to creation. Creatures die because they are crea- tures6 which have had a beginning. The fall made them unable to overcome their creaturely limitation and achieve the immortality for which they were created.7
This introduces us to the problem of time. If we dissociate time ultimately from the fall and attach it to creation, the first thing we must do is to see how it can be at one and the same time a positive and a negative thing, how time can constitute being, the being of creation—since without time creation would simply not be—and how it can equally constitute a problem for being, since without time neither the fall nor death could be realized. What is it that makes time such an ambiguous and paradoxical factor in creation? Only if we can somehow answer this question, can we go on to consider in what ways liturgical time constitutes a redeemed time for existence.
6 I.e., because of their nature, which is mortal. See Athanasius, De Inc. 4 (PG 25:104B– C): “For the transgression of the commandment turned them back to the state in accor- dance with their nature, so that just as they had come into being out of nonbeing, so were they now deservedly returning through corruption to nonbeing again.... Man is mortal by nature, since he is made out of nothing.”
7 See my Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), p. 101f.
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