Remembering the Future: Toward an Eschatological Ontology

by John Zizioulas

The same importance must be given to eschatology in dealing with the doctrine of the fall. We normally understand the fall as the loss of an original perfection owing to the disobedience of the first human beings to God’s commandment, the cause of the appearance of all the evils in our existence, including corruption and death. Such an understanding of the fall is at odds with the scientifically established fact that corruption and death existed in creation long before the appearance of the human being and were not caused by human behavior. The idea of an originally perfect world was common to ancient mythology and religion, but, in spite of any prima facie evidence to the contrary, it was essentially foreign to both biblical and patristic thought. For both of these, creation and the human being were brought into existence with a call to become perfect, to grow into maturity, as Irenaeus would put it. For both the Bible and the Fathers, creation and the human being were called to a future state of existence much higher than the original one.