Logoi–Evolution Dissonance: (1) Immutability of Logoi versus Mutability of Evolution

Maximus is quite clear that the logoi are immutable and inviolable and so it is tempting to think he understood them to be Platonic forms or universals existing as timeless and unchangeable “Types” in the intelligible divine realm in which the sensible, created realm can then participate, albeit weakly and imperfectly. It is the kind of “typological thinking” that was to be seriously challenged by the “population thinking” of Darwinism with its blurring of ontological boundaries through time and in space (Mayr 2004, 134–37). But Maximus’ Platonism was less constrained by typology. For him, all creaturely details (not just generic types) are predefined in the Logos and are executed without error or diminution (Louth 2004, 188; Maximus 2014, Amb 42.23). The logoi appear at their proper time in the finite realm, all the while existing eternally and unchangeably in the Logos (Maximus 2014, Amb 7.16, 7.19, 42.13). Therefore, the inviolability of the logoi needs to be understood not in terms of the fixity of species but in terms of the invincibility of divine intention and purpose with respect to all levels of the created order, from highest genera right down to particular individuals—thus apparently ruling out those varieties of process and kenotic theology that see evolution as a dynamic interplay between God's ultimate purposes and creation's autonomous freedom (Sollereder 2019, 63–81). For Maximus, creaturely ontology follows God's will ineluctably every step of the way. Only in the case of human beings is there to be found a freedom that allows their so‐called tropos—a malleable mode of human expression—to either follow or depart from their ontological logos of being (logos tēs ousias) (Skliris 2018, Chapter 2).

Logoi–Evolution Dissonance: (2) Teleology of Logoi versus Dysteleology of Evolution

The teleological nature of the logoi is a result of the fact that creation is in motion toward its final repose in God, the summing up of all things in the Logos (Mitralexis 2018). The fact that, as Maximus insists, the Logos is the logoi, and vice versa, means that this purpose is not externally imposed by God but internally enacted or “lived out” by God. The Logos does not threaten the causal closure of the cosmos assumed by metaphysical naturalism since he does not add anything new that was not already present, by himself, from the beginning. This has been known as “panentheistic naturalism” (Ritchie 2019, Chapter 8) or “incarnational naturalism” (Knight 2007, 112) whereby God does not compete with his own creation but is immanently unfolding within it as his eternal “fixed instructions” (Knight 2007, Chapter 4). Such an “immanentist” view of God operating within evolution is not new, and was an early theological response to Darwinism, exposing as it did, the implicit deism lurking in those “externalist” notions of God as a divine watchmaker or demiurge (Moore 1891, 75–76). Moreover, it is increasingly recognized that evolution is much more “internally driven” than previously thought and that the external filtering of natural selection needs to be supplemented with internal mechanisms such as autopoiesis, developmental constraint, and convergence (Depew and Weber 1996; Stoeger 1998; Wagner 2016). Taken to its logical conclusion, the fact that God acts “in, with, and under” the processes of biological evolution (Peacocke 1998, 367) implies that: (a) nothing is left to chance in the creation of new ontology; and (b) that every creature is theophanic, revealing both God's unfolding purposes, and God himself (Bradshaw 2000, 813). Therefore, contrary to those models of divine action in which God kenotically gives chance a “role to play” in the achievement of his ends (Bartholomew 1984, 21), and contrary to those that see only tragedy and failure in the countless deaths and extinctions of intermediate individuals and species (Schneider 2020, Chapter 1), Maximus’ vision of the logoi would tend to emphasize the purposefulness and goodness of all products of evolution. The logoi are not just “great attractors” or convergent optima on the adaptive landscape, pace Southgate (Southgate 2008, 61). No, every transitional form, no matter how ephemeral, has the dignity of being specified by the logoi and has the sacredness of actually being, somehow, the Logos incarnate.

Logoi–Evolution Dissonance: (3) Uncreated Logoi versus Created Cosmos

How then can the creator‐creature distinction be safeguarded against a wholescale pantheism or divine idealism? The answer might be found in two distinctively Eastern resources: the concept of the divine energies (Lossky 1976, Chapter 4; Ware 2004; Bradshaw 2004, 2013a; Karayiannis 2013), and the metaphysical distinction between logos tēs ousias (“logos of being”) and tropos hyparxeōs (“mode of existence”) or hypostasis (individual or particular instance of something) (Skliris 2012; Louth 2017; Skliris 2018). Maximus speaks of certain things existing eternally around God (peri theou) yet not being identical to God's essence (Maximus 1985, Cap Gnost 1.48–50). These divine energies or activities are in some sense “in” God without affecting the fundamental simplicity of God and without adding extra divine persons to the Trinity. Maximus also speaks of everything having its own mode of existence (Maximus 2014, Amb 42.26). The logoi are never present in creation “in the nude” but always accompanied by a particular tropos (Zizioulas 2010, 150). In the case of human beings with free will, a person's tropos can be aligned or misaligned with their logos, but in the case of nonhumans their tropos is fixed, unless God should supernaturally intervene, as in the case of miraculous transformations of nature (Maximus 2014, Amb 42.26–28). On the one hand, therefore, God is present in creation as his energies, not his essence, thus avoiding pantheism. On the other hand, the logoi, as God's ideas and wills, are given a mode of existence outside the mind of God, thus avoiding divine idealism. The logoi bridge God and creation in such a way that creation can be said to be both ex Deo (by virtue of divine exemplarity), and ex nihilo (by virtue of divine will and power to produce a finite mode of existence). Such a view is significantly different from those Western traditions that would prefer to speak in terms of finite creatures participating in God's essence (Sherman 2008; Boersma 2011; Tollefsen 2012; Davison 2019). One might ask, what is actually meant by tropos huoparxeōs or “mode of existence” and can such a metaphysical term be interpreted scientifically? One possible answer is to consider the tropos as a platform or vehicle for hosting information, analogous to how different kinds of hardware (e.g., vinyl, CD, tape) store the same data (e.g., music or software programs). According to this model, the logoi are information that cannot exist without being hypostasized in a particular mode of existence, either “inside” God, as the person of the Logos, or “outside” God, as finite creatures. Of course, God is not a hardware platform, and we should be wary of reifying information such that it becomes a genus or universal standing over both God and creation. Yet, as Niels Gregersen has argued, there are grounds for considering the Logos, or Word, to be a “divine informational resource,” the “generative matrix” of all that is, and the source of all rationality and meaning (Gregersen 2010, 2013).

Logoi–Evolution Dissonance: (4) Good Logoi versus Evil Evolution

Perhaps the most difficult challenge to an evolutionary interpretation of the logoi is the “debris” left behind in the wake of evolutionary change: the competition, violence, suffering, and destruction that is part of the differential survival and reproduction upon which the process of natural selection depends. The suffering of nonhuman creatures is a particularly troublesome aspect since its occurrence for millions of years before the arrival of Homo sapiens makes it less easily attributable to a cosmic fall resulting from Adam and Eve's first sin. Many theodicies and defenses have been advanced to account for why God used an evolutionary process involving so much suffering and extinction (Southgate 2008; Murray 2008; Creegan 2013; Sollereder 2019; Schneider 2020), though few, if any of these, have made any reference to the logoi, which is perhaps not surprising given the apparent incompatibility of the immanent and good logoi with the natural evil incurred in biological evolution. Notwithstanding this apparent dissonant feature of the logoi, I will now draw upon two other resources from Maximus and the Eastern tradition to help restore some harmony: the intrinsic evolutionary character of the logoi; and the occlusion of the logoi with so‐called “garments of skin” within the framework of a simultaneous creation and fall.

First, the logoi are intrinsically and primordially evolutionary. According to one of Maximus's famous triads, the logoi are moving along a course (dromos) or trajectory involving a beginning, a middle and an end, corresponding to the logoi of being, well‐being, and eternal well‐being (Maximus 2014, Amb 7.22; 2018, Ad Thal 60.8). “Being” is equivalent to the original creation of things, “well‐being” to their spatiotemporal flourishing, and “eternal well‐being” to their final eschatology consummation outside space and time (Skliris 2018). The journey involves advancement, maturation and completion. It is not the result of sin but a fundamental, “originally intended” process. An important consequence of all this is that from our current vantage point, we are able to perceive only the logoi of well‐being of creatures and not their logoi of being or their logoi of eternal well‐being, since such extremities lie outside space‐time and beyond the purview of the natural sciences. Knowing that we have only a partial view of the logoi should therefore give us pause to consider whether some of what we might label as the “not‐good” of evolution (or of creation more generally) arises not from degradation or corruption (e.g., caused by sin) but from immaturity and incompleteness. This is not to say that all the sinister aspects of evolutionary biology are to be understood in terms of immaturity, but simply to say that before trying to explain how additional elements might have intruded upon what is essentially a good process, we must first parse creation according to its spiritual ontogeny versus its spiritual ontology; we must distinguish that which is merely juvenile (but good) from that which is alien (and not good). Such is not an easy task for any theologian, but is particularly difficult within a Western Augustinian framework in which an historical fall from an initial paradisiacal state can be seen as the default cause of all that is overtly evil or even simply lacking in perfection. By contrast, the Eastern tradition's notion of a “falling upward” from an initial immature state to an eschatological consummation or summing up in Christ offers an important caveat against any wholescale dismissal of evolution as necessarily an evil process. The logoi are fundamentally evolutionary and their evolution is both good and theophanic, though not fully good and not fully theophanic until discerned from their end, their logoi of eternal well‐being. As Skliris puts is, “…the Fall is a fall not from a perfect past where the perfection of man would have already been accomplished, but a Fall from the future…” (Skliris 2018, 147).

Having completed this important ground‐clearing exercise, the question of the origin and nature of unequivocal natural evil and its compatibility with the logoi still remains; for, even after allowing for the immaturity of creation and its lack of perfection on account of its finitude and movement toward its end, we are still left with an alien residue that cannot, it seems, be attributable to the logoi. Examples of what I am thinking of here include: (1) the egregious suffering of animals that exceeds what might be expected in a world where pain is simply a useful warning signal; (2) the premature death of organisms that have never had the chance to flourish and which add no material or moral value to any other organism's life; and (3) the violence inflicted by creature upon creature, whether the result of instinctive necessity (e.g., a predator hunting for food), or apparently needless cruelty (e.g., a predator toying with its prey). All of these examples pre‐date the arrival of humankind and therefore cannot be the sequalae of human sin; at least not in a world where God's responses must follow the temporal causation of humankind's actions.

Western scholars operating either within a literal biblical narrative of a cosmic fall coinciding with the arrival of the first humans, or a purely moral fall lacking in any cosmic consequences, have been burdened with how to explain the prevalence of evolutionary (nonhuman) suffering millions of years before the appearance of humans. Aside from Young Earth Creationism and some minority views such as retro‐active causation (Dembski 2009) or a primordial angelic fall (Lloyd 2018), most have opted to accept the reality of evolutionary suffering as part of God's “original” intended means of generating biological diversity and complexity. Without human sin to blame, reasons have therefore to be sought for why God chose to use evolution by natural selection rather than by some other means; those hypothetical “other means” usually amounting to some kind of instantaneous creation that bypasses suffering and death. Thus has arisen a plethora of evolutionary theodicies designed to show how evolution might have been the “only way,” or the most fitting way, for God to have created life as we know it; and how evolutionary evil might be instrumental in securing some greater good for individual suffering creatures. In other words, the fact that animal suffering pre‐dates sin inclines many Western theologians to assume that evolution by natural selection (or “natural elimination”) must have always been God's original intention and it motivates them to look for ways of seeing the disvalues of evolution as being somehow good and natural—a move that has been described as a “failure of theological nerve” (Peters and Hewlett 2003, 158).

But this is where I come to the second part of my defense of the goodness of the logoi in the face of evolution, which requires the introduction of two neglected theological resources from the Eastern tradition: the notion of a simultaneous and co‐extensive creation and fall, and the notion of the “garments of skin” that are the cosmic consequences of that fall. Maximus asserts in several places that Adam fell as soon as he was created (Maximus 2018, Ad Thal 59.12, 61.2; 2014, Amb 42.7) and this has been interpreted to mean that God in some sense anticipated the rebellion in the ordering of his creation (Knight 2020, 188). Unlike the standard accounts of a cosmic fall where the effects of sin pre‐date their cause, this a‐temporal or meta‐historical account creates no chronological disparity between cause and effect. As to the cosmic consequences that are with us from the beginning, these so‐called “garments of skin” (from Genesis 3:21) have been interpreted to include the mortality given to man in advance of his creation and in anticipation of his sin (Nellas 1987, 46). Although not to be identified with the body per se, the garments consist of both the psychological accretions of sensual pleasure, anger, gluttony, insatiate greed, self‐indulgence and profligacy, and the somatic accretions of sex, conception, birth, pollution, nipple, food, excretion, growth, adulthood, old age, sickness, and death (Nellas 1987, 48–49, quoting Gregory of Nyssa)—that is to say, more or less biological life as we know it. The combined psychosomatic unity of these garments overlaid on our natural, God‐given logoi cause us to inhabit a world in constant flux, mutation and change in which “life has been transmuted into survival” (Nellas 1987, 47). The garments serve two functions: (1) a penalty and necessary means of survival in the postlapsarian state; for example, sexual reproduction allowing the human race to continue in a different way than originally planned; and (2) a remedy, by which humans can recognize the garments they are wearing and either choose to take some of them off (i.e., those which cause us to sin) or be thankful for those others over which we have no control and which allow us to continue living. If one were to classify this combined “garments‐of‐skin‐plus‐simultaneous‐creation‐and‐fall” model, one might say it was a type of cosmic fall/soul‐making theodicy but one in which sin and natural evil are linked not in a causal (temporal) way, but in a structural (timeless) way (Collin 2019).

But was Gregory of Nyssa going too far to include things like feeding and excreting in his list of the garments of skin? It is certainly difficult to imagine life as we know it without the input of energy and without the selective assimilation of materials and the elimination of waste products. Our whole ecosystem depends for its stability on the transfer of energy and materials between its various occupants, whether willingly given or not. In a world of limited resources, it seems inevitable that those organisms that compete better will survive for longer, either as tokens (original individuals) or as types (replicated progeny). Even if we take on board the undeniable importance of behavioral cooperation, symbiotic association, and spontaneous self‐assembly—as the proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis insist we should—it is still likely to be the case that in a world of finite resources, those that cooperate, “symbiose,” or self‐assemble better than others will prevail over less capable contenders. It seems that in our material world, conflict and competition are inevitable and that there will always be “winners” and “losers,” which is why great efforts are made to find theodicies or defenses for why God has chosen to create using a process that involves pain, suffering and violence. To deny the legitimacy of such “disvalues” would seem to deny the possibility of any complex, flourishing life, given what we now know about our collective dependency on each other's demise. Much life would not be possible if bacteria or cockroaches bred exponentially and unchecked. We rely on death to make room for life; not just life of the same species, but the life of altogether different species such as herbivores, predators, parasites, scavengers, and decomposers. When we appreciate how invested we are in each other's existence it becomes difficult to dismiss those creatures whose purpose includes doing violence to other creatures, without whom we would be overrun with rampant monocultures. The same is true when we think from a diachronic rather than a synchronic perspective. According to the standard NeoDarwinian account, new life has emerged through a process of natural selection in which competition, differential survival, arms races, and exploitation are all seen as having played essential roles in the evolution of outstandingly diverse, complex, and beautiful new life forms. One might even say that such has been the success of natural selection that we need it to be blessed and we need its violence to be sanctified, for without it, we can think of no other way by which creatures can flourish and the diversity of creatures be generated and maintained. In the absence of sin to blame, God must have had a good reason to use violence, suffering and death in the process of executing his divine will to create. His hand must have been forced. Evolution by natural selection must have been the “only way.” Or so the thinking goes.

But does this way of thinking reflect a failure of our theological imagination? Is there another way to call out the evil of natural selection for what it is—evil—without making God directly complicit in it, and, of course, without force‐fitting science to harmonize with a 4,000 year old earth and an original paradisiacal state? Are there really only two options on the table: creation by a nearly instantaneous (i.e., 6 day) fiat, or creation by “full‐blooded” Darwinian evolution? I would like to suggest that the Maximian/Eastern protology outlined so far, provides a third option, and one not often encountered in standard treatments of evolutionary theodicy. This is the possibility that some aspects of the standard Darwinian process correspond to the intrinsically evolutionary logoi and other aspects correspond to the garments of skin.

It is often assumed that Darwinian evolution comes as a “package deal” comprising natural selection, competition, differential survival, and extinction. (Southgate 2014, 101). These components appear to be a necessary, if unfortunate, consequence of organisms inhabiting a world of finite resources. If, however, the finitude of the earth's resources is itself a “garment of skin” imposed by God as a concession, then perhaps in the absence of such a concession, organisms could have evolved without experiencing any competition due to resource conflicts. Darwinian evolution could have consisted solely of the “good aspects”—variation and adaptation—without the “bad” aspects—competition and natural selection. A world of infinite environmental niches could theoretically have accommodated all the variation produced by mutation and recombination. Evolution would have still taken place but in a much more extravagant fashion, with no culling of “weaker” lineages or domination of one lineage over another. It could even have proceeded in the same haphazard fashion it does in our current world but without dead‐ends. Of course, one could say that it would also involve a hypothetical loss: the absence of the cougar or the deer whose hunting or escaping prowess would never have had the chance to flourish (Rolston III 2006, 134). However, if the ability to cause harm and suffering will one day be eliminated, there is no reason why the redeemed versions of the cougar and the deer could not have emerged via different phylogenetic routes in a world of infinite resources.

The distinction between the “good” evolution of the logoi en route to their final telos in Christ and the “bad” evolution introduced by the garments of skin raises the question as to the ontological status of these garments. Presumably they are not themselves defined by logoi, since the logoi are wholly good, being themselves the Logos. Could they instead be defined by the absence of logoi as states of privation, or by a special tropos or mode of existence? Further research is needed in this area, but a clue as to where the answer might be found lies in Maximus’ distinction between the different wills of God: his good will (thelēma eudokia); his dispensatory will (thelēma oikonomia); and his concessive will (thelēma sugchōrēsis) (Maximus 2010, Q Dub Q.83). These distinctions find their use in the context of salvation where, as Skliris explains, the crucifixion is the result of God's concessive will rather than his good will and is therefore according to tropos rather than according to logos (Skliris 2017, 48). In the context of creation, they could be interpreted to mean: the good will to accomplish eventual deification of the cosmos (creation as it should be); the dispensatory will to employ an evolutionary process of maturation (the triadic dromos of the logoi); and the concessive will to allow “nongood” elements to intrude upon that process (the punitively remedial garments of skin).