I
I am sometimes asked how serving as a deacon in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church shapes the way I read and write and teach theology. The truth is that I cosset a general allergy to the question. Answers to it often decline into styles, and each of these styles court reduction. One style reduces theology to ministry, which of course makes nonsense of the vast majority of theological discourse. Consoling a bereaved mother is, for example, entirely wide of the essence-energy distinction’s remit. Another style reverses the reduction, as if chanting the stichera during vespers might resolve the question of being’s univocity. But again: why imagine that ministry can only mean theologically? How exactly to think my way out of these twin reductions is not always clear to me. And so I habitually avoid the question of ministry’s relation to theology rather than risk reducing one to the other.
Even so, I am now prepared to confess that ministry as a deacon has indeed shaped the way I read and write and teach theology. But what diaconal ministry has taught me arrived as a surprise. I knew that the diaconate’s lessons disciplined the body’s movements. I did not know, though, that learning to move my body habitually in particular ways would begin to carve grooves within which thought too could move. One among these movements carved deepest: retrogradation.
This term, retrogradation, indicates that the orbital or rotational movement of one celestial body is in the opposite direction of the rotation of its primary object. In our solar system, all planets orbit our sun in the same direction the sun rotates; that is, they circle the sun in a motion that is parallel with how the sun spins on its axis. And so, in our solar system, all planets are said to orbit in prograde. But even though Venus and Uranus orbit in prograde, they rotate in retrograde. They move around their axis in a direction opposite from the way the sun rotates around its.
Sometimes English speakers confuse retrogradation with time travel. Confusions of this sort suppose that moving in retrograde means stealing backward in time. Let me be clear, then: by commending theologizing in retrograde I do not commend a return to some unreconstructed shape of what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would call spirit’s past. Nostalgias of this (or any) sort are venoms that warm the body by numbing the mind. And theologians are never as immune to nostalgia’s toxins as we fancy ourselves.
Not that returning to any given past is possible anyhow. A close reading reveals how neo-Palamism owes as much to romanticism as it does to Saint Gregory Palamas; neo-Thomism as much to Christian Wolff as to Saint Thomas Aquinas; neo-integralism as much to Carl Schmitt as to Boniface VIII; and so on. In each case, time travel demands innovative technologies. The paradoxical result is that for technologies of return, one must search for the dead among the living.
But if thinking in retrograde does not mean attempts at time travel, what does it mean? And what do I mean when I say that ministry has taught me to practice theology in retrograde?
II
Movement is one of the signatures of liturgies. Praying liturgies means moving with them, and learning to pray them means learning to move with them. Crossing oneself and kissing icons and lighting candles and prostrating and processing within and without the temple—these movements constitute the liturgical life of a Christian.
Movements in my tradition, for example, circumambulate the altar in expanding concentric circles. The innermost circle is drawn by clergy who coil tightly around the altar as a lodestone with sacred items in hand and psalms on lips. That circle expands as clergy move around the altar at a wider berth and process outside the iconostasis for a time before repairing into the sanctuary. The circle grows still more when clergy process outside the iconostasis and into the nave bearing the eucharistic gifts, after which the faithful are bidden to approach the chalice. Sometimes this widest circle even swells to encompass even the parish exterior—as at Easter, when candles dispel death’s dark, and songs disturb death’s quiet.
Movements of this sort also punctuate a liturgical life within the Byzantine tradition. Consider baptism: a child wheels around the altar if male and around the tetrapod if female (though older liturgical texts do not distinguish). Or marriage: a couple trails a priest around the tetrapod in the dance of Isaiah. Or ordination: a postulant follows a protodeacon in circles around the altar as the church chants hymns to the martyrs. Or burial: mourners loop the casket counterclockwise to kiss or wreathe the dead with flowers.
In each case, these movements run counterclockwise. But why?
It was not always so—not everywhere, anyway. Before Patriarch Nikon introduced his reforms, for example, processions on Muscovite soil moved “sun-wise,” or clockwise.[1] That may seem confusing, even backward. After all, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so wouldn’t sun-wise be a counterclockwise movement?
Try this: Hold up your right hand and spread out your fingers. Let your index finger point east, the direction toward which all altars point (or should). This makes your outstretched thumb point north and your pinky point south and your wrist point west. Now use your other hand to trace a semicircle from your index finger over your pinky and to your wrist. You have just charted a path from east to west by the southerly route: precisely the clockwise path the sun follows. So it goes, anyhow, with the earth’s prestidigitation.
Back to Nikon’s reforms. Whatever the poetry of the provincial Muscovite practice, Nikon saw in it only transgressions from rubrical precision, so he amended the service books, proscribing clockwise processions and prescribing counterclockwise. Soon, some among the faithful demurred. Christ, they said, is the light. Following him means mirroring the cosmic rhythms of the earth’s rotation around the sun. Moving against the sun seems counterintuitive and unnatural and perverse. Not that their pious protest would matter. Imperial brutality and theological argument—strange but common bedfellows, these—laid near waste to Old Believer worries (and lives). And today nearly all Byzantine Christians contemn the sun’s path across the sky by moving in the opposite direction.
But again: why did the liturgical highbrow from Kyiv (and Constantinople before them) insist upon counterclockwise processions in the first place? The historical tableau of the Muscovite schism more stages the question than answers it. And I confess that the theological reasons for counterclockwise procession interest me more than the historical reasons.
One theological reason to prefer counterclockwise movement hides within assumptions about the movement of the Eucharist. When he glosses the altar in his commentary on the liturgy, Germanus of Constantinople notes the following:
The holy table corresponds to the spot in the tomb where Christ was placed. On it lies the true and heavenly bread, the mystical and unbloody sacrifice. Christ sacrifices His flesh and blood and offers it to the faithful as food for eternal life. The holy table is the throne of God, on which, borne by the cherubim, he rested in the body. . . . Thereby having come into the unity of faith and communion of the Spirit through the dispensation of the One who died for us and is sitting at the right hand of the Father, we are no longer on earth but standing by the royal throne of God in heaven, where Christ is.[2]
Germanos’s allegories traffic in the spatial, concerned as he is with wherethe altar is during the liturgy. The altar stands during the Divine Liturgy not just in the parish but at once in Christ’s tomb and in the throne room of God. Concomitant with this view on space is a view on time, or when the altar is during the liturgy. The altar stands now before our gaze in the ever-vanishing present. But it is also on Holy Saturday within the tomb and in the eschaton within God’s throne room.
We could set Germanus’s view against a broadly Western perspective. We could say that, for him, the Eucharist’s time and space pleats counterclockwise from the future’s glory rather than clockwise from the past’s Golgotha. We could, but that would be too easy. In truth, the eschaton cannot plot a future any more than the lamb slain before the foundation of the world plots a past (see Rev. 13:8). Better instead to notice how what interests Germanus most is not the direction we dial in for the Eucharist’s time travel, as if its present referent points eitherand onlyto a remote past or gathering future. Better to learn from Germanus that the true time of the Eucharist is not in fact a time at all.
And that’s because the eucharistic when is in fact the eschaton, the “ages of the ages.” If the Eucharist arrives from the eschaton, its direction is neither a remembrance from the future nor an anticipation from the past. Instead, it arrives, as Maximos the Confessor writes, by raging “againsttime”—which is, incidentally, the same reason Eucharist can irrupt and be plotted onto any and every time, future or past.[3] It turns out, then, that Byzantine insistence upon counterclockwise liturgical processions has little to do with the clock. The theological point is not to reverse time; it is, rather, to resist its squeeze around our throats.
So construed, the direction of the deacon’s movements in the liturgy appear differently—“more truly and more strange,” as Wallace Stevens writes of something entirely unrelated. The deacon moves in retrograde to the world’s own revolutions around the clock, true. But the deacon also moves eschatologically in prograde with “the angelic hosts,” to quote Germanus once more, “who run invisibly in advance of the great King, Christ, who is proceeding to the mystical sacrifice, borne aloft by material hands.”[4]
III
The liturgy’s strange relation to time borrows from the throne-room scene in the fourth and fifth chapters of the Apocalypse. Readers will know the scene as the source for the Sanctus recited in many Christian liturgies. But the scene is worth revisiting for how it depicts the heavenly liturgy as curiously tensed.
The scene begins “after these things” (meta tauta; Rev. 4:1).[5] After what things? The phrase, repeated again at the end of the same verse, recurs across the book (see 7:1, 7:9, 15:5, 18:1, and 19:1) and likely borrows from a trope in Daniel 2:29. Whatever he means, the revelator, Ezekiel-like, locates himself “in spirit (en pneumati)” (4:2): a reality in which truth can be clearly discerned in large part because time’s veils have been removed. An angel explains that he “will show (deixō) him things that must occur after these things (meta tauta),” though what he “sees” are things already “placed” (4:1). They are already beyond time, that is—what appears to him in the present as a future is what has already happened in the past. Then the revelator sees four animals who, arranged around the one on the throne “who lives unto the ages of ages,” paradoxically chant a hymn forever, though the hymn bears a definitive beginning and end (4:10). The one on the throne is hymned, we’re told, because the one “created all things and on account of [that one’s] will they were and were created (ēsan kai ektisthēsan)” (4:11). All things existed, it seems, before they were made.
The one on the throne holds a book whose contents are somehow visible and can be opened before its seals are broken (Rev. 5:1). A lamb then appears, though the text suggests that he may have been seated on the throne all along. The lamb is described as “having been slaughtered (esphagmenon),” which indicates a past action with ongoing effects (5:6). The lamb is both alive and still slaughtered. Upon his appearance, twenty-four elders “sing a newsong” (5:9). This “new” song hymning the lamb’s deeds, both past and future, itself attributes to the lamb “honor and glory and might unto the ages of ages” (5:13). And the priests this lamb has made from the nations either will reign or already do reign—the Greek, like the plain meaning of much of the text, is ambiguous.
What explains this tense confusion? Some readers believe that the tense variability in this scene aims to comfort suffering Christians. That things paradoxically exist before they are created is a reminder that their suffering is only temporary and that the Lord of time will vindicate them. Other readers stress the revelator’s poor Greek. Perhaps he simply struggled with Greek’s difficult relationship between tense and aspect.
Churches whose liturgy is borrowed from the throne-room scene do not much care about the provenance of the text’s grammatical irregularities. What they care about is the theological pattern that the scene offers for the church in prayer. Like the revelator, the church in prayer also finds itself “in spirit,” arranged around the throne with the martyrs and hymning the still-slain-but-also-living lamb who breaks the seals on the already opened book. In prayer, then, the church, like the revelator, stands “after” time—or within, as one reader of the Apocalypse writes, “the eschatological past and present as well as the future.”[6]
The importance of the throne-room scene for liturgy may be well known. Less noticed, though, is the scene’s question for theology. In fact, the scene knows no sharp difference between claims about the Lord and the proper way of hymning the Lord. And the way to hymn the Lord, it seems, is to recognize that the Lord transcends—and therefore penetrates any and all—time. Projecting serial time into the throne room of God who is equally “the beginning and the end,” the text suggests, is wholly inappropriate (Rev. 21:6). Thus, paying close attention to the text’s tense confusion suggests that it may not be the revelator who is confused after all; it may instead be his theological readers. Why do we imagine that the throne room of God obeys and predicts historical sequence instead of casting judgment over it?
IV
We often forget that time is itself among God’s fallen creatures that have been loved into being by speech and damaged by sin. That time should be a creature may puzzle us. After all, didn’t Immanuel Kant already discover that time is not out there but rather what makes experience possible? And didn’t Martin Heidegger teach us that interrogating time is like the proverbial fish asking his companion what the hell water is?
Indeed. But a creature time must be, at least according to the iron law of the absolute. Whatever is not God, that law holds, is either nonexistent or created. Assuming that time belongs among existents rather than fictions (like square-circles and tasty candy corn and virtuous politicians), it must be a creature.
More puzzling still is imagining time as a creature that is (or has) fallen. Sin’s damage within and upon other creatures seems easier to measure. Rational creatures damaged by sin suffer wounds of mind and will and body, the movements of which furl increasingly and inexorably around death. Irrational creatures—if there are any; and theologians ought to wonder at rather than avoid this question—also suffer wounds that end in death (if, like a monkey or a plant, they live) or erasure (if, like a rock, they do not). What, though, is the measure of fallen time? And from where, within the death grip of fallen time as we are, might we even ask the question?
One way to discover what it means for time to be fallen is to ask what it means for time to be healed of sin’s deathly damage. Here, again, liturgy offers some helps. Liturgical time is, as Paul J. Griffiths writes, “systolic.”[7] A systole names that motion in which a heart contracts during its work to circulate blood around the body. Blood flows from and returns to the heart at intervals syncopated by this systole. The heart’s beat, the time it keeps, is precisely this process. Liturgy too is systolic. Its measure is not the clock’s ticktock but the repetitive movement away from and back toward its muscle—not the heart but, rather, the birth, life, death, being-dead, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,” chant the Apocalypse’s creatures as they rotate around the slain lamb’s throne, “who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8). Healed time, then, is measured by liturgy.
The devastation the world has suffered inverts that relation. Here below, anyhow, time does not gather and fold around the events of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection. Like Lucifer, time’s fall is marked by a new name—or many. He is Cronus[RK1] , the god who eats the children he fathered. He is Saturn, whose scythe gathers the harvest only by cleaving it from its root. He is Father Time, hooded and armed with an hourglass, whose sands reduce lives to the nanoseconds that constitute them. He is Edwin Muir’s “gaoler,” who “slays [beauty] with invisible hands.”[8] Whatever his name, fallen time moves not systolically but in obeisance to the metronome whose ticktock measures life and death, and then more life and more death, and so ever on until at length it delivers our heat death by the very star that warms us. Fallen time, then, deals principally in death. Its price for life is always and without remainder lives.
V
We too often forget time’s fall. That forgetting is clearest when we theologize as if time were not a creature itself but rather a crisp white canvas upon which the fall stains the lives of other creatures. But as Aristotle warns, “The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.”[9] Forgetting time’s fall, then, opens us up to important theological misunderstandings.
Saint Augustine, for example, denies that theophanies in the Hebrew Scriptures could have been Christ precisely because they predate Christmas. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that because the flesh of the saints now lay in graves or in reliquaries, their souls in glory, absent reunion with that flesh, are really only “sort of” (secundum quid) saints. Modern scholars laugh off Victorinus of Pettau’s third-century conviction “that on the same day he was incarnated, [Christ] formed man out of the ground.”[10] Some deny that the Mother of God could be immaculately conceived by virtue of her Son’s later holiness. Although disparate, these theological positions share a common confusion: erasing healed time by projecting the seriality of fallen time into eternity.
Still, those are precious questions of interest to very few. Of broader interest and theological scope are recent attempts to consider the doctrine of creation inside or alongside the biological theory of natural selection. Most attempts begin by noting (correctly) that the myths proper to Genesis’s early chapters need not and should not be read as a historical annal. They continue by noting (correctly) that the human genetic record betrays striking family resemblances to that of other creatures. And they conclude by arguing (correctly) that natural selection offers a narrative of how creatures emerged that is not finally incompossible with Scripture.
The confusion here lies not in using natural selection to explicate a doctrine or in positioning natural selection as compatible with Christian doctrine. No, the confusion lies rather in the particular doctrine that natural selection is used to explicate—most frequently the doctrine of creation. On this view, God creates something from nothing precisely by steadily and providentially guiding microbes into more complex organisms in billion-year intervals. These intervals, again on this view, correspond to the “days” of either Genesis 1 or 2. “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years,” after all (2 Peter 3:8). These ages and their species “were able to exist at separate moments in history to uniquely manifest the glory of their Creator.”[11]
There are difficulties here. Natural selection’s principle technology is death, remember. It trades on the extinction of creatures that have heritable traits less suited to that creature’s environs than others of their kind. Billions of years of trait refinement may well evince the “patience, subtle presence of the gracious Creator who achieves divine purpose through the free play of created processes.”[12] But it also evinces the extinction of organisms by orders of magnitude beyond our imaginations and moral scales. Let us not forget that beneath today’s biodiversity lay interred the corpses of as many as 99 percent of all organisms that have ever graced the planet. Many more organisms—humans among them—will trace their steps into oblivion. So yes, natural selection can serve as the means of creation. But it can serve this function only for theologians who have already presupposed Augustine’s chiaroscuro theodicy—that is, that there is no light without shadow. Theologians who doubt that the world’s mass graves are what God calls “good” are left to wonder if it is not the doctrine of creation that natural selection details but rather the doctrine of the fall.
An aside: many recent accounts of creation and natural selection work aslant of theology’s tendency toward anthropocentrism. True: our call to exercise dominion has often excused or encouraged rapacious violence against the very charges humans ought to protect. True again: our genetic intimacy with other creatures should trouble our presumed privilege above them. But by identifying natural selection as the process of creation, these same accounts rarely avoid the sort of anthropocentrism they mean to attack. The claim that God employed the extermination of uncountable lives over billions of years as somehow necessary for the nocturnal arrival of the human species is no less anthropocentric than the assumption that the human bears some ontological superiority among creatures. In fact, the former may prove considerably more anthropocentric.
Anyway, I do not mean here to tender a brief in defense of creationism. (That view also projects fallen time into eternity, or perhaps subjects eternity entirely to fallen time.) I mean only to note how here, exactly at the point that theology begins to address biological origins, theology forgets time’s devastation. And when theology forgets, it equates God’s means of creation with the altar on which the vast majority of the world’s lives have met not only death but total erasure. God proclaims creation “good” by entailment only when intoxicated by the aroma of sacrifice rising from history’s altar.
But why think this? Remembering time’s fall might allow another account—one attentive to how Genesis 3 opens upon a creation and a time that isalready fallen. (Even the good fruit, notice, can be eaten and therefore killed by the human, all quite before the fall.) According to this view, natural selection’s depredations across the ages would be the work not of God but of sin. And creation—that which God calls good and after whose work God rests and with whom God makes his dwelling—would name not a primordial past but, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa knew, an eschatological future. Only when “the old things are passing away” will time itself “be finished” and God be recognized as “the beginning and the end” (Rev. 21:4–6). An account like this would need to prove its antignostic bona fides. It would need also to explain, as Sergei Bulgakov writes, “a supramundane fall.”[13] But it would have the advantage of removing the tool of death from our conception of the divine workshop. “God did not make death,” after all, “and he does not delight in the death of the living” (Wisd. of Sol. 1:13 NRSV).
Conflating the doctrine of creation with the eradication of 99 percent of the world’s creatures is one among many consequences of forgetting time’s devastation. I note it only because of its unconsidered prevalence in theology. I note it also to sketch what could begin to take shape if theologians would only struggle to think in a manner liberated from—while within the death grip of—fallen time. To do so would begin to theologize in retrograde—to move in a direction contrary to the death spiral of our world.
VII
It turns out that ministry has formed the way I think theologically. But its lessons were for me harsh, throwing into question as they did nearly every theological assumption I had cosseted. Whether I have yet learned ministry’s lessons is doubtful. Revisiting every aspect of one’s thought is not something one can neatly fit into a schedule. I can say only that I have begun.
I can say too that serving at the altar in retrograde and beginning to think theologically in retrograde are mutually enriching operations. The more I transgress fallen time liturgically, the more easily the same motion arrives theologically, and vice versa. I enact both in studied imitation of the revelator, who struggles but is forbidden to write what he has seen by the angel of the seventh seal: “Then the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that time will be no more” (Rev. 10:5–6).[14]
[1] See Boris A. Uspenskij, Крест и круг: Из истории христианской символики (Москва: Языки славянских культур, 2006), 150–54. I’m indebted to Daniel Galadza for recommending Uspenskij.
[2] Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1984), 59 and 101.
[3] Maximos the Confessor, Ambiguum 10.20a: “For it is said of [Melchizedek] that he was without father or mother or genealogy, which I understand to mean the complete setting aside of natural characteristics through the highest gift of grace in accordance with virtue. That he has, moreover, neither beginning of days nor end of life, points to knowledge that is not limited by the properties of time and the present age. . . . For virtue is accustomed to fight against nature, and true contemplation against time and the age; the former so that it might not be enslaved to or subdued by all those things considered after God . . . the latter so that it might remain unbounded, for it cannot abide to linger among things that have a beginning and an end, since it is the image of God, who is the boundary of every beginning and end, and who draws to Himself, by means of an unspeakable ecstasy, every intellection of intelligible beings” (trans. Maximos Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:215, emphasis original).
[4] Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” https://poets.org/poem/tea-palaz-hoon; and Germanus, Divine Liturgy, 87.
[5] I here follow and at times amend David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
[6] G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 318.
[7] Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).
[8] Muir, “Betrayal,” in First Poems (London, UK: Hogarth, 1925), 30.
[9] Aristotle, De caelo, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 452.
[10] Victorinus of Pettau, “On the Creation of the World,” trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans), 343, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf07.vi.i.html.
[11] Nicanor Austriaco, “The Fittingness of Evolutionary Creation,” Thomistic Evolution, https://www.thomisticevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/182/2020/05/Thomistic-Evolution-22.pdf.
[12] Elizabeth Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the Love of God (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015), 159. See also the many very erudite volumes by Celia Deane-Drummond.
[13] Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 184. Also, note that an initial (and interesting) attempt at confronting potential Gnosticism is made in Alexander V. Khramov’s “Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach,” in International Journal of Orthodox Theology 8.1 (2017): 17–105. Khramov’s account, however, may shade too closely into ancient Gnosticisms for many readers.
[14] This is my translation.