Sophiology – Forging Ploughshares

Achieving Synthesis Between Religious Studies and Sociology with Sergius Bulgakov

Aristotle’s cosmology is nothing but a sophiology, but a sophiology that is deprived of its trinitarian-theological foundation. This sophiology is a doctrine of divinity without God and apart from God, of divinity in place of God, in the capacity of God. We have said the same thing about Platonism as a theory of self-existent ideas, of Divine Sophia in herself. The entire difficulty and, in a certain sense, the impotence and indefensibility in this form of Plato’s theory of ideas consist in the separateness of the Divine Sophia from the creaturely Sophia as well as in the ungroundedness of the world of ideas.[1] Sergius Bulgakov

A doctrine of divinity without God or self-existent ideas absent divinity. Doesn’t this more or less cover the range of possibility within human thought and religion, absent Trinitarian reality? There is a separation focused, either on the transcendent or the creaturely. There is either Plato or Aristotle, Mircea Eliade or Peter Berger. Religion is either beyond study or it reduces to sociology. The dialectic may favor the transcendent or the immanent, the practical or the philosophical, the creaturely or divine, but there is an absolute separation, in which the divide is the constituting factor in the opposites. All that can be said never attains the essence of things, and one can focus on one or the other (the sayable or the essence). Sergius Bulgakov’s critique of Aristotelianism and Platonism might be stretched to roughly serve alternative approaches to religion. Bulgakov foresees modern religious studies and sociology, as founded by Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger (respectively), in that religion reduces to the absolutely transcendent and ineffable or it is fully explained by the sociological.

Eliade creates a unified category for study, not through any positive statement about the substance or content of religion, but by deeming all religion, in its essence, as that which is noumenal or sui generis. Eliade held that religious experience is distinct from historical pressures and influences and that religious experiences are their own cause and belong to their own unique category. Religion shares the Kantian characteristic of being beyond definition, yet all “religion” somehow pertains to what is most real. As I have described it (here), for religion to be an object of study, Eliade’s paradigm must be the case. If there is no unique essence to religion, then psychology, history, or sociology can explain religion. The problem with Eliade’s paradigm is that a sui generis experience cannot be studied. By definition it is beyond study as it is distinct, it transcends historical, social, and psychological, causality and arises as its own cause. Religious studies reduces to studying religion as the reaction and interpretation of an essence which is not itself open to examination. This theoretical stance predetermines that the religious perspective is essentially free of social, economic, and political interference. Religion arises from a reality which falls outside of historical factors and cultural values. Even the psychological phenomena of religion are an after-effect of a reality that does not make itself directly available.

Here the problem is that of Platonism, in that there is no actual object to study, nothing in which to ground the study, as the essence of religion is completely removed from its manifestations. The articulation and striving of religious practices can only point toward its object, and there is no ground but only endless gesturing. In the words of Bulgakov, “The entire difficulty and, in a certain sense, the impotence and indefensibility in this form of Plato’s theory of ideas consist in the separateness of the Divine Sophia from the creaturely Sophia as well as in the ungroundedness of the world of ideas.”[2] It is impossible to bring the creaturely and divine into relationship or union, and thus there is a vague encompassing of every possibility, or every form of religion. “This world is not unified; it is not even subsumable in a higher unifying principle. The world therefore turns out to be only a speculative projection of pagan polytheism.”[3] While Bulgakov means this as a criticism, for Eliade, this is his point of departure for studying religion.

On the other hand, Peter Berger poses the Aristotelian possibility, of finding the transcendent fully explained in the immanent, but as Bulgakov notes, Aristotle is simply filling in the other half of an inevitable dialectic divide. Plato gives us the “fleshless abstractions” and Aristotle puts flesh on these ideas but only by saturating them and reducing them to the concrete and impersonal. Just as Eliade leaves us with pure abstraction devoid of empirical reality, just so, as with Aristotle, Berger reduces religion to an empirical “sacred canopy,” providing a groundless ground for sociology. That is the sacred canopy is fully explained by its empirical necessity in holding society together. Berger, the good Presbyterian, is not refuting religion, but as with Eliade, there can only be a “rumor of angels.”

In Bulgakov’s explanation, “What Aristotle did was transpose ideas from the domain of the Divine Sophia to the domain of the creaturely Sophia. He proclaimed the being of the latter without the former, as if in separation from it. He thus reduced ideas to the empirical, taken only in the category of universality (which would also require special explanation).”[4] Neither Berger nor Eliade are able to distinguish God from the world. For Berger, “God” or the sacred is constituted by the world, and for Eliade only the world is available for observation. What they both lack is the Personal God.

Just as Aristotle transposes Plato into the empirical, so too Berger transposes Eliade, but both (Berger and Eliade) reduce religion to a set of practices (and in both, the practice is removed from the divine), reproducing the divide between the abstract and concrete. Religious studies and the sociology of religion build upon and generate the difference between Plato and Aristotle, but this difference is not so much a problem, as the engine, of dualism. The divide between heaven and earth, theory and practice, creator and creation, body and soul, religious studies and sociology of religion, perform the same trick of turning the problem into the solution. To bridge the gap, close the divide, or overcome the dualism, would undermine the foundation generating the predominant form of understanding.

The thesis and antithesis of the divide condition the answer on either side of the divide but, contrary to what Aristotle or Berger or the host of pragmatists and materialists might imagine, they cannot replace or explain away the transcendent (without themselves appealing to it in the process). On the other hand, it is also true that ideas exist only in things or in the world, though the world does not exhaust or explain or displace ideas (mind or theory). “Plato and Aristotle are both right, and both wrong, in their one-sidedness of thesis and antithesis. They each postulate a synthesis, which is not contained in their theories but which must be found beyond and above them.”[5]

The Greek unmoved mover, Eliade’s sui generis, and Berger’s sacred canopy, all fit Bulgakov’s description in which God “can be likened to the line of the horizon where the earth and sky meet and appear to join.”[6] In each case, God disappears and is replaced by the world, and the divide between heaven and earth is foundational, for both religious studies and Christian theology.

Eliade needs Berger, the transcendentalists need the pragmatists, the study of religion and the sociology of religion need each other. “The creaturely Sophia is the manifestation and reflection of the heavenly Sophia. Nevertheless, sophiology, as the doctrine of the supramundane principle of the world, must incorporate these great sophianic insights of ancient thought.”[7] However, none of these systems has the means of synthesizing with or accounting for its opposite. The question of synthesis, as it applies to the study of religion, is not only an issue of bringing sociological insights to bear on the study of religion, but it pertains to Christian theology.

As I have stated it (see the above link), the sui generis reading of religion is not unrelated to sui generis notions of Christianity: that the Church somehow exists apart from a particular society and culture and that culture has its own innate essence apart from Christ. This disembodied, transcendent notion of Christianity reveals itself in an incapacity to imagine a real-world kingdom on earth. In this form of thought the Church cannot itself be a holistic, immanent reality, constituting its own culture. The body of Christ is spiritualized, too otherworldly, and culture is too much the essence of this world’s reality to have the two realms intersect.

There is a singular synthesis of creator and creation, of the immanent and transcendent, of God and human. Jesus Christ, the God/man synthesizes what cannot otherwise achieve synthesis. This is not an end point, but the beginning presumption, not just in apprehending Christianity, but in understanding religion. Plato and Aristotle, or Eliade and Berger, do not have the resource for appropriating the other (none of the dualisms do), but the Christian synthesis brings together and utilizes the opposed pairs. “The dialectic of Platonism and Aristotelianism in the theory of ideas is synthesized in the Christian revelation of the divine-creaturely, or divine-human, character of being, of the sophianicity of creation.”[9] Faith and practice, doctrine and action, heaven and earth, Creator and creation, and sociology of religion and religious studies have a Subject.

The end result is something on the order of James McClendon’s practical theory of Christianity and religion, in which religion is not believed, apart from practice. It is is embodied and practiced so that it is a conviction that shows itself in a form of life. In this “practical understanding” doctrine or belief discloses its meaning only within the practices and convictions of the culture that embraces it. This provides both a theology, and as our upcoming class on religion demonstrates, it provides an alternative ground for understand the world’s religions.

(Register now for the class in World Religions and Cultures starting the week of January 22nd: Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings to register.)

[1] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 11). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. Thanks to Matt Welch for his constant inspiration, which stands behind this blog.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bulgakov, 12.

[5] Bulgakov, 12.

[6] Bulgakov, 14.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bulgakov, 14.

[9] Ibid.

Bulgakov’s “The Tragedy of Philosophy” as Entry into Sophiology

MAN WAS CREATED IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF God. This means that the image of the Holy Trinity is imprinted upon every part of his spiritual nature. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. 1:26). So says the word of God, precisely pointing, by means of this plural number, to the trihypostaticity of the Divinity and the triunity of the image of God – which after all, is also the human image.”[1] Sergius Bulgakov

To attempt to describe the atmosphere or texture of Sergius[2] Bulgakov’s theology in doctrinal terms is in danger of missing the warmth and spiritual excitement of his theological project, and yet the attempt to simply restate or summarize his theology without reference to its doctrinal significance also falls short, as he is demonstrating a revolutionary shift in the very tenor of his writing. Rather than writing analogously about God (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) he presumes to speak directly of divine love (Sophia). There is no presumed gap or distance between creator and creation as Jesus Christ brings together the divine and human (Bulgakov sees Maximus as central to this development).[3] He is doing theology in a different key, and this shows up even (or especially) in his early work laying out his Trinitarian Sophiology in contrast to the philosophical project. Even as he describes the particular failings of philosophy, the failures illustrate the necessity of the Trinitarian Personhood reflected in the human image. His philosophical critique is so interwoven with his personalism and Sophiology, that this may be the place (his The Tragedy of Philosophy) to start with Bulgakov. Rather than beginning with being (or with presumptions of the economic and immanent Trinity, his description of the western failure characterized by Thomas Aquinas) or with reason, Bulgakov’s starting premise is the Trinity or a trinitarian holism necessary for reason, which cannot be subjected or reduced to reason but apart from which reason fails.

Presumed throughout is the eternality of the humanity of Christ, so that the truth of the intra-Trinitarian relationship is the truth of God and humans, and there are not two realms of truth (the presumption not only of philosophy – e.g., noumena/phenomena, act/being, – but of western theology, e.g., economic and immanent Trinity, Creator and creation, as a divide). There is one necessary realm of truth which reveals itself in human personhood, pointing to the Divine Person. What gets obscured, according to Bulgakov, and what he aims to recover is the focus on personhood (the person of God revealed in Christ and taken up in the human image) and the manner in which the person of Jesus Christ, in particular, bridges or brings together the antinomies of creator and creation (as developed in his Sophiology).[4] He presumes to develop a Chalcedonian orthodoxy (on the order of Maximus) but to more completely illustrate and define its parameters.

His Sophiology develops as an overcoming of the antinomies of reason as expressed in philosophy, which provides a platform or insight (negative though it is), as spelled out in The Tragedy of Philosophy. The book traces the three characteristic mistakes found in philosophy, against the background of a Trinitarian theology and dogma, which in the description sounds fairly dry, but in the execution traces psychoanalytic and experiential reality such that human thought, perception, and experience, correctly perceived, is integrated directly with the reality of the Trinity. Philosophy is a tragedy but it is a tragedy awaiting and pointing toward the particulars of a Trinitarian solution.

Bulgakov applies Trinitarian theology, very much in the pattern of Paul in Romans 7, in that the tripartite reality of human experience and the human subject, absent the Trinity, does not hold together, but chapter 7 of Romans may be the necessary prologue to the heights of chapter 8, and so too Bulgakov’s philosophical engagement opens the path to his Sophiology. Throughout Bulgakov’s tracing of the problem, the light of the answer (the equivalent of Rom. 8) shines through. As Paul depicts in Romans, one might begin with the law, with the ego, or with the body of death, but what is specifically missing, as detailed in Romans 8, is the Trinity. The negative moment points to its singular resolution in Christ. Paul fills in the functioning of the human subject as a participation in Christ, by which we realize God as Father, and thus have life and being in the Spirit. Bulgakov carries out the same project in his depiction of the three-fold mistake of philosophy, and of course this Threeness is that of the Trinity absent this acknowledgement.

The philosophical project (and the human project) is always striving to bring together that which, outside of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, cannot be made to cohere. Philosophy begins with a basic mistake, the premise of his book, in its focus on human choice (Greek hairesis), so that philosophy is by definition a heresy. All philosophy bears the singular characteristic of “arbitrary election, the choice, of some single thing or part instead of the whole: that is precisely a one sidedness.”[5] Rather than beginning with the reality of God in Christ, philosophy begins with choices or perspectives or an elected portion of this reality. Rather than beginning with the reality of God and extrapolating reasonably from this reality, philosophy begins with reason and attempts to describe reality (inductively or deductively). As a result, there is a philosophical drive to reduce plurality (all things) to a singular thing (monothematism).

He raises the question as to why this should be, and answers, “It is the spirit of system and the pathos of system; and a system is nothing other than the reduction of many and all into one, and conversely, the deduction of all and many out of one.”[6] He describes the drive as the human sickness or a manifestation of original sin. As the title of this chapter indicates, “The Nature of Thought,” this chapter and the first portion of the book is about fallen human thought as evinced in philosophy, but philosophy is simply a case in point of the human predicament. The philosopher “has desired a system. In other words, he has wished to create a (logical) world out of himself, out of his own principle – ‘you shall be as gods’ – but such a logical deduction of the world is not possible for a human being.”[7] The philosopher, like every human, has taken up the appeal of the serpent, to make of the dialectic of knowledge a replacement for living reality. Reason or philosophy as its own origin and end betrays signs of the human malaise: “Sickness, corruption, the perversion of all human existence which presented itself in original sin, also, in other words, afflicts reason, and makes it impossible for reason to gain access to the tree of heavenly knowledge, since access is denied by the fiery sword of the cherubim – the antinomies.”[8] Philosophy puts on display, not a personal pride, but the objective role of hubris, in that the philosopher, like the legalist, has no sense of the limits of the system. This then gives rise to the contradictions or antinomies of the system.

In Pauline terms, this starting point reduces God to the system of the law. In psychoanalytic terms (which is to say the same thing in different terms), the human sickness is to interpolate the self (and with the self, all of reality) into the symbolic order. The law, the logos, the symbolic, or philosophy, would serve as its own end, displacing the divine Logos with a human word. Bulgakov traces the philosophical impetus, but he has in mind the general human orientation toward deception, violence and sin: “Logical continuity, or, what amounts to the same thing, the continuous logical deduction of all from one, making the whole system circle around a single centre which can be passed through in any direction, and which admits of no hiatus or discontinuity of any kind: this is the task which human thought naturally and inevitably strives to complete, not stopping short of violence, and self-deception, of evasions and illusions.”[9]

Logical monism, or the attempt to bridge subject and object, subject and predicate, noumena and phenomena, or to create a synthesis out of the antinomies, demands a full investment of faith (a violent bringing down of reality to fit it into the system). Every philosophy “dimly or distinctly, instinctively or consciously, timidly or militantly” claims “to be the absolute philosophy, and each of which regards its own sketch of what is as the system of the world.”[10] Hegel’s system is the characteristic illustration of overcoming the antinomies: “Hegel – and in his person, all philosophy” supposes it can bind reality into a system.[11] It presupposes what is impossible – to begin from itself, or generate from itself what can only come from what truly exists. The impossibility shows itself in the characteristic failure of philosophy, of taking one arm of tripartite reality as an end in itself.

As Bulgakov describes, philosophy will choose either “(1) hypostasis, or personhood; (2) the latter’s idea or ideal form, logos, thought; (3) substantial being as the unity of all moments or states of being, as the self-actualizing whole.” These three philosophical moments can be summed up in the formula, “I am Something (potentially everything).”[12] This is a true enough statement, but philosophy “incessantly” cuts apart this indisseverable statement. “Philosophizing thought produces heresies through the arbitrariness of these disseverations, and through its choices of discrete beginnings; and the style of philosophizing is determined by the way in which this dissection is made.”[13] Philosophy takes what exists and that which is a necessary component of human consciousness and attempts to enter into this reality by segmenting and privileging a particular component.

The classic example is Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” The thinking thing is privileged over being. Being is subject to question and doubt, and is presumed to be determinate only through the predicate of thought, the second I. The first I and the second, (the thinking thing and that which exists as the predicate) are only conjoined in thought. This presumption cuts off the subject from its predicate and copula, as if the subject precedes predication and existence. Descartes is using his formula as a foundation to arrive at the certain proof of his existence and the existence of God, performing a dissection of thought in order to reduce it to the parameters of reason.

In one form or another, this dissection of subject, predicate, and being indicates the history of philosophy. “Every philosophical system . . . is governed by an attempt of this kind: the subject, or the copula, or the predicate is announced as the single beginning, and everything is made to derive from it or to lead towards it. Such a ‘deduction,’ whether of the subject from the predicate, of the predicate from the subject, or of both from the copula, in fact presents philosophy with its principal task, and, thereby presents an insoluble difficulty to philosophical thought, which strives toward monism, strives to reduce everything to a first unity, no matter what.”[14] Bulgakov’s book is mostly dedicated to proving this point in three philosophical moments or movements, through engaging a wide range of philosophical thought, but focused most intensely on Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (I will return, in future posts, to the specifics of his proofs).

Though Bulgakov is focused on philosophy’s denial or dissection of a triadic unity and the tragedy which results, the same story could be told in the register of psychoanalysis or theology. The psyche strives to unify the self, experienced as mind and body, or as the objective I in the mirror and the I of experience. For Jacques Lacan, the Cartesian dilemma is the human dilemma, in that every subject is split by language. The enunciating subject is split from the subject of the statement (the enunciated) and thus the subject is inescapably split or castrated by language. By taking up and defining the self through language, there occurs a three-way split between the symbolic (language), the ego or imaginary, and the dissonance of nonbeing or death drive created in the relation between the two. Here, the tragedy is not a philosophical or metaphysical mistake, but the human sickness and neurosis which arises from trying to make the self a synthesis out of an antithesis. The compulsion to repeat, the death drive, human violence toward the other and self-destructiveness, can be traced to the psychoanalytic sickness.

The point is universalized in Paul’s use of the law, which pits the subject against itself. “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). The philosophical and psychoanalytical is captured in Paul’s depiction of the I split by the law, but Paul includes the religious, the legal, the sexual and the social, or every aspect of the human predicament. What Bulgakov claims about philosophical systems seems to be a particular instance of Paul’s point, that could be described as the drive to a legal monism, in which the law is the system of the world, and the split between the two ‘I’s (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, mind/flesh, body/spirit) caused by the law would also be resolved through the law.

Bulgakov, like Paul, will not so much resolve the dilemma of the split as address it through the reality of the Trinity. His presumption is that humans are created in the image of God and it is only on the basis of the divine image that the human image can be approached (if not comprehended). Like the Divine Person, the human person cannot be defined. “The essence of the hypostasis consists precisely in the fact that it is indefinable and indescribable; it stands beyond the limits of the world and of the concept, even though it continually reveals itself in them.”[15] It is not that the self cannot be named, but the I is not merely the subject of thought and reason, but thought and reason arise from the subject. The subject, transcendent as it may be, is revealed through the immanence of its predicates. “The subject, the hypostasis, is always revealed, always expresses itself, in the predicate. It goes without saying that the hypostasis in this sense is not the psychological I, psychological subjectivity, which already defines the hypostasis as a predicate, not as a subject.”[16]

The life force or spirit of the human subject is no more definable than the divine Spirit. Just as the Son bears the image of the Father, so too every child of God is defined in this relationship: “Eternity belongs to the hypostasis; it is eternal in the same sense as eternal God, who Himself breathed His own Spirit into humanity at the latter’s creation. The human being is the son of God and a created god; the image of eternity is an inalienable and indelible part of him.”[17] Humankind bears eternity in the image, and Bulgakov suggests that even suicide is not actually aimed at annihilating or extinguishing the I (“suicide attempts represent a kind of philosophical misunderstanding, and are directed not at the I itself, but only at the way in which it exists, directed not at the subject, but at the predicate”). As Bulgakov sums up, “The hypostatic I is the philosophical and grammatical Subject of all predicates; its life is this predicate, endless in its breadth and depth.”[18] The Father, Son, and Spirit, are the reality of subject, predicate, and copula of being. The Father is revealed through the Son, and this lived out realization is the work of the Spirit. This participation in the divine is the reality behind human thought and experience, and even a failure of thought points to its completion in this reality.

[1] Sergij Bulgakov, The Tragedy of Philosophy (Philosophy & Dogma), trans. by Stephen Churchyard (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020) 91. Many thanks Jim, for the gift of this book. It is a key into Bulgakov.

[2] Or Sergij, or Sergei, among some 9 possible variants.

[3] See Jonathan R. Seiling, From Antinomy to Sophiology: Modern Russian Religious Consciousness and Sergei Bulgakov’s Critical Appropriation of German Idealism (PhD Dissertation, Toronto School of Theology, 2008) 229-233.

[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 35. Cited in Katy Leamy, “A Comparison of the Kenotic Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov” (2012). (Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 211. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/211), 36.

[5] Bulgakov, 3.

[6] Ibid. To miss this point will not only amount to missing the thesis of the book, but is the characteristic theological mistake. The issue is on the order of that of Jordan Wood in his departure from David Bentley Hart, or the tradition through Origen to Maximus, taken up by Bulgakov. The antinomies of heaven and earth, God and human, subject and object, are only resolved in the concrete case of the God/Man Jesus Christ. Reason cannot overcome these antinomies but Christ (in reality), in who he is, brings them together. Thus, reason begins with Jesus Christ as ground. Otherwise, it is not clear what a subject or reason might be.

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid, 3.

[10] Ibid, 3-4. Bulgakov has passed through commitment to Marxist Hegelianism, then with his conversion and the Russian Revolution, at this writing, he is without a job or a library in Crimea.

[11] Ibid, 6.

[12] Ibid, 9.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 10.

[15] Ibid, 11.

[16] Ibid, 12.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.