Tag: Sophiology

William Desmond’s Metaxology as a Refinement of Sophiology

The benefit of delving into Sophiology and by extension, metaxology, is to aid in attaining to a positive knowledge of God. Can we know God in Christ, and does this knowledge structure our understanding, or is Christ analogous to God, a partial or expedient revelation, that does not intersect with knowing per se? In Catholic and Protestant nominalism there is no positive knowledge, but empty words and names and perhaps religious feeling. Pietism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and many forms of religion (popular and academic) have abandoned the project of a speculative theology (a thinking out of the faith). Followers of Luther’s condemnation of scholasticism have tended to throw out the philosophical baby with the bathwater, and abandon every form of speculative theology which would tie theology to philosophy. The question, “What does the God of the Bible have to do with the God of the philosophers?” has sometimes stifled all thought. Even if a particular form of philosophy has fabricated idols, does this rule out any attempt to think philosophically?

In Russia there has developed the most expansive example of this thinking out, simultaneously recognizing the danger of a philosophical theology but also its necessity. Sophiology is a continuation of the “Eastern” interpretation of the Chalcedonian formula, which declares, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, possessing two distinct natures in one single person. The natures are still distinct, and are not fused in general, but are synthesized in this person. Christ synthesizes or unifies what were considered antinomies. God and not God, earthly and divine, created and uncreated, are opposites, and yet they are united in Christ. It is no longer a question of whether there is any communication between transcendence and immanence, as clearly in Christ this is the case. But it is also true, that though these categories are united in Christ, there is still a distinction to be made. Sophia is a way of describing this reality, in which there is the possibility of synthesis, and yet there is a distinction that must be maintained. The problem is in maintaining the balance, neither allowing for a dualism between these categories nor allowing for a collapse.

The Goal of Sophiology

The father of modern Sophiology, Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), struggled much of his life with the tension between God’s transcendence and immanence, seeking to understand God in conjunction with the idea of the whole, and attempting to express this philosophically. He begins with the understanding that the synthesis accomplished in Christ is being communicated to the world. All material reality is undergoing the transformation which took place in the death and resurrection of Christ. There is a “spiritualization of matter,” a process of theosis, in which the world is penetrated by the spirit. There is an unfolding deification of both the individual and the created world, which Soloviev ties to “worldly” spheres.[1] According to Oliver Smith, “Soloviev understands this process of transfiguration not only as a divine initiative but as the conscious ‘task’ of humanity, which is called to transfigure both itself, as corporeal form, and the material world around it. He sought to explain how “the individual realization of the spiritualization of matter coincides with the realization of the same at a universal level.”[2] Soloviev is seeking to explore uncharted territory, searching to bridge, through “All-unity” the individual and the universal, the human and divine. “The spiritualization of matter is thus an idea that feeds on an entire historical complex of philosophy, theology, and mystical experience.”[3]

Christ demonstrates the potential holiness of matter extended to the world, which is at the same time challenged by “the bondage to decay.” The struggle between the mortal and immortal was keenly felt by Soloviev. Being between life and death makes of the spiritualization of matter the personal liberation from death, but it also poses the possibility of the idol or the lie. Throughout, his thought is linked to an intense mysticism and experience. The love of Sophia (an erotic sort of love), the fear of death, and the possibility of the counterfeit or the anti-Christ. This intensity was augmented by his visions of Sophia, which he characterized as the most significant events of his life. As Smith maintains, “Sophia’s role as the wellspring of that feeling of consonance between the spiritual and material realms should be remembered as the constant backdrop to his thinking.”[4] He was eager to communicate this reality, which though it began as a mystical experience, must be thought. Thought and experience must be joined: “A God who is only thought, though, remains an abstract principle until she is concretely felt in the temporal and spatial conditions of our physical reality.”[5]

To realize (affectively) and think out the joining of the material and the divine, was the goal of his vision of “All-unity,” in which all aspects of human life would be united to the divine. As he put it, “I consider it my duty, from different perspectives, in different forms and in different contexts to explain the central idea of Christianity: the idea of the Kingdom of God as the fullness of human life — individual, social and political — reunited through Christ with the fullness of the Divine.”[6] His project is to articulate a worldview, with its own criterion for truth, and answering the fundamental question of meaning: “the goal of the historical process; the vocation of humanity; the interaction of the divine with the creature.”[7] He sought to overcome the absolute dualism toward which philosophy tended, but he also recognized the potential danger of collapsing transcendence into immanence.

The Problem of Sophiology and the Entry of Metaxology

One of Soloviev’s primary interlocuters was Lev Shestov (1866–1938) who bitterly opposed any sort of collusion between philosophy and religion, maintaining that the difference was unbridgeable and that Soloviev had indeed collapsed the transcendent, referring to “All-unity” as an over-reaching “omnitude,” without clear distinctions.[8] So while Soloviev strived to arrive at an “All-unity” which would be compatible with Christianity, Shestov would cling to the distinctiveness of biblical revelation, which he thought could only be distorted by philosophy. Philosophers cannot compete with prophets, he maintained.

William Desmond enters into this controversy, and places his (philosophical/theological) metaxology between the poles of “absorption” and “dualism” he sees represented by Soloviev and Shestov, respectively. “The metaxological way seeks to avoid both reduction and absorption, trying to find the right words for a sense of the One and the plural, beyond both dualism and the self-mediating whole.”[9] The extremes are the absolute sovereignty of God, which does not allow for integrity and meaning in the world, or a complete reduction of God to the world in some form of pantheism. Desmond locates metaxology between the two, and concludes “it is other than both in the way it seeks, beyond their respective exclusions or overemphases, in the between of the intimate universal, for the God beyond the whole.”[10] The meaning of Desmond’s “God beyond the whole,” resisting the tendency either for God to be absorbed into the world or for the world to be evaporated into God, is filled out in following his intervention in the struggle between Soloviev and Shestov.

Soloviev’s turn to German idealism, according to Desmond, favors immanence and God’s absorption into the world. What is lost in idealism is the sense of creation, with its distinction between creation and Creator. Creation, according to Desmond, is a departure from the holism advocated by Soloviev, as creation from nothing “stresses the difference of nothing, as not within the divine life, rather as between world and God. God is, and is not the world; the world is, and is not God.”[11] This “not” separates, but it also brings together, conditioning the communication between God and the world differently than holistic self-communication. “It is communication between others—an intercommunication, not a self-communication, though it is not exclusive of self-communication. The world is not relatively ‘‘outside’’ God, it is essentially ‘outside’ God.”[12] Where the holistic God would tend to reduce creation to emanation, the God of creation “keeps open an essential difference.”[13] To speak of “outside” God is obviously an approximation, as nothing is outside God, but this contrasts with the holistic “reassimilation” of world to the source, in which the world disappears into the creator. “Assimilation invokes similitude, likeness, but we can push likeness to the verge of merging into identity.”[14] There is a potential loss of difference in this similitude or holism. “With creation, likeness and participation keep open an essential difference. World and God are not of the same essence; creation is not the self-creation of God. God cannot be cloned.”[15]

In this, Desmond recognizes the value of Shestov’s criticism, that freedom is in danger of being given over to rational necessity. As Josephien van Kessel notes, “Shestov pleads for the freedom of the creation and of revelation. Every revelation comes from beyond the whole, from transcendence, but every rationalization tries to include this beyond into the whole, to make it immanent.”[16] This is the “death-knell” of revelation, on the order of the Hegelian reduction of God’s word to the immanent whole. The transcendent nature of truth is lost and there is a loss of plurality and difference. What comes to us from within the whole will be attributed to the whole, which is not revelation.[17]

The Possibility of the Anti-Christ in Sophiology

As Soloviev came to recognize ‘‘All-unity’’ risks reducing God to a human projection, and this imitation of God would be the anti-Christ. It requires more than Shestov’s simplistic distinction between reason and revelation, as it is “even more intractable, concerning the counterfeits of God, and the counterfeits of the absolute community.”[18] Soloviev’s holistic god is in danger of usurping the God beyond the whole with the whole, something more intimate and tempting than the God of the philosophers. “This is a superbia that takes worldly form in the claims to initiate the absolute, the ultimate community within the whole of immanence itself.”[19] Soloviev began to suspect that his god of the whole is a monstrous idol. He came to see that the anti-Christ can take shape in the worldly community, mimicking Christ and corrupting the church.

Desmond wonders if Sophia may in some way contribute to this error. It is supposed to be a doctrine which, while pointing to the milieu between the ultimate other and the finite, is also maintaining an ontological difference. “This difference of the Word turned back to the origin (Father) and wisdom turned toward creation might be seen as intending to keep open the ontological difference of Creator and creation.”[20] But does the feminine Sophia lend itself to over-accentuating the difference and in fact blocking communication between the divine and immanent. “One might wonder if the doctrine of the Mother of God, Theotokos, perhaps takes up some traces of mother religion, even the pagan love of Gaia, over against an utterly aloof father who simply stays aloof, as a God beyond the whole.”[21] As Shestov argues, Sophia may become an idol.

Yet Desmond counters, “But why not a name for a community of wisdom and love between the God beyond the whole and the divine-human community coming to be within the finite whole?”[22] He notes Soloviev’s Sophia is not unlike Old Testament depictions of God, both being intimately personal: “But then is not the doctrine of Sophia, especially in its feminine and maternal metaphorics, as intimately personal as the dominant paternal metaphorics of the Old Testament transcendence that seems to be Shestov’s preferred emphasis?”[23] The problem is not in the doctrine but, according to Desmond in the language of “All-unity” or a language of the whole, which is not adequate, in that it may indeed produce the counterfeit double of the anti-Christ.

Six Questions for Soloviev as Pointers to Metaxology

Desmond concludes with six questions which indicate the inadequacy of Soloviev’s holism. His first three questions focus on the assumed fall into difference in Soloviev. Isn’t the focus on the negative element of difference (a result of the fall, to be overcome), missing that difference is the very means of recognizing unity? “The very plurality that roused us to thought of the One is put into the pale by the One. Being put in the pale is not entirely wrong, but we want a One that will lead us out into the sun, and give us to affirm, reaffirm the plural.”[24] Kessel notes that Bulgakov agrees with Desmond, “that to see difference only as the result of the fall is to see it too negatively: both want to affirm plurality as positive.”[25]

Why consider a fall in time at all? “Does not this too degrade the temporal, instead of elevating it as the gift of finite becoming in the between?”[26] The early church, beginning with Origen, down to Maximus, will locate the fall outside of time. The fall in time degrades the temporal, as if the temporal is the result of the fall, “instead of elevating it as the gift of finite becoming in the between.” As Desmond asks, “Why does the One have to alienate itself at all, if it is the absolute it is? Why not be one with itself from eternity? Why then temporal differentiation at all? Suppose there is no fall, only the giving of being to the other, being-other as good. Clearly, the language of fall is not adequate to this good.”[27] Necessity and not freedom rules in a creation ruled by the dynamics of the fall.

Desmond’s between does not fall but is focused on the power of being raised or of being elevated. “Arising is as if every moment were a resurrection from the dead; or a preserving from the threat of death, a guarding the goodness of beings; as if God were torn by grief for every death, and yet on the instant resurrected the beloved this into the goodness of life.”[28] As Kessel explains, “In Desmond’s metaxology, the origin of difference is not the fall in time, but an arising in time: time is supported on the love of eternity which cannot be an erotic love, but only an agapeic love.”[29] The emphasis on the erotic in Soloviev (which Bulgakov will also critique) falls short: “Is it the love of the agapeic origin that frees time into the goodness of its own otherness? Is it the love of an erotic origin that needs time to be itself the consummated absolute?”[30] Soloviev, in both the estimate of Desmond and Bulgakov, gives too much weight to erotic necessity, which Desmond will counter with an agapeic freedom.

Desmond’s final three questions concern the space for freedom in view of the holistic God. The question concerns both human and divine freedom, and the possibility of a community of freedom. “Where is the allowance for the unfinished and the open? Is the indeterminate not engulfed by the self-determining whole?”[31] The eternal predetermined necessity crushes divine and human personhood. “Destining and destined universality would be no more than a monstrous universality, a quiet indifference the resting face of an enemy, if it merely crushed the singular in its intimate being for itself.”[32] On the other hand, “An agapeic destiny would communicate, in the intimate universal, the promise of a gift. We must accept the gift, though we can refuse; since the gift is itself a promise, we must serve the good to redeem its promise.”[33] Desmond maintains the holistic view is a closed view of God, with no space for freedom. As with Bulgakov, he recognizes the Economy in which we live “is this fight, and synthesis between freedom and necessity” which is a human and divine struggle.[34]

Agapeic love is open to the difference of self and other, and according to Kessel, “even demands it.” The integrity of the individual is not undone by the whole, but there is the possibility of “‘a community of open wholes’ in the between, beyond the dialectical language of parts and wholes.”[35] Soloviev’s holism reduces both God and the individual to a dialectical community, reducing community to an organic self-communication. “Is this adequate to the communication between beings in the finite middle? Or between the origin and the beings in the between? Or indeed between the divine and itself?”[36] As Desmond argues in conclusion, “Surely, the other as standing in the integrity of its otherness is necessary for community as more than self-communication. But if so, there is a community of metaxological togetherness that is beyond dialectical self-mediation, and hence beyond the embrace of divine holism.”[37]

Desmond’s Corrective to Soloviev’s Holism

Creation, for Desmond, must be thought within an agapeic origin, and rather than a speculative unity or a whole, he offers a logos of the metaxu: “a metaxology of the between rather than a dialectic of the whole.”[38] He wants to maintain a qualitative difference between God and creation, which allows for the integrity and otherness of creation, and individual integrity of God and humans, which still allows for communication between the two, as in his understanding of the “intimate universal.”[39] Desmond appreciates the struggle between Shestov and Soloviev, but indicates the failures of each, pointing to his metaxological resolution. Shestov may tend toward a simplistic opposition to the God of the philosophers, which may land in some sort of dualism – “an affirmation of divine transcendence insufficiently purged of dualistic opposition.”[40] Soloviev does not bear Hegel’s hostility to the transcendent, but his “All-unity” still poses the possibility of a counterfeit double of God, something which Soloviev himself came to realize. The conclusion is, the “God beyond the whole” of All-unity cannot be thought within the idealistic notion of the whole. Recognizing why this is the case, brings out the strengths of the metaxological realization.

[1] Oliver Smith, Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011) 2.

[2] Smith, 13-14.

[3] Smith, 2.

[4] Smith, 9.

[5] Smith, 10.

[6] V. S. Solov’ev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. N. V. Kotrelev, 2 vols, 1989, ii, p. 316. Cited in Smith, 11

[7] Smith, 12.

[8] Josephien van Kessel, “Transcendence in Metaxology and Sophiology” inWilliam Desmond’s Philosophy between Metapysics, Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics: Thinking Metaxologically, ed Dennis Vanden Auweele (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 247. Many thanks to Professor Kessel for providing me this chapter.

[9] William Desmond, ‘God Beyond the Whole: Between Solov’ev and Shestov,’ in Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005 pp. 167-99), 199.

[10] God Beyond the Whole, 199.

[11] God Beyond the Whole, 171-172.

[12] God Beyond the Whole, 172.

[13] God Beyond the Whole, 172.

[14] God Beyond the Whole, 172.

[15] God Beyond the Whole, 172

[16] Kessel, 247.

[17] God Beyond the Whole, 175.

[18] God Beyond the Whole, 180.

[19] God Beyond the Whole, 180.

[20] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[21] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[22] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[23] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[24] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[25] Kessel, 250.

[26] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[27] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[28] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[29] Kessel,250-251.

[30] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[31] God Beyond the Whole, 195.

[32] God Beyond the Whole, 194.

[33] God Beyond the Whole, 194-195.

[34] Kessel, 251.

[35] Kessel, 252.

[36] Beyond the Whole, 197.

[37] Beyond the Whole, 197.

[38] God Beyond the Whole, 169.

[39]

[40] God Beyond the Whole, 168.

Metaxology as an Extension of Sophiology

Metaxology and Sophiology are all-encompassing descriptions of reality, of God’s relationship to creation, and are theological and philosophical descriptions of the realization of this relationship. So the most important element of this blog is in the title. Placing William Desmond’s work on a continuum with that of Sergei Bulgakov’s, helps explain the tenor and emphasis of his project, and for example, helps answer the question as to why the turn to aesthetics. I do not question the possibility of a difference, which there is, but work from the premise, that showing the conjunction will reveal the significance of this ground-breaking mode of thought.

Bulgakov’s Sophiology and Desmond’s Metaxology are both focused on the metaxu, or the between, or living this out (betweening), as living out the between of immanence and transcendence contains the fulness of human potential. Both describe a transformational synthesizing process, recognizing the antinomy of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence. In Bulgakov’s description of Sophia, “in setting alongside itself the extra-Divine world, the Divinity thereby places between itself and the world a certain border and this border, which according to the concept itself is found between God and the world, the creator and the creature, is itself neither the one nor the other but something completely particular, simultaneously uniting and separating the one and the other.”[1] As Josephien Kessel explains, Bulgakov was “interested in the nature of the connection and border between immanence and Transcendence, which is Sophia as metaxu, or ‘between’,” which also explains the parameters of Desmond’s Metaxology.[2] The principle of the metaxu or Sophia is “the ultimate middle term, the intermediary between God and the world . . . which makes the God-world relationship possible.”[3] As John Milbank explains, “one could say that Sophia names a metaxu which does not lie between two poles but rather remains simultaneously at both poles at once.”[4] Bulgakov and Desmond are continuing the particular synthesizing work of Maximus, Eriugena, and Hegel.  The mode of thought, the turn to a reworked dialectic, and the attempt to describe the potential encounter with God in philosophy and aesthetics, characterizes each. In Bulgakov’s terms, there is a “symphonic connection” or a synthesizing unity or togetherness. Both recognize Hegel aimed at describing this synthesizing process, the dialectic of unity in difference in which opposites are paired and synthesizing (syzygy). For them though, it is a dynamic unfolding reality. Both can be characterized as building on the project of Hegel and German idealism, and of course Desmond is conscious of his work’s continuity with Sophiology. It seems he takes up where the Russian sophiological tradition left off, refusing the sense of a gulf between Creator and creation, and presuming supernatural grace pervades creation. This is an attempt to demonstrate, in a very small and inadequate manner, the convergence of this thought.

The Synthesizing Possibility Between Infinite Life and Death

In Desmond’s description, there is a glimpse of the infinite that may “put us out to sea,” arousing something on the order of the sublime, which he relates directly to the darkness and light of the Eucharist. Likewise, Bulgakov, in his Sophiology of Death, expounds upon the awakening to eternity through a dark realization. “The day’s din of temporality alternates with night’s whisper of eternity, and under the swelter of life, the icy breath of death occasionally blows by, and when this breath enters а soul, even just once, that soul can thereafter hear this silence even in the middle of the din of the market, can feel this cold even under the scorching sun.”[5] Recognition of good and evil seem to arrive entwined. “A historical sense of self is colored by a feeling of the tragic in life, in history, in the world, it is freed from its eudaimonistic coloring, it is made deeper, more serious—and darker.”[6] Desmond concurs: “Yes, the passion of being is not univocal and its saturated equivocity can border an extremity of affirmation, as well tempt desire with a descending movement into darkness, touching on death, if not going into hell.”[7] He appeals to Freud and Schopenhauer to make the point: “Begetting on the beautiful participates in the agon of eros and thanatos. Doomed love: intenser life. Death itself raises the ultimate question of the giftedness of beauty.”[8]

 Desmond relates the mixture of this infinite darkness and light in the story of Moby Dick: “the blank Leviathan, whether innocent or malicious, who knows, mysterious beyond our moral measure of good and evil. The saturated equivocity of beauty still tasks us metaxologically.”[9] Ishmael, when he finds himself dampened in spirit, a “November of the soul,” is lured to the sea to purge his burdened soul, to hunt the monster of the deep. Can we equate, Desmond wonders, “Ecce homo: the sacrificial lamb on display. And the sea monster?”[10] The infinite sea, personified, is at once monstrous and sacred: “’Monstrare’ means ‘to show’: the monster is a show of the sacred, but there is a sacred show in the monstrance: golden carrier of the consecrated bread that is the body of Christ, once to be beheld, even on the streets of the city of man on the feast of Corpus Christi.”[11] Christ is present in the midst of darkness and death, in the very midst of the city of man, the infinite shines forth. According to Bulgakov, the creature exists between being and nonbeing, and creaturely Sophia acts as a counter to death and nonbeing, and the Holy Spirit as Sophia, “actualises,” “concretises,” and insinuates “beauty,” “sensation” and “life.”[12] Both thinkers converge upon the exposure of infinite goodness in the midst of a potentially overwhelming darkness.

Inspiration and Deification in the Between

Both Desmond and Bulgakov depict a simultaneous revealing of infinite light and darkness in Christ. There is an erotic yearning for “sophianic Illumination” and this unfading light challenges the darkness. “The love of the Father through the Spirit in the life of the Son is unbroken and there can be no room for any sort of mutual abandonment. But ‘economically,’ in the relationship of God to the world, as Creator to creation, there occurs, as it were, a division of the hypostases because the very hypostasis of union, the Holy Spirit, in ‘abandoning’ the Son, ceases, as it were, to unite the Son with the Father and instead remains with the Father.”[13] The Spirit, which “blows where it wills” (John 3:2), momentarily and manifestly (economically) “stops blowing on the Son.” This presence and absence, darkness and light, experienced by humanity, however, is encompassed within the reality of the Trinity.[14] The outcome of deification, in the midst of death and darkness, being predetermined.

Bulgakov links the working of Sophia explicitly to Christ: “The humanity of Christ is created Sophia, permeated by Divine Sophia and in this union with it already pre-deified.” [15] Desmond likewise, describes a pre-deified creation. God breathes into the mud, energizing, enlivening, making human (the breath of Spirit and Sophia?). “God’s kiss is not just a blown kiss that dissolves in the air. It touches the humus and what it touches comes alive and breathes—breathes for itself, breathes as itself.”[16] Creation and divinization are deepened and widened. “Created Sophia, as the human nature of Christ, admitted of further sophianization or divinization, which is exactly what was accomplished through the resurrection of Christ and in his glorification.”[17]

The struggle between life and death, being and nonbeing, indicates the possibility of divine being or nonbeing enacted in every human life; a struggle predetermined in Christ and carried out in the Spirit. “The Divine ousia is thoroughly transparent for the Spirit and in this sense is Sophia, entirely hypostatized and not leaving a place in itself for anything that is not hypostatically clarified (for any Urgrund or bottomless abyss).”[18] Communication of the Spirit is the ongoing work of the Trinity in creation and the repetition of God in the human image calls for continued life and repetition with a difference.

Desmond describes this as the possibility of “inspiration and creation” as the world is not determinately bounded, but open. It is open to a “participation in the porosity,” expressed in “energetic endeavor in relation to what is beyond itself,” a “beyond as already seeded or sleeping in itself.”[19] The metaxological supposition “draws on the aesthetic overdetermancy of being,” and “draws us to it as alluring” and so to we draw on this supposition in creating “works that shine with its surplus.”[20] Desire is not simply a lack but the opening to an enabling grace. “The poros as opening a way, as enabling a porosity, is not always recognized when we treat of desire as if it were only a lack. There is the memory of divine festivity in the birth of eros, and with this the endeavor towards beauty is already in receipt of the promise of more than lack, of a more fulfilled festivity.”[21] Desire points to “the promise of the agapeic”: “the promise of a surplus generosity that comes to us in the delight of beauty. This festivity participates in an affirming ‘yes’ to being. The gift of beauty offers this incarnate ‘yes’ in a celebratory delight.”[22] The infinite shows itself in this unexpected, and even potentially monstrous (sacred) beauty; an agapeic overflowing which might be likened to Sophia.

The Iconic Aesthetics of Sophia and the Potency of the Middle

Sophia or betweenness is a possible realization of the divine in the immanent, a recognition and pursuit of unity in difference and betweenness. Bulgakov illustrates the natural intersection of Sophiology and art through icons, which are images made to reflect the Godhead, but these images are possible because the Name of God is the original and real icon of the Godhead. [23] Art, like the icon, is made possible by the iconic nature of reality, the presence of God in creation. Just as the human is an iconic and real representation of the divine, so too the possibility of art or language. God is present in his Name, just as he is present in the sacramental bread and wine, indicating the sacramental nature of all creation. “More than an icon, it becomes the temple, the altar, the shrine, the Holy of Holies, the place for the presence of God and of encounter with God.”[24] Creation as temple, a fit dwelling for God, and human encounter with the divine.

For Desmond, the pursuit of love, goodness and beauty, are at once erotic and spiritual (on the order of the icon?) and give rise to focus on the aesthetic and ethical as realms of “potencies.” Being permeable, porous, and relational, is definitive of personhood and its powers. The ethical, for example, is not delimiting or disempowering, but a potency.  “We are endowed in receiving and being invested with these potencies. And we are plurally endowed in that these different potencies bring to explication the ethical promise of our ethical being.”[25] There is promise in the good and ethical, open to realization. “All of the potencies of the ethical come forth out of an initial immersion in the ethos of being where we are offered an opaque intimation of the surplus of the good.”[26] The good (like the sophianic), is a gift of the between opening the human to the divine. “There is an elemental intimacy with the worth of being: before all determinate values, there is a pre-determinate sense of the good of the ‘to be’ at all, which we participate in, and witness to in the fact that our being is itself a kind of affirmation of being.”[27]

There is a potential sabbatical peace, beyond war and peace or beyond death, but also an encounter with something other. “Beauty witnesses an elemental rapport between ourselves and what is other. There is nothing of a vis dormativa in this rapport. We are surprised by beauty and taken outside of ourselves.”[28] It as if the other has “taken the initiative in communicating to us.” We are given the (divine) perspective of “beholding from the beautiful.”[29] We receive from the other, and only then are we “perceivers and conceivers.” There is an erotic, energized, endowment given in beauty. It is “not that our passio essendi makes us merely passive. To the contrary, we are energized to creative work in receiving originating power. But there is an endowed character to our participation in creative power.”[30] We can be perceivers, conceivers and creators because grace saturates creation, and this is the foundation of all human endeavor.

Conclusion: The recognition that Desmond’s metaxu accords with and can be read as a development of Sophiology, is a simple but enlightening realization, providing a long historical context for Desmond’s work, which like that of Bulgakov, calls upon the (mostly Eastern) tradition, in his expansive theology and philosophy. The excitement and beauty of his writing hit me, when I recognized he is providing a first-order description of divine encounter, on the order of Bulgakov’s Sophiology. The promise of the Gospel is premised on a universal accessibleness to God and the Spirit, and it is this premise which Desmond and Bulgakov are spelling out in Sophiology and Metaxology.

[1] Sergei Bulgakov, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 217. Cited in Richard Paul René, Absolute Vulnerability: A Contemporary Orthodox Anthropology in Dialogue with Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson, John Zizioulas, and Sergius Bulgakov (Toronto: University of Toronto and St. Michael’s College, PhD, 2024), 83.

[2]Josephien H. J. van Kessel, Sophiology and Modern Society: Sergei Bulgakov’s Conceptualization of an Alternative Modern Society (Nijmegen: Ipscamp Printing, 2020) 148

[3] René, 27.

[4] John Milbank, Sophiology and Theurgy: the New Theological Horizon (Unpublish paper available online at https://rprt.northwestern.edu/documents/research-scholar-articles/milbank-article-2.pdf, 9

[5] Sergius Bulgakov,. The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal )Cascade Books. Kindle Edition) 3-4.

[6] Sophiology of Death, 4.

[7] William Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, (Eugene, Oregon, Cascade Books, 2018), 60.

[8] The Gift of Beauty, 60.

[9] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[10] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[11] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[12] Milbank, 17.

[13] The Sophiology of Death, 128.

[14] The Sophiology of Death, 129.

[15] The Sophiology of Death, 123.

[16] The Gift of Beauty, 33.

[17] The Sophiology of Death, 123.

[18] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter (pp. 62-63). Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.

[19] The Gift of Beauty, 50.

[20] The Gift of Beauty, 26,

[21] The Gift of Beauty, 26-27.

[22] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[23] Sergii Bulgakov, Philosophy of the Name (NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies) (pp. 295-296). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

[24] Philosophy of the Name, 314,

[25] William Desmond, “The Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good” in An Ethics of/for the Future? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 65

[26] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[27] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[28] The Gift of Beauty, 21

[29] The Gift of Beauty, 21.

[30] The Gift of Beauty, 24.

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.