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.