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.
[40] God Beyond the Whole, 168.