Thomas Aquinas – Forging Ploughshares

Where Does Thought Begin and End: Mary Versus Martha

The most basic question concerns that with which we are always occupied, the why and how of thought. What is it, how do we best do it, and how does it shape who we are? We might picture thought as either a verb or noun, a doing or a receiving, a striving and working from lack, or a resting in a given and received abundance. It is like the difference between six days of work and the day of Sabbath, or the difference between Mary and Martha upon Jesus’ visitation. “Mary was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations” (Luke 10:39). If we think of the two women figuratively, with Martha representing the verb, the working form of thought, and Mary representing the Sabbatical resting form of thought, it not only illustrates two forms of thought but the perspective of each in juxtaposition to the other.

From Martha’s perspective, Mary is being lazy, and she is “left to do all the serving alone.” Martha’s response to Mary is not meant to devalue Jesus’ teaching, but there are “more pressing and practical matters.” In terms of thought, Martha might represent a kind of pragmatism, asking what work is being accomplished? Martha’s busy-ness (food and serving preparation) will result in a tangible product. We often picture thinking and life as a task aimed at producing. Thought is not simply to be enjoyed and indulged, but must justify itself, and show its value in some other coin. Martha is cleaning, getting a meal ready, and the value of her work is evident, but it does not occur to her that all of her preparations are subordinate to the “one necessary and good thing.”

Mary, as a Sabbath form of thought, is thought for itself, and is not for something else. Our tendency is to put thinking to work, either in a neurotic compulsive repetition, or aimed at attaining (perhaps ourselves) in and through thought. Sabbath thought, is on the order of Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet and taking in his instruction. We may have the experience of insight or a realization occurring to us, in which we are the receptors of something beyond ourselves. This thinking is not like producing a meal but is more on the order of a form of art, to be enjoyed for itself. There is food for thought which has no object other than itself. In the case of Jesus teaching, so too with a certain form of thought, it is simply to be received with joy. According to William Desmond, it presumes an original ontological ground: “a vision of all things being what they are by virtue of an ultimate ontological peace —to be at all is to be in the gifted peace of creation as good.”1 Sabbath thought is a realization of this ground of thought outside of itself.

Given this ground, contemplation, study, meditation, and prayer, are for themselves, though they may infect and channel all that surrounds them, but thought which does not have this center, is all Martha and no Mary. Sabbath thought “rests” in the realization of the divine, presumes a dependence on God, a providential guidance, an opening to deeper insight. It is a waiting, expectation, and gratitude, while its opposite is pure distraction which never realizes its primary purpose. Sabbath thought bears peace, that is beneath and perhaps beyond articulation. Unadulterated appreciation of beauty, enjoyment, profound contentment, pervade this thought centered on receiving grace. It is the “very good” of God in his admiration of creation and it is our participation in that same realization.

However, before we too readily dismiss Martha’s accusation (or before Jesus’ dismisses it), we recognize that though sloth is not Mary’s problem, this is a real possibility. Isn’t it the case that Sabbath itself contains the possibility of a sort of bored laziness; that the day in which we are to sit at the Saviour’s feet becomes instead a groggy oppressiveness in which we fail to discern the Lord? Thomas Aquinas recognizes this juxtaposition and poses Sabbath as an exposure of slothfulness: “Sloth is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. . . [, which] implicitly commands the mind to peace in God to which sorrow of the mind about the divine good is contrary.”[2] Aquinas defines sloth, as an oppressive sorrow, which, “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing. . . . hence sloth implies a certain weariness of work. . . a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.”[3] Sabbath sluggishness, describes a form of thought that is sorrowful, and having ceased activity (busyness), sorrow sets in as the mind turns in on itself. The lack of purpose, the despair, covered up by activity, may strike us in this moment. The wait for Godot, or for some larger explanation or purpose, is the opposite of Sabbath thought, in that it is all delay, anticipation, suffering, and there is no meaning. Sunday boredom may be much more pervasive than Sunday joy, but from this perspective Sabbath (the day of the Lord) is exposing something otherwise repressed. Sabbath may expose a sloth, a sorrow, a boredom which work hides.

Aquinas explains that sloth may pass from being a venial to a mortal sin, if it is deep ceded enough: “So too, the movement of sloth is sometimes in the sensuality alone, by reason of the opposition of the flesh to the spirit, and then it is a venial sin; whereas sometimes it reaches to the reason, which consents in the dislike, horror and detestation of the Divine good, on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit. On this case it is evident that sloth is a mortal sin.”[4] That is, the spirit may be willing but the flesh weak, or it may be that fleshly torpor also dominates thought and spirit. Sloth can become a way of thinking and Sabbath is meant to intercede in this downward spiral. According to Aquinas, sloth is opposed to joy, and as he explains “sloth can infect reason,” constituting its own joyless form of thought.

Thinking, of the Sabbath kind, the Mary kind, the received kind, is joyous. It is the thought God had on the Sabbath when he recognized, “It is very good.” There is an inherent pleasure in this recognition, which need not “do” something. This thought is an ontological ground out of which all thinking and goodness flows. There is no thinking, of any kind, apart from this origin. This goodness and peace are the basis of peace and goodness, making even defective forms possible. This thought need not wait till the end of history but is present throughout, the beginning and middle, as well as at history’s end. This goodness though, may be so pervasive that it is taken for granted, in that all possibility flows from this reality, making it difficult to recognize.[5] Martha-like busyness may not have time or inclination for this recognition.

We can hide from work, in the manner Martha projects upon Mary, but work can be a distraction, and this may be Martha’s problem: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things” (Luke 10:41). Jesus’ description of Martha captures life for many: worry and bother about many things but missing the point. According to Aquinas, “Now just as we do many things on account of pleasure, both in order to obtain it, and through being moved to do something under the impulse of pleasure, so again we do many things on account of sorrow, either that we may avoid it, or through being exasperated into doing something under pressure thereof.”[6] Martha is exasperated, and she seems to betray a sorrow, which according to Aquinas, she may be repressing. Sloth is a resistance, a dis-ease, the opposite of peace and joy, even where sloth is hidden by activity. Martha and her repressed kin may be missing the only thing necessary, “the good part.”

Martha wants Jesus to spur Mary into action, presuming she is avoiding work, but Jesus suggests Martha’s exasperation is causing her to miss what Mary has found (v. 41). He explains, “Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Lk 10:42). Martha is misfocused, worried, anxious and bothered, and in the process may miss the good thing, the main thing, and to take it away from Mary would be tragic. Mary has found the peace that has escaped Martha. This peace and goodness give value to everything else. It is the original goodness that makes all the work and preparation an extension of goodness.

Jesus doesn’t tell Martha to drop everything and come and sit down, though we might expect she would finish what she is doing and not miss out. He doesn’t command her, or us, to stop working, and sit meditating, but the work is not going to produce goodness, but flows from and toward this goodness. Martha cannot whip up this thing in her kitchen. What is being imparted to Mary may be assisted by Martha, in that Mary is not taken away from what is necessary, but Martha’s worried, bothered, busy-bodyness, is not helping, but is a distraction from what is essential. “Mary has chosen the good part,” the part that gives value to what Martha is doing. Martha’s busyness is justified by what Mary is doing, but not her worry and bother.

To say her worry and bother are justified would be to justify her experience of exasperated futility. It would be on the order of saying war is necessary for peace, or evil is justified by goodness, or sin is essential to salvation. The two are not connected. Martha’s worry is for nothing, serves nothing, and accomplishes nothing, though it is connected to her service. The problem is, separating Martha and her worry, her service and her exasperation. Is worry or war a necessary means to an end? The one necessary and good thing Mary is experiencing is not aided but hindered by Martha’s worried interference. Mary does not need the worry of Martha. Jesus is immediately accessible, and the goodness and peace he brings are accessible. Nothing else is necessary, and certainly futility and sin in no way aid or serve the good. Paul can experience this peace in prison, John received visions of hope and peace while in exile and under torture, and Christ grants peace from the cross. This thought transcends context and potentially descends into every context.

Now if Mary had said to Jesus, “Excuse me, I must go into the kitchen and strangle my sister,” this would have been like the strategy of peace through war. There is a total disruption, a total break. The one is completely opposed to the other, though we understand the confusion. Life as war, or thought as a plague, killing as the means to life, all Martha and no Mary, kills off the goal in striving to achieve it. There is a basic negativity, nothing as ground, which is not simply a philosophical problem, but which philosophy exposes.

For example, Descartes would doubt his way to God, in a form of thinking which receives nothing which transcends it. Like Kant, he “wants to accept nothing he has not earned through his own work.”[7] Descartes gives more room to doubt and the demonic, (the possibility a demon is deceiving him), than he does to love of God. He considers the possibility that he is brain damaged, that he is dreaming, or that an evil genius is deluding him. Things are precarious, my head may be “made of earthenware,” or “glass,” or I may be insane, or a demon deceiving me. Every possibility must be equally entertained before the arbiter of doubt.[8] He aims for a sure thought, like mathematics, that cannot be doubted but which can be mastered. This suspicious doubt is aggressive to what is beyond its control, and has no room for wonder, astonishment, or love, none of which can be reduced to a mathematical formula. It is as if love of my wife needs a prior surety, perhaps a private detective to investigate, so as to relieve any doubt. In this thinking, love of God is not a possible starting point, but the detective of doubt must first be deployed. Doubt may seem the more rigorous form of thought, but it is by definition the refusal of received thinking (not just received tradition, received authority, received understanding, but the very possibility of reception), on the order of the Sabbath. I must be in all the thought as author and originator. Given Descartes’ starting point (radical doubt and the possibility of radical evil), Sabbath thinking is not possible. Things are too unsure. Tradition, Church authority, and faith, have their place, but not in the realm of serious thinking (the rational kind). It is no great leap from Descartes’ radical doubt to Nietzsche’s nihilism.

This Enlightenment thought promotes an empty autonomy, all Martha and unaware of the Mary form of thought. They will do for themselves: think the greatest thought after Anselm, think one’s being after Descartes, and accept nothing not earned with Kant. The fumes of a presumed autonomy render them unconscious to any alternative; all work and no resting-playful grace. This form of empty thinking brings on Nietzsche’s pronouncement, “God is dead,” and he is dead for this form of thought. It is as if Martha has gotten so caught up in her kitchen duties that she has forgotten the possibility of divine visitation (Jesus in the other room). Mary-like reception can be disrupted and broken, not due to lack of effort, but because of energy, effort, worry, and bother, all directed to attaining what can only be received.

In the same way, grasping the tree of the knowledge of good and evil excludes from the tree of life (they die unaware), but then they find they are naked and ashamed. This failed knowledge is a doing, a grasping, a divinizing through its own power, and at the same time it is a refusal of mortality. Adam is the original Descartes, imagining that in this knowing he has grasped immortal divine being. Busyness, business, war, philosophy, or neurotic thought, may distract and cover the reality (of nakedness, mortality, and frailty). The human impetus is to cover the nakedness without addressing the root problem. As Desmond describes the philosophical project, “preaches speculatively against nakedness and every beyond, and the system weaves its conceptual clothes to cover our naked frailties.”[9]

To cease one form of thought, to bring busyness to an end, to enter the Sabbath, is to give up on covering frailty. There is no activity, no thought, no system of knowing, that can cover this nakedness. All pretense of defense, all weapons, all notions of self-determination, all busyness, must be dropped, as there is nothing to be done, other than receive the gift of the Master. There is no working to get there, but the work of preparation, in the metaphorical kitchen, must cease so as to enter the metaphorical living room at the feet of Jesus. There is no warring our way to peace, struggling to gain rest, or working our way to salvation. You cannot get to Mary-thought through Martha-thinking, the one precludes the other.

The dialectical intelligibility of the world, its oppositional antagonism, may in fact be more familiar, and may even provide a momentary satisfaction, but hunger will return. As Jesus explains at the well in Samaria, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about,” (Jn 4:32) and he promises a living water which “will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13). Martha-thought may provide temporary sustenance but it cannot serve in place of what Mary receives. Mary takes the time given to receive what is not otherwise available, while Martha cannot make time.

Goodness and peace, like the thought they entail, require only sitting at the feet of Jesus. This is cessation of activity of the Martha kind so as to receive the Word in the way of Mary. This thought is from beyond us, just as every origin, including ourselves, transcends us. We cannot cook up this peace or create this goodness, but only receive it. The point is not to denigrate Martha and her work or any work, but to acknowledge that all work requires more than itself. Even God’s work days are followed by interludes recognizing the goodness and then an uninterrupted Sabbath day, recognizing and declaring this goodness. To enter into this divine recognition is the beginning of Sabbath thought. “There is nothing we can do, nothing we are to do; except to take joy in the gift of being, and to live divine praise.”[10]

So thought is that which pervades every waking and even sleeping moment of our lives, and it may not have occurred to us that there is a failed form, an inadequate form, and a redeemed form of thought. It is not that we can easily be continually absorbed into this reality, but the goal of this transformed, grateful form of thought, holds out the immediate realization of rest and peace, the fulfilled Sabbath rest of Christ.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 320.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa, ques. 35, art. 3, response, and ad. 1. Cited in Desmond, 319.

[3] Summa, Question 35, Article 1: Whether sloth is a sin?

[4] Summa, 35:3.

[5] Desmond, 320.

[6] Summa, 35:4.

[7] Desmond, 341. This Lutheran rejection of works somehow preserved a toilsome thought, perhaps in making God so transcendent that his goodness was unavailable.

[8] René Descarte, Meditations 1 & 2.

[9] Desmond, 347.

[10] Desmond, 347.

Paul Blowers: From Creation Ex Nihilo to Creation Ex Deo or From Being to Well-Being in Maximus the Confessor

In Genesis the formless void, or the chaos of creation, in the view of Tertullian[1] and Gregory Nazianzen,[2] did not mean that matter was intrinsically formless, but apart from the light of Christ, which illumines and tames it, matter carries the possibility of lapsing into chaos and the nothingness from which it arose. This means Christ creates and sustains in the same self-giving love by which he saves, with death and nothingness as the other possibility. To state it clearly, creation and saving are part of the same kenotic self-giving of God in Christ. In the words of Paul Blowers, a leading specialist on Maximus the Confessor (who is the premiere innovator on the Chalcedonian Formula), there is a passage from being to well-being, inclusive of eternal well-being, as part of the same gift of grace flowing from God.[3] God calls from out of death and nothing in creation and salvation, and this is the all-inclusive work of Christ.

There is a progression of creation through salvation which unfolds not only in the Bible’s first chapters but its final chapters in which the purposes of creation are met in salvation. That is the eternal – joined to, shaping, holding together, from out of the ex nihilo is realized through Jesus Christ. The summing up (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of Ephesians 1:10, ties the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, directly to the incarnation. The death and nothingness which Christ overcame in his life, death and resurrection, is that which is continually overcome, through him, in creation. Or to say the same thing differently (if a bit redundantly), God’s grace in Christ is one, in salvation and creation. The sin which gives way to death, opens creation to the nothingness from which it arose and which Christ in his saving work turns back. This turning back is the completion of creation’s purpose. This is the mystery, hidden since the foundation of the world, revealed in Christ: “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him” (Eph. 1:9). The purposes of creation are found in incarnation.

This is the clear teaching of the New Testament, which has profound ramifications. Obviously, there is no nature grace duality or an ungraced nature, but it also implies a radically different understanding of the relationship between God and creation and time and eternity.

Creation Ex Deo

Creation ex nihilo is primarily a negative statement and is not meant to describe the how of creation, nor does it convey the positive interpenetrating relationship of God with his creation. The ex nihilo, even in the work of Aquinas, plays the primary role of combating both the doctrine of the eternality of the creation, or the notion that creation was made from out of some pre-existent matter. The doctrine does not refer to creation being called from out of nonbeing, but refers to the Creator as the cause, the source, or the power behind all being.[4] Nothing exists apart from Him, but He exists and the universe is a result, in one way or another, of His existence. This is not an explanation of how God did it but is simply a pointer to the fact that creation is His doing. According to A. Maryniarczyk, “the Creator is the cause of everything that is – form, matter, properties, and substance – and that nothing exists apart from Him that did not come from Him. The universe was and is a work of creation (creatio continua).”[5]

The danger with creation ex nihilo is that the nihilo will be conceived as an actually existing void or nothingness, or that creation will be pictured as something separate from God. The point of the doctrine is, that apart from God, nothing exists. All things are created and sustained through his active presence. According to Irenaeus, “God drew matter, and the very substance and form of things, ‘from himself’ (a semetipso) by willing the creation into being.”[6] Gregory of Nyssa argues that apart from God’s active willing matter has no existence. He assigns it to an “ineffable intellection” but does not speculate as to how this might be, but clearly there is the sense of ex Deo, or creation coming from out of God.[7] Dionysius the Areopagite directly explains the ex nihilo through the ex Deo. He asserts that God has brought the universe into being out of his goodness, and that “the Divine who transcends being is the being of all that is.”[8] As Blowers points out, “Dionysius adds the crucial caveat that God is creatures’ being only in the sense of their relative participation in him, and that the God who “is all things in all (1 Cor 15:28) is no-thing among any existent.”[9]

The passage from nonbeing to being is a possibility only through the direct act and continuing activity of God. As Blowers puts it, “In creating, God not only produces and shapes matter and bodies, he already saves them from nonbeing, from unfulfilled potential.”[10] The nothing or what is not, is filled in by what is and what is becoming in the creating/saving work of Christ. According to Gregory of Nyssa, the power of the Creator-Logos is “creative of what is, inventive of what is not, sustaining of what has come into being, and foreseeing of what is yet to be.”[11] There is a teleological purpose in which what we will be has not yet appeared (I John 3:2). This unrealized potential is not yet, but in Christ will be. It is only in contrast to what is and what is becoming, through Christ, that nothing or what is not can be posited. So creation ex nihilo is another way of saying that all that is has its being through Christ.

This then raises a series of problems (recognized by Dionysius), in that creation might be thought to be an emanation from God in a Greek sense, and that ultimately all things reduce to God (pantheism). God might be pictured as a multiplicity of beings, though everything is just his one Being (producing a plurality) with a loss of distinction between Creator and creation. The resolution to this potential (and real) misconstrual is a proper understanding of the role of Christ.

Jesus Christ as Mediating Divinity to Humanity

Maximus the Confessor goes further than his predecessors in distinguishing creation from a Greek emanation, but also in explaining how it is that Christ completes creation (through incarnation) while maintaining a creation/Creator distinction. He notes that beings become, through his being “all in all” (1 Cor 9:22), but that God never becomes. He cannot be said to be a being: “In this way he can in no way be associated by nature with any being and thus because of his superbeing is fittingly referred to as nonbeing. For since it is necessary that we understand correctly the difference between God and creatures, then the affirmation of superbeing must be the negation of beings, and the affirmation of beings must be the negation of superbeing.”[12] Both being and beyond being (or nonbeing) must be ascribed to God. “In one sense they are both proper to him, one affirming the being of God as cause of being, the other completely denying in him the being which all being have, based on his preeminence as cause.”[13] Maximus creates a sharp divide between Creator and creation, or between the divine and the human, but this divide is bridged by the one who is both Creator and created, both human and divine. These categories are absolutely separate, but this separation is overcome by the one bearing both realities in his singular personhood.

Salvation as the Means of Creation

For Maximus, not only are salvation and creation the work of Christ, they are of the saving work. Maximus posits the saving work of Christ as having precedence over his creating work: “insofar as [the Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in vain.”[14] He describes the incarnation of Christ as a “’a super-infinite plan infinitely preexisting the ages,’ with a view to which God created the very essences of all creatures.”[15] In other words, Christ as savior is the Creator. As Peter puts it and as Maximus notes, “But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (I Peter 1:19-20). The slain lamb manifest at the end of time is the foundation of creation. His sacrifice in the middle of history serves as the arche at the beginning and the goal realized at the end of history.

As Maximus writes, “The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos holds the power of all the hidden logoi and figures of Scripture as well as the knowledge of visible and intelligible creatures. Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose (logos) for which God originally made all things.”[16] He goes on to note, one cannot abstract from the slain lamb to the arche of all things through either the intellect or the senses. That is, it is this particular person, and not an intellectual (in the Greek sense) or sensible abstraction, that accomplishes creation in incarnation:

All visible things require a cross, meaning the capacity of preempting the attraction to them of those who engage them by sense experience. And all intelligible things need a burial, meaning the complete immobilization of those who engage them by intellect. For when all activity and stimulus toward all (sensible and intelligible) things is suspended together with all inclination to them, the Logos, who alone exists in and of himself, appears anew as if rising from the dead, since he encompasses all those (created) things that come from him, though none of them has any intrinsic connection to him at all by natural relation. For he is the salvation of the saved by grace and not by nature.[17]

The logoi or undergirding arche by which Christ creates and sustains are not extrapolations, abstractions, intellections, senses, apart from who he is. Thus, though Maximus may occasionally sound Greek, he is not appealing to a Greek sort of Forms, but is appealing directly to Jesus Christ as forming the logic, the purpose, the arche or the logoi of creation. Christ’s embodiment in incarnation is the same presence found throughout creation. As Blowers sums up,

Through the logoi, the Logos has pre-evangelized all things and prepared them for the Christophany in which all things are ‘recapitulated’ according to their proportionate participation in the work of Christ. Maximus frequently speaks of this ongoing work of recapitulation as the ‘mystery of Christ,’ within which the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is perpetually culminating in the deification of humanity and the transformation of all creatures.[18]

The participation in Christ of the Christian is the creation power which gave the first birth but which leads to the second birth. According to Maximus, “Indeed, this divine power is not yet finished with those beings created by it; rather, it is forever sustaining those – like us human beings – who have received their existence from it. Without it they could not exist. This is why the text speaks of the riches of his goodness (Eph 2:7), since God’s resplendent plan for our transformation unto deification never ceases in its goodness toward us.”[19] God’s creative purposes encoded in the logoi are part and parcel with his salvation purposes worked out in the incarnate Logos. In the pithy phraseology of Blowers, “When Christ spoke of ‘working still’ along with the Father, he was speaking in his own role as Creator, effecting a new integrity of creation, a new unity of its universals and its particulars, and a new condition in which creatures that are by nature moved by the Creator move on their own toward well-being.”[20]

[1] Tertullian, Contra Hermogenem 29.1–6; 33.1 (SC 439:140–50). Cited in Paul Blowers, “From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being: Creation ex nihilo in the Cosmology and Soteriology of Maximus the Confessor,” in Light on creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, eds. Geert Roskam and Joseph Verheyden [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017], 173.

[2] Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana 4 (De mundo) (Moreschini, 16). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[3] Blowers, 176.

[4] See Daniel Soars, “Creation in Aquinas: ex nihilo or ex deo?” (New Blackfriars, DOI:10.1111/nbfr.12603)

[5] Andrzej Maryniarczyk, ‘Philosophical Creationism: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Creatio Ex Nihilo’, Studia Gilsoniana 5 (2016, 217–68), 240. Cited in Soars, 4.

[6] Adv. haer. 2.30.9 (SC 294:318); 4.20.1 (SC 100:626). The Citation and full quote are from Blowers, 175.

[7] De hominis opiicio 24 (PG 44:212D–213C). Blowers, Ibid.

[8] De caelesti hierarchia 4.1 (PTS 36:20); cf. Ep. 8.1 (PTS 36:173–4). Blowers, Ibid.

[9] Blowers, 175, referencing Dionysius De divinis nominibus 7.3 (PTS 33:198).

[10] Blowers, 174.

[11] Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:16, ll. 20–2). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[12] Mystagogia, prooemium (CCSG 69:9, ll. 106–19), trans. George Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 185 (altered). Cf. Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.4 (PG 90:1084B–C). Cited in Blowers, 175.

[13] Ibid.

[14]Adversus haereses 3.22.3 (SC 211:438). Cited in Blowers, 179-180.

[15] Blowers, 180 referencing Quaestiones ad Thalassium 60 (CCSG 7:75–7).

[16] Capita theologica et oeconomica, 1.66–67 (PG 90:1108A–B). Cited in Blowers, 180.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Blowers, 181.

[19] Q. Thal. 22 (CCSG 7:143), trans. Paul Blowers, in Paul Blowers – Robert Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 118. Cited by Blowers, 181.

[20] Blowers, 182.

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.