“Orthodoxy, Heresiology, and Why We Should Care:
A Response to the Essays on Bulgakov and Apollinarius”
by Anthony D. Baker
Seminary of the Southwest
Austin, Texas
Rarely is new research on heresiarchs of the ancient church of any real theological interest. Whether or not Augustine was right about what Pelagius meant is an archeological matter, since he was certainly right about the disasterously contractual conception of grace that his “fictive Pelagius” offered. One of a small handful of exceptions to this rule is Rowan Williams’s Arius, which digs deeply into the source materials of fourth century Christology in order to deliver a punchline not so much about what we are to do with Arius, but about the relation of a creative theologian to the church, especially the church in a time of great doctrinal ambiguity.
As another exception to this rule, though, we must surely count Bulgakov’s reassessment of Apollinarius, part of a beautifully-crafted 88-page essay on Patristic Christology. As Mr. Bruce points out here, this now seventy-five year old thesis holds up remarkably well alongside the recent work that has been done on Apollinarius, which must now cause teachers of Christology to stop assigning him that remarkably naïve notion that the human nature of Christ was void of a human soul. In fact, as Bulgakov shows, the bishop of Laodicia understood quite well that what is not assumed is not healed, and so that a body and soul must both be assumed by the Logos. What he lacked, however, was consistency of language and a thoroughly worked-out anthropology, leading later readers to make a rather insane caricature of his position in order to show the sanity of Cyril’s. Bruce points out very helpfully the crude scholarship of 19th century dogmatic histories on this point, and this makes Bulgakov’s rise in popularity over the last decade even more timely, since only now are these broadly sweeping and almost universally inaccurate tomes finally being exiled from seminary and undergraduate lecture halls.
What do I mean, though, in suggesting that this return to a new appreciation for a 4th century heretic is of theological interest? What emerges in Bulgakov’s essay is a new approach to what is the pearl in the oyster of Patristic theology, the set of teachings culminating in the articulation, in Leontius of Byzantium perhaps, of the enhypostatic humanity of Christ. In Christ there is a full human nature, but not a human person, since the unity of the Logos asarkos is also the unity of the Word made flesh. This is how Chalcedon arrives at its definition of a hypostatic or Personal unity that conjoins two natures without compromising their integrity. And this must, it seems, be seen as the crucial move of all Patristic Christology, gathering together the New Testament witness to a Christ who, in being lifted up, can draw all unto himself, and within whom all can be made a new creation
This teaching also leads, it should be added, toward that scholastic development which, since de Lubac, we are beginning to see as one of the most important developments in the history of Christian thought: the location of human perfection in participation in God’s nature, rather than in an autonomous completion of our own. This is, we must now say, a direct inheritance from the Christology of the Fathers. If Christ’s human nature is completed only by becoming personal or hypostatized in the Logos, then a Christian anthropology must assume that humans have no natural perfection, only a natural desire to become perfect through a sharing in the “hypostaseity,” to borrow Bulgakov’s most dizzying neologism, of Jesus.
Before returning to the theological import of reattaching this orthodox stream to Apollinarius, I want to linger for just a moment on this notion of the relation of nature and hypostasis in God and in the world, which is of course where the controversies of Bulgakov’s sophiology emerge. I agree with Mr. Karlson, who finds the overuse of Fichtean idealism through the Divine Humanity Trilogy to be a weakness. I am not convinced, as I think he is not, that God is a “tri-hypostatic Person,” since this seems to collide incoherently with Bulgakov’s own use of Person as the hypostasis of the Logos. However, I do not take this to mean that “Bulgakov perhaps went too far in trying to connect God with creation by using Sophia as a common principle between the two.” While this might be a fair evaluation of the Bulgakov of Unfading Light, I cannot see it as warranted by the dogmatic works. Tertium quid non datur, as Bulgakov well knows. What sophiology constructs instead is, within the Godhead, a nature that tends toward divine hypostatization, and so also a created nature that tends toward this same intermingling with the divine hypostases, though here only through its incorporation in the Incarnate Word. This means that the fundamental distinction for theology can no longer be thought of as that which divides God and the world-or, if it is, we must remain unsure of where to draw this boundary, since it is not a barrier, but a kind of four-dimensional frontier, whose edges, along with the persons they mark off from one another, all fade into distensive pixels. Indeed, the divine humanity, eternally hypostatized in God, is itself this very frontier. And while Bruce makes the very important point that there is a commonality between Barth and Bulgakov on the refusal of a full speculative abstraction from the incarnation, this sophianic metaphysics surely gives a quite unBarthian coloring to the refusal in Bulgakov’s dogmatics.
Returning to the matter of Apollinarius’s reassessment, it might be important to ask whether Bulgakov is actually making a run at “a new Christological tradition” as Karlson suggests. I think he is not, simply because the “old” Christological tradition is one in which language was constantly stretched and teased in order to speak faithfully to the union of distinct natures - this, I think, is only one of the enduring aspects of von Balthasar’s book on Maximus the Confessor, which is the text, I believe, that Karlson refers to at the opening of his piece. Christology dies when the church ceases to contemplate its way into the hypostatic union, and a certain rigidity to much post-Chalcedonian Christology amounts to just such a death. I do think, it bears mentioning, that Bulgakov is wrong about Maximus’s role in this inheritance, and that he skirts far too quickly over the rigor of Maximus’s reflections on the two wills in Christ in order to set up his own sophianic solution, a dodgy method that Bulgakov employs even more consistently in Bride of the Lamb.
The larger point, though, remains sound. We teach Patristic christology badly if we assume that the real breakthrough was the “discovery” of the new meanings of persona, hypostasis, phusis, and ousia in the fourth and fifth centuries. Cyril uses these terms; however, as Bulgakov shows with such alarming persuasiveness, his use of them amounts more to an ecclesiastical posturing than to proper theological reasoning: “antimony clothed in apophatics” (Lamb of God, p. 25), which those mindful of Bulgakov’s radical notion of the participation of human intellection in divine reason will recognize immediately as a damning evaluation. So, his surprising but seemingly sound conclusion: “Apollinarius is superior to St. Cyril, however, in consistency and clarity of thought: the unity of the life of Christ and the resulting sanctification of the human essence (communicatio idiomatum) are, in their own way, sufficiently well grounded in Apollinarius’s Christology, something one cannot say about St. Cyril’s Christology” (28).
In short, if Christianity holds Christ to be the one who crafts a unity of time and eternity that allows temporal creatures to share in God, then the key theological move is the removal from Christ’s person of anything natural or temporal that would perfect his humanity, prior to its ecstatic perfection in the Logos. And this, it seems, is precisely the doctrine sketched, however inadequately, by Apollinarius the heretic.
“… if Christianity holds Christ to be the one who crafts a unity of time and eternity that allows temporal creatures to share in God, then the key theological move is the removal from Christ’s person of anything natural or temporal that would perfect his humanity, prior to its ecstatic perfection in the Logos.”
Is the issue here really “perfection” — or is it an inherent GOODNESS and DESIRE that even sin cannot cancel or annihilate? Bulgakov himself uses the term “potentiality.” Does natural, temporal humanity have the inherent “potential” to move toward and cooperate in the divine life of God? (Mary and her humanity would be archetypal here, as we see it is in Bulgakov.)
While surely we can agree that human beings do not acheive perfection without Christ’s sacrifice or apart from union with Christ (and even then only imperfectly or proleptically during this life), yet surely human nature is in itself ordered toward the fullness of the divine life, because of its roots in creation, which of course Bulgakov explicates in terms of his created Sophia, which has dwelt in all of creation but especially in human nature, made in God’s image, from the beginning.
Is there a (divinely instituted) goodness in human nature itself; is there a yearning and a desire for God and for God’s fullness of life, which the fall has not erased and which awaits the disclosure of a redemption that is made fully available only in and by Christ? In _Sophia the Wisdom of God_ (this is the only book I have read of his) Bulgakov seems to skirt the usual view that Christ has no Adamic nature (no sin nature), since he sees Mary as having had an fallen Adamic nature whose proclivity to sin was reduced to a mere “virtuality” by her comp[ete submission to the Holy Spirit, and then he goes on to say that it was THIS humanity that Christ received from his mother.
Does this not seem to depart from the doctrine that Christ was “without sin” — not only in act but also in his essential nature as a human being? But even if so, this would be a very good example of how even dubious theology can contribute to raising some really central and important issues, in the hands of a theologian as wise and deep and faithful as Bulgakov. Can Christ really be one of us, if he is without our human sin nature? If he is, then this in itself would show us how deeply our humanity rests in that original, unfallen, sophiological humanity as it was given to us in the beginning.
And if Bulgakov means to suggest that Christ’s humanity was exactly like ours, then must he not think that, like Mary’s humanity, Christ in his humanity was capable of submitting so completely to God’s will that in him the sin nature was reduced to a mere “virtuality”?
I do not mean to suggest a Pelagian view that human nature is endowed with all that it needs in order to acheive salvation apart from the grace of God. But when or how does human nature ever even exist, apart from the grace of God? We are weak; we are blind. But surely in our natural, temporal humanity there must be a tendency and a potentiality to “move toward the perfection” of its own nature, and that must be by attempting to return, however feebly in our cases, to the wellsprings of its very being that lie only in the Being or Ousia of God.
I mention this in order to get at the importance of human nature itself being good before it fell and being “potentially” holy and pure if only by grace the effects of the fall can be abrogated. Christ may be the “man from heaven,” as Bulgakov emphasizes, but he is also “the last Adam,” the human being who in his humanity is tempted, but does not fall.
I wonder what the rest of you think about this issue of Christ’s humanity, and whether its goodness must come NOT only from the divine side of the hypostatic union, but also from a genuinely human nature that is already predisposed, through the original Sophianic anthropology of creation (and perhaps renewed as well by the infusion of Christ’s blood and water into the entire physical creation from the Cross, a very “beautiful idea”), to bear always within itself the “potential” to be filled with a divine-human fullness of life that can only be poured out from God.
That “potential” within human nature seems to me to be crucial, certainly to Bulgakov — but also in general. Redemption is after all the SECOND act (or the third); the first act is the creation. How can divine fullness of life ever come to dwell in a nature that was never capable of or ordered toward participation in that life to begin with?
Given the recent interest in rhetorical analysis of Patristic writer, it is interesting the Bulgakov, and his commentators here, have “re-evaluated” Apollonarius with a similar method. I have to add, however, that much of this conversation would be better served by the material rejected, rather tongue and cheek, in the opening sentences: “Rarely is new research on heresiarchs of the ancient church of any real theological interest.” First of all, this whole section of the response is a thinly veiled ad hominem of historical method, and thus historical theologians. While it may be true that there is a question of Pelagius’ and Apollonarius’ own words and thoughts, I think to say that we are “certainly right” to consider the theological implications divorced of any historical study is a truly fallacious move. The prime example of Williams’ Arius also makes this point more plain: One cannot ever dissect Williams theologically constructive work from his historical acumen.
In terms of the Christological controversies of the Fourth and Fifth centuries, this historical acumen is key to any sound theological assertion. As was noted throughout these essays, technical vocabulary is key to the elaborate Christology we arrive at in the mid-Fifth century. Yet, on a closer, and I mean historical, look we can see that these words were not the result of skilled theologians but consummate rhetoricians (see Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004).) Also to say that these authors used hypostasis, ousia and prosopon with the technical clarity we assign them today would be unhelpfully anachronistic.
Unfortunately, I have not kept this response to the topic of Bulgakov’s reading of Apollonarius. I would offer, in contradistinction to Mr. Baker’s comments, to set Bulgakov’s Apollonarius next to contemporary historical looks at the man and his theology. Yet, I am afraid this commits the same fallacy, just by a swing of the pendulum. This leaves open the important intersection of history and theology. Is there a better way to integrate the two fields for the betterment of theology? I think we need only look as far as Williams and deLubac to see how its done. In this way, hopefully, history is less “archaeological” and theology less “ethereal.”
Anthony,
I think the question of whether or not Bulgakov is starting a new Christological tradition depends upon whether or not someone takes up where he left off or not. That he is trying to engage traditional Christology does not, in itself, indicate he is not trying to engage a new tradition: he is pointing out how the old tradition is at once valid but incomplete, insufficient, and he made it clear many times that there is the need for a positive Christological development. For him that comes within the lines of “Godmanhood.” He wants to re-examine the relationship between humanity and divinity, and I think that is his strong point; there is much to offer in it. However, it also seems to have one weakness: it’s very anthropomorphic, and that, I think, comes into the issue I have of his notion of Sophia and creaturely/divine Sophia… throughout his writings I just get a very anthropomorphic reading of God by how he sets out to understand the nature of God. It’s an issue I find with most of the theological tradition, and not just him, but I think it comes out in a unique way in his writings.
Janet Leslie Blumberg–
Thank you for pressing this terribly important question about the potency of Christ’s humanity. I’m something of a de Lubacian, so was excited about the line of thought in Bulgakov’s Patristic intro to Lamb of God that sketched an anthropology leading in almost perfectly, it seems to me, to de Lubac’s thesis: even fallen humans retain a natural and unelicited desire for the supernatural. I think, after reading Lamb, that this is precisely what SB means, at least when I can bring him into focus, by earthly sophia. The important point, though, and the one that Apollinarius helps him get to, is that the desire for perfection (yes, I think it is about perfection–the completion of the human nature–and here there’s enough Bulgakov as well as de Lubac to back me up) is not the same as the potential for perfection. So in Christ, and therefore by mediation in us, human nature is whole and complete only in its assumption into the hypostasis of the Logos—but if this wasn’t its deepest and most essential desire all along, then this wouldn’t really be a completion of human nature at all, but an extrinsic supplementation. It’s the desire that makes this assumption a fitting and suitable means to deification.
Joshua–
I may have provoked you into a dichotomy inadvertently. The example of Williams was meant to suggest that on occasion, a rigorous history of a heretic can say something more profound than “we’ve been wrong about this guy.” Lots of scholarship may try to make this case about, for example, Pelagius, but not much of this work will change the way we read Augustine’s critiques of Pelagius and Pelagianism–what he’s writing against is still bad, regardless of whether it’s a fair treatment of his opponent. Williams changes how we read Origen and Athanasius, and the whole question of the Son’s origin, by looking critically at the substance of Arius’s thought. Bulgakov pulls off something that important: his treatment of Apollinarius makes us reconsider the entire landscape of Patristic theology, and especially Cyril.
So there’s no reason, I hope, to take my comments as an attack on historical criticism (though I’m not sure how one could be guilty of an “ad hominem” against an intellectual methodology!). It’s simply to say that rarely does anyone manage to make theological hay out of critical-heresiological seed…
Henry–I think I may have said this above, but it’s the only response that comes to me at the moment: you’re right, to my mind, about the potential anthropomorphic dangers of some of the divine sophia language. His point, though, is entirely non-anthropomorphic–that there is a relationality in God that is eternally constituted, and we only enter into this story as a reflection of who God has been eternally. It’s a crucial, post-Hegelian destination— but there may be too much Fichte lining the path.