“Sophiology: Divine Sophia”
By Aron Dunlap, Temply University
In the hands of Bulgakov Sophia is described under two general forms, Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia. Divine Sophia goes under many names, one being that of the ousia, the Being, of the very Godhead, in distinction to the persons, the hypostases of the Father, Son and Spirit:
The first part of the dogma, that is, the doctrine of the relationship between the three hypostases with their hypostatic qualities and distinctive features, has been to a certain extent elucidated in the process of the Church’s dogmatic creativity. But the other side, the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity, as well as the actual conception of the substance or nature, has been far less developed and, apparently, almost overlooked.1
It is important here that we do not think that Bulgakov is saying something like that Sophia is the divine Trinity taken as a whole, in the way that the encircling of the divine AUM in Hinduism is an actual fourth state. In fact, Bulgakov reminds us that this very position, in the thought of Gilbert de la Porrée, was ruled out by the Council of Rheims in 1147. The church concluded then that, “Divinitas sit Deus et Deus Divinitas, God is Divinity and Divinity is God.”2 Bulgakov, in a typically nuanced way is claiming that this does not rule out the fact that the nature of Sophia, who is “not God, but divinity,”3 has not been fully thought out. What makes Bulgakov’s claims about Sophia different from Porrée’s heresy, is that Bulgakov is not attempting to redefine the nature of the Trinity, or even the nature of created being-he is not trying to add something to God-but he is claiming that there is a border zone (or better, a background), an intermediate concept, that has simply not been discussed, or in the name of fighting against heresy, has been simply thrown out with the heretics, a matter of tossing the baby with the bathwater.
In this same vein Bulgakov also uses the language that Sophia is the “nature” of God, the very world in which the Godhead lives. And that nature is the Love which defines the Godhead, but a love which is of a different description than the Love of the Trinitarian persons for each other-”But besides that which is personal there can be a love which is not. . . . in the love of the Godhead for God.”4 What he is saying is that in the love of any of the persons of the Trinity for each other there is a personal love, but this does not rule out the fact that there is also an impersonal face, or even grounding to this Love, and that this is Sophia, the very environment in which God lives, or in the words of Augustine (speaking of sapientia creata, created wisdom), “the rational intellectual mind of God’s pure city, our mother, the heavenly Jerusalem, a city of Freedom, which lasts eternally in heaven.”5
The distinction that Bulgakov makes is quite fine, and shows the degree to which he was committed to bringing Sophianic thought into the folds of orthodoxy. The following reveals the extent to which he was determined that Sophia not be viewed as a 4th:
The nature of God (which is in fact Sophia) is a living and, therefore, loving substance, ground, and “principle.” But, it might be said, does this not lead to the conception of a “fourth hypostasis”? The reply is “certainly not,” for this principle in itself is non-hypostatic, though capable of being hypostatized in a given Hypostasis, and thereby constituting its life. But, it might still be urged, would this not result in “another God,” a sort of totally “other” divine principle within God? Again we reply, no; for no one has ever attempted to maintain such an idea in connection with the divine Ousia in its relation to the hypostases, while the very conception of Ousia itself is but that of Sophia, less fully developed.((Bulgakov, Sophia: The Wisdom of God, 35-36.))
and also, from a book often considered his magnum opus:
As divinity, Sophia is nonhypostatic (is not a “fourth hypostasis”), but she is eternally hypostatized in the Holy Trinity and never exists nonhypostatically or extrahypostatically. She belongs to the divine trihypostatic Person as this Person’s life and self-revelation. She exists in herself, but not for herself.6
In his position that Sophia is not a person he allows her to be the provenance of all the members of the Trinity, to be “hypostatized” in the movement of the Father, Son, and Spirit, without being solely identified with one of the members, which he said happened with the early fathers who, in fighting the Arians, shared with their enemies the point of view that the Wisdom mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures always referred to the Logos: “The Arians and the anti-Arians who attempted to equate wisdom with the Son, by their very attempt deny wisdom both to the Father and the Holy Spirit.”7 In a sense we can say that Wisdom is an attribute of the Godhead, but Bulgakov wants her position to be more elevated than that-she is more like a fundamental attribute without which God would not be God. At times he describes Wisdom and Glory as being like the right and left hands of God, intimately tied up in the very relatedness of the members of the Trinity to each other, where the action of the Son is revealed as Wisdom and the work of the Spirit is to crown creation with Glory.
Inasmuch as she expresses the essence of God, Sophia is also intimately linked with God’s creativity, for Bulgakov was adamant that creation was not simply an arbitrary or accidental event that resulted from a divine whim:
The notion, freely accepted by Aquinas and others, that God, by virtue of this “freedom” of His, could have refrained from creating the world must be rejected as not appropriate to His essence. If God created the world, this means that he could not have refrained from creating it, although the Creator’s act belongs to the fullness of God’s life and this act contains no external compulsion that would contradict divine freedom.8
Even though Bulgakov was adamant that God does not need the world and that God is completely satisfied in the love that flows between the three persons, this love is of the nature to spill out beyond itself-as the nature of the ocean is to transgress its shores-and God desires to share this love with something that is not God, namely that which He has made: “The Godhead in its divine liberality, in self-renouncing love, longs for what is not itself, not divine, and so goes forth from its selfhood in creating.”9 Love, for Bulgakov as well as for other theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius, was fundamentally ecstatic, in that it causes God to God to reach out beyond God’s self to create and relate to non-divine reality, at the same time as it allows created beings to reach beyond their own limits and be united to their creator. So while Bulgakov is perhaps not saying anything that certain of his predecessors, both East and West, haven’t already said, the conclusions he draws are, I believe, novel. The fact that ecstatic love is the nature of God, and that the creation we know is the result of this nature means, for Bulgakov, that in some way this creation has always existed with God, not as a separate person or hypostasis but in some way as a living reality, a heavenly Jerusalem, uncreated and eternal.
In 1935 the Sophiological aspects of Bulgakov’s theology was judged heretical by the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church Abroad (not, incidentally, Bulgakov’s own jurisdiction). They felt that Bulgakov made Sophia a fourth member of the Godhead, turning the trinity into a quaternity. Many of Bulgakov’s arguments concerning the “hypostatizable” nature of Sophia are the result of this condemnation, and his struggle with the Orthodox authorities no doubt forced him to articulate his views in different ways. The following long quotation is perhaps one of his most creative attempts to find a way to express the fundamental distinction between Trinity and Sophia, in a way that would remain within the bounds of orthodoxy:
The entire Holy trinity in its tri-unity “is Sophia” just as all the three hypostases are in their separateness. But we should be clear in this connection what we mean by “is.” The connecting word “is” here unites the tri-hypostatic subject with the predicate. The subject is a Hypostasis which, according to its nature, possesses being and which discloses this being in its nature. Nevertheless this predicate, as the content of the subject’s natural life, does not contain within itself the Hypostasis as such, but only reveals it. And Sophia, in this sense, once more, is not a Hypostasis, but only a quality belonging to a Hypostasis, an attribute of Hypostatic being. Therefore we should point out a very important peculiarity of such statements as the following; The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Trinity “is” either Ousia or Sophia. Such a statement cannot be reversed. We cannot on the basis of the foregoing argument affirm the converse in which the place of the subject would be occupied by the Ousia-Sophia, and the place of the predicate by the hypostases; for instance: “Ousia-Sophia is the Father, Son, etc.” Such as statement would simply be untrue for it would contain the heresy of impersonalism as regards the Holy Trinity.10
This passage, it seems to me, is simply a commentary on I John 4:8, which states that “God is Love.” God is, of course, Father, Son, and Spirit, but that is not to say what God is. What God is is Love, and not just the personalized aspects in which the Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved, and the Spirit is Love (as per Augustine). For in a sense, the nature of Love disappears, or is obscured, when it is acted out by these persons. Bulgakov’s point is that there still remains an essence of Love that has yet to be sufficiently thought out or revealed. Bulgakov has a very high understanding of the importance of history, such that that the image of perfect love was given in the event of the cross, but this has not yet been sufficiently understood. History is simply the process of coming to understand what that Love means, and of course, as in the new command of John 13:34, how we are to participate in that love by loving God and by loving others: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”11
- Bulgakov, Sophia: The Wisdom of God, 24.↩
- Ibid., 36 fn↩
- Ibid., 30.↩
- Ibid., 35.↩
- Augustine, Confessions, 292.↩
- Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 39.↩
- Bulgakov, Sophia: The Wisdom of God, 31 fn.↩
- Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 31.↩
- Bulgakov, The Unfading Light, 133.↩
- Bulgakov, Sophia: The Wisdom of God, 52-53.↩
- It should be noted that in earlier writings he actually did consider Sophia to be a fourth hypostasis. He says in The Unfading Light (1917) that “Sophia possesses a personality, a face; it is a subject, a person, or, to use the terminology of theology, a hypostasis. It is of course distinct from the hypostases of the Holy Trinity, it is an individual reality of another order, a fourth hypostasis. It does not share in the intra-divine life: it is not God, and so does not turn the Trinity into a quaternity of hypostases.” Bulgakov, The Unfading Light, 135.↩
“Love, for Bulgakov as well as for other theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius, was fundamentally ecstatic, in that it causes God to reach out beyond God’s self to create and relate to non-divine reality, at the same time as it allows created beings to reach beyond their own limits and be united to their creator.”
Yes, this is wonderful, Aron. And this ex-stasis is lies for Bulgakov within the single consubstantial unity or simplicity that is the very life and being of the Trinity, giving rise for Bulgakov then to enactment of this lving principle of exstasis AS the relational individuation of the Persons of the Trinity.
Hence, as you say, Sophia as the ousia of God, “God’s divinity,” is a sort of “background,” or a mediative “border zone,” that opens simplicity itself into the mutually individuating energies ofrelational diversity or distinctness….
This must be why Bulgakov must say over and over again of a particular unity in view that it is also composed of distinctnesses or difference, and of the distinct entities in view that they are also single and one by participation. Thus every constitutive component of reality is in its very being and structure open and porous to others. What is transcendence is always a movement to become immanent as what is not transcendent, and immanence is always a coming to be as a hypostasis within (and apart from) the transcendence within which it participates and by which it is sustained….
Transcendence itself (God’s divinity) becomes willingly oblated or subordinated to its own immanences, the vehicles of its coming to be, as Sophia is predicated of the subjects of the Trinity but not vice versa… As also is seen in the humilis-sublimis paradox of the lifting up of the lower nature as the vehicle for the birth of God into the world, as seen in Mary first and then in Christ as the divine-human: energies of precedence are always circulating and being exchanged….
This is a very different conceptual framework from the one inherent in our own intellectual traditions since the rise of Newtonian mechanics. That’s why we have to struggle against our tendency to view this sophiological energy as being merely an empty abstraction or static concept, an “idealism” without substance. (Yet this way of thinking is very like the worldview that contemporary physics has come to embrace, in which the fundamental reality is not matter or an empty mental ordering or “law,” but rather the circulation and interaction of energy fields, one form of which energy IS the kinds of structure in which energy instantiates itself as mass….)
Go Bulgakov!
And another inevitable aspect of this dynamical grasp of the really real in Bulgakov is, as you show, Aron, that mirroring or dynamic imitatio must keep on occurring, fractal-like, over and over again on every level of manifestation, in the elegant formality of the kind of relationship seen as between the divine and human natures in Christ, for example, or as between God (the Father) and the Image of God withinin the Trinity, or as between the divine and created Sophia within the very life and being of God: God’s divinity that is ex-static Love.
All you Augustinians out there, is this within the Western theological tradition — or what? In any case, it is certainly at the heart of that prescient pre-mechanistic ratio-nality that sustained the thinking of the West from Plato to the Renaissance humanists! The very capacity to think the One in Three and the Three in One (or the Two in One and the One in Two) without making the One into the thudding literalism of being another “one” just like each of the three — the reductive literalism seen in Russell’s take on set theory, or which the opening of Plato’s _Parmenides_ intimates is the source of the “third man” mistake, the kind of mistake that can (and will) be overcome only by an extraordinarily strong and sustained thinking. That is, by a thinking of co-inhering love or participation that unites without abolishing distinction (at base a thinking of the dynamism of the eidos IN ITS INSTANCES and of the kynde-ness(es) that manifest themselves as the world of Kyndes — it was this that opened the way to the original vision of the liberal arts in the first place, and sustained them from the fourth century BCE to the Renaissance.)
Enough of this undisciplined rhapsodizing on the theme of ex-staticizing Love as the very life of God. (Remember Augustine? “YOU are the life of the life of my soul.”)
Just a quick question, if ‘love’ is the basic concept that expresses the divine substance/essence, and B. says that ‘love is life’ or something like that, then isn’t life conceptually prior to love (just like being/ousia)? I certain agree that love is a divine attribute, but I am very confused by this statement:
“Love, for Bulgakov as well as for other theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius, was fundamentally ecstatic, in that it causes to God to reach out beyond God’s self to create and relate to non-divine reality, at the same time as it allows created beings to reach beyond their own limits and be united to their creator”. What does it mean to say ‘love causes God to cause’? Can’t we just say, ‘God wills/loves creatures into existence’? My guess is that there is some ambiguity here re: the divine will and love as a peculiar kind of act of the divine will.
Janet: I happen to know that in Richard of St. Victor’s De Trin. he focuses on divine power and wisdom. In his search for an account of why there are three divine persons, he discover that an argument along the lines of power won’t work, but one along the lines of wisdom will. In which case, he claims that love derives from divine wisdom; and then goes on to his arguments about ‘perfect love’ somehow necessitating that there be three lovers. This argument gets rehearsed by some scholastic theologians who like Richard; I know that Henry of Ghent cites the argument, but he doesn’t think the argument from love goes as far as Henry’s own psychological arguments (from reflexive knowledge and reflexive love–one might say). I know that Duns Scotus rejects Richard’s argument, at least so far as ‘mutual love’ is required for the spiration of the Holy Spirit. But Scotus has other aesthetic sensibilities, like claiming that the intrinsic perfection of the divine essence entails that the infinite divine essence is shareable and shared by three divine persons.
Scott,
What would you say, Scott, that Aquinas thinks about what you cite above? I would love to hear what you would conclude about that. What causes God to will the good suited to its own being to each of the kinds of things?
Part of the big picture here is the way that we separate substantive (noun) from act (verb) in modern epistemology. (This followed from the paradigmatic separation of matter and motion, did it not?)
There is also a huge difference between our analytic notion of “attribute” and the thinking of what is essential to the kinesis of ousia….
Imagine a life, not the biological life of a single living creature, but a life that brings forth such creatures over and over again to be conceived and born and to grow and flourish and to grow old and die and decay while their offspring repeat the cycle over and over. Of course such life is wise and determinate and purposive, but what are the energies of its being? This life supports the burgeoning and exchange of determinate living kinds of things, and the dynamic organization of the elemental kinds of things that underlie and support them.
oops, I hit send accidentally…
Scott, when you ask about love as “the basic concept that expresses divine substance/essence” I wonder about that term “concept.” We ourselves think the concept in Lockean terms to this day. I cannot find “concept” in the earlier thinking of the West — except in our translations, of course. The idea and the eidos were not “concepts.” We find “names” and we find essential kinds of things and we find heuristic accounts of what those essentials are, both determinatively (”in” the beings) and essentially in their own eidetic or formal manner of being. (When the nominalists elide this and cut the bond that holds all these together dynamically, then perhaps we are moving into a thoughtworld in which we can find concepts and things — and keep them substantively separate from the acts which are always already keeping the cosmos in being.)
In any case, for Bulgakov as Aron talks about, love is no concept. It is the intrinsic kinesis of the divine being. To separate being and love — or being and wisdom! — is problematic. We can do it for analysis, we can do it in principle, but only by taking our own analysis and principles with a high degree of skepticism and even irony…. It would be better, perhaps, to speak of loving and wise-ing and be-ing as one?
Hey Janet,
Thanks for the response. I should mention that I am fairly well rehearsed in scholastic theology– I study it full-time. The latin word ‘conceptum’ was used in the 13th c.; but that isn’t really the issue–we’re after the meanings, not the particular words (or synonyms). In any case, if you’d prefer a fairly direct realist account of cognition (sense, imagination and intellect)-where the external object immediately connects-up with our cognitive powers-I’d recommend looking at the non-Aristotelian-type people, like Peter John Olivi, or Duns Scotus, or Ockham, and not Aquinas. Also, the word ‘conceptum’ was used in particular ways in the 13th c., and that is tied to the particular theories of cognition–so that scholastic A might define it in one way, and scholastic B might define it in another way. So I’m not really bothered or afraid of the word–I’m more interested in the particular theories and uses of the word.
If you go in for a radical direct realist sort of account of cognition, say, where the external object immediately acts on a cognitive power–and one believes this acct. based on some deep mystical intuitions– how much does this account explain? Does it account for how ‘universal names or concepts’ happen? Does it explain how we have words like ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘therefore’, ‘not’? Does it explain the constructive activity that humans engage in, in order to achieve some goal, like discovering a definition of some external being?
As for ‘the concept of love’; I wasn’t suggesting that ‘love’ is merely a concept or name that we have for God, but that it is some real feature of God that is identical with the triune God whether or not any creatures ever have been or are or will be created. A doctrine of divine simplicity certainly crunches together how our concepts represent or express this or that feature of God.
Having studied scholastic philosophy and theology for awhile now, I am somewhat scekptical of assuming that medieval dude or dudette has got some genius or magical theory that will save us all.
I am sort of baffled by talk of divine ‘kinesis’–if by that we mean ‘motion’– and not something having to do with the incarnation of the Son of God. Perhaps I am just too classical theist about this issue of divine (im)mutability to accept it as a given.
Could you say a bit more about this following?
“nominalists … keep [things] substantively separate from the acts which are always already keeping the cosmos in being.”
Which acts are ‘keeping’ things ‘in being’? A person’s cognitive acts? I’m confused.
Hi Scott –
Yes, I was being somewhat provocative in hopes of getting responses to help me think through what I’m after….
“I am somewhat scekptical of assuming that medieval dude or dudette has got some genius or magical theory that will save us all.”
But what if they have ways of approaching issues that help to lever us back out of scientific reductionism? But we can’t think those approaches because of scientific reductionism?
Especially, I don’t think we are very good at thinking with them the reasons that they are concerned with “essence” and “essential” all the way back to Socrates’ origination of the Eidos as the opening of the possibility of our knowing anything at all…
I appreciate your willingness to engage with my provocations, Scott, because I am NOT familiar as you are with all the various medieval theologians. When I read them , though, I find myself on their wave-length in ways that come to me from being a student of the poetry of pre-modern thought. It’s a precarious, vulnerable, and fragile discipline, at best!
As for that venture about the nominalists, I’m thinking of the way that nature operates according to her kyndes: the elegance of the kinds of beings is what maintains itself within and through the cycles of birth, maturing, and death. It is this dynamic formilty that human thinking tries to follow, until the active formal substance of all of this formal knowing is rejected and we are left eventually with objects (rather than kinds) and ideas (rather than heuristic formal accounts of the substance of ideas. When this has happened, we aren’t in the Socratic tradition anymore. The middle — where it is all happpening — has dropped out of cognizance…. But it’s just a theory!
Dear Janet,
I am sympathetic to what you are saying. I am just unwilling to give a pass to some people– as though they have got something right b/c of some general cultural situation. One reason I think this is that various and sundry people read folk like Aquinas and presuppose that whatever he is saying is perfect-great and inspirational, but are unwilling to admit that he might’ve been mistaken on this or that point. In short, I like to ask certain people, ‘do you think e.g., Aquinas got anything wrong, anything at all?’ I once got a ‘nope; I don’t disagree with any of it’ back from a Cambridge Phd. student– I was shocked, utterly shocked.
The ‘where it is all happening’– isn’t this like saying there is a non-theory laden account of what is real? Can we talk about ‘what is going on’ without using our beliefs and accounts in order to talk about ‘what is going on’?
“I am just unwilling to give a pass to some people– as though they have got something right b/c of some general cultural situation.”
Yes, Scott, this is legitimate scholarly rigor on your part. On the other hand, though, we all say we are in need of better interdisciplinary thinking and you know that large-picture re-visions can be very exciting, challenging, and fruitful. So we need this dialectic with the specialists and yet we lose too much if we remain specialists only….
That’s why referred to a poetry of thought, and if such a thing exists at all, it is a very “precarious, vulnerable, and fragile discipline, at best.”
About the “where it is all happening” that drops out of sight in early-modern epistemology. The “happening” I mean is the ongoing disciplinary dialectics that operates around its formalizations — the dynamics of the disciplinary theorizing itself — and the way that this ongoing history of formal posits, revisions, and extensions is able to provide a genuine contact with a reality beyond theory.
I am thinking that it is in the formal dynamics or nuanced theoretical motions that we repeatedly experience a capture of something of the dynamics of what’s happening “out there,” in the real, if you will.
I believe that all our human accountings are theory-laden — but this is the strength of form-al knowing and not its drawback. Our ability to theorize the real comes from the real. Only because phenomena manifest themselves as patterned, are we able to discern patternings. This essential determinateness of the real is there IN its manifestations — to discover that was the faith and genius of the Greeks.
We never “see” this formality directly or unmediated. It is not on the surface. Actuality is fuller than that form-al structural/functional identity we are looking for with our elegantly selective disciplines. But we do begin to see it when we devote ourselves as a community to looking intently. To do so, we select and combine aspects of what is manifest. These “seeings” of a deeper essentiality are what come to constitute our theoretical posits: by seeking what is essential to the phenomenon in question, with respect to the approach we have in mind, we seek to make a deeper contact with the essential reality of the to-be-known…
This determinate reality of the real is what gives us leave to attempt to determine for ourselves what IN a given KIND of reality is essential to it, and why, and how. We risk these theoretical determinations not to fix them in stone, but instead because we want to be faithful and responsive to what is there to be discerned. If our first gestures and tenets are faithful, they will usually confirm themselves in the work of future generations — because we are all seeking to be faithful to the same “thing” — that is, to the deep-structure reality of that which governs the entire operation, the to-be-known we are seeking.
So we have the opportunity and the privilege to risk our formal accounts, because we think we have seen something beyond them, against which they will be tested. We have to select what we think is essential and combine it with other essentials formally and elegantly, but there is always more there to be seen than what we have selected. It is the ongoing activity of testing what-is-essential against the greater fullness of the phenomenon that constitutes each avenue of formal knowing.
If we ever say, “okay, we’ve got it now. THIS is THE essence. This formalization IS the reality.” THEN THAT is when human knowing ceases. That is when we forget all the rest that is there, too, also substantive in some manner, remaining for a different path of knowing to bring it out into the light of theorization. That is when we make ourselves superior to the to-be-known, and lose it altogether.
So I believe it is in the ongoing back-and-forth of risking our disciplinary formulas vis-a-vis the real, that we come to know we are making contact with reality (an “external world” for instance). The real is there and we know it — not because experiments confirm our hypothesis but because they do NOT confirm it — BECAUSE the real challenges us and forces us to revise and deepen our formulas….
The place where we make most contact with a reality “outside of us” is where our theoretical qestures in their own elegant formality carry us so deeply into the real that the real is enabled to force upon us a sea-change in our apprehensions of it.
Objects and concepts have no such power to be known. They are transparent and have no formal depths. Nothing connects them with each other. (Except perhaps a mathematical logic that is purposely tautological rather than heuristic.) What ought to be indwelling them, so that we have a chance of connecting theory with reality, is formality itself. This must lie IN the objects first, so that it can THEN be to some extent captured (or not) in the provisional “conceptual” formalizations that sustain our making-of-accounts.
The thinking of the Form-al in the phenomena — the thinking of the eidetic — this is what enables us to forge any contact between our formalizations and reality. And this, by the way, as as true for Galileo or Newton in practice, as it was explicit for Plato and Aristotle.
Just an fyi: ‘real’ is a medieval invention; that is, the word itself derives from ‘res’, and it doesn’t really show up until the later medieval period. I discovered this once when looking up the word in a big bag latin dictionary— it wasn’t in it! I could only find it in a medieval latin lexicon.
And besides, Plato and Aristotle didn’t speak either kind of Latin, right?
We’re talking, as you know, about thinking the formal structure of oppositions underlying the words — and the dynamical systems within which they are embedded when we do find them in the texts. You suggested this when you noted that the 13th c. appearance of “conceptum” wasn’t really the issue — for which, thanks! (It COULD prove important, of course, but it isn’t necessarily.)
What IS relevant is that the classical Latin “res” didn’t mean “object” OR “concept” (in their post-Lockean senses) and it certainly never meant “matter” in our modern sense, either. Nor was the Greek “ta onta” our modern “reality,” despite the fact that it is typically translated today as reality…. Res: not “thing” but the kindness of a kind of thing. Ta onta: not “reality” but the irreducibly many kinds of things; the formal modes of being.
So the proliferation of discourse around realitas in the scholastic era shows they were thinking deeply about formality in nature and formality in our accounts of nature.
From my experience of medieval texts, ‘res’ was used in many ways. I don’t see that it’s sole use, or what some 12th c. grammarians might call ‘natural signification’, had to do with kind-natures. They had ’substantia’ for that, or even ‘essentia’, depending on the context. Arist.’s distinction between first and secondary ‘ousia’, was expressed by either ’substantia’ or ‘essentia’–though in later 13th. texts ‘essentia’ was more frequently used as a kind-nature (secondary substance).
I was not suggesting that Plato and Arist. didn’t discuss real entities (that would be stupid and silly).
As you know differing ontologies lead to refined and changed uses of words. We could look to Boethius for the influential view that universals are only in mente, or to Avicenna for leading many 13th c. theologians to believe that a ‘universal kind’ only exists in the mind, and an ‘instantiation of the kind’ exists extra-mentally. Are you arguing for a certain ontology regarding universals? Do you buy Plato’s theory of separate subsisting Forms? Or Aristotle’s rejection that a form exists by itself (in a Platonic heaven, as it were)?
“…a ‘universal kind’ only exists in the mind, and an ‘instantiation of the kind’ exists extra-mentally.”
Is this what you meant to say, Scott? It’s fascinating. (And makes me want to say I rest my case….)
I’m sorry for being so infuriating. I am not arguing for a certain ontology of universals, but for a certain heuristics embracing the entire discussion. This requires a genuine textual argument — or many of them — impossible to provide here. Readings of Plato and Aristotle to show why I don’t think Plato had a doctrine of Forms, but was raising crucial questions about the conditions of the form-al knowing that Socrates had made possible. Forthcoming, Scott, after which we’ll talk, because I so appreciate your courteous patience in engaging with me. My patronizing tone is really only timidity, after all, as is generally the case! (Timidity in this case about putting my essays out there!)
Hmmm.. I’m not quite what is meant by a ‘heuristics embracing the entire discussion’. I thought that a particular metaphysical account (and its truth) was what we were after, no? If no particular metaphysical account is put forward as being true (or nearly enough true), what is the point? To my mind, it would be like saying, ‘I want all people to be happy’ and also saying, ‘I can think of no particular reason for why you should be happy’. If a particular ontological account isn’t what we are aiming for, then why rubbish Locke? or nominalists about universals? or conceptualists about universals? Why not say they all are participating in the dance that is creation–and so this unitarian universalist sort of methodology would be so inclusive as to make any and all happy, whatever their metaphysical account (beauty is in the eye of the beholder)?
I’m struggling getting my head around Bulgakov’s sophiology and I know it’s important since its akin to his hermeneutical lens. If I hope to understand Bulgakov’s ecclesiology and his understanding of the Eucharist as well as ecumenism, I believe I must first get grounded in his sophiology since he sees the Church, the Eucharist, and relations with other Christians through this lens.
Regarding the first quote in Mr. Dunlap’s post, Bulgakov makes reference to how little attention is given to the “doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity”. I think I’m completely missing out on something because I assume Bulgakov sees Sophia as the doctrine of consubstantiality; however, I don’t understand how or what this means.
Excuse my limited knowledge in this but I would greatly appreciate any insight on the relationship between Sophia and the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity.
I’m eager to see AD’s response to your question, but since I just happened to check in, here’s something that might apply.
The consubstantiality of the Trinity is of course the Godhood that is shared by its three Members (as separate persons).
Bulgakov calls Sophia the “very divinity” or “godhood” of God; also God’s “life” and “being.”
Much, much Western discussion and church history, of course, has dealt with each one of the three members of the Trinity — and also with their relationships with one another (as in the filoque controversy).
What Bulgakov offers with his recourse to the biblical figure of Wisdom — especially in Proverbs but also as in “Christ, the Wisdom of God” in the New Testament — is a rich theological means for thinking about and meditating upon the undivided essence and being of God as the One True God.
This is one of the many ways that Bulgakov’s sophiology (it seems to me) parallels the Western development of the thinking of the God-Man within the Trinity. In both cases, the divine life of God opens within itself into a dual dimensionality — that’s what is so exciting to me about it. The singleness of the One God not only contains within itself the Three-ness of Father, Son, and Spirit, but through Jesus Christ it contains within itself the otherness of the created order, the otherness of human nature. Historical process and finite being is included in the Trinity itself through the God-Man Jesus Christ as the second Person of the Trinity…. Much Western poetics and theology dwells richly on this, through the media of the Image and the Word, which are figures that are inherently “doubled” in order to be the unities they are.
For me, this opening to the otherness of non-God circulates by means of Christ the Word and Image of God, but Bulgakov is able to emphasize this richness within the divinity of God by exploring the Wisdom of God as God’s divine life as the divine Sophia, and her intrinsic counterpart, the creaturely Sophia….
It is so important for the church now to (re)develop means to think this (or any) unity/plurality because our own Western heritage of early modern epistemology has left us impoverished in this respect, restricting our ability to meditate on this fructifying aspect of divine being and to be nourished spiritually by it.
The human person, also, “doubles” within the womb of the human woman; the Body of Christ is meant always to be multiplying within itself…. How do we celebrate this unity/plurality with a “hermeneutical lens,” as you rightly call it, that has required us in the West, especially in Protestantism, to view the world as “a plenitude of objects standing in external relations to one another” as Lord Russell so eloquently put it!
Or, for another unforgettable Russellian statement: “I view the world as a heap of shot, while Whitehead views it as a bowl of treacle.”
We need some better alternatives than these!
Does this help or merely confuse things the more?
Yeah, this is a really tough doctrine, because what is consubstantial about the trinity is not separate from the trinity. I think Bulgakov himself was not quite sure how to get at this, and came up with a lot of different ways of talking about it. For me, the most fascinating aspect of this actually has more to do with creation than with Creator, more to do with men and women than with the God-Man. I like Janet’s talk of doubling, because what essentially happens is that the common substance of the trinity, though it is limited to the three persons of the trinity, also somehow makes room for created beings. The movement of consubstantiality itself (it is only there as movement, perhaps) bends towards creation. Or better, it tends, and then it bends, perhaps like a polished lens gathering distending waves into an image and then out of it again.
Aaron,
Does Bulkagov agree with the idea that God is immutable, or the more modern idea that God is mutable? I imagine if he goes for the former, then whatever else we say about creation, there is a hard limit on what we might mean when we say the divine life extends into creation; but if he goes for the latter idea, then it would make more sense. Of course, some theologians like to have their cake and eat it too by affirming and denying both doctrines, which amounts to non-sense (unless someone could help illumine me otherwise).
Thanks!
Scott,
I have to admit I’m not too experienced on this subject. At first glance, that distinction looks way to cut and dry. I would imagine that Bulgakov would definitely come across as having and eating (and come to think of it, how often do we have the cake without eating it? or eat it without having it?) Anway, he is completely orthodox and traditional in maintaining that God is eternal and unchanging, but clearly there is movement and transformation (fundamentally, the movement of death into life via love) at the essence of God. So is the mutable or immutable? Got me. . . .
I’m not sure how Bulgakov dealt with the mutability/immutability question, but I believe it follows the Orthodox understanding of the essence/energy distinction and the dual nature of Christ. Christ died in His humanity, but His soul descended into hades. Since we do not put division between His divinity and His humanity we can’t fully say that His humanity died and His divinity lived on. His soul was divine and human. So in one way God died, but in another God didn’t. Also Christ in His humanity grew and developed, but He was always fully God.
Regarding the essence and energy distinction, this provides a way to understand that the unknowable, transcendent personhood of God in His essence is unchangeable, but He chooses with His will among many goods which are manifested in His energies. He creates at certain points, sustains, is merciful, and is just - in other words He’s dynamic. I think the references to God “changing His mind” are a bit anthropomorphic, and I can’t pretend to explain how God chooses between justice and mercy, but I believe He is consistently good and loving - divine attributes/energies. His essence is beyond our grasp of these things.
My physics studying son says “His essence is eternal so He can’t change because change necessitates time, and His essence is outside of time.”
Christ becoming human means that God entered into time, but I don’t think we can project back a change to God in His essence from that. It’s a mystery.