The Land of Unlikeness

The Burning Bush and Bulgakov’s Kataphatic Theology
M. S. Compton (all rights reserved)

Rowan Williams has observed that, in The Unfading Light,  Bulgakov expounds upon the Palamite doctrine, and finds “not only the foundation of the theology of negation…but also a vision of the transfiguration of the cosmos by the penetration of divine energy.” (1) Although Wisdom-Sophia is “not God” (i.e., a 4th hypostasis,) she is “the first principle of the new created plurality of hypostases…human and angelic…existing in sophianic relation to the divine.” (2) Bulgakov, in essence, says: “The mystery of the world is this femininity.” (3) Bulgakov’s Mariology, wherein the sacred feminine dimension of his theology is perhaps most explicit, is outlined in the second book of his first sophiological trilogy, The Burning Bush, the English translation of which will be available November, 2008 by Eerdmans.

I have examined the apophatic background and it’s development in the Church in a recent article in the Bulgakov Live Journal, from which portions of this article are excerpted. (4) For Bulgakov, apophatic theology of the Spirit is unacceptable, for “in herself, Sophia contains life…[she is] the revelation of the Glory of God.” (5) He asks if it is possible to have a kataphatic theology about the Divine and answers in the affirmative-not through human ascent, but through the condenscension of the Divine to the creaturely world, i.e., through a self-revelation of God that is accessible to humankind. (6) The whole thrust of Bulgakov’s theology is that God created the world not for Himself but for the world. (7) If God has no relation to creation, then God is a “conventional abstraction.” (8)

To the degree that the Divinity is clothed in life, the world itself experiences God as ‘all in all.’ Bulgakov insists on a kataphatic theology because of his deep engagement with the world, unlike neo-patristic theology, (popularized  primarily by Vladimir Lossky and George Florovsky) which is a trend in modern theology. Interestingly, Paul Valliere has noted that:

“Neopatristic theologians privileged apophatic theology both in their reading of the fathers, and in their own theological constructions. Since most contemporary western students of Orthodox theology were introduced to the subject by Neopatristic scholarship, the apophatic bias established itself among them as well….[for example, Vladimir] Lossky could expel categories of nature and history from dogmatic theology with an easy conscience because, as a rigorous apophaticist, he assigned little positive theological status to the world to begin with. Bulgakov, on the other hand, could not set aside these categories.”  (9)

If the apophatic has any meaning for Bulgakov-and indeed he acknowledges that the Absolute and Transcendent is a Mystery-it is because it serves as a source of revelation: “It presupposes that which is revealed, that which reveals, and a certain unity or identity of the two: a mystery and a revelation.” (10)

Without its kataphatic counterpart, the apophatic yields a theology that is empty and agnostic. He has severe criticism for extreme apophatic philosophers-i.e., speculative mystics like Eckhart and Boehme-because such mysticism “places the impersonal above the personal, the preconscious above the conscious, and consequently the soulless above the spirit.” (11)

For Bulgakov, the immanent or sophianic dimension of God is present in the Son and the Spirit.  He praises the early Church Father, Athanatius, for his remarkable doctrine of Divine-humanity as the dyadic action of the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity. (12)  He observes, however, that although the Holy Spirit is the ‘giver of life’ for Basil, he still could never call the Holy Spirit ‘God’; thus, what emerges is an incomplete pneumatology in which the Spirit is revealed through her gifts, but the Spirit herself is not revealed. (13) Bulgakov notes that Gregory the Theologian demanded an answer to the question: “Is the Spirit God?” However, the Holy Spirit was not called God even in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Bulgakov therefore demands that we re-examine it:

“And this was not an accidental instance of forgetting, but an intentional silence and evasion, for the question concerned precisely this. The Creed’s definition concerning the Holy Spirit is therefore deficient. It is incomplete and needs to be completed….[for] all the question of the dogmatics of the present day chiefly concern pneumatology.” (14)

In Bulgakov’s pneumatology, the descent of the Holy Spirit represents, in fact, “a second creation of the world in God, its deification.” (15) Bulgakov continually reminds us that to identify the Spirit’s work, one must look to the unfolding world historical process. The Holy Spirit, who previously was “sent into the world” at the Annunciation in order to accomplish the Incarnation, is “now sent into the world by the Son…[and] is now directed toward the world…” (16) The third Hypostasis, as the Comforter, now lives and acts in the Church, but it’s Spirit of wisdom and prophecy is not confined to the Church. Paul Valliere remarks that “Bulgakov never tires of reminding the Church that the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost took place in the world.” (17) In this sense, Bulgakov sees piety and prophecy to be a natural revelation of the Holy Spirit which can be observed at the very beginning of the world, and therefore it is intimately connected to the earth from its genesis: for it is an immanent Spirit. (18) The Spirit was revealed in history, and will be actively involved in history till its end.

The Spirit is the natural energy of the world, eternally bearing within itself the principle of creative activity, rather like the world-soul of the medieval humanists; only Bulgakov is quick to point out that even though Spirit is the life of the vegetative and animal world “after their kind,” this does not imply pantheism, at least in the way it is normally understood, that is, as an “exhaustive conception of the world.” (19) It is however, panentheism, or Spirit in the world, a world in which we “live and move and have our being” in Spirit. (20) Panentheism, for Bulgakov is a “dialectically necessary moment in the sophiological cosmology.” (21) Nature, in fact, which is created by a transcendent God who stands apart from it, is nothing other than dualism. (22) It is the Spirit of God in creation that the Psalmist hymns. (Ps. 104:30)

For Bulgakov, we are meant to be ‘spirit-bearing’ people, the most perfect example of which is the personification of the Bride (Church), which is Mary herself. Bulgakov sees the descent of Shekinah-glory upon Mary, the perfected “Spirit-Bearer”, at the Annunciation. (23) We will revisit this theme in more detail  in our examination of the Annunciation theme, below. For now, I want to underscore that in Bulgakov’s Mariology, the Motherhood of the Holy Spirit has a direct relationship to the Mother of God.

In Bulgakov’s vision, the male and female polarities of Christ and the Holy Spirit find correspondence in the Incarnation of Christ and the Theotokos, who is “the most perfect manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the image of the Spirit-bearer.” (24) In this way the image of the “perfect Divine-humanity”  is reflected not only in the Son, but also in his Mother. (25) In Bulgakov’s anthropology the “human sophianic spirit is a male-female androgyne,” and both male and female principles reflect the image of the Divine Sophia. (26)

The Mother of God as Spirit-Bearer? 

For Bulgakov, “cognition and intuition are two paths of revelation, two wings” which leads to knowledge. (27) He understands revelation, not in the apophatic “night of extinguished consciousness” but in the “midday light of consciousness.” (28) This dyadic revelation which Bulgakov calls the two revealing hypostases comprise, in Bulgakov’s sophiology, the Divine Sophia, who reveals and expresses the hidden essence of the apophatic God, which is the First Person of the Trinity. (29) Through the Logos and the Spirit, Sophia is in the process of revealing the depths of Divine-humanity. Furthermore, “man is created for Godsonhood and Goddaughterhood” through the image of Christ and Mary, Theotokos, for they reveal the image of Divine-humanity. (30)

And here, Bulgakov leads us to a deeper appreciation of the mystery of Mary. He expresses that, like the Spirit, she is an image of the glory of Beauty, “the beauty of holiness.” (31) And even though we do not have an image of her state of heavenly glorification, her earthly image has so “stung our heart” that her spiritual beauty is itself invincible: “Before this image, if it appears to the world and becomes accessible to it, no human heart will persevere in its hardness…” (32) Bulgakov very lucidly observes that the (first) Pentecost of the Virgin Mary precedes the Divine Incarnation, for at her Annunciation, “the divine conception is accomplished by the divine inhabitation of the Logos and the Holy Spirit, who, in this sense, (in the Gospel of the Egyptians) is sometimes called His Mother.” (33) Most remarkably, perhaps, this is the clearest indication that what is communicated is not “a particular gift of the Spirit” but the hypostatic Spirit who reposes on the Son. (34) For the Son came down, not alone but together with the Spirit; they are the dyad sent into the world by the Father. Between the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit, there is not a “hypostatic identification” but rather an “inhabitation”, a kind of “action by grace” which enables Mary to “commune with the Divine Life in the Holy Trinity in Her perfect spirituality.” (35)

The Orthodox theologian and disciple of Bulgakov’s, Elizabeth Behr-Sigel, has stressed on numerous occasions that “Orthodox theology pushes quite far the idea of a particular relationship between the ‘feminine,’ of which Mary is the archetype, and the Holy Spirit,” as well as “the Holy Spirit, Divine Wisdom [and] the Virgin.” (36) This is because the hypostatic motherhood of the Spirit is intimately connected to the earthly divine motherhood of the Theotokos. Because of her Fiat, Mary the woman and Mary the disciple stand-together with the whole Church-united to the consecration of Christ which is offered, as the Byzantine Liturgy proclaims, “on behalf of all and for all.” At the symbolic level, Mary represents the new anthropos. Her living faith radically opens her to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, whose vessel she becomes. In naming Mary the “Spirit-bearing Person” Bulgakov once said that “to this day, [the church] has not realized the treasure of revelation concerning the Mother of God” (37).

In Bulgakov’s kataphatic theology, then, we begin to see the ideas linking the Sophia-Spirit (the Old Testament Shekinah), made present at the sign of the burning bush, to Mary. Bulgakov’s Mariology, outlined in his The Burning Bush, echoes the title first given to Mary by Gregory of Nyssa, who said: ?”From this we learn also the mystery of the Virgin: The light in divinity which through birth shone from her into human life did not consume the burning bush…That light teaches us what we must do to stand within the rays of the true light.” (38) The radiance at the burning bush “did not come from a material substance, this light did not shine from some luminary among the stars but came from an earthly bush and surpassed the heavenly luminaries in brilliance.” (39)

In Bulgakov’s theology, the term “Motherhood of God” (bogomaterinstvo) is more than a statement abut Christology. Mary could not have given birth to the Divine Word by virtue of her humanity alone: a human being does not generate the divine. Her divine Motherhood is a Spirit-filled mystery and demonstrates an active participation on her part. Mary cannot be separated from the presence of God made flesh among us, inaugurated at her Fiat, brought to fullness at Pentecost, and now permeating and sanctifying creation. As a visible image of the Holy Spirit, she is revivified, deified human being, who manifests the fullness of the divine image in humanity (40) carrying out the Holy Spirit’s work of nurturing and sanctifying the world; that is, continuing to give life as it did on the first day of creation, when it ‘brooded’ over the face of the waters. Bulgakov sees the Spirit’s work as a kind of mothering, brought to perfection in the perfect human mother. In Mary’s womb there is a spaciousness (”Wider than the Heavens”) as there is a spaciousness in her presence in the Church. (41)

Although Bulgakov acknowledges the great Mystery of the ineffable and unknowable God, the theophany of the Burning Bush is a sign that the transcendent God is still with us, for what was prefigured in the image of the flame and the bush was revealed through the mystery of the Virgin. (42)

1. Williams, Rowan, ed. Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. 1999. p. 125.
2. ibid. p. 135.
3. quoted in ibid. From Svet neverchernii. Moscow: Izdatel’ stvo ‘Respublika, 1994. pp. 211-214. In The Unfading Light Bulgakov outlines the apophatic tradition from Plato to Boehme and sets forth his kataphatic approach.
4. http://community.livejournal.com/sbulgakov.  See also my recently published, More Glorious than the Seraphim: Byzantine Homilies and Feasts in Honor of the Theotokos.  Minneapolis, MN.: Light and Light Publications. 2008.
5. Bulgakov, S. The Lamb of God. Translated by Borid Jakim. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William Eerdmans. 2008. p. 112.
6. ibid.
7. ibid. p. 120.
8. ibid. p 121.
9. Paul Valliere. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Eerdmans. 2000, pp. 299-300, 389.
10. Bulgakov, S. The Comforter. Translated by Borid Jakim. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 2004. p. 360.
11. ibid. p. 361.
12. ibid. pp. 23-27.
13. ibid. p. 36.
14. ibid. pp. 39-40.
15. Bulgakov, S. The Bride of the Lamb. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 2002. p. 245.
16. Comforter, pp. 260-261.
17. Valiere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 2000. p. 355.
18. Comforter, p. 157.
19. ibid. p. 200.
20. Acts 17: 28, in ibid. p. 200.
21. ibid.
22. ibid.
23.  Bride of the Lamb. p. 398.
24. Comforter. p. 187.
25. ibid.
26. ibid. p. 186.
27. ibid. p. 363.
28. ibid.
29. ibid. p. 366.
30. ibid. p. 367.
31.ibid. p 279.
32. ibid. p. 280.
33. ibid. p. 246.
34. ibid.
35. ibid. p 247.
36. Behr-Sigel, Elizabeth. Discerning the Signs of the Times. Ed: Michael Plekon and Sarah Hinlicky. St. Vladimir Seminary Press. 2001. pp. 106-07.
37. from Agnets Bozhii, quoted in Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov.  p. 298.
38. Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses. Translation and Introduction by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. N.Y.: Paulist Press. 1978. p. 59.
39. ibid.
40. Kupina neopalimaia, in Valliere, Paul.ed., Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov.  p. 325.
41. Wider Than the Heavens icon. http://byzantineimages.com/wider-than-heavens.htm
42. Burning Bush icon: http://byzantineimages.com/burning-bush.htm