The Land of Unlikeness

Our final installation in the Bulgakov Blog Conference is a dialogue, which I think you will find highly illuminating. The dialogue will be published over the next couple days until we have posted it all.

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” (PART ONE)
Between Joshua Delpech-Ramey (The Land of Unlikeness) and Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory):

Hello Joshua –
I have an opening question for you, having just finished Sophia, The Wisdom of God and being filled with its wise and gentle music…. Bulgakov says that Sophia, as the ousia of God, is “not a fourth” with respect to the Trinity. Not a quaternity. But via the Marian dimension of Sophia, he does bring into view an additional dimension to the efficacy of the Godhead, in terms of that special human nature that was Mary’s first, and then, through Mary, Christ’s. This humanity “possesses the Adamic nature” and is therefore capable of sin, but sinfulness is effectively reduced to nothingness by the holy life produced by the Holy Spirit with the full consent of the human agent.

I’m wondering, since you know much more about Pico della Mirandola than I do, how you would compare Bulgakov’s vision with Pico’s famous vision of a divinized humanity (a vision, by the way, somewhat qualified and brought down to earth by Shakespeare in the person of Prospero, in The Tempest).

And also, but this is a very BIG question, how much does the dual nature of Sophia (as divine Sophia and created Sophia) constitute an opening of the Godhead into a “fourth” dimension of genuine “otherness,” into an “outside of God” in Bulgakov’s words, and should we not rejoice in this?  By the way, I really did love how Bulgakov was able to distinguish, so reverently and with such fine nuance, between the eternal Logos and Christ, the divine-human hypostasis, as the locus of the redemptive miracle….

Best, Janet

_________________________

Reply from Joshua Delpech-Ramey:

Janet,

[A disclaimer to our readers:  We are not in the following dialogue discussing Sophia as an aspect of the Trinity, but Sophia in her creaturely dimension, created wisdom.]

Bulgakov claims in the introduction to Sophia that the West has never realized her theological importance.  This is certainly true at the level of systematic theology, but it is not true in philosophy or in literature.  And there are profound Western connections for Russian sophiology.  We know that Bulgakov (and Soloviev) were influenced by Boehme and by German Idealism, especially Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy of nature. Schelling’s philosophy is an important entry point into the idea of the creaturely Sophia because, unlike Hegel, Schelling does not reduce the nature of cosmic reality to a function of human self-consciousness. Schelling insists that we cannot reduce the workings of nature to those objectivities the rules of which might define human cognition.  Thus unlike Kant and Hegel Schelling leaves open a genuinely transcendent relationship between humanity and its natural and divine alternates, one in which there is the need for genuine rapport, full of surprises and contingencies, and not reducible to any logical or dialectical scheme of derivation whereby natural diversity or divine perogative can be placed with respect to, let alone limited by our own self-understanding (transcendental or dialectical).

Now this “deregulation” of nature in Schelling can have the Nietzschean consequence of pitting nature against mind, or worse of reducing mind to a mere perspective, one that is necessarily doomed to antagonistic struggle with other perspectives coordinated only by will to power and eternal recurrence, and mapped only by the concepts of so called “sociobiology.”  But the deregulation of nature can also have the alternative consequence that mind participates in an order of undefinable complexity and unimaginable beauty. This consequence of the situation of mind within an infinite nature (as opposed to a view of nature as that which must necessarily correspond to some universalizable notion of objective forms whether mathematical or otherwise) was already present in the Renaissance, which assumed, from Cusa to Pico della Mirandola and even to Bruno, that the infinity proper to nature, although containing as Schelling puts it “a preponderant mass of unreason,” was itself a divine beauty.  Is this divine beauty the creaturely Sophia?   And is, as Janet suggested, Pico’s humanity the “godman” or divinized humanity  of sophiology, a possibility of divine human life ever-present even in its fallen state?

Pico writes, in the “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” a stunningly ambitious treatment of human nature.  Here are the first few paragraphs (full text found easily at here)

I once read that Abdala the Muslim, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus (1) concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!” However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions, all these reasons given for the magnificence of human nature failed to convince me: that man is the intermediary between creatures, close to the gods, master of all the lower creatures, with the sharpness of his senses, the acuity of his reason, and the brilliance of his intelligence the interpreter of nature, the nodal point between eternity and time, and, as the Persians say, the intimate bond or marriage song of the world, just a little lower than angels as David tells us. (2) I concede these are magnificent reasons, but they do not seem to go to the heart of the matter, that is, those reasons which truly claim admiration. For, if these are all the reasons we can come up with, why should we not admire angels more than we do ourselves? After thinking a long time, I have figured out why man is the most fortunate of all creatures and as a result worthy of the highest admiration and earning his rank on the chain of being, a rank to be envied not merely by the beasts but by the stars themselves and by the spiritual natures beyond and above this world. This miracle goes past faith and wonder. And why not? It is for this reason that man is rightfully named a magnificent miracle and a wondrous creation.

What is this rank on the chain of being? God the Father, Supreme Architect of the Universe, built this home, this universe we see all around us, a venerable temple of his godhead, through the sublime laws of his ineffable Mind. The expanse above the heavens he decorated with Intelligences, the spheres of heaven with living, eternal souls. The scabrous and dirty lower worlds he filled with animals of every kind. However, when the work was finished, the Great Artisan desired that there be some creature to think on the plan of his great work, and love its infinite beauty, and stand in awe at its immenseness. Therefore, when all was finished, as Moses and Timaeus tell us, He began to think about the creation of man. But he had no Archetype from which to fashion some new child, nor could he find in his vast treasure-houses anything which He might give to His new son, nor did the universe contain a single place from which the whole of creation might be surveyed. All was perfected, all created things stood in their proper place, the highest things in the highest places, the midmost things in the midmost places, and the lowest things in the lowest places. But God the Father would not fail, exhausted and defeated, in this last creative act. God’s wisdom would not falter for lack of counsel in this need. God’s love would not permit that he whose duty it was to praise God’s creation should be forced to condemn himself as a creation of God.

Finally, the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of man! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be! As soon as an animal is born, it brings out of its mother’s womb all that it will ever possess. Spiritual beings from the beginning become what they are to be for all eternity. Man, when he entered life, the Father gave the seeds of every kind and every way of life possible. Whatever seeds each man sows and cultivates will grow and bear him their proper fruit. If these seeds are vegetative, he will be like a plant. If these seeds are sensitive, he will be like an animal. If these seeds are intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, satisfied with no created thing, he removes himself to the center of his own unity, his spiritual soul, united with God, alone in the darkness of God, who is above all things, he will surpass every created thing. Who could not help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how could one admire anything else? . . .

—

There are terrifying ambiguities here—ambiguities that precisely Shakespeare and Goethe are attuned to with their figures of Prospero and Faustus.  What guarantees that the ultimate gap between human conceptualizing and natural infinity is not pernicious, that it is not the ensign of a “weak” God, a God who cannot but allow the gap between knowledge and being to be filled in by avarice and cunning?   Or, if not this gnostic vision, does it not  appear that the gap between the finitude of human conceptualizing and the infinity of natural process might be one of the primary aspects of the Fall?   How could we presume, from our obviously limited and corrupted state, to beatify or even “divinize” the process of the development of reason and the unfolding of cosmic evolution, which is precisely what Bulgakov seems to do in the figure of the created Sophia?

What the Renaissance held to was a Platonic definition of knowledge as a certain capacity to be affected.  This originates in Plotinus’ doctrine of “reception according to the capacity of the recipient” (Enneads VI, 4-5).  Originally this was how Plotinus accounted for the presence of the Absolute, the One, at every level of being.  The One cannot be mixed with or limited by matter, but matter can contain or reflect the One according to its capacity.  The mind is filled with knowledge according to its capacity, but this capacity, as Plato taught as early as the Phaedrus, is not simply a cognitive capacity but is primarily an erotic or affective capacity to desire knowledge.  For the entire Platonic tradition, knowledge was inherently linked to love.  And this paradigm is what gets lost with the de-enchantment of the cosmos with Galileo and Descartes:  the idea that attraction and desire and patterns of fulfilled desire might be themselves the determinants of the value of knowledge (rather than knowledge being determined as that which survives the inspection of a detached observer).  It is lost because unless nature is understood as inherently trustworthy and inherently desirable, and desirable as an image of and entrée to the divinity nature contains according to its various capacities, there is no mediating link from human sensory awareness to knowledge of God.

The Renaissance realized that these mediating links, this “book of nature,” was much more complex than the medieval Aristotelian image of the cosmos as a series of concentric circles.  Already with Nicholas of Cusa there was an attempt to teach Christians how to “recognize” the divinity of the cosmos without “seeing” it:  Cusa teaches that God is present as infinite or un-imaginable geometric forms (such as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere).  But the lack of visibility is both enticing and disturbing.  It seems to prove both God’s all-pervasiveness and invisibility, but also seems to limit those who can truly know God to those capable of rendering divine powers visible to others.  Hence the coming crisis in church authority!  This crisis was anticipated by the attempt of Pico to make magic or occult knowledge of the cosmos a legitimate part of theology, if not the culmination of theology itself.

But a couple hundred years after Pico, Prospero and Faustus both give up magic for love.  And this has struck most serious modern Christians as the right thing to do.  But are not Shakespeare and Goethe here clinicians of modernity rather than moralists?   Is not the choice of “ordinary life” over and against the magical life of power itself a symptom of an emerging modern paradigm that could not see science otherwise than as driven by the need for control over the elements rather than in terms of a genuine dynamic relationship with them?   Why has it seemed to us in modernity somehow inherently “Christian” to give up knowledge for love?   Is it not partly because we have accepted the possiblity—unthinkable for the Renaissance or anyone in the Platonic tradition—that genuine knowledge could ever be devoid of desire, of erotic longing for the infinite?

Or is it an even worse ambiguity, the ambiguity that seems to signify that longing for the infinite is itself split between heavenly and earthly loves?   This definitely seems to be the crisis of John Donne and perhaps even of George Herbert.  Certainly Donne saw the very worst sorceries at work in religion and politics, and in himself.  But Pico seems to insist in his oration that in spite of potential and even all-pervasive abuses, a genuinely experimental and even magical thought is a function of human openness to radical alterations and to a radical alterity at its own heart, and human power a radical mutability or transformability which in some sense is the continuous self-knowledge through self-transformation of the cosmic orders.  Pico even denies that the mind can be determined in terms of a finitude set tragically over and against an infinite natural diversity:  “We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal . . .” he writes.

Goethe has Faustus realize (or fail to see that he realizes) that what he really wants most of all is the simple homely love of a common woman.  That he is ready to give up everything for that love.  Prospero breaks his staff, and leaves off his magical meddlings with nature in order to accept the more humble and more difficult tricks of conjuring up human justice and human love in broken cities and broken families.  Clearly Christians can relate to this, and it has in many ways been the more genuinely Christian option to forego knowledge and power for the sake of love and forbearance.

But Bulgakov arrives from the East to remind us that this has always been a matter of damage control.  And he forces us to remember the possibility dreamt of by Pico of another modern, scientific relationship with the universe, one that would not begin with the presupposition that knowledge of nature could be had without love of nature and willingness to be transformed by that love.

About a hundred years after Pico, Giordano Bruno, always over the top, imagines this love as Actaeon being turned on by his own hunting dogs.  Having sent them out to ensnare the beautiful stag (knowledge of the infinite), the dogs (Bruno’s thoughts) having reached their goal (infinity) turn upon the knower and “devour” him:  allegorically, this means that to know the infinite is to be radically changed, since any finite concept will be insufficient to grasp the truth it seeks in nature.  The sign of one desiring true knowledge of nature becomes the mark of one willing to be transformed at one’s core.

This is the true magic, the high magic in which the elements are not called to do one’s bidding, but in which the elements deliver us to a higher will, one more expansive and all encompassing than our own.

Here is the passage from Bruno’s Heroic Frenzies to which I am referring above: {The Heroic Frenzies, First Dialogue, Book 1}

Bruno writes a dialogue in which Tansilio is explaining to his friend Cicada what the true use is to which Petrarchan energies should be put.  The work, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, purports to demonstrate the truly philosophical use to which the erotic frenzies of the love poets for their beloveds can be put.  This involves not simply an allegorizing of love poetry, pointing out that everything said to and for the beloved can be said to and for Nature or the Sublime Infinite, but involves actually using poetry differently, in order to demonstrate that knowledge is itself a kind of poiesis.

Found on here

Fourth Dialogue

Tansillo: Now is described the path taken by heroic love, as it tends toward its proper object, the supreme good, and the path taken by the heroic intellect as it strives to attain its proper object, the primary or absolute truth. All of the above is summarized in the first poem which expresses the purpose to be developed in the following five. Thus he says: The youthful Actaeon unleashes the mastiffs and the greyhounds to the forests, when destiny directs him to the dubious and perilous path, near the traces of the wild beasts. Here among the waters he sees the most beautiful countenance and breast, that ever one mortal or divine may see, clothed in purple and alabaster and fine gold; and the great hunter becomes the prey that is hunted. The stag which to the densest places is wont to direct his lighter steps, is swiftly devoured by his great and numerous dogs. I stretch my thoughts to the sublime prey, and these springing back upon me, bring me death by their hard and cruel gnawing. Actaeon represents the intellect intent upon the capture of divine wisdom and the comprehension of the divine beauty. He unleashes the mastiffs and the greyhounds; of these the greyhounds are swifter and the mastiffs more powerful, for the operation of the intellect precedes the operation of the will; but the latter in turn is the more vigorous and efficacious; since divine goodness and beauty are more lovable than comprehensible to the human intellect, and besides love moves and spurs the intellect to go before it, like a lantern, to the forests, uncultivated and lonely, very rarely visited and explored, with the result that few men have left the traces of their steps there. The youth is of little experience and practice, as one whose life is brief and whose frenzy is unstable. In the dubious path refers to the uncertain and the ambiguous reason and passion which the letter Y of Pythagoras symbolized. On the right this path shows him the more thorny, uncultivated and deserted arduous path upon which he unleashes the greyhounds and mastiffs near the traces of the wild beasts, which are the intelligible modes of ideal concepts. These are hidden, are pursued by few men, and visited most rarely, and do not offer themselves to everyone who seeks them. Here among the waters, that is to say, in the mirror of similitudes, in the works in which is resplendent the efficacy of the divine goodness and splendor — these works are represented by the symbol of the superior and inferior waters over and beneath the firmament. He sees the most beautiful countenance and breast, that is to say, he sees the power and external operation which can be seen in the state and act of diligent contemplation of a mortal or divine mind, by a man, or by some deity.

Cicada: If he compares divine and human comprehension and places them within the same class, I believe that he does so not with respect to the two modes of comprehension, which are very different, but with respect to the object of contemplation which is one and the same.

Tansillo: That is it exactly. He says in purple, alabaster and gold, meaning the purple of divine power, the gold of divine wisdom, the alabaste of divine beauty, in the contemplation of which the Pythagoreans, Chaldeans, Platonists, and others attempt to rise as best they can. The great hunter sees: he as understood as much as he can, and he himself becomes the prey; that is to say, this hunter set out for prey and became himself the prey through the operation of his intellect whereby he converted the apprehended objects into himself.

Cicada: I see. For he gives shapes according to his mode to the intelligible species and proportions them to his capacity inasmuch as they are received according to a mode of him who receives them.

Tansillo: And he becomes the prey by the operation of the will whose act converts him into the object.

Cicada: I understand; for love converts and transforms into the thing loved.

Tansillo: You know very well that the intellect understands things intelligently, that is, according to its own mode; and the will pursues things naturally, that is, according to the manner in which things exist in themselves. Therefore, Actaeon, who with these thoughts, his dogs, searched for goodness, wisdom, beauty, and the wild beast outside himself, attained them in this way. Once he was in their presence, ravished outside of himself by so much beauty, he became the prey of his thoughts and saw himself converted into the thing he was pursuing. Then he perceived that he himself had become the coveted prey of his own dogs, his thoughts, because having already tracked down the divinity within himself it was no longer necessary to hunt for it elsewhere.

Cicada: Then it is well said that the kingdom of God is within us, and that divinity lives within us by virtue of the regenerated intellect and will.

***

Willingness to be part of this process of course requires extraordinary faith, trust, and willingness to risk—precisely virtues that are systematically shut down by the politics of fear, suspicion, and “risk management” that since Hobbes have dominated modern states.  At the end of another of his works, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Bruno indicates the massive political and religious reforms that would have to take place for genuine knowledge to become a possibility for anyone other than rogues, outlaws, and heretics.

The final lesson of Sophiology is that there is an ever-present unfallen humanity within human history, paradigmatically Mary and Jesus of Nazareth, but by extension every human being to every degree to which humanity participates in its own unfallen essence. The extraordinary optimism and heroic ambition of Pico and Bruno connects directly with the fantastic utopian confidence in Adam Kadmon, primal and final humanity, expressed in Bulgakov’s Sophiology.  What the Renaissance perhaps enables the West to do is to contribute its own sense of irony to Sophiology (Russian art and philosophy seems much less attuned to irony and more attuned to a kind of feral and primal sympathy that even the most criminal humanity shares with everyone—see Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for this).

But we irony-stewed Westerners must also maintain an ironic reading of our own ironic detachment:  an ironic reading of Prospero and Faustus.  We must see their choices to give up magic not as inherently a choice of Christian love over heathen science, but a choice forced by a false alternative between love and knowledge/power.  Ultimately, it is not secular modernity but failed Christian theology that is to blame for the separation between love and knowledge.  Pico’s oration was to be the preface of a debate that would have brought together the leaders of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and near-eastern paganism at Rome.  Pope Innocent’s censors found 9 of Pico’s 900 proposed points potentially heretical, and the debate was shut down.  Pico lived the rest of his life in infamy—again another strange parallel with the fate of Bulgakov, who so desperately wanted to impress upon us the orthodoxy of sophiology.

Joshua