The Land of Unlikeness

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART TWO
From Janet Leslie Blumberg to Joshua Delpech-Ramey:

Joshua,
So many rich ideas here in your own oration, Joshua:  An Oration on the Dignity of Sophia — the creaturely Sophia, that is. (As if she ever could be kept apart from the divine Sophia for very long…but we’ll try.)

I must choose just a few threads, out of this closely woven tapestry of yours….

So…you begin with precursors of sophiology in the German Romantic tradition; they had a direct influence on the Russian sophiologists. Then… you work your way back into the Great Unknown, back into the darkness of that more ancient tablet of the West which, according to Bulgakov, is a blank slate with respect to Sophia — at least insofar as her importance to theology is concerned. (But no one, including Bulgakov, should ever be expected to be acquainted intimately with everything, or be made to suffer indignity because of not being.)

So you say, Joshua, that the thinking of the creaturely Sophia was not absent in the West – at least among the poets and philosophers, although “at the level of systematic theology“ you accept Bulgakov’s judgment. But then I notice that after your wonderful “deregulation of nature” (Schelling’s liberation of the physical world from some of the rigid enclosures effected by early-modern epistemologists) –- that you make your transition back in time to the Renaissance not by explicitly citing Pico or Bruno as sophiologists, but instead by using Goethe’s Faust to raise a crucial modern problem, the way that knowledge has been drained of eros and set against love in our scientific, post-Newtonian thoughtworld, so that we are forced to choose one as against the other….

Poised against this (our own Faustian situation), you then introduce Pico’s “great shape-shifter” — as the result amd exemplar of an older vision of human knowing, the long Platonic tradition in which “knowledge is a certain capacity to be affected.” In this tradition, the loves of human knowers (in response to the natures of that which they come to know) directs the development of the knower’s humanity. In his Oration, Pico fables that whichever of the manifested natures or “seeds” encountered in the world proves to be the one that is the most desired and chosen, one’s humanity accordingly will grow into a conformity with that nature, whether it be of a plant or an animal or an angelic being…. But then Pico’s Most Magical Man, more ambitious than any of the other human shape-shifters, suddenly proves himself to be an Augustinian:

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, 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?

Now St. Augustine ’s powerfully mythopoeic influence on the Renaissance humanists, often mediated through Petrarch, cannot be overstated. And in the Confessions, of course, Augustine had first tried to find his heart’s desire amongst the various creatures of the world. But he was disappointed; all of them testified back to him: “No, we are not that One you seek; that One is He who made us.” At last, in the celebrated passage in Confessions 7 that even Coleridge would still be remembering, Augustine withdraws from everything in the created world and gazes instead into the depths of his own being – and “in an instant” he sees there the image of God and ascends to the vision of the eternal I AM.

It is only a glimpse, of course, like Actaeon’s fleeting glimpse of the virgin Huntress whose nakedness is suddenly revealed to him in the pool of water. (Evoking Narcissus; evoking also, via Petrarch’s poems to Laura, a sprinkling by the cleansing waters of Baptism). Augustine is not yet reborn in Christ at the time of his vision of God and, like all these later lovers (except for Pico’s magus?), he is “too weak” to maintain his gaze upon the divine Beloved. Nevertheless, this movement toward contemplative union will be reiterated at key points in the Confessions as the ultimate destiny of human nature. Centuries later, the Thomistic and Augustinian Dante will figure this as the Beatific Vision, as that miraculous union of impersoned minds to which the pilgrim Dante is finally brought by his irrepressible love for Beatrice, the feminine archetype who is the “bringer” or “agent” of earthly and ultimate beatitude. Or better, Dante is brought to the consummation of his journey by the object of his love, by her intrinsic beauty and worth, and by the irresistable attraction they exert upon him. (As Joshua instructs us, in the older world “Knowledge is a certain capacity to be affected.”)

But Beatrice (like the Host) will pass Dante on to Christ, and Dante’s climactic vision of the God-Man, who will gaze back at him with recognition and love, and who knows Dante and is known by Dante from within the midst of the Trinity, this ultimate unitive vision (this knowing) can be mediated in its final stage only by the Mother of God. Dante is invited to look with her, to gaze along Mary’s own personal line of sight as it blazes a path of intimate knowledge and insight, into the mystery of the Triune Godhead, where Mary discerns her Son with the loving eyes of a human mother….

Now granted, the depth of Augustine’s inward human nature is not perhaps the “indeterminate and indifferent” nature of Pico’s redaction, but it is most certainly nonetheless the site of a curious kind of indeterminacy, or “dual” determinacy, in that at his own deepest core of being, Augustine finds a divine kernel that IS capable of carrying him into the very presence of God’s own transcendent Being. Augustine’s humanity is not the God-Man, of course, but it is nonetheless a kind of human-divine, and Pico daringly brings us to the very brink of these thoughts of man becoming God — and then Pico elides the moment, passing swiftly on from all that he has so very audaciously implied.

For Augustine, the divine is seated within him through the mediation of God’s image, the image at the heart of every human nature — even when it has been most nearly erased and willfully forgotten by the human subject. But for Pico, it would seem, there is no problem of erasure or sinful neglect of a pre-existing nature (only a certain laziness of the will, or a lack of imagination, in choosing one’s essential destiny of being for oneself?). With Pico, it would seem, there is no determinate nature already “seeded” within the would-be Magus, so as to serve as the basis or predisposition to move toward oneness with God. In the Augustinian tradition (as in orthodoxy in general, of course), the human movement toward divinization has always been founded beforehand by the image/nature/seed that is seated/seeded within the human being by God at Creation, that image with its dual potency within it, since it belongs both to humanity and to God. Pico’s Magus is therefore a successful aspirant to a pure divinity, to be sure, but is he also genuinely human? In this sense, perhaps, Augustine’s lover/knower is more sophiological than Pico’s?

Joshua’s introduction of Bruno’s charming Actaeon myth calls attention vividly to the centrality of the Augustinian dynamic — with its humanly formative “mirrorings” and “conversions” — as it plays out everywhere among the Renaissance humanists. (The reversal between the hunter and the “divine prey” is known to us today in a simpler form in “the Hound of Heaven” motif.) Actaeon, like every Petrarchan/Augustinian lover, through his audacious glimpsing of the “divine countenance and breast,” is himself transfigured into the image of the divine Stag, Who has always been, whether he knew it or not, the transcendent object(ive) of his passionate hunting. Therefore, his own “thoughts,” those “mastiffs and greyhounds” he had set upon the hunting trail, turn back upon their master and devour him.

In Ovid this violence is divine retribution from Diana, but Tansillo’s friend Cicada (can we trust a friend named Cicada?) observes instead, most piously and meekly: “I understand; for love converts and transforms into the thing that it loves.”  A little later he adds:  “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….” Rebirth in Christ re-enacts (if yet more radically and efficaciously) the same formal dynamics of the original Adamic creation: and the bringing forth of a “new creation” always relies upon the same fascinating and living oneness, as of Prototype and Image, that Bulgakov treats so well through his lucid inter-dynamics of the divine and creaturely Sophia.

In Confessions 1:1, the 4th century Augustine had effected some additional potent revelations of the co-inherence of the divine nature within the human nature, not in this case via God’s image as originally implanted within humanity, but instead “through the becoming human [humanitatis] of Your son and through the words of Your preachers.”  God has become manifest in us through an even more intimate and decisive implanting of God within humanity through Christ’s work, of course. (But every manifestation of God, within us or outside of us, is a provision for us to become knowers, to engage every avenue of knowledge as being what it is: a means to develop more richly our various capacities to be affected by God.)

Here in Conf. 1:1, however, because Christ is the Word of God, we are rescued not only by Christ’s humanitatis but by every preacher of God’s word, who by Grace is also a humanitatis of Christ, the Living Word. The preacher is a preaching of Christ, and as such has the capacity to begets new images and words of Christ, such as the very Augustine who is penning this story of his own journey of becoming-human in Christ. In this crucially significant prose poem of Confessions 1:1, Augustine is himself the “creature” of the preaching of Ambrose, who was himself the “creature” of the preaching of Christ by others, and all of them by the preaching of Himself by Christ in word and deed. (Notice this co-inherence of the substantive activity within its own substantive result — this is a kind of thinking that is fundamental not only for Christian theology, but also for thinking along with the classical Greek philosophers, I believe.)

In this same passage, Augustine also enacts Bulgakov’s insight into the “impersonal”  connection of the creaturely Sophia with God: Augustine “must praise God” simply “because I am a part of all that You have made.” Augustine is impelled to praise: he is homo adorans, and his dilemma is not need and desire but the problem of finding the true object of his desire, “lest I call upon another in Your stead, not knowing.” So there are at least two more of Bulgakov’s unitive sophiological energies registered and enacted here:  there is the “personal” way that an impersoned word or image of God re-incarnates Christ the Word and is capable of converting other persons into conformity with Christ’s own nature. And there is another way operating at the same that is an “impersonal” manner of loving God. For I think that Bulgakov means by the creaturely Sophia’s “impersonal love” for God that loving God does not require a personal subject, an active agent; that in this sense we are all like any star or tree or stone, “passively” loving God. Like Augustine, we  must praise the Maker just as the firmament must declare His handiwork, simply because “I am a part of all that You have made…and therefore I must praise you….”

This longing of all created nature (both as personal agent, when impersoned, and always in any case “passively”) is the dual energy that makes the human knower into the inveterate seeker to know its own source and to “rejoice in love” with it. So Augustine opens the Confessions with both motives energizing his love-words to his own divine Begetter:

You are great, Oh lord, and worthily to be praised, but I cannot praise you worthily, because I bear about in my body the mark of sin. Nevertheless, I must praise you, because I am a part of all that You have made, and [also] because our (human) hearts are restless, except they rest in You.

In Conf. 13:15, looking forward to the promised heavenly fulfilment of both of these kinds of creaturely needs and desires, Augustine writes of the angelic peoples that, as they behold the face of God: “they read, they elect, and they rejoice in love” [legunt, eligunt, et diligunt]. In their ex-static “elections” of their own destinies in God and in the “dilectations” that those “elections” lead to — in their creaturely choosings and rejoicings in the play of love through their reading with an ever deepening knowledge of an ever deeper object of knowing — surely they are also enacting the archetypical life of Proverbial Wisdom, who “plays before God’s throne” and “whose delight is ever in the sons of men.”

So we have this Augustinian dynamics of erotic longing for deep reality, working at the core of all human knowing. We have all these fascinating mirrorings and conversions, through a fundamental love-energy that keeps on merging into oneness and emerging out of oneness, while yet lovingly and proportionately preserving distinctness. So it is hard for me to see, but perhaps I am being too provocative (or too foolhardy), how these other-mirrorings and other-begettings in the Augustinian tradition, between the lover and Beloved, are so very different from Bulgakov’s mediatorial workings out of the divine and created Sophia in her many beautifully delineated manifestations?

In other words, is it really the case that the ousia of God, “God’s divinity,” has merely been left in the West in the “lifeless scholastic form” in which it was taken over from Aristotle (as Bulgakov believes)? Joshua suggests that this was not the case among the poets and philosophers. I wonder about it in reference to theology as well.

So I would like to ask us all to consider whether there might not be a variety of grace-filled ways to work out and to inhabit devoutly the same (sophiological) insights about the out-workings of the divine nature itself? Now admittedly, in doing so, Augustine relies very heavily upon reading out the Logos as the Incarnate Christ, the Image of God and the Word of God for human persons: the Logos both in its original inherent dwelling within creation and especially within human human nature, and also in its Incarnation in order to redeem of all creation, through Christ’s even more radical incarnational and atoning instantiation of the divine within the created universe.

But let us note that Bulgakov too, after all, is himself willing to affirm that “the Logos preeminently represents divine Wisdom…” (45). He writes also that “the Logos in himself is hypostatic Wisdom as such” (44). On the other hand, Bulgakov’s exposition of the Logos as The Divine Hypostasis, the Second Person of the Trinity, in counter-distinction to Christ, who is the hypostatic union of divine and human natures, is beautifully nuanced; in some ways it is more subtly precise than the endlessly unfolding and re-enfolding fractal transformations of the Augustinian tradition. But there is also an inexhaustible well of profound psychological and cosmological insight in Augustine’s manner of getting at these nourishing truths. Is this not also a sophiology?

Augustinian mirroring, after all, rests on “more than a correspondence,” just as Bulgakov points out concerning the relationship between created Sophia and divine Sophia:

Indeed, it is nearer the truth to speak of unity, even identity, as between the divine and creaturely Sophia, for nothing is doubled in God…. The identity and [also the] distinction, the unity and [also the] duality of Sophia in God and in creation, rest on the same foundation   (76).

The “foundation” is unquestionably found by Bulgakov in the simplicity of the single consubstantial divine nature, a simplicity that is paradoxically burgeoning with multiple determinate othernesses. But if Augustine can say to God that “You are the life of the life of my soul,” is it not clear that for him this same life is also “the life of the life” of the Godhead and of each of its Persons? And this life, as Aron elaborates in his paper on the divine Sophia, is “the force of God’s love overflowing beyond the limits of its own being to found being other than his own” (Bulgakov, 73).

This consubstantiality, if I may call it thus — at once essential, formal, and dynamic — whether it is accommplishing the oneness of the creaturely with the divine Sophia, or of the Trinity with its own divinity, and of the human with the divine nature in Christ… this ultimate and original self-transforming-ness, this energy that is ever substantiating and instantiating itself, is also at work as the desirous divine-in-us that drives human nature (whether that of Bulgakov or that of Augustine) to send forth its hunting dogs, seeking on the mountain sides for the “divine prey,” for naked contact and for an ever more transfiguring union with the source of its own being, and the source of the being that it would become. (And, as Henry insists, for the “perfection” of that being it desires and wills to become. For in the end, will and potential are indeed distinct, but they are also mutually interrelated and sustaining of one another).

Well, it seems that Bulgakov has challenged us all, when he states that “humanism…up to its present remains pagan, whereas in truth it should be Christian.” He challenges us in his claim that “the true humanism has yet to appear” (142). But Joshua has led us into the complex web of Augustinian textuality that belongs to a Christian humanism that has already appeared….

So I wonder if I could now press Joshua, perhaps, to take a stand and declare himself more fully, as to whether or not he thinks that sophiology is alive and well in the West in the Renaissance, just as he has reminded us that it was in nineteenth century Germany? (Something he finessed most adroitlythe first time around, as I read him….)

And we have not even begun to consider Sophia in Thomistic theology, the theology which directly inspired Dante, of course, on the cusp of the early Renaissance. Dante dared to make the figure of Beatrice into the energizing fountain that maintains the comedic human journey to God, in this life and the next. But if there is a sophiology here, we must trace its distinctive motions here also back to Augustine, as well as to Aquinas, and of course, to Aristotle. For no matter how much its philosophical resources change over time, all of medieval and Renaissance theology remains, in its deep structures, profoundly faithful to the Christianity that Augustine envisioned as a love affair between God and the cosmos. And faithful also to that long Platonic tradition of liberal knowing (liberating knowing) that Joshua has invoked, in which knowledge and love are one.

So…Joshua?