The Land of Unlikeness

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART TWO, cont.

Meanwhile, the Longest Overtly Sophiological Poem I know
by Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Meanwhile, let me regale everyone with two passages from the longest overtly Sophiological poem I know. Or so I will posit… to see what you think. (It ought to further our discussion of precursors to sophiology among the Renaissance humanists, at any rate.)

This poem was written by an acquaintance of Giordano Bruno and a fellow renegade, John Donne, although Donne chose to go under cover so as not to die as Bruno did. Or to die as Donne’s own brother had died during the Elizabethan anti-Catholic purges of the 1590s.

In 1611, Donne was asked to commemorate the untimely death of his patron’s adolescent daughter, and Donne seized upon the occasion to write not only about Elizabeth Drury, but also about what he called “the Idea of a Woman.” And while he was eulogizing the young woman who had died (and also eulogizing the passing of more than she), Donne performed an “anatomy” upon the “corpse” of the desolate world that “Shee” had left behind her at her passing. The poem is called “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of World,” and it turns out to be, among other things, a prescient lament for the “death” of Sophia in the coming mechanistic age.

(If you are wondering how Donne could have gotten to this dark proleptic vision of the new world order, apart from having lived through such a ferocious persecution of the “old religion,” I believe that it came to him from reading his kinsman Francis Bacon’s earliest book, The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605.)

Donne’s poem is very long, and most of it is as hypnotic and compelling as the two brief sections I will now cite. Donne is writing here of the condition of the cosmos after the death of “Shee”:

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man, alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
This is the world’s condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetique force alone,
To draw and fasten sundry parts in one;
She whom wise nature had invented then [ie. had “discovered”]
When she observed that every sort of men
Did in their voyage in this world’s sea stray,
And needed a new compass for their way;
She that was best, and first Original
Of all fair copies, and the general
Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast
Guilt the West Indies and perfumed the East,
Whose having breathed in this world, did bestow
Spice on those Isles, and bid them still smell so,
And that rich Indie which doth gold interre,
Is but as single money coined from her.
She to whom this world must it self refer,
As suburbs, or the Microcosm of her,
Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead: when thou knowst this,
Thou knowest how lame a cripple this world is,
And learnst this much by our anatomy,
That this world’s general sickness doth not lie
In any humour, or one certain part,
But, as thou saw’st it rotten at the heart,
Thou seest a hectic fever hath got hold
Of the whole substance, not to be contrould,
And that thou hast but one way, not to admit
The world’s infection, [which is] to be none of it.
For the world’s subtilst immaterial parts
Feel this consuming wound and [this] age’s darts.
For the world’s beauty is decayed or gone –
Beauty, that’s colour, and proportion….

To which one earlier section should now be added:

Let no man say, the world itself being dead,
‘Tis labor lost to have discovered
The world’s infirmities, since there is none
Alive to study this dissection,
For there’s a kind of world remaining still,
Though shee which did inanimate and fill
The world be gone, yet in this last long night
Her ghost doth walk, that is, a glimmering light,
A faint weak love of vertue and of good
Reflects from her, on them which understood
Her worth; And though she have shut in all day,
The twilight of her memory doth stay,
Which from the carcase of the old world, free
Creates a new world, and new creatures be
Produced: the matter and stuff of this
Her vertue [is], and the form our practice is….

So we can see that Bruno is not the only Renaissance humanist willing to go over the top….

Ben Jonson, Donne’s playwright friend (and an open Catholic who nevertheless had managed to survive into Jacobean times), remarked in exasperation that “had it been wrote of the Virgin Mary, it had been something….” But because it was only about the young Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never laid eyes on, the poem exasperated some of Donne’s lady friends and former patronesses as well. Donne wittily replied, “I wrote of the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was.” If any other lady felt slighted, he continued, then she had only to undertake for herself to live as the true exemplar of that “Vertue” he had praised. Then she could rightly regard the poem as written of herself!

However, as you may have noticed, the poem is filled — shades of Ben Jonson — with unmistakable Marian imagery. The Holy Mother is the special guardian of sailors; she is the perfume of the East, and so forth…. But what about that “best, and First Original / Of all Faire copies,” which is also Marian through and through (the New Eve), via the same thinking about her pure and elevated humanity that Bulgakov and the Eastern tradition expounds? At the same time, like Bulgakov, the image draws upon the Platonic Idea, and upon the potent relationship of Prototype and Image. Or what about the figure of “Shee” as the indwelling harmony of the world?  And at the same time as the cosmological Greek Eros who, in the face of Strife and chaos, “should all parts to reunion bow.” She is also Nature, as God’s providential order still indwelling the material world, struggling to maintain it despite its now-fallen state, and she is even God’s Providence itself (ultimately, as in Aquinas, Providence is superior — “steward” — to Fate).  Then She is the World Soul, too, the indwelling divine life that continues to “inanimate and fill” this decaying ghost of the world, re-membering it as it once was, and as it yearns to be again: the paradaisical “golden world” that God designed and intended, God’s divine artistry….

And Renaissance minds were always expecting that the worlds of art could and would imitate this greater and more original Reality, instead of merely copying the “brazen” world in which we fallen humans must dwell, with its “preponderant mass of unreason.” Hence Donne’s imitatio of Woman in terms of “the gold of divine wisdom” (as Bruno’s Tansillo’s explicated the golden color associated with the Goddess Diana). Elizabeth Drury will be extolled by Donne as the Golden woman she is divinely meant to be, and not merely as one of those tarnished copies that are likely to appear in the inferior Ages of Silver or Brass….

We also have clear evocations in the poem of the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs, and of Dante’s Beatrice. Like Bulgakov’s Sophia, the “Shee” of this long and compelling poem can be recognized and known in many dimensions and many aspects: she appears on occasions to be created or divine, mortal or immortal, feminine or cosmological, immanent or transcendent. If Shee is indeed an Idea, this idea is no mere “concept” or “empty abstraction” but what Bulgarov calls “the living thought of God.”  Thus, in a very real sense, “Shee” is one with the essential life and being of the universe, and she is also one with the being of the young Protestan believer named Elizabeth Drury. (By the way, I suspect that Bulgakov’s dismissive comments about the emptiness of the scholastic reception of Aristotelian terms have something in common with Heidegger’s complaints about the shortcomings of medieval “ontotheology”; such criticisms fall upon these earlier thinkers because they are being read — or not read — at something of a distance, and in Heidegger’s case, certainly, through the abhorred conceptual framework of the modern centuries, out of which he struggles so hard to emerge.)

So, I ask you, how on earth, without thinking Sophia in her divine and created oneness (and distinction), could Donne have made such extravagant and contradictory claims, even in principle, about a young Protestant girl? (I don’t care how prominent – and wealthy – her aristocratic family was!)

One way he managed it, of course, was by relying heavily on “Christ in her,” the mystical union of the believer with Christ, which is “the hope of glory.” Except that this by no means would explain everything in the poem. Had Donne restricted himself to Christology and the Body of Christ, he would not have written many, many of the lines contained in this poem. Why, we even have the Aristotelian anima and the Thomistic form here — Form as the indwelling unitive functioning and life that sustains each created being by virtue of the kind of being it is (that is, according to its eidetic nature). No, Donne is uniting here, in one extended Metaphysical conceit (which is the very life and essence of this eulogy), elements drawn from a multitude of resources and traditions, and he is uniting them into a single principle: the creaturely “Shee” who is also divine.

In my judgment, this is not animism, not “vitalism,” not “occult forces,” and not “mere metaphysics” – even though the later 17th century “natural philosophers” would dismiss 2000 years of patient and exceedingly brilliant Western thought with such labels. But their own energies were preoccupied with gazing at other chosen and elect objects, and in gazing at them within the new mechanistic framework they required. Yet these new “objects” of learning, like previous ones, were still quite capable of arousing all of the old erotic devotion in their students, because of their astounding inherent beauty and power. (This is why Lesslie Newbigin aptly called the Enlightenment the “conversion experience of the Modern West,” in Foolishness to the Greeks: the Gospel in Western Culture.) So the early modern thinkers would all impatiently wave aside a past that seemed to clog their way.

But what these ardent and brilliant devotees of “matter in motion” and the new calculus waved aside in the short run, proved to be inescapable in the long run. It returned first as “force,” when Galileo’s “kinematics” yeilded to Newton’s much more powerful “dynamics” of motion. And many decades later, it would emerge again, and this time decisively, as a certain uneluctible numerical quantity that kept showing up in the equations of steam engines and water mills, a quantity that was always the same. This quantity came to be called “energy,” of course, and ever since Clerk Maxwell and Einstein, physics has been the story of the conquest of the material world by energy, and of “solid bodies” by “fields.” In a wonderful irony of history, the name energy (believe it or not) was borrowed directly from the German nature philosophers, who were quite enamoured of old Aristotle’s energeia and had been writing a good deal about it….

*  *  *  *

I keep recalling the very first question asked in this Bulgarov conference, requesting help in providing a  “conceptual framework” for grasping Bulgakov’s “mystical lyricism” and for working out, for example, the “physical” and “historical” ramifications of the believer’s union with Christ. Sophia’s efficacy for philosophy and theology, it seems to me, lies precisely in her inaccessibility to any thought that refuses to think the co-inherence of formal energies within the organizations they inform, and at the same time the transcendence of those formal energies — as more fundamental and more enduring than the material organizations they create and sustain. Compare: “Wisdom is to be understood ontologically, not as an abstract quality, but as the ever-present power of God, the divine essence, as the Godhead itself” (66) and “Wisdom in creation is ontologically identical with its prototype, the same Wisdom that exists in God” (72).

To think Bulgakov, then, means to think ontological identity, to think a formal and dynamic oneness underlying that which we do not cease to keep, structurally and functionally, “distinct.”  (This is the deep structure of classical Greek taxonomical logic in general.)  And it is not nonsense. But it is not the “sense” or “logic” deriving from the “word-concept-object” schema of modern epistemology either.

I do happen to think, though, that this kind of thinking originated and sustained in order to thhink the ratio or logos or proportion-ality of those elegant formalities discovered in the world by the Greeks, and so beloved by them. In Plato and Aristotle, we find a thinking of form (eidos) as the real and dynamic being sustaining and moving all things, but formally distinguished “according to their kinds.” The formal elegance at work in the world was for the Greeks astoundingly multiple, but in a deeper sense, at its core, it was one, and is what first aroused the Socratic longing to engage dialectically in pursuing the Eidos, that beautiful Stag, “in-animating” the world in and through its kinds.  Only thus could an education in the various formal ways of knowing (in knowing in each with exquisite depth something of the formal elegance of one of the quite different kinds of determinacies unfolding in the world) — only thus could such an education possibly be formative and liberating.

It was, I believe, something like an indwelling of the divine Sophia, seen in and as the ratio-nal energies of emerging determinateness itself (kinesis) — this divine energy that was glimpsed so tantalizingly within each of the kinds of things to which the Greek disciplines were devoted (the creaturely Sophia) –  this is what  opened the very possibility of the liberal arts as ways of knowing, and made them capable of forming and transforming human personhood. Only by the oneness within the ontological diversity of that which the liberal arts explored lay a power capable of lifting and transfiguring a human knower into a lover of Wisdom, and into an imitator of her.

And until the 17th century at least, the Western tradition would never lose sight of this Greek love affair with the ordering principles of the world, or lose its faith in the dunamai of the arts and sciences to build in us the enhanced capacities to discern and engage with and be affected by the beauty of what we are coming to know. This Greek word dunamis is in Aristotle translated as a “faculty” or a “discipline” or way of knowing (in The Nicomathean Ethics) and it is in Plato “a power to know” (Ion). But a knower endowed, with with however many such powers, does not become a lover until the divine Stag is glimpsed in (and through) these paths into the truth of the eidos, whereupon the mind is raised to a higher state and friendship becomes possible.

It was the miraculous manifestation of patterns of formal energy in each of the kinds of things (ta onta) that, in the first place, convinced the Greeks that human beings could become able to come to know anything, and on that basis of givenness, that they could develop various formalized means of perceiving them more exquisitely. In this tradition, disciplinary communities and their methodologies are what develop in us our capacities “to be affected” and this is what enables us to press further on in our knowing. Every communal disciplinary pursuit, whether theological or not, whether “first philosophy” or merely one of the “seven pillars of Wisdom” (from Prov. 8 ) interpreted as being the Seven Liberal Arts, could help to equip the lover of Sophia to rise to a higher and deeper contemplation of the divinity in and through the creature. (“Sapientia hath builded herself an house,” and the medieval university was a garden, a mother, a fountain for the cultivation of human nature.)

It is very difficult for us today to “flesh out” the “mystical lyricism” of Bulgakov or to read the dynamical formal elegance of earlier Western thought, and assimilate it to our own standards of clear thinking, because it is necessary at every turn to rely upon a thinking of the “dual” (but non-dualistic) principle of immanent transcendence.  In contrast, modern epistemology labored to contain all phenomena within an apparatus of mutually exclusive, self-enclosed structures, such as “solid bodies” and “motion” in the case of Galileo, or “objects” and “concepts” in Locke, or “the world” and “clear and distinct ideas” in Descartes.

This is why I am grateful that Bulgakov works so very hard to reinvigorate the “consubstantiality” shared by the members of the Trinity, in order to grasp it as being more than an “abstraction” or a mere “concept.”  God’s Ousia is the very “life” and “being” of the Godhead; it is “God’s divinity”; “God’s divine Godhead or nature.” But also, these are very old Greek philosophical gestures, seen in the thinking of the mutual and reciprocal relationships between the Eidos and its instances, and within the Eidos between its eidos-name, its eidos-ideal, and its evolving formal definitions. This thinking of the oneness that participates distinctness is the essential seed of Socratic/Platonic dialectics and it is brilliantly developed by Aristotle when he claims that the form-al nature as such (essence or eidos) is most truly itself when it is fully realized in the actuality of its instances. (That eidectic realization is what he calls an ousia, something that is more akin to a Christian hypostasis.)

Basically, though, I think that I sould show that it is this thinking of immanent transcendence and of transcendent immanence, this fundamental dynamic — that any-thing and its intrinsic formality are one and also distinct (not same) — upon which all knowing is based in the Socratic “philosophical” way of life.
But if I dare to claim that sophiology was working at the heart of Western “first philosophy” (theology) and continued in the West prior to the rise of Newtonian mechanics, then someone might well wish to protest that she is never called by her name. But yes, she was. She was named as Sophia in the very name of philo-sophy itself, and this is not “mere semantics.” It would also be easy to show the profound influence in the Christian West of the Wisdom tradition from Proverbs, prior to the scientific revolution. Look too at the ubiquity of the divine feminine, as in Fortuna and Natura, as in Mistress Kynde, and as in the medieval and Renaissance figure of Truth as a naked woman standing on the summit of her high hill….  Are these merely verbal echoes or merely visual conventions? It was Locke who taught us how to think the “concept” as an abstraction quite apart from the empirical “object.” Have we in the Modern West forgotten how to think the living substance of the Word/word, or of the Image/image, so that we do not even read the sophia in earlier Western philosophy?

For this too, perhaps, “Bulgakov arrives from the East….”

Perhaps all of these “signs” I have mentioned are genuine and iconic pointers, urging us to think more fully the ways in which “hagia sophia” may have survived, for many, many centuries in the West, just as she did in Constantinople, and always, everywhere, as “the last, silent revelation of the Greek genius bequeathed to the ages” (Bulgakov, 2).

Like

Unlike