The Land of Unlikeness

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART THREE

By Joshua Delpech-Ramey (The Land of Unlikeness)

The question Janet raises about whether Renaissance humanism, as found in Pico and Bruno, is really human enough, is very important to think through in terms of what we could call the application of sophiology in contemporary culture.

Pico’s emphasis on the polyvalent or indeterminate status of the human essence is not so much opposed to the Augustinian duality of divinity/humanity as the defining feature of human life as it is a setting of that duality in an epistemological situation that has complexified.  Augustine was adroitly skeptical about tying theology to the current dogmas of natural inquiry, whether it be inquiry about the difference between animals and humans or about the number of fixed stars or about any other subject of natural knowledge, including Biblical interpretation, where he advised much more caution about fixing the meaning of Biblical sense than future commentators would. Augustine’s is a profound hedge against the scholastic tendency to attempt to correlate too closely the realms of natural and supernatural reality (or to endlessly speculate on the border between philosophy and the sciences on the one hand, and theology on the other, ad nauseum).  What emerges from Nicholas of Cusa to Bruno is Augustinianism (and Neo-Platonism) in a more speculative approach to natural knowledge, one that blurs the distinction between natural and supernatural modes of apprehension, from within natural philosophy.  In other words, we in some sense –give up- the quest to know the border between divinity and humanity, in general, in order to explore its potential presence, in particular, beyond pre-conceived construals of its limits (even without taking the dynamics of self-consciousness as paradigmatic, as Augustine did in On the Trinity).  So it is not Augustinian skepticism about the limits of human reason that maintains our openness to knowing that we are known by God, but rather it is an experimental use of reason itself that breaks onto the terrain of the transcendent (the very same territory of transcendence Augustine preserved against the positivisms of his day).

This move has enormous practical consequences for spirituality and for science—consequences I think that Bulgakov desires us to discover from sophiology.  Magic was an important spiritual practice for the Renaissance, and perhaps was the paradigmatic spiritual discipline (as opposed to contemplative prayer, for instance), because it more fully situates cosmological dynamics within the mystery of the incarnation and the sacraments.  In Neo-Platonic terms, we discover the One in the All rather than in contmplative Nous.  What appears as an overly heroic, even stoic kind of humanity in Pico and Bruno is in a way just the desire to discover not only the self but the world in God, and this requires a certain foregoing of the psychological, interpersonal emphasis of traditional Augustinianism.  But what is interesting is that the emotional registers of Augustine are not so much rejected or abandoned, but rather pro-jected into a vision of an “impersonal” dynamic of becoming that, as Absolute, finally reveals genuine Personality but in the ultimate form of that Adam Kadmon or Cosmic Humanity that truly unites us across the divisions of ego, isolate consciousness, personal history, linguistic difference.

This is why I believe that the great visions of a post-human subjectivity, an impersonal or pre-personal form of trans-human being in Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, and Deleuze, among others, is no simple nihilism or quest to “outrun” the melancholy self. In an uncanny way the anti-humanism of post-Nietzschean philosophy has profound resonances with Renaissance humanism, accurately understood.  These more recent thinkers proclaim the death of God only to emphasize the death of any pre-conceived limit to the human, in order to emphasize the radically transpersonal and trans-finite (to that which is not locked within the strictures of consiousness).  Their subversive systems undermine the Victorian, bourgeoise, and Enlightenment liberal strictures put upon human life, and thus they link up once again with pre-modern archaic trust in a profound affinity of the self with the cosmos, one that embraces more of its dangers, risks, and seemingly chaotic elements than modern paradigms have been willing to do.  Or one might say that modernity incessantly allows for a minimal degree of chaos in order to survey and control it to the maximum degree.

A wilder science, a more natural religion . . . a kind of magic.  A more primitive or “basic” relationship with the elements. All driven by faith, hope, and love, where these terms lose their “all too human” resonances and begin to echo within the unknown of nature itself, in our affinity with that which we are “not” only because we participate in the All.  In the end, still an Augustinianism, but one that has become less of an autobiography and more of a tale of science fiction:  less TS Eliot and more Philip K Dick.  That is where, I would say, modern magic seeks out Sophia, and reconnects with Renaissance ambitions.  Our Sophia plays at the border between madness and desire, between delirium and hope, between despair and longing for that divine flesh so redolent and yet so elusive everywhere around us.

If according to Bulgakov this humanism is still pagan, this may be precisely because Christianity has yet to fully claim its status as -the- vindicator of pagan instincts—a project Bulgakov’s own Sophiology could finally help begin to complete.