GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that.
So we’ll start with Zizek. Slavoj Zizek and GK Chesterton make strange bedfellows.  The Slovenian born philosopher is most well known for his readings of Hegel and Lacan as well as his obsession with, and acute observations of, the banalities of popular culture. His atheism is of the school of Marx and Freud but with an insight into Christian and Jewish thought that is almost always arresting. To get right to the point, its seems that what Zizek really gets from Chesterton is the idea that, in the arsenal of human language and thought,  paradox is the best weapon we have, the most effective way of getting at the truth of human existence. Chestertons description of christ’s cry from the cross is a good example of how he employs paradox:
“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

Zizek quotes these words in a book of his entitled On Belief, and when he calls himself a “Christian atheist” as I heard him do once at a talk in Philadelphia he is agreeing with Chesterton that Xity, by revealing God to have been abandoned by God, places a certain value on the atheist, as when Chesterton notes that “The next best thing to really being inside Christendom is to be really outside of it.”
For Zizek, and I think for Cheseterton as well, this brutally honest cry given by the dying Christ, is an example not only of a unique kind of God, but also sets the groundwork for a certain type of thinking, for a certain type of philosophizing. In reading Zizek a quote from Chesterton is often followed by one from Hegel, for it was Hegel, according to Zizek, who gave philosophical voice to paradox, who even constructed his entire system around it. An all powerful God, for Hegel, is revealed most truly in the moment of greatest weakness and desolation, which is a necessary moment in the revelation of that God. For Hegel the all powerful God of the Jews, inasmuch as he communicates with his creation, does so most authentically not through a revelation of words, of sacred texts, but through a revelation of Word, that is, incarnation. For Hegel and Zizek after him, far from proving that Christianity is a kind of opposite of Judaism, the fact that one of the fundamental tenets of Judaism, that against making an image of the invisible God, is overturned in the person of Christ, reveals Christianity to be the inner truth of Judaism. Zizek is then quite happy to read the Christian tradition in the way that Chesterton does, via the lens of paradox: A God who first and foremost creates—but only out of nothing. A God who allows no imitation of himself, human or otherwise, and then promptly shows up in the flesh. A God who claims ascendancy over all other Gods, and is then overpowered and murdered by the feeble beings he made.
Zizek agrees with Chesterton, against all liberal bias and political correctness, that one must affirm that Christianity does something fundamentally different from any other religion. I quote from length the very beginning of his book On Belief:
In the Larry King debate between a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist, broadcast in March 2000, both the rabbi and the priest expressed their hope that the unification of religions is feasible since, irrespective of his or her official creed, a thoroughly good person can count on divine grace and redemption.  Only the Baptist—a young, well-tanned, slightly overweight and repulsively slick Southern yuppie—insisted that, according to the letter of the Gospel, only those who “live in Christ” by explicitly recognizing themselves in his address will be redeemed, which is why, as he concluded with a barely discernible contemptuous smile, “a lot of good and honest people will burn in hell.” Zizek’s comment is that it is this voice, of the fundamentalist, I think we could say, which we must follow because only it, in emphasizing the violent and exclusionary nature of redemption, maintains Christianity’s status as unique, as laying a path. . . . which for Zizek is key if we want to understand the uniqueness of the subjectivity that has developed in the West under the banner of Christianity, but also, and no less authentically, in its form as enlightened and secular. Zizek, following Lacan and also Descartes, maintains that we must accept a certain bifurcation when we are considering the subject, but it is not that the subject is split between two poles, say between the spirit and matter (as one might understand Descrates to be saying) or between conscious and unconscious (as one might understand Freud. . . ) or between the symbolic and imaginary (as one might understand Lacan); but rather, the subject is this split. So in Zizek’s reading of Lacan, the third important register, that of the Real, in a way embodies the subject, or as Zizek says, is the hard kernel at the core of the subject. Its not that the subject is divided, and must choose the path of good over the path of evil, but the subject is rather division itself, and at no point can claim to have “found the way” or seen the light. The cry from the cross shows that even God is marked absolutely by this division:
In Christianity, says Zizek, “we are not FIRST separated from God and THEN miraculously united with him; the point of Christianity is that the very separation unites us - it is in this separation that we are “like God,” like Christ on the cross, i.e., the separation of us from God is transposed into God himself. (http://www.lacan.com/zizhegche.htm)

Milbank, fictioning things
While Zizek is closest to Chesterton in their emphasizing paradox as what makes Christianity unique among world religions and thought. Milbank is closest to Chesterton at a point that is inaccessible to an atheist like Zizek, for it concerns the meaning of the resurrection. In a paper published online entitled Fictioning Things: on gift and narrative,  Milbank examines the theology of Chesterton through his writings on fairy tales and especially his understanding of the prohibitions which mark so many of them. For Chesterton the point of the negative prohibition was always  to emphasize a positive creative act, like when, arguing in support of monogamy, he says that “keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.” For Milbank what Chesterton is doing is emphasizing the status of the world as gift—it might not have been this way, there might have been nothing at all—and the seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary prohibition–you can eat from any tree in the garden except this one–only serves to emphasize that this world was created by a personal force, it was not eternal or necessary, but it was spur of the moment, and it very well could be unique in all the universe (even the language that god uses in the bible “you may eat of any tree” couches the negative in a positive. And of course if we look at the first chapter of Genesis, all the commands there are explicitly positive. Be fruitful and multiply. Have dominion over the creation. enjoy every green plant for food.) The ban, then is not fundamentally negative, but it is the only way that the positive creation can be seen for what it is from the side of creation. In the garden of eden, the reason why this prohibited fruit is connected with knowledge is because this is the nature of the temptation that our first parents, and us, always face in regards to how we understand the world. Is it going to be seen with the eyes of a child, full of wonder and surprise and new things, or is it going to be understood through the lens of knowledge, as something that fits into a system, thereby robbing it of its contingency and capacity to amaze. In one of his matchless phrases Chesterton notes that “A childe of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. A child of three is excited by being told that someone opened a door.”(ortho 42) This is not to say that knowledge in itself is fundamentally negative, for we can’t forget that prior to falling Humanity did have knowledge, to multiply and to have dominion and even to converse with God. What they didn’t have was complete knowledge, which is what the tree represents, knowledge of good and evil, of the all represented by both sides of a duality. The apples hanging from it would have half fresh and half rotten, just like in the old Disney Sleeping Beauty.
Chesterton claimed that seeing Christianity as a fairy tale was a big step in his embracing of the Catholic faith, and for Milbank the link between those tales and the faith is that both speak of a positivity behind the world and infusing it, which goes beyond the dualities of adult knowledge and mortality: “the ineliminable positivity of things has to be read as a sign of promise despite of or beyond death, unless we deliberately refuse to receive things as gifts” (13)
Fairy tales are, of course, the stories that we tell children and for Chesterton, and Milbank after him, following Jesus’ command to become like little children means understanding what it is that fairy tales do. Part of Milbanks argument that I won’t go into here is how we must see the Christian story as a fairy tale and not as myth. Christainti is not, says Milbank primarily “something to be fully grasped by adults in absttrarct terms, and then presented to children in terms of image and story that they will find more readily comprehensible” (2) To really stick to the command of Christ we must see Adults as simply the “means of transmission . . . . . conveying what they have received and must continue to receive themselves as children.” (2)
To conclude, I would just like to briefly address the aspect of revolution which is included in the title of this paper. It seems to me that a weakness of much of the best thinking today is that there is no longer any hope for revolution but only for revolt. Thinkers like Agamben, Badiou and Zizek have a subltle vocabulary of the Event, of a momentary eclipse of empire. So much of this degenerates, I feel, into the bad kind of paganism, which looks at the world with a certain resignation, sighs and says, Life does not offer us all that it pretends to. Back away from your dreams and just get what little pleasure, what little jouissance, you’ve had the luck to rescue. In two words, carpe diem. But for all Zizek gets about Chesterton and for all his keen insight into what makes Christianity unique, it seems important to me that we must side with Milbank  (and Chesterton) against Zizek here and we must demand that this revolt of the truth be turned into a revolution not through a rejection of traditional modes but precisely through a correct understanding of the stories we’ve now been listening to for two thousand years. As Chesterton notes Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.”  In affirming the voice of the southern Baptist preacher, Zizek says we must reject him inasmuch as he is bigoted but that we must affirm a materialist version of his approach. But it seems that zizek is contradicting himself here. What he is really affirming about this guy is his abstract assent to the importance of that violent cut. The title of his chapter is From Christ to Lenin. . .  and back. In other words we can accept the figure of Christ inasmuch as his actions, to bring a sword into the world, to found a new world by explicit separation from the old, can be abstracted from the material fact of his incarnation. But I would hold that the Christian view is much more materialistic than either this minister or Zizek can stomach. For the preacher, his contemptuous smile tells us that his understanding of redemption is that merely intellectual “accepting of Jesus into my heart.” which is to blame for so much of what has been bad in Christianity of the last century. For Zizek the desire to abstract a mode of reasoning from the event of the cross means that he is ultimately denied access to the materiality of the risen body, a materiality which is not simply that of the historical Jesus, that’s what his master Lacan would call a fantasy, but rather that of the second person of the Trinity who existed before the foundations of the world and whose body appears as a kind of fairy tale magical food in the sacrament of the mass.

This would be an excellent opportunity for me to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the conference. Whether you made a large or small contribution, we are in your debt for what turned out to be a fascinating and thought provoking event!

In any event, we were busy. I was in Chicago with many of you at AAR. However, Aron seems to have joined that contentious group of protesters who haven’t quite come to terms with the AAR/SBL estrangement. Fear not, they’re getting back together, maybe even by 2011. Aron made up for his absence by attending the Chesterton Conference in Niagra, Ontario. Look for his paper to appear here soon once I steal it from his laptop.

I’ve recently become interested in the Bible again after reading Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and teaching the Revelation unit in my advisor’s Seminarian course a couple times.I’m currently writing a paper on the regula fidei, and at Joshua’s suggestion began reading up on some literary theory, including Northrop Frye (although I wonder what you had in mind when you made that recommendation, JADR). Anyway, I stumbled across this bit in Frye that made me laugh, and for lack of anything substantial to post at the moment, I thought I’d toss this one out there:

It took me some time to hit on the right formula for a course in the Bible. I consulted the curricula of other universities, and found that they gave courses called “The Bible As Literature,” which involved chopping pieces out of the Bible like the book of Job and the parables of Jesus, saying, “Look, aren’t they literary?” that approach violated all my instincts as a critic, because those instincts told me that what a critic does when he is confronted with any verbal document whatever is to start on page one at the upper left-hand corner and god one reading until he reads the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But many people who have attempted to do that with the Bible have flaked out very quickly, generally somewhere around the middle of Leviticus.

- Northop Frye from Northrop Frye and Jacy McPherson, Biblical and Classical Myths

By Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Wow, Joshua. You responded to every issue I raised, only more succinctly than I had managed to raise them. (In fact, I had to throw away two previous responses, because I discovered I hadn’t read your reply deeply enough yet.)

I find myself much won….

As you say, surely, what is most important is to think through the application of sophiology in contemporary culture. And that means most of all thinking how Bulgakov helps us to “maintain our openness to knowing that we are known by God.”

Contemporary culture is in dire need of profound hedges against positivism. It is in dire need of a genuine re-awakening of respect and recognition for “an experimental use of reason itself that breaks onto the terrain of the transcendent.” Bulgakov involves us in a reading and a thinking that nurtures both. I also understand your use of the Renaissance humanists to call for a wilder science, a more natural religion, and a Christian spirituality that vindicates pagan instincts, because humanity itself comes from God and bears God’s image in its inmost core.

We truly need today, also, a rebaptism of human desiring, and a renewed vision of the philosophical practice of life that makes it, once again, an education in desiring.  We find this in Bulgakov’s rich and subtle indwelling of the principle that “God is love.”

Bulgakov excites us, also, by liberating within us what you call the “pre-modern archaic trust in a profound affinity of the self with the cosmos.” In a certain sense, therefore, this makes him subversive of the same “Victorian, bourgeoise, and Enlightenment liberal” structures/strictures that caused such immense depths of misery and quiet desperation in the 19th century, and gave rise to the anti-humanisms of the Nietzschean tradition. (This was the language of paradox, after all. How anti-humanistic is it, finally, to oppose an established “humanism” that is deadly to human beings?)

Most of all, I understand why you seek a practice of trust in the cosmos and in God that “embraces more of its dangers, risks, and seemingly chaotic elements than modern paradigms have been willing to do.” As you say, modern paradigms have allowed minimal degrees of chaos only in order to control them to the maximum degree. But let me just add, if I may, that we might be in quite a different situation right now, from that within which arose the anti-humanistic visions of a transpersonal humanity, or the phenomenological and poststructuralist resistances to techological thinking and materialistic reductionisms.

Physics has spent the past 100 years transforming its own formal understandings of what the world is like, and of what a science is, making knowing heuristic again: making it provisional and unfinalized, a rigorous ongoing theorizing that interrogates its own past even while using it, but that is also always in willing submision to the next, as-yet-unknowable, but ever-faithful, paradigm shift in its future….  (The same kind of vision-of-knowing, then, that motivated each of the eager new contributions to their tradition from the medieval theologians, for example.)

Most wonder-ful of all, we see in physics the re-opening of that salvific gap between our own heuristic formalizations (our logoi or accounts) and the deep reality to which they seek to do justice. This was the original Socratic opening that energized the pursuit of the liberal arts and sciences, and sustained it for the first 2000 years of its now 2400-year-old history.

Because of physics, and because of correlative revisions within every other academic discipline during the 20th century, we may not be confined at this point to rehearsing and negotiating the tragedy of the scientific Enlightenment, which always entails also the tragedy of its loss.  (Derrida, for instance, determined himself always to view the situation as tragic, which was his own practice of faithfulness to it).

Instead, we might have right now a renewed opening for freshly re-theorizing the disciplines, and for bringing to light once again their inherent magic. It might be that we can reclaim the once so rich and elegant (and so richly and elegantly qualified) humanistic agency — an agency that came to be buried and overwhelmed by the thought of a Newtonian “material” world, ruled by single monolithic and mechanical determinism. Since that monolith first loomed, we have had one overwhelming determinism offered after another…all of them deeply instructive, but incapable of extinguishing the personal styles in which human thought nonetheless continues to dwell.

Yes, we require “a kind of magic,” no doubt of that. We desperately need a power for thought that can open (or re-open) those liberating places of in-determinacy that are always constituting a kind of chora for the re-birthings of humanity, religion, and science. But how do we effect this? (Always assuming, of course – and this too is a gamble, a risk, and a daring – that the thought-work carried on by every human generation is a significant and needful contribution to this unending human-divine project.)

Perhaps you and I, Joshua, are devoted to exactly the same project, while working at it from different locations. There is an energy in the writers you cite that seems to aspire, through their wild and joyous subversions and their baroque — or “subliminal” — inventions, to leave all determinacy behind altogether, in ascending to that Cosmic Humanity…. (This is again that problematic of the impersonal vis-avis the im-personed, with all its problems — and glories — of impersonation.)

Is it perhaps that one seeks a practice of magic that would finally transcend the realms of structure and limit entirely? (This is why I cannot accept the Deleusian notion of imperceptible variations, for instance. To me there must be determinate structure underlying the freedom from structure that is being achieved…. a matter of supersubtle perceptions, if you will….)

For myself, I seem to treasure determinacy and to see in it the paradoxical source of every potential for transformation and self-transcendence. I want above all to re-open determinacy itself.  Not to allow the over-determinations of the Enlightenment to cause us to situate determinacy itself as the enemy. Human eudaimonia, for me, accordingly, would lie in a personal union with God, and not in that dissolving away into the nothingness of the divine being that is so much spoken of among the contemplatives and the neoplatonists.

But in either case, however, and by any and all means, let us set aside the mistaken epistemology of the modern centuries by offering better, and let us reclaim the “wisdom” of the Socratic tradition, the wisdom of Bulgakov, the wisdom of traditional religious knowing, and the contemporary wisdom about knowing that is shared (unbeknownst) between contemporary physicists and cultural theorists alike.

What I’ve just said reminds me a little of Zizek’s joke about how the deconstructionist cannot say “I love you.” Instead, the Derridean will issue forth with all of those past antecedent conditionals and “accordings to a certain trajectory of thought” and the “if one were able to believe” and so on and so forth. The punch line to Zizek’s story comes when he remarks that there used to be a time, back in the day, when we simply hazarded those three words “I love you,” and when we did that, all of those qualifications were already included in the words….

I would like to show that “back in the day,” it was not the case that we used to believe in absolutes or  that our creeds were statements of a truth that was certain and indubitable. No, in the old days, before the rise of scientism, truth was in herself much more difficult to come by than that – and more alluring and rewarding. It was the upstart era of mechanism and determinism that taught us to think like that about truth. And now, it has been the honesty and brilliance of physics that has taught us not to think like that, because the world is not like that, and neither are our paths of knowing.

The gloriously human responsibility can be back upon our shoulders, as Christians and as Socratic philosophers, to engage in the unexpected journeys of coming to know that only occur when we genuinely trust in our subject (Subject) to correct and challenge us in our efforts. This is why we must have the formulas and creeds handed down to us by our traditions of knowing, but we are to use them as vehicles, in order to move into deeper contact with the realities they seek to represent. When such processes bring about those moments of truth — as an Augustinian Polanyi defined truth to be “any deep contact with reality” — such actual contacts tends to shatter as much as to confirm our formulations. In those moments of truth within all of our disciplines, we find a stronger power-for-knowing, and with it a stronger human agency, being determined within us. Such experiences in knowing occur when in an instant we see our creeds or formulas simultaneously fulfilled and transcended. We reclaim more deeply what they must always really have meant.

But in the final analysis… Between, on the one hand, an on-going heuristic thinking – itself always a re-thinking — of the modes of determinacy maintaining all determinate structures (structures themselves dynamically in movement and irreducible to a simple unity), and on the other hand, a thinking that genuinely liberates potentiality through the subversion and transcendence of determinacies, there may be no determinate difference at all.

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.

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).

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?

“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

In chapter five of Catholicity and Orthodoxy, Eastern theologian John Myendorff insightfully inquires how the historical development of Western Christianity during the Reformation would have gone had there been a stronger Eastern Orthodox presence.  Reading David Congdon’s and Kyle David Bennett’s lucid presentations on Bulgakov’s sophiology reminded me of Myendorff’s insight; Congdon is, by his introductory admission, a Western Protestant, while Bennett offers a comparative analysis between Bulgakov and the Western Protestant theologian J. Moltmann.  The Eastern Orthodox/Western Protestant conversation, while interesting, inspiring and important, is unfortunately infrequent if not rare among theologians today.  That these two thinkers agreed to pursue Bulgakov is admirable and courageous.

Consequently, it was somewhat refreshing to read these two thoughtful reflections on the enigmatic doctrine of Sophiology as found in the thought of Sergius Bulgakov.  Both reflections offer praiseworthy considerations that help to draw out the beauty of this Eastern thinker.  At the same time, both offer points that merit critical attention.
Congdon provides a helpful analysis of the Trinitarian grounding for Bulgakov’s Sophiology, situating it within the themes of procession and revelation.  Concerning procession, Congdon explains how Bulgakov thinks beyond the distorted equivocation, initiated by the ninth century Patriarch Photius, by resisting the urge to import concepts of causality and origination when contemplating Divine Tri-unity. From this emerges the notion of God as per se relation (or we might, in scholastic parlance, be called ‘subsistent relation’), rather than three divine persons in a broader, and hence prior, relation.  Consistent with that splendid feature of Eastern thought, the resistance to reified abstractions is keenly poignant in Bulgakov’s Trinitarian thought, and Congdon does well to expound this difficult feature.  Viewed from this perspective, God’s intra-Trinitarian life overflows in an act of kenotic-creative revelation, and the immanent/economic distinction of the Holy Spirit “takes shape” in Sophia – both divine and creative.  This act of creative self-disclosure is the grounding of all creaturely participation in the deifying of all creation – a key theme within the tradition of Russian Symbolism.  For Bulgakov, deification as the telos of Creation is not merely an extrinsic addition of an alien grace, but an intrinsic momentum of creaturely union toward Life in the Triune Godhead, and all the discrete creatures in Creation energize this momentum toward its goal.  As far as I understand Bulgakov and his Eastern tradition, its content is well represented by Congdon’s presentation.

With such a fine presentation of Bulgakov’s content, it is somewhat surprising to find myself taking issue with a few of Mr. Congdon’s interpretative remarks throughout, as well as some of his conclusions at the end.  But this may be more a result of a distinction between fundamental principles of thinking than anything else.

My first issue, and one very close to my heart, involves the areas where Mr. Congdon attempts to relate Bulgakov’s Sophiology to the analogia entis.  We first confront this concept when Mr. Congdon, insightfully describing Bulgakov’s Sophiology, writes: “The unity of divinity and humanity in Christ becomes the analogical template for all other unions, including the unity of God and creation.”  Most scholars of medieval theology and philosophy would recognize in these words an expression of the Thomistic understanding of the analogia entis.  While there are obvious distinctions between Bulgakov and certain scholastic thinkers, there are also important similarities because of, not in spite of, particular formulations of analogy.  I was buoyed by the subtle connection – at least until I read the very next line: “We might even speak of an analogy of Sophia, as opposed to an analogy of being (the latter being far too Latin and scholastic).”  Opposed?  Really?  Before addressing the footnoted explanation, a few observations of this terse statement must be put forth lest the misconception of the analogia entis be perpetuated further.

What does that mean, “far too Latin and scholastic”?  Is there such a simple understanding of “scholastic” freely circulating about?  That one would posit a “scholastic” notion of the analogia entis assumes that there is a simple unity within scholasticism reminiscent of M. De Wulf, who claimed that the unity of medieval philosophy can be understood as a “strict, scholastic synthesis.”  But this view can be (and has been) called seriously into question, if not discredited entirely, based on two points.

1] The work of Baeumker who, arguing that it is misleading to maintain a strict unity within scholasticism advocating instead a Gemeingut or “common heritage,” and the work of Gilson who, also rejecting strict unity and advocating a “common Spirit,” demonstrates that it is wrongheaded to make any sweeping claims over scholastic doctrine.  Even De Wulf’s theory of unity does not allow one to gloss over variety within scholastic thought.  Mr. Congdon does this not only in the body of the work, but even more so in the footnote when, referring to the analogia entis, he calls it the “traditional scholastic analogia entis”.  The fact that I recognized in this presentation of Bulgakov subtle hints of (NB!) Thomistic analogia entis, and that Congdon saw it as less “complex” and “interesting” than Bulgakov’s Sophiology, further refutes the idea of a simple “tradition” – clearly, we do not see the same tradition, so de facto it cannot be as simple as Mr. Congdon would like it to be.  For these reasons, Mr. Congdon is at least obligated to describe how he understands the doctrine of the analogia entis if such criticisms are to hold any validity.

2]  This takes us to the second point: the evidence itself.  Thomistic analogia (which, by the way, pace Mr. Congdon, is more Greek than Latin, based as it is on the Greek doctrines of participation and Biblical Creation) is vastly different from, e.g., the conception of analogia formulated by Cardinal Cajetan, despite the fact that the latter believed himself to be a loyal heir to the former.  In fact, it is Cajetan’s notion of analogia, which is really a “univocal analogy” that tends to find itself associated with any (so-called) “traditional notion”.  Cajetan made the mistake of importing unity as a synthetic a priori to understand what, for Aquinas, could never be prioritized by unity over difference; for Thomas, difference is constitutive of all Being(s), and the unity incumbent upon these beings is always-already arriving.  Now, there is debate as to whether analogia, as understood by Aquinas, is real, i.e., a condition of the real order (in re), or merely notional, i.e., a condition in the logical order (in mente).  Debate continues today (e.g., B. Montagnes who argues for the former, and R. McInerney who argues for the latter).  Suffice it to say that all this renders it more than valid to call into question Mr. Congon’s understanding of the analogia entis.  It seems, if we may be permitted to speculate, that his is an understanding born not from the sources themselves, but from a Barthian secondhand reading.

My second and final issue with Mr. Congdon involves his criticism that Bulgakov’s theology is “non-Christocentric.”  Now Mr. Congdon makes an important qualifier: “at least as that word (i.e., Christocentric) defines the kind of theology pursued by theologians like Karl Barth.”  I readily and wholeheartedly concede this point, but would submit that is hardly a criticism.  Must all theological approaches be Christocentric in the way that Barth’s was?  Is Barth’s understanding of Christ the only legitimate one?  Now, to be sure, I find Mr. Congdon’s criticism here to be quite attentive to the existential importance of the historical person of Jesus Christ.  This is quite worthy of being pursued in dialogue with many Eastern thinkers.  The sophiological approach can risk becoming too ‘spiritual’ at the expense of the concrete person of Jesus Christ either in history, or in the Church.  But it is also the case that we in the West may learn a great deal about the person of Christ as he exists now by engaging in the more, let us say, mystical approach of the East without relinquishing the concrete.  In other words, the Western approach, which especially in the last century has become historical (at times, in my opinion, overly so), risks preventing Christ from truly ascending beyond the limits and constraints of the material, historical, order.  I believe that the current obsession, among Biblical scholars, with the historical-critical method is symptomatic of this, as is the fundamentalist identification of American, political state-craft with Christian faith praxis – but these digressions need not be pursued here.

I see in Bulgakov a Christo-centrism of a different mode (a point that Congdon himself makes a few times).  For Bulgakov, Sophiology is nothing but the full elucidation of Godmanhood,¹ a concept he derives from Solovyov, who employed it as a philosophical principle of synthetic unity (not, to be sure, a priori) of science and philosophy, on the one hand, and theology on the other, viewed as the primary constituent of reality. “In Solovyev’s system not only does religion receive a rational basis, but East and West come together, matter and spirit unite.”²  Christ lives in the most real and concrete way as the world of creatures consecrated to the divinely ordained telos of redemption.  But such a view only makes sense within the context of an ontology formed from the authentic tradition of analogia, since only then is unity and difference properly held in the blessed tension of convenientia.

My sincere apologies if this response to Mr. Congdon has been overly drawn out.  I was inspired by his articulate positions, even if not in complete agreement with all aspects.  Still, none of this s