Published by DWM at 10/28/2008
“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic: Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART FOUR
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.”
Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 14 – FINAL POST’
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Published by DWM at 10/18/2008
“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic: Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART TWO
From Janet Leslie Blumberg to Joshua Delpech-Ramey:
Joshua,
So many rich ideas here in your own oration, Joshua: An Oration on the Dignity of Sophia — the creaturely Sophia, that is. (As if she ever could be kept apart from the divine Sophia for very long…but we’ll try.)
I must choose just a few threads, out of this closely woven tapestry of yours….
So…you begin with precursors of sophiology in the German Romantic tradition; they had a direct influence on the Russian sophiologists. Then… you work your way back into the Great Unknown, back into the darkness of that more ancient tablet of the West which, according to Bulgakov, is a blank slate with respect to Sophia — at least insofar as her importance to theology is concerned. (But no one, including Bulgakov, should ever be expected to be acquainted intimately with everything, or be made to suffer indignity because of not being.)
So you say, Joshua, that the thinking of the creaturely Sophia was not absent in the West – at least among the poets and philosophers, although “at the level of systematic theology“ you accept Bulgakov’s judgment. But then I notice that after your wonderful “deregulation of nature” (Schelling’s liberation of the physical world from some of the rigid enclosures effected by early-modern epistemologists) –- that you make your transition back in time to the Renaissance not by explicitly citing Pico or Bruno as sophiologists, but instead by using Goethe’s Faust to raise a crucial modern problem, the way that knowledge has been drained of eros and set against love in our scientific, post-Newtonian thoughtworld, so that we are forced to choose one as against the other…. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 11′
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