Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the wisdom of a true theologian

The folowing is part of an article by Fr. Aidan Nichols:

Bulgakov is a theologian of Wisdom. The Old Testament has a number of ‘‘Wisdom texts’’ which speak of wisdom as a divine power that is active in the world. (It also has many texts which speak ofwisdom as a human virtue, whether acquired by effort or infused byGod, but these are not immediately at issue here.) The most important ones are to be found in the Book of Proverbs (1:1–9:18), the Book of Wisdom (6:22–11:1), the Book of Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach, 24:1–34),the Book of Baruch (3:9–4:4) and the Book of Job (28:1–28).

Sometimes these texts give the impression that wisdom is essentially divine, that it is on God’s side of the distinction between God and the world, the Uncreated and the created. On other occasions, however, these texts give the contrary impression:that wisdom is a created reality, on the world’s side of the distinction between finite reality and God, very much an aspect of the creation rather than the Creator. Because it is not entirely clear from Scripturewhat these texts are speaking about, biblical scholars find it hard togive a theological account of them. Bulgakov believed he had comeup with a solution, and one that could be usefully included within avision of Christian dogmatics as a whole. In the version that can beoffered in the time available, it falls into two parts: a theology of thedivine nature, and a theology of creation.


A theology of the divine nature

Sometimes, Bulgakov says, people who want to be as Trinitarian asthey possibly can be, who want to say that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and nothing but that, think they are doing the Holy Trinity a good turn by denying that there is such a thing as the divine nature in itself. He agrees that the divine nature is thoroughly hypostatised,comprehensively taken up into the personal life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But to deny there is a divine nature, and restrict God to the interplay of the hypostases, is not to do the Trinity a favor at all. On the contrary, it is to minimize the divine being, and reduce the being of God to what he calls ‘‘an abstract consciousnessof self’’. But the Holy Trinity does not only exist ‘‘for itself’’, in the wondrous awareness that is the relations of communion of the three divine persons. It also exists ‘‘by [or through] itself’’, that is to say, by reference to the divine nature, the divine ousia. Nor is the divine nature just the power of the divine life of Father, Son and Spirit. More than this, it is its content – or, as Bulgakov puts it, the divine nature is the

‘‘absolute content of the. . .[divine] life, with all its properties’’.

But Bulgakovhas an objection to how all this has usually been discussed. As he says, in the Church’s tradition, discussion of the divine nature – as distinct from the divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – has largely been conducted in philosophical terms which perhaps become theological in the contexts where they are used but are certainly innocent of much in the way of biblical input. He writes:

Substance both in the East and in the West is interpreted purely asa philosophical abstraction, and utilized to achieve a logical solutionof the trinitarian dogma. . .Such a conception cannot embracethe divine revelation in regard to the one common life of the HolyTrinity, of God in three persons. The dogma of consubstantialitywhich safeguards the unity of the Holy Trinity, thus remains a sealed book so far as we are concerned – for in a religious sense ithas been neither properly adopted nor developed. The Bible, however,though it never alludes to the abstract concept of substance,does give us revealed teaching on the life of the triune God.

Now at one level, Bulgakov himself continues the practice ofspeaking philosophically about the nature of God. It is just that his tools sometimes come not from the ancient Greek philosophical tradition on which Christian Scholasticism drew from the later patristic period onwards but from the classical German philosophers of the nineteenth century. We can see their influence when Bulgakov tells us that it is proper to the content of the divine life that in God everything is understood, understood not just as an infinite number of different aspects of the divine mind but precisely as the ‘‘interior organic integrity’’ of all those aspects in the world of God – in the divine nature – there is, he says, an ‘‘all-unity’’, a unity of everything as the divine mind knows it.But if these remarks reflect the concerns of the German philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it should be noted that those philosophers were themselves indebted an older Platonist tradition.

For a Christian Platonist like Origen, for example,the intelligible realities, logoi, which are the models of beings, constitute an intelligible world, a spiritual cosmos that is coherent and unified,in the Logos, the Word – and for Origen, as for Bulgakov, that is in an important sense an eternal creation taking place when the Son is begotten by the Father. But philosophy is not Bulgakov’s main emphasis, which is to unite with these reflections what the Bible has to say about the nature and life of the triune God, and indeed, to give the biblical data priority over the philosophical. The biblical texts on these matters have not, he remarks:

been utilized in trinitarian theology, in particular as regards theapplication to the doctrine of the substance of God of the biblicalrevelation of Wisdom or Sophia, and of the Glory of God.

And he goes on to say that

In this particular respect the liturgical consciousness of the Church is superior to the dogmatic, for the earliest liturgical texts have included such revelation in the text of hymns, lessons, and doxologies. The lex orandi bore witness in itself to the lex credendi. This witness, however, was disregarded by theology until the middle of the nineteenth century in Russia, when there were fresh stirrings of sophiological thought.

This is of course a covert reference to Soloviev. And this provides for him the transition he needs to the theme of divine wisdom. When Scripture speaks of the Wisdom of God, it means not just one divine property among many, as for example the justice of God or the mercy of God. The Wisdom of God is the foundation of all the divine properties. It is the divine nature as containing that all-unity which is the content of the life of God. And this means not just all the properties of the divine nature but the archetypes of all created things as well. It means not just the divine attributes but what many of the Fathers and later St Thomas Aquinas called the ‘‘divine ideas’’, God’s creative idea of everything that exists from plants – pace Angelus Silesius – and animals to stars and planets. All this is contained andcoherent inter-related in the ‘‘all-unity’’ of divine Wisdom. There is an‘‘interior organic unity’’ to all the divine properties and ideas. The divine Wisdom is God’s own nature, as known first of all tohimself, to Father, Son and Spirit. It is the divine ‘‘world’’ where God lives as the Holy Trinity. It is the divine life. But it is also the first principle of all created life before it has yet come forth from God as the cosmos, the created order.

Bulgakov has already described the Wisdom of God as the ‘‘interior organic unity’’ of the divine ideas. Now he adds that this ‘‘universal and cosmic assembly’’ of the divine world is best explained by the love of God. It is God’s love that assures the coherence of the world of the divine ideas; and it is God’s love that binds this ‘‘world’’ of divine Wisdom to the hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit. The persons of the Trinity love the divine Wisdom with the personal love that is appropriate to them. But there is also a sense, Bulgakov thinks, in which the divine Wisdom can itself be said to ‘‘love’’ the tri–hypostatic God. How is that? When something impersonal, such as the divine nature, is the subject of the verb [to] ‘‘love’’, that verb – plainly — is not being used in the same sense as when its subject is a someone, someone personal, as, for example Father, Son or Holy Spirit. Bulgakov quiteagrees.

Love in the strict sense is always between persons and thus, inthe Holy Trinity, between the hypostases. However, there may alsobe love in a non strict sense. He speaks of divine Wisdom as typified by love in two ways. Not only is the internal order of God’s Wisdom marked by love, because the divine ideas fit harmoniously with eachother in perfect unity. (Harmony is a sign of love.) More than this, thedivine Wisdom exists through belonging to the hypostatic Trinity —through giving itself to the divine persons, yielding itself up to be drawn into their personal life. Belonging, giving, yielding: these are terms of love. And more especially,these words suggest that the Wisdom of God may bestbe spoken of by feminine metaphors, since in the deepest and most abiding love we know, the married love of human beings, they are words that suggest the attitude of the bride more than the bridegroom. This for Bulgakov is the love that is ‘‘in’’ the divine nature, what Thomas would call amor naturalis Dei. And this as it were bridal or feminine love is what we find in Scripture which personifies the Wisdom of God as Lady Wisdom. When the Old Testament thinks ofWisdom as an aspect of the divine, its writers speak of Wisdom very much as ‘‘she’’.

So can we sum up so far? The Wisdom of God is the divinity of God – not the personal existenceof Father, Son and Spirit, but the living reality of the divine nature theyshare – the divine nature as a ‘‘world’’ that is wonderfully coherent initself (all the divine attributes and ideas fitting perfectly with each other), and a world that is at the loving disposal of the divine hypostases, on which they can draw, with which, in which and from which they can act.This is the ‘‘something real about God’’ that corresponds to the ‘‘LadyWisdom’’ of the Bible.


A theology of creation

As Bulgakov sees things, what he has done by now is to point us to the ‘‘sufficient basis’’ of the creation. The Wisdom of God is that sufficient foundation, and the creation which eventually issues from the triune Creator – in and with the beginning of time – is consequently marked by ‘‘sophianity’’. It is, or was meant to be, asophianic creation, a creation filled with the wisdom of God. Bulgakov introduces his account of creation by pointing out that the God who creates from nothing does not do so because he needs the world – meaning by that, through some hypostatic or natural necessity to complete himself in so doing. God does not need the world in order to be the Trinity. Nor does he need the world in order to be divine. He is already the fulness of personhood by being thetrihypostatic God who in his existence as Father, Son and Holy Spirit exhausts all the modes of personhood there are – I, thou, he, we, you. And in his divine nature he is already plenitude, than which nothing greater is possible. Rather, the world issues from God’s creative freedom.

This said, however, Bulgakov is very keen to emphasise that the world’s creation was in no sense an arbitrary act, the result of a vast divine caprice. The creation is not just a manifestation of God’spower. Bulgakov calls such an idea blasphemous, an impiety. And the reason is that the God who in no ordinary sense needed the world still in his love longed for it, desired to bring it about from nothing. Here the love of God is once again the key. Love is not only the main feature of the interpersonal life of the trinitarian persons, it is also‘‘in’’ the divine nature where the Wisdom of God is lovingly disposed to be taken up and used by Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is love and it is the property of love to love and to enlarge oneself by love. It is proper to the divine love not only to realise itself within the limits of divinity but to over- flow those limits. . .It is proper to the ocean of divine love to spread beyond its shores. . .Granted the possibility of creation, the divine love by its own inner character must take up that possibility. God’s ‘‘insatiable’’ lov emoves him to go out of himself, to love elsewhere than himself, to love beyond himself, in the world. So there is a sense in which God‘‘had to’’ create, after all. But this is an altogether sui generis kind of necessity. The ‘‘necessity’’ of love is really, writes Bulgakov, a ‘‘fusion of necessity and freedom’’.

The Absolute need have no relations. But in fact, as we know from revelation, the Absolute is God. And God can only be understood not in himself alone, but in his relation with the world as well. If God were simply the Absolute all our theology would be negative theology, saying what God is not. But God is not just the Absolute. He is God, related by his love to the world. And so our theology can be affirmative theology, saying what God is. God is the Absolute who is also the relative or relational, and this makes him a mystery of whom we can only speak in apparent contradictions, statements with two sides either of which, if pressed to a conclusion, would tend to contradict the other. For Bulgakov the most important of these ‘‘antinomies’’ or seeming contradictions is found in the very statement of what the word‘‘God’’means. It means ‘‘the Absolute existing for another: existing for the world’’. Bulgakov insists that the ‘‘frontier between the Creator and the creature must be unfailingly preserved’’. And yet he can see an acceptable meaning in ‘‘panentheism’’, the philosophy which states that though God is not all things (which would be pantheism) all things are ‘‘in’’ God. To make the link between God and the world just something contingent, with no implications for God’s own reality, looks like magnifying God but it is really reducing him, because it is downplaying the fact that God loves the world with the same love as that whereby he loves himself.

Bulgakov does not think that belief in creation – belief in our own createdness — requires a prior grasp of divine revelation. It is grounded, he thinks, in a ‘‘metaphysical fact’’ open to everyone to register. In what way? He replies, while we do in a sense put in place our own personal existence (we decide to be, more or less, the kind of personality we are), we certainly do not put in place our own being as such. When we advert to this, a conviction of our own limits steals over us and, along with it, a sense that beyond those limits our state is given or created. In this common experience we enjoy what Bulgakov calls a ‘‘metaphysical memory’’ of our own creation. However, from this ‘‘memory’’ we cannot move back by further reflection directly to confront or analyse the act of creation itself. The actof creation is a ‘‘limit concept’’ (he uses the German term Grenzbegriff) which sets a boundary to thinking but not, however, to faith. Here Bulgakov cites the Letter to the Hebrews:

‘‘By faith we understand that the worldwas created by the word of God, so that what was seen was made outof things which do not appear’’ (Hebrews 11:3).

The ultimate origin ofthe world is not one of those things than can be known by rational thought. It can, however, be known through the revelation of the HolyScriptures, in their testimony to creation by the Word in Wisdom.Still, we do have from our ordinary resources one clue to the wondrous act of creation and that is the human experience of creativity, of the origination of the novel, the new. By his creativity man bears the seal of his divine Prototype. But of course this is a created creativity: it is only the sub-creative action of the creature within the creation. Unlike such creativity as we embody, God’s creativity is an absolute creativity that has to meet no conditions beyond God himself. That is why we say, the world was created ‘‘from nothing’’ – a statement made in Scripture itself in the Second Book of Maccabees (7:28).

God made the world through Wisdom. Bulgakov uses a translation of the Book of Proverbs which at Chapter 8, verse 22 reads not – as in the most commonly used English Bible, ‘‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old’’ (RSV), but rather‘‘The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his ways, before his works of old’’. Here the Russian Bible reflects the translations of the Hebrew qina to be found in the non-Septuagintal Greek Old Testaments of antiquity. But a few verses later, at verse 30, Bulgakov’s Bible is not so different from our own when it tells us that Wisdom‘‘was at work with [the Lord]’’, which in the English Bible, in a translation already cited, appears as: ‘‘I [wisdom] was beside him, like a master workman’’. Bulgakov uses the Book of Proverbs to make the point that we cannot suppose God to have improvised the world on day one of the creation. The creation belongs with the eternal counsels of God, as the Fathersof the Church recognised when they spoke of the eternal prototypesof created things in the divine mind. The creation of the world does not mean that God decides at the beginning of time what he proposes to do. It means that the pre-existent content of divine Wisdom begins to exist outside God, in time, as well as within him, in eternity. As Bulgakov writes:

Metaphysically speaking, the world’s creation consists in the fact that God has put forward his own divine world not now as aworld existing eternally but as a world in becoming.

Divine Wisdom (with an upper case ‘‘W’’) has thus become creaturely wisdom (with a lower case ‘‘w’’) without for all that ceasing to be itself. God has so to speak ‘‘repeated himself in creation’’: he has ‘‘reflected himself in [the realm of] non-being’’. What in the divine ousia, in uncreated Wisdom, was an ‘‘all-unity’’ now becomes in created wisdom an ‘‘all-multiplicity’’ in the manifold forms of differentiated being. And so we have the world around us, a world composed of ‘‘all creatures great and small’’ as Mrs Alexander’s Evangelical children’s hymnputs it. Bulgakov emphasises that we are dealing here with only one wisdom, one wisdom in two modalities, Uncreated and created. Between the eternal ideas in the mind of God and the temporal realisations of those ideas there is the infinite difference which separates the divine from the worldly. And yet the content of both wisdoms is the same.

In the beginning, on day one of the world, in the unique singularity of the first moment of space-time, a hypothetical observer could not ofcourse experience the cosmos in all its wonder. The world was only at the beginning of its development or evolution. As the Fathers of the Church (again) say, the ‘‘seeds’’ of all things were planted within the creation but they needed time to germinate and grow. This is somethingof which modern science makes us more aware, but for the Church’s theological tradition, it is not exactly news. In founding the world the Wisdom of God is not at first fully actualised there. The Wisdom of God is to begin with only present in the world’s potential. UsingAristotle’s terminology Bulgakov speaks of the fulness of created wisdom – and thus what would be a perfect reflection of the uncreated Wisdom — as the world’s ‘‘entelechy’’, the final state to which creation is purposefully moving. But that is the final state – as it were the oaktree, whereas at the beginning all we have is the original potential – as it were the acorn.

The Book of Genesis calls the world at this initial stage ‘‘earth’’, and says of it, ‘‘the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep’’ (Genesis 1:2). But the eternal divine plan for the completion of the creation, notably in the emergence of personal– hypostatic – beings on earth (namely, ourselves) was already communicated to that other aspect of the creation which Genesis calls‘‘the heavens’’ and which Bulgakov, like the Fathers generally, identifies with the holy angels. The angels have known, from the first moment of creation, what course its development was to take.