Notes on Bulgakov, Part 1

From Bride of the Lamb.  I'll polish it in my review.

Bulgakov says he rejects pantheism and monism.  He makes several incisive criticisms against cosmic dualisms (the two creating entities annul one another).

Creation Out of Nothing

What do we mean by the word “nothing?”  Are we reifying “nothing?”  Bulgakov says there is “no extra-divine ground of creation” (Bulgakov 6).   We must distinguish two different types of “nothing:”

1. pre-creaturely nothing, ontological zero. The negation of all being
2. Ontic, creaturely nothing, me on. It is a mode of creaturely being.  

More on nothing (116ff)

• nothing is no-thing, not just something.
• Its existence can only be posited by extreme abstraction.  
• All creation has a non-creaturely, creaturely character.  
• The positive force of its being is the creaturely Sophia, which is the image of the divine Sophia (117).

Aquinas

Aquinas has a difficulty with calling creation “good.”  Rather, it is imperfect.  It is only one type of many possible worlds.  There is a non-correspondence between ideas and things, as the former is always larger than the latter.  The divine ideas are suspended in mid-air.  They aren’t entirely accidents, because God doesn’t have accidents, but to the degree that they actualize creation, they can’t be fully God, either.  

Creatio and God as Cause

Motion cannot be explained on the basis of the motion itself (???).  

“The strength of the causal series lies in its continuity” (35) and if a gap were introduced, it would fail.  And there is a gap between God and creation.  Both causality and mover belong to the world of unitary being.  “It is not possible to transcend the world.”  

But the Christian faith does not need any of this.  It has the doctrine of creation, which is personal and presupposes a personal God (37).  

Divine Sophia is the en-hypostatic life of the Trinity.  

• It is the Divine World.
• Not a hypostasis, but a hypostasizedness

Creation of the World

• a self-positing of God (46).
• But the world is not a piece of God.
• Rather, Divine Sophia has a creaturely Sophianic mode of existence in which the world exists.
• Divine Sophia exists in a dual mode
• eternal (proper mode)
• creaturely
• contains multiplicity
• relative nothingness
• There can be no divine principle of existence which exists in the “nothing” (ouk on).  
• “Nothing” is a modus of reality.  It cannot exist by itself and for itself.

Divine Prototypes

• These are the plan of creation (55).
• The problem Patristics faced with this was how to relate these prototypes, which were divine, to creation.  Bulgakov suggests Sophia is the relation.
• Ideas are the “seeds” of being.
• Creation

Temporality of Creation

What do we mean when we say that the world is created “in time?”  How do eternity and temporality interact without the former subsuming the latter?  Is the latter merely an illusion?

• Temporality is not yet time; time is the mode of its existence (70).
• Time is the abstract measure of temporality, but it is not the unique measure.
• With respect to creation, we must not speak of the beginning of time (which is contradictory), but of the emergence of temporality.
• Time is a relation within becoming.

Therefore, we say that creation is beginningless, but not eternal.    It can’t have a beginning in time since time, too, is created.  Therefore, we say that creation and time emerge from temporality.

The World Soul and its Hypostases

world soul: the creaturely Sophia (79).  It is here that Bulgakov’s project shines in all its brilliance but also threatens to come undone.  He admits that the existence of the world-soul marks a “loss of clarity” and one wonders if he is reverting back to Aristotle’s chain of being.  But it is a lively chain, for he assures us: “There is no place for dead matter in the world.”

• We are speaking of the world soul, not the world spirit.  The difference between soul and spirit is that the soul is not hypostatic, whereas the Spirit is.  
• The soul corresponds to the spirit’s nature.  It is the spirit’s hypostatizedness.
• This is not Neo-Platonism, for he does not see the World Soul as a hypostasis.  
• The World-Soul is a connected, multi-organic unity
• It is the world’s inner entelechy which unifies.
• Therefore, there is an “inner life principle” in the world.  If this were not so, then why would we enjoin creation to praise God if creation is merely dead matter?
• It is the actualization of creaturely being (197).  The world-soul actualizes creation’s instincts for power.
• In its proper being it is divided into heaven and earth

Angels

Angels are how God usually relates nature (199).  They are the bearers of the sophicanic prototypes of creation and the earth’s reality.  Creation arises through the elemental forces of the world soul but its formation presupposes angelic activity and participation (Rev. 7:1, 14:18; 16:5; and fight battles).

Angels are the sophicanic heaven of the world, the creaturely bridge between Divine Sophia and Creaturely sophia, metaxu.  Angels contain the assurance that creation is a ladder of life.

Main Point

The connection of God and the world is grounded in Sophianicity.  “The divine Sophia is one, though she has two forms of being” (223).  Bulgakov argues that the Western insistence on speaking of God as First Cause and creation as Second Cause has the effect of subsuming the latter under the former.  Rather, God is not the cause of the world but the Creator.

• In the creation of the world God repeats or doubles his own Being.  This is the Divine Sophia positing the Creaturely Sophia’s mode of existence (222).
• It is the self-repetition of the Divine Sophia.

Bulgakov thinks he solves the main aporia--that of divine and human freedom--in placing this interaction within the realm of creaturely Sophia (231).

The Church

Holds to a highly qualified apostolic succession (280-282).

The Eucharist

• He suggests that Ignatius’s stringent appeal to the bishop suggests that his position is new and far from indisputable (284).
• The initial emphasis was not on the Bishop, but on the koinonia.

History and Knowledge

• mankind finds its unity in Adam and is the gnoseological subject, The Universal-I.  It is realized in the particular cognitive acts of individuals.  This is what Hegel was getting at when he said knowledge is social.  If knowledge is atomized, it can’t be transmitted.
• If there is a transcendental subject, then there is a transcendental object.  This is the world in its integral unity, creaturely Sophia.

Expanding Being in History

We know from revelation that spiritual hierarchies participate together with man in the world.  “They act within the limits of the world.”  

Criticisms

What does Bulgakov mean by alluding to an “ontological hierarchy” in creation (53)? Elsewhere, he rightly rejects the Aristotelian chain of being.  I think he means something along the lines that creation is not a nominalistic bundle of atoms (a string of pearls without the string).  

Book Review: Imagining the Kingdom

We all know that worldviews (hereafter w-v) are inescapable. Worldviews rarely move beyond the intellectual dimension.  Smith doesn’t want to do away with w-v talk, but to place it within a larger whole.  We are not simply isolated intellects, but situated intellects--situated and embodied.  We are always embodied individuals and we experience the world as being-in-the-world (per Heidegger).

And we are not Gnostics.  Rather, “The Spirit marshals our embodiment in order to rehabituate us into the kingdom of God (15).”



What is imagination?  Smith defines imagination as  “a kind of faculty by which we navigate and make sense of our world, but in ways and on a register that flies below the radar of conscious reflection” (19).  This is why using concepts like “social imaginary” or “plausibility structure” is much superior to w-v.   W-v rightly highlights the inescapability of presuppositions on our thinking.  We do not deny that.  Smith notes, however, that social structures and our bodily being-in-the-world also function in a “pre-theoretical” (per Dooyeweerd) manner.

Knowing in the Body and By Stories

Liturgies are not only aesthetic, but kineasethic.  They come to us in the body and tell a story.

Perceiving by Stories

*Who we are is shaped by the stories we encounter and imbibe.  “We live into the stories we’ve absorbed; we’ve become characters in the drama that has captivated us” (32).
*narrative trains our emotions and those emotions condition our perception of the world.
*we are not disembodied choice machines.

Smith aims to capture “the creational conditions of human action” (33).  This is where Anchoretism fails.  Anchoretism seeks to transcend finitude and attain unto hyperousia.

*Perception and evaluation are intricately linked.
*“Affect and emotion are part of the ‘background’ I bring with me that constitutes the situation as a certain kind of situation” (35).
*“Stories are means of emotional prefocusing that shape our tacit ‘take’ on the world” (38).
*Antepredicative know--the affective register upon which narrative operates--is processed by the body below the cognitive level (Merleau-Ponty).

Pre-cognitive perception breaks down the traditional epistemology of subjects and objects.  "The world is not what I think, but what I live through” (Merleau-Ponty).  Our being-in-the-world is between instinct and intellect (43).  We aren’t just thinking-things.  “We don’t have being-in-the-world; we are being-in-the-world” (44).

More on Stories

A story has a “flow” and “rhythm” that simply isn’t reducible to a string of facts.  A string of facts is not a story.  It’s a memo.  No one dies for a memo.  No one’s embodied life is transformed by a data brief.  But people do die for the Story of Matthew, for instance.

“The material meaning of a poem means uniquely because it is meant on the register of motor intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty).  Kineaesthetic and Poetics are interconnected.

Worship: Story as Liturgy

Smith doesn’t add too much on Reformed liturgies.  He does apply his earlier insights into how it shapes stories, drawing on scholarship on John Calvin.  We can rejoice that more Evangelicals are moving away from “3 songs and a lecture, 3 points and a poem.”  People don’t die for that, either.  So, good stuff here.

We live at the nexus of story and body--a “between” space where the aesthetic power of a story captures our imagination because it resonates with our body. And all good liturgies tell an implicit story.  The Holy spirit reconfigures our neural maps.

Liturgy is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with a Story about who and what we are (139).  It is an imaginative social practice that captures our imaginations by becoming the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.

Criticisms:

Smith admits he has a hard task: steer a middle course between popular literature and the scholar.  He kind of succeeds.  His thesis is fascinating and I believe (literally) life-transforming.  Still, one gets the feeling he is often “Dancing on the edge” rather than “diving in for the kill shot.” As a result, a lot of sections seemed to “go on” in a way that repeated earlier chapters.