Sophiology

A very brief review of Sophia, The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, by Sergei Bulgakov.

Many of the twenty-first century’s greatest theological minds have asserted that the greatest theologian of the twentieth century was none other than Sergei Bulgakov.

To say that Bulgakov’s works are daunting would be an understatement. His multilingualism and complex philosophical vocabulary, combined with no great urge to explain his own definitions however esoteric, produced thick and brilliant tomes that nevertheless come across as word salad to the uninitiated. It’s taken me years to get to the point at which I think I know what he means—and even then, I only think so, I’m not sure.

My mistake appears to have been in tackling his magnum opus right off the bat, an abortive exercise in frustration, when I ought to have begun right here: with his far slimmer summation and outline of Sophiology as he understands it. Even then, this slender volume demanded slow and attentive reading, no less a labor than the 1200-page history that I wrapped up last week.

Sophia is wisdom, and wisdom subsists in recognizing the oneness, the unity, underlying all things. Here then is my starting point: translating every instance of “Sophia” in Bulgakov as “Oneness.” Unity, of course, does not mean uniformity.

Bulgakov affirms the definition of Chalcedon, that God is One Essence in Three Hypostases. Western theology pays plenty of attention to the Threeness, he argues, to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but makes no concerted effort to tackle the Oneness, the Ousia or Substance of the Godhead. For Bulgakov, that Oneness is Sophia: he uses the terms Ousia, Wisdom, and Glory more-or-less interchangeably. Wisdom is the content of Ousia and Glory its manifestation.

Sophia is not personal, not some fourth Hypostasis. She is, so to speak, divinity rather than Deus, the Godhead rather than God. If God is truly transpersonal, beyond the distinction between personal and impersonal, then Sophia may be taken as the latter and the Trinity as the former. In effect, Sophiology is an entirely new level of theology of which the West is unaware, such that opening Bulgakov feels akin to discovering a New World.

God creates all things from nothing, which is to say, from nothing other than Himself. Only the divine is real, the source and ground of all. “What is not God is nothing,” Bulgakov bluntly states. Thus the difference between Creator and Creation lies not in substance but in mode: God is, while Creation is becoming. We are called, as it were, out from nothing unto pleroma. All of Creation comes from God, is sustained in God, and returns to God. Deification is the fullness and fate of all things.

The same divine Oneness that reveals the Persons of the Trinity unto one another (Divine Sophia) also sustains the world and reveals God unto us (Creaturely Sophia). At root, all of Creation is a single unity, and that unity is shared with and in God. Thus there are not two Sophias but one, and our destiny is to realize Her, fulfilling Wisdom in Creation through divine-humanity, that God at the last may be All in All.

Bulgakov goes on to demonstrate how Sophia is expressed, or manifested, within the Trinity, through each individual Hypostasis, in Creation, Incarnation, Pentecost, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Church—this last, for Bulgakov, consisting of the entirety of divine-humanity in history, both the Old Covenant and the New, even in “the barren church of heathendom,” and extending to the worlds of angels and of beasts.

Just as love can never be encountered in the abstract but only in loving particular people and things, so Sophia can only be encountered in the Persons of the Trinity, and in the divinity undergirding all of Creation. She belongs to God, yet is God, both His substance and possession. And all are One in Her.

Or something like that. I think.