Abstract
In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, the discourses of Elder Zosima lyrically depict a deep beauty and an enchanting mystery that can be apprehended in nature by the pure in heart. Dostoevsky suggests here that for modern humanity, the beauty and goodness and wisdom that in here in the order of creation constitute an especially important path to God. This insight has been eloquently articulated in the tradition of Russian sophiology by figures such as Soloviev, Florensky, and Bulgakov. But despite the appeal of Sophia as the immanence of Divine Wisdom in creation, there are serious philosophical and theological problems with the concept. However, the decline of natural law theory has left a normative vacuum that needs to be filled. It is argued, then, that a series of patristic concepts (such as the notions of divine energies and divine logoi inherent in creation) as they have been developed in the Christian East, can serve both to offer a better lexicon that is offered in sophiology as well as comprehend the divine wisdom in creation better than natural law had done.
This essay has greatly benefitted from readings by Hieromonk Alexios (Trader) of Karrakalou Monastery, Fr. Hans Jacobse of St Peter Orthodox Church, and Prof. David Bradshaw of the University of Kentucky. Of course, any remaining weaknesses are attributable solely to the author.
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Notes
- 1.
In Florensky’s classic discussion, Sophia is first discussed not in nature, but in the lives of the saints and monastic elders, in “the beauty of spiritual life”; see Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, tr. Boris Jakim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1997, pp. 233f. (Hereafter, PGT)
- 2.
PGT 200, The Philokalia, Vol. 4, St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, tr. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 92; trans. altered.
- 3.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volikhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1991), 295. Hereafter, BK
- 4.
BK, 107.
- 5.
BK 362.
- 6.
Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2015), p. 58.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
On the modern, supernatural God of Western metaphysics as intrusive and unwelcome, see Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
- 9.
Louth, p. 58.
- 10.
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 101.
- 11.
For “the holy” as the highest order of axiology, see Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) pp. 93 f.
- 12.
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan, (New York: New Directions, 2001) p. 426.
- 13.
For a horrifying look at a set of moral values based purely on empirical, scientific nature, see the diabolical masterpiece of the Marquis de Sade, Juliette. Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno see this monstrous work as the ultimate, and most consistent, elaboration of the Enlightenment view of nature and its implications for human conduct, while Sade himself saw it as based squarely upon the materialistic understanding of nature in the French Encyclopedist Baron d’Holbach, especially his Système de la Nature. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) pp. 63–93.
- 14.
Pavel Florensky, “On the Efimovs’ Puppet Theatre,” in Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicolette Misler, (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 134; Pavel Florensky, For My Children, cited and translated in Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius (New York: Continuum, 2010), 5. Italics added.
- 15.
Florensky, For My Children, 7.
- 16.
PGT 237. Italics added.
- 17.
Florensky, “Celestial Signs,” in Beyond Vision, 122.
- 18.
Ibid, 254.
- 19.
BK, 319.
- 20.
Ibid, 289.
- 21.
PGT, 241.
- 22.
PGT, 5.
- 23.
The great Church historian Georges Florovsky, who knew him personally, argued that Solovyov’s Sophia was that of “Valentinus and Cabbala,” and complained that he had “pushed Russian society on the path of fascination with Gnosticism and theosophy.” Cited in Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) p. 102 f. As subsequent studies have shown, however, Russian society in the late nineteenth century was already quite fascinated with esotericism of this kind and hardly needed pushing from Solovyov. See, for example, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
- 24.
Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 228 f.
- 25.
John Milbank, “Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon,” in Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneinder, eds., Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 64.
- 26.
Ibid, 50.
- 27.
Lossky, 80.
- 28.
My example here is drawn from the contemporary Greek philosopher, Christos Yannaras, who points to the remarkable fact that in the work of art we can actually encounter the very person of the creator who has invested himself in the work (Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, tr. Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007) pp. 167–172. But already in the fourth century, we can find a similar claim in St Gregory of Nyssa, who points to “human works of art where, in a way, the mind can perceive the maker of the product that is before it,” St Gregory of Nyssa, The Beatitudes, in Helda Graef, tr. St Gregory of Nyssa: The Lord’s Prayer & The Beatitudes, Ancient Christian Writers Vol. 18, (New York: Newman Press, 1954) p. 146. But it must be emphasized that this analogy is limited: the presence of God in His energies infinitely exceeds that of the human artist in his created work.
- 29.
St Gregory of Nyssa, p. 147.
- 30.
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, tr. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 64.
- 31.
St Clement of Alexandria, cited in PGT, 239.
- 32.
“‘That everything is fitting’ [kata taxin] is precisely what constitutes the beauty of creation, as well as its good and its truth,” Florensky, PGT, 132.
- 33.
PGT, 283, italics added.
- 34.
The most important source in ancient philosophy for this understanding of eikasia is the “divided line” exegesis in Plato’s Republic, where the “double-seeing” of an original through the image is used as a model for each step proceeding up the divided line to the highest step of the forms or eidē themselves. And even the latter are ultimately images of what in Plato is variously called the Good, the One, or the Same, and which Church Fathers understood as Plato’s intuition of God. My reading of Plato has, in turn, been influenced by several works of former teachers and mentors: see Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), especially pp. 112–115; Eva Brann, The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2011), especially pp. 172–175; 188–194, 338–343; and John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), especially pp. 418–422.
- 35.
For my understanding of creation as iconic, see Bruce V. Foltz, “The Iconic Earth: Nature Godly and Beautiful,” Chapter Six of Foltz, The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) pp. 113–157.
- 36.
Louth, p. 57.
- 37.
On Sophia in this text of Bulgakov, see Bruce V. Foltz, “The Resurrection of Nature: Environmental Metaphysics in Sergei Bulgakov’s Philosophy of Economy,” Chapter Five of Foltz, Noetics of Nature.
- 38.
Milbank, 45.
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Foltz, B.V. (2019). Chapter Seven Nature and Divine Wisdom: How (Not) to Speak of Sophia. In: Byzantine Incursions on the Borders of Philosophy. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96673-1_7
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