Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia

The doctrine itself, stated as Bulgakov stated it: Sophia is not a person, not a fourth hypostasis, and not a being intermediate between God and the world, but the divine ousia considered as revealed content — the “Divine World,” God’s own self-disclosure — which exists in God eternally as Divine Sophia and is posited outside God, by creation ex nihilo, as creaturely Sophia. This file sets out the claim, the denials Bulgakov attached to it, and the pressure points his critics found.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) — an exposition of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s own theology, not the dogma of the Orthodox Church

The Problem Sophiology Was Built to Solve

Bulgakov’s starting question was not “who is Sophia?” but “what is the relation of God to the world?” — and he thought the received answers left a gap (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993 [1937], ch. 1; Aidan Nichols, Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, ch. 3).

On one side stood the absolute distinction between the uncreated and the created, which Orthodoxy confesses without qualification. On the other stood the Incarnation, in which God and creation are united in one hypostasis without confusion; the deification of the creature, which the Church teaches as the end of human life; and the sacramental order, in which bread, wine, water, oil, and wood carry uncreated grace. Bulgakov held that these facts require some positive account of the world’s capacity for God — some answer to the question of how the created and the uncreated can be united at all, if they are simply and only other (Bulgakov, Agnets Bozhii [The Lamb of God], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1933, Introduction; English trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3; Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, Part III).

He named the answer he rejected: a God so defined by transcendence that creation becomes an arbitrary act of will with no ground in God’s own life, and a world so defined by its nothingness that its relation to God is merely extrinsic. Sophiology is his attempt to say that creation is founded in God without being identical with God (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, chs. 2–3).

Sophia as the Divine Ousia Revealed

The core thesis, in Bulgakov’s mature statement, is this: Sophia is the divine nature — the ousia — considered not as the abstract substrate of the three Persons but as the whole living, self-revealing content of God’s life (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2; The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Introduction and Part I; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3).

He resisted the manual conception of ousia as bare essence — an inert “what” behind the three “whos.” For Bulgakov, God’s nature is not a thing God has but the eternal, infinitely rich, self-disclosed life God is: God’s own self-revelation to Himself, God’s own Glory. That self-revelation, that “Divine World” (Bozhestvennyi mir) which the Trinity eternally is and eternally knows, is Sophia (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).

Three consequences follow in his system.

Sophia is uncreated and fully divine, because she is nothing other than the divine nature. Bulgakov is emphatic that Sophia is not a being between God and the world, not a tertium quid, not a demiurge (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2).

Sophia is not a hypostasis. She is hypostatized — that is, she has her personal reality in and only in the three divine Persons, and never independently of them. Bulgakov coined for her the term hypostaticity (ipostasnost’): a capacity to be personally possessed, a belonging-to-a-person, which is not itself personhood (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2; The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Part I; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3; Brandon Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, ch. 3). This coinage is the pivot of the whole dispute over the “fourth hypostasis,” and it is discussed below.

Sophia has a Trinitarian shape. In Bulgakov’s account the Father is the eternal source who reveals Himself; the Son is the Wisdom of God as content, meaning, the ideal all — the Logos in whom the Divine World has its rational form; the Holy Spirit is the Wisdom of God as life, reality, beauty, glory — that which makes the ideal actual and living. Sophia is thus the dyadic self-revelation of the Father in the Son and the Spirit (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2; Uteshitel’ [The Comforter], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1936; trans. Jakim, Eerdmans, 2004, Part III; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, chs. 3–4). Wisdom is therefore preeminently Christ, as the Fathers said — and, for Bulgakov, not only Christ, because the same divine content is the Spirit’s as life and glory.

Creaturely Sophia

The second half of the doctrine concerns creation. God creates ex nihilo — Bulgakov affirms the dogma without reservation and repeatedly (Bulgakov, Nevesta Agntsa [The Bride of the Lamb], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1945; trans. Jakim, Eerdmans, 2002, Part I; Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 3). But what is it that God creates? Not an arbitrary content, and not a second divine world. God posits the same Sophia, His own self-revelation, outside Himself, in the mode of becoming, in nothing, in time.

Hence the formula: creaturely Sophia is Divine Sophia herself, in a creaturely mode of being (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 3; The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part I; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 5). The world is not a second something alongside God; it is God’s own Wisdom given a creaturely existence — placed in the “nothing,” subjected to becoming, made capable of a history, and given freedom, which is why it can fall.

Bulgakov summarized the relation in the phrase that his critics found most alarming and his defenders find most misread: the world is “God’s other” or “the divine ground in the mode of creation” — the same content, not the same being. Sophia in God is eternal, complete, actual; Sophia in the world is temporal, becoming, potential, and only at the eschaton fully realized (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Parts I and III; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 5).

Three things follow that shape the rest of his theology:

The world has a real theological dignity. Matter, labor, art, and the body are not neutral stuff but the creaturely mode of the divine Wisdom, which is why they can be sanctified and why sacraments are possible (Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy, trans. Catherine Evtuhov, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000; The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part I).
Deification is intelligible. The creature can be united to God because the creature is, in its ground, God’s own Wisdom in a creaturely mode; theosis is Sophia in the creature coming to correspond to Sophia in God (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part III; and cf. the Church’s teaching in Theosis).
Godmanhood (Bogochelovechestvo) is the key to everything. Because the human being is the created Sophia in its personal, conscious form, the union of God and man in Christ is not a violent conjunction of incommensurables but the fulfillment of what creation was for. The whole trilogy is titled On Godmanhood for this reason (Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Parts I–II; see On Godmanhood: The Major Trilogy).

What Bulgakov Explicitly Denied

Because the charges against sophiology are stated in a fixed vocabulary, it is necessary to record what he said about each.

“Sophia is a fourth hypostasis.” Denied, explicitly and repeatedly. Bulgakov held that Sophia has no hypostasis of her own, exists only as hypostatized in the three divine Persons, and that “hypostaticity” is precisely not hypostasis (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2; The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Part I; O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935, his memoranda). He also acknowledged that Florensky’s formula “the fourth hypostatic element” and some of his own earlier language in Unfading Light (1917) had invited the charge, and he treated the mature trilogy as a correction (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).

“Sophia is a divine feminine principle, a goddess.” Denied. Bulgakov’s Sophia has the grammatical gender of the Greek and Slavonic noun and a real association in his thought with the Theotokos and with the Church as Bride, but he denied that Sophia is a female divine person (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, chs. 2 and 5; Kupina Neopalimaya [The Burning Bush], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1927; and see Kenosis, Christology, and Mariology).

“Sophiology is pantheism.” Denied. Bulgakov insisted on creation ex nihilo, on the creature’s radical non-necessity, and on the absolute distinction between the divine mode of being and the creaturely mode (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part I). He proposed instead the term panentheism for what he was doing — all things in God, God not identical with all things — and defended it as the only alternative to a deistic extrinsicism (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part I; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 5).

“Sophia is a being intermediate between God and the world.” Denied, and denied as the very thing he was writing against: there is no tertium quid, because Sophia is either the divine nature (Divine Sophia) or the creature grounded in it (creaturely Sophia), and never a third kind of being (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, chs. 2–3).

Where the Pressure Falls

Stating the denials is not the same as showing they succeed, and this collection does not claim they do. Three pressure points are worth naming, because they are the substance of what the 1935 acts and the later critics pressed (see The ROCOR Determination and Seraphim Sobolev and The Critics).

First, the status of “hypostaticity.” Critics argue that the term is a construction with no patristic warrant, invented to hold a position that the traditional categories will not hold, and that in Bulgakov’s actual prose Sophia is spoken of, addressed, and loved in ways that only a person can be — so that the disclaimer is formally made and materially withdrawn (Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii, Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936; Archbishop Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Sofia, 1935).

Second, whether identifying Sophia with the ousia imports necessity into God. If the world is the divine Sophia posited outside God, is creation still free? Bulgakov insisted that it is, and that the freedom lies in the positing; critics have replied that the identification of the divine nature with the ground of the world makes creation flow from what God is rather than from what God freely wills (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; and, for a modern examination of exactly this question that concludes Bulgakov is more defensible than the charge allows, Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, 2016, ch. 3).

Third, the essence–energies alternative. Orthodox theology, since the fourteenth-century councils that vindicated St. Gregory Palamas, has a way of affirming that God is genuinely communicated to creation without confusing God with creation: the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the uncreated divine energies (see St. Gregory Palamas and Theosis). Lossky’s central objection was that this distinction already does all the work Bulgakov wanted Sophia to do, does it in the Church’s own conciliar language, and does it without the difficulties (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, chs. 2–4). Bulgakov’s own relation to Palamism is more complicated than the polemic suggests — he wrote on the energies and did not reject the distinction — but he did not accept that it answered his question (Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, trans. Smith, Eerdmans, 2009, excursus material; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3).

[Disputed: whether Bulgakov's disclaimers ("Sophia is not a hypostasis"; "creation is ex nihilo and free"; "this is panentheism, not pantheism") are consistent with the actual working of his system. (a) The critical position, from Seraphim Sobolev and Lossky through the ROCOR determination of 1935 to much later traditionalist theology, is that the disclaimers are sincere but ineffective: the system requires Sophia to do work that only a hypostasis or an intermediate being can do (Seraphim [Sobolev], *Novoe uchenie o Sofii*, 1935; Lossky, *Spor o Sofii*, 1936). (b) The defending position, argued by Nichols, Valliere, Gallaher, and Rowan Williams, is that the disclaimers are structural to the mature trilogy, that the "fourth hypostasis" charge attaches to Florensky's vocabulary and to Bulgakov's pre-1925 writings rather than to the trilogy, and that read charitably the system is a legitimate if strained theologoumenon (Nichols, *Wisdom from Above*, 2005; Valliere, *Modern Russian Theology*, 2000, Part III; Gallaher, *Freedom and Necessity*, 2016). This collection reports both and adjudicates neither.]

References

Bulgakov, Sergius. Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993. (First published 1937; the compact authorial summary used throughout this file.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. (Original Agnets Bozhii, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1933; the Introduction and Part I for Divine Sophia and hypostaticity.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Comforter. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. (Original Uteshitel’, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1936; the Spirit as Wisdom in the mode of life and glory.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. (Original Nevesta Agntsa, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1945; Part I on creation ex nihilo and creaturely Sophia; Part III on the eschaton.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935. (His memoranda in reply to the first Moscow ukaz, containing his own denials.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household. Trans. Catherine Evtuhov. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (Chs. 3–5: the most careful sympathetic English exposition of the doctrine.)
Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Part III.)
Gallaher, Brandon. Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. (Ch. 3 on Bulgakov and the freedom/necessity question.)
Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii [The Sophia Dispute]. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. (The essence–energies alternative.)
Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Sofia, 1935.