It is not often in Orthodoxy, renowned for not changing, that you can see in one’s lifetime a theological shift and Plested’s book marks a turning of the tide. When I first became Orthodox in the early 1990s in Western Canada, I heard virtually nothing about Sergii Bulgakov, except, with some digging (then without the internet), that he was accused of an obscure heresy about some goddess called “Sophia” in a dispute no one seemed to understand or remembered between warring parts of the Russian Church (some things do not change). When I arrived as a student at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in 2001, I was slightly better informed having read Bulgakov in French translation at McGill but my professors at St. Vladimir’s (including Fr. Tom Hopko, Paul Meyendorff and John Erickson) thought my enthusiasm for him an arcane interest at best and dangerous at worst. Indeed, I remember a comment at the end of one essay asking me when I was going to give up my obsession with Bulgakov and return to more serious pursuits like history, patristics, and liturgy. What everyone agreed on in the then Orthodox theological world—and St Vladimir’s was typical here—was that Bulgakov’s work had next to nothing to do with the Fathers, who were the wellspring of Orthodoxy, and did not really reflect the ethos of the Church seen in its liturgy. “Sophiology,” as one professor asked, “why do you need it at all?” Mrs. Schmemann, who I interviewed for my MDiv thesis, clearly thought the whole thing ridiculous, Sophia was an almost “separate divinity” and Bulgakov had an “obsessive presence” and was surrounded by mostly female acolytes, “an ecstasy,” and when he died they all stopped going to church. It was “Russian religious philosophy” or “Russian religious thought” and Bulgakov was said to be a sort of Russian émigré Origen who meant well but was a deluded and passionate enthusiast. My professors, and the community in Crestwood that had lived in Paris, were simply following their teachers in these opinions. As Florovsky wrote in the late 1960s, “I was professing theology in the spirit of the Holy Fathers, I don’t find in the patristic teaching anything of what Bulgakov is teaching.”1 And even more trenchant in Vladimir Lossky in the 1930s: Bulgakov’s Agnets Bozhii (Lamb of God) “was written by a presbyter of the Church – who was captivated by his own philosophy and who, for its sake, perverted Orthodox doctrine and rebelled against the Fathers.”2 Again, Fr. Alexander Schmemann in a classic 1971 essay (“Three Images”) on Bulgakov still untranslated into English writes that “Fr. Sergii decided to build a complete and all-encompassing theological system. And now, I do hope he forgives me, if I, having owed him so much, truly being unworthy to untie the thong of his sandal, in all good conscience say honestly that in this desire of his for a ‘system’ I see for him a personal fall of sorts. It seems to me that Fr Sergii fell here into a kind of ‘temptation.’… [The creative] tragedy [of Fr Sergii], in the end, is that his system …does not correspond to his experience [of God’s glory and joy, revealed in the Church].”3 Finally, Fr. Tom Hopko, in a late sympathetic (where he nevertheless compares him to Origen and Augustine) essay on receiving Bulgakov, wrote that “the attacks on Bulgakov’s name and memory throughout the Orthodox world, especially by Russians, is, ironically, wholly disproportionate to his actual influence on Orthodox theologians and believers, which to date has been virtually non-existent. At St Vladimir’s, for example, contrary to what is claimed in some circles, no one ever supported or defended Fr Bulgakov’s Sophiology. Fr Sergius was either ignored or criticized by those here who knew him and his work. In my time Prof. Serge Verhovskoy and Fr John Meyendorff, like Vladimir Lossky and Fr Georges Florovsky, rejected his theological vision.”4 This was the context of my initial interest in Bulgakov and, until the last decade, the norm in Orthodoxy. 

Several years later when I went up to Oxford to do my doctorate on this latter-day Origen with the great Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes (as Met Kallistos Ware had retired and at that time—like everybody else—thought Bulgakov theologically dubious—though he later changed his mind), I remember getting into a Wiki-war with a ROCOR priest on NS Christmas day (both of us celebrated on January 7 so we both had spare time on December 25). I would change the Wikipedia entry of Bulgakov to reflect the historical record and he would change it back to reflect the position of ROCOR. I eventually gave up. It has taken (for me) about thirty years, nay nearly eighty years since the death of Bulgakov, and we now have a book by a leading Orthodox theologian and patristic scholar that without apology argues that “Sergius Bulgakov is the most constructive and creative Orthodox theologian  of the modern era—indeed one of the greatest theologians of any stamp in the last several centuries” and, for me, more breathtaking still, “In sum, Sophiology especially as articulated by Bulgakov, is indeed firmly rooted in patristic tradition in some of its base affirmations, notably in its apperception of the coinherence of God and the world, its insistence that divine wisdom is not reducible to the person of the Son, its intuition of the potential utility of the essence-energies distinction, and its renewal of a wisdom Christology. In all of these respects it can find considerable grounding and support” (35 and 229). Wow! It can’t be underestimated how much of a departure this book is in defending the patristic basis of Sophiology from previous generations given that just twenty years ago the consensus view was that Sophiology was profoundly unpatristic and Bulgakov was at best deluded and at worst a heretic. 

Plested’s monograph then is a quite decisive fork in the road for modern Orthodox theology. It is a beautiful and important scholarly monument that manages to be a systematic study of the multiple patristic theologies of wisdom, an unprecedented careful evaluation of Russian Sophiology’s claims to be founded on patristic teaching (and a balanced but critical vindication of those claims), and, perhaps most importantly, in its brief constructive final pages a contemporary synthesis of patristic Sophiology that corrects the doctrinal ambiguity of Russian Sophiology. It is a careful historical theological evaluation of the claim by Florensky and Bulgakov that Sophiology had patristic foundations, arguing that, rightly understood, and with a correction which is a completion, Sophiology is distinctly Orthodox theological form which is not only in line with tradition but speaks powerfully to a contemporary world that, in its rationalism and utilitarianism (seen in the environmental crisis and the reduction of humanity and community to the economic), has lost the vision splendid of the natural world as charged with the wise love of its Creator, alternatively, God’s divine power and beauty, and the Church, as the Body of Christ, as radiating that holy wisdom which is ever to come but breaking forth in our midst in the liturgy. 

I’ve taken the time to trace, via my own biography, how important Plested’s volume is in the history of modern Orthodox theology but here I want to raise a crucial query for him on theology and the limits of patristic tradition. As I understand it, the correction or completion of Sophiology that is offered by Plested in the concluding pages of the volume is to bring Sophiology more in line with Palamism, as he rightly observes that Bulgakov and later Evdokimov claimed its basic vision was indeed Palamite. Here Plested says that Sophia for Bulgakov was a “free-floating category—neither essence, nor hypostasis, nor energy” but a reality that is neither fish nor fowl and “God is wisdom as essence, hypostasis and energy—but not otherwise” (240–41). The reason that, he argues, we need to follow this corrective path is that as Orthodox we need “patristic warrant” (232) for our positions and Bulgakov’s “mature theology is in no way ‘post-patristic’, nor does it espouse a notion of development of doctrine that would in any way supplement or add to the given fullness of the faith of the Church. Like his detractors, he regards the patristic witness as essentially normative” (226). Thus, we need to follow wisdom as essence, hypostasis and energy because the Fathers have essentially canonized these categories as a sort of sacred grammar. But Marcus also seems to have more theological reasons than mere patristic warrant for this Palamite realignment which is that Sophia as a category unhinged from the traditional categories cannot clarify theological matters like the patristic terminology as it is a “theologically indeterminate and inherently problematic notion”: “In his schema, Sophia hovers between the traditional Orthodox dogmatic categories of essence, hypostasis, and energy—and indeed between Creator and creation” (238). Bulgakov evidently feels the need for a “missing link” to tie these categories together within God and in turn to bind God to the world in an eternal embrace. But is such a “missing link” really necessary (237)? Yet which is it? Do we follow the Fathers because they have the best theology or because they provide our theology patristic warrant? Or both? Here then is my question for Plested. What does it mean to say that a theology has “patristic warrant” or is “normative”? Or put otherwise: what does it mean to “follow the Holy Fathers,” to be traditional in our theologizing?

One view would hold that we cannot theologically color beyond the lines set out by the Fathers since to do theology is in some sense to work within established limits. Truth, in this sense, is bound to the form of its articulation and cannot be rearticulated using contemporary language or categories. Florovsky held this position saying that it was wholly illegitimate to express Christian teaching in any other philosophy but that forged by the Fathers. Christianity “is history by its very essence” and there exists no abstract general Christian message that can be detached from its historical context and there likewise is no eternal truth “which could be formulated in some supra-historical propositions.”5 The philosophy that the Fathers used in expressing Christian dogma was in fact unique and differed greatly from that of Aristotle and Plato in that the Greek thought forms of such thinkers were baptized and then redirected to Christian purposes. It was wholly “ridiculous” to attempt to reinterpret “traditional doctrine in terms of categories of a new philosophy, whatever this philosophy may be”6 since that doctrine was quite simply inseparable from the renewed Greek philosophy in which it was formulated. The Christian philosophy of the Fathers is, therefore, wholly coextensive with Christian dogmatic teaching and tradition and, more precisely, Eastern Orthodoxy which, he argued, stands for the “common heritage of the Church universal” in both East and West, as “patristic tradition.”7 This includes the canonized conceptual apparatus of ousia, hypostasis, and energeia Plested calls upon and says Sophiology needs to be realigned with in his new vision. 

Bulgakov, in contrast, held that dogmas were truths of religious revelation that had metaphysical content. They were expressed differently depending on the language of the philosophy of the day, whether it was the Greek philosophy used by the Fathers or our own contemporary philosophy.8 He believed that for our theology to be according to the Fathers did not mean that everything we articulated had to have patristic warrant or needed to be articulated in the terminology forged by the Councils. This was because the Fathers were indeed normative but as the “Church’s witness to itself.” There were multiple patristic traditions, Bulgakov argued, and not all of them were in harmony but were often in contradiction forcing us to give preference to one tradition over another. We should not treat the Fathers as “dogmatically infallible ‘unerring texts’ smoothing over and harmonizing the different patristic writers like the Talmud does with different rabbis (‘a rabbinic approach’ to the writings of the Fathers as ‘tradition’).” They are instead “authoritative witnesses” and should not be transformed into “unerring texts.”9 Bulgakov continues, “Orthodox theology is not the Talmud, and a real veneration of the Fathers must reverence not the letter but the spirit. The writings of the Holy Fathers must have a guiding authority, yet be applied with discernment.” We must read the Fathers critically, historically, and comparatively and they don’t possess a universality applicable willy-nilly to any and all periods of history but are limited and historically conditioned even if they have eternal value because they witness to the dogmatic consciousness of the Church.10 This is not far off from Florovsky late in life who argued that “The ‘authority’ of the Fathers is not a dictatus papae. They are guides and witnesses, no more. Their vision is ‘of authority,’ not necessarily their words.”11 And not far off again from Plested when he writes that “the Church Fathers are seen to provide a paradigm of theology and practice which we are called on to faithfully and creatively ‘translate’ to our own specific contexts—preferably within the context of a living tradition, a continuum of faith” (226).

So, we return to the earlier question. Why do we need to correct Bulgakov in eliminating Sophia as a free-floating category and essentially assimilating her to the patristic categories of hypostasis, ousia and energeia? Do we do this because his theology does not work, is not fit for purpose when Sophia is a category unmoored from traditional terminology, or because for his theology to work, to be coherent, o/Orthodox, it needs to be in line with a previously canonized theology with its blessed and iconic categories? But could it be that some of the obscurities in Bulgakov which appear because of the category of Sophia are merely apparent and are simply the result of his attempt to articulate aspects of the mystery of Christ that the Fathers had not yet foreseen? In other words, the trouble with the obscurity or apparent heterodoxy in Bulgakov is not with him but with us as we have yet to catch up with Bulgakov? This is not inconceivable given it has taken nearly eighty years to appreciate that he is as central a thinker as Plested claims. 

Thus, for example, the Fathers by no means applied the terminology of Trinitarian theology to human persons. It was with the moderns from Ivan Kireevskii onwards that we see this “personalistic turn.” Nor did they, to mention just one of the issues Plested identifies as having no ready grounding in patristic tradition, “warrant any idea of God’s self-revelation to Himself” (229). But are not these ideas theologically helpful within a new modern context where, for example, with the notion of the human being as a person in relation, a living hypostasis defined by outreach in love to the Other, one needs to make an argument for the impossibility of reducing the human being to their biology or their function in society? Or to turn to the idea of Selbstoffenbarung, self-revelation, if God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit reveals himself primordially to himself as love, as Sophia-ousia, then we can see creation as the natural Trinitarian self-expression of God to Himself externally as Sophia-love that, although contingent, is in some sense necessary given the sort of God who God is eternally. Such a vision—though it may be non-patristic—is needed in a world which has been desacralized, shorn of his sacredness with no sense of their being a golden thread tying earth to heaven. What I am calling for is real creative novelty in a theology that has a patristic base and inspiration. To be traditional does not mean that every idea must be traced genetically to the Fathers. And do not forget that the age of the Fathers has not closed somehow arbitrarily with Palamas. So some might say that Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, Philaret of Moscow, and Paisii Velichkovskii were Fathers. I remember a conference at St. Serge in Paris in 2009 where some proclaimed Florovsky a new Church Father. 

Plested’s book inaugurates not only a new era in the reception of Sophiology and Bulgakov. But it also pushes us into a new period of trying to understand what it means to be theologically traditional and theologizing “according to the Holy Fathers.” If Bulgakov is in some sense also a neo-patristic writer, as the late great Fr. Matthew Baker claimed, then this means that to be a patristic theologian is a much freer and more creative enterprise than Orthodox have thought since the death of Florovsky. Indeed, we are perhaps coming to an understanding of ressourcement much more liberating and akin to what it has long been the case in some Catholic circles. We may now—as Bulgakov certainly did—be willing to see the Fathers and the patristic inheritance as not so much ramparts to keep us within the body of the living Christ protected from the surging darkness beyond, as high walls upon which one may stand “seeing beyond the End of the World into Aslan’s country.”12

“Truth is attained through the honest, free, and loyal confrontation of ideas.”1 That is how Prof. Sergei Bulgakov would open his seminars on economics and social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century. Therefore, he would be delighted about this book by Marcus Plested, who offers a thorough and sympathetic account of the pros and cons of Bulgakov’s Sophiology from a patristic point of view, guided by the sincere intention to “hold on to what is good” (1 Thess 5:21). Moreover, Plested situates modern Russian Sophiology within the much broader and “dazzling scope of Christian wisdom reflection” (224), that has somehow fallen out of focus because of the overwhelmingly negative reception of Sophiology by Bulgakov’s “neo-patristic” colleagues, and against the background of the heated church-political atmosphere of Russian Orthodox intellectuals in exile. 

Plested’s main question is “whether or to what extent (Bulgakov’s) Sophiology is grounded in patristic tradition.” However, one should bear in mind that this is not Bulgakov’s main question or goal. Bulgakov’s recourse to patristic theology is a method, not an end in itself. Therefore, on the one hand, Plested’s answer that “Sophiology is clearly rooted in patristic tradition, but only up to a point” (230), is not surprising. On the other hand, Plested convincingly shows how Sophiology “misses a great deal from the tradition – not least from the Bible” (230) and demonstrates that Bulgakov could have even amplified his own arguments by more thoroughly studying both Christian wisdom reflection in the Greek East and in the Latin West, where, as Bulgakov quite polemically claimed, “Sophia never had any place” and only “constantly hovers on the brink of sophiological problems.”2 That is, of course, not true, and Plested deserves ample credit for trying to bring Sophiology out of the self-inflicted ghetto of Russian Orthodox exoticism—a fact that Bulgakov deplored3—and for locating it within the breadth of Christian theology as a whole. That is actually how Bulgakov wanted to present Sophiology, because in his view it “brings a special interpretation to bear upon all Christian teaching and dogma, beginning with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation and ending with questions of practical everyday Christianity in our time.”4

The expression “in our time” is crucial here, and in this regard, I would like to highlight that Bulgakov’s recourse to patristic theology and even his development of Sophiology are methods developed in order to answer questions of a modern theological anthropology. This fact is sometimes overshadowed by the scandals surrounding Sophiology. Moreover, Bulgakov’s Sophiology is an endeavor to engage with contemporary philosophical thought “in our time,”5 like the Church fathers did in their time, since, in his view, their “language of ancient philosophy […] is no longer our philosophical language.” He argues that: 

there is thus a voluntary (or involuntary) inevitability of the influence of contemporary philosophical thought. Dogmatists cannot avoid it. It is a kind of translation into modern language of the lexicon of the early church. The result is not a new dogmatic definition, which in its essence remains unchanged, but its philosophical interpretation, which is indispensable for a sincere philosophical internalization of dogma in our time. Without this process, a dogma will sound foreign to our thought […] This means that the theologian in point of fact is also a philosopher who must have [an appropriate equipment].6 

Therefore, in The Wisdom of God (1937), Bulgakov presented Sophiology not only as a teaching based on patristic tradition, but as “one trend of thought within Christianity, and that one which is by no means dominant in the Orthodox Church, just as, for instance, Thomism or ‘Modernism’ exists within Catholicism, or liberal ‘Jesuanism’ or Barthianism within Protestantism.”7 Bulgakov wanted to be taken seriously as an (Orthodox) theologian in his time, tackling the questions of “our modern age.”8 Hence, apart from Bulgakov’s patristic grounding, an important next step in the contextual understanding of Bulgakov’s Sophiology would be comparison with his contemporaries like Jacques Maritain, the theologians of the Catholic Renewal who also returned to the Church Fathers in order to “bring Catholic thought closer to the concerns of modern intellectual life,”9 and Protestant theologians like Karl Barth and Emil Brunner who held disputes about “natural theology” and the meaning of human culture.10 Also, Bulgakov’s book on The Wisdom of God was mainly written for an Anglican and Protestant public, and his mention of “practical everyday Christianity” alludes to the contemporary Ecumenical projects that formed the World Council of Churches in 1948. Thereby he critically emphasized, that the social cooperation of the churches and the call for a “Nicaea of Ethics” by Nathan Söderblom, recipient of the 1930 Nobel Peace Prize, could not do without finding dogmatic common ground by justifying the world in God. In Bulgakov’s view, that should and could be done by focusing on the dogma of incarnation, and he boldly presented Sophiology as a solution for overcoming Karl Barth’s “non-acceptance of the world.” For Bulgakov, the “[vital antithesis] of our [Christian] unity as something given, and at the same time, of our disunity as a fact” cannot leave “the modern Christian” in peace who must seek its resolution.11 Of course, a common focus on patristic texts could be helpful in this endeavor, since the “call to return to the sources” is known within all Christian confessions.

If Bulgakov’s recourse to patristic theology and his Sophiology were methods developed in order to answer modern theological questions—what were they? In Bulgakov’s own words: 

What was the place of man in nature, and of nature in man? What was man in the whole complex of his capacities as a thinking being, endowed with will and intellect, called to creative effort in the world, sensible to beauty and art, and capable of love, individual and social at the same time, spirit and flesh, angel and animal in one life?12

Bulgakov found that “the universal fact of the incarnation in Christ is the […] single convincing answer of philosophy to the riddle of man.”13 Here is why in answering the question “why Sophia?” we immediately see “Bulgakov the dogmatic theologian,”14 who found the single convincing answer to modern philosophical questions about human freedom and necessity, subjectivity, physical matter, creativity and social philosophy in the Chalcedonian dogma of incarnation that contains a notion of “human nature.” Therefore, “our modern age stands in need of a new apprehension of the dogmatic formulae preserved by the Church in its living tradition.”15 Bulgakov is convinced “that it is precisely our epoch […] that is called to be the Chalcedonian epoch, that is called to a new religious and theological disclosure and assimilation of this gift of the Church.”16 In his view, “our” Chalcedonian epoch should attempt a positive concept of the four negative definitions of the Chalcedonian dogma about the “unconfused, unchangeable, indivisible, and inseparable” union of divine and human natures in Christ. He believed that such an endeavor would calm down and resolve all the “exhausting” modern disputes between idealism and materialism, immanentism and transcendentalism, pantheism and theism, individualism and communism. All these “–isms” tackle just one aspect of the holistic truth of “theo-anthropology,” that was miraculously expressed, but not “theologically justified or even fully understood” by the participants of the Council of Chalcedon:17 

Do people […] sufficiently realize that this dogma in itself is not primary, but derived? In itself it presupposes the existence of absolutely necessary dogmatic assumptions in the doctrine of God and humanity, of the primordial Divine-humanity. These presuppositions are in fact unfolded in Sophiology.18

Therefore, Bulgakov’s grand “theological trilogy” was devoted to the study of God-humanity—hence to traditional Christology, that, in David Bentley Hart’s words, “allows us to think of the incarnate Logos not as a mythic demigod or divine-human chimaera composed of disparate natures, but instead as truly wholly human and wholly divine.”19

The Chalcedonian presuppositions unfolded in Bulgakov’s Sophiology are the notions of “divine nature” (ousia, and divine Sophia “as ousia revealed”20) and “human nature” (created Sophia) which are united in Christ. What is “human nature” in relation to “divine nature”? and how is their unity by incarnation even possible? That is the question Bulgakov wanted to answer, and which patristics did not, in his view, or only indirectly. It is an anthropological question—the “key question” of theological inquiry of the twenty-first century, in Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s view.21

Bulgakov’s main anthropological argument against Marxism in his early career was that only a being made in God’s image would be able to act freely, while a mere product of nature or society remains determined by its producers. Only God, by a kenotic act, is able to grant freedom to creation. Also, Bulgakov felt provoked by Ludwig Feuerbach’s claim that God was made in the image of man, and not the other way round. He agreed with Feuerbach’s “discovery” of the divine essence of man, but contested the conclusion that therefore God does not exist.22 On the contrary, Bulgakov concluded that the Christian teaching of man as God’s image and likeness reveals a God-given “inner kinship” or “essential conformity” of Creator and created human being.23 Indeed, in Russia, Gregory of Nyssa’s works, published between 1861 and 1865, and especially his exegesis of Genesis 1:26 about God’s image and likeness, accrued enormous hermeneutic value among Orthodox theologians and religious philosophers. After all, the so-called “neo-patristic turn” did not happen after Bulgakov, but already in imperial Russia in the nineteenth century when clerical academies of the Orthodox church translated and popularized thousands of patristic texts into the vernacular.24

Based on Bulgakov’s intellectual history, I argue that Bulgakov’s Sophiology can best be explained—and a “re-oriented Sophiology” best be developed25—by including the concept of the human person as God’s image and likeness, which, of course, also has “patristic grounding.” In Bulgakov’s Chapters on Trinity (1928), Bulgakov clearly puts the main focus on anthropology: 

The image of God in the human being, although darkened by sin and error, is the ontological foundation of revelation. Anthropology is the natural foundation of theology. Of course, it is incapable of substituting for revelation, but it gives the possibility of its acceptance.26 

Moreover, Bulgakov closely relates his thought to the “personalism” of this time and speaks of the “personalism of the revealed doctrine of God,” since “the whole Holy Trinity in unity says of itself: I and We.”27 On the grounds of “revealed personalism,” Bulgakov asks, as Kallistos Ware has put it: “‘What is the human person?’ What does it mean, more specifically, to be a person-in-relation according to the image of God the Holy Trinity?”28 

In Bulgakov’s anthropological concept, “Sophia” is not sort of a third item that “hovers” between Creator and creation as Plested put it (237), but it should rather be understood as a kind of “common denominator” of the Holy Trinity united by divine nature, and of human persons united by human nature, created in God’s image. Bulgakov defines the correlation between Creator and creature by the category of “co-imagedness” (soobraznost’),29 or as “some original analogy […] which yet does not overthrow all the essential difference between them.”30 Put differently, God’s creation should be rather thought of as birth, passing on of life (sophia) and setting it free, rather than production of something ontologically “other.” The “inner kinship” of divine and human nature makes incarnation possible: “The very possibility of God’s taking human nature and uniting it with his own, rests upon the essential conformity between the two; and that, in its turn, rests upon the unity in diversity of Wisdom.”31 Moreover, the Chalcedonian definition that human nature not just dissolves in Christ’s divine nature, but is “inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably” united with it, reveals the God-given ontological reality and freedom of human nature, which will not be “abolished as something unnecessary” but transfigured in the kingdom of God.32 God’s creation is personal being in His image and likeness, an “anthropocosmos.”33

In Bulgakov’s thought, Christology is inseparably connected to an “anthropo-cosmology” of human persons, who, in God’s image and likeness, freely live, act, and create by “humanizing” or “hypostasizing” the potential of God-given human nature (created Sophia), manifest in each individual’s body, but moreover in the whole of created universe, that “can become our body, its external, peripheral extension.”34 In Bulgakov’s theology of personhood, there is no juxtaposition of person (as freedom) vs. nature (nor person vs. individual), but the individual person is defined by a constant free creative relationship of her “I” (self-consciousness) towards her own and universal human nature. After the fall this relationship is mostly one of “overcoming necessity,”35 but it, first, simply defines the God-given fact of bodily existence, and second, the freedom and capability to transcend individual nature by communicating and interacting with God, other persons, and the whole of creation.

***

To conclude, I hope that the mentioned points and quotes demonstrate that Bulgakov (and Soloviev, maybe even Florensky) would be quite unhappy with the presentation of Sophiology as “a species of anti-modernism” (15, 238) or an “unmodern turn” (238)—maybe with good intentions to “save Bulgakov” from neo-patristic assaults. Yet Bulgakov’s “justification of religion” or of the world consisted in a strong claim that faith is a timeless human condition, that can and should inform modern, “progressive,” and enlightened worldviews. I actually believe that Bulgakov wanted to save Orthodox theology from being “distinctively unmodern” (244) and called Orthodox theologians to creatively engage with questions of their time, to “test them all and hold on to what is good.” 

I am grateful to have been included in the Syndicate discussion of Marcus Plested’s marvelous new book.

There is no better treatment of wisdom in the broad sweep of Christian tradition, and one no less that covers so much, so well, in so short a space. It provides an encyclopedic overview of East and West, early and medieval; it is tantalizing, yet also substantial, both compendious and frequently edifying.

Motivation for work:

The work is written with a much-needed combination of openness, even-handedness, and groundedness. It is motivated by the need for less stand-offishness between neo-patristic critique and Sophiology, and seeks a more charitable yet still careful re-integration of the category of divine wisdom within Orthodox theology.

Overview of work

St. Paul gives us a twofold scheme involving the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God. Marcus uses his deep and expansive reading of the Christian tradition to expand this, positing a fourfold scheme (see 2–3):

• S0: human wisdom/learning ordered away from God.
• S1: wisdom as craft, skill, learning, applied to realities of life, when ordered towards God, predisposes for reception and experience of divine wisdom.
• S2: wisdom as divine gift of supernatural knowledge.
• S3: wisdom as manifestation/appellation of God, his relation to and presence in the creation.

The importance but also controversy surrounding modern Sophiology lies in the background throughout this work, even when Sophiology is not explicitly being discussed. Marcus brings his characteristic even keel and healthy dose of dispassion to the texts, which allows him both to make fair judgments and also supply fresh insights that are overlooked by each side of the Sophiological debate. For instance, the recurring importance in the early tradition of the sapiential dimension of the category of wisdom, that is, wisdom as the day-to-day enactment of a godly life, is virtually absent in the debate. As Marcus puts it, “Sophiology remains oddly unsapiential in Bulgakov” (38). This touches on a key point, namely the tendency on both sides to sever the high-octane debates about Sophia on the dogmatic plane from the existential dimension of lived wisdom.

The bulk of the work is a tour and analysis of wisdom texts from Scripture through the patristic and medieval traditions of East and West. Every careful reader will glean a huge amount from these analyses, and will likewise pick up many memorable turns of phrase: “the religio-philosophical bear pit of second-century Alexandria” springs to mind. Marcus commends the nascent theology of divine uncreated energy in the Cappadocian Fathers as opening “the gap for Sophiology,” a gap which he argues “remains, largely thanks to Augustine, tightly shut in the Latin West” (159). Augustine is in fact pummeled on a few occasions for identifying divine wisdom or Sophia straightforwardly with the divine essence (although, perhaps somewhat ironically, Bulgakov will also make this identification in his own way). The divergence between East and West on divine wisdom “is due above all,” says Marcus, “to St. Augustine of Hippo” (152). That said, Marcus’ much-needed deep dive into subsequent Latin theology on the matter reveals a more nuanced and complex picture. I was especially taken, for instance, by his brief description of the thought of Alcuin of York on the matter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, for Marcus it is Thomas Aquinas who comes out on top in his assessment of the Latin Middle Ages.

Time would fail me to describe blow by blow Marcus’ analyses of such a dizzying range of figures.

Allow me instead to focus on the issue of the place of modern Orthodox Sophiology that underpins the work, and which comes to the fore in the first and last parts of the book. It should be noted that Marcus makes some key points regarding the diversity that exists within Sophiology itself: Soloviev’s Sophia is not Florensky’s, which in turn is not quite Bulgakov’s, even if there is much that joins them. Marcus appears less taken with Soloviev’s program. He discusses in some detail the background in the work of the German theologian von Baader, and I couldn’t help thinking that Soloviev comes across as von Baader to worse, as it were. Where Florensky champions St. Athanasius as a forerunner, Bulgakov champions St. Gregory Palamas, though both say we must go beyond the Fathers to arrive at a true understanding of Sophia. Sophiology, in other words, is not a monolith, even if it has a broad set of defining features (e.g. Sophia as divine but not reducible to the person of Christ and Sophia as somehow definitive of the God-world relationship). I would add also that it is hard to call Sophiology a monolith within Bulgakov’s own thought: he is so capacious a thinker as to be very hard to ever definitively pin down.

Marcus is clearly taken by much of the beauty offered in the theology of Sophia, especially Bulgakov’s, and urges his readers to give it its due. Yet his inebriation is a sober one. For each celebratory remark regarding Sophiology’s accomplishments one can find a note of caution to temper it. He tells us early on that “Sophiology, duly reconfigured, may yet prove an axis of integration of the so-called ‘Russian religious’ and ‘neo-patristic’ schools of thought” (10). This is the book’s aim, as I mentioned earlier. But then later he criticizes Sophiologists for allowing the “personification of Sophia” to prevail over “the person of Christ” (97). While he can defend the reticence to refuse to reduce the category of wisdom to Christology, he also sees a “far more dangerous problem: a docetic tendency within Sophiology as a whole in which the historical incarnation is subordinated to the principle of Sophia or divine-humanity” (97). This is, of course, a classic neo-patristic critique. 

At the end of the book, this oscillating tension between high praise for Sophiology and damning criticism is especially in evidence. To some extent, this is perhaps unavoidable for a project that seeks to reintegrate Sophiology with the wider Christian tradition in a critical and responsible manner. But it is striking nonetheless. Thus Marcus tells us bluntly that the origins of Sophiology “lie outside the patristic tradition” (224). But we then hear that “Sophiology’s unmodern turn found far more grounding in patristic tradition than its detractors were ever able to allow” (227)  and further: “Sophiology’s consistent contention that the category of wisdom cannot simply be reduced to the person of the Son has some very heavyweight support” (227). The point, I think, is that Sophiology is both unpatristic in the immediate historical context of its emergence, but that the patristic tradition nevertheless lends credibility to many of its claims. But the tension, and the need for funambulatory flair to handle it, is evident. 

In his most damning comments of Sophiology as a theological system, Marcus argues that “some of the key intuitions of Sophiology are blatantly incompatible with patristic tradition—above all the idea of wisdom as a primal other, a pre-principle of divine humanity irreducible to categories of essence and hypostasis. Sophiology is clearly rooted in patristic tradition, but only up to a point” (230). He tells us we need a “re-oriented Sophiology” with a Christological and stavrological corrective (238–39). He upholds St. Sophrony Sakharov whose theology is to Bulgakov as the theology of St. Irenaeus is to the gnostics (239). This strong critique culminates with a call for “Sophiology without Sophia,” that is, without the mythic and gnosticizing elements characteristic of Bulgakov’s contemplations of divine wisdom (239). He offers positive proposals in the final pages, a sort of manifesto for what this kind of Sophiology might look like, one resting on a more faithful reading of Palamas’s theology of divine energeia than he sees offered by Bulgakov (see 241–42). But in almost the same breath as these harsh criticisms, Marcus’s tone softens: Sophiology “reminds us that the scope of revelation is not yet closed and offers a compelling vision of a comprehensive theology that connects all aspects of human life and experience to one another and to their divine source and origin” (243). It needs not so much a corrective as a “completion” (243). Within a few pages we appear to move from Sophiology as Gnosticism to Sophiology as the “glory of modern Orthodox theology” (citing Evdokimov approvingly: 243).

The oscillation we find between the positive and negative assessments of Sophiology are, as I mentioned, surely part of what it means to grapple with such an important and difficult project of integration, synthesis, symphony, or whatever the going term is. But I did leave with the impression that the tension has not been entirely resolved. The tightrope walk is not yet over.

Together with this overarching matter, I had a few smaller questions I would like to mention briefly before giving a brief conclusion.

Questions.

1. The book posits a fourfold scheme for understanding wisdom, but the first two, S0 (wisdom ordered away from God) and S1 (wisdom in a more neutral sense of craft, skill, learning for the practicalities of life that can be ordered towards God), receive very little treatment. In fact, other than the theology of Eunomius being categorized as S0 (without much discussion), everyone else seems to escape it. And yet I do think that St. Paul’s preoccupation with the negative category of the wisdom of this world that is incommensurable with the wisdom of God (a theme developed in earnest by St Gregory Palamas), is a salutary one. Grappling with this notion sheds a rather precise light on the potential problems of Sophiology’s comfort with a rather straightforward continuum between human wisdom and divine wisdom.
2. At several points, a claim drawing on St. Maximus is made regarding the logoi of creation and God’s eternal logoi, which in turn appears to line up with Plested’s use of the terms created and uncreated wisdom (see 176, 185, 228, 242–43). However, I think this does not quite do justice to the text of St. Maximus. The claim rests on Theological Chapters 1.48, but here St Maximus does not distinguish between created and uncreated logoi, but created and uncreated works of God. In his dense and poetic way, St. Maximus considers the divine attributes like Goodness and Wisdom to be divine works that have no beginning (or end), as opposed to creation itself which does have a beginning and an end. The logoi are not the same as these works. All the logoi are eternal and uncreated in St. Maximus, since they correspond to the eternal divine wills for all things, as he explains in Ambiguum 7. As far as I can tell, the distinction Marcus attributes to Maximus between eternal logoi and the logoi of creation is not strictly present in his thought. It deserves closer attention because this could have knock-on effects for the arguments about created and uncreated wisdom that recur in the study.
3. As I read the book sometimes I wondered whether a little too much credence was given to the Sophiological project of detaching wisdom from the Son. Certainly, patristic theology has more to say about divine wisdom than simply to equate it with the Son and move on, but St. Paul’s lead on this is still rather important and formative for all subsequent reflection. This includes the significance of the Agia Sophia church in Constantinople (a frequent Sophiological symbol), whose connection to the nearby Agia Irene and (the admittedly more obscure) Agia Dynamis churches clearly reflects a primarily Pauline impulse identifying Christ as the Wisdom, Peace, and Power of God. One must also reckon with the fact that Byzantines often referred to the Church of Hagia Sophia as the church or temple of “the Wisdom of the Word of God” [τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγου Σοφίας], or simply equated Agia Sophia with “church/temple of the Word of God.” This is not to say that the identification of holy wisdom with the Son of God is all that can be said. Theology of course can go further than this (e.g. in discussions of divine wisdom as a common energy of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), but this cannot be done by wresting the theology of divine Sophia from its assumed Christological foundation.
4. Finally, I was intrigued by Marcus’s repeated appeal to Sophiology and Orthodox theology as a whole as distinctly “unmodern” rather than pre-modern, modern, or post-modern (see 34ff., 227, 238, 244). It is in some ways a neat way of bypassing many vexed problems with this kind of terminology in theology. But is “unmodern” a fully accurate or appropriate moniker here? Certainly, the relationship of Orthodox theology to modernity is different from many other types of theology, especially Western theology, but I’m not sure this makes it “unmodern.” The term seems a little too aloof, a little too disconnected from reality. If we simply mean that Orthodox theology strives to be “ever ancient, ever new,” I think I get it. It’s certainly a term that prompts further discussion.

Conclusion:

Despite these few general and specific questions that bubbled up as I read this magnificent volume, as a whole I think this is just the kind of book we need right now. It offers a serious and charitable reading of Sophiology, but without falling head over heels in utter bewitchment. To some readers, he will perhaps be read as a straightforward vindicator of Sophiology as a traditional and longstanding form of Christian thought. To others, as a neo-patristic operative, courageously attempting to vaccinate the masses with a mild Sophiology, one that may bring with it minor symptoms, but at least prevents the serious and fatal illness that can come with courting and welcoming the myth of Sophia into the heart of dogmatic Orthodox theology. Whatever the case, scholarly care and theological insight present on each page of the work demonstrate a wisdom worthy of imitation. It is a wisdom, as he tells us in his concluding paragraphs, that does not conceive of Orthodox theology as “the preserve of the solitary practitioner, however gifted,” but which offers and attunes itself to the larger body, the mind of the Church (243). This involves, as he again says, “a disciplined and non-eclectic reading of scripture and tradition” (244). In a time where undisciplined, eclectic, and indeed unwise, readings of Scripture and tradition have tended to proliferate, often pushed by this or that “lone genius” or self-proclaimed authority, Marcus’s ecclesial book serves as an exemplar of what wise theology can look like. 

Marcus Plested is not only a prolific interpreter of patristic literature but also an astute critical reader of modern Eastern Orthodox theology, so he is ably positioned to compose a monograph on whether and how the modern Russian sophiologists (Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, et al.) engaged, positively and negatively, their ancient Christian forebears’ project of distinguishing and relating divine Wisdom and human wisdom. Russian Sophiology is certainly a foreign territory to many Western Christian readers, so Plested provides, on the front end, a substantive introduction to this intellectual group. But the bulk of the book is an inventory of patristic “sophiologists” that repeatedly raises questions of the Russians’ fidelity to, criticism of, and movement beyond their ancient authority. Bulgakov holds privileged place because of his extensive reading of the Fathers; Gregory Palamas holds privileged place since, especially for Bulgakov, he represents the zenith of patristic Sophiology.

Challenging Plested’s study, not to mention the people he’s studying, is the fact that S/sophia has been far from transparent or monovalent in classical, biblical, patristic, and later sophiological usage. From a purely semantic standpoint, wisdom is a veritable leviathan. In Christian usage, S/sophia has taken on something of a life of “her”—or his or its—own. A taxonomy is necessary for perspectival coherence, and, particularly because he applies it throughout his book, Plested’s basic four-fold schema of Sophia-discourse is a helpful rubric:  S0, human wisdom on its own apart from God; S1, prudential human wisdom or philosophia ordered toward God and opening human beings to a higher divine gift of wisdom; S2, wisdom as a divinely bestowed gift of supernatural knowledge or instruction (paideia); and S3, Wisdom as theophanic attribute or divine energeia. Each one of these, of course, is complex by itself and in its relation to the other three. At the divine level (S3), for example, one question is whether wisdom has a priority all its own, as an eternally creative and salvific resourcefulness (such as how Origen privileges it among the divine Logos’s epinoiai, or revelatory aspects), or, like love, is the perfect intersection of many divine attributes, connecting grace or mercy, providence, forbearance, faithfulness, et al., all of which are intrinsically simultaneous in God. The latter would certainly support, at the human and ascetical level, the mutual insinuation of the virtues that was so important to numerous early Christian moralists and to some of their Graeco-Roman counterparts.

This is a book with many conversations going on at the same time, largely because there is no even or collective retrieval of patristic sources in the Russian sophiologists. Their work of retrieval is often very spotty business. What provides consistency and continuity across Plested’s presentation, in my judgment, is his gravitation to distinct guideposts and leitmotifs, without which the middle chapters would become overly discrete and survey-driven. I will limit my comments to identifying some of these since the success of the book significantly depends on them.

First is the perennial elephant in the room, the matter of allegiance to the insights of the Bible, where wisdom (חָכְמָה; σοφία) already has a vitality within and beyond the specific genre of wisdom literature. The Bible as a whole seems to be in conversation with itself over who or what wisdom essentially is, but in Plested’s overall account, patristic and Russian sophiologists alike were thoroughly content that Holy Scripture did not try to nail down the definition of W/wisdom, conceding to it its own self-revelatory prerogative. Wisdom in the OT manifested both as a quasi-divine hypostasis (Prov 8; Wis Sol; Sirach) and as the crowning gift of morality and piety, while the NT introduced the idea that Jesus Christ was the ultimate teacher and embodiment of divine wisdom. Many patristic authors picked up on all of these, while, as Plested indicates, the Russians were far more selective, sometimes even arbitrary, in gleaning from biblical wisdom texts. The Russians were captivated with the mystique of the feminine hypostatization of wisdom in some OT texts, and yet ignored much of the tradition, while in the NT they became enthralled with John’s Apocalypse as a “paean to Sophia” (94–96). Plested does not hold back his critique: the Russian sophiologists, in their mythologizing of Sophia, risked “a functional disavowal of the primal significance of the incarnation” in the divulgence of divine Wisdom (97).     

A second leitmotif, a crucial center of gravity in Plested’s monograph, is the precise divine status of Wisdom (S3), since this was the object of such heavy speculation in patristic and medieval sources and in Russian Sophiology. Was Wisdom of the very divine essence, or rather an attribute or energeia, radiating from the divine essence but distinctive from it in God’s self-revelation to creation? Was Wisdom to be identified with a specific person of the Trinity, namely the Son or else the Holy Spirit? Closely related, however, was the Christological question. To what extent did the incarnate Son, as “the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24) who united uncreated and created wisdom, provide the supreme access to divine Wisdom and the true fulcrum of a viable Christian Sophiology?    

As I see it in Plested’s study, most of these were make-or-break considerations in the Russian sophiologists’ patristic retrieval. The regular benefit of the historic speculations about divine Wisdom is that they helped bring to a head Christian thinking on divine transcendence and immanence, on the relation between metaphysics and the sophianic mythos, on the conditions under which divine self-revelation becomes perceptible by creatures, and on the whole mapping of the relation of uncreated and created reality. One of Plested’s most important observations—valuable for its insight into patristic philosophical theology itself and not just the critical appropriation of that legacy by the Russians—is the contrast elicited between those thinkers (Augustine, most notably) who insisted on Wisdom as absolutely intrinsic to the divine essence and properly basic to divine simplicity (156–57), and those (like Basil of Caesarea, and even Origen) who associated Wisdom eternally with the inaccessible divine essence but refused to equate them so as not to breach divine simplicity. Augustine’s advantage was that he could identify Father, Son, and Holy Spirit concurrently as the very essence of divine Wisdom. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and others, being so deeply influenced by Athanasius’s interpretation of the persona of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22 as referring to the Son and his incarnational kenosis, instead ascribed Wisdom principally to the hypostasis of the Son or Logos, though without precluding Wisdom in naming the Holy Spirit. The advantage here, it seems, was to connect Wisdom to the divine essence as one of the divine names or “glories” or energies, while also accentuating the hypostatic freedom, especially but not exclusively of the Son, in revealing divine Wisdom. Here, of course, was the groundwork for later Byzantine theologians like Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas, more fully to articulate the essence/energies distinction that would fertilize Eastern Orthodox theology for centuries to come.

The irony is that, in their free-spiritedness and urgency to avoid dogmatic repetition of ancient perspectives, and their collective aversion to “limiting” Sophia to the Son (as if that threatened the feminine persona of Sophia or left out the Spirit), the Russian Sophiologists significantly missed the range and nuance in patristic Sophiology.  

Another powerful leitmotif in the Russians’ encounter with the Fathers was the role of Sophia “in between” (μεταξύ) Creator and creation, including the interrelation between the pure freedom of God to be immanent in the creation, and the converse participation of creation (ontologically and morally) in the uncreated God. In Florensky’s words, “Sophia is the Great Root by which creation goes into the intra-Trinitarian life…” (29). Or again, “Sophia is God’s presence in the world and the world’s presence in God” (31). The focus here turns more to Sophia’s creative and salvific mediation. Plested mentions more than once the Russians’ affinity for patristic authors who had christened the Platonic connection of Wisdom with the eternal divine “ideas,” the archetypes of the world. Bulgakov recognized, however, that neither this construct, nor the notion of an ad hoc creation ex nihilo, was adequate to describe the self-investment of divine Sophia, indeed of the divine essence itself, in creation. In The Lamb of God, Bulgakov found compelling Maximus the Confessor’s notion (shared with Dionysius and Eriugena) that the “nothing” from which God created the world was itself the essence of God which is “no-thing” in a hierarchy of being. The no-thing is Wisdom. Additionally, Bulgakov was drawn more than any other Russian sophiologist to Maximus’s highly developed conception of the logoi of creation as eliciting the Creator’s self-investment in the cosmos. He even called Maximus’s “logology” essentially a “Sophiology.” My own disappointment is that Bulgakov did not pursue Maximus’s logology in much more depth, and it is enhanced all the more by the fact that Plested, in the present book and in a previously published essay, has furnished a marvelous analysis of the different strands (including the doctrine of logoi) that aggregately form Maximus’s intensely Christocentric Sophiology.  

I will conclude with a few remarks on the overall impact of Plested’s monograph. For scholars of early Christianity, for medievalists as well, this book is now the indispensable guide into the many faces of W/wisdom in patristic thought. But this hardly sums it up. Wisdom in Christian Tradition is also, at one level, a highly sophisticated but also fiercely critical apologia of the Russian sophiologists’ project, especially Bulgakov’s, as he is so profoundly representative of the promise and problems in the Russians’ patristic retrieval. While Plested builds on Florovsky’s critique, he goes far beyond it in specifying the many factors in play besides fidelity to dogmatic tradition. Plested grants generous room for Bulgakov’s own speculative venture into the identity of Sophia, which was a heuristic task still going on by the end of Bulgakov’s career. Yet Plested does not back away from fully displaying the tension between theological logos and sophianic mythos in Bulgakov, a tension in which contemplating the mystery of Sophia threatened to become more exotic than heuristic.

As far as Bulgakov was concerned, patristic Sophiology, even in Palamas, was incomplete. Bulgakov’s attempts to remedy this deficiency produced some astounding insights and amount to a truly breath-taking theological achievement. Where Bulgakov becomes unstuck, and his work more like papier maché than solid rock, is where he attempts to go beyond anything that can be readily grounded in that tradition—for instance in his ruminations on God’s self-revelation to himself as wisdom, on Sophia as a divine realm of ideas somehow distinct from the Trinitarian persons, and especially on Sophia as a principle subsisting in multiple created and uncreated forms but reducible to neither (240).

Plested’s parting shot, proffering a “reoriented Sophiology” (238–44), will doubtless stimulate ongoing discussion of the prospective bridges between patristic and modern Christian Sophiology. Though he is shy to suggest this reorientation as an ultimate correction of Bulgakov or the other Russian exponents of Sophia, Plested’s recommendation is clearly informed by his repeated and detailed investigations of their shortcomings, in particular Bulgakov’s failure more fully to plumb Gregory Palamas. The upshot is an exemplary retrieval of Plested’s own (241–43), centered on the need to envision Sophia unabashedly according to divine essence, hypostasis, and energy alike; to strengthen understanding of its Trinitarian matrix; to fortify the notion of Wisdom’s insinuation “between” (μεταξύ) Creator and creation through the divine energies; to reclaim Wisdom’s role in calling all of creation back to God (a deifying movement); to recognize the Theotokos as herself the “boundary” (μεθόριον) between uncreated and created nature; to enhance human participation in divine Wisdom through all manner of human knowledge, learning, and skill. But most impactful, in my humble judgment, is Plested’s insistence that this reoriented Sophiology would recover the centrality of the incarnation and the cross (Christology and stavrology) for fathoming the divine Wisdom, as well as the role of the Church in hosting Sophia’s self-manifestations. Indeed, Plested’s reoriented Sophiology, carries extensive implications for virtually every aspect of ecclesial life: liturgical, sacramental (and mystical), pastoral, ethical, and so on. My strong hope is that it will be read and discussed beyond Eastern Orthodox audiences, since it is bound to bear fruit for the renewal of contemporary ecumenical theology.