The Sophiology
of Father Sergius Bulgakov
and Contemporary Western Theology
86
The trinitarian character of the Dyad is fully affirmed
through the principle of monarchy, which is established
by the dyadic self-revelation of the Father as the
“Principle”,
the Divine Subject. But His Predicate or Self-revelation,
the Divine Sophia, is actualized as the bi-unity of two
hypostases:
the Word uttered by the Father, upon which reposes
the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father.
Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter
It must be said from the outset that the idea that Sophiology is a thing of the past is already out of date. Some time ago, and again today, in certain circles, one hears repeated the claim that all discourse about the biblical figure of the Wisdom of God results in nothing more definitive than the idealist deformation of a heresy stemming from Philo of Alexandria and Gnostic groups in the second century. One is reminded that Sophiology was rigorously condemned by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1935 and that it had been defeated theologically, which (having lost its importance today) is moreover the reality, over against the powerful current of the neo-patristic synthesis. Yet recent historical research, exploring a certain obstinacy in the memory of the subject of the famous dispute between the wars about Sophia, has recalled that in reality, the Orthodox Church exonerated Sergius Bulgakov in 1937 from the charges of heresy which may have been all too hastily brought against him by Metropolitan Sergius and by the Karlovtsy synod. The decree of Metropolitan Sergius, in the absence of the reunion of the synod in Moscow, had no legal force. And
the charges against Bulgakov done by the Karlovtsy synod were also inadmissible since this synod had no canonical authority. These charges may also have been based in political-ecclesiological animosities rather than in theological discourse. The synodal commission convoked by Metropolitan Evlogy removed all suspicion of heresy from the writings of Bulgakov against the accusations of Vladimir Lossky and of Georges Florovsky and Sergius Chetverikov.
And above all we should explain why, despite the victory of Sophiology in Paris in 1937 over its detractors, it was in the end the neo-patristic movement which has occupied the leading position in the international theological scene in the Orthodox Church for half a century. Let us cite the principal reasons. The political context of the Cold War and the persecution of the church prevented all new theological debate in the East as in the West. There was also the ecumenical context on the way to globalization and then the unification around the fundamentals of the seven ecumenical councils. Then there is the philosophical context that gave privilege to post-Kantian phenomenological thought (which distinguishes the thing in itself from its manifestation) over personalist philosophy (which postulates the personal origin of action and its energies). Finally there was the change of a generation which privileges the thesis of “the [Western] captivity of Orthodox theology” over that which prized the dogmatic development of Orthodox thought.88
This work, at the same time critical and respectful with respect to the present and the past, did not get done in one day. It is the long term result of an effort of theological and poetic maturation. Many thinkers, from Lev Zander and Olivier Clément to Sergius Averintsev (but it is also necessary to mention Alexander Schmemann, Constantine
87 Igumen
Gennady Eijkalovic, Th e Aff air of
Father Sergius Bulgakov,
San
88 With considerable finesse Rowan Williams quotes Arthur Dobie Bateman who published an analysis of Bulgakov’s work in London in 1944: “When he named the existential problem Sophia, we behaved like Greeks who thought Anastasis was a goddess!” (Acts 17:18) “Sergius Bulgakov. Towards a Russian Political Th eology.” Edited with a commentary by Rowan Williams, Edinburgh, TT Clark ltd. 1999. The book is the result of more than 10 years’ work by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, previously Archbishop of Wales and Bishop of Monmouth and former professor of Divinity at Oxford University. The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
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Andronikov, Nikita Struve, Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom)
of Sourozh,
On the contrary, the apophatic theology of Vladimir Lossky, pushed to its extreme, would separate in a radical or dialectical fashion the unique essence of God from its personal foundation, the monarchy of the Father. This would lead to an imperialist nominalism, to an absolute impossibility of representing the Wisdom of God at the same time as the Church, but also in the features of the young woman of Galilee and under the form of eucharistic communion. The past of the Orthodox tradition would now appear a new dark ages. Now not only is sophiology not passé, but as Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev), deputy director of Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk, has said in what sounded like the beginning of a rehabilitation on the part of the patriarchate of Moscow, it is necessary to recover today the intuitions and the spiritual journey of one of its most ardent defenders, Sergius Bulgakov.91 And in Belgrade during the war against Croatia in 1991-93,
89 Kliment
Naumov, Serge Boulgakov, Bibliographie,
Paris, IES, 1984.
90 Monahinia Elena, Professor protoierei Serguij Bulgakov 1871-1944, Moskva, Pravoslavnij Universitet, 2003
91 Remarks by Bishop Hilarion were made at the beginning of the conference in Moscow, March 2001. Church, Culture, and Identity
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Bulgakov’s theology was for the famous Serbian writer Mirko Djordjevic the main argument in favor of the inter-denominational peace.92 This brief essay on the reception of his thought in the West during the past 50 years on the dogmatic, ecclesiological and aesthetic levels is, though far from exhaustive, a modest contribution to the contemporary movement of renewing our spiritual consciousness.
Sophiology: a deepening of the dogmatic tradition
In order to appreciate the reception of Bulgakov’s thought, it is necessary to first briefly recall the dogmatic problematic of the dean of the Saint Sergius Institute.Bulgakov’s principal question, not resolved in the patristic tradition, was the following: How is each hypostasis, and the three all together, linked to creation? To respond to this question it is necessary to pass from the order of the economy, of the apophatic contemplation of the activity of the energies of God in the world, to that of the inter-Trinitarian life, of the cataphatic participation in the mystery of the tri-hypostatic source of these energies. Also did not Bulgakov draw his inspiration above all from the celebration of the Eucharist as well as from his teaching at the Saint Sergius Institute, from his ecclesial engagement with Metropolitan Evlogy, along with Mother Maria Skobtsova and Berdyaev? If Bulgakov very often had the intuition of what would be the response to this question posed above, he was not able except progressively to formulate this, and he did so in connection with the spiritual density of the milieu in which he evolved. Schematically, one can state in a few words the principal response of Bulgakov to the enigma of Chalcedon as follows: God does not have three persons; God is Himself a tri-hypostatic Person. The identification accomplished by the Cappadocian fathers between hypostasis and person did not have meaning except for leading us out of the Aristotelian comprehension of hypostasis and to posit the monarchy of the Father. According to them, God is not an abstract essence who predetermines existence. He has a personal consciousness of self (hypostasis) which is inseparable from his nature (ousia). But the
92 Mirko Djordjevic, La voix d’une autre Serbie, Paris, Parole et Silence, 1999, p. 124. The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
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patristic understanding of the person is antinomic, positing unity and trinity. That means, and this is the most important point of Bulgakov’s sophiology, that the Divine Person is conscious of self (of me, of you, of him, of you) but also of the me outside of self. In 1933 he wrote in The Lamb of God: With respect to the hypostasis, God—the Absolute Subject—is one tri-hypostatic Personality93 who reunites in his unique personal consciousness all the modalities of the personal principal: me, thou, him, us, you; while the mono-hypostatic person possesses all the modes except the me outside of self, in other persons, in the measure which these limit it and condition it in its being. Manifest to the end and integrally actualized, the personal principal, the hypostasis, is a tri-hypostatic personality, where the personal unity uncovers itself in the reality of three hypostatic centers or hypostases in the tri-unity(...) Neither three, nor one, but in a singular manner three in one, Trinity.(...) This is why the Divine Person is, before all one can say, tri-hypostatic and is also actual only in one hypostasis rather than in three, that this Person is the reciprocity of love eternally realized, victorious definitively of personal singularization and identifying the three with the one and nevertheless exists itself of the real existence of these personal centers.94
There is no Sabellianism here. Instead, the ousia, rather than being thrown out into the darkness of mystery reveals itself as a relational modality, as uncreated Wisdom and as created Wisdom. Put most simply, the mystery of the Trinity is the self-revelation of God in Wisdom as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nevertheless this approach had been vigorously criticized in 1935 by Vladimir Lossky because it seemed to him a mixing of the nature and the person of God. Today once more, George Kotchetkov, who shares a number of ideas with Bulgakov, has been accused of heresy by certain groups within the Saint Tikhon Institute of Moscow. Yet one of the principal inheritors of Vladimir Lossky’s thought in Paris, Boris Bobrinskoy has given proof of a great openness to Sophiology.
93 Personhood,
AA.
94 Sergius Bulgakov, Th e Lamb of God, Paris: YMCA Press, 1933, republished, Moscow: Univ. A. Men, 2000, p.126; Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1982, pp. 13-14.; Th e Lamb of God, by Sergius Bulgakov, tr. by Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2007) Church, Culture, and Identity
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In his book, The
Mystery of the Trinity,95 Bobrinskoy proposes a phenomenology of the Trinitarian mystery. Aware of the richness of the prophetic vision of Wisdom personified, he suggests that
we “not make rigid the Christological interpretation of Wisdom.” Yet,
the present dean of the Saint Sergius Institute limits himself to
observing that the biblical figure of the Wisdom of God can be considered as one of
the names of God. However, an even more remarkable realization by
Bobrinskoy is to be found in his talk on Bulgakov as the “Visionary
of Wisdom,” in the annual academic conference at Saint Sergius Institute
in 1995.96 In this careful examination of Bulgakov’s work, of the
accusations leveled against him by Vladimir Lossky, among others, as well as
of the “indifference,” the ignoring of his work for many years, Bobrinskoy calls
for a sober re-evaluation and recognition of Bulgakov’s
significance and genuine contributions to theology in our time, one of the very
few responses of its kind within the Orthodox theological community. In his sweeping and magisterial study, Modern Russian Theology: Soloviev, Bukharev, Bulgakov, 97
95 B. Bobrinskoy, Le Mystère de la Trinité, Paris, Cerf, 1968; Anthony Gythiel, trans.; Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
96 Boris Bobrinskoy, Le mystère de la trinité, Paris: Cerf, 1986, p. 58; “Le père Serge Bulgakov, visionnaire de la sagesse,” discours académique, à la séance solennelle annuelle de l’Institut Saint-Serge, 12 février 1995, SOP no. 196, mars 1995.
97 Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2000, The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
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by Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky have dominated the theological landscape. Brandon Gallaher has provided a meticulous but most insightful and provocative look at Bulgakov’s eucharistic theology and its culmination in the proposal for shared communion in the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius in the 1930s. Using Bulgakov’s own characterization, the study, done as a thesis at Saint Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, is entitled “Catholic Action,” and has been published in condensed form in two articles, hopefully forthcoming as a book.98 Almost as an echo to Gallaher’s work is Andrew Walker’s challenging Constantinople lecture “Open or Shut Case? An Orthodox View on Intercommunion,” in which he very passionately asks about the future of eucharistic and ecclesial unity.99
Finally, Michael Plekon includes Bulgakov as one of the figures profiled in his study of contemporary persons of faith in the Eastern Church and incorporates two of Bulgakov’s most important essays in an anthology.100 It is also noteworthy that more of Bulgakov’s works are being published in English translation. Boris Jakim has translated The Friend of the Bridegroom, the book on John the Baptist from the lesser triology, as well as all three volumes of the great trilogy, The Bride of the Lamb, The Lamb of God, and The Comforter. Olivier Clément, for his part, has insisted on the importance of the theme of created Wisdom in Bulgakov as an indisputable continuation of the theology of uncreated energies begun by Gregory Palamas. Paul Evdokimov has written that the Wisdom of God is even the common energy of the three persons. It is according to him, “the revelation of the Father-the Wise One in the Son- in Wisdom through the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Wisdom.”101 I also would not like to ignore here the work
98 Brandon Anastassy Gallaher, “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought, Part I,” and “Bulgakov and Intercommunion, Part II,” Sobornost 24, (2002), 1: pp. 24-55; 2: pp. 9-28.
99 Sobornost, forthcoming.
100 Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, pp. 29-58 and “By Jacob’s Well” and “Dogma and Dogmatic Th eology,” in Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time. Readings from the Eastern Church, ed. by Michael Plekon, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld/Sheed & Ward, 2003, pp. 55-80.
101 Paul Evdokimov, Th e Art of the Icon: A Th eology of Beauty, Steven Bigham, trans., Crestwood NY: Oakwood/St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990, p.348. Church, Culture, and Identity
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of Metropolitan John Zizioulas, one of George Florovsky’s students and one of the most influential Orthodox theologians. As Michel Stavrou, professor of dogmatics at the Saint Sergius Institute has shown, the originality of the thought of Zizioulas consists precisely in that it shows the limits of apophatic thought of the person and the necessity of understanding more fully the “personhood” or personality of God. In the same fashion as there are many interpretations of Wisdom in Orthodoxy, it is not appropriate to reduce all of Protestant thought to Barthianism. Karl-Gustav Jung, who was close to Vysheslavtsev and Paul Evdokimov, has been sensitive to the manifestation of Wisdom in the Book of Job and has interpreted Wisdom as a revelation of the heart of God’s mercy. Today the Reformed theologian Alain Houziaux has used the language of quantum physics in order to understand in a sophianic manner the theme of the “dust,” of tohu wabohu, out of which God created the heavens and the earth.102 Paul Ricoeur philosophically follows the trail of actual historical research that leads from the feeling of obligation to the duty of memory and of the liberation of history to prophecy and to faith in the Providence of God, one of the many names in the Bible for God’s Wisdom.103
The new importance of the figure of Wisdom of God in Western Catholic theology is evident if one consults it by name in the following sources: the article on “Wisdom” edited by B. Schulze in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité,104 or the collection in honor of Maurice Gilbert entitled Toute la Sagesse du monde.105 One could also cite the work of authors who were in contact with Russian religious thinkers and who sought to become part of the sophiological tradition: Teilhard de Chardin, who visited Berdyaev between two trips to China after the war, Tomas Spidlik, professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome and author of L’ idée russe and other studies on the Eastern Church, Louis Bouyer, who was a friend of Bishop Cassian (Bezobrazov),106 and
102 Alain Houziaux, Le Tohu-bohu, le Serpent et le bon Dieu, Paris: Presses de la renaissance, 1997.
103 Paul
Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris: Seuil, 2000.
104 T.
XIV, Paris, 1988, col. 122-126.
105 Toute
la sagesse du monde, F. Mies, ed.
Louvain, 1999.
106 Louis Bouyer, Sophia ou le monde en Dieu, Paris: Cerf, 1994. The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
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Le Guillou, professor at the Paris Institute of Ecumenical Studies with Olivier Clément.107 I wish, however, to concentrate my reflection on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar insofar as it has exerted a considerable influence upon Catholic thought from Vatican II until our time. The question posed by this Swiss theologian in The Truth of God, the second volume of his dogmatic theology, is similar to that of Bulgakov: How is the absolute Being, who cannot exist except as Trinity, reflected in the being of the world?108 Arius had thought that the Father begot the Son because He knew Himself perfectly. Conversely, Hegel thought that the Father was obliged to beget the Son in order to know Himself as God. Balthasar, so as to avoid these impasses, suggests as did Bulgakov, that we leave the sphere of rational knowledge in order to speak in symbolic terms of the Father as the pure gift of self, as love free and without foundation. Balthasar writes: “To grasp that is impossible for me, except if one dares to speak with Bulgakov of the first inter-Trinitarian kenosis.” The apocalyptic vision of the Lamb immolated [before the creation of the world] signifies not that a blood bath inaugurated the world but that inter-Trinitarian love is the common foundation of both the creation and the Incarnation. That means that the antinomic idea of a development in eternity, of a growth in the fullness becomes thinkable. Against the static soteriology of Karl Rahner, Balthasar affirms in L’Action, the third volume of La dramatique divine, that God is not unchangeable, that the life of the world attains God from his own act of opening himself in the Incarnation.109
108 H.U. von Balthasar, La Gloire et la Croix, Les aspects esthétiques de la Révélation, III, Th éologie, Nouvelle Alliance, Paris, DDB, 1990, p. 187. Also see the same author’s La Th éologie, II, Vérité de Dieu, Bruxelles, Culture et Vérité, 1995, p. 192.
109 Balthasar does not seem to have known Bulgakov’s work except at second hand. He cites an article by P. Henry in DBS on kenosis. It takes up in a veiled fashion Florovsky’s accusation of Bulgakov, about the gnostic and idealist temptation to make the kenosis the structure of being, without knowing that since 1916 Bulgakov was the fi rst modern Orthodox theologian who wanted to liberate God from all the imprisonments of theology and philosophy which were insuffi ciently apophatic. Th is can explain his suspicion with respect to Bulgakov’s “sophiological excesses.” Yet what is important is that Bulgakov and Balthasar are together at the very base, in knowing that sapiental source of the interpretation of the scriptures and the possibility of a “katalogic” knowledge stemming from the “Trinity towards the world.” Church, Culture, and Identity
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Sophiology : the foundation of a rethought ecclesiology
The principal attainment of sophiology, from the perspective of ecclesiology, is to have rendered comprehensible another “folly” of the New Testament, that is, the personal dimension of the Church, the Bride or Spouse of the Lamb. In the same manner as the psalms tell us that all of creation praises the Lord, the Apocalypse helps us to hear, in the last verses, the amazing voice of the Church which blends itself with that of the Spirit to make Christ present by the ancient Maranatha. The Church in this perspective is no longer limited by canonical borders. She is the bride made ready for her Bridegroom, descending from the heavenly Jerusalem to the earthly Jerusalem. Also it becomes insufficient to speak of the fullness of grace present in the historical church; it is necessary immediately to add that the church is in tension with the Kingdom. In this perspective the intellectual rediscovery of otherness (that of the sister-church for example) is no longer a condition sufficient for the coming of the Kingdom. Ecumenism is not a contract between two separated entities but a sacrifice, a gesture of love between two spouses. Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) of Kyiv, formerly the exarch in Paris of the Russian Church in Western Europe, did not hesitate to write that the sophianic ecclesiology of Bulgakov is as it were “the last word in Russian theology on the Church.”110 In his dissertation published in Kyiv in 1997, he does not even mention Vladimir Lossky’s ecclesiology, but rather underscores “the inspired richness of the theological thought of Father Sergius.”111
In
110 Vladimir
Sabodan, Ekklesiologuia v otecestvennom
bogoslovii, Kyiv, 1997, p. 403.
111 ibid.,
p. 357
112 Paris,
Labor et Fides, 1988.
113 Ibid, p. 117.The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
Page 87
a dimension in his examination of the Eastern Church, having based his work on that of Bulgakov’s study of 1931, L’Orthodoxie,114 Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his noted article “Pull down the strongholds,” from the 25th anniversary edition of the journal Dieu vivant, asks himself, “Of what good is the Church?” after the collapse of the medieval vision of the city of God on earth as an oasis protected from the world’s darkness. The only response possible for him was this: “The grace of Christ which is universal, the grace won for all on the cross is not given independently of his Bride, the Church.(...) Without the Church there is no participation in Christ. The Church is this participation and at the same time its communication.”115 One can see even beyond Christianity with such a vision and observe that the traditional conception of the borders between religions is breaking down. Dominique Cerbelaud, in his book, Ecouter Israel, une théologie chrétienne en dialogue, studies closely the evolution of the representation of the figure of the Wisdom of God in Judaism and in Christianity. 116 Like Henri Corbin, former president of the association of the friends of Berdyaev, he concludes that sophiology constitutes a source of rapprochement with the mysticism of Islam, with Jewish spirituality and even with Asian traditions. In the Qu’ran it is said that God taught or gave Wisdom to Jesus. For the Jews, the Torah is nothing else but the Wisdom of God. Finally, if one follows St Paul in the letter to the Ephesians, for whom Wisdom is polypoikilos, that is, quite diverse, a dialogue with both Hinduism and Buddhism is possible. Cerbelaud writes: Appropriated from the very first ages of Christianity both for Christ and the Spirit, Wisdom was maintained as a sort of intermediary between the two hypostases, participating in the reality of both the one and the other as the Russian sophiological thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries had observed. This figure possessed then an inestimable advantage in bringing us back upstream of the Trinitarian discourse as it was elaborated in a so to speak “pre-Christian” universe. Further, Wisdom has become an object of other interpretations in the traditions of our religious neighbors.117
114 Th e Orthodox Church, rev. trans. Lydia Kesich, Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988.
115 H.U.
von Balthasar, “Raser les bastions,” Dieu
vivant, no. 25, p. 23.
116 Dominique Cerbelaud, Ecouter Israël, une théologie chrétienne en dialogue, Paris: Cerf, 1995.
117 ibid., p. 176. Church, Culture, and Identity
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One finds here a profound affinity with the thought of Annick de Souzenelle, an Orthodox theologian and student of Bishop Jean Kovalevsky, one of Bulgakov’s own students. From Le Symbolisme du corps humain which she wrote in 1974 to her last book, Résonances bibliques, Annick de Souzenelle has pursued a meditation on the kabbalistic vision of Wisdom and the tree of 12 sephiroth. This vision of the Zohar brings together for her the biblical and patristic visions of the sacred ladder that joins the Trinity to humankind. In her interpretation, the Shekinah enveloped the temple in King Solomon’s time just as the Holy Spirit enveloped the Twelve at Pentecost. The rediscovery of the original language evoked the saying of Rabbi Simeon: “All people will one day come beneath the wings of the Shekinah.”118
118 Annick de Souzenelle, Résonances bibliques, Paris: Albin Michel, 2001, p. 228. The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
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(spiritual and not necessarily visible) and the prototype of all that is (a corporal and visible image). In this perspective, Wisdom should be understood as the image of God. For on the one hand, the world is a created image of Wisdom, and on the other, Sophia is the icon of God in humanity. This is why, for Bulgakov, Wisdom is also the common foundation of the veneration of the Virgin and of creation. These stunning reflections of Bulgakov have left their mark upon Orthodox theology, from Vladimir Il’jin’s celebration of tintinnabulation to the celebration of the face in Paul Evdokimov, from the rediscovery of the theurgic dimension of the liturgy by Alexander Schmemann and Constantine Andronikov to the elaboration of a theology of ecology by Olivier Clément and Patriarch Bartholomew I. If the conference in celebration of the Second Council of Nicea in 1987 gave voice again to the legacies of Vladimir Lossky and Leonid Ouspensky, the renewal of mosaic and the work of an American theologian, John Breck on the iconography of Pascha and the shroud of Turin have prolonged the cataphatic vein of Bulgakov.119
In Catholic thought, I would very briefly mention the study by Louis Bouyer, Le trône de la Sagesse, essai sur la signification du culte marial, which is marked by the direct influence of Russian theology.120 He wrote: To what would correspond this image of a being who seems, in God, to be inseparable from God, in a singular relationship with doubt at one and the same time with both the Son and the Spirit and therefore inseparable also from creation and in these perspectives which are those of a chosen creature, of the Elect One destined to become the Spouse of the Lord? It was therefore natural to think of the Virgin Mary, above all when the reflection on her approached that of the Woman clothed with the sun and crowned by the stars which the Apocalypse shows us.121
119 John
Breck, Th e Power of the Word, Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1986.
120 Louis
Bouyer, Le trône de la Sagesse, essai sur la
signifi cation du culte marial,
Paris: erf, 1957. [Translator’s note: In her biography, Un moine de l’Eglise d’orient: Le père Lev Gillet,
Paris: Cerf, 1993, pp. 218-219, theologian Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, herself a
member of it, documents Louis Bouyer’s attendance at liturgy in
the fi rst
121 ibid., p. 277. Church, Culture, and Identity
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I will limit myself here to one example from the work of the French composer Olivier Messiaen to the extent that this one can perceive a synthesis of the sophianic theme with the artistic celebration of Christ, the Virgin and creation. Born in 1907, Messiaen was the organist of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris and began to draw his creative inspiration from the singing of the birds, the world’s greatest musicians in his opinion. This French composer always has been sensitive to the biblical theme of Wisdom reflecting the eternal light (Wisd. 7: 26) In his article, “Les livres de la Sagesse dans l’oeuvre d’Olivier Messiaen,” Jean-Marie André underlined that in 1935 in his Nativité, the composer coupled the Christological interpretation of the work of Wisdom in the world with a Marian reading. As the Book of Sirach (24: 8) has Wisdom say, “Then the creator of all things instructed me, and he who created me, fixed a place for my tent,” so Messiaen writes “He who created me has reposed in my tent”...In La transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, written in 1969, Messiaen explores the theme of the encounter on Mount Tabor between created Wisdom and uncreated Wisdom. Messiaen writes: It is in looking in clear weather at Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau and the three glaciers of the Meije in Oisans that I understood the difference between the small splendor of the snow and that great splendor of the sun. It is also that I was able to imagine at which point the place of the Transfiguration was awesome! The sacred terror is rendered by the pedal sounds of the trombones and the cluster trills in the bass. The décor is given by the cries of the mountain birds.122
Messiaen, like Bulgakov, was sensitive to the Eucharistic dimension of the sophianic theme. In Le livre du saint sacrement in 1984, the 6th piece is entitled La manne et le pain de vie. Messiaen there includes the choppy and monotonous song of the Ammomane of the desert, the lark of the rocky terrain of Palestine to recall the discourse of Jesus at Capernaum about manna as a prefiguring of the bread of life. In his libretto he also uses extracts from the Book of Wisdom (16:20-21): “You gave them the food of angels, from heaven untiringly sending them bread already prepared, containing every delight, satisfying every taste.”
122 Toute la sagesse du monde, op. cit., p. 676. The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov
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Conclusion
But it is equally necessary, so I believe, to go further in concluding by noting the significance of the sophianic dimension in our most technological civilization on the way to globalization. Here I would mention an agnostic thinker, Edgar Morin, one of the most influential and important of contemporary French philosophers. He once confided to me that for him the fresco of the creation of the world in the Sistine Chapel done by Michelangelo had a considerable influence upon Renaissance thought precisely because of the mysterious appearance of Sophia/Wisdom at the side of the Creator. Will we see, breaking in upon us, in this “light without end” found again in the Wisdom of God after the coming of the darkness of a new Middle Ages, the next arrival, that of a new Renaissance?
123 Fides
et ratio, Paris, Centurion, Mame, Cerf,
1998, p. 133.
124 La
Sophie Sagesse de Dieu,
Moscow: Radounitsa, 2000.