We have claimed so far the following: Christians believe in “one God,” that is, one divine ousia, “being” or “essence,” which is simple, infinite, and purely actual—putting Christians at the table with other classical theists—that subsists in three consubstantial, coeternal, and coequal hypostases, whom Christians, structuring their experience of God by scripture and tradition, call on as Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the ungenerated hypostasis, to whom belongs the monarchia of the Godhead, who eternally generates or begets the Son and breathes forth the Spirit; the Son is the generated hypostasis, who is born from the Father, receives the Spirit from the Father, and, by the Father’s gift, reciprocally returns the Spirit to the Father; the Spirit is the processional hypostasis, who goes out from the Father (prohodos; exitus) upon the Son and returns secondarily from or through the Son to the Father again (epistrophe; reditus). Philosophically, Christians can call these hypostases by names derived from metaphysical reflection on the world and the self: the Father is the hypostasis of God as infinite Being; the Son is the hypostasis of God as infinite Mind or Consciousness, reflecting back to the Father his own essence and nature; the Spirit is the hypostasis of God as infinite Life, Eros, and Love, the desire of the Father for the Good that he is known in the Son, and the desire of the Son for the Being that he reflects back.
The created world, in turn, is the natural overflow of the simple, infinite, and purely actual divine essence as hypostatized in these three, who interpenetrate one another in the divine perichoresis, or “circle-dance” of knowledge and love, the Son and the Spirit fully inhabiting the Father, the Father and the Spirit fully inhabiting the Son, the Father and the Son fully inhabiting the Spirit. Creation derives its existence from God energetically in a way that imitates or images the processions internal to the Trinitarian life: specifically, the energeia of creation proceeds from the Father, in and through the Son, and by the Spirit, and returns by the Spirit, in and through the Son, to the Father, going out from God (exitus) and returning to God (reditus) in a different mode. Because God is infinite, there is nothing for creation to be other than the divine essence consenting to be emptied to the point of nothingness and to ascend from nothingness to the fullness of divine life in a creaturely mode; this is bridged by the dialectic of the intelligible and the sensible, the Divine and the Creaturely Wisdom, and the mystery of the anthropic character of the universe and the cosmic character of the human being. This mystery of creation is bridged in the hypostasis of the Son, “in and through” whom creation exists—that is, in whom the intelligible creation, God’s poiesis, subsists, as the Divine Wisdom himself, and through whom the sensible creation, God’s plasis, comes to be as its manifestation—and in and through whom God assumes humanity. The hypostasis of the Son, fully divine with the Father’s divinity by virtue of his consubstantiality, coeternity, and coequality with the Father, pre-contains all the essences, natures, forms, archetypes, and purposes of creatures that the Father foreknows and wills in his act of creation, including human nature, replete with all of the subsistent beings in whom it is concretized. Because God and creatures do not possess reality in the same way—since God is Being itself, or even Beyond Being, all finite beings participate in God in order to exist—these human hypostases also cannot be said to exist in the same manner as the divine hypostasis of the Son. Therefore, one can speak of the mystery of the Son’s incarnation, humanization, and assumption of human nature either from the vantage point of eternity, in which case one ought to speak of hypostatic union, or from the vantage point of history, in which case one can appropriately speak of prosopic union. The Son’s mission in the divine oikonomia of the creation is, through the self-emptying of his own divine status, to realize God’s will for creation to come to be, to be well, and to be eternally well and to enable creation to become God by assuming a human nature and prosopon, and thereby also deifying the kosmos of which the human being is the miniature.
This lays out, effectively, the theologia of the Trinity and the oikonomia of Father and Son. What is the oikonomia of the Spirit? What role does the Spirit play in the work of creation, incarnation, and deification?
Recall the twin principles that we laid out in earlier entries: first, that we know the theologia of God’s inner world only by seeing the divine oikonomia at work in scripture, tradition, and experience and abstracting from that providence those conditions that specifically pertain to the created order; second, once we have arrived at an authentic vision of theologia, we may then see that all divine activities within the administration of the kosmos are simply economic implementations of those things which are proper to the immanent life of God. The Father creates by overflowing the divine essence, mind, and life into the kosmos because it is his hypostatic idioma as Father to be God in the mode of inexhaustible generation; the Son co-creates by incarnation and deification because it is his hypostatic idioma as Son to be God in the mode of generated self-expression, receiving and giving back again to the Father all that the Father bestows. So what is the Spirit’s idioma? To be God in the mode of processional eros which consummates in the union of knowledge and love; proceeding from the Father upon the Son, and secondarily from or through the Son, by the Father’s gift, in an active rather than a causal way, back to the Father, such that the inner life of the Godhead is both completed rest, not needful of any internal or external activation of latent potency, and ever-moving dynamism, irreducible to stasis. So the Spirit’s oikonomia of creation is ontologically located in the eternal “moment,” so to speak, of his procession upon the Son and through the Son back to the Father. And thus we find that, logically, the only diminution of the Spirit’s idioma in the immanent Trinity would translate, in the economic Trinity, to the activity of life-creation which is the Father’s act of recognition and loving forth into existence all those creatures which he beholds in beholding the Son.
Consider for a moment the way Eastern Christians have traditionally spoken of the Spirit. He is, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “the Lord and Creator of Life,” and, also, in the words of the Trisagion Prayers, “everywhere present and filling all things.” The logical implication for anyone who prays both things is that the Spirit who is everywhere present also creates life everywhere: he is the divine hypostasis responsible for the panpsychic creation, just as the Son is the divine hypostasis responsible for the intelligible creation. In Neoplatonic terms in fact we might say that insofar as Son and Spirit are consubstantial with God the Father, they should not be conflated with the emanated hypostases of Nous and Psyche, Universal Intellect and Soul, in, say, the Plotinian system of the Enneads, but rather ought to be understood as different modes of the One’s self-contained existence; nevertheless, Son and Spirit, Logos and Pneuma, do provide the analogue within the divine life that ground those respective foundational realities in cosmic reality. That is to say, God knows himself in and through the Son and loves himself by the Spirit; the inner life of the Trinity is one of a self-contained ever-moving rest, in which the generation and spiration of Son and Spirit respectively constitute God’s prohodos from God, in and through God, and epistrophē back to God in perichoresis. But pre-contained in that single act of knowing himself is God’s emanation of the Universal Intellect, the luminous web of substances, natures, archetypes, and summative logoi for every creature in the Son, and pre-contained in that single act of loving himself by granting the Spirit to the Son is God’s emanation through the Son and by the Spirit of the Cosmic Soul, and all the souls that knitted together constitute it. Just as the Logos is the true, divine hypostasis of the cosmic, creaturely hypostasis of the Universal Intellect, the Spirit is the true, divine hypostasis of the cosmic, creaturely hypostasis of the Universal Soul. The Universal Intellect is vivified and embodied through the agency of the Universal Soul; and if we would maintain, with the Greek Fathers in particular, that the logical superstructure of reality, the web of infinite logoi that subsist in the Son, is his intelligible body, then we may also say that this intelligible creation, God’s poiesis, is really God’s translation of the Son’s divine infinity into creaturely form. Sticking to the sophiological, anthropological, and Christological dimensions of creation sketched out in previous posts, we may go further: that creaturely form is in fact the Divine or Cosmic Humanity, the Adam Kadmon, the human being made in God’s image and likeness, who encompasses all historical human prosopa as their true hypostatic reality, and is himself revealed in the historical prosopon of Jesus Christ.
So, if the Son’s incarnation is ultimately cosmic in scope, teaching its nadir of specificity in the historical face of Jesus, beginning with the poetic creation of the Universal Intellect, we may say that the fundamental oikonomia of the Spirit is to enable this body to be conceived, formed, vivified, inspired, anointed, raised from death, glorified, and metamorphosed—in a word, all that the Gospels say the Spirit has done for Jesus. Hence the Spirit’s mission to create a universe that is fully alive and conscious of the noetic world, beginning from the most rudimentary forms of corporeal matter and progressing through the big history of the kosmos, through the long history of Earth and its Lifekind (to borrow Stephen RL Clark’s phrasing); leading to the historic emergence in the evolutionary history of the planet of human beings; hence the Spirit’s mission to guide human beings into higher forms of conscious awareness of the self, the world, and God, through the development of tactical, practical, theoretical, and mystical philosophy, including what we now acknowledge as the breadth of the natural sciences, the humanities, the arts, and, yes, religion and theology. The Spirit’s goal, in bringing forth in the void of nothingness which the Son has economically emptied himself into in consent to the Father’s will to create, a kosmos in which rational souls adopt a variety of evolving forms consonant with their evolving purification (katharsis) with respect to the life of virtue, illumination (phōtismos) concerning the Logos resident within the logoi of all creaturely things, and union (henōsis) with the divine nature by grace of participation, fulfilling and perfecting the potency resident within all creaturely nature, is nothing less than to share in the mystery of the Son’s embodiment at every level, to bring to be, in the divine plasis, that which is eternally foreseen by God in the divine poiesis, and therefore to realize the eschatological ktisis; to bring about in creaturely form that which is eternally prefigured in the Divine Wisdom. (I realize this is a lot of Greek, but I’ve used these terms at great length in numerous posts, so go look there.)
We might zoom in on three specific ways mentioned above that the Spirit enacts this oikonomia from the perspective of Christian theology. The first is that, just as the Son, God the Logos, consents to be the individual logos of every created thing, so the Spirit also consents to be the life-breath of every individual creature, while also offering himself to that creature in a way that respects the integrity of creaturely freedom while also constituting its limits. The Spirit is both the cosmic “wind” (Heb: ruaḥ) from God that blows across the primordial waters of creation, as well as the “breath of life” (neshamah) that infuses the nostrils of both the man made from the dust of the earth, making him into a “living creature” (nephesh ḥayyah), as well as, crucially, the very same principle by which the animals are said to be “leaving creatures” with him (Gen 2:7, 19). (A quick note that I do not think Modern Christians are in the position of Ancient Christians to afford to be ignorant about the obvious truths of conscious experience in non-human life, animal cognition, meaningful interiority, and therefore, that animals are rational spirits alongside humans; and, in fact, I think there are similar arguments to be made for plants and for the whole of the created order, that it is rational spirits all the way down.) Participation in the Spirit is also the means by which, in Christian eyes, God renders the angelic beings “spirits” (LXX Ps 103:4), granting them varying degrees of illumination about divine and cosmic realities and consequently glorious corporeality. The same principle would extend to any and all rational beings that we might wish to fill our cosmology with or that we may someday meet and have our hands forced so to do. The Spirit would also be the life-breath, the fire of consciousness, resident within any and all extraterrestrial life; it would also be the life-breath of fay, jinn, and other spiritual entities that do not fit into the angelic realm but are also clearly inhuman. Daimonia still participate the Spirit, which is the source both of their vitality in God’s sight as well as of their “tyrannical” power over human beings (Maximus, Cap. 1.15).1 Insofar as the entire universe—perhaps the infinity of universes which God creates—may possibly be thought of as a rational animal, it is the Spirit who, diminishing himself to be the World Soul without changing his divine nature, is the fundamental hypostasis of all rational spirits, moving from the potencies inherent in the first principles of their natures to their actualization in and as God (1.3-10). The Spirit is also, therefore, the vinculum who guarantees that all rational beings are of the same fundamental nature, but simply in various states of heat or cooling by virtue of their orientation towards the divine nature (Origen, Princ. 1.5.1-6.4; Maximus, Cap. 1.11ff).2
Second, the Spirit oversees the cosmic evolution of rational beings, particularly humans (though caveat lector that “human” has multiple meanings in Christian theology not reducible to simple equivocation with Homo sapiens), in their movement from the potencies inherent in their nature qua rational beings, and therefore created according to the divine image who is the Logos, the Son, to the actualization of those potencies in the cultivation of the divine likeness (homoiōsis). The Spirit is therefore the propulsion of the cosmos at large, the kosmopolis of rational beings collectively, the societates of angels, humans, and the like in particular, and of individual human beings from the power to become like God to the actuality of being like God. But in no sense does this propulsion constitute a determinism in which creaturely freedom to unfold as things may unfold, from the most minute interactions of subatomic particles to the evolutionary history of life on worlds to the political fortunes of empires and civilizations to the most seismic movements of planets and stars to the pneumatic warfare that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic apocalypticism describe in their scriptural texts, is impeded. God is not a determinist, and the Spirit, as God, is also not a determinist; the Spirit’s particular cooperation in the divine energeia of providence (pronoia) is one of infusing the plastic creation with the divine life necessary to move towards and unify with the poetic creation but always requires creaturely synergeia to accomplish. In this sense, it is a fool’s errand to look to the natural or human histories unfolded by the natural and social sciences, the long evolution of the universe from beginnings to now and the prognostications of the cosmos from now into the deep future, for obvious evidence of a divine hand intervening in the world of phenomena as proof of Christian Theology, at least a proof that would be convincing to those who have not already engaged eyes of faith. That is not what providence means in Christian Theology. Providence is a divine activity that is filtered through because unthreatened by the cosmic conditions of Fate, Fortune, and Freedom as they engage in interplay with one another; it is a divine activity that does not impose upon the agency of any rational being, from the greatest and mightiest and eldest of all the gods down to the most rudimentary photon superpositioned in all possible states at once and/or collapsed in the moment of observation. This means that, yes, creatures, especially rational beings, are capable of reducing themselves to the ontological nothingness from which they were made; but it also means that, simultaneously, the Son in and through whom the Father called them forth from nothing into being and the Spirit whom the Father breathed upon them to make them live are always there to “catch” them, as it were, and summon them back into being from nothingness, no matter how many times they may so condemn themselves to oblivion.
Likewise, if we do choose to look with eyes of faith on cosmic history and see in it apocalyptic interventions of the deity into the history of the world to rectify adharma and restore the true Way, perhaps in the form of apocalyptic violence, the tandava dance of destruction in which the Spirit, the Wild God, removes himself from the living, reducing them again to dust (Ps 104:29), in which he is not only the sweet life-breath, but the ecstatic frenzy of mana charging upon prophets to call for the blood of oppressors or the Judges to slay the enemies of Israel, the tempestuous cataclysm sweeping across the world to cleanse it of evil, etc., then we understand that the Spirit’s economic engagement of the creatures for whom he is the life-breath may actually require that he submits them to Death by withdrawal, but only in order that he may return and restore them to life once again (104:30). Because rational beings are all of one nature, and their embodiments simply reflect differentiated status based on merit, the Spirit destroys in order to remake them, kills as the phenomenal aspect of a deeper act of life-creation. It is in this sense that Origen speaks of Death as merely the haunting visage of the principle of change in the plastic kosmos, the fallen universe in which sin and suffering are cyclical, and rational beings are questing for God, assuming new forms along the way (what South Asian religion would call samsara; Princ. 2.9-11; 3.5-6).
This hands-off, so to speak, style of providence, providing the means to actualize those potencies that creaturely synergy shows interest in, also provides the basis for a Christian pneumatology of world religions. From the Christian point of view, God’s unity and ubiquity mean that Christianity does not have the market cornered on God; Christ’s circumscription of reality’s intelligible and sensible orders, both substantially as God and by the assumption and deification of humanity in the incarnation, mean that the heart of the Christian mystery may be found under many different local linguistic, cultic, mythic, and philosophical guises, sometimes better expressed there than in historical forms of Christianity itself.3 Pneumatologically, then, Christians would say of the world religions that it is one and the same Spirit illuminating the mystery of God in Christ that is the true soul of every religion, every culture, every way of being in the world. To invoke, as some Christians do, the ancient Christian and Jewish notion that daimonia are intercepting or innovating originators of non-Jewish and non-Christian religions is, on the one hand, fairly triumphalistic and chauvinistic in an age like ours where pluralism (which also has ancient Christian precedents) is so much more important, but is also, on the other hand, irrelevant if we admit that the Spirit is also the true life-breath even of the demons, meaning that even they also know great and considerable truth (Jas 2:19).
Remember that, for the Spirit, as the God who is simple, infinite, and purely actual in the mode of concrete existence as God’s Knowledge, Eros, and Love for God, his activity of creation is the emanation of his dynamic interrelations with Father and Son in the inner life of God; for the Spirit, then, just as for Christ, there is really just one work, one cooperation with the Father’s will to create. So in the third and ultimate aspect of the Spirit’s oikonomia, we see the union of the Spirit’s presence in and to all rational beings as the one “everywhere present and filling all things” as well as, simultaneously, the Spirit’s non-coercive guidance of creation towards its appointed telos. From the Christian perspective, that coinciding moment is in the auxesis of union between God and humanity in the historical saga of Israel and Judah, Early Judaism, and the family and person of Jesus Christ, his disciples, and the communities they created that we collectively call the Christian Church. In this very human history, the Spirit has found synergeia with the patriarchs, prophets, and people of Israel, preeminently in the person of the Theotokos, sufficient to facilitate the Incarnation.4
It is here that it should be freely admitted that to see the pneumatological axis mundi in this covenantal history, rather than in some other one (say, the Islamic read of sacred history, or the Hindu, or the Buddhist, etc.) is the point of view that only a Christian could hold. Everyone has to stand from somewhere, looking out upon everything else from that vantage, and this is the place from which Christians do that: Golgotha, and the flow of blood and water that run down from the side of the crucified Christ out into the mighty river delta of historical Christianity. This point of view does not need to be read, though, as suggesting either a historical exclusivism or triumphalism about Christianity as the “right” world religion among others (see footnote 3 below). Christians are historical Wayfarers alongside many Christian and non-Christian others, progressing towards the farther shore of the transcendent through history, always making sense and new sense of the mysteries they have experienced in worship, asceticism, and theology. We profess to have had Jesus Christ breathe the Spirit of God upon us (Jn 20:22), to have received him with joy on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-11), and thereby to have been sent out into the world as witnesses to Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and the promise of forgiveness of sins in his name. But they do not thereby have grounds to profess that they understand even the full nature of the kerygma which they proclaim of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Lord, nor of the full meaning of the dogmatic and cosmopolitan reception of that kerygma; in fact, Christians have most often made progress in either pursuit only to the degree that they have been willing students of the wisdom and sanctity and beauty already available to their non-Christian counterparts. Yet in so doing Christians also demonstrate what they believe themselves to be: a growing cosmic corpus of Christ (1 Cor 12:12-14) and a temple of the Holy Spirit (6:19), one whose destiny is to encompass the whole universe, not under the hegemony of a historical Christian religion, but in the Trinitarian life of knowledge, love, and glory that Christ and the Spirit have made available.
There is ultimately one divine oikonomia, one unified administration of the divine activities cooperated by Father, Son, and Spirit. The Father foreknows creation in and through the Son by the Spirit and wills by the Spirit to bring it forth out of nothing into being in and through the Son; the Son consents, without any diminution of his deity, to self-empty in order to become the Logos not only of God but also the logoi of all creation, the true substance and subsistence of all rational beings; while the Spirit, also without any diminution to his deity, consents to be the rational spirit of all rational beings, providing the means to activate the potencies inherent in their natures by virtue of the logos that Christ is in each one of them, enabling them by grace to synergistically cultivate the divine image within in the direction of the divine likeness but also freely permitting them to move away from the divine likeness, albeit not in a manner that permits them to permanently destroy or damn themselves. Both missions of Son and Spirit come to a climax in the incarnation: the Son, by assuming in his one hypostasis human nature (from the eternal angle) which is unified to his divine nature and deified by grace under the common prosopon (from the historical angle) of Jesus Christ, and the Spirit, by facilitating the incarnation in preparing for Christ a humanity sufficiently purified, illumined, and unified with God in the people of Israel and the Blessed Virgin Mary, so as to provide for the Son a true and perfect humanity to assume. Here the poetic and plastic creations, the Divine and Creaturely Wisdoms, the Anthropic Cosmos and the Cosmic Man meet together; here the whole work of God in creation finds its true unity in the God-Man whose mystical body fundamentally includes the covenant people of Israel and the nations called out to be a people for God by integration into Israel’s mystery, but also the whole noetic web of rational beings in this and every world, the whole of the sensible and intelligible creation themselves which come to their union in the eschatological ktisis. Christ’s significance in Christian eyes as the point of convergence of the whole divine oikonomia and the theological, logical, and pneumatological mysteries of creation is not to the exclusion of the significance of every other being, but the very ground from which Christians may see every being piously as a manifestation of the same mystery.
The astute reader will notice that in the articles which have come thus far we have spoken of the theologia of the Trinity, the oikonomia of creation, and how the theological identities of Son and Spirit ground their economic missions in the work of creation as sharing a single will and work with the Father. We have, in this article, also spoken of rational beings, their common nature, the variety of possible embodiments they may assume, and the means and mechanics by which they do so in the vision of Christian Theology. I have here argued, effectively, that Christ’s Incarnation is God’s “Plan A,” not his “Plan B,” such that God only became human and therefore only unites the universe to himself insofar as he must respond to things like the Sin, the Devil, and Death. We have not spoken so far about the mystery of iniquity, nor have we posited it as the cause of the incarnation. That is because, if it can be called one, sin is at most a secondary cause of the missions of Son and Spirit. But it still merits tracing out the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of evil—or, rather, the way evil constitutes a syntactical error in the theological trivium—in the Christian tradition, so as also to understand this secondary function the incarnation plays.
“God, having liberated us from the bitter slavery of the tyrannical demons, has gifted us the humane yoke of divine service, namely, humility, through which every diabolical power is subdued and through which, for those choosing it, every good is brought about and is carefully kept inviolate” (Ὁ, τῆς πικρᾶς δουλείας τῶν τυραννούντων δαιμόνων ἐλευθερώσας ἡμᾶς, θεός φιλάνθρωπον θεοσεβείας ἡμῖν ζυγὸν ἐδωρήσατο τὴν ταπεινοφροσύνην, δι’ ἧς πᾶσα μὲν διαβολικὴ δαμάζεται δύναμις, πᾶν δὲ τοῖς ἑλομένοις αὐτὴν ἀγαθὸν δημιουργεῖται καὶ ἀραδιούργητον διαφυλάττεται). Text and translation from St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology, trans. Luis Joshua Sales (PP 53; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015).
Origen: “one should know that every rational being that turns aside from the measures and ordinances of reason is undoubtedly involved in sin by this departure from what is right or just” (Princ. 1.5.2); “in the case of every creature, it is by its works and its movements that those powers, who appear to hold sway over others or to exercise authority or dominion, are set above and placed over those whom they are said to rule or on whom they exercise their authority, from their merits and not by a privilege of creation” (1.5.3); “it lies within ourselves and in our own actions whether we will be blessed and holy, or, through sloth and negligence, we fall from blessedness into wickedness and ruin to such a degree that, through too great an advance, so to speak, in wickedness, one may descend even to that state…that he may become what is called an opposing power” (i.e., a demon; 1.5.5); “if they are negligent and careless about such participation” in God, “then each one, by fault of his own slothfulness, becomes—one more quickly, another more slowly, one to a greater extent, another to a lesser—the cause of his own lapse or fall,” resulting in the various angelic, human, and demonic ranks “which divine providence bestows upon them, in fair and just judgment, according to their merit and the progress by which they advanced in the participation and imitation of God” (1.6.2); and hence “every rational being is able, passing from one order to another, to go from each order to all and from all to each, while it continues, through its faculty of free will, susceptible of promotions and demotions according to its own actions and efforts,” which is the cause for the ranks of celestial beings (Sun, Moon, and Stars), angels, and the succession of worlds (1.7-2.3). See Origen, On First Principles, ed. and trans. John Behr, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Maximus sounds very Origenic (if not Origenist) when he says that “A rational soul is not in substance more valuable than another rational soul, for God, fashioning each soul according to his image given that he is good, brings it into being as self-moved; but each one, according to its inclination, is either declared honorable or willfully takes on dishonor through its deeds” (Cap. 1.11), and therefore because “God is the sun of righteousness…shining his rays of goodness simply on everyone,” it is the case that “the soul by tis natural capacity becomes in character either wax when God-loving or clay when matter-loving,” hence assuming either denser or more fluid, pneumatic character (1.12).
See, e.g., David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 2022), 110-111: “For this reason, incidentally, the religion historically called ‘Christianity’ is not a ‘truth’ that exists among and in competition with ‘false’ non-Christian religions. ‘Christianity,’ in fact—which is not really one thing, in any event, but only a loose designation for a diverse set of beliefs and practices and cultural forms and numerous often incongruous religions, comprised within a single but nonetheless porous hermeneutical and historical ‘set’—is only one limited trajectory within history’s universal narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely deification, superior in some ways to alternative trajectories, vastly inferior in many others. (A strictly Reformed theology of, say, penal substitutionary atonement is infinitely more remote from the Logos who has become incarnate in created nature and history than is, for instance, the bodhisattva ideal unfolded i the Lotus Sutra and the Bodhicaryavatara; indeed, the latter in some very real sense attests, under the veil of the unfamiliar, to the truth made present in Christ, while the former is totally antithetical to that truth and therefore pure falsehood. A manualist Thomist ‘two-tier’ understanding of the relation between the supernatural and the natural, or between the divine and the created, with its associated concept of natura pura, is so contrary to everything proper to the narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely divinization that it is immeasurably more irreconcilable with any truth revealed in Christ than is the metaphysics of classical Vedanta, in either its Advaita or Vishishtadvaita form. Sri Ramakrishna’s understanding of the nature of an avatara is truer to the gospel than is Calvin’s bifurcated Christology. And so on.)”
This is the inspired and brilliant point made by Sergius Bulgakov in a variety of his works. See especially the greater dogmatic trilogy: The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb. See also The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God.
Thanks for another great read.
I’ve reached a point where all
That I don’t know, and all the truth spread throughout the universe and hidden in diverse religions, is something awe inspiring. People like DBH and even your blog have really helped me leave my box of certainty behind. I now kind of believe everything and it makes life more interesting. I just see the mystery of Christ and his mother, or the logos and the holy spirit as the center of all reality.