Sophia as Creation Revealed by Incarnation and Pentecost

Reflections on the Ongoing Symposium about Marcus Plested’s book Wisdom in Christian Tradition (with Notes on Bulgakov's Reading of Thomas Aquinas)

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This subsection about Aquinas in The Bride of the Lamb (from the first chapter: 1.3.d) rehearses several categories from the section on Aristotle. It also introduces some key concepts such as causation versus creation, freedom versus necessity, and will versus intellect that Bulgakov continues to develop extensively in the rest of the book. Although this is critical content to start to understand, it is a brief section that can quickly be given a basic outline containing concepts that will be considered again later in the book. I have therefore kept my book section overview very short (as the next part of this year-long schedule) and have situated it within my reflections on a series of debates over Bulgakov that are currently underway as Syndicate is almost finished posting essays and responses from four scholars who engaged in a symposium on Marcus Plested’s book Wisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology. These respondents are Brandon Gallaher, Regula Zwahlen, Alexis Torrance, and Paul Blowers. So far, the essays by Gallaher, Zwahlen, and Torrance have been posted along with replies to each one from Plested. These essays are pulling in more current thinkers as such things do. Zwahlen, in a lively and brilliant response to Plested, cited David Bentley Hart in defense of some of Bulgakov’s more controversial ideas. Meanwhile, Jordan Daniel Wood (who has recently responded here to a critical review by Plested of Wood’s own book on Maximus) received some commendation from Fr. John Behr as Wood backed up Zwahlen in a series of social media posts. It is wonderful to see this conversation underway with reference to Bulgakov and his connections with Aquinas, Palamas, Maximus, and others. At the heart of it is the question that has always surrounded controversies related to Bulgakov: Does Bulgakov’s doctrine of Sophia as the creaturely life of God’s own nature rest upon the Incarnation and Pentecost, or does Sophia blasphemously push the Incarnation and Pentecost to the sidelines? Actually, these current essays are just focused on the Incarnation, and I have yet to see the Pentecost brought up in the debates which means that the engagement with Bulgakov is highly inadequate. For Bulgakov, Incarnation and Pentecost reveal to us a true creation and one that is divine—a universe that is alive with the fire of God like the bush before which Moses removed his sandals. Obviously, I am not a scholar of any of these theologians but just a layperson who loves to read and listen as such scholars debate each other. I have some confidence as I follow along due to my bit of graduate school training in history at Saint Andrews University in Scotland many years ago. But this is all essentially a devotional listening and reflecting exercise for me around the edges of my personal and professional lives (which do not overlap much at all with such high-level theological debates).

The first time that I encountered Marcus Plested was listening to the recording of a May 2016 lecture that he gave at Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University of Humanities in Moscow, Russia defending the common ground between Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas. Having heard so many Orthodox polemicists set up Palamas and Aquinas as diametrically opposed, I appreciated the spirit of theological fraternity between East and West that Plested’s line of argument fostered, and Plested’s case was compelling. Now, however, as I follow what the Syndicate is currently sharing from their symposium on Plested’s book Wisdom in Christian Tradition, I’m getting another look at Plested’s reading of Aquinas. In what follows for my subscribers, I will therefore share two sections with the first being some reflections on the first few essays from the public symposium on Marcus Plested’s book Wisdom in Christian Tradition, and the second being a bullet-point summary of the Aquinas section (1.3.d) in our book The Bride of the Lamb (as I’ve committed to do following this schedule).