Per Caritatem

In chapter seven of his book, Redeeming Beauty:  Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Nichols discusses, among other things, Jacques Maritain’s view of pulchrum (the beautiful).  Maritain appeals to St. Thomas’ dictum in which beauty is defined as id quod visum placet.  According to Maritain this definition relates to the effect, not the essence, i.e., the beautiful gives joy to the knower.  However, as Nichols points out, Maritain is quick to add that the “bestowal of delight in knowing” is a “formal constituent of beauty” (p. 133).  Here Maritain and U. Eco part ways, as Eco believes that Maritain is reading more into Thomas than is present in the text. According to Eco, “what Thomas actually says is, ‘people call things beautiful when they give pleasure on sight’.  For Eco this is a ‘sociological finding’ with ‘introduces the problem’ rather than solves it” (p. 133).  It seems to me the Eco’s point merits further consideration.

This brings us to Maritain’s account of the beautiful as found in Art et scolastique.  According to Maritain, “[i]f a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact of being given to its intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful” (p. 36).[1]  Here beauty is no doubt connected with the intellect, but following Thomas, beauty delights the mind through the senses.  “‘Our [human] art’ works over sensuous matter to bring joy to the spirit.  It is in a sense a taste of Paradise, the first Paradise, the Paradise of Eden, because ‘it restores for a moment the simultaneous peace and delectation of the mind and the senses’” (Art et scolastique, p. 37).[2]

Notes

---

[1] As cited in Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, p. 134. [2] As cited in Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, p. 134. 

In the previous post, I mentioned two experiences that helped bring Bulgakov back to the Orthodox Church.  In this post, we encounter the third experience, viz., the death of Bulgakov’s  four year old son in the summer of 1909.  At his son’s funeral, Bulgakov had a strong sense that “his child lived in the life of the Resurrection” (p. 602).  This experience moved him to re-read Soloviev’s works in which the theme of wisdom (created and uncreated) is prominent.  Bulgakov develops his theme of “the Wisdom of God as the foundation and goal of all earthly reality” and begins to employ it in his writings on economics and philosophy.  In his book, Философия Хозяйство (The Philosophy of Economy, 1912), Bulgakov argues that even though our labor is toilsome, the economic process is meaningful because it participates in the Divine Wisdom.  Moreover, our struggles in nature also involve (besides pain and difficulties) joy and beauty, if we, as followers of Christ, realize that human beings possess a “hidden potential for perfection [and so must] work to resurrect nature, to endow it once again with the life and meaning it had in Eden.”[1]  For Bulgakov, the most mundane human activities have value and are redeemable “by the Christian message of the fall and resurrection of man and, with man, nature.  We have a common task and it is universal resurrection out of fall, bringing resurrection-life into everything” (p. 603). 

By 1917, Bulgakov was recognized in Russia as a gifted Orthodox intellectual and was elected a member of the Russian Church Council-a council which had the massive responsibility of picking up the pieces after the fateful February Revolution (1917).  However, with the subsequent October Revolution and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, the Orthodox Church came under great persecution, and Bulgakov, now ordained as a priest, was forced the following year (1918) to flee (p. 603, 604).  He found a temporary place of rest in the Crimea, but this was soon taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1922.  As a result, Bulgakov, as were many intellectuals, was forced to leave and eventually made his way to Paris where he lived his remaining years (1925-1944).  In Paris, Bulgakov became a founding member of the theological institute, Saint-Serge, where he taught for a number of years (p. 604).  During his time in the Crimea, Bulgakov briefly entertained becoming a Catholic; however, this period of doubt ended in a strengthening of his own Orthodox roots. Nonetheless, Bulgakov was extremely ecumenically minded and interacted with a number of Anglicans and other Protestants. Describing Bulgakov’s ecumenical activities, Nichols writes:

In 1927 he helped found-in England-the Anglican-Orthodox Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and in the years 1933 to 1935 published some remarkable articles in English in the journal of that Fellowship, arguing that Orthodoxy remained in what he called an “invisible, mysterious communion with Catholicism (p. 604).

Although Bulgakov was well-known as a theologian-in part due to the publication of his “Little Trilogy”:  The Friend of the Bridegroom, The Burning Bush, and Jacob’s Ladder-in 1935 Bulgakov was charged with heresy by two Russian jurisdictions (both of which were not his own jurisdiction, the Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarch for Western Europe, in which Bulgakov remained in good standing) [p. 604, 605].  The charge against Bulgakov, which he strongly denied, was that “Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is in effect a fourth person of the Holy Trinity” (p. 605). 

In the years 1933-1936, Bulgakov wrote his “Great Triology”:  The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb.  He became ill with cancer of the throat in 1939 and died on July 12, 1944, not long after the completion of his final book, The Apocalypse of John. 

Nichols, Fr. Aidan.  “Wisdom from Above? The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov,” New Blackfriars 85, (2004): 598-613.

Notes

---

[1] C. Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, p. 147, as found in “Wisdom from Above,” p. 603. 

My brief introduction to Bulgakov is based on Fr. Aidan Nichols article, “Wisdom from Above? The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov”[1]-an article that is worth reading in its entirety.  Bulgakov, who was to become an important 20^th century theological figure in both Orthodox and Latin theological circles, was born in 1871 in a rural town in south-central Russia.  Bulgakov’s father was an Orthodox priest, and his family line included a number of priests (p. 599).  Although his early education was religiously focused, as a young teen Bulgakov underwent a faith crisis and in 1888 publicly proclaimed himself an unbeliever at the age of 18.  Two years later, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, where his interest in and commitment to Marxism grew with an ever-increasing intensity (p. 599).  Entailed in Bulgakov’s embrace of Marxism was the idea that human beings are essentially material beings, “albeit an expression of the nobility and complexity matter could attain” (p. 599).  In 1897 Bulgakov published his first work, “On Markets in the Capitalist System of Production,” and even so, he had already begun to experience some uncertainties with regard to central Marxist claims. 

As Nichols explains, there were three significant experiences (two of which are described below) that played crucial roles in bringing Bulgakov back to his Orthodox faith.  The first occurred

in 1894 when holidaying in the Caucasus mountains on the border between the present day Georgia and the Russian Federation.  It was an experience of the beauty of the mountains as somehow more than material-a pointer to a beauty that transcends matter [...].  A few years later, in the period 1898 to 1900 while he was studying abroad (by this point, incidentally, he had married), he underwent the second experience which led to his re-conversation to the faith.  And this was by way of response to the spiritual purity he glimpsed in a painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael.  Known as the “Sistine Madonna”, he saw it displayed in Saxony, in the City of Dresden art gallery.  On his return from Germany to Russia, his Marxism was definitely shaken, and his master’s thesis on capitalism and agriculture, which he presented at this time, is generally regarded as the work of someone already leaving a distinctively Marxian viewpoint behind (p. 600). 

With the completion of his thesis, he was able at the age of thirty to obtain a teaching position in political economics at the University of Kiev.  In addition to teaching, Bulgakov was also very active in politics and served in 1907 as a deputy to the Second Duma (p. 600).  During this time, Bulgakov began to doubt the ability of Russia’s newly introduced constitutional reforms to truly change people’s lives.  As Nichols observes, the changes in Bulgakov’s views

coincided with a change of direction in the aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia generally.  They become more interested in the creative powers of the human mind-an interest which, in philosophy, is often connected with the school of thought called “Idealism”.  They also began to look more sympathetically at religion and especially at the Russian heritage of Orthodox Christianity.  Such intellectuals hoped for a reform and renewal of the Church. That was partly because they expected so deeply rooted an institution to have some effect in transforming the rest of society.  Bulgakov’s own personal developments mirrors these trends.  He moved from Marxism to Idealism, without, however, denying his earlier interest in the economy and the potential of matter.  And then he moved from Idealism to a rediscovered Orthodoxy, without, however, denying his earlier convictions of the importance of human creativity, the uniqueness of the human subject, the person who says “I”.  This happened at an exciting time in Russian cultural and intellectual life, a time historians have dubbed Russia’s “silver age” (pp. 600-601). 

Bulgakov’s contribution to Russia’s short-lived Silver Age was to help reawaken interest in Dostoevsky by giving a famous lecture on the novel, The Brothers Karamazov.  Ironically, or rather providentially, Bulgakov’s efforts to draw attention back to Dostoevsky occurred during the same time that Dmitri Merezhkovsky-a highly influential literary critic-was also promoting Dostoevsky’s works among the intelligentsia of St. Petersburg.  According to Merezhkovsky, Dostoevsky’s work points to the religious principle that should govern human culture, viz., “Godmanhood”-a principle of grace by which God raises humanity into union with Himself and, which stands opposed to the principle operative and ruling in the West, “mangodhood” (p. 601).  Bulgakov, in his essay “Церков и культура” (“Church and Culture”)-an essay written prior to his return to the Church-stressed Christianity’s mission to culture, claiming that there are no “religiously indifferent” or neutral zones; “[t]here must be nothing that is in principle ‘secular’”.[2]  In essence, Bulgakov’s essay was a challenge to the Church, “for the Church had in effect abandoned its task of being yeast to the leaven of the rest of culture and [had] withdrawn into the ghetto of its own rituals” (p. 602).  As a number of Silver Age intellectuals grew weary of the claims made by the then predominant anti-religious voices of Russian intelligentsia, they published a collection of essays entitled Вехи (Signposts), which served both as a kind of manifesto as well as a critique of their predecessors.   One of the new (religiously attuned) intelligentsia’s main points of contention focused on how a true and lasting transformation of culture is possible.  According to the authors of the Signposts essays, genuine transformation of society must include, and in fact presupposes, conversion of human hearts to the Good. 

Notes

---

[1] As found in New Blackfriars 85, (2004): 598-613.

[2] As found in “Wisdom from Above?” p. 602.  Republished in S. Bulgakov, Dva grada (Two Cities), Moscow, 1911, p. 309. 

“God is the light by which, indispensably, we perceive our darkness.  The light itself is not perceived.  The cognitive pursuit of God, like the sunflower weary of time, counts the steps of this Sun, seeking after journey’s end but falling again and again to earth with each circuit of the central and invisible Presence.  The mystic goes like a moth to the flame and is consumed, but the theologian who survives relapses into autobiography.  The sun can illumine only if it keeps its distance; God can authorize our inscriptions only so long as they fail to catch him.  The remotion of the signified is the life (mortal life and living death) of the signifiers and the condition of signification” (pp. 42-43). 

Louis Mackey.  Peregrinations of the Word:  Essays in Medieval Philosophy.  Ann Arbor:  Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000.

I recently finished reading the book of Job, and came across a few surprising verses in the last chapter.  For example, at the end of Job, we read that part of Job’s restoration included ten more children-seven sons and three daughters-and that Job “named the first [daughter] Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch.” The text goes on to say that Job “gave them an inheritance along with their brothers” (Job 42:13-15). First of all, it struck me as very unusual, particularly in an Old Testament book, to find a listing of the daughters’ names and not the sons’ names. Likewise, I wondered whether, in light of the cultural practices of the day, it was significant that the text highlighted the fact that the daughters also received an inheritance from their father.  Lastly, it seemed that a number of redemptive historical connections that might be drawn from these “clues.”  So I ran these questions/thoughts by a friend of mine who happens to be an Old Testament scholar, Professor Douglas J. Green (Ph.D. Yale University).  Below is a summary of what he said:

(1)  It is indeed unusual that the daughters are named and the sons are not.

(2)  It is also surprising that the daughters along with the sons receive an inheritance, as this instance in Job is unlike some cases that we find in the OT where daughters receive an inheritance because there are no male siblings. 

(3)  If we read the end of Job as a metaphorical return from exile, i.e., as a proleptic view of what things will be like (or at least will begin to be like) in the age to come (i.e., our present age), then a number of interesting possibilities present themselves. 

In other words, the end of Job can be understood as a proto-resurrection story and, as mentioned above, as a foretaste of kingdom life in which both sons and daughters receive an inheritance from the Father, and male and female are given an equal status in the Resurrected One (Gal 3:28) to whom Job’s proto-resurrection points!

I haven’t done justice to Green’s insights on Job-trust me he has significantly more to say than what I’ve summarized briefly above.  Perhaps he will publish the detailed version of his reading of Job sometime in the near future, until then, I’ll leave you with a lengthy quote from Green from one of his lectures on the topic.

Allowing for a reading that transcends (strict) authorial intention, Green suggests that there are a number of connections to be made between Job and righteous Israel’s suffering in exile, and that even if some readers refuse to listen to these clues because they have been overly influenced by modernist hermeneutical assumptions, such was not the case for readers of the late or post-exillic period.  As Green explains,

perhaps readers in the late Exilic or post-Exilic period, readers familiar with Deuteronomy and the Prophets, readers struggling with questions about the suffering of righteous Israel similar to the ones that Second Isaiah is trying to answer, might read Job very differently. The language of Job as Yahweh’s servant, the apparent “echoes” of Second Isaiah in Job 16-19 (or are they echoes of Job in Isaiah?) and the use of Deuteronomic-prophetic “return from captivity” language to describe Job’s reversal of fortunes – all this may have provided more than adequate grounds for these ancient readers to pull Job into the orbit of the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah and even to (metaphorically) identify the two.

If this is what happened – and yes, it is speculative but in the light of some hints in later exegesis, not entirely so  – then this might explain why Job eventually found its way into that body of literature that Israel eventually labeled as “Scripture.” My contention is that Job came to be read, not as the story of the suffering of “Any Man.” Rather, later readers have pulled Job into the metanarrative of redemptive history, interpreting and valuing the book as another creative commentary – like Second Isaiah – on the meaning of one of the great conundrums of the Exile: the inexplicable suffering/exile of the righteous remnant of Israel. 

In suggesting that Israelite readers made this connection, I realize that I am pulling both the question of Job’s meaning and the question of its canonicity out of the realm of authorial intention and into the realm of reader-response.  Not wild reader response. Not deconstruction or ideological criticism. A reader response that has its roots at least in the text’s connotations if not its denotations. There are enough “hooks” in the text – again, whether they are authorially deliberate or accidental is of no consequence at this point – to invite and encourage, or at least make Job susceptible to, a reading that connects the story to the metanarrative of redemptive history. A reading that makes Job a parable (extended metaphor) of the Exile and Restoration of righteous. A reading that turns it into an additional commentary (besides Second Isaiah) and theological reflection not merely on the generic problem of the suffering of the righteous, but the very specific problem of the God’s apparent violation of the (Mosaic/Deuteronomic) covenant when he brought the covenant curse of Exile/Captivity (Deut 28) on the covenant-keeping remnant of Israel.

Whether I am right my speculations about the reasons behind Job’s canonicity matters little.  What I am arguing for here is a way of reading Job – as an intertext to the story of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant.  I am not suggesting that this is the only right way of reading Job, only that it is a good reading – a good midrash! – (that is, a profitable interpretation that creatively reads with rather than against “grain” of the text, and a reading that will conform to the shape of the Gospel once it is fully revealed to us).  

In a section discussing the ways in which Gadamer relativizes Heidegger’s ontological difference, Wachterhauser states the following:

If [according to Gadamer] we cannot raise issues of Being apart from other related issues like Being’s relationship to the other transcendentals-including the Good-and these issues in turn involve us in questions about the relationships between transcendentals and Ideas, as well as Ideas and things, then we can no longer insist on a strict and unequivocal ontological difference.  This is perhaps the most profound implication of Gadamer’s ontological insights.  Gadamer’s position implies a modern appropriation of the analogia entis and as such it emphasizes the analogical connections between all realities.  Such ontological analogies or connections imply a challenge to any unbridgeable gap or difference between Being and beings.  If Heidegger’s thought suffers from an increasing tendency to insist on this unbridgeable difference, Gadamer’s thought relatizives the difference between Being and beings and draws them closer to each other without forgetting that there is also a difference to be preserved.  The most important implication of this relativizing of the ontological difference is that questions about the Good can once again be seen as central to ontology” (Beyond Being:  Gadamer’s Post-Platonic Hermeneutical Ontology. Evanston:  Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999, pp. 193-194).

Although a Christian might want to probe further, asking whether Gadamer’s position (on Christian presuppositions) is not guilty of a possible blurring of the Creator/creature distinction, the idea that Gadamer’s project is a kind of “modern appropriation of the analogia entis” harmonizes well with Gadamer’s hermeneutical claims regarding the multivalent nature of meaning.   In other words, his hermeneutic maps nicely onto his ontology.