Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) 9780198744603

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee J. BARTON M. J. EDWARDS G. D. FLOOD D. N. J. MACCULLOCH

M. N. A. BOCKMUEHL P. S. FIDDES S. R. I. FOOT G. WARD

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Ethics and Biblical Narrative A Literary and Discourse-Analytical Approach to the Story of Josiah S. Min Chun (2014) Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia The Rise of Devotionalism and the Politics of Genealogy Kiyokazu Okita (2014) Ricoeur on Moral Religion A Hermeneutics of Ethical Life James Carter (2014) Canon Law and Episcopal Authority The Canons of Antioch and Serdica Christopher W. B. Stephens (2015) Time in the Book of Ecclesiastes Mette Bundvad (2015) Bede’s Temple An Image and its Interpretation Conor O’Brien (2015) C. S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation Gary Slater (2015) Defending the Trinity in the Reformed Palatinate ‘The Elohistae’ Benjamin R. Merkle (2015) The Vision of Didymus the Blind A Fourth-Century Virtue-Origenism Grant D. Bayliss (2015) George Errington and Roman Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century England Serenhedd James (2016) Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch Julia T. Meszaros (2016)

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Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology B RA N D O N GA LLA H ER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Brandon Gallaher 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931587 ISBN 978–0–19–874460–3 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Michelle . . . more distant than stars and nearer than the eye T. S. Eliot, ‘Marina’

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Foreword We have more or less got used to the idea that theology cannot be done as if we could be spectators of the divine nature and action from a stance that is nowhere in particular. Not only does theology presuppose a God whose action has both established and maintained relation with what is not God (i.e. us among other things), it also works on the assumption that only the contemplation of this action can give us access of any kind to any understanding of ‘what’ God is, what it is to be God, the divine essence. About this latter, it is strictly impossible to speak, except on the grounds of how divine action has impinged on us as acting and knowing subjects. So from the start of any theological enterprise, we are stuck with a dual requirement. What we say of God must be grounded in what God has done in our regard; in the act of God in relation to the finite order. And what we say of God must do justice to the completely unconstrained character of God’s action as something that belongs in no causal chain or interactive pattern but is eternally and ‘necessarily’ what it is. Forget the first of these points and theology becomes an exercise in metaphysical arrogance—not to say nonsense—seeking to analyse the infinite as it is in itself, beyond all relatedness. Forget the second and theology sinks towards mythology, chronicling the adventures of a spiritual agent among others, though vastly superior. Positively, we want to say that what God does in our regard is of a piece with what God is, not an arbitrary or groundless act; and we want also to say that, unless that act is an act of utterly unconditioned freedom, it simply is not really God we are speaking of, and we have no hope of being delivered from whatever tangles and slaveries are created by the interaction of rival finite agencies. Brandon Gallaher, in this magnificently learned and sophisticated study of three of the greatest theological minds of the last century, shows how thinking about all this in the context of specifically Trinitarian theology brings us up against the most fundamental questions of theological method. But he also suggests ways through—not by resolving problems with tidier and more satisfying theological schemes, but by making us clarify again and again the shape and grammar of the basic narrative out of which Christian theology grows. God’s freedom is a freedom to be God; that must be axiomatic. But it must also be a freedom to be the God revealed in Jesus Christ. What is freely shown, embodied, and enacted in the incarnate reality of Jesus is what it is to be God, not a passing phase of divine life or a mere aspect of it. And this in turn means that if the reality of Jesus is to be characterized above all as a reality shaped by dispossession, by the free putting of oneself at the disposal,

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or even at the mercy, of an other, then God’s own eternal freedom (thatin-virtue-of-which God exerts the activity of being eternally God) is an eternal movement of dispossession, emptying into the other. Put more simply, God’s freedom is the freedom to be bound in faithful love. Only a freedom quite outside the competing forces of rival finite identities can be free in this way. And this is where the doctrine of the Trinity provides the essential key, in its absolute denial that there is in the divine life any collision or competition of identities, any more than there is a competition of identities between finite and infinite. What we learn to say about God in the Trinitarian context is that there is in God no ‘selfhood’ to defend as we understand it; so that the act of being God is sheerly self-bestowing, so much so that it can be embodied and expressed in contexts that are as far as can be imagined from freedom or perfect self-presence—in the dereliction on the cross, in the realm of the forgotten dead. The three theologians examined here share this general set of assumptions and give them immensely complex but often exceptionally poignant and memorable expression. All seek to find a way of acknowledging that all we say of God is about God in relation to the finite—but that to make sense of this, we have to see that relatedness as rooted in God’s eternal character. Relatedness is the ground of what we say because relatedness is what we cannot avoid speaking of where God is concerned, in eternity or in time, in God’s self or in God’s action ad extra. This involves some sailing close to the wind: language which might imply that God’s being God somehow depended on the history of the finite universe, language which might qualify eternal freedom in the name of eternal relationality. But all of them clearly want to affirm both of the requirements we began with. And to make full sense of how they do this, we need a very resourceful and nuanced discrimination between different usages of the word ‘freedom’. Brandon Gallaher provides just such a set of analytic tools, and brilliantly allows us to read his theologians in the light of what they intend. He helps us resist leaping to negative conclusions on the grounds of the risks they take for the sake of doing justice to the irreducible relatedness of God to God—in which the relation of God to what is not God is rooted. This is a book which raises issues of the most basic theological interest. It is very far from being a monograph on a single rather technical point in dogmatics or philosophy of religion; it points to the deepest questions of theological method, and to the question of how to express a thoroughgoing Christian ontology. In discussing thinkers from the Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed worlds with equal insight and sympathy, it models an ecumenical engagement that goes far beyond institutional courtesies and pacific formulae. It reminds us that to do theology at all, whatever our confessional location, we have to tackle the issues raised by speaking of divine freedom and divine relatedness—because these are the questions that the narrative of Jesus Christ

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ultimately obliges us to think through: not as detached observers or as enthusiastic mythographers, but as created persons seeking to understand what it means for them to be made sharers in the divine nature by the divine liberty. It is a book of signal and unusual importance in its breadth of reference but also in the fundamental nature of its agenda, and it will repay detailed and repeated study by all interested in theology’s integrity and creativity. Rowan Williams Magdalene College, Cambridge Feast of Mary Magdalene 2015

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Acknowledgements This book is a revision of my doctoral thesis for the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. I would like to say I have simply taken too long on this project. But perhaps it is better to say: it took as long as it needed. Certainly, the study had a life of its own. During its composition I was first a postgraduate student at Regent’s Park College, Oxford (thanks to Dr Robert Ellis and the Fellows) followed by a Stipendiary Lecturer of Theology at Keble College, Oxford (thanks to Prof Markus Bockmuehl) then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, Oxford (thanks to Prof Johannes Zachhuber) affiliated with Regent’s Park (thanks to Dr Robert Ellis and Prof Paul Fiddes) and presently a Lecturer of Systematic and Comparative Theology at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter (thanks to Profs Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Morwenna Ludlow). As a doctorate the work took its final shape at the Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR), Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University (thanks to Prof Torrance Kirby). It came to a conclusion as a book while I was a Distinguished Guest Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Notre Dame (NDIAS) (thanks to Profs John Betz, Brad Gregory, Cyril O’Regan, and Dr Donald Stelluto) and a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions (CISMOR), School of Theology, Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan) (thanks to Profs Katsuhiro Kohara and Junya Shinohe and Dr Juichiro Tanabe). I am immensely grateful for financial support from the British Academy. Thanks are also due to the Overseas Research Students (ORS) Awards Scheme and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. I am indebted above all to my doctoral supervisor Prof Paul S. Fiddes for his wisdom, patience, exacting standards, creativity, and compassion. He taught me that to be a creative theologian is to have a sympathetic communion with one’s sources and openness to the world. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia has been to me both a friend and father in Christ and has shown me the vision of the Fathers: an oecumenical Orthodoxy freed from all provincialism. Dr Rowan Williams, my DPhil External Examiner, has been ever gracious and inspiring. Remarks in his Bulgakov book inspired the thesis, which he then examined with compassion and insight. I am honoured he agreed to write a foreword. Prof George Pattison, as the Internal Examiner of both my MSt and DPhil, has always challenged me as a thinker. His refusal to be satisfied with settled

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orthodoxies and his fearlessness on the path of dialogue remain an inspiration in my recent work on comparative theology. Great thanks especially are due to Prof Aristotle (‘Telly’) Papanikolaou, who read my manuscript for Oxford University Press, and provided important insights and critiques. He has become a trusted friend, mentor, and intellectual co-worker in the current re-envisioning of Orthodox theology. Thanks to Amber Schley-Iragui for Chapter 3’s diagram and Boris Jakim for generously sharing his unpublished translations over many years. I am grateful to Canon A. M. (‘Donald’) Allchin (†), Profs John Behr, John J. O’Donnell SJ (†), and Michael Plekon for crucial early guidance and mentorship. Thanks to Dr Alexey and Prof Lucy Kostyanovsky for proofreading and checking my Russian translations; Dr Matthew Baker (†), Profs Peter Bouteneff, Matthew Bruce, Gavin D’Costa, Nicholas Denysenko, Dr David Dunn, Prof Paul Gavrilyuk, Dr Oliver Herbel, Prof Alexei Klimoff, Drs Romilo Knežević, Julia Konstantinovsky, Irina Kukota, Profs Paul Ladouceur, Andrew Louth, Michael Martin, Jennifer Martin, Paul Meyendorff, Dr David Newheiser, Fr Aidan Nichols OP, Profs Cyrus P. Olsen, Marcus Plested, Fr Andrei Psarev, Dr John Romanowsky, Prof Joost van Rossum, Fr Nicholas (Sakharov), Dr Jonathan Seiling, Prof Vera Shevzov, Dr Oliver Smith (†), Prof Jonathan Sutton, Prof Alexis Torrance, Fr Tikhon (Vasilyev), Drs Daniel Whistler, Roman Zaviyskyy, and Regula Zwahlen for discussion of drafts and critical engagement; and Prof Nicholas (Fr. Maximos) Constas and Dr Susan Griffith for help with Patristic sources. Only the mistakes are mine. The last year and a half at the University of Exeter’s Department of Theology and Religion has been a wonderful transition from postdoctoral research to regular academic life. I am especially grateful to the kindness and grace shown to me by Profs David Horrell, Morwenna Ludlow, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, our administrator, Susan Margetts, my close teaching colleagues (Dr Susannah Cornwall and Prof Esther Reed), and students. Special thanks are due to Oxford University Press and the Theological Monographs Series for their great patience and generosity, especially, Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tom Perridge, and Karen Raith. I am especially thankful to Susan Frampton for copy-editing the book, to Donald Watt for proofreading, to J. Naomi Linzer for creating the index, and to Saraswathi Ethiraju for managing its production. I am grateful to many friends for encouragement over the years, especially, Fr Matthew Baker (†), Profs Markus Bockmuehl, Federico Caprotti, Fr John Chryssavgis, Profs Will Cohen, Paul Gavrilyuk, Fr Ian Graham, Nick and Helen Graham, Fr Oliver Herbel, Amber and Charles Iragui, Frances and Simon Jennings, Fr Romilo of Hilandar, Sr Seraphima of St John the Baptist Monastery, (Essex), Dr Alexey and Prof Lucy Kostyanovsky, Profs Paul Ladouceur, Morwenna Ludlow, Andrew Marlborough, Fr Stephen and Anna Platt, Fr Porphyrios (Plant), Fr Richard and Jaime René, Dr Albert Rossi, Joel and Barbara Schillinger, Fr Peter and Irina Scorer, Patricia Scott and Gregory and Christopher Sprucker.

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This book would not have been written without my family’s long-suffering love and support: Dr Donald and Yolande (†) Gallaher, Tiffany Gallaher, Massimo Savino, Safia and Ilyas Boutaleb, Howard (†) (and sine qua non) Anne (‘Arnee’) Holloway, my children (Sophie, Ita, Alban, and Maria) and especially my wife, Michelle, who is pure gift: Should I tell what a miracle she was. University of Exeter Holy Saturday 30 April 2016 B.D.F.G.

Excerpt from The Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, a verse rendering for the modern reader by John Ciardi. Copyright © 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970 by John Ciardi. Reprinted by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics. 4 vols. Edinburgh: T & T Clark International UK, 1956–75. Used by Permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All Rights Reserved. Excerpts from ‘Marina’, ‘Burnt Norton’, and ‘Little Gidding’ from THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. © 1969 by Valerie Eliot, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Also from COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by Permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Portions of Chapters 5–8 appeared in an earlier form as ‘“A Supertemporal Continuum”: Christocentric Trinity and the Dialectical Reenvisioning of Divine Freedom in Bulgakov and Barth’ in Correlating Sobornost: Conversations Between Karl Barth and Russian Orthodox Theology, eds John C. McDowell, Scott A. Kirkland, and Ashley J. Moyse (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 95–133. Copyright © 2016 by Augsburg Fortress Publishers and reprinted by permission. All Rights Reserved. ‘The Well Dressed Man With a Beard’ from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Also from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1955, 1966 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Excerpts from ‘Crazy Jane on God’ and ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOLUME I: THE POEMS, REVISED by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by The Macmillan Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All Rights Reserved.

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Contents References and Abbreviations

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INTRODUCTION: THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF GOD AS MYSTERY AND ‘PROBLEMATIC’ 1. Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’

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2. Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach: From Freedom to Necessity—The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A)

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3. Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach: From Necessity to Freedom—The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B)

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PART I. GOD AS BOTH ABSOLUTE AND ABSOLUTE-RELATIVE IN SERGII BULGAKOV 4. ‘Sophiological Antinomism’—Sergii Bulgakov’s Debt to and Critique of Vladimir Solov’ev

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5. God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative in Bulgakov: Theological Antinomy in the Doctrine of God

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6. Divine Freedom and the Need of God for Creation

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PART II. DIVINE SELF-DETERMINATION IN J ESUS CHRIST IN KARL BARTH 7. Trinity and the Doctrine of Election in Karl Barth

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8. Trinity, Freedom, and Necessity in Karl Barth—A Dialectical Approach

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PART III. JESUS CHRIST AND THE TRINITARIAN APPROPRIATION OF THE DIALECTIC OF FREEDOM AND NECESSITY IN HANS URS VON BALTHASAR 9. The Metaphysics of Love—Four Steps

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10. The Trinity, Creation, and Freedom—More on the Fourth Step

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11. Christ, Creation, and Divine Possibilities—‘Sheltered within’ the Trinity

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Contents CONCLUSION: THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF GOD AND THE MYSTERY OF DIVINE ELECTION

12. Concluding Unsystematic Systematic Postscript

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Bibliography Index

251 287

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References and Abbreviations The Library of Congress System for Russian transliteration (except for certain names) is used. For the Bible, the RSV is used, unless otherwise indicated. Given the bulk of criticism, a hybrid system of citation has been used: a) the abbreviations listed below for frequently cited works and some series; b) and the author’s name and date of publication for all other works (except a few ‘classics’). Where the original of a work is simply cited, the translation is my own. Where two or more separate sentences have the same citation, the citation will be given in the last sentence. Full titles and information are provided in the Bibliography. AA AB AHT Amb. AW BB BC BL C CCSG CCSL CD I–IV Cht. CL CO CRDT CSEL CSG DN enn. I–VII FC

Athanasius’ Against the Arians Sergii Bulgakov’s Agnets Bozhii Rowan Williams’ Arius: Heresy and Tradition Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua F. W. J. Schelling’s The Ages of the World—Third Version Bulgakov’s The Burning Bush John Zizioulas’ Being as Communion Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb Bulgakov’s The Comforter Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, vols. I–IV Vladimir Solov’ev’s Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy Zizioulas’ Communion and Otherness Bruce L. McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Paul S. Fiddes’ The Creative Suffering of God Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divine Names Plotinus’ Enneads, vols. I–VII The Fathers of the Church

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xviii Filo. FKh G GCS GL I-VII GNO H I-III HH I IAP IiI IJST IIRM IV KB KD I–IV K Krit. LDH LG NF NPNF OF OM PE PG PGT PIG PIK PL PM PO De Pot.

References and Abbreviations Solov’ev’s Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia Bulgakov’s Filosofiia Khoziaistva Bulgakov’s ‘Glavy o Troichnosti’ Die grieschischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, vols. I–VII Gregorii Nysseni Opera Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit, vols. I–III Bulgakov’s ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity’ Bulgakov’s Ikona i Ikonopochitanie Bulgakov’s ‘Iuda Iskariot—apostol-predatel’’ Bulgakov’s ‘Ipostas’ i Ipostasnost’’ International Journal of Systematic Theology Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli Bulgakov’s The Icon and its Veneration Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth Barth’s Die kirchliche Dogmatik, vols. I–IV Bulgakov’s Kupina neopalimaia Solov’ev’s Kritika otvlechennykh nachal Solov’ev’s Lectures on Divine Humanity Bulgakov’s The Lamb of God John Behr’s The Nicene Faith Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (first and second series) John of Damascus’ The Orthodox Faith Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics’ Bulgakov’s Philosophy of Economy Patrologia Graeca Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth Fiddes’ Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity Solov’ev’s The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge Patrologia Latina Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung Thomas Aquinas’ De Potentia

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References and Abbreviations PR 1–3 PTS REU RUC S SB SC SEET SG SJT SN SS SSVSS 1–12 ST SVTQ SW I–XIV SWG SWKG SysTh 1–3 ThD I–IV TD I–V TF TH TK ThL I–III TL I–III U UL Urk. De Ver. WP WSA

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G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vols. 1–3 Patristische Texte und Studien Solov’ev’s La Russie et l’église universelle Solov’ev’s Russia and the Universal Church Florensky’s Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny Rowan Williams’ (ed., trans., and introd.) Sergii Bulgakov Sources chrétiennes Studies in East European Thought Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles Scottish Journal of Theology Bulgakov’s Svet Nevechernii Bulgakov’s ‘A Summary of Sophiology’ Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vols. 1–12 Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, vols. I–XIV Bulgakov’s Sophia, The Wisdom of God Fiddes’ Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, vols. 1–3 Balthasar’s Theodramatik, vols. I–IV Balthasar’s Theo-Drama, vols. I–V Bulgakov’s Tragediia Filosofii Balthasar’s A Theology of History Jürgen Moltmann’s The Trinity and the Kingdom Balthasar’s Theologik, vols. I–III Balthasar’s Theo-Logic, vols. I–III Bulgakov’s Uteshitel’ Bulgakov’s Unfading Light Urkunden zur Geschichte des Arianischen Streites 318–328, ed. H.-G. Opitz, Athanasius Werke, 3.1 Aquinas’ De veritate Adrienne von Speyr’s The World of Prayer The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century

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Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Cor. 3:17)

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Introduction The Absolute Freedom of God as Mystery and ‘Problematic’

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1 Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ Any Trinitarian theology that is honest must begin with its defeat. It is impossible—being bound by the flesh—to worthily draw near and serve, let alone conceptualize, the King of Glory who is without beginning, uncircumscribable, and changeless, beyond both affirmations and negations.1 This ‘defeat’ of theology as realized in worship, however, is not merely a negative posture. On the contrary, defeat or ‘un-mastery’2 for the Christian can flower forth awe, a wonder at something joyous and inconceivable, which is the basic contemplative attitude out of which theology should arise. It is through awe that we come to experience the Trinity and the nexus of this experience is one of divine-human love, what might be called the ‘mystery of freedom and necessity’. Here John of the Cross (1542–91) is helpful in unpacking the theme of our study. Man has a desire for God implanted in him by God, John claims, and God in seeing this love—like a ‘hair’ fluttering at the soul’s neck—comes down in freedom to arouse it, to make man captive to it, but in arousing it, God Himself becomes ‘wounded’ by a ‘crazy love’ (eros manikos) for creation,3 captive to it Himself since ‘The power and the tenacity of love is great, for love captures and binds God himself [pues Dios prenda y liga].’4 But how can God be ‘bound’ if for Him, as Spirit, Freedom itself (2 Cor. 3:17), ‘all things are possible’ (Mt. 19:26; and of Christ: 28:18, Jn. 17:2) because no one can resist 1 Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, 1.2 and 5 [PTS 36; 1.2, ll.3–7, 143 and 5, 11.5–9, 150], 136 and 141. 2 Coakley 2013, 43ff. and see 255–6, 343–4, 2002, 3–54 and compare Lossky 1976, 23–43, 1974, 13–43, S. Sakharov 1991, 39–42, 208–13, and Adrienne von Speyr, World of Prayer [=WP], 294–8. 3 Cabasilas, Life in Christ, 6.3, 164 [PG 150/SC 361, 2: 6.16, 648A, l.4, 52–3]; compare Dionysius, Divine Names [=DN], 4.10–18, esp. 13–14 [PTS 33; 154–63, esp. 158–60], 78–83. See Evdokimov 2001, 191–4. 4 John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 32.1, 599 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 32.1, 189] and see 31.1–10, 595–8 [ibid., 184–9]. (Unless otherwise indicated, I shall use the English literary convention of ‘man’ when referring to ‘humanity’, male and female.)

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Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

His will (Rom. 9:19)? Thus, just as it would be incorrect to conclude that God cannot call or is unjust in calling the Gentiles to be engrafted into Israel, so too it would seem that we would be in error (mē genoito (Rom. 9:14)) in saying that God had to call us, was impelled to bind Himself to us in Christ (Rom. 9:15ff.). God, John continues, freely becomes the ‘prisoner’ of the soul and he ‘is surrendered to all her desires…those who act with love and friendship toward him will make him do all they desire…by love they bind him with one hair’.5 Yet no credit is due to the soul in attracting the ecstatic desire of God in Christ through its love. The soul cannot of its own power ‘capture this divine bird of heights’. God’s love is free and He was ‘captivated by the flight of the hair’ because He first gazed at us, loved, and came down to arouse our desire in taking flesh.6 The love that John speaks of is the desire of the soul for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, as the ‘Bridegroom’, but this love is divine since the Son of God ‘is the principal lover’.7 The Word, the Son of God, together with the Father and Spirit is hidden by His essence, which is love itself, and therefore is present in the ‘innermost Being of the soul’.8 God out of a free ecstatic self-giving and self-receiving love, an ordered outward-going desire (marrying eros and agape=‘love-desire’)9 which is both Trinitarian and Christoform, has become bound by His own desire for creation, allowing His life to be determined by the creature as a certain freely willed necessity for Him creating a divine-human joint captivation of love.10 In thinking about such a form of love-desire we are immediately thrown still deeper into awe when we remember that the same God who is self-captivated by us is said to have always loved us with an ‘everlasting love’ (Ps. 103:17, Is. 54:8, Jer. 31:3) in Jesus Christ (Jn. 17:20–6). Divine love freely and everlastingly covenants itself to us (Is. 55:3–5) in Christ (Heb. 7:22), who, being ‘before all things’ (Col. 1:17), is the foundation of creation (Col. 1:16) as the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8 [KJV]). Such a love will not, indeed, cannot turn back from its commitment to creation in Him (Ps. 110:4/Heb. 7:21 and see 6:17–18). The author of 1 Peter puts this neatly: ‘He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake’ (1 Pet. 1:20). This union of Christ + world + Father/God is quite simply an eternal union of love (Jn. 15:9, 17:20–6 and see 2 Thess. 2:16–17) and it is the eternality of this union of creation with God in

5

John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 32.1, 599 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 189]. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 31.8, 598 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 188]. 7 John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 12.2–3, 516 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 73–4] and 31.2, 596 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 185]. 8 John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 1.6, 480 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 24] and see 11.3–4, 511–12 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 67–8], Living Flame of Love, 1.6–15, 643–6 [Llama de amor viva, 2: 243–7], 2.34, 670–1 [ibid., 280–1] and 4.14, 713 [ibid., 334]. 9 See Paul Fiddes, Seeing the World and Knowing God [=SWKG], 150ff. 10 See Coakley 2013, esp. 2–27, 308–34. 6

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Jesus Christ (Jn. 17:24) that is so theologically problematic. If God has always desired to be in union with us in Jesus Christ, has He not then always been freely captivated by us in the way John of the Cross describes above? More audaciously yet, do we not need to exist in order that God might be lovingly (albeit freely) captivated by us in Christ? How can we conceive such a God? In other words, what we have called the mystery of freedom and necessity is Trinitarian in character, for if God has always loved us, it would seem plausible that the free ‘self-captivation’ of God has an eternal basis in God as Trinity. The tensions here are the bounds of the mystery of freedom and necessity which defeat us. Herein lies the Trinitarian depths of this mystery, for if God has an everlasting love for us in Christ and He is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then it would seem that God is God as Trinity only as God for us in Christ. This mystery of freedom and necessity is firstly an experience of revelation but it can be conceptualized in terms of a question: ‘How can God as Trinity be free in creation and redemption if in His everlasting love, His mad desire for creation, He has eternally bound Himself to the world in Christ?’ By stating the mystery as a ‘question’, however, we do not mean to imply that a particular interpretation of the data of revelation leads us to a specific theological ‘problem’ with a determinate doctrinal ‘solution’. Rather, the question here is, to adapt Martin Heidegger on philosophy, a theological path or way forward into whose ‘total and original meaning’ we are called to enter. Our speaking about God will correspond to the mystery of His love for us in Christ by our remaining in conversation with the question and in being placed in relationship to it, that is, attuned to it by it in our response.11 This question need not rule out an intellectual aporia. We are not faced with an impassible way preventing an illumination of the depths of the mystery, and so we will speak in this work not of a ‘problem’ of divine freedom and necessity but of what we will call a ‘problematic’. A problem, as Gabriel Marcel famously argued, has certain defined dimensions. We lay siege to it and reduce it insofar as it can be definitely ‘re-solved’ by the application of a specific technique which we control and which anyone can apply to it and obtain the same ‘result’. A ‘mystery’, in contrast, is something which defies technique and which involves us personally such that it can be thought only in a sphere where the distinction between what is ‘in us’ and ‘before us’ no longer is appropriate and has no ruling claim.12 By ‘problematic’ we understand an intellectual mystery to which we can respond conceptually but which, in contrast to a problem, defies the application of technique, for any mystery makes a personal and spiritual claim on us. Unlike a problem, therefore, a problematic has no ultimate (re)solution and any response to it, while by no 11 12

Heidegger 1956, 40–1, 66ff. Marcel 1935, 169–70 [1949, 117–18] and see 1950–1, I, 211ff. [1951, I, 227ff.].

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means necessarily ‘private’, simply clarifies for one the dimensions of the mystery and drives us further into its depths. We shine, as it were, a light on a forest track creating an opening that spills out at its edges into darkness, allowing us to go deeper on the path of the question. This book aims to respond to the problematic in two ways. Firstly, it critically and constructively discusses the nature of the problematic and the response it evokes in Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944) (Part I: chs. 4–6), Karl Barth (1886–1968) (Part II: chs. 7–8), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) (Part III: chs. 9–11). Secondly, throughout our work, we shall constructively respond to the problematic by drawing on select ideas from these conversation partners to articulate our own tentative synthetic response in counterpoint to their exegesis which will culminate in the Conclusion in an ‘unsystematic systematic’ theology of divine freedom and necessity. As shall be clear in chapters 2–3 of this Introduction, we frame the problematic and the terms of any response ‘dialectically’ through a complex interweaving of three different senses of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ that exist in a creative tension from which emerges what we mean by divine freedom. What are the basic lines of the problematic of freedom and necessity that we shall explore? On the one hand, Christian theology affirms that God is absolutely free as an eternal trihypostatic movement of pure self-giving and self-receiving love, Holy Trinity as a texture of divine desire, ‘who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see’ (1 Tim. 6:16). This God, out of an everlasting love for us in Christ, set us apart, chose, and called us through His grace (Gal. 1:15, Eph. 2:8–10) but yet is in no way impelled to create and redeem the world in Him, and, indeed, as some have claimed, might have been satisfied with His own life of love (cf. Rom. 9:13ff.). On the other hand, Christian theology also affirms that this same God, who is uncontainable (1 Kgs 8:27), out of everlasting humble love becomes subject to the parameters of flesh and temporality through emptying Himself and taking on the form of a slave (Phil. 2:5ff.). This same everlasting love of God for His creation in Christ, self-giving, self-emptying, and selfreceiving, has neither beginning nor ending since God has eternally chosen the eternal Son to be Jesus of Nazareth (1 Pet. 1:20), the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8 [KJV]), leading us to the admittedly hard conclusion that the created world seems inseparable from the Trinity. Put in volitional terms, God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit out of His everlasting love for creation has eternally chosen to be God for us in Christ. Christ, through this eternal self-determination, has become part of God’s own selfidentity. Yet if there was no world, there could be no Christ, so there is a tension or dialectic at work in this divine love for creation between God’s absolute freedom and, in the incarnation, the necessity of the world for Him as God for us in Jesus Christ. The meaning of ‘dialectic’, as we shall see, changes according to the context of the respective thinker’s response to our problematic, so it

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can be understood broadly as the interplay of two distinct but mutually defining realities, roughly similar to Balthasar’s notion of ‘polarity’, or, as a contradiction between mutually opposed realities, as in Bulgakov’s ‘antinomism’ and Barth’s ‘dialectical theology’. The different senses of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ will be outlined in chapters 2–3 (with a diagram at the end of ch. 3). Why choose these three theologians? All three of these writers exhibit a form of what we might call ‘anticipatory Christology’ in which God out of an everlasting love for creation freely binds Himself to that creation absolutely and eternally in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, with all that implies, including sin and death. This form of Christology complicates the issue of divine freedom, and consequently the doctrine of the Trinity. It gives the world in relation to God a sort of external necessity by making God dependent on the existence of the world, for, we seem to be compelled to say, quite simply, if there was no world, there would be no Christ. Creation must exist if God has freely determined that He will be God for us in Christ. But how can we say this if God is free to love and not to love us in Christ? All three theologians, in attempting to embody the necessary but free nature of the Incarnation, presenting God’s relationship to creation in Christ as a sort of oxymoronic ‘free necessity’, are not without problems in their respective attempts to reimagine the doctrine of God in terms of the primacy of Christology. Our triumvirate were forced to rethink the meaning of both divine freedom and necessity, and it is here that we shall see some of their most creative theology. However, we will argue, drawing on aspects of all three of our theologians and especially Barth’s notion of eternal divine election, that while Christology certainly intensifies the problematic of freedom and necessity in Trinitarian theology, it may just provide a key to its reasonableness—though not a rational explanation which dispenses with mystery. It is the articulation of a Christological ‘key’ to unlock a problematic (ironically) created by Christology in the doctrine of God, which shall increasingly become the focus of our study, culminating in the Conclusion. Such a vision of the fabric of the doctrine of God as being, as it were, intrinsically Christological is by no means ‘new’.13 Indeed, more generally, some Patristic scholars now argue—albeit within the context of a broad somewhat territorial dismissal of systematic theology—that Patristic ‘Trinitarianism’ is so inseparable from ‘soteriology’ and ‘Christology’ that the categories should be avoided or even jettisoned.14 What was unprecedented was that our writers 13 e.g. ‘Since he pre-existed as one who saves, it was necessary that what might be saved also be created so that the one who saves might not be in vain [Cum enim praeexsisteret saluans, oportebat et quod saluaretur fieri, uti non vacuum sit saluans]’ (Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 3.22.3 (SC 211, 438–9) and compare Luther: ‘He created us for this very purpose, to redeem and sanctify us’ (Large Catechism, 64, 419 [Die Bekenntnisschriften, 36, 660]); see Jenson 1997, 72–3). 14 See Ayres 2004, 3–4, 2007a, 141–2, Behr, The Nicene Faith [=NF], 2ff., 2007 (responding to Ayres 2004), 150–1 (Ayres’ response: 2007b, 166–71).

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explored the notion that creation, cross, and Trinity were eternally bound up together within the relatively recent discipline of systematic theology, where an account of the Trinity, with Christology as a chapter of Trinitarian teaching,15 becomes foundational for an account of all reality.16 This makes them suspicious of discussing the Trinity outside the relationship to creation God establishes in redemption in Christ, since God chooses to not be God without the world He has created and redeemed.17 Moreover, incarnation and creation always already presuppose man’s fall into sin and God’s reconciliation of creation with Himself through the cross and resurrection. To speak of God as Trinity, to see Him and know Him as an eternal movement of love, can only be done, properly speaking, in light of God’s prior initiative in His self-revelation, His seeing, knowing and loving of His broken world in Christ crucified. For a Christian theologian, one cannot be properly ‘theocentric’ unless one is first ‘Christocentric’, for one cannot speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (immanent Trinity) except in light of how He has first spoken of Himself in Christ (economic Trinity). It is for this reason that they rejected the scholastic tendency to treat the oneness of God (de Deo Uno) apart from and before God as Trinity (de Deo Trino).18 All of our theologians, for example, drawing on nineteenth-century kenoticism,19 adapt the language of ‘self-emptying’ for the Trinitarian relations, thereby wedding revelation with God Himself. Jürgen Moltmann puts this approach neatly: ‘The content of the doctrine of the Trinity is the real cross of Christ Himself. The form of the crucified Christ is the Trinity.’20 Therefore, to adapt an image from George Pattison, all three theologians only gaze upon the icon of the Trinity in their work by first casting an eye to the icon of Christ beholding them. They cannot see God without seeing and being seen by Christ.21 Such a kenotically reconceived ‘threefold God’, as Barbara Hallensleben argues for Balthasar and Bulgakov (her words might also be applied to Barth), is a ‘underivable free dynamism of love which is able to express a type of self-movement of God’ subject neither to external compulsion nor mutability.22 In the articulation of such intratrinitarian kenoticism, it is indisputable that our writers were products of their age and were all drawing on aspects of German Idealism, not just Hegel, as is often mentioned in 15

Rahner 2004, 120. See R. Williams 2007c, 142, 149-n. 190 and 2004, 50. 17 See R. Williams, Sergii Bulgakov [=SB], 169 and compare 2007b, 80–1. 18 But contrast Sonderegger, 2015, xi–xxv, 7–9 (this volume arrived too late to take into serious account). 19 See Law 2013, 36ff., Colyer 2007, Gavrilyuk 2005, and Gorodetzky 1938, esp. 156–74. 20 Moltmann 1995, 246 and see 207, 235ff., The Trinity and the Kingdom [=TK], 160 and compare Jüngel 1983, 343ff., esp. 350, 382–7 and (the famous) 1972. 21 See Pattison 2005, 158–60, 165 (on the Rublev Trinity and Spas icons); see Ouspensky and Lossky 1983, 198, 200–5 and Bunge 2007. 22 Hallensleben 1999, 35. 16

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suspicious tones, but also Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Indeed, some of the distinctive terminology they use in their God-talk, such as ‘posited’ (gesetzt), ‘self-determination’ (Selbstbestimmung), ‘self-realization/actualization’ (Selbstverwirklichung), ‘self-differentiation/distinction’ (Selbstunterscheidung), ‘in/ for/with-itself ’ (an/für/bei-sich), and ‘primal decision’ (Urentscheidung), is adapted by them from German Idealism, though often entirely transformed in its meaning. Thus Bulgakov and Balthasar both wrote large works examining and critiquing Idealism and Romanticism,23 while some critics are now acknowledging that Barth’s love of a little ‘Hegeling’24 in his theology points to an unacknowledged engagement with the thought-forms of the Idealism of Hegel and Schelling mediated through the work of the German Lutheran theologian Isaak August Dorner (1809–84).25 This influence will be discussed at points in the text but due to the restrictions of space and the fact that the fundamental trajectory of this work is constructive, such discussion will necessarily be schematic. Despite the importance of this tradition for our writers, we can no more legitimately reduce modern systematic theology to just one of the allegedly heterodox ingredients of its ‘soup’ than we can, for example, accurately sum up Augustine’s Trinitarian thought by the ‘Neoplatonic’ work of Plotinus or dismiss Tillich as simply ‘Heideggerean’. This book, therefore, should not be taken as a historicist examination of the afterlife of Idealism in modern systematic theology. Rather, it is concerned with responding constructively to theological difficulties in our writers that they inherited along with Idealism from the wider Christian tradition; although Idealism was an important recent stop along this path. Moreover, our work is a contribution to the mainstream tradition of systematic theology and so it has not attempted to engage with the many important analytic discussions of God and necessity produced in the last forty years.26 Nor do we argue that Bulgakov, Barth, and Balthasar directly influenced one another’s thought; we are examining these writers as they shared a common problematic. Their different responses will help us in the contemporary rearticulation of the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity in Trinitarian theology. Nevertheless, such historical ‘links’ between our writers do in fact exist. The friendship of Barth with Balthasar and their mutual influence is uncontroversial despite their famous debate concerning the analogia entis.27

23 Sergii Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie (Darmstadt, 1927 [Russian–1993]) and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (Salzburg, 1937–9). 24 ‘I myself have a certain weakness for Hegel and am always fond of doing a bit of “Hegeling”. As Christians we have the freedom to do this…I do it eclectically’ (K. Barth to W. Herrenbrück, 15 February 1952, cited at Busch 1976, 387). 25 See Dorner 1994 [1883] (cited at Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [=CD], II/1, 330, 493) and commentary at Bruce 2013. 26 e.g. Platinga 1974, Swinburne 1994, Rowe 2004, and Leftow 2013. 27 See Chapter 7.2.

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Furthermore, there exists a growing critical literature on the interrelation of Bulgakov and Balthasar, and, in particular, Balthasar’s critical appropriation of Bulgakov’s intratrinitarian kenoticism.28 The historical connection, however, between Barth and Bulgakov is less well known. We learn from an amusing passage of a letter of Barth to his secretary Charlotte von Kirschbaum (1899–1975)29 that Barth, then teaching at Bonn, had met Bulgakov in September 1930 at a conference at the University of Bern. Their mutual friend. the Orientalist Fritz Lieb (1892–1970),30 who later wrote on Bulgakov, possibly served as the mediator31 and Bulgakov sends his greetings to Barth via Lieb in a letter a month after their meeting.32 The event mentioned was the second East–West theological conference from 6 to 12 September 1930 on the theme of the Epistle of the Ephesians. Barth mentions a number of people who gave papers on the first day of the proceedings, towards which he is quite scathing, saying he does not feel like attending the rest of the conference. The only one who made an impression, and that more on the strange side, was Bulgakov, wearing the traditional priestly long hair, cassock, riassa, and cross, or in Barth’s words, ‘in the getup of a Russian priest, as he stands in a picture book, but speaking with more considerable passion and not without a speculative verve’. Afterwards, Barth went out to dinner with Bulgakov, Lieb, and his brother-in-law Karl (‘Kari’) Lindt and got further ‘peculiar insights’ on the divine Sophia and other Russian Theologoumena.33 It appears that Barth then became curious about Russian theology and read a 1925 German Reader of Russian thought which included a selection from Bulgakov’s early sophiological dogmatica minora, Svet Nevechernii (Unfading Light) (1917).34 He is, though not mentioning Bulgakov directly, scathing about Russian religious philosophy and theology, which he says ‘obliterat[e] the frontiers of philosophy and theology, of reason and revelation, of Scripture, tradition and direct illumination, of spirit and nature, of pistis and sophia (but also the distinction between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity)’.35 It is interesting to note, since Barth accuses Russian thought, and it is reasonable to think he was aiming his comments at Bulgakov, of blurring the lines between the immanent and economic Trinity, that the excerpt of

28

See Chapter 9.1. ‘73. Barth in Bern to von Kirschbaum in Munich, 7.9.1930’ in Barth-von Kirschbaum Briefwechsel 1925–1935 (Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe V.45), 146–51. 30 31 See Lieb 1962. Lieb 1934, 1965. 32 Bulgakov sends greetings via Lieb to ‘Prof. K. Schmidt and K. Barth’ (‘S. N. Bulgakov. Pis’ma k Fritsu Libu’ [c.Oct. 1930] (IIRM, 2001/2002), #7, 385). 33 ‘73. Barth in Bern to von Kirschbaum in Munich, 7.9.1930’, 149. 34 See ‘Sergej Bulgakow—Kosmodizee’, 195–245=Svet Nevechernii [=SN], 165–211 [Unfading Light [=UL], 181–239]) at Barth CD, I/1, 478–89, 481. 35 ibid., 481; He may also have had in mind Georges Florovsky (see Baker 2015, 303–9). 29

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Bulgakov in the said Reader includes his early discussion of God as both the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative (vis-à-vis creation), which Bulgakov would sixteen years later develop in his Christological treatise Agnets Bozhii (1933). This passage has great resonance with Barth’s later doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), who knew both men well, observed the connection as early as 1968 and precisely because he thought both men risked collapsing God and creation in their theologies in their assertion that the Son of God as a member of the Trinity is already the Lamb of God sent from eternity.36 Following the meeting mentioned above, Bulgakov, likewise, appears to have developed an interest in Barth’s work,37 but it is unclear, unlike say Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948)38 and Florovsky,39 whether his knowledge of Barth ever went beyond ‘Barthianism’, that is, the slight caricature of dialectical theology current in Orthodox circles of the day.40 Our work, therefore, aims, amongst other things, to tease out some of the profound parallels of these two thinkers noted by Florovsky who, with Balthasar, stand as a sort of triumvirate over modern systematic theology in Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. This book, therefore, explores these three writers because they each had a similar theological problematic, concerning freedom and necessity, with quite different responses. Moreover, it is hoped that through the analysis, comparison, and critique of the thought of each and the attempt to synthesize aspects of their thought, contemporary theology might be aided in its construction of a doctrine of the Trinity that coherently weaves Christology into its fundamental fabric.

Florovsky, ‘Renewal’ (1968), 5–6 (see Baker 2015, 315–16) and compare Meyendorff 1978, 170. 37 See ‘S. N. Bulgakov. Pis’ma k Fritsu Libu’ [27 May 1931] (IIRM, 2001/2002), #13, 401. 38 See Berdyaev 1929, 11–25 and ‘N.A. Berdiaev. Pis’ma k Fritsu Libu (1926–1948)’ (IIRM, 2002), #6, 261–2, #8, 274–6, #9, 282, #17, 296, #30, 327–8 (see also Bambauer 2002 and Busch 1976, 219). 39 See Busch 1976, 215, Peterson 1993, Arjakovsky 2002, 387, Payne 2004, and Baker 2015. 40 Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God [=SWG] [1937], 13; Rubin 2010, n. 22, 68 wrongly identifies Bulgakov as the author of a 1934 anonymous article in Put’ which discusses Barth (see Arjakovsky 2002, 310, 400, 662, 668–9, and 719). 36

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2 Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach From Freedom to Necessity—The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A)

What do we mean when we speak of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’? These terms have been used throughout theological and philosophical history in a bewildering number of different ways. A history of the dialectic of freedom and necessity in Christian theology is beyond the scope of this work and would depart from its systematic theological remit, so in this chapter we shall explore selected conceptual aspects of the problematic in the history of theology and philosophy which are relevant to this work. At least three respective forms of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ will recur throughout our analysis in the case of both the infinite and the finite, although differing according to each case.1 What follows outlines what is meant by each of these forms. When applied to the infinite, these forms of freedom and necessity are different conceptual aspects of what we shall call Absolute Freedom,2 by which is meant the eternal divine movement of love which is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, both in Himself (immanent) and for the world (economic). In describing these forms as ‘conceptual aspects’ of Absolute Freedom we wish to emphasize their heuristic status (they are in no way to be taken as eternal psychospiritual powers or potencies in the manner of Schelling) as intellectual tools aiding us in dimly discerning a mystery that is ultimately beyond both affirmations and negations. To begin, freedom is to have a free will or the power to act from within oneself 3 insofar as one has power over oneself or is self-determining, causa sui.4 1 Hereafter, F[reedom]1, F2, and F3 and N[ecessity]1, N2 and N3. See the diagram at the end of ch. 3 summarizing our scheme. 2 Here compare Couenhoven 2012 (in Barth), McCormack 2010b, 64 and 2013, 123–4, and Bruce 2013, ch. 5. 3 i.e. autexousia, autexousion from adj. autexousios. 4 Balthasar, Theo-Drama [=TD], II, 213–15 [Theodramatik [=ThD], II.1, 192–4] and Telfer 1957.

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If one has such an internal capacity in the soul, then one can say that the actions that flow from such a free will depend upon oneself or are in our power.5 Moreover, we must deliberate about those things that are in our power and can be done.6 However, such deliberation presupposes that we can choose between at least two possible acts (‘a’ or ‘b’) that are contingent, which is to say that we can just as well do ‘a’ as we can do its opposite, ‘b.’7 Freedom in this sense, therefore, has a direct relation to rationality, for a rational being leads his nature rather than is led by it, as is the case with irrational beings.8 As Diadochus of Photiki (400–c.486 AD) puts it: ‘Free will is the power of a deiform [logikes: rational] soul to direct itself by deliberate choice towards whatever it decides.’9 This sort of freedom prima facie applies absolutely to God, who, although He does not deliberate, as this implies ignorance,10 is pre-eminently free or allpowerful (pantexousios)11 because He has His Being completely from Himself (i.e. aseity) where will and nature are one. It is not, however, self-evident that human beings have this form of freedom, at least not absolutely. Besides being subject in their faculty of will to temporality and passion,12 they are always relative to others on whom they depend in their willing for certain choices and circumstances and so they must deliberate, since their will is not their essence. It could be argued, however, that one can still posit this form of freedom of humanity insofar as the will, through the grace and kenosis of God in creation and redemption, is made inviolable.13 It is not surprising, therefore, that we see Basil the Great (329–79) and Maximus the Confessor (580–662) holding that the autexousia is the imago dei insofar as man is potentially God because he is gifted with the grace of self-determination.14 Thus, freedom in its purest sense as unencumbered self-determination would seem to imply omnipotence but, as we shall see, it can actually be conceptualized diversely. If freedom, as we have described it, can be summarized in the concept of ‘self-will’, then this may be found in two senses which are our first two forms of freedom: (F1) without ratio and (F2) with ratio. F1 or the exertion of self-will lacking any ground or reason (ratio) is ‘negative’ insofar as a will that has no 5 John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith [=OF], 2.26, 257 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 40, 97–8]; on (in) voluntary acts, see Nicomachea, 3.1.1109b 30ff. 6 7 ibid., 3.2.1112a 20ff. Damascene, OF, 2.26, 257 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 40, 97–8]. 8 ibid., 2.27, 258 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 41, 98–9]. 9 Diadochos of Photiki, ‘On Spiritual Knowledge’, 5, SC 5, 5, 86 (The Philokalia, 1:254) and see Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus, 23 and 25, 10–12 [Disput s Pirrom, 294A–C, 154–7]; 55, 22–3 (referencing Diadochos) [ibid., 301C, 168–9]; 61, 24–5 [ibid., 304B–D, 170–1]; and 101, 35 [ibid., 312D–313A, 180–3]. 10 Damascene, OF, 2.22, 250 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 36.95–9, 91] and Maximus, Disputation, 25, 11–14 [Disput s Pirrom, 294B–295A, 154–7] and 87, 31–2 [ibid., 308C–309B, 176–7]. 11 See Adamantius, Rec. Fid., III.9.128, 118–19 [PG 837E/GCS 4, 128, l.6–9]. 12 Maximus, Disputation, 139, 46 [Disput s Pirrom, 325A, 199–200]. 13 See Lossky 2001, 73. 14 Basil of Caesarea, ‘Homily on Psalm 48’, 8, 324–5 (FC 46) [PG 29b.449B–C] and Maximus, Disputation, 61, 25 [Disput s Pirrom, 304C–D, 170–1].

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need of anything but its own pure self-assertion is defined by its lack of constraints. Such freedom from and over oneself, often described as power, allows one to say that one need not have acted in a determinate fashion. Yet F1 has sometimes been used to define the ‘shape’ of God as such, as, for example, can be seen in the form of radical divine monarchy found in Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900).15 A G/god characterized by groundless freedom is often found within radical monism, so that in Plotinus (205–70), who wrote perhaps the first treatise in the West on divine freedom and necessity,16 the One, which is supremely selfsufficient in itself,17 the best and the simplest, is also most free.18 Being most free, the One is a substanceless willing of itself beyond alterity but the world still inevitably flows out of it in an eternal non-temporal ‘radiation [perilampsis]’.19 However, such thinking also can be found in Christianity. Arius (c.280–336) held that God was an Ingenerate ‘monad and principle of all things’ who is ‘supremely alone without beginning’20 and since He ‘exists in Himself ’, he is inexpressible21 even to the Son who, as the subsequent generate dyad, neither shares in a part of God nor, it seems, participates in the same substance.22 Despite this apophaticism, God is said to be ‘the source of all things’ and ‘the cause of all things’ by his will.23 By the same will, God as the Unbegotten (agennetos) and Unoriginate (agenetos) generates/begets the Son to be not out of a ‘substrate’ over against Him but out of nothing (ex ouk onton estin)24 before ‘aeonian times’ as ‘a perfect creature [ktisma] of God, but not as one of the creatures, an offspring [gennema], but not as one of the offsprings’.25 The Son, therefore, has a beginning (‘there was once/a time when He was not’),26 an ‘interval’ separating him from the Father before which he was not begotten or created,27 is possibly mutable,28 and is an instrument made by God to create 15

See ch. 4. Plotinus, Enneads [=enn.], VI.8, Vol. 7, 221–97 (‘On Free Will and the Will of the One’). Plotinus, enn., 7: VI.9.6, 325; cf. Proclus, Elements, 10, 12–13. 18 19 Plotinus, enn., 7: VI.8.7, 20, 246–51, 292–5. enn., 5: V.1.6.28, 30–1. 20 Urkunden zur Geschichte des Arianischen Streites 318–328 [=Urk.] (Athanasius Werke, 3.1), 6.4, 8, 12–13, 13 [Behr, NF, 136–7] and see Urk., 1.4–5, 2–3. 21 Thalia l.35, Athanasius, De Synodis, 15 [Behr, NF, 140–1 and see NPNF 4, 457–8, R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition [=AHT], 101–3]. 22 Thalia vi, Athanasius, Against the Arians [=AA], 1.6.1–3, ll.1–6, 115 (Werke, I.1.2) [NPNF 4, 309/R. Williams, AHT, 101]. 23 Urk., 6.4, 7–8, 13 [Behr, NF, 136]. 24 Urk., 1.4–5, 1–2, 5, 3 [Behr, NF, 139] and Thalia ii, Athanasius, AA, 1.5.3–4, ll.12–15, 114 [R. Williams, AHT, 100]; cf. Hanson 1985. 25 Urk., 6.2–3, 9–10, 12 [Behr, NF, 136] (gennetos and genetos are synonymous: Urk., 1.4–5, 2–4, 3 [Behr, NF 139]). 26 Urk., 4b.7, 21, 12, 19, 7–8; 12.3, 19; 14.10, 8, 15, 4–5, 27, 32, 21–3; etc. 27 Urk., 14, 18, 22–6, 22–3. 28 Thalia v, Athanasius, AA, 1.5.8, ll.28–34, 114–15 [R. Williams, AHT, 100] and see 1.35–6, 144–6 [NPNF, 326–7] (cf. Urk., 4b.8–10, 8 and 14, 21ff., 23ff.) but see Urk., 6.2, 9, 12; cf. R. Williams, AHT, 113–15. 16 17

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the world (and humanity, in particular).29 Arius’ divine voluntarism was most likely directed at Origen (185–254), via the critique of Methodius of Olympus (d. c.311) in his Xeno: de creatis,30 who argued that in order for God to be called ‘almighty’ he needed an eternal creation over which he could exercise His eternal power,31 which risked creating a necessary relation and even continuity between God and the world.32 However, F1, which is what is commonly meant by ‘omnipotence’, can be seen in some forms of orthodox theology, especially when it wishes to emphasize freedom as an arbitrary assertion of power lacking any rational ground except that the actor chose to act. Thus, for example, in Duns Scotus (c.1265–1308), we see that both divine and human wills are wholly uncoercible.33 The will as such has ‘superabundant sufficiency’ in its self-determination insofar as its actions have an ‘indeterminacy of surpassing perfection’34 so that what it wills need not be because the will is always already contingent.35 The will’s action has no other ground than itself.36 One can give no other reason why the will causes any action except that it wills: ‘There is no other cause to be found except that the will is will.’37 Being ‘free’ is more essential to the will than even its direction in wanting, seeking, and desiring an object, and thus the will is completely groundless or lacking in a ratio.38 Unsurprisingly, God, for Duns Scotus, is absolutely free and everything He does and effects in creation and redemption through His will, including the moral law itself,39 has—without any creaturely qualifications—the nature of the accidental and so is wholly unnecessary, resting on a groundless decision.40 Divine freedom as F1 is a limit or boundary concept (Grenzbegriff) distinguishing God from the world insofar as it is defined by its being uncompelled, lacking in constraints, and so only free because it is free not to have acted in a determinate fashion. Such a blind voluntarist understanding of radical freedom is literally ‘arbitrary’ insofar as it is a ‘blind, purely actual discharge of energy’.41 However, it can far too easily be divorced from love, which is itself a reason for an act of will.

29 Thalia ll.5–6, [Behr, NF, 140] De Synodis, 15, Thalia iii, Athanasius, AA, 1.5.4–5, ll.15–18, 114 [R. Williams, AHT, 100] and Urk., 4b.9–10, 8. 30 Photius, Bibliothèque, 5: cod. 235 [PG 103.301b–304b], 107–16 [‘On Things Created’, 176–82]. 31 Origen, First Principles, 1.2.10, 23–6 [SC 252, 132–9, ll.303–95]. 32 33 See Patterson 1982 and NF, 43–6. Duns Scotus 1997, Ord. 4. d.29, 151–2. 34 35 ibid., In metaph. 9, q.15, 140–1. ibid., In metaph. 9, q.15, 148. 36 ‘Nothing other than the will is the complete cause of volition in the will’ (Duns Scotus, Op. Ox. [=Ord.] 2, d. 24, q.un., n. 22 as cited in Pieper 1960, 184 and see 140–2). 37 38 Duns Scotus 1997, In metaph. 9, q.15, 139–40. Pieper 1960, 142. 39 See Duns Scotus 1997, Ord. 4. d.46, 186ff. and T. Williams 1997 (but in contrast: Vos et al. 2003, 58–64). 40 See Duns Scotus 1987, Op. Ox. 1, d. 2, q.1, a.2, 52–6 and T. Williams 1998. 41 Pieper 1960, 142.

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By contrast, F2 is self-will that acknowledges a ground or ratio to its willing. All humans have free will, as the crown of their rational nature, which is good, as it is from God, and this free will must will its end, which is the good of its nature. The end of human nature is to glorify Him and in glorifying Him to love and know Him by whom they were created and enjoy Him forever,42 so this is the basis of all voluntary acts. F2 is deeply intuitive because it assumes that there always exists some reason, love, or goodness, which is the cause of an action.43 In the case of God, His end is for Him to love and take joy in Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this is accomplished through the Father’s begetting of the Son and spiration of His Spirit and the Son and Spirit’s affirmation of the same. Against the F1 of the One/God seen in some Neoplatonism, the Christian tradition sees the freedom of God as being expressed in the generation by the Father, as the monarchos of the Trinity,44 of the Son, and the Spirit. The Son and then the Spirit, in turn, obediently and freely accept or consent to their generation and with it their divinity. In this fashion, they affirmatively constitute the Father as the Father God and divine source.45 This fully reciprocal or mutual movement of divine self-generation and self-affirmation is the ‘process’ by which God becomes fully united as a communion of divine persons living in and through one another. God, in short, constitutes Himself as a reality wholly grounded in love (F2) through an eternal reciprocal trialogue or circulation: the monad from the beginning being stirred into movement as the dyad, which, having rested in the triad, eternally returns again to its source.46 Thus, Athanasius (c.299–373), albeit focusing on the dyad, writes that the Son is willed (thelestho) and loved (phileistho) by the Father and by the same will the Son ‘loves (agapai), wills (thelei), and honours (timai)’ His Father so that there is one will ‘from the Father in the Son, so that here too we may consider the Son in the Father and the Father in the Son’.47 Indeed, so intimate and loving is the bond of the 42 See Westminster Catechism, Q.1, 676 (Comp. Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 4.17–18 (SC 100, 574–615)) and Geneva Catechism, Q1–2, 9; compare Catechism of Christian Doctrine (‘Penny Catechism’), 1, 3. 43 See Davidson 1963. 44 Here see Lossky 1974, 71–96 and 1976, 55–63 and John Zizioulas, Being as Communion [=BC], 40ff., Communion and Otherness [=CO], 34–6, 113–54, 2010, 22–4, 41–5 (but see Loudovikos 2011, 691–2 and 2013, 269–70), the Vatican PCPCU statement: ‘Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Spirit’ (1997) (with response at Zizioulas 2010, 41–5) and Pannenberg 2007, 81–2 (where he argues that the mutuality of the Trinity is in the service of the monarchy of the Father). 45 See Loudovikos 2011, 691, 2013, 269–71 and Pannenberg, Systematic Theology [=SysTh], 1: 273, 280, 311–13, 320, 324–5, 329, 2007, 81ff. and compare Balthasar, Theo-Logic [=TL], III, 236–7 and Bulgakov, Agnets Bozhii [=AB], 121–2 [Lamb of God [=LG], 98–9]. 46 See Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 29.2, 70 [PG 36/SC 250, 76B, ll.13–18]. 47 Athanasius, AA, 3.66.3–4, ll.8–13, 379 (Werke, I.1.3) [NPNF, 430 revd] (See Loudovikos 2011, 691 and 2013, 269–71).

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Father and the Son that Athanasius describes the Son as the living internal will (boule) of the Father by which everything external came to be created.48 Ideally, however, divine generation is characterized by both F2 and F1, as we shall see later in Bulgakov and Balthasar, insofar as the foundation of the divine life is the ground of mutual love, but this love is a groundless free gift, being both the Urgrund and the Ungrund.49 The will in divine generation is of one essence with its nature, which is wholly good, so we cannot speak of a will apart from the goodness of the nature—as if God could not will His own goodness, could not love Himself—but this does not mean that God is not good in accordance with His will. Indeed, the principal object of the divine will, as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) held, is His essence50 and this, being His own goodness and Being, He wills necessarily.51 Therefore, God, in a sense, necessarily but freely wills His own goodness; He necessarily but freely loves Himself, but goodness is the assumption behind the willing. Like F1, F2 can be applied to God’s relationship to the world. We are told famously in the Timaeus of Plato (c.427–348 BC) that the world came into being through ‘a mixture and combination of necessity and intelligence’,52 where intelligence, which is identified with the Good,53 persuaded necessity ‘to bring about the best result’.54 Earlier in the Timaeus, the same reality is described mythically by speaking of a demiurge who embodies and imitates in becoming intelligence or the Good in itself/Being,55 which is, arguably, a sort of Platonic ‘God’.56 The demiurge is the first and ‘best of causes’ of the good and beautiful cosmos that flows out of him.57 Being perfectly good, this ‘God’ had no jealousy in him and ‘willed [eboulethe] all things to be as like himself as possible.’58 But once again, as we saw earlier with F1, there are Christian parallels to the application in this context of F2. God is ‘full beyond all fullness’ and He brought creatures into being ‘not because He had need of anything’ but instead He desired that they should participate in Him and that He ‘might rejoice in His works through seeing them joyful’.59 But God’s love and joy for His creatures cannot be separated from His own love and joy as Trinity, so we must say that He loves and takes joy in Himself in all things.60 Indeed, in God, 48

Athanasius, AA, 3.63–5, 376–9 [NPNF, 428–9] and 2.2.5, l.25, 31.5, l.19, 179, 208 [Anatolios 2004, 112, 126]; see Widdicombe 2004, 159–222. 49 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, 86–91 [SW, VII: 406–9]. 50 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles [=SG], 1.74, 163–4; cf. 1.72–3, 159–62. 51 See Summa Theologicae [=ST], 1.19.3co, 10co, SG, 1.80, 173–4 and De veritate [=De Ver.], Vol. 3: 23.4co, 110–1. 52 53 Plato, Timaeus, 48a, 66. ibid., 30b, 42. 54 ibid., 48a, 66; see Zizioulas, BC, 29–30, CO, 16, 104 and 250ff., and 2012, 193–4. 55 56 Following Numenius, 25, 24–7. See Alcinous, Didaskalikos, 9–10, 16–17. 57 58 Plato, Timaeus, 29a, 41. ibid., 29e, 42 (revd). 59 Maximus, 400 Chapters on Love, 3.46, PG 90.1029C (Philokalia, 2:90). 60 Meister Eckhart, Serm. 56, 142–3.

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unlike in creatures where the acts of understanding and will are not their Being but accidental, there is but one simple act of intelligence and one simple act of will, so God ‘by understanding his essence . . . understands all things, and by willing his goodness, . . . wills whatsoever he wills’.61 Thus, as we shall see with Balthasar, the procession of creation is founded on the divine processions62 insofar as God wills things other than Himself in willing Himself—creatures— since their end is His goodness.63 The predominant Christian tradition asserts that He does not necessarily will these created things, because He would attain His goodness regardless of their creation. God naturally wills, desires, and loves Himself but in regard to things not Himself, which do not affect this desiring, loving, and willing, the will of God is not determined to one course or is underdetermined.64 The divine will is perfectly free, having no necessary relation to any particular created end, and so possesses indifference65 to any particular possibility of creation.66 Given divine absolute power (potentia absoluta), there are many more possibilities available to God than the determinate execution of power ultimately commanded by Him (potentia ordinata).67 This is a key distinction we shall later see Barth critically building on and being rejected (as it is identified with nominalism) by Bulgakov and Balthasar. In short, God would be God without willing the world, so His willing of it is voluntary, not natural, although certainly not contrary to His nature.68 Yet creation is not only freely willed to be out of love by God but freely sustained by Him in love. Following John of Damascus (670–750), we speak of providence (pronoia) which is the good will of God as Creator manifested in his actions towards it as Provider in guiding things through to their appointed end.69 The choice of all actions to be done—good and bad—lies with us. However, their accomplishment depends on the absence or presence of divine co-operation with us through God’s one providential will which has two aspects—approval (kat’ eudokian) and permission (kata sygchoresin)70—that are described as two divine ‘wills’.71 There also exists, however, F3, which includes ‘necessity’ within it as an element of dependence, neediness, vulnerability, or the freedom to be wounded by love, a divine-human nexus of desire.72 The etymological connection of ‘necessity’ and ‘need’ (which assumes ‘dependence’) is clearer in German

61

Aquinas, De Potentia [=De Pot.], Vol. 3: 9.9co., 156 and see SG, 1.75, 164–5. I, Commentary on Sentences [=Sent.], d.10, q.1, a.1co and see ST, 1.34.1.3ad and De Pot., 1:2.3.6ad, 62. 63 64 ST, 1.19.3co. ibid., 1.41.2.3ad. 65 66 De Pot., 1: 1.6.7ad, 37 and see SG, 1.82, 176–9. ST, 1.19.3 and 1.25.5. 67 ibid., 1.25.5; cf. Bruce 2013, chs. 1–2, Oakley 2002, Moonan 1994, Courtenay 1990. 68 69 ST, 1.19.3.3ad. Damascene, OF, 2.29, 260 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 43, 100]. 70 ibid., 2.29, 261 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 43, 101–2]. 71 ibid., 2.29, 263 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 43.71–2, 102]; see Bouteneff 2006 and Louth 2002, 140–4. 72 See John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 31–2, 595–601 [Cántico espiritual, 2: 184–93]. 62

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where Notwendigkeit has this dual sense deriving from Not. F3 assumes a form of self-limitation, a curbing of F1–2, by freely entering into relation and even putting itself in need to another. If F1–2 involves some form of an exertion of will, then F3 involves the sacrifice of the will, which is to say that freedom in this sense is self-assertion through self-giving. With the formulation of F3 our work builds on the fundamental quasi-Barthian insight of Paul Fiddes that ‘God freely chooses to be in need’,73 although this idea needs greater clarification. Yet even if we say that F3 is the curbing of F1–2, it also must be seen as the culmination or even synthesis of the two basic forms of freedom. One cannot freely give oneself away unless one has an ungrounded power to do so if and when one wishes (F1). But such a power is motivated by love (F2) insofar as one has the will to sacrifice oneself (F3). Thus F3 is both the kenosis of F1–2 and their ultimate fulfilment and flowering. F3 is prima facie creaturely freedom, since as a creature one cannot simply assert oneself because one needs a web of relationships to others (persons, places, and things) in order to exercise one’s self-will. Choices only exist in a world where I’s, as it were, bump up against one another. Creaturely freedom, in short, presupposes something which is not the self—whether it is called impersonally, a ‘Not-I’,74 or, more personally, a ‘Thou’,75 which assumes, to adapt Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), ‘the two basic ideals of modern man . . . the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice’.76 Furthermore, in being a free being, one not only operates within a specific context influencing one’s character and ultimately the sorts of choices that one makes, but one becomes oneself in relation to others. The ‘I’ is always constituted, as Bulgakov realized, by the ‘you’ which is another I, a ‘co-I’ or, more intimately, a ‘Thou’.77 This is a point which is central to much modern Russian thought, especially Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), which is that freedom is not constrained by otherness but in fact is the result of it insofar as I become myself only through revealing myself for, through, and with the help of another.78 But even if our freedom is always in some sense dependent, we can still choose between possibilities (F1–2). The question becomes whether in the act of choice we can acknowledge our dependence on others in that choice and appropriate this dependence by deepening our loving need for the Other. The Other’s deepest desires become my desire; the Other’s good becomes my good; the Other’s suffering becomes my suffering and determines the shape of my 73 Fiddes 2001a, 181 and see 2000a, 210–15, SWKG, 148, 292, 386–7, and The Creative Suffering of God [=CSG], 63–71; compare Moltmann, TK, 58 and contrast LaCugna 1991, 355. 74 See Fichte 1994, 3ff., 40ff. 75 See Feuerbach 1997, 56ff., 76ff. (but later Ebner, Buber, Rosenzweig, Brunner etc.); compare Pavel Florensky, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny [=S] [1914], 438–40 [Pillar and Ground of the Truth [=PGT], 314–15]. 76 77 Pasternak 1997, 10. Bulgakov, ‘Glavy o Troichnosti’ [=G], (1928), 1: 35. 78 Bakhtin 1984, 287.

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being. I am because I pour out my Being for the Other (amo ergo sum) by living with, through, and in him (perichoresis, circumincessio).79 This vision of freedom through bearing one another’s burdens, substituting one for the other, exchanging love, was what Charles Williams (1886–1945) called ‘co-inherence’.80 Williams understood it to be both a ‘natural fact’ and a ‘supernatural truth’ that was ‘one of the open secrets of the saints’.81 F3 is, in contrast to F1, wholly positive. It is, to use an old distinction, not freedom from but freedom for82 because it emphasizes the capacity of the person to give to another not despite but because of their internal and external constraints and (even) compulsion, which they appropriate and make their own. F3, which we might call ‘dependent freedom’, is the free will to be in need, to freely love my brother, to depend upon him so that his life is a portion of my life (‘our brother is our life’)83 even if it requires my death. Thus F3 might be called Christoform freedom, for when we love in this way, we are arguably not only reflecting God as Trinity in whose perfect image, Christ Jesus,84 we were formed, but attaining His perfect likeness by being subject to God.85 But can we apply F3 to God? It would seem not if God is a God who by definition cannot be in need. However, this book will attempt to establish, following our writers, that God’s eternal free perichoretic life of love,86 where each hypostasis wholly participates in the other, cleaves to the other for its life, lives one in the other, can rightfully be described as a life where each of the divine hypostases needs the Other. It is a life where each divine person subsists by being fully and freely dependent on the other while yet remaining totally itself. Such a free eternal life in dependence is the joyful way of obedience and even can be described, without impugning the divine coequalness, as the voluntary subordination through the Spirit of the Son to the Father where the Son ‘co-inheres obediently and filially in the Father, as the Father authoritatively and paternally co-inheres in him’.87 F3 can thus be seen to apply to the internal life of the Trinity. Furthermore, we will explore the possibility that Trinitarian co-inherence can be reinterpreted kenotically, as in our writers, and then applied to the divine economy. We shall argue that the Father God as the Lord of the 79

See R. Williams 2008, 36. See C. Williams 2000, 94 following Prestige 1969, 282–301 for perichoresis. 82 C. Williams 1939, 69, 236. R. Williams 2008, 39. 83 S. Sakharov 1991, 371; compare Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Α, Anthony the Great, 9, 3 [PG 65.77B]. 84 See Irenaeus, Apostolic Preaching, 22, 53–4. 85 See Diadochos, ‘Spiritual Knowledge’, 4, SC 5, 4, 86 (Philokalia, 1:253). 86 See Damascene, OF, 1.8, 186–7 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.250–65, 29], Ps-Cyril of Alexandria, De Sacrosanto Trinitate, 10, PG 77.1144B, Athanasius, AA, 3.3, 309 [NPNF, 395], Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 31.14, 127–8 [SC 250, 149A, 302–5] and Augustine, De Trin. (CCSL 50) 6.8.9.11–14, 6.10.12.54–6 [Trinity, 211, 214]; see Harrison 1991 and Otto 2001. 87 C. Williams 1939, 39–40 (discussing Origen). 80 81

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Universe, long suffering, of great compassion and filled with pity, as Origen observed, is not simply impassibile, but can and is in His impassibility voluntarily affected by the passion of love for us.88 The Father God is freely sympathetic for His creation as a man is for His son, and so gives us, through His Spirit, His only Son, who empties Himself in creation and redemption and becomes dependent in His freedom on the world. In the love of the Trinity, adapting Eberhard Jüngel, we see free self-relatedness that begins with selflessness understood as the heightening and expanding of the self by a ‘pure overflow, overflowing being for the sake of another and only then for the sake of itself ’.89 If dependent freedom (F3) includes a sense of ‘need’ or ‘necessity’ within it, then we must now turn to a delineation of the different senses of ‘necessity’ and their interrelationship to the forms of ‘freedom’ just outlined.

88 Origen, In Ezech. Hom. 6.6.3, 92–3 [SC 352, 228–31, ll.28–52]; for commentary, see Ware 2016, 229–32. 89 Jüngel 1983, 369 and see 222ff., 372, 385 (Compare ibid., 314ff. and Moltmann, TK, 57ff.).

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3 Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach From Necessity to Freedom—The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B)

With our exploration of the diverse forms of freedom in the last chapter, we discovered that at least one form (F3) implied ‘necessity.’ However, it shall be argued that all the forms of freedom we detailed have their respective ‘poles’ in forms of necessity. The first to be mentioned is the concept of necessity, which can be named N1, understood as external compulsion, given constraint of power, in contradistinction to N2, which is internal or natural compulsion, given the constraints of one’s nature. Besides N1 and N2, whose poles are F1 and F2, freedom as self-will with and without a ratio or ground, we have N3, which is what we shall call ‘free dependence’, in contrast to F3, which is ‘dependent freedom’. Building on what was said at the outset, these different senses of freedom and necessity are meant (a) to summarize the different conceptual aspects of uncreated and created freedom and necessity used throughout history; and (b) to evoke the divine life of love-desire or Absolute Freedom which includes within it, and even can be said to be generated by, the perfect tension of F1–3 and N1–3. All Being in its creativity realizes itself, is free, by a tension between moments of freedom and necessity, moments, that is, of a subject freely but necessarily reaching out and encountering an Other who defines it as itself, acts on it as a necessity. A ‘perfect tension’, as I define it, is one in which all the elements of the immanent-transcendent divine process which is Freedom— involving both moments of what we call freedom and moments of what we call necessity—exist within an eternal and completely fulfilled synthesis. It is, therefore, an identity. In this synthesis there is no need to look outside itself for any element to complete itself as itself. All the elements live in and through one another but yet remain distinct even as they are one in the divine identity. This does not rule out, however, God’s free self-determination to become what He always eternally is as Holy Trinity, a perfect tension of the hypostases, in

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history in Jesus Christ. Such a decision is contingent and might not have been taken, and God would still be who He is if He had not so decided. Being and Becoming in God coincide and Being is merely proved to be what it already always is in its becoming in history. Such perfect tension in the creative realization of Being of the uncreated differs from the ‘imperfect’ creative tension of the created. Here any creature to realize itself also, like the uncreated, must live through and by another, but, in contrast to the divine, this other for the created is always outside itself, does not form an identity with it.1 The freedom of the creature is forever encountering others who act as a necessity upon it and, as the creature is finite, this tension of creative self-realization is ultimately unfulfilled. Being and Becoming in the creature, unlike in God, never coincide and the Being of the creature is in some sense perpetually deferred. In other words, we are distinguishing between the relationship of Being and Becoming/creativity in the divine and the same in creation. The first of our forms of necessity is external necessity (N1), which is the polar opposite of F1, because the emphasis in N1 is upon compulsion from an arbitrary exertion of power from without; in such a state we lack any form of self-determination. N1 was classically captured by Aristotle (384–22 BC), who regarded it as the basic sense of necessity, which is ‘that because of which a thing cannot be otherwise’.2 Now if something cannot be otherwise, then it is because one cannot act according to impulse. What prevents such spontaneity is external ‘compulsion’ or an ‘act of violence’ (biaion, bia),3 that is, necessity understood as a cause of action outside the agent. Aristotle, accordingly, quotes Euenus of Paros (fifth century BC) that ‘every necessary thing [anagkaion pragma] is by nature grievous’4 and John of Damascus shows that this understanding continued down into Christianity5 when he writes that ‘Necessity is a cause of violence [bias].’6 What happens when you apply this notion to ‘God’? Plato’s demiurge in the Timaeus finds the visible universe in disorder and reduces it to order by looking to the eternal pattern of the good in implanting reason (nous) in the soul of the world and soul in the body of the world. However, his activity is compelled and constrained by a pre-existing intractable ‘givenness’ in reference to which he acts and upon which he acts. Not only must he follow the pattern provided by the ideas of the beautiful and the good in ordering the cosmos7 but also he is faced with a pre-existing ‘space’ or ‘receptacle’ of Being 1

Compare Przywara, Analogia Entis, 201–14, esp. 212–13. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 5.5.4, 1015b2–3, 224–5 (there are four other senses besides this ‘basic one’). 3 4 ibid., 5.5.2–4, 1015a27–b7, 222–5. ibid., 5.5.2, 1015a30, 224–5. 5 See Chadwick 1983 and Patch 1935. 6 Damascene, Dialectica, 108 (FC 37) [PTS 7, fus. 68.1, 140]. 7 Plato, Timaeus, 29a, 41. 2

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(khora) which is itself neither Being nor becoming8 and a universe in ‘inharmonious and disorderly motion’ that contains formless characterless material.9 Unsurprisingly, when necessity is referred to in the Christian tradition, from the Fathers to the Middle Ages, it generally is N1. The demiurgic vision of God was rejected—being rapidly replaced by creatio ex nihilo10— because God, being uncreated and wholly other than creation, was said to be uncompelled by definition.11 As Maximus put it: ‘Who then attributes necessity to God? Consider, my friend, if thou wilt, the blasphemy of such a proposition!’12 At least three reasons exist for the traditional rejection of applying necessity to God. Firstly, in the ancient world, necessity was closely associated with the divine power of fate13 or the fates14 that limited Being.15 Of course, the Fathers understood God as unlimited.16 It is inconceivable for such a God to be externally compelled. The Fathers argued that if there was some power that restrained God Himself 17 or if God was not Creator and sovereign over the actions of men, then this power—call it ‘fate’, ‘necessity’—would be Lord of all, not God Himself.18 Secondly, as far back as Parmenides of Elea (c.540 to fl. c.480 BC), it was held that a personified ‘Necessity’ (later, ‘fate’) guided the heavens by holding the limits of the stars,19 which the ancients commonly believed determined future human actions: ‘If then each star effects some primary necessity, / It’s a myth.’20 John of Damascus wrote that ‘the movement of things which are always the same’ belonged to necessity, presumably alluding to the pagan cosmological belief, and then equated it with fate.21 It is, Methodius of Olympus tells us, possible for man to determine before he acts for good instead of evil, as he has received a mind that is free of all necessity, that is, compulsion, in the choice of what he, as his own master, chooses as best: ‘We are not slaves to Fate or to the whims of Fortune.’22 With the pagan identification of Fate with the stars, 8

9 ibid., 48e–53, 67–73. ibid., 30a, 42; see Zizioulas, CO, 16. A gloss on Gen. 1 from at least 2 Ma. 7:27–9 (see G. May 1994). 11 See Zizioulas, CO, 14ff., 206–49, 250ff., Florovsky 1974–89, 3: 43–78 and 4: 39–62. 12 Maximus, Disputation, 25, 13 [Disput s Pirrom, 294D, ll.14–16, 156–7] (tying Origen to Monothelitism). 13 heimarmene or moira, both from meiromai: to be apportioned, receive one’s due. 14 moirai: the apportioners. 15 See Euripides, Phoenissae, ll.999–1000, Parmenides, §298, Kirk, Raven, Schofield 1993, 251 and Damascene, OF, 2.25, 256 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 39.10–13, 96]. 16 e.g. ibid., 1.8, 176–7 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.1–29, 18–19]. 17 See Eusebius of Caesarea, Préparation évangélique, 6.3.2–5, 122–5 (SC 266). 18 ibid., 6.6.59–60, 156–7 and Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 2.5.4 (SC 294, 58–61). 19 Parmenides, §305, 258. 20 Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘On Providence, Poem 1.1.5’, 54 [PG 37.426.25/Poemata Arcana, 24–5]. 21 Damascene, OF, 2.25, 256 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 39.11, 96]. 22 Methodius, Symposium, Logos 8: Thecla, 13, 120 and compare De autexusio, 120–38 [Photius, Bibliothèque, 5: cod. 236, 116–25/PG 103.304b–307b]. 10

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Cicero (106–43 BC) acknowledged,23 as did the Christian tradition,24 that free will was negated and necessity, in practice, collapsed into the deified stars.25 In deifying the stars, providence was then thought to be inevitably expunged and this either would make God responsible for evil, as he created this necessity,26 or, as Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) wrote, ‘God, too, subject to fate,/ unwillingly bearing the tyranny of his own weaving.’27 God, in short, would not be God properly speaking if He was said to be subject to the stars. Thirdly, freedom, with the locus of freedom being (as was said earlier) in the free will, is expressed in voluntary acts which are, by definition, uncompelled, uncoerced—so having their locus of motion in the agent himself—and done, moreover, in full awareness of the particular circumstances of the action.28 Thus, if necessity was identified with compulsion and coercion, then it would be the direct opposite of freedom and the free will, for such a will only wills what it does, whether it be good or evil, out of a spontaneous impulse involving pleasure, desire, and wish. Necessity, in contrast, is always, for this sort of thinking, in reference to an external force and involves pain not pleasure as in a free act.29 A free man, therefore, is one who, not being a slave, who is under violent compulsion/necessity, acts under his own impulse and so ‘exists for himself and not for another’.30 How then could God, being pre-eminently free, existing for Himself eternally, be said to be subject to compulsion like a slave? Freedom, whether that of God or man, is generally incompatible,31 in the traditional way of thinking, with necessity, as necessity is more often than not taken to be N1. A concern for N1 is particularly notable in the Romantic period. Here it takes the form of the contradiction between the natural order structured by cause and effect and human freedom faced by moral imperatives. Famously, for Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the final level to cognition, which begins with the senses and goes from there to the Understanding, is Reason.32 Reason is the faculty of completeness and unity. It characteristically assumes as a principle that one will find the unconditioned for a whole series of conditioned cognitions of the understanding with which the unity of the series will be

23

Cicero, On Fate, 9, 272 and 17–19, 279–81. e.g. Eusebius, Préparation, 6.6.54–6, 154–5 (SC 266) and Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Fatum, 43.27–44.19, 71–2 [GNO 3.2, 43–5]. 25 See ibid., 36.14, 67 [GNO 3.2, 36–7]. 26 Eusebius, Préparation, 6.6.56, 154–5 (SC 266). 27 Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘On Providence, Poem 1.1.6’ (De eodem argumento), 76 [PG 37.431.17–18]. 28 See Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 3.1.1111a 21–5. 29 See Magna Moralia, 1.12.1187b 31–15.1188b 23. 30 Metaphysics, 1.2.11, 982b 25–6, 14–15 and compare Damascene, OF, 2.25ff., 255ff. (FC 37) [PTS 12; 39.1, 96ff.]. 31 But see Augustine, de civ. Dei, 5.10, 194–5 [PL 41.152–3/CCSL 47, 1: 140–1] and (citing Augustine) Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 22.5co, 51–3; see Couenhoven 2012. 32 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A299/B355, 387. 24

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completed.33 It therefore generates certain transcendental ideas through which it seeks to base the latter series as ultimate foundational principles that might give unity a priori to Understanding’s ‘manifold cognitions’.34 The categories of Understanding would otherwise be scattered, as they are concerned with distributive unity. However, this demand in reason for the unconditioned, either as a series, a boundary, or a discrete object, cannot be met by experience because within the appearances within it we never encounter directly any unconditioned reality.35 By extension, Reason’s ideas are identified with transcendental objects (i.e. the Self, the Cosmos, and God) without any regard to the limitations of experience, which has no access to such objects. Reason, therefore, is led, ‘unavoidably’, to certain necessary ‘rational’ (or ‘sophistical’, as Kant prefers) illusions,36 the most famous of which are his four rational antinomies.37 These antinomies will later be appropriated positively by Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) as reflecting the nature of truth itself as a self-contradictory judgement (Part I). Bulgakov and Florensky were interested in the fourth antinomy between the assertion that an absolutely necessary Being belongs to the world, either as its part or as its cause, and that such a Being exists nowhere in or outside the world as its cause.38 However, following after F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831),39 they above all laid great stress on the third antinomy between (human) freedom and necessity. Kant holds that if one does not hold to his dualism, one has equally rational arguments for both transcendental freedom (or ‘an absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself ’40) and, in contrast, one can argue that freedom is an ‘empty thought-entity’ and ‘mirage’.41 Everything happens solely according to the empirical necessity of laws of nature, where no cause exists that was not itself previously an effect of a prior cause reaching back in an indefinite but unbroken series where compulsion is the norm.42 Freedom, however, is needed for the purposes of morality, and for Kant freedom is always rational or grounded (F2), so Kant resolves this antinomy by arguing that the human subject has a dual character: empirical and

33

ibid., A307–8/B364–5, 392 and see A409/B436, 461, A497/B525, 514. 35 ibid., A302/B359, 389. ibid., A510/B538, 521. ibid., A339/B397, 409, A582/B610, 559, A619/B647, 577, A644–5/B672–3, 591 and A702–3/B730–1, 622. 37 38 ibid., A405–567/B432–595, 459–550. ibid., A452–60/B480–8, 490–5. 39 e.g. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §35Z, 73, §48, 91–4, §158, 232–3, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [=PR], II [1824], 395–403 [Vorlesungen, 295–304], and Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 47, 203ff. [SW, III: 395, 593ff.], Philosophical Inquiries into Freedom, 59–64, 74–8 [SW, VII: 382–6, 395–8], ‘Stuttgart Seminars’, 204 [SW, VII: 429], and Ages of the World [=AW] [1815, 3rd Vers.], 5–6, 23ff., 36ff., 78–9 [SW, VIII: 209–11, 234ff., 251ff., 305–6]. 40 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A446/B474, 484. 41 42 ibid., A447–8/B475–6, 485, 487. ibid., A445/B473, 485. 34 36

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intelligible.43 As the subject of the world of sense, a being in time, its actions would stand wholly under constant natural laws where the series of appearances would be an unbroken, incomplete, and necessitous chain of cause and effect. As an intelligible reality, a thing-in-itself, outside the conditions of time, insofar as time does not condition things-in-themselves but only appearances, its causality would not stand in the series of empirical conditions but would itself be wholly unconditioned, moving out freely from itself. Freedom (F2) and natural necessity (N1) are asserted in one and the same action—each independent of the other—depending on whether one speaks of that action empirically or transcendentally/intelligibly.44 However, just as God, for Kant, is completely unknown, so too freedom is utterly ‘inscrutable’,45 in religious language, a ‘mystery’.46 We can be certain of freedom’s existence on the practical basis that we have an awareness of an obligation to comply with the moral law which assumes the autonomy of the will as a necessary consequence47 but its reality—a theoretical explanation or positive presentation of the idea—is completely unknown. Here we must turn from the external compulsion of N1 to N2, which is internal necessity, meaning that a nature or being has a certain structure, a lawfulness, even a determinate pattern of relationality, personality, which constrains it from acting in certain ways and compels it to act in others. As Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) put it: ‘One must gradually learn that what we call fate does not come upon humans from outside, but emerges from within.’48 Thus, as a human being, I am constrained by my nature from going too long without nourishment, as it requires food and therefore I am compelled to eat or I will die. In the case of God, we might say that, as God as Father, Son, and Spirit is the eternal act of love, what we have called Absolute Freedom, being a love that is always already freely given by one hypostasis to the other, He cannot cease to be such, to love in freedom. God cannot be otherwise than Himself (eternal, omniscient, omnipotent etc.)49 even when the Son empties Himself and takes flesh. In other words, the eternal life of love-desire or Absolute Freedom is characterized by both a free will to love the Other (F2) and an internal imperative, being such a God, to remain such a God (N2). This is why Augustine (354–430) could speak of a ‘certain blessed necessity’

43

44 ibid., A539/B567, 536. ibid., A557/B585, 545. Critique of Practical Reason, 178 [Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 5:47] and see Critique of Judgment, 156 [ibid., 5: 275]. 46 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 145 [ibid., 6: 144–5]. 47 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 106–7 [ibid., 4: 460–1] and see Critique of Practical Reason, 176–80 [5: 46–50]. 48 ‘Rilke to Franz Kappus [12 August 1904]’, 98–9, quoted in Louth 2002, 143. 49 See Augustine, de civ. Dei, 5.10, 194–5 [PL 41.152–3/CCSL 47, 1: 140–1] and Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 22.5co, 51–3. 45

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characteristic to the divine life because ‘it is necessary that God always lives both immutably and most happily’.50 Likewise, John Calvin (1509–64), claiming precedence in Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153),51 has the notion that there can be sin or virtue where there exists necessity (rightly understood). This kindredness of freedom and necessity takes different forms in God and in creation. Thus, man, as he is sunk down into sin after the Fall, by necessity (N1), wills evil inevitably but this in no way makes him less culpable or in some sense free in his sinning (F1/2). God, in a similar way, is good of necessity (N2), since He cannot be evil, but He does not therefore obtain less praise for His goodness, in acting and willing such (F2), because He simply cannot do otherwise than be good. Lastly, the devil, following his fall from heaven, is set inevitably and necessarily in evil ‘but his wickedness is no less culpable [for that].’ In God, His necessity (N2) is at one with His free will (F1 and F2) as they are ‘combined together’ in the divine goodness or are concomitant.52 God, and here He differs from creatures, is what He is by nature but in such a fashion that He wills to be such and ‘he also wills what he wills in such a way as to have it naturally’,53 as, for example, is the case with Father, who naturally as well as willingly begets the Son.54 This is the case because the divine goodness, wisdom, power, righteousness, and will are ‘united together’ in what Calvin describes as a ‘circular connection’ which cannot be broken apart.55 Here we see one of the roots of Barth’s actualism, though taking Calvin in a completely new direction, where God eternally chooses His own being, with the vision of God as being the One who loves in freedom.56 For that matter, it is also reminiscent of the dynamism in Bulgakov of God as Trinity as a free act of selfpositing. For Calvin, God to be God is groundlessly free (F1) but this freedom is at one with who He simply necessarily must be as a good God (F2 and N2): Since, then, God wills to be whatever he is, and that of necessity, there is no doubt that just as he is good of necessity, he also wills to be so, a state which is so far from coercion that in it he is to the greatest degree willing [voluntarius: voluntary]. I would say ‘free’, if it were agreed between us that this should be understood as ‘self-determined’.57

Conceptually, therefore, the divine life, which cannot be said to be anything but one of an Absolute Freedom (2. Cor. 3:17), is characterized by something like what we call ‘freedom’ and something like what we call ‘necessity’. Here Absolute Freedom is not simply being defined by itself, namely F2, resulting in 50

Augustine, c. Jul. imp., 5.2.53, 577 [CSEL 85/2, 258–9] and see Couenhoven 2012, 397ff. Augustine, nat. et gr., 46, 54, 252 [CSEL 60, 272–3] and Bernard, Concerning Grace and Free Will, 4, 18–23 and 10, 56–7. 52 53 Calvin, Bondage and Liberation of the Will, IV, 333–4. ibid., IV, 334. 54 55 See Aquinas, ST, 1.41.2co. Calvin, Bondage, IV, 334. 56 57 Barth, CD, II/1, 257. Calvin, Bondage, IV, 334. 51

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a vicious circularity. What we are arguing is that when evoking the divine life of love-desire, one must use both notions of freedom (F2) and necessity (N2), which clarify, temper, and refer to one another, thereby (in the tension) generating what we mean by Absolute Freedom. This builds on the idea, inspired by Schelling’s identity philosophy, that the divine life as an absolute identity of real and ideal is a self-revelation of the One God to Himself as an Other in Himself, and God is the ‘living link’58 between the two, which means that identity (freedom, the subject) includes difference within it (necessity, object). Schelling may be of use here in understanding how freedom and necessity might be included as moments within Absolute Freedom. He argues that God’s experience of the world, his own self-consciousness as Being for the world, must not be understood to be an anarchic freedom, as in a wild and orderless self-positing of fantastic chimeras. Nor can it have any impersonalized necessary givenness, or limitation, but God’s Being as absolutely free is an ordered freedom and every absolutely free act originates from the inner necessity of His absolute nature.59 In short, absolute freedom is absolute necessity. Thus, God did not consult with Himself/itself about the best possible world to create but freely chose to create the world based on the necessity of His/its nature as love and goodness.60 Schelling’s later thought might seem rather (literally) voluntarist in inspiration61 (‘All choice is the consequence of an unilluminated will.’) with the collapse of internal freedom of the groundless variety (F1) with internal necessity (N2). But Schelling claims, in a point brought up later by Bulgakov, that if God acts with ‘good reason’, choosing the best world from an infinite number of possibilities, His freedom is the ‘least degree’ or ‘highly subordinate’. Schelling tries to avoid a sort of accidentalism with divine freedom, and here Bulgakov and Balthasar are indebted to him, by identifying it with necessity: ‘all, genuine, that is, absolute, freedom is an absolute necessity’.62 It is precisely because this is the case that divine Being is unprethinkable (Unvordenklichkeit des Seins),63 since ‘It is impossible to adduce any further ground for an act of an absolute freedom; such an act is because it occurs in such a given manner, that is, it is unconditional and thus is necessary.’64 Yet even such a groundless act of freedom is grounded as it

58 See Schelling, Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie, SW, VII: 54 (where he is discussing Being) as cited in Bowie 1993, 65. 59 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 47 [SW, III: 395]; cf. Philosophical Inquiries into Freedom, 62–4, 74–8 [SW, VII: 384–6, 394–8]. 60 61 ibid., 76–8 [ibid., 396–8]. See AW, 77 [SW, VIII: 304]. 62 ‘Stuttgart Seminars’, 204 [SW, VII: 429–30]. 63 See Philosophie der Offenbarung [=PO], ‘Another deduction [etc.]’, SW, XIV: 337ff. and esp. 341 and see PO, SW XIII: Lec. 10, 204ff. 64 ‘Stuttgart Seminars’, 204 [SW, VII: 429].

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flows from the necessity of the divine nature, which is wholly love/the Good; a marriage, as it were, of F1–2 with N2.65 In the third draft of his Ages of the World (c.1815), Schelling seems to read the play of his famous triad of potencies—Being in/for/with itself66—through the dialectic of freedom and necessity. These, for Schelling, are one in God, although, insofar as one can distinguish the two, necessity is the ground (‘first and oldest’) of freedom ‘because a being must first exist before it could act freely’. Necessity is identified, therefore, with the nature of God, which cannot not be and Schelling, in typical fashion, has it in conflict with freedom in creation, where God is said to overcome the necessity of His nature through a free creative act.67 In the necessity of God, which grounds freedom, there exist two eternal potencies: (a) that eternal potency of ‘egoity’ or selfhood which allows the being which is love to exist for itself (‘eternal force of selfhood, of retreat into itself, of Being in itself ’), which seems like a version of our N2 married, as it were, to F1–2; and (b) that eternal potency which is love but which does not seek its own but which instead pours out itself in an absolute commitment that cannot be withdrawn and is therefore ‘the outpouring, outstretching, self-giving Being’,68 which seems like our F3. The first potency Schelling refers to as the ‘No’ or ‘negating force’ of Being which is the ‘highest Being-in-itself ’ and is ever withdrawing into itself, thereby making creation impossible. This first potency precedes and grounds, although also attempts to repress the second force which rises from within it as the ‘Yes’ which affirms Being in its eternal outstretching, giving, and selfcommunication of its Being to the world.69 As Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) puts it: ‘After the final no there comes a yes/And on that yes the future world depends./No was the night. Yes is this present sun.’70 The Yes and the No in this scheme both claim to be God and exclude one another in having Being and in not having it, and God ‘is the third term or the unity of the Yes and No’,71 freedom and necessity, which they posit outside and above themselves as the third potency finally constituting the eternal nature of the Godhead in relation to Being as absolutely free72 or the ‘eternal freedom to be’.73 The Absolute YES rises from the Yes and the No, Absolute Freedom climbs up from freedom and necessity, Absolute Self-Positing from affirmation and negation in an ‘unprethinkable decision [unvordenkliche 65

See AW, 25–6 [SW, VIII: 236–8] and see Wirth 2003, 5–31. See Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 12, 251ff. and XIII: Lect. 13, 266ff. and Philosophie der Mythologie [=PM], SW, XII: Lect. 3, 49–65 (see Beach 1994, 116ff.). 67 68 Schelling, AW, 5 [SW, VIII: 209–10]. ibid., 6 [ibid., 210–11]. 69 ibid., 9, 11 [ibid., 215, 218]. 70 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’, ll.1–3, 247. 71 Schelling, AW, 11 [SW, VIII: 218]. 72 73 ibid., 19, 27 and see 74 [ibid., 228, 238–9 and see 299–300]. ibid., 26 [ibid., 238]. 66

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Entscheidung]’74 of self-granting rising out of self-denial constituting God. God as eternal freedom75 has ‘the most utterly free divine will’, being a ‘pure actus’,76 which one cannot climb up behind to understand its fruition. The Godhead is absolutely free because it generates itself eternally through a dialectic of moments of what we call ‘freedom’ and what we call ‘necessity’. This is an idea we shall return to repeatedly with our writers and, in particular, Balthasar. This ‘abyssal freedom’ takes up and integrates necessity in a voluntary self-affirmation, that is, God self-actualizes Himself by modifying and transforming necessity in a marriage with freedom. In this way, the Godhead grounds itself, is its own destiny and necessity, and cannot be ‘overwhelmed’ from anything external except that it can, being the Good itself as it is eternity itself (not just ‘good’ and ‘eternal’), while remaining the One utterly free God, ‘be overcome by the Good such that God yields to Love and makes Himself into Love’s ground’.77 Certainly we have here a conception of God that is, without extensive qualification and discernment, problematic for more ‘orthodox’ theology. God comes to Himself/itself as a ‘becoming God’, as Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) observed,78 and even becomes Trinity in and through creation.79 Yet the application of necessity to God’s eternal free life of desire can also be found in a more ‘orthodox’ context in regards to the ‘mutuality’ in the Trinitarian relations we mentioned earlier. We must say, for example, that, since God is eternally a Tri-personal united movement of love, that God the Father cannot not beget His Son or spirate the Spirit because He would then cease to be God as Trinity, which appears to be a form of N2 without in any way denying God’s freedom.80 Indeed, as Athanasius observed,81 if Jesus is the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6), then He is such even of the Father God, so that the Father, as Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) summarizes him, ‘would have no truth and no life, if he were without the Son . . . It is not the case, then, that the Father is God by Himself, even without the Son . . . the Fatherhood of God depends on there being this Son . . . even the divinity of the Father is not independent of his relationship to his Son. How could he be the one God without being the Father?’82 By extension, we can contend that, since God is

74 ibid., xxxiii, 12ff. [ibid., 197, 220ff.] (see xxxii) and compare, in the context of Barth, McCormack 2010b, 64 and 2013, 123–4 and Bruce 2013, ch. 5. 75 Schelling, AW, 26, 31, 40 [SW, VIII: 237–8, 244, 256]. 76 77 ibid., 26, 74 [ibid., 237, 299–300]. ibid., 77–8, 26 [ibid., 303–5, 237–8]. 78 Heidegger 1985, 109. 79 e.g. Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 321–4, 330ff., XIII: Lect. 16, 337–40. 80 See Athanasius, AA, 1.29.1.10–11, 139 [NPNF, 323] (see Pannenberg 2007, 81) and AA, 1.14, 123–4, 34, 143–4, 2.2, 178–9, 3.6, 312–13 [NPNF, 314–15, 326, 349, 396–7], Ad Serap., 1.24, PG 26.585B–588C [Anatolios 2004, 223–4], Damascene, OF, 1.8, 178 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.48–9, 20], Aquinas, ST, 1.41.2co. and ad 5 and De Pot., 1: 2.3co, 59 and 2:5.3co, 93. 81 82 Athanasius, AA, 1.20, 129–30 [NPNF, 318]. Pannenberg 2007, 81.

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love, He is constrained from hating Himself or destroying Himself but is compelled to love Himself as Trinity. Nor need we identify, as John Zizioulas seems at times to hold, this divine internal ‘necessity’ (N2) with the ousia in contradistinction to F2, which is identified with the hypostasis, so that freedom=personhood and necessity=nature.83 This is all the more the case if God’s essence is always already hypostasized in a free movement of love, as Zizioulas in fact claims,84 for then His freedom is His perpetual affirmation in begetting the Son and spirating His Spirit that He must freely be what He in fact is in these personal acts (as we will see later in Balthasar). Here we are returning to issues surrounding the famous Arian question, expressed classically by Eunomius (c.335–94), ‘Did the Father beget the Son willingly or unwillingly?’ If the Son existed as another within Him, it was alleged, then He did not beget by choice, but by nature, thus meaning that God was not free in His self-generation but begot necessarily. Yet, in contrast, if the Son was not within the Father, but was begotten by His will, then the will existed before the Son and the Son is not coeternal, and the Son clearly might not have been generated just like creation.85 Athanasius, arguing against Arianism (especially Aëtius of Antioch ( fl. 350) and Arius), contended that the begetting of the Son is primary, proper to, internal, essential, and from the divine and eternal essence of the Father. The creation of the universe, as what is external to God, is from the will of the Father and that ‘living will’ is His proper Offspring—the Son. Creation, in contrast to the Son, is secondary and contingent and comes into existence from without or outside (exothen) the divine essence and is therefore external to the living will that caused it and need not have been.86 Athanasius’ distinction, with some notable exceptions, eventually became normative for Trinitarian theology in the East up until and following the settlement of the Arian controversies in 381.87 John of Damascus is typical of this tendency and, in a famous passage, speaks of begetting as an ‘action [or ‘work’] belonging to His nature [physeos ergon] and proceeding from His substance’ in contradistinction from creation as a ‘work of His will [theleseos ergon]’, which, being produced from nothing, is mutable and therefore not by nature and coeternal.88

83 Zizioulas, CO, 18–19, 166, 214, 232, 278, and BC, 43ff., 49ff., 121 n. 126 but contrast 2013, 106ff. (see Farrow 2007 and Loudovikos 2013); compare Yannaras 2004, 171ff., 2006, 26ff., 2007, 235ff., 258ff., and 2015, 243–50. 84 Zizioulas, BC, 41 and 44 n. 39. 85 Vaggione 1987, 181–2 and compare Athanasius, AA, 3.62, 375–6. 86 ibid., 2.2, 178–9 [Anatolios 2004, 112] and 1.29, 138–9 [NPNF, 323–4]. 87 e.g. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 2.5.69.26.5–6, 2: 346–7 and Ancoratus, 52 (GCS 25) [PG 43. 105C–8C]. 88 Damascene, OF, 1.8, 179 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.67–72, 21].

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On the one hand, Athanasius did not wish to say that divine generation was by the will, as willing implied mutability, ignorance, and some sort of parity between creation and generation.89 He held that one can no more say that God might not have generated His Son—though indeed one can legitimately say God might not have created and redeemed the world—than one can say that God might not have been good.90 The Father is simply not Father without His Son and so was indeed never without Him.91 This seems like N2; but since ‘necessity’ for Athanasius was identified with an external law above God (N1), he argues that God is good and Father not by free will or by ‘necessity’ but transcends both (‘human contrarieties’) in being good and generative by nature.92 On the other hand, Athanasius still wished to respond to the Arian challenge: ‘Since then the Son is by nature and not by will [bouleseos], is He without the will [atheletos] of the Father and not with the Father’s will [me boulomenou]?’ Thus, he argues that, although the Son is not from or by will (since He is the will of the Father), yet we cannot say that He who is essentially almighty and beloved is ‘without’ the will/intention (boulesis) or will-desire (theletos) of the Father. God did not begin to be good by will, and for the Father to beget His Son is to be so good; yet He is not good in begetting and loving His Son without that will. It is impossible to say, then, that the Father did not ‘have Him in mind’ as what He purposed so that He is not generated in free love (F2), ‘for what He is, that also is His will-desire [theletos]’. The Father’s subsistence, although we cannot say that it could be otherwise, is by His intention, and since the Son is proper to the divine essence, the Son is not without His willingness or ‘contrary to His judgement [para gnomen]’. So the Son is generated not necessarily but freely because it is not by or from the will; yet, nevertheless, it is not arbitrary and not counter to that divine will.93 Athanasius, in the apt phrase of Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), was advocating for divine generation being a ‘free necessity’.94 In our terminology, Athanasius was reaching towards something like a marriage of F2 with N2 in characterizing the divine life. In later writers, arguably, we see a move towards such a union of freedom and necessity in Trinitarian theology with the idea of the ‘concomitance’ of the divine will with its nature in begetting and spiration.95

89

Athanasius, AA, 3.62, 375–6 [NPNF, 427–8]. ibid., 3.66.5–6, ll.19–25, 380 [ibid., 430]. 91 ibid., 1.29.1.10–11, 139 [ibid., 323]; here, see Pannenberg, SysTh, 1: 273, 280, and 312. 92 Athanasius, AA, 3.62.3–4, ll.15–18, 375 [ibid., 428]. 93 ibid., 3.66.1–3, ll.1–10, 379 [ibid., 430]. 94 Florovsky 1974–89, 7: 53 but contrast: ibid., 4: 53. 95 See Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogues sur la Trinité, 2.457a, 340–1 (SC 231), Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 29.6, 73–4 [SC 250, 80C–81C, 186–9], Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, NPNF, 5, 8.2, 202–3 [GNO, 2: 3.6, 15–22, 191–4], Aquinas, ST 1.41.2 and De Pot., 1: 2.3.2ad, 8ad, 12ad, 60, 62, 63. 90

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The relationship of F2 and N2 traced above can be seen in the modern period in Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), who influenced Bulgakov and Balthasar through Idealism. God or nature is absolutely infinite Being, substance, caused by and existing in itself, conceived through and by itself, 96 so called free because it exists from the ‘necessity of its own nature alone, and is determined to action by itself alone’.97 N2, therefore, not only means that God’s Being, understood in the broadest sense, requires God to do certain things but that God is totally self-sufficient; He need not be conditioned by another. Yet Spinoza, along with many others,98 argued that the divine self-sufficiency assumed the divine necessary existence.99 It is besides our purpose to prove the mistakenness of the jump from N2 as divine self-sufficiency to N2 as divine necessary existence, but it needs little proof that this implication has not inevitably been drawn from divine unconditionality, in instances from the Anaphora of the Byzantine Liturgy of St Basil100 to Kant’s transcendental ideal, especially since the ontological argument is held only by a minority of theologians and philosophers. Furthermore, we shall see various attempts to rethink divine self-sufficiency (N2) in our writers, none of which assumes the ontological proof. So far we have mainly been discussing N2 as God’s relation to himself but can we apply N2 to God in His relationship to the world? In Platonism, ‘God’ or the ‘One’ is understood to be perfectly good, possessing a freedom of selfwill that is grounded by His own sheer goodness. However, God, being perfectly good, has certain constraints on his nature such as not being able to be otherwise than good, and he must express this goodness externally; thus, his goodness spills out of himself in the forming of the world from an eternal pre-existent matter. In Plotinus, for example, although he argues that the One is beyond either chance101 or necessity,102 by which it seems he means N1, he holds to some form of N2, since he repeatedly speaks of things ‘flowing’ out from the One and reality as an ‘overflow’ from the One.103 Anything, when it comes to perfection, produces or makes something else because it does not, indeed, cannot ‘endure to remain by itself ’.104 The Good simply would not be the first principle, perfect, best, and the ‘productive power of all things’, if it remained in itself ‘as if it grudged to give of itself or was impotent’: ‘Something must certainly come into being from it [the One], if anything is to exist of the

96

97 Spinoza, Ethics, 1, defs. 1–6, p. 3 and 4.Pref., 162. ibid., 1, def. 7, 3. See Anselm, Proslogion, 1–4, 90–5 and Debate with Gaunilo, 113–31; Descartes, Meditations, 5th Med., 142–9; Leibniz, New Essays, 4.10.7, 437–9; Hartshorne 1965; and (recently and brilliantly) Hart 2013, 109–22. 99 Spinoza, Ethics, 1, def. 11, 10ff. 100 See Basil, ‘Liturgy of St Basil’ [Prex Eucharistica, Spicilegium Friburgense 12, 230–43]. 101 102 Plotinus, enn., 7: VI.8.14, 274–7 and 7: VI.9.5, 319. ibid., 7: VI.8.9, 255. 103 e.g. ibid., 5: V.2.1, 58–61 and 7: VI.7.12, 127; but see 6: VI.4.5, 289. 104 ibid., 5: V.4.1, 143. 98

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others which derive their Being from it: that it is from it that they come is absolutely necessary.’105 The world, therefore, acts after all in some way as an external necessity (N1) on God/the One, given His own internal necessity (N2) in forming it as the Good who must flow out of Himself. This sort of Neoplatonic reasoning of the self-diffusiveness of the Good has a long after life106 and it forms part of the argument of Bulgakov. However, more recently, we see it in Jürgen Moltmann, when he argues that for God to be the sort of Being He is in His perfection, that is, self-communicating, co-suffering love, is to be creative: ‘It is impossible to conceive of a God who is not a creative God.’107 The conception of God as one who need not love the world would contradict His Being as a free ‘love’ beyond the creaturely oppositions of ‘choice’. It is axiomatic for God to love freely in creation for He is God and this free love-desire—in which one can even say God ‘needs’ the world—is one where necessity and freedom coincide.108 One of the central tasks of this monograph is to argue that there exists an explicitly Christoform problematic of divine freedom and necessity which is that God acts on the basis of love and He has determined to be Himself as love for us in Christ. This self-determination is a sort of freely chosen (F2) internal necessity (N2) for God, because by His own free choice He can become dependent on the world (F3) and by His own free choice He can become constrained from acting otherwise than as a God who has determined to be God for the world in Christ. In order for Him to be this particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, an internal necessity, though freely chosen, seems to compel Him to create a world in which this man exists. The world, therefore, acts as a sort of external necessity (N1) on God, given His own freely chosen (F2) internal necessity (N2) to be out of His own free will dependent on the world (F3) in taking flesh. And, as we shall see momentarily, this is a freely dependent act of divine condescension from which God will not turn back. God graciously condescends to become man for our sake even to the point of becoming dependent on His creation and by this free divine humanization, man is made God by divinization, ‘For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.’109 Angelus Silesius (1624–77) is typical of the radical Christocentrism of such theology, which looks towards Barth,110 in arguing that God is necessitated to love by His own eternal self-determination to be God as man for us in 105

ibid., 5: V.4.1, 142–5 and see Timaeus, 29–30a, 41–2. See Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 38.9 [PG 36.320C–321A/SC 358, 120–3], 45.5 [PG 36.629A–B], Festal Orations, 66–7, 165, Dionysius, DN, 4.1 [PTS 33, 143–4], 71–2, Aquinas, SG, 1.37, 83 and ST, 1.19.2co, 3.1.1co. 107 108 Moltmann, TK, 106. ibid., 53–8 and 107. 109 Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1084C–D (Constas 2014, 1:106–7). 110 Despite Barth’s criticism of Angelus Silesius: CD, II/1, 281–2. 106

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Christ,111 since ‘Love rules o’er everything; even the Trinity / Itself has been her subject throughout eternity.’112 More famously, in Hegel, whose complex legacy lies behind all our writers, God as immanent Trinity (a ‘playing of love with itself ’)113 risks becoming a static corpse unless the universal Father becomes actual through creation and reconciliation in His particular Son.114 The Father can only be God through the world by revealing Himself to Himself in it by particularizing and objectifying Himself in it, and in this way bring about the reconciliation of the world through His Son. Therefore, God to be truly living, fully self-conscious, must be actual, and this requires externalization, a concretization of Himself as an Other over against Himself in the world, that is, the ‘labour of the negative’, which is to say that the infinite must necessarily be tested by the crucible of the finite, risking the loss of itself in alienation in order to be an absolute free and necessary Being.115 The finite is, therefore, ‘an essential moment of the infinite in the nature of God’ insofar as God ‘finitizes himself ’ by externalizing Himself outside of Himself in radical alterity, but this is still His positing of ‘determinations within himself ’, since ‘outside him[self] there is nothing to determine’.116 Thus, when God creates a world and takes flesh as Christ, He wills or thinks it, and this is to determine Himself by positing Himself over against Himself as finite so that there are two finite realities—God and the world—but this is simply a show because this world is something of Himself He has posited to be Himself.117 This is to say, quite simply, that the finite is a moment of the infinite divine life,118 so that just as God is finite, like me, so too I am infinite, like God. (Here we have at least some of the roots of sophiology.) If this is the case, then God truly needs the world: ‘Without the world God is not God.’119 Have we not arrived here at a new form of necessity? It is at this juncture that we must speak not merely of freedom, and, in particular, a ‘dependent freedom’ (F3), but of what I will call ‘free dependence’ (N3). N3 is the other side of the free love of F3 except that in this context the emphasis is placed on its freely irrevocable nature. If N1–2 involve various forms of the bondage of the will, N3 involves the free acceptance of the bondage of the will to another so that the will cannot but be for another because it has chosen and accepted its own complete self-giving. In the case of man, N3, as a free dependence, is usually perceived as an external weight driving one on, moral necessity or a dependence that is entered into freely, given one’s external obligations and internal desire to sacrifice oneself, to be in 111 ‘When God for the first time bore God’s son, then he / Chose [auserkorn] without further ado for childbed you and me’ (Angelus Silesius, Wanderer, 1.151, 15 [Wandersmann, 21]). 112 113 ibid., 5.241, 129. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §19, 10. 114 i.e. the ‘Kingdom of the Son’: PR, III [1831], n. 67, 274–5, 365–71 [Vorlesungen, 282–7]. 115 116 Phenomenology, §19, 10. PR, I [1824], 307–8 [Vor., 212–13]. 117 118 ibid., I [1824], 308 [ibid., 212]. ibid., I [1824], 308–9 [ibid., 212–13]. 119 ibid., I [1824], n. 97, 308.

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need (F3). We can see the interplay of F3 and N3 in 1 Corinthians. Thus, when the Apostle Paul (c.5–c.66) writes that in His preaching of the Gospel ‘necessity [anagke] is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!’ (1 Cor. 9:16), it is clear that this necessity (N3) to preach is from Christ (1:17) and it is a part of Paul’s apostleship, which he tells us is by God’s grace (15:9–10). He even describes this state as being a ‘slave of Christ’ (7:22) but he is not helpless in the matter, for he speaks of preaching of his will or not (9:17). Though he is free from all men in order to gain them for the Gospel, he has freely put himself in need (F3) to all men and, irrevocably so, as he has in fact enslaved himself (edoulosa) to them (N3) (9:19). It should be noted here that just as F3 is both the kenosis and flowering of F1 and F2, so too likewise is N3. N3, as free loving boundness to the Other, involves both the modification and transformation of an external necessity (N1) that only knows coercion and of the naturalism of an internal necessity (N2) that simply does what it does. But this would not be giving the fullest picture of free dependence (N3), for it could not be so steadfast in its commitment to the last if it was not driven to give itself (N1) and in some sense fulfilling who it is (N2) as a Being made to love another who simply loves to be itself. Could N3 be applied to God? We shall contend that God, insofar as He has freely bound Himself to the world in Christ and has made its joys and sufferings to be His very own, is in need and cannot do otherwise than He has in fact chosen to be: God for us in Christ. God, one might say, who is absolutely free in Himself as love (F2), yet utterly dependent upon Himself, gives Himself to the world in free love by choosing (F3) to be Himself as the God of divine desire for us in Christ (N2). He lays upon Himself an external necessity of the world in His love for it in Christ (N1). This love for the world in Christ is faithful and utterly committed because it has put itself in need to the world (N3). Divine desire for the world is not arbitrary. It is the external but free expression of God’s own intra-dependent eternal but irrevocable desire for Himself, where each hypostasis freely gives its all to the Other (F3). In giving everything away, the divine hypostases cannot but be in and through the Other (N3). We will argue that such love dares, indeed, ecstatically desires to make itself vulnerable in the world (F3) by freely making itself captive to its creation even unto death on a cross (N3). It is for this reason that Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow (1782–1867) could speak of the Trinity, as it were, as a ‘heavenly Cross of love’ which is the foundation of the cross of Christ:120 ‘The love of the Father is the crucifying one. The Love of the Son is the crucified one. The love of the Holy Spirit is the one triumphing in the power of the cross.

120

Drozdov 1848, 32 [1992, 7].

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So has God loved the world!’121 God is freely captive on the cross because His own law of love always already freely binds Him.122 In short, we will explore a possible response to the problematic we have traced concerning Christology and divine freedom where Absolute Freedom embraces in itself, in a perfect tension, F3 and N3 because it has always already freely chosen out of love (F2) to be God as God for us in Christ (N2) even unto ‘servitutis extremum summumque supplicium’123 (N1) which will not turn back from its love (N3). The axis of F3–N3 appears, therefore, in this work as a sort of theological ideal of the balance that needs to be struck between freedom and necessity in any response to the problematic. We will first attempt specifically to elaborate this axis in dialogue with our writers and try to make a case for its application to God both in Himself and in His relationship to the world. Secondly, we will more generally argue for the coherence of a form of divine self-determination focused on Jesus Christ. The argument up until now assumes that what we have called ‘dependent freedom’ (F3) lives in a perpetual tension in and through what we have called ‘free dependence’ (N3). In order to express God’s Absolute Freedom towards the world, F3 by itself, as articulated in the quasi-Barthian idea of Fiddes that ‘God freely chooses to be in need’,124 is insufficient. One needs some reference to what we have called N3 because merely asserting God’s free ‘neediness’ (as it were), as Fiddes does, lacks the sense of the total irrevocableness of divine self-giving. Fiddes intends to indicate this irrevocableness, or N3, in the idea that, if God so gives Himself, then he ‘cannot be otherwise’.125 But expressed just like that, it seems to wipe out the implication of F3 that God need not have so chosen to be in need. F3 cannot be simply identified with N3, for then N3 overshadows F3 and one risks losing the sense of the contingency of the free love-desire of God. At its extremes, it seems to make it impossible to speak of God as a Trinity of relations apart from His relationship to us and indeed the relations constituting the world. For this sort of theology, God and the universe—out of God’s good pleasure in which there is no ‘otherwise’—are eternally co-existent.126 In other words, Fiddes risks collapsing the immanent and the economic Trinity. These are all difficulties, as we shall see, also found earlier in Bulgakov, who Fiddes creatively engages with in his ‘sophiological’ magnum opus.127 We want to argue in contrast to such thinkers that one needs to give both F3 with N3 their full force by seeing them in a dialectic. It is not only inevitable but even desirable for any theology of divine self-determination that the divine economy both ‘could have been otherwise’ 121 122 123 124 125 126

ibid., 30 [ibid., 4; following N. Sakharov 2002, 98]. Drozdov 1848, 32 [1992, 6–7]. Cicero, Against Verres, 2.5.169 at Hengel 1977, 51. Fiddes 2001a, 181 and see SWKG, 148, 292, 386–7, CSG, 63–71 and 2000a, 214. CSG, 71, 74ff., 119, 121, 132ff., 142 and 262 and SWKG, 292. 127 ibid., 264, 291–3, 384, and 386–7. ibid., 289, 383–7, and 392–3.

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(F3) and ‘could not have been otherwise’ (N3). Absolute Freedom as a concept embraces both notions, and once one emphasizes one position, then one must immediately correct it with the other. Keith Ward has critiqued Fiddes’ notion of a wholly self-decided God who chooses to make creation necessary to Him as being incoherent because God, he argues, must have a nature that lies behind His self-choice. Moreover, he maintains that the argument utilizes a ‘Pickwickian’ notion of choice, as it denies there is any sense in saying that God ‘could have chosen otherwise’ if God chooses to be the kind of a God who is God for the world.128 In Ward’s view, this amounts to a choice that is no choice at all. Ward has identified in Fiddes’ theology problems with a theological idea that should, nevertheless against Ward, be central to modern Trinitarian theology. Our book responds to these problems in both its exegesis and its synthetic response to the problematic. In this context, it looks to Christology for resources to respond to the very difficulty it has caused with the doctrine of God. In arguing for a notion of Absolute Freedom that presupposes a dialectic of F3 with N3, we are quite consciously departing,129 following Bulgakov and Florensky, from Leibniz’s principle of the ‘identity of indiscernibles’, arguably entailed by his law of contradiction.130 Ontological identity need not exclude difference, as we saw earlier with Schelling. On the contrary, we follow Heidegger when he argued that identity, as ‘Sameness’, is a ‘belonging-togetherness [Zusammengehörigkeit]’ or mutual indwelling of thinking and Being. This belonging-togetherness of thinking and Being which is identity exists in man’s appropriation or enownment (Ereignis) of Being and Being’s appropriation of man, and this presupposes difference. Ereignis=enownment is understood as the act/event of appropriation in which humans and Being are en-owned (ge-eignet) to one another or come into their own towards each other.131 Thus, identity and difference, sameness and differentiation belong or dwell together for Heidegger. This ‘place’ of that which belongs together which is ‘not-a-place’ (Fiddes)132 is a mysterious Between (Zwischen) or perdurance/ dif-ference (Austrag). As a ‘place which is not a place’, it is the enowning event/act (Ereignis) by and to Dasein whereby Being and beings come to 128 K. Ward 1996, 177–9. (i.e. to interpret words in an idiosyncratic fashion, like Dickens’ character Mr Pickwick, in order to avoid problems (see Dickens 1981, 24–5)). 129 Compare Milbank 2004. 130 See Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 9, 14–15, and ‘From the Letters to Clarke (1715–16)’, 4.4–6, 327–8 and see 2.1, 321. 131 Heidegger 2002a, 28 [90] (revd) and see ‘The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics’ [=OM], 47 (see Inwood 1999, 54–7, Polt 2005, and Hemming 2002, 103–77); Ereignis is variously translated: ‘event’/‘act’, ‘appropriation’, etc. With ‘enownment’ (or ‘enowning’) we favour a standard translation. See Hoftstadter 1979, 17–37, Heidegger 1999, xix–xxii, and Emad 2007, 31–3. 132 See Fiddes 2001b, 35–60, SWKG, 218–65 (esp. 249ff.), 320–1, 325–6 (we will return to this idea in Bulgakov in 5.3).

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presence as apart from and toward each other in a clearing (Lichtung), since ‘Man and Being are appropriated [sind übereignet] to each other. They belong to [gehören] each other.’133 We want to appropriate these ideas theologically and suggest that God and the world are enowned one to the other in Jesus Christ and exist in Him in a loving tension of unity in difference, albeit initiated entirely by God. Moreover, ‘contraries’ like ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ and the fact that the divine economy ‘could have been otherwise’ and ‘could not have been otherwise’ likewise belong together in any attempt at articulating Absolute Freedom in itself and for the world. We will pursue a dialectical or antinomic trajectory, especially in Parts I and II on Bulgakov and Barth, in order to articulate an understanding of God and the world and freedom and necessity where they exist in an identity-in-difference in Christ. However, a dialectical trajectory, it will be argued (chs 8, 9), by itself is insufficient in articulating the difference in unity between God and the world in Christ. Such a position so greatly emphasizes the paradox of God’s simultaneous existence as utterly different from His creation and His complete identification with it that we lose all sense that there might be both a noncontradictory dissimilarity and similarity between the uncreated and the created. What is needed is a way of relating God to the world in Christ that maintains the difference and the identity of the two without continually falling into conceptual contradiction: this is what the polarity of similarity/dissimilarity gives us. To claim that two realities are dissimilar is not the same as saying they are utterly different. It assumes a background of similarity, not total identity, which endures in the dissimilarity and on which basis one can say ‘this’ is not like ‘that’. If there were no basic similarity between God and the world, then there could be no foundation for saying that they are dissimilar, in some way different. Here, following the lead of David Tracy, we will turn to the concept of analogy in Part III as developed by Balthasar. In particular, we will adapt the Balthasarian idea of Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of Being’134 in further articulating a response to our problematic that might complement and temper antinomy/dialectic.135 We have described three historical and conceptual forms of freedom and necessity. Firstly, there is freedom as self-will without any sort of ground or ratio. Secondly, there exists freedom, which acknowledges its ratio. Thirdly, we have freedom in dependence or a dependent freedom that chooses to be in need. These three forms of freedom are in a polar relationship with their counterparts in necessity. F1 is a non-rational self-groundedness or a sheer self-positing. It is the mirror image of N1, which constrains one from effecting 133 Heidegger 2002a, 31–2 [95], 36, and see OM, 65ff. [132ff.]; cf. 2000, 148 (see Fiddes, SWKG, 222ff.). 134 Balthasar, Theology of History [=TH], n. 5, 69. 135 Compare Milbank 2009a, 112ff., 176ff., and 2004.

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F3

N3

F2

N2

Figure 1. The Absolute Freedom of the Trinity=the Trinitarian life of love-desire F1. Freedom as self-will, without ratio. F2. Freedom as self-will, acknowledging ratio (e.g. love-desire). F3. Freedom in dependence/dependent freedom which is a freedom to be in need. N1. Necessity as external involving constraint of freedom and compelled activity. N2. Necessity as internal involving natural compulsion given the constraints of one’s nature. N3. Necessity in freedom/free dependence which is an irrevocable acceptance of necessity (e.g. moral necessity).

one’s will and compels one to certain actions. F2 is freedom that is grounded in itself, but what it is grounded in is its Being as love-desire. This is the mirror image of N2 which is an internal compulsion of Being where one must express oneself externally by the very lawfulness or inner constraints that determine the activity of one’s own Being. Finally, F3 defined as ‘dependent freedom’ is the free will to love, ecstatically desire another, to be in need, but this selfgiving and self-receiving love-desire could have been otherwise. It is in a polar relationship, a ceaseless creative tension, with N3. N3 is defined as ‘free dependence’. Once one chooses to be in need, one already always acts according to that love and it could not have been otherwise. Whereas F1–F2 is the exertion of the will, N1–N2 is its compulsion and bondage. Moreover, whereas F3 is the free self-giving of the will to another and its self-receiving in turn, N3 is its free acceptance of its compulsion and bondage to another. Finally, F3 as well as N3 is simultaneously the kenosis and flowering of F1–F2 and N1–N2, respectively. Taken together these two sets of three aspects of freedom and necessity evoke what we call Absolute Freedom, by which is meant the divine life of love-desire of God as Trinity in and for Himself. These forms of freedom and necessity can be summarized in Figure 1. We shall use the terminology just outlined to aid the analysis of our three theologians through which we hope to discern an adequate response to the problematic of freedom and necessity.

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Part I God as both Absolute and Absolute-Relative in Sergii Bulgakov

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4 ‘Sophiological Antinomism’—Sergii Bulgakov’s Debt to and Critique of Vladimir Solov’ev Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944) is a thinker who is increasingly viewed by critics as the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. He is also a figure whose philosophical and theological oeuvre,1 in its breadth and depth, is comparable to such younger Western luminaries as Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Karl Barth (1886–1968), Karl Rahner (1904–84), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88).2 Recent criticism has emphasized the role of the Greek Fathers, the Eastern Orthodox liturgical ethos,3 and the sacramental-poetic metaphysics in Bulgakov’s theology and sophiology more generally.4 However, it still remains the case that to understand Bulgakov’s sophiology, one must above all understand his complex relationship to the work of Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900).5 This chapter will lay out the basic ideas and terms utilized in the version of the problematic we have outlined as it is presented and responded to in Bulgakov’s O Bogochelovechestve [On Godmanhood] (1933–45) (see chs. 5–6). The discussion in this chapter will be in two stages. First, we will look at his appropriation and critique of Solov’ev’s sophiology in his pre-revolutionary philosophical work.6 We will then turn to an introduction to Bulgakov’s theological methodology, ‘theological antinomism [antinomizm]’.7 Bulgakov’s interpretation of Solov’ev’s idea of ‘Sophia’ began life as his response to the need in his own philosophy of economy for a form of 1

See Akulinin 1996 and Naumov 1984. Overview: Vaganova 2011, 333–69, Arjakovsky 2006, Nichols 2005a, Coda 2003, 7–66, Gallaher 2002, Valliere 2000a, 227–371, Williams, SB, Evtuhov 1997, and Zander 1948. 3 See Louth 2009 and Gallaher 2013a; see Sergii Bulgakov, Radost’ Tserkovnaia [1938] [Churchly Joy]. 4 See M. Martin 2014, 2016. 5 See Bosco 1992, Seiling 2008, chs. 3–6, and Vaganova 2011, 144ff., 259–69. 6 See Valliere 2010, Seiling 2008, R. Williams, SB, Rosenthal 1996, and Evtuhov 1997. 7 i.e. not as the usual English meaning, which is an alternative expression for ‘antinomianism’, but as the philosophy of antinomy. 2

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‘transcendental subjectivity’ embracing both the subject and nature. However, it quickly evolved into a metaphor for understanding the tension between God and the world. Put negatively, Sophia is neither divine nor creaturely but in between both realities. Put positively, she is both divine and creaturely. However, the ambiguity of this metaphor quickly proved to be a double-edged sword for Bulgakov. Solov’evean ‘Sophia’ was bound up with a determinism, which made creation a natural necessity for God (N1) overshadowing divine freedom (F1–2). In response to this problem in Solov’ev, Bulgakov attempted to turn a potential liability into a benefit by applying, in ‘theological antinomism’, the positive interpretation of Sophia as a living antinomy, both divine and creaturely, to God Himself. However, this theological move, simultaneously asserting God’s utter transcendence from the world as ‘Absolute’ and His complete identification with it as ‘Absolute-Relative’, simply opened up a version of our problematic to which he had to respond (see chs. 5–6).

4.1 SO P HIA AS A LIVING ANTINOMY—THE ORIGIN S OF BULGAKOVIAN ANTINOMISM Bulgakov’s early sophiology was formulated in response to Neo-Kantianism and, in particular, Kant’s third antinomy.8 Kant contended that reason was faced in nature with a rational antinomy between freedom and necessity whose solution was found in conceiving the subject and its activity dualistically as both an intelligible and empirical reality with freedom and necessity holding sway in their respective realms.9 With a series of articles from 1896–8 critiquing the work of the German Neo-Kantian legal philosopher Rudolph Stammler (1856–1938),10 Bulgakov began the slow process of putting forward a particular interpretation of this latter solution while attempting to avoid a crude dualism. He wished to hold together in nature as a whole both necessity and freedom. Necessity implied for him an empirical account of the world as conforming to natural laws (e.g. cause and effect). By freedom he understood a space outside but still at the root of this empirical world where there might exist a free ‘transcendental subject’ in but not of history. Bulgakov considered the latter dialectic as philosophically crucial, for ‘the question of freedom and necessity is the basic problem of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.’11 8

9 See Seiling 2008. See ch. 3. See Bulgakov, ‘O Zakonomernosti Sotsial’nykh Iavlenii [Concerning the Lawfulness of Social Phenomena]’ (1896), 1–34 and ‘Zakon prichinnosti i svoboda chelovecheskikh deistvii [The Law of Causality and Freedom in Human Action]’ (1898), 35–52. 11 ‘Osnovnye problemy teorii progressa’ [1902], 74 [‘Basic Problems of the Theory of Progress’, 106]. 10

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However, freedom, for Bulgakov, is not a negative concept, like our F1 so lordly in its force that it is beyond all necessity. It is not unlimited by law or givenness (dannost’) of nature as a ‘nondeterminism, noncausality, or absolute occasionalism’ floating in the ‘extramundane emptiness of nonbeing’. Rather, freedom is a positive intelligible reality, our F2; the ability to (relatively) act from one’s self, given one’s self-existence (a se—as in aseity). It is ‘to commence causality from oneself ’ and thereby ‘refract’ the causative chain of necessity as one wills. In this way, one disrupts but does not negate ‘the principle of general mechanism’, acknowledging the necessity that reigns in the orderly succession of cause and effect, since experience, following Kant, presupposes this order.12 Freedom (F2) in humanity is limited in its power by necessity (N1) but this very limitation gives it shape by allowing it to seize itself in its individuality, since it only becomes conscious and reflective ‘in its opposition to necessity’.13 Freedom and necessity are poles, which by their opposition and mutual selflimitation imply and depend on one another. Kant is being subtly adapted here through Bulgakov’s reading of Fichte, Hegel, and especially Schelling with their positive concern for antinomy. It should be noted, however, that Bulgakov was extremely critical of all of these thinkers and argued that their work fell into various forms of the Trinitarian heresy of modalistic monism.14 Indeed, he considered what he called the ‘mechanical materialism’15 of Marx and others to be the ‘shadow’16 of what he referred to as ‘idealistic subjectivism’17 seen in the ‘Luciferian pride’ of the grand ‘panlogistic’ idealistic systems of Hegel and Fichte.18 Both were forms of ‘monistic philosophy’ or ‘monism’19 which were practically united in a ‘mechanistic worldview’ where ‘there is no living nature but only a mechanism.’ The ‘confused spirit’, Bulgakov wrote, only can flit between these two poles searching for a living nature.20 Bulgakov saw his understanding of the relationship of freedom and necessity as ‘opposite’ to that of Kant. In Kant, freedom only exists ‘for the noumena’, beyond what can be experienced in the intelligible realm of the thing-in-itself in contradistinction from ‘the world of experience . . . [where] necessity wholly reigns’.21 Bulgakov drew on the psychology of Idealism but consciously contrasted himself with Kant. To be a free being was to be a

12

Filosofiia Khoziaistva [=FKh] [1912], 214 [Philosophy of Economy [=PE], 199]. FKh, 224 [PE, 208]. 14 Tragediia Filosofii [=TF] [1927/1993], 329 (see Hadot 1957, J. Martin 2015a, and O’Regan 2014, 305–21). 15 16 Bulgakov, ‘Priroda v filosofii Vl. Solov’eva’ [1910], 18. FKh, 100 [PE, 87]. 17 ‘Priroda’, 18. 18 FKh, 59 [PE, 46], Svet Nevechernii [=SN] [1917], 189 [UL, 209], and TF, 355 (see critique of both writers: 459–518). On idealism: Seiling 2008 and Gallaher 2006b, 54–74. 19 20 Bulgakov, FKh, 100 [PE, 87]. ‘Priroda’, 18. 21 SN, n. 1, 191 [see: UL, n. 36, 475–6 (my trans.)]. 13

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self-conscious created unihypostatic spirit as ‘an indivisible union of selfconsciousness and self-Being or self-foundation, of hypostasis . . . and nature’. Experience as the consciousness of oneself as a free being thereby requires my encounter with what is not myself, the Not-I, sheer givenness. This selfassertion of the I by its Nicht-Ich is not the positum of J. G. Fichte (1762–1814) where all of reality is in and from my own self-derivation as an other to myself.22 This Not-I is the co-I, the thou or we, other I’s whom I bump into as the world experienced over against me. This reality constrains me, limits me, and therefore serves as a conditioning necessity on me. In this way, I begin to apprehend myself as free, to experience a world which I am in but not wholly of.23 Bulgakov, therefore, holds that ‘on our understanding, freedom exists only where there is necessity, that is, in creaturely self-consciousness’.24 Bulgakov was attempting to both build on and go beyond the dualism of the Kantian subject towards a new interrelation of the subject and its object, spirit and matter and freedom and necessity. He was explicitly inspired by Schelling’s notion of an identity of opposites.25 If we are free only in relation to the world that limits us and this generates our experience of that world, then the ‘subject is given to us only in interaction with the object, as a subjectobject: I am in the world or in nature, and nature is in me.’26 Action or creative production is that factor which allows for the creative conjunction or ‘mutual penetration’ of subject and object, spirit and matter/nature and freedom and necessity.27 This mutual penetration of opposites, in Heideggerean language, their Zusammengehörigkeit, reflected the reality of God as Trinity, as trihypostatic unisubstantial Spirit who is ‘simultaneously subject and object for itself ’. However, in God, different from creation, there can be no necessary egress of the subject out of itself into the object so that ‘subjectness-objectness is postulated in a single, identical, timeless act: the mystery of the holy Trinity and intratrinitarian life!’28 In God there is no polarization or mutual limitation of freedom and necessity as in Him there are no boundaries. God is beyond both freedom and necessity understood as discrete moments in the sense that, following Schelling, His freedom is in a perfect union with His necessity: ‘The freedom of the Absolute has no boundaries and therefore perfectly coincides with absolute necessity.’29 God wishes what He can do and He can do everything He wishes. Wishing and becoming merge in one perfectly

22 ‘‘Ipostas’ i Ipostasnost’ [=IiI]’ [1925], 313 [see Gallaher and Kukota, ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity’ [=HH], 18] and see Agnets Bozhii [=AB] [1933], 112ff. [LG, 89ff.]. 23 See IiI, 313–14 [HH, 18–19], G [1928], 1: 32–7, and for Fichte, see Gallaher 2006b, 56–8. 24 Bulgakov, SN, n. 1, 191 [see UL, n. 36, 476 (my trans.)]. 25 26 FKh, 95ff. [PE, 83ff.]. FKh, 125 [PE, 113] and compare AB, 113 [LG, 90]. 27 FKh, 128–9 [PE, 116]; see SB, 120–4, Hughes 2002 and Valliere 2010, 181–4. 28 29 Bulgakov, FKh, 126 [PE, 114]. FKh, 224 [PE, 208]; see ch. 3.

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free act that, in being one with necessity, already always contains sufficient grounds for its realization. Nevertheless, this synthesis of freedom and necessity rules out all occasionalism as if God might wish anything whatsoever. God only wishes what is good and can only be what He is, which is love, so God does not wish anything that is not love. In revealing Himself, He reveals Himself freely and necessarily and He accepts no limits on His power except those He sets for Himself through love, leaving room for creaturely freedom and in this way ‘limiting himself and humiliating himself voluntarily in the name of free love’. Absolute free will, Bulgakov writes, is a ‘holy will, and the highest freedom lies in capitulation to a certain holy necessity (Schelling)’.30 God, for Bulgakov, in His own Triune eternal life is a free movement of love-desire who exists because He loves (F2) and He cannot but love Himself as He is such as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (N2). Bulgakov differs in this context markedly from Schelling for whom the Trinity comes to be as a result of creation.31 As I intend to show in this study, in creation, God’s freedom is a free self-giving that does not baulk in dependence on the creature (F3), but in giving itself so totally and effectively it cannot turn back from its free dependence on creation (N3). How, more precisely, did Bulgakov re-envision the Kantian subject? NeoKantian philosophy held that in order for one’s representations to be made the objects of thought, all particular acts of cognition had to be referred to a nonempirical ‘transcendental subject’ of knowledge given in the act of ‘transcendental apperception’,32 the I in ‘I think’. This subject provided a ‘formal condition, namely the logical unity of every thought in which I abstract from every object’ so that every particular cognition could be referred to a centre where it was known as precisely universally valid, objective.33 However, the (Neo) Kantian subject, Bulgakov argues, is ‘idle/empty [prazden]’, a hollow man, an armchair ‘I’ perceiving reality as a play but not acting in it, a passive formal unity of self-consciousness when the subject is in truth a ‘working energy’ which seizes its own subjectivity in and through the given world.34 For Bulgakov, therefore, such a subject had to be a transcendental subject of labour who imparts unity to the many disparate acts of the economic process—otherwise nothing founds and objectifies all the noetic-praxic processes.35 Such a subject would bring together the multifariousness of experience. It had to be ‘simultaneously transcendent to and immanent in history’ by organizing experience into a unified continuum of time and binding it together with an unbroken chain of causation (causal necessity) as well as

30

31 FKh, 224–6 [PE, 208–9]. See SN, 180–3 [UL, 199–202]. See Kant, Pure Reason, B131ff., 246ff. and see B427, 455, A492/B520, 512, and A545/ B573, 539. 33 ibid., A398, 440 and on Hermann Cohen, see Poma 1997, n. 30, 282. 34 35 Bulgakov, FKh, 127–9 [PE, 115–16]. FKh, 139–40 [PE, 126–7]. 32

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being the initiating cause of action (freedom).36 Moreover, it had to unite in itself a host of polarities including freedom/necessity and subject/object-nature so that the free subject did not exist in some realm apart from nature and nature was not reduced to a mere mechanism but each lived in and through the other. The Kantian subject failed to achieve any of these tasks, he argued (and here he was building on earlier Idealist critiques of Kant) because, being empty, a headpiece filled with straw, it simply does not exist. It is neither an empirical reality nor a noumenal one, for one cannot enter into the transcendental realm, but, in the end, it is a necessary ‘methodological fiction’. Such a stuffed hollow man is a ‘device’ to give universal validity to knowledge but only ends up subjectifying both knower and known.37 Nor can God, although he contains all the oppositions in unity within Him, act as the needed transcendental subject. We cannot say God ‘causes’ the world because this would make what is absolute wholly relative, placing Him as transcendent in a necessitous immanent series and continuity of causes and effects.38 One cannot explain the ultimate origin of the world by empirical causality.39 God indeed is the Creator of the world, but its origin is from the ‘creative fiat’ of God who ‘posits’, not causes it.40 What was needed, Bulgakov believed, was some sort of version of this hypothesized transcendental subject; yet one ‘in’ but not wholly ‘of ’ nature. Such a subject, while wholly intelligible, independent, and free of the empirical necessity of cause and effect, would still stand at the root of nature as its animating cause. This subject could not be coextensive with God as Absolute or with any one individual because it would then fail the test of being able to exist as the perfect mono-dualistic mediation of the transcendental and the empirical, or, put theologically, the divine and the creaturely. Bulgakov believed that ‘mediation’41 was needed because it was assumed that there was a fundamental dualism between the transcendental and the empirical, the noumena and the phenomena. In practice, God was identified with the first and the creature, being in the world, with the second so that a ‘bridge’ was needed. In short, the desired subject had to be not only in but not of nature, but also identified but not coextensive with God and individual human beings. The form of causality Bulgakov sought was a cause, to adapt Kant, beginning its effects in the sensible world from itself ‘without its action beginning in it itself ’ because effects in the world of sense cannot begin from themselves if the law of cause and effect is to hold.42 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

‘Osnovnye problemy’ 75 [‘Basic Problems’, 107] and FKh, 142 [PE, 129]. FKh, 140–1 [PE, 128]. SN, 142–3 [UL, 155]; see Slesinski 2007, 136–7, 142–3, 2008, and Gavrilyuk 2015, 454. Bulgakov, SN, 165–6 [UL, 182]. SN, 142 and 166–7 [see UL, 154 and 183–4 (my trans.)]. See Milbank 2009b (commentary: Gallaher 2006a, Dunn 2012, R. May 2013). Kant, Pure Reason, A541/B569, 537.

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This is where the influence of Solov’ev becomes critical, for Bulgakov found his desired transcendental subject in Solov’ev’s ‘Sophia’. Firstly, Sophia, as Bulgakov interpreted Solov’ev, was a unique subject in but not of nature since she was not a limited human subject but ‘humanity’ as an ‘intelligible essence’. She was an ‘integral, universal and individual organism’ in whom one finds the consciousness and the unity of the ‘all’ (i.e. vseedinstvo) of nature, so ‘in this sense humanity is the world soul’.43 Secondly, Sophia was a new vision of nature as a living personal reality, a sort of quasi-subject, the soul of the world (natura naturans).44 She united in herself subject and object and all the other polarities previously mentioned, especially freedom and necessity. Sophia, in other words, in her all-embracing sacramental wholeness45 as the embodiment of all-unity was able to overcome Neo-Kantian dualism through being a perfect living mono-dualistic mediation of all polarities. Indeed, in an early essay on Solov’ev, Bulgakov asked rhetorically what idea Solov’ev gave to modern thought and he replied to his own question that it was ‘positive allunity’.46 This Solov’evean vision was, he argued, a development of Schelling’s identity philosophy47 free of what he calls the ‘Schellingean dogmatism’.48 Yet the most important polarity Sophia united was God and the world. Sophia is, in common with pantheism, an intelligible ‘living substance [sushchestvo]; [so] nature is the subsistent [sushchee], nature is the absolute’ or what Bulgakov will refer to later as the Divine Sophia undergirding all reality. But in contradistinction from pantheism, ‘nature is other than God [drugoe Boga: lit. the “other of God”], His creation and image, a second absolute, which becomes absolute as a result of a process, and in time’49 or what Bulgakov will later refer to as the (quasi-empirical) Creaturely Sophia. Yet these two realities are ultimately one Sophia as a living personal antinomy embracing the absolute and the relative.50 Here we see positively the nascence of what will become a basic theological antinomy for Bulgakov (see ch. 5): Sophia as both divine and creaturely. I refer to this as Bulgakov’s positive both/ and vision of Sophia. Bulgakov sometimes claimed without much elucidation that this Solov’evean distinction (as well as that between God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative) was simply a restatement of the distinction of Palamas51 between essence and 44 Bulgakov, ‘Priroda’, 36. FKh, 143 [PE, 130]. See Valliere 2010, 174–5 and compare van Kessel 2012, 262ff. and M. Martin 2014, 159ff. 46 Bulgakov, ‘Chto daet sovremennomu soznaniiu filosofiia Vl. Solov’eva?’ (1903), 195 [see Pain and Zernov 1976, 42] and see Valliere 2010, 174–5. 47 See Bulgakov, FKh, 98–107 [PE, 85–94]. 48 FKh, 107 [PE, 93] and see ‘Priroda’, 31; see Valliere 2010, 175–6, 182ff. 49 Bulgakov, ‘Priroda’, 33; see Vladimir Solov’ev, Kritika otvlechennykh nachal [=Krit.] [1877–80], SSVSS, 2: 315–24, esp. 317–18, 323. 50 Bulgakov, ‘Priroda’, 32. 51 See Gregory Palamas, 150 Chapters (Toronto, 1988), §§132–45, 237–51 [PG 150.1214A– 1222C]. 43 45

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energies.52 He certainly knew of Palamism53 by at least 1910 through Florensky54 and his own involvement55 in the Athonite name-glorifiers controversy (imiaslavskie spori) (1910–18).56 Nevertheless, the Sophia distinction, besides being different from the Palamite one, comes from Solov’ev,57 whom he knew at least seven years before encountering Palamas.58 Parallels between the two systems, while heuristically useful for interpreting Bulgakov, should be treated with caution.59 However, there is an ambiguity in Bulgakov’s appropriation of Solov’ev. Sophia can be understood not only positively but also (and perhaps more famously) negatively, as neither divine nor creaturely but a ‘bridge’ between both realities. Sophia is said to be a tertium quid, ‘a certain metaxu60 in Plato’s sense’, ‘an ineffable, incomprehensible borderland [gran’] between the creaturehood-Being [bytie-tvarnost’] and the supra-Being, existenceessence [sushchest’]61 of the Godhead; neither Being, nor supra-Being’. Rather, she is a ‘between’ situated in the midst of God and the world.62 She is, in a manner of speaking, a ‘fourth hypostasis’63 but she does not ‘participate in the inner-divine life: she is not God’. But neither is she created since ‘the world is not outside Sophia, and Sophia is not outside the world, but at the same time the world is not Sophia’.64 This negative neither/nor vision of Sophia is perhaps 52

e.g. Bulgakov, AB, 144n [LG, 122n] and Nevesta Agntsa [=NA] [1945], 72 [Bride of the Lamb [=BL], 63]. 53 See SN, 122–4 [UL, 131–4]; IiI, 316 [HH, 23–5], Kupina neopalimaia [=K] [1927], 212, 249–50, 254–5n [Burning Bush [=BB], 117–18, 138, 179–80 n. 16] and 288; Ikona i Ikonopochitanie [=I] [1931], n. 1, 264 [IV, n. 47, 35], AB, 139–40, 144n [LG, 116, 122n], O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei [1935], 32–3 and 36, 58–9; Dokladnaia Zapiska [1936], 8–10, Sophia, the Wisdom of God [=SWG] [1937], 33n; NA, 23–4, 71n, 72 and 335 [BL, 18–19, 61n, 63, and 309]. 54 See Florensky, ‘Ob Imeni Bozhiem’ [1921], Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol. 3 (1), 558–60 (see Alfeyev 2002, 2: 112–13), and S, n. 127, 660–1 [PGT, n. 128, 468–9]. 55 See Bulgakov, ‘Afonskoe delo’ [1913], ‘Smysl ucheniia sv. Grigoriia Nisskogo ob imenakh’ [1914], 292–304 and 336–43 and Filosofiia imeni [1953] (see Evtuhov 1997, 210–28, Alfeyev 2002, 1: 585ff., 2: 144–95, and Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 4). 56 See Grillaert 2012, Reznichenko 2012, Vaganova 2011, 307ff., Senina 2011, Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 4, Nedelsky 2006, Alfeyev 2002, 2007, 241–307, Gourko 2005 (on Bulgakov, 1: 202–42), Leskin 2003, Horužij 2003, and Denn 2003. 57 See Gallaher 2009a, 622–3; Solov’ev knew Palamas: ‘Mistika—Mistitsizm’, Stat’i iz Entsiklopedicheskago Slovaria, SSVSS, 10: 245, and RGALI, Fond 446, opis’ no. 1, ed. khr. no. 42: Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev, ‘Zapisnaia knizhka, Vol. 1, 1880-e gody’, 70 ll, p. 8 (Solov’ev’s notebooks in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow; thanks to Dr Oliver Smith (†) for this citation). On Solov’ev’s engagement with Patristic writers (on theosis), see Pilch 2015, chs. 1–2. 58 Bulgakov, ‘Chto daet [etc.]’, 195–262. 59 See Rossum 2008, Zaviyskyy 2011, chs. 2–4, and Louth 2013 (response: Asproulis 2013). 60 Favourite Platonic notion: Bulgakov, K, 265, 268 [BB, 145, 147], I, 262 [IV, 32] and NA, 135, 244 [BL, 123, 223]. 61 sushchest’=sushchestvovanie (existence) + sushchnost’ (essence). (Thanks to Dr Alexey Kostyanovsky for his insight on this term.) 62 SN, 193, 195 [see UL, 217, 219 (my trans.)]. 63 SN, 194 [UL, 217] and qualification: IiI, 317–18 [HH, 27–9]. 64 SN, 194 [see UL, 217] and 202 [UL, 228].

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closest to Solov’ev’s conception. It never really disappears from Bulgakov’s work but it is gradually superseded by what I have called the positive both/and vision of Sophia whose seeds are also found in Solov’ev. The positive vision of Sophia as both divine and creaturely becomes crucial for Bulgakov’s later thought. He used it as the basis for re-envisioning the distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity. God as Trinity is understood, in an antinomy, to be both wholly transcendent to everything as ‘Absolute’65 and relative to a creation for which He is their ‘God’. As the Absolute as ‘God’, He is defined by and in reference to the world and so becomes ‘AbsoluteRelative’.66 Here we see the nucleus of the problematic in Bulgakov. If God is defined by His creation, which is an internal necessity for Him (N2), then how can he truly be said to be transcendent and so free from the world (F2)? Sophia as a new vision of subjectivity-cum-nature—at once both creaturely and divine and neither fully divine nor fully created—being empirico-intelligible, faces toward God and toward creation. She is the ‘union of antitheses, coincidentia oppositorum, transcends reason and pulls it apart antinomically’.67 Sophia serves as the ‘transcendental subject of knowledge, of economy, of history’68 precisely by being a living antinomy. She founds and synthesizes all the multiple economic acts into a creative unity, ‘transforming the subjective into the transsubjective, synthesizing the fragmented actions and events that make up economy, knowledge and history into a living unity’.69 She is able to found human production in nature because she is the world soul animating that nature and is so precisely as the principle of humanity.70 Being such a world soul, she hammers together into a unity in diversity all human subjects. Sophia serves as the creaturely mediation of the unity of subject-object and all other worldly polarities that exists in God’s pre-eternal intratrinitarian life. A tall order indeed! But what of causation? Sophia rules over history as ‘Providence’ as history’s ‘objective lawfulness/causal necessity [zakonomernost’],71 as the law [zakon] of progress’.72 She does this precisely by bringing the ‘infinite multiplicity of experience’ together in one space and in all moments of time tying it ‘with an unbroken causal connection’.73 Thus, not only is she the cause in, but not of, the world, but causality itself in nature. Through this new subject which is also an object/nature, Bulgakov could assert suprarational resolutions of the dialectics of a host of polarities and problems without in any way 65

SN, 192 [UL, 214]. See SN, 167ff. [UL, 184ff.], I, 261 [IV, 30–1] and AB, 143ff. [LG, 121ff.]. 67 68 SN, 215 [see UL, 245 (my trans.)]. FKh, 144 [PE, 132]. 69 70 FKh, 144 [PE, 132] (revd). FKh, 145 [PE, 132]. 71 Russian calque of Gesetzmässigkeit (lawfulness) variously translated: Seiling 2008, Chap. 3. I.2, n.295 and Gerschenkron 1973, 176–81. 72 Bulgakov, FKh, 171 [see PE, 154] (revd). 73 FKh, 142 [PE, 129]; compare SN, 201 [UL, 227]. 66

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demonstrating the said resolutions. If Sophia was initially drawn on to respond to problems in political economy that presupposed a Kantian ‘God’, unknown in Himself but needed to ground science and ethics, then gradually she became a purely theological means to hold together the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and His creation in a perfect difference in unity. Through Sophia, God can freely will the world without being completely identified with it, as she is (depending on the passage!) (quasi-) divine. Through Sophia as well, as she is (quasi-) created, the world can be said to be in a perfect eternal union with God without collapsing back into Him and becoming a necessity for Him. The concept of Sophia, then, becomes for Bulgakov a sort of conceptual panacea for all number of philosophical and theological ills. But such a notion, because it means everything, comes to mean nothing in particular and indeed we shall see that this is also the case for Solov’ev. One sees, then, in both thinkers the danger of ontological monism. Yet Bulgakov was not uncritical in his appropriation of sophiology and perceived its latent (albeit eclectic) Gnosticism.74 This cannot be said—it is sad to say—for some of the past and present enthusiasts for sophiology who see it as one more species of modern esotericism. Admittedly, in the first flush of his encounter with Solov’ev’s thought, Bulgakov was uncritically enthralled by the poetic-erotic aspects of Solov’ev’s devotion to ‘the Eternal Feminine’ and Solov’ev’s dabbling in the occult. This led Bulgakov to a rather absurd credence in the hysteric Anna Schmidt (1851–1905), whose Third Testament and correspondence with Solov’ev he published. Schmidt believed herself to be the incarnation of Sophia and offered herself as a ‘bride’ to Solov’ev (who realized she was disturbed) as a Christ ‘bridegroom’ figure.75 Bulgakov would later regard this poetic-erotic aspect of sophiology as ‘heresy and spiritual fornication’ to which he was once enthralled and had now turned firmly to the teachings of the Church.76 All things considered, Bulgakov considered the major difficulty with what I have called the negative notion of Sophia as a ‘neither-nor’ bridge (neither fully divine nor creaturely) between God and the world to be that it was characterized by rationalism, determinism, and ultimately monism. All of these problems he identifies in Solov’ev. It is for this reason, that Bulgakov builds his mature theology on what I have called the ‘positive’ (albeit antinomic) notion of Sophia as both divine and creaturely. But before we turn to Bulgakov’s antinomism we must look at both his major criticism of Solov’ev’s sophiology and Solov’ev as the inspiration of his antinomism. 74 SWG, 9–10 and see AB, 137 n. 2 [LG, 114 n. 18] and ‘S. N. Bulgakov, Pis’ma k G. V. Florovskomu’ (IIRM, 2002), 204. See Vaganova 2011, 70–85. 75 See Bulgakov, Tikhie dumy [1918], 71–114. 76 ‘Prot. S. Bulgakov. Iz Pamiati serdtsa. Praga (1923–4) [Prague Diary]’, entry of 29 October/ 12 November 1923 (IIRM, 1998), 199 and see ‘Prot. Sergii Bulgakov. O Vl. Solov’eve’ (IIRM, 1999), 216–17 (see Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 5).

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4. 2 THE S OLOV ’ EVEAN ABSOLUTE AND THE BULGAKOVIAN CRITIQUE Solov’ev’s account of the self-generation or self-differentiation of the Absolute, which Bulgakov criticized, is coextensive with his Trinitarian theology77 but it is as if the first—with its intense abstraction—is the logical truth of the second.78 This is not surprising because Solov’ev, following Hegel and Schelling, sees Trinitarian teaching as a speculative teaching79 not unique to Christianity.80 Much of the obscurity of his teaching comes from his (mostly unexplained) mixing of the canonical Christian language about God with its Neoplatonic and Idealist counterparts, which forms, in the manner of Hegel, its philosophical ‘content’. He argues, following Schelling and the German mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624),81 that God is the Absolute or ‘divine principle’82 who is (variously) the subsistent (sushchee), supersubsistent (sverkhsushchee), and absolutely subsistent (bezuslovno-sushchee) One.83 Firstly, one must speak of God as the supersubsistent subject or Absolute proper, who completely transcends every finite limited content (‘negative absoluteness’),84 is free from every kind of Being,85 because He ‘exists’ as absolutely One (i.e. hen).86 This existence is general or abstract insofar as He has no particular determination. Put in terms of our terminology, the One is a radical version of F1. ‘Translated’ into Christian Trinitarian terms, and one is forced to do this constantly in reading Solov’ev, God as the subsistent One as such is a ‘hypostasis’ or Absolute Subject and, principally, He is the hypostasis of the Father as the ungenerated ground of the Trinity or monarchos.87 Here existence or the ekstasis of personhood precedes essence, as is the case with the personalism of Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) and his student Vladimir Lossky (1903–58), who

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I am indebted to O. Smith 2011 and Romanowsky 2011. Bibliography on Solov’ev: Groberg 1998–9, 299–398 and Kornblatt et al. 2009, 277–87. 78 But see Fiddes, SWKG, 382 (on Solov’ev and Bulgakov: 381–7). 79 Solov’ev, Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve [=Cht.] [1877–81], Lect. 6–7, SSVSS, 3: 80–111 [Lectures on Divine Humanity [=LDH], 74–104]. See Bulgakov’s objection: SN, 145 [UL, 158–9]. 80 See Hegel, PR, III [MS], 79ff. [Vor., 17ff.] and Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 312ff. and PM, SW, XII: Lect. 4, 78. 81 See Schelling, ‘System of Philosophy in General’, 149 [SW, VI: 150], Philosophische Einleitung in PM, SW, XI: Lect. 11, 273ff., PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 8, 173–4 and see 160ff. [Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 211–12 and see 201ff.] and Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 29, 1, 254. 82 Solov’ev, Cht., 4: 48 [LDH, 45]. 83 See ibid., 6: 83ff. [ibid., 77ff.], Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia [=Filo.] [1877], SSVSS, 1, 333–7 [Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge [=PIK], 97–101] and Krit., 306. 84 85 86 Cht., 2: 19 [LDH, 17]. Filo., 348 [LDH, 113]. Krit., 308–9. 87 Cht., 6: 87 [LDH, 81] and compare La Russie et l’église universelle [=REU] [1889], 245–8 [Russia and the Universal Church [=RUC], 152–5]; see Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 310–36, XIV: Lect. 25, 37.

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influenced John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras.88 God, then, as the hypostasis of the Father, the One, the monarchos, is wholly unconnected to anything. He is defined negatively by His separation from everything particular, finite, and plural as the Kabbalistic En-Sof ‘free from the all [vse], as absolutely united’.89 Yet such a relationless indeterminate conception of the Absolute would ultimately collapse into pure negative nothingness because—a key idea of both Solov’ev and Bulgakov—Being (bytie) is thinkable only as a concrete relation of a subsistent reality to its own objective essence (sushchnost’) or content (soderzhanie).90 In this way, it serves as the principle of the otherness of its own Being.91 Put in terms of the dialectic of freedom and necessity, Solov’ev argues that the freedom of the Absolute depends both on it not being bound to anything that exists and on it not lacking anything that exists. If, however, it was merely free from every kind of Being, then it would simultaneously lack every type of Being and so be ‘deprived’ of Being as a sort of external lack and could not be said to be free from it. Being, in such a case, ‘would then be for it a necessity’ insofar as perfect freedom implies that there is nothing that is not dependent upon one: ‘that which does not depend on me, which is given apart from me, is for me a necessity, which I must endure whether I desire it or not’.92 The Absolute, therefore, in order (ostensibly) to avoid the external necessity of ‘lack’ (N1) must not merely be a negative absolute, our F1. It also must simultaneously be a positive potentiality (‘positive nothing’),93 our F2, which contains the ‘positive force or creating principle’. The One is a ‘nothing that is’, ‘a positive nothingness’ in containing, being both nothing and everything, the all.94 This ‘all’ is its Other, which Solov’ev will call ‘Sophia’. One must, therefore, speak of two different ‘centres’ or ‘poles’ of the Absolute: the One (‘Father’) and its Other (‘Sophia’). The second pole of the Absolute, Sophia, is negative unmediated potentiality. Neoplatonism was influential here, so it is not surprising that Solov’ev identifies the second pole of the Absolute with ‘prima materia’ (i.e. intelligible matter or the Plotinian dyad (he aoristos duas)).95 This second Absolute is ‘essence’ or the ‘spontaneous potential of Being’ which the first Absolute needs to affirm in itself in order 88

e.g. Lossky 1976, 56ff., Zizioulas, BC, 44, Yannaras 1991, 33–6. On Karsavin, see Rubin 2013, 108ff., 130ff., 246ff., Horužij 2009, and Meerson 1998, 148ff. (key texts: Noctes Petropolitanae (St Petersburg, 1922), O Nachalakh (Berlin, 1925), and O Lichnosti (Kaunas, 1929)). 89 Solov’ev, Filo., 346 [PIK, 111 (revd)]; on Solov’ev’s hybrid Kabbalism (mixed with Gnosticism, Renaissance esotericism, and Boehme), see Burmistrov 1998, 2007, 159–64 and Rubin 2010, 26ff., 47ff. 90 Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 83 [LDH, 77] and 7: 104 [ibid., 96–7] and see Bulgakov, SN, 104 [UL, 109]. 91 92 Solov’ev, Filo., 349 [PIK, 113]. Filo., 348 [PIK, 113]. 93 Filo., 348–50 [PIK, 113–15]. 94 Filo., 348 [PIK, 113] and see Krit., 309–10; see Bulgakov, SN, 147ff. [UL, 160ff.]. 95 See Plotinus, enn. 5: V.4.2.8–9, 144–5, 5: V.1.5, 26–7, 2: II.4.2ff., 108ff, and 2: II.4.5, 117 (compare Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.6.5–6, 9–10, 987b19–23, 988a9–17, 44–5, 46–9).

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not to become a pure negative nothingness.96 Here plays out the same dialectic of Being and Nothingness we traced above in regards to the freedom and necessity of the Absolute. If the Absolute were to assert itself only as an Absolute as such, then it could not then be Absolute because its Other or not-absolute would be outside of it ‘as its negation or boundary’ and it would then be wholly ‘limited, exclusive, and not free’: ‘If the absolute were to remain only in itself, excluding its other, then this other would be its negation, and as a consequence it itself would no longer be absolute.’97 If anything were outside God, some ‘being’ apart from His divine substance, then it would limit Him as He would no longer be Absolute.98 For the Absolute to be Absolute it must include its opposite/Other, being thereby a unity of itself and its opposite.99 This observation is central to Bulgakov’s ontology as well. This same point can also be viewed more explicitly in terms of the classic One-Many dialectic. If the One is such only by the absence of multiplicity, then its unity would be merely ‘accidental not absolute’ and multiplicity would ‘have power over it’. True absolute unity, the One, En-Sof, the Father is only such through generating or positing multiplicity in itself but still remaining totally one and so ‘constantly triumphing over [multiplicity], for everything is tested by its opposite’.100 The Absolute as a first principle, therefore, simply states in abstract form the truth that God is love. Love is self-denial of a being, self-affirmation of it by an other, and thereby through self-denial ‘its highest self-affirmation is realized’.101 Bulgakov, despite his criticism of Solov’ev’s rationalism, was drawing his theological methodology and epistemology, ‘antinomism’, and even indeed aspects of his intratrinitarian kenoticism, straight from Solov’ev’s teaching on the Absolute. The Absolute, for Solov’ev, is both antinomic, in that it is constituted by the perfect union of contraries (sc. the One (‘Father’) and its Other (‘Sophia’)), and kenotic, insofar as divine self-affirmation presupposes loving self-denial. For Solov’ev, the Father as the One is the ‘principle of its own other’ or ‘will’ insofar as it/He posits—he will also speak of the same eternal act as ‘determining’, ‘possessing’, ‘relating’, and ‘causing’—its/His Other, which is His essence. What the One posits by its own will is its own and a part of it insofar as it posits it but also simultaneously distinct from it insofar as it posits it.102 God, therefore, in contrast to Himself as En-Sof, the One, as the absolute supersubsistent Father, is also perfectly complete in that He possesses His Other as the totality of essence (i.e. all content, every determination). This

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Solov’ev, Filo., 350 [PIK, 114–15] and see Krit., 311, 313–15. Filo., 349 [PIK, 113–14] and see Krit., 310, cited at Bulgakov, SN, n. 3, 140 and n. 2, 167 [UL, n. 117, 460 and n. 3, 469]. 98 99 Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 85 [LDH, 78]. Krit., 310. 100 Cht., 6: 89 [LDH, 82] and see Krit., 310–11. 101 102 Filo., 349 [PIK, 114] and see Krit., 310. Cht., 7: 104 [LDH, 97]. 97

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essence is also referred to as the All (i.e. pan)103 understood as ‘every type of being in a certain aspect, specifically in its positive force or creating principle’.104 God determines Himself, therefore, positively over against the Other insofar as He possesses the All (so being completed, finished, fully, whole, etc.) and is not ‘capable of having anything outside of itself ’.105 In other words, the hypostasis of God the Father contains the All in Himself (‘positive absoluteness’)106 as His essence or ousia in an eternal act and in this way can be said to have Being. The divine All is the positive ‘content’ of God which, being possessed, is the fullness of Being or essence.107 It is, quite simply, ‘the idea of the absolute good, or more precisely, absolute goodness or love’, which is the inner unity, integrality, and fullness of all ideas in God.108 Solov’ev refers to this divine essence-love, the All or Other of the One/ Father, as ‘Sophia’, echoing Boehme,109 and ‘all-unity [vseedinstvo]’,110 echoing Schelling’s Spinozist notion of Alleinheit or All-einigkeit.111 He is, therefore, identifying Sophia with the substantia or ousia of God as love.112 This will later become a cornerstone of Bulgakov’s late sophiology, which speaks of God’s ousia as the divine Sophia and creation as the creaturely Sophia.113 Hence, God as the Absolute is not only hen (the ‘One’) or the hypostasis of the Father but also pan (the ‘All’) or Sophia the ousia of God. This makes Him hen kai pan114 or He is, building on Schelling again, the All-One Subsistence (sushchee vseedinoe).115 The Father as ‘the absolutely subsistent [absoliutno-sushchii]’116 solely possesses His content of the All (Sophia) potentially in an immediate and undifferentiated unity, that is, God is the All ‘in Himself [v sebe]’117 or He is ‘Being-in-itself [v-sebe-bytie]’.118 Nevertheless, He is not content to possess the 103

104 Cht., 4: 48 [LDH, 45] and 7: 113 [LDH, 106]. Filo., 348 [PIK, 113]. 106 Filo., 346 [PIK, 111]. Cht., 2: 19 [LDH, 17]. 107 Cht., 4: 48 [LDH, 45] and 7: 113 [LDH, 106]. 108 Cht., 4: 57 [LDH, 53 (revd)]; cf. 5: 69, 7: 109–11, 9: 136 [LDH, 63, 102–4, 128]. 109 Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 6, 2. 28 and 29, 2–5, 254–5 (for Boehme and sophiology, see M. Martin 2014, 39–61). 110 Solov’ev, Cht., 10: 144 [LDH, 135] and REU, 251 [RUC, 158–9]; also, ‘all-integrality [vsetselost’]’, the ‘ideal all [ideal’noe vse]’, and ‘all-one [vseedinoe]’ (Cht., 4: 58, 5: 70 [LDH, 53, 64]). See ‘Vseedinstvo’, SSVSS, 10: 231. 111 See Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 310, 333, XIV: Lect. 31, 195, ‘System of Philosophy in General’, 170–1 (universe/totality=Das All) [SW, VI: 181–2] and The Philosophy of Art, 24 [SW, V: 375]; Spinoza: Ethics, 1.Def. 6, p. 3, Prop. 11, 10, Prop. 15, p. 14, Append., 35 and 4.Pref., 162 (see Solov’ev, ‘Poniatie o Boge’ [1897], SSVSS, 9: 23ff. [‘Concept of God’, 50ff.]). Compare Boehme, Mysterium, 6, 1 and ‘Second Apologie’, Part I, 89, 19. 112 113 Solov’ev, REU, 249 [RUC, 157]. Bulgakov, SWG, 23–36, 54–81. 114 Solov’ev, Filo. 337 and 346 [PIK, 101 and 111] and Krit., 309; compare Boehme, Mysterium, 29, 2, 254. 115 Solov’ev, Cht. 6: 84–5 [LDH, 78–9] and see Krit., 169, 188; cf. Schelling, PM, SW, XII: Lect. 3, 60–5, Lect. 5, 80ff. and esp. 96. 116 117 Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 90 [LDH, 83 (revd)]. Cht., 6: 86 [LDH, 79]. 118 Cht, 7: 103 [LDH, 96]. 105

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All solely in Himself, but, building on Schelling’s Potenzen, must have it also in two other mutually exclusive eternal acts or positings for himself and with Himself.119 In order that God the Father as the One can will the All or Sophia as His Other, the Other must be ‘represented by or to that which is’. Thus, the Suprasubsistent, the Divine Subject, determines itself and so has Being as the All-One Subsistence not merely as will but also as representation, as an object for itself. This ‘represented essence’ receives the possibility of acting on the Suprasubsistent which represents it (i.e. subjectivity) and so both Suprasubsistent and the essence as representation can will.120 If this is the case, then the represented essence clearly is personal or upholds the essence hypostatically. In theological terms, we are speaking of the Logos who is as an object to the Father who includes multiplicity in His unity, that is, God is the All ‘for Himself [dlia sebia]’121 or He is ‘Being for-itself [dlia-sebia-bytie]’.122 When the hypostasis of the Logos, the divine principle of form as a producing unity, unites Himself with the divine multiplicity of Sophia, as a produced unity or the principle of humanity, they together comprise the integral divine organism at the heart of God: Christ.123 Lastly, the Suprasubsistent as subject, which was separated from that which it represents as object, is united with it again. The Suprasubsistent finds itself in the represented essence and vice versa. Here we have a new third mode of Being, a sort of subject-object, following Schelling’s intuition which Bulgakov so highly prized. In this third reality, which presumably can also will, the first two interact or feel one another—namely, feeling.124 We have finally arrived, in Christian terms, at the Holy Spirit whom the Father posits as maintaining Himself in an actual mediated and differentiated unity with His content, Sophia. By His Spirit, the Father finds Himself in His Other, the Son, as eternally returning ‘to itself [k sebe]’ and ‘subsisting with itself [u sebia sushchee]’,125 that is, God is ‘Being-with-itself [u-sebiabytie]’.126 Although we shall see shortly that Bulgakov is very critical of Solov’ev’s Trinitarian thought, he does clearly adapt the notion of the Father’s self-revelation or self-positing of Himself as Trinity from Solov’ev. This highly rationalist Trinitarian theology where God necessarily generates or posits Himself is extended to creation and it is here that the greatest problems with Solov’ev’s theology emerge. The second Absolute or pole of the Absolute as it is the principle of Being in its multiplicity, is attracted 119

Cht, 6: 94–5 [LDH, 87–8]; see Valliere 2000b, 121–2. 121 Solov’ev, Cht., 7: 104 [LDH, 97]. Cht., 6: 86 [LDH, 79]. 122 123 Cht., 7: 103 [LDH, 96]. Cht., 7: 113–16 [LDH, 106–9] and 8: 121 [LDH, 113]. 124 Cht., 7: 104 [LDH, 97]; compare Filo. 347–74 [PIK, 112–37] and REU, 241–3 [RUC, 148–50]. 125 Cht., 6: 90 [LDH, 83]. 126 Cht., 7: 103 [LDH, 96]; see Filo., 357–9, 375ff. [PIK, 121–3, 139ff.]. 120

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towards Being and searches for it in deprivation as the ‘craving for Being’.127 The Absolute, therefore, needs the Other. In order to manifest itself in freedom, to know itself beyond the pull of the necessity of the Other (‘there is consequently necessity, a divine fate’), to quench its thirst for Being, it ultimately must concretize itself outside itself as the world to possess itself in freedom.128 Creation is conceived thereafter differently according to the period of Solov’ev’s thought. But in every period, like Solov’ev’s teaching on the Trinity, it is characterized by rationalism, determinism, and pantheism.129 In whatever form creation may be conceived, for Solov’ev, and he is here rehearsing Schelling’s theomachy of the Absolute, in order for the Absolute in itself to be free, to be unified and unchanged ‘in all the multifaceted creative works of its essence or love’, it must eternally triumph over its necessity. It so triumphs by externalizing itself so that ‘Freedom and necessity are correlative— the first being real only through the realization of the second.’130 In terms of our terminology, God possesses not merely F1, a raw discharge of pure divine will unencumbered by anything, freer than free, but also F2. He is, possessing F2, a movement of sheer positive desire into the Other for the sake of love. This movement of love only takes place because God already always has an internal need (N2) of an Other (whether divine nature, Being, or the world) to define himself. In short, God needs the world and must create it in order to be a truly free God. In this very context, Bulgakov feels that Solov’ev is akin not to Kant, who with his thing-in-itself acknowledged a mysterious unknowable reality beyond man, an ‘absolute NOT’, but to Hegel and Schelling. With their grandiose systems of metaphysical speculation, they would not acknowledge proper bounds to human reason.131 Solov’ev, Bulgakov writes, ‘generally sins by an excessive rationalism in his theology’. He conflates a speculative account of the self-generation of the Absolute discernible to reason with the Christian revelation of the Holy Trinity, which is the crux of reason, resulting in ‘an excessive deduction of creation’.132 This can be seen particularly in Solov’ev’s characterization ‘without elucidation’ of the ‘transcendent absolute’ by the ‘problematic’ kabbalistic notion En-Sof which he then ‘illegally and without any explanation’ equates with the hypostasis of the Father. On this basis, he then ‘rationally deduces its relation to the world’ and the world and the Absolute’s ‘mutual determination’ of one another.133 En-Sof and God the Father, Bulgakov continues, are treated as synonymous when they are actually quite distinct ideas ‘belonging to different planes’. En-Sof is ‘the transcendent 127 129 130 132 133

128 Filo., 353 [PIK, 118] and see Krit., 313. Filo., 351 [PIK, 116]. Cht., 9: 137–40 [LDH, 129–31] and REU, 251–3 [RUC, 160–1]. 131 Filo., 352 [PIK, 116] and see Krit., 313. Bulgakov, SN, 139–40 [UL, 151–2]. SN, 140 and n. 2, 167 [see UL, 152 and n. 3, 469 (my trans.)]. SN, 140 [see UL, 152 (my trans.)] and for Kabbalism, see SN, 130–3 [UL, 140–3].

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Godhead before disclosure’134 or, alternatively, the ‘NOT-something’ of negative theology.135 In contrast, God the Father is ‘the first hypostasis of the triune God’136 which concerns ‘God who has disclosed Himself in the world—at the beginning of this disclosure’.137 We shall see in chapter 5 that ‘God’ as Absolute, for Bulgakov, exists in two antinomic forms—as a ‘Not-Something’ negating relationship, and as Holy Trinity, who is Absolute Self-Relation-inItself. Antinomism, for Bulgakov, becomes the means by which he attempts to tame the rationalism and determinism of sophiology by asserting a suprarational unity in difference for a host of ‘opposites’. Bulgakov specifically notes how Solov’ev, having ‘completely swallowed up and excluded’ the ‘Other’ ‘by the notion of the all-one absolute’, then imports metaphysical ‘need’ into the Absolute, thereby ‘limiting [the absolute] by means of some incomprehensible fashion not in accordance with its notion’. Creation cannot be impelled if it is a divine free act of God: ‘The “Other” can only be created entirely without compulsion and is not posited according to metaphysical necessity.’138 Bulgakov is objecting here not simply to Solov’ev’s rationalism, but to God being made into what Barth would later call a ‘world-principle’.139 Ironically, however, Bulgakov, despite his best attempts to correct the excesses of sophiology through antinomism, seems to fall into the very same mistakes as Solov’ev. He makes creation into a derivation of love, a result of ‘sophianic determinism’, although stripped of rationalism and as only one of the possibilities of the antinomy of creation (see ch. 6). The picture is further complicated, as was mentioned earlier, by the fact that Bulgakov’s very antinomism, as a reaction to Solov’ev’s arguably rational determinism, seems to have its roots in Solov’ev’s notion of the absolute as a harmony of opposites. Another possible source of inspiration for Bulgakov’s antinomism is the fact that Sophia is so polyvalent in Solov’ev’s thought that it is unclear, in the system, what cannot be said to be her role. Not only is Sophia all-unity but also she is the ideal human and to this Solov’ev adds that she is the body of God140 and the eternal but fallen soul of the world. As the Anima mundi, through the various incarnations of the Logos, Sophia gradually acts once again as the bond and unity of creation.141 Indeed, Aleksei Losev (1893–1988) lists ten quite different, even he admits, logically contradictory aspects of Sophia.142 Thus, Sophia, in Solov’ev, is a living antinomy, a metaphor for difference-in-unity, as in her is united any number of ‘opposites’, from ‘freedom and necessity’ to ‘God and the world’. One can, arguably, speak of a tacit Solov’evean ‘antinomism’ that becomes the basis for Bulgakov’s unique articulation of our problematic as well as his response. But 134 135 136 138 140 142

SN, n. 4, 140 [see UL, n. 118, 460 (my trans.)]. SN, 140 [see UL, 152: lit. ‘NOT-what.’ (my trans.)]. 137 SN, n. 4, 140 [UL, n. 118, 460]. SN, 140 [UL, 152]. 139 SN, n. 2, 167 [see UL, n. 3, 469 (my trans.)]. Barth, CD, II/1, 321. 141 Solov’ev, Cht. 7: 115 [LDH, 108]. Cht, 9: 140 [LDH, 131]. Losev 2000, 200–24.

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what was the antinomism that Bulgakov developed both in reaction to Solov’ev’s sophiological excesses and as an indirect inspiration of its celebration of paradox and contradiction?

4.3 BULGAKOVIAN ANTINOMISM Bulgakov argues that by meditating on revelation we are given two selfdefinitions of God as Trinity. The first self-definition is that of the ‘Absolute’ and it itself is dual. Apophatically, the Absolute (properly speaking) is a wholly Other transcendence, an eternal NO, whose pursuit eventually negates even the relational name of ‘God’. Kataphatically, the Absolute (or properly, ‘Absolute Relation’)143 is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Absolute Self-Relation-in-Itself, immanent Trinity, an eternal YES. The second selfdefinition is the Absolute as relative to or immanent in the world (i.e. the ‘Absolute-Relative’ or ‘Absolutely relative’). It is affirmed kataphatically as the economic Trinity, a divine YES to creation, ‘God’ for us, since, as Bulgakov quotes Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘The name Theos is a relative name, just as also the name Lord.’144 ‘God’ is a relative concept always in reference to a specific ‘creation’ for whom it is their God.145 The Absolute out of a free self-giving love posits Itself as ‘God’, thereby accepting in Himself the differentiation of ‘God’ and the ‘world’.146 If creation is an internal divine self-differentiation, then when God creates the world, He is ‘born’ or ‘becomes’ ‘God’ with a world and cannot be otherwise (N3) since He has given Himself with a free but necessitous self-sacrificial humble love (F3) that could have been otherwise.147 We shall examine this dual self-definition in chapter 5. By arguing that the notion and even reality of ‘God’ presupposes relativity, Bulgakov was building critically on his predecessors. Solov’ev, like Bulgakov, held that all Being, even divine Being, implies relativity.148 Bulgakov also drew from Schelling, with his account of the Absolute’s self-differentiation through self-affirmation, whose favourite phrase from Newton (‘Deus est vox relativa’)149 Bulgakov repeatedly cites.150 Therefore, ‘God’, properly the 143

Bulgakov, I, 261 [IV, 30]. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 30.18, 108 [SC 250, 128A, ll.9–12, 264–5] as quoted (paraphrase) at Bulgakov, SN, n. 1, 167 [see UL, n. 2, 469 (my trans.)] and see SWG, n. 4, 60; see Lingua 2000, 37ff. 145 146 Bulgakov, SN, 103 and 167 [UL, 109, 184]. SN, 103 [UL, 109]. 147 SN, 104 and see 165–9 [UL, 110 and see 181–6]. 148 SN, 104 [UL, 109] and see Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 83 [LDH, 77] and 7: 104 [LDH, 96–7]. 149 Isaac Newton 1713, 482. 150 See Bulgakov, SN, n. 1, 167 [UL, 184, n. 2, 469] (from Schelling, Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus, SW, X: 261, 279 but see PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 14, 291) and see Bulgakov, SWG, 60 n. 4. 144

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Absolute, is both the ‘NOT-is [NE-est’]’ as well as immanent Trinity, Absolute Self-Relation-in-Itself, and, as He posits Himself as ‘God’, economic Trinity. He accepts to be in relationship to a world and receives existence in revealing Himself: ‘He is, He is ON [i.e. ego eimi ho on: Ex. 3:14 (LXX)], The One Who Is [Sushchii] [Ex. 3:14], Yahweh, as He revealed himself to Moses.’151 (Note the parallel with the positive both/and vision of Sophia.) These two self-definitions of God—the Absolute (in its two forms) and God as Absolute-Relative—are in an antinomic relationship, being conceptually contradictory, where the thesis and antithesis cannot be harmonized by human reason. This is well expressed by an image used frequently by Bulgakov taken from Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64),152 ‘an archangel with a flaming sword of antinomies bars the way to human understanding, commanding that it bow down before incomprehensibility in a podvig of faith’.153 Effectively, this leads to two paths in theology, the apophatic and the kataphatic, which must be continually balanced through faithful reasoning, with the kataphatic always existing on the basis of the apophatic.154 However, as we shall see, there is great ambiguity in this system. The Absolute as Self-Relation-in-Itself (immanent Trinity) appears to be a conceptual (kataphatic) projection of the Absolute-Relative (economic Trinity) so that the only apophatically consistent ‘God’ is Divine Nothingness. Apophatic theology, if it can be said to apply to the immanent Trinity, enters in with the monarchy of the Father (see ch. 5). We have emphasized the ultimate roots of Bulgakov’s antinomism in Solov’ev as this is less well appreciated. Bulgakov’s thought, however, is but one example of a broad quest in modern Russian thought and culture155 for a unity that respects uniqueness and difference. This search for a unity in difference begins in the early nineteenth century with the Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireevsky (1806–56). Kireevsky famously upholds ‘integrality’ (tsel’nost’), which he understands as ‘wholeness of Being, both external and inner, social and individual, intellectual and workaday, artificial and moral’, where variety flourishes in unity.156 But this same cultural trend continues down right through into the late twentieth century, as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). In Bakhtin’s famous writings on the novels of Dostoevsky, we see a ‘polyphony’ and ‘dialogism’157 which marries profound pluralism

151

SN, 102, 104 [UL, 108, 109]. See SN, 127 [UL, 137] and Cusa, De Visione Dei, Vol. 2: 9.39–11.47, 697–701. 153 Bulgakov, SN, 141 [see UL, 153 (my trans.)]. (On the untranslatable podvig (roughly, ‘spiritual struggle’ or ‘ascesis’) in Bulgakov, see Radost’ Tserkovnaia, 30–4 [Churchly Joy, 44–50] and for commentary, see R. Williams, SB, 65–6.) Cf. Bulgakov, SWG, 61, TF, 388 and I, 260. 154 SN, 104–5, 119, 121, 127, 146 [UL, 110–11, 128, 130, 137, 159] (see Gallaher 2013b). 155 See Akhutin 1991, Blank 2007, and Poole 2001. 156 Kireevsky 1911, 1: 218 [1998, 229]. ‘Integrality’ is reminiscent of sobornost’: Khomiakov 2006, 275–9 [1998, 135–9] and Zenkovsky 1927. 157 Bakhtin 1984, 40; see Blank 2007, 31–3, who compares Kant, Bakhtin, and Florensky. 152

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to unfinalized unity, seen in the image of the ‘church as a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous come together’.158 However, the more immediate and better-known source of Bulgakov’s antinomism is Florensky, whose reading of sophiology was influential upon him due to their strong friendship.159 Truth itself, for Florensky, must take the formal logical form of an antinomy or ‘self-contradictory judgement’ where the antithesis entrains its thesis and vice versa.160 In the background to Florensky’s argument lie Nicholas of Cusa and, especially, Kant.161 Truth, he argued, must be stated in a selfcontradictory judgement because, if a rational formula is true, then it will foresee all objections, itself providing the bounds or limit of all its refutations. Materially speaking, truth is, as Nicholas of Cusa puts it, a coincidentia oppositorum that necessarily involves multiple determinations that logically cancel each other out or are irreconcilable but which must be held together in faith.162 In heaven, certainly, there is only one Truth but on earth we have ‘a multitude of truths, fragments of the Truth, noncongruent to one another’.163 Florensky applies this antinomic vision of truth to all the major Christian dogmas. For example, in the Chalcedonian horos with its alpha privatives concerning the two natures united in Christ, we see a coincidentia oppositorum of the thesis that these natures are unconfused and unchanged (asygchytos, atreptos) with the antithesis that they are indivisible and inseparable (adiairetos, achoristos).164 But there is an even more important passage in Florensky that is crucial for the development of Bulgakov’s antinomy of the Absolute and AbsoluteRelative. Florensky speculated that God brings about a correlation of Himself with His creatures through the condescension of Himself as the unconditional and absolute Holy Trinity. He does this through allowing Sophia (‘love-ideamonad’), as a sort of ‘fourth’ hypostatic bridge element, entry into the life of His hypostases, so that, ‘Remaining all-powerful, God treats His creatures as if He were not all-powerful . . . Remaining ‘one’ in Themselves, the Hypostases make Themselves ‘other’ in relation to creation.’165 Antinomies, thesis with its 158

Bakhtin 1984, 26–7 and see 289. See R. Williams, SB, 116ff. and Rubin 2010, 314 (critique of Florensky). 160 Florensky, S, 147ff., 153 [PGT, 109ff., 114]. 161 See Florensky, S, 153, 158–9 [PGT, 114, 117–18] and ‘Kosmologicheskie antinomii I. Kanta’ [1909], 596–625 (see Schneider 2013, Žust 2002, 198–200, 254–7, Slesinski 1984, 142–9, and Zenkovsky 1953, 2: 880–3); compare Bulgakov, SN, 127–30 (Cusa), 139–40 (Kant). 162 Florensky, S, 156–7 [PGT, 116] and see Bulgakov, SN, 127–30 and 141 [UL, 137–40 and 153]; cf. Schneider 2013, 36–41, Slesinski 1984, 144–6, Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, 1: I.4.11–12, 8–10 and I.22.67–69, 36–8 and De Visione Dei, 2: 9.38–39, 697, 13.54–55, 705. 163 Florensky, S, 158 [PGT, 117]. 164 Florensky, S, 164 [PGT, 121]; cf. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §302, 108. 165 Florensky, S, 323 [PGT, 236]; see Vaganova 2011, 269–76 and Slesinski 1984, 116–18, 172ff. and 196ff. and 1995, 471–3. 159

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antithesis, Florensky argues, are the constitutive elements of the unutterable religious experience (and so of religion itself) of its mysteries. These mysteries cannot be put into words except in the form of contradictions166 and thereby require the response of faith: ‘Thesis and antithesis, as warp and woof, bind the very fabric of religious experience. Where there is no antinomy, there is no faith.’167 But how did Bulgakov adapt these fundamental insights? Antinomism, for Bulgakov,168 is especially characteristic of religious consciousness with its contact with the mystery of the transcendent world. Religious experience, for reason, contains what appears to be a contradiction. On the one hand, one has God, as the object of religion, what is given to religious consciousness, who is something, which is utterly transcendent, alien to what is natural and external to man and the world. On the other hand, God reveals himself to the religious consciousness of man: ‘he touches it, he enters within it, he becomes its immanent content’. Both moments of religious consciousness are given simultaneously as ‘poles, in their mutual repulsion and attraction’. The object of this consciousness, the Godhead, is both ‘transcendentally-immanent or immanently-transcendent’ since God is necessarily both (error comes from emphasizing only one of the poles) the one who dwells in light inaccessible (1 Tim. 6:16) and the one who condescends to reveal Himself to the world and dwell with man as a man (Jn. 14:23).169 When we translate these basic elements of experience into the language of the philosophy of religion, ‘we immediately see that before us is clearly a contradictory combination of concepts resulting in an antinomy’, since the transcendent cannot be simultaneously immanent and remain transcendent and vice versa.170 Antinomy admits of two contradictory, logically incompatible, but ‘ontologically equally necessary assertions’, which testify to the existence of a mystery beyond which reason cannot penetrate but which is ‘actualized and lived in religious experience’.171 Yet rational impossibility and contradictoriness are not the guarantee of a real impossibility, so we should be spurred on to lay bare and realize the antinomies of religious consciousness to their furthest consequences to discern the mystery. Antinomy, Bulgakov contends, is neither logical contradiction nor dialectical contradiction. Logical contradiction results from error in thought where thought does not conform to its own immanent standards insofar as there exists an ‘inadequate grasp of the object of thought from the side of logical form’.172 In contrast, the dialectical contradiction of Hegel does not result 166

167 Florensky, S, 158 [PGT, 117]. Florensky, S, 168 [PGT, 120]. See Seiling 2008, ch. 6.II, Lingua 2000, 33–54, Coda 1998, 56–72, and Kukavin 1994, 2: 630–1. 169 Bulgakov, SN, 99 [see UL, 103 (my trans.)]. 170 SN, 99 and see 102ff. [UL, 104 and see 107ff. (my trans.)]; compare SN, 29, 39ff. [UL, 6–7, 20ff.]. 171 172 SWG, n. 18, 77. SN, 100 [see UL, 105 (my trans.)]; cf. SWG, n. 18, 77. 168

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from an error but from what Hegel mistakenly regards as the very nature of the ‘critical self-consciousness of formal thought’. Thought, Hegel argued, continually moves and changes positions, considering itself superior to all contradictions because, whenever it encounters a stop in its movement, it arbitrarily sublates it to move on to a new point.173 Antinomy is quite different, therefore, from these latter two forms of contradiction in that it is concerned with the inadequacy of thought to its given object or objectives. On the one hand, if the object were completely transcendent to thought, it would then not only be inadequate to thought but cease to be an object for thought itself, since it would be inconceivable. On the other extreme, in turn, if the object was entirely adequate to thought, then it would be fully immanentized. This is the case with divine or transcendent reason (razum=Vernunft), since in God thought and Being coincide in the same act (the subject-object) and transcendence and immanence also are transparent to one another. In God there are no antinomies, gaps, and hiatuses, as these constitute the ‘natural property of human reason’. Human or immanent reason (rassudok=Verstand), in contrast, where there is a disjunction between transcendence and immanence, simply cannot make that which is, its object, Being, ‘entirely immanent to itself ’ by subordinating it to the laws of its own thinking, since ‘between [the laws of thought] . . . and Being is disclosed a disjunction, which also finds its expression in antinomies’. When an antinomy is found, it is a sure sign of the transcendence of the object in question and of the shipwreck of rationalistic approaches to reality, which make all nature fully cognizable.174 Antinomic thinking does indeed seize its object but it is only made partly immanent to itself to a ‘certain limit, which is also disclosed in the antinomy’ which is to reason ‘a precipice and abyss, but at the same time it cannot not go to this point’.175 Bulgakov was certainly aware that Kant had argued that he had ‘cleared up’ his antinomies by reason. However, he felt that the limited competence of reason, the ‘antinomicity of its structure’, was disclosed by this demonstration, so that Kant’s solution did not at all disprove the basic ‘antinomism in thinking’ with its supposition of the inadequacy of thought to its object.176 In other words, Kant believed that his antinomies were the result of a denial of the dualism of the noumenal and the phenomenal and that this could be rationally resolved once thought recognized its said limitations. Bulgakov, in contrast, is arguing that reason cannot resolve its antinomies nor should it even attempt to resolve them. The way of truth is found through grasping both theses of the antinomy in a difference in unity. Antinomism is in fact 173 174 175 176

SN, 100–1 and see 141 [UL, 105 and see 153]. SN, 100 [see UL, 104–5 (my trans.)]. SN, 100–1 [see UL, 104–5 (my trans.)]. SN, 100 and see 143 [see UL, 104 and see 155–6 (my trans.)].

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quite natural to thought: ‘Lawful/Necessitous antinomies [zakonomernye antinomii] are entirely inherent to reason.’ It determines the limits of thinking and lays out its possible lines of activity. In experience, thought does not create its own objects (as some Neo-Kantians believed) but is given them or has them imposed upon it in the stream of life and these objects are more or less adequate to it, so antinomies will naturally arise in all thinking.177 As was mentioned earlier, in the case of religious understanding, with its consciousness of mystery, it is only the fire of faith which through its striving holds together in unity both sides of the antinomy. This striving itself acts as the motor of religious life.178 If it is natural for all reason to produce antinomies, given that the basic building block of self-consciousness all too easily falls into contradictions, then this is the case above all with reason when it is concerned with God. The ‘object’ of God is immanent in reason but nevertheless radically transcendent to it. Indeed, Bulgakov argues, like Florensky, that if one does not encounter antinomies in religion, one knows something is wrong and one probably has stumbled into the realm of rationalist religion which negates faith.179 Nor was Bulgakov insensitive to the linguistic texture of all thought, including religious thought. Bulgakov later applies, in his Die Tragödie der Philosophie (German: 1929/Russian: 1991), his antinomic thinking to language. Bulgakov focuses on the antinomic form of the basic linguistic-existential judgement/sentence, ‘I am A’ with its three moments of hypostasis/subject, logos/predicate, and ousia/copula. Bulgakov saw the sentence as an icon of the Trinity.180 Taken as a whole, these three moments in their unity as a sentence express the rational human subject’s self ’s affirmation of itself in its self-consciousness as substance.181 Human spirit is ‘a living, ceaselessly self-realizing sentence’182 and, in this way, it is a living witness to the Trinity which is sealed upon it.183 The subject as a sentence, however, is riven by antinomies where each moment defines itself against the others; yet this is not anomalous but what structures and constitutes human spirit.184 Bulgakov called, therefore, for a ‘critical antinomism’, echoing Kant’s own critique of reason, in both metaphysics and epistemology, which would replace dogmatic rationalism.185 Such an undertaking would reveal the antinomic structure of reason, its very real limitations, in order to avoid 177

SN, 101 [see UL, 106 (my trans.)]. (See n. 71 above.) 179 180 SN, 104, 141 [UL, 110, 153]. SN, 101 [UL, 106–7]. See TF, 317–18. 181 Bulgakov, TF, 325 and ‘Substance is a living sentence, which contains a subject and also a predicate and a copula’ (TF, 518 and see 317ff.). See Krasicki 2010, Reznichenko 2012, 200–25, Meerson 1998, 170–2, and Hadot 1957. Compare Bulgakov’s Filosofiia imeni [1953] (see Arjakovsky 2009, R. Williams 2009, and Gourko 2005, 1: 202–42). 182 183 TF, 318. ibid., 389–90; see Hadot 1957, 245–6. 184 ‘Reason necessarily [zakonomerno] comes up against antinomies, determining its structure and objectives . . . The antinomies which tear apart reason—they themselves build it up and determine it’ (Bulgakov, TF, 327–8; see Hadot 1957, 241–3). 185 Bulgakov, TF, 328 and see NA, 250 [BL, 229]. 178

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the one-sidedness of rationalist systematizing, thereby not tearing down but building up reason: ‘Criticism consists precisely in the clarification of the structure of reason and its foundations not for the purposes of the dethroning of reason, but on the contrary, for the purposes of its strengthening.’186 Furthermore, such criticism would encourage a knowledge of the existence of both planes in any antinomy (e.g. God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative) without confusing the two by jumping from one to the other.187 Moreover, a critical antinomism would simultaneously hold both elements of any antinomy together in an ordered unity, avoiding the dualistic temptation of localizing the truth of an assertion (e.g. if God is Absolute-Relative, then He is not simultaneously Absolute). An unsurpassable abyss exists for reason between the antinomy of the NO of apophatic theology and the YES of kataphatic theology. This abyss cannot be crossed through rational dialectic188 but only through reason’s stepping back in all humility from the abyss of the incomprehensible, the mysterious, which is its admission that it can go no further. The ‘stepping back of reason’ before incomprehensibility is the heart’s feat of faith. Semen Frank (1877–1950) called it a ‘free hovering’ between opposites ‘in the unity of two knowings’ in which ultimate truth was revealed.189 For faith there can be nothing that can be understood to its end, for ‘faith is the child of mystery, a podvig of love and freedom’ which must not fear ‘rational absurdity’, for precisely in such absurdity ‘is revealed eternal life, the boundlessness of the Godhead’.190 To humble faith, the unknowable and unnameable God reveals Himself by a name, a word, a cult, different manifestations, and finally by the Incarnation.191 Faith at work in religious experience sees the unity beneath the antinomies, ultimate mystery, understood as the pre-eternal ground of the created world. Theology, when faced with the antinomy of God’s existence as the Absolute and Absolute-Relative, is forced rationally, on the one hand, to humbly acknowledge their contradiction. It then provides, as Valery A. Kukavin put it, a ‘logically non-contradictory mystical-phenomenological description’ of each side of the antinomy.192 On the other hand, theology is compelled to realize that contradictions will only be synthesized in faith’s vision of the Kingdom of Heaven where there are no contradictions.193 We have come to the end of our (inevitably schematic) introduction to Bulgakov’s sophiology and, as inspired by the vision of Sophia as a living antinomy, his theological methodology (sc. antinomism). Indeed, to call Bulgakov’s thought simply ‘sophiology’ says very little and ignores his creative interpretation of Solov’ev and extension of the somewhat undeveloped 186 189 191 193

187 188 TF, 328. NA, 250–1 [BL, 229–30]. SN, 141 [UL, 153]. 190 Frank 1983, 95. Bulgakov, SN, 104 [see UL, 110 (my trans.)]. 192 SN, 146 [UL, 159]. Kukavin 1994, 631. ibid., 631 and see Florensky, S, 158 [PGT, 117].

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thoughts of Florensky. His thought is, therefore, more accurately called a ‘sophiological antinomism’ or, perhaps, ‘antinomical sophiology’. We have also seen, in particular, how he saw freedom and necessity as mutually selfdependent and self-defining, in an antinomic relationship where both had to be held together in faith. In chapters 5 and 6, we shall see that the rudimentary outline of our axis of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) can be discerned in the God–world relation.

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5 God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative in Bulgakov Theological Antinomy in the Doctrine of God

In chapter 4, we introduced Bulgakov’s ‘sophiological antinomism’ as an attempt to hold together a host of polarities from ‘freedom and necessity’ to ‘God and the world’. Much of Bulgakov’s legendary obscurity comes not from the fact that there is no ‘structure’ to his thought—for antinomism is precisely such a frame—but often this structure, especially in his late work, is simply presumed without explanation or executed imprecisely and, finally, sometimes completely ignored. In this chapter, we shall apply his sophiological antinomism to the doctrine of God giving (as it were) a phenomenology1 of ‘God’ in His two self-definitions: Absolute and Absolute-Relative. Through this phenomenology we shall see how our problematic forced itself upon Bulgakov insofar as ‘God’ as Absolute is radically transcendent in His freedom, but, as Absolute-Relative, He is only called ‘God’ in relationship to the world having a necessary relationship to it. We shall see how the outline of the form of our axis of F3–N3 can be discerned in Bulgakov’s kenotic account of Trinitarian theology and then is expressed in the divine economy. With this divine phenomenology we can turn in chapter 6 to a critical exposition of the problematic and Bulgakov’s response to it, finally laying out the first stage of our own constructive response.

5.1 GOD AS AN ABSOLUTE N OT -I S Bulgakov’s thought is paradoxical and often less than clear in his great trilogy O Bogochelovechestve (1933–45), partially due to the fact that it is not preceded 1

i.e. a kind of phenomenology of religious experience and faith, not phenomenology in a Husserlian sense.

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by both an explanation of his antinomism and an antinomic résumé of his system. Thankfully, just such a résumé can be found in the second chapter of his The Icon and Icon-Veneration (1931). The context of this chapter is his exploration of the ‘antinomy of the icon’, by which he means the fact that God is unrepresentable but in taking flesh He is imaged after us, depictable.2 To clarify this antinomy, he lays out three basic theological antinomies, each with its respective theses and antitheses. These antinomies have far broader significance for his system than iconography and consequently our exposition of his system will use these antinomies as a rough framework: I. Theological Antinomy (God in Himself ) THESIS: God is the Absolute, consequently, a pure NO, the Divine Nothing. (Apophatic theology). ANTITHESIS: God is the absolute self-relation in Himself, the Holy Trinity. (Kataphatic theology). II. Cosmological Antinomy (God in Himself and in creation) THESIS: God in the Holy Trinity possesses complete fullness and allblessedness, is self-existent, immutable, eternal, and therefore is absolute. (God in Himself). ANTITHESIS: God creates the world out of love for creation, with its temporal, relative, and becoming Being, and he becomes God for it; he puts Himself into correlation with it. (God in creation). III. Sophiological Antinomy (The Wisdom of God in God and in the world) THESIS: God, who in the Holy Trinity is consubstantial, reveals Himself in His Wisdom, which is His Divine life and Divine world in eternity, fullness, and perfection. (Uncreated Sophia—Divinity in God). ANTITHESIS: God creates the world by His Wisdom, and this Wisdom, constituting the Divine foundation of the world, abides in temporal-spatial becoming, immersed in non-being. (Created Sophia—Divinity outside God, in the world).3 Bulgakov’s three antinomies are interlinking perspectives on different theological issues. So, for example, the thesis of the second antinomy concerning the fullness of the life of the Holy Trinity in God Himself is identical in content to the first antinomy’s antithesis, but the second antinomy is focused on the economia and the first on theologia. Let us begin with those theses that focus on God as He is in Himself apart from creation—the theological antinomy, 2 3

Bulgakov, I, 258 [IV, 25–6]. Bulgakov, I, 264 [see IV, 35–6 (my trans.)]; see Vaganova 2011, 329–33.

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together with the thesis of the cosmological antinomy (i.e. the antithesis of the theological antinomy) and the thesis of the sophiological antinomy. The ‘Absolute’, ‘God’ in Himself, is wholly transcendent to the world both as ‘Absolute Relation’4 or Holy Trinity, pure relationality,5 which is expressed in kataphatic theology, and as the ‘Absolute’ proper which is the absence of all relations whatsoever, God as pure divine nothingness, as expressed in apophatic theology.6 God as Absolute Divine Nothing is ‘an unconditional negation of all definitions’, being ‘an eternal and absolute NO to everything, to every something [chto: what]’, even nothingness itself insofar as nothing is a conceptual ‘shadow’ of something: ‘God is the NOT-something [NE-chto: lit. ‘NOT-what’] (also the NOT-how, and the NOT-where, and the NOT-when and the NOT-why). This NO is not even nothing [nichto] insofar as with it there still entails a connecting relation to some something [chto].’ The Absolute as ‘NOT-something [NE-chto]’ is ‘supraqualified’ (so not only without but beyond qualities) as the/a ‘Supra-something [Sverkh-chto]’.7 One cannot call the Absolute ‘God’ because ‘God’ is a relative term in reference to someone for whom it is their God or a God.8 One cannot even say this NOT ‘exists’ insofar as ‘Being is a correlative concept’ and ‘to exist is to be for another’ and this NOT being supra-relative, supra-immanent9 is beyond even Being itself (‘Being is not proper to the Godhead’), so one is left with saying oxymoronically that He ‘is’ a ‘NOT-is [NE-est’]’.10 Here one is reminded of the Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius (c.462–post 538), who argued that we cannot even say that we can know that we know that we do not know God (=the One). We are in a state of ‘transcendent ignorance’ (hyperagnoia) about Him which is like staring at the sun up close until one sees neither the sun itself nor the objects it illumines, ‘since we have completely become the light itself, instead of an enlightened eye’.11 This would appear to leave us not with awe but stupefied silence and a vain pointing to a something beyond even the one we call upon as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who ‘abides in the sanctuary of transcendent silence’.12 But is this not the end of all theology? Why do we need such a self-definition of God? On the one hand, ‘God’ as NOT-something is needed as a ‘necessary ground of the idea of God’ insofar as it witnesses to the fact that God’s Being is indescribable, unfathomable, changeless, inaccessible, and so forth.13 One cannot rationalize such a God or control Him in any way since the Absolute 4

5 Bulgakov, I, 261 [IV, 30]. SN, 182 [UL, 202] and I, 260 [IV, 29]. 7 I, 261 [IV, 30]. SN, 102 [see UL, 105 (my trans.)]. 8 SN, 103 and 167 [UL, 109 and 184]; see 4.3. 9 10 SN, 104 [UL, 109] and AB, 143 [LG, 121]. SN, 102 [see UL, 108 (my trans.)]. 11 Damascius, Traité des premiers principes, 1, 3rd part, 25, Vol. 1, 84. 12 Damascius, Traité des premiers principes, 1, 3rd part, 25, Vol. 1, 84 [Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, Part 2, Sec. 3, 29, 127]. 13 Bulgakov, I, 260 [see IV, 28 (my trans.)]. 6

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and Transcendent are more profound and full of content than the relative and immanent and so stand as the latter’s source.14 On other hand, ‘God’ as ‘pure zero’ is not a religious idea at all insofar as religion (religio) in its true sense, as seen in the Old and New Testaments, presupposes a religious ‘binding’ of creation and the ‘God’ who reveals Himself to it so that an ‘Absolute outside creation and outside religion’ is a ‘Divine Nothing’.15 A negative definition of the Absolute in itself is a nonsensical abstraction as Being, and the Absolute is beyond Being, only begins to be in the face of a definite boundary; otherwise it collapses into nothingness.16 A purely apophatic definition of the Absolute is unthinkable, for it effectively does not exist, becoming irrelevant,17 a little like an extreme version of Joyce’s artist as the ‘Creator’ who lies ‘within or behind or beyond’ his creation, ‘invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails’.18 Thus, the Absolute, if it exists and means anything, must be relative to be in its absoluteness, just as the transcendent must be immanent to be in its transcendence.19 The NO of apophatic theology is mute and empty in itself, for it requires the YES of kataphatic theology to have ‘resonance’.20

5.2 GOD AS AN ABSOLUTE TRINITY OF LOVE The Absolute ‘God’ in Himself also is, as was said earlier, not only the absolute NO, complete absence of relationality, but is joined antinomically with an absolute YES, absolute relationality, difference and definition in Himself, that is, the Holy Trinity as the Trihypostatic unisubstantial Spirit or Personality, the immanent Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity (divine triunity). Both the apophatic (thesis of theological antinomy) and the kataphatic (antithesis) absoluteness are equally primordial to the Godhead and can only be taken together as ‘an identity of contraries (coincidentia oppositorum)’.21 Thus, strictly speaking, the ‘Absolute’ is only the divine abyssal ‘NO’ which exists in a theological antinomy with ‘Absolute Relation’, the divine YES of the Trinity. However, for the sake of simplicity and following Bulgakov’s own frequent practice, we shall take the ‘Absolute’ in a broad sense to presuppose both self-definitions or what is, arguably, one dual self-definition.22 Bulgakov seems to identify the contraries of apophatic and kataphatic precisely in the personal groundless ground of the Trinity—the Father. He is 14

15 U, 407 [C, 360]. I, 260 [see IV, 28 (my trans.)]. 17 U, 443 [C, 391] and see Kołakowski 2001, 23. Bulgakov, U, 443 [C, 391]. 18 19 Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 165. Bulgakov, U, 407 [C, 360]. 20 U, 407, 443 [C, 360, 391]. 21 I, 260 [see IV, 29 (my trans.)]; for the Trinity: O’Donnell 1995, Coda 1998, 87–129, Meerson 1996, 1998, 159–86, Lingua 2000, 63–94, Papanikolaou 2011, 2013. 22 Bulgakov, I, 261 [IV, 30]. 16

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luxuriant in his apophatic-kataphatic description of the Father.23 The Father is Absolute, the principle, source, monarchos, the Initial and Revealed hypostasis, Love-Will, Love itself, and the heart and Will of Love, First hypostasis, God proper, autotheos, and ho Theos. The Father is defined in reference to and contradistinction from His revealing hypostases, the Second and Third hypostases (the two not-First hypostases), the dyad of the Son and Holy Spirit: ‘The Father is God, revealing Himself in the Two revealing hypostases, divinely emptying Himself in the eternal kenosis of the Father. He is the initial hypostatic Love, the Depth that is being revealed, the unsearchable but selfmanifesting Abyss, the Divine Principle, arche. The Dyad of the Son and Holy Spirit is the double image of Revealing Love, and They receive Themselves from the Father and God.’24 God the Father, then, reveals Himself as Love by His ‘two hands’, the Dyad, the Son and Spirit. One could argue, however, that the use of the idea of ‘self-revelation’ is not an application of an apophatic-kataphatic antinomy but is merely an instance of an Idealist notion that personality (‘spirit’) is a dialectic of self-consciousness.25 Under the latter theory, which Bulgakov certainly utilizes, an ‘I’ presupposes as its self-affirmation a ‘co-I’ to whom it can say ‘Thou’, but to confirm this it needs a third term, so it presupposes a ‘he’ through which its unity is then realized as ‘we’ or ‘you’.26 God, for Bulgakov, is one ‘Divine I, the Absolute Subject, Holy Trinity’ as a ‘trihypostatic subject’ in whom exist three I’s,27 so for God to know Himself as Himself, the Father must reveal Himself to Himself in and through His ‘Dyad’ of the Son and Spirit. Does this not lead, as Vladimir Lossky claimed, to the notion that God the Father is an individual Fichtean ICH whose Son and Spirit are simply necessary manifestations of His self-consciousness of Himself as Absolute?28 Bulgakov, however, was not unaware of such pitfalls in Idealism and he is at pains to emphasize the equi-divinity of the hypostases and the freedom of selfrevelation. Indeed, his emphasis on divine self-revelation was above all a rejection of causal categories for the divine which is found in the doctrine of God from the Cappadocians to Aquinas and on to Solov’ev and recently Zizioulas.29 He thought applying ‘causation’ to God would lead to impersonalism, monarchism, subordinationism, and determinism: insofar as the Father causes the Son and Spirit, then they must be understood as simply His own necessary self-definitions which are then associated with Him by a relation of identity. Thus, ‘self-revelation’ shorn of causal language, although it may have adapted the dialectic of self-awareness, was an attempt to transcend, not a capitulation to, the excesses of Idealism.30 Bulgakov used self-revelation, pace 23 25 27 29

24 See epecially U, 407ff. [C, 360ff.] and SWG, 38ff. U, 428 [C, 376–7]. 26 R. Williams 1975, 61. Bulgakov, U, 66 [C, 54] and see G, 1: 34ff. 28 U, 67–8 [C, 55–6]. R. Williams 1975, 61–2. 30 See Zizioulas, CO, 113–54. Bulgakov, U, 72ff. [C, 59ff.].

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Lossky, as he wished to identify the Father as the suprapersonal groundless ground of the Trinity. If the Father is utterly transcendent but yet reveals Himself as love through His Dyad, then not only does He show that His freedom is one of personal love (F2) but that this love-desire is an utterly groundless gift of God to God (F1): ‘The Absolute loves; He is the Father . . . If the Son and the Holy Spirit are Love and the revelation of Love, the Father is Love itself, the very Heart of Love and, truly, the Will of Love.’31 We will return to this issue but first let us explore the dialectic of freedom and necessity in God and creation. God is a Trihypostatic Unisubstantial Personality made up of three distinct hypostases. They share one fully hypostatized unknowable divine essence, which is God’s ‘Being-according-to-itself [po-sebe-bytie]’ or ‘Being-in-itself [bytie-v-sebe]’, that is, His pre-eternal unchangeable bliss.32 In this unchangeable bliss, where there is neither addition nor diminution, God’s Absolute life of Freedom includes perfectly unified moments of what we call freedom (F2) and what we call necessity (N2).33 To be God is to be free but this freedom is a necessary reality for God insofar as He is the pure act of love as self-positing (actus purus or actus purissimus), a notion drawn as much from Aquinas as Schelling.34 God as the Absolute Self-Relation-in-Himself, a perfect selfrealization in love-desire, does not have to create the world to complete Himself. He is under no ‘determinate necessity’. In our terminology, there exists no N1–2 upon God inflicted by the world.35 God in Himself, and this applies only to the theses of the cosmological and sophiological antinomies (not the antitheses), does not need the world: ‘God as Absolute is completely free from the world, or “supraworldly”, is not conditioned by it to any degree whatsoever and does not need it at all. The creation of the world, or the arising of the relative, in no sense whatsoever is causally compelled or necessary for the Absolute, as a moment of its life.’36 In creating the world, in choosing to freely give Himself to us in becoming Absolute-Relative, at least from one side of the antinomy, God’s choice is not ‘Pickwickian’37 as it could have been ‘otherwise’ (F3). As Trihypostatic Spirit, God is Absolute Relation-in-Itself. Unlike created unihypostatic spirit, Trihypostatic Spirit encounters no limitations, since that with which it is in relation is fully contained within itself, as in Schelling’s identity-in-difference. Created spirit, being unihypostatic, must find all of the persons in the external world by which it is conditioned. In contrast, Absolute Spirit finds all of its persons in itself.38 Unihypostatic spirit is static and unfree unless it proceeds out into the world and posits and seizes itself over against 31 33 34 35 36 37

32 U, 446–7 [C, 394]. AB, 250–1, 433 [LG, 222, 404]. AB, 250 [LG, 222]. NA, 48–50 [BL, 41–2], I, 261, G, 1: 59 and see SN, 181–2 [UL, 199–201] (Schelling). AB, 141–2 [LG, 119–20]. SN, 142–3 [see UL, 154–5 (my trans.)]; cf. K, 267–8 [BB, 146–7]. 38 K. Ward 1996, 177–9. Bulgakov, AB, 117 [LG, 94]; compare G, 1: 38ff.

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that world as a givenness-necessity. Trihypostatic Spirit, quite differently, posits itself in a pure internal activity. God’s revealed nature is not, as is the case with created spirit, a fact or givenness that encounters Him as a resolute external limit. Rather, His nature, while existing in complete facticity, is a divine pre-eternal act. As the purest creative activity, God’s nature is completely transparent to Him.39 Since God’s self-positing does not require givenness-necessity, He surpasses creaturely freedom and necessity by possessing a ‘superfreedom’ which is a ‘supra-necessity’.40 Creaturely spirit faces an indeterminate number of possibilities, as tasks to be realized or not, generated by the opposition of freedom and necessity. In contrast, divine Spirit never encounters different possibilities,41 since in Him there is neither more nor less in a ‘reign of total determinism in total freedom’.42 The life of God as Trihypostatic Spirit is wholly freedom and wholly necessity.43 For God, human freedom remains transparent, and the future is open to Him where there are no different possibilities but ‘there is only reality, the real fates of the creature’.44 Human freedom being changeable only passes over to determinacy by its free act of choice between possibilities.45 In contrast, in the divine life, choice is overcome—adapting Maximus the Confessor—so that for randomness, changeableness, one has ‘free determinism’ and for many possibilities one has a single or unique possibility.46 Yet if one can say that God in Himself, Absolute Trihypostatic Spirit, does not need the world and need not have created it, one cannot also claim that God is bound by His omnipotence. God is, as we shall see Barth also arguing, free in regards to His freedom.47 Thus, for Bulgakov, it is not as if His divinity acts as a law making God immobile in His absoluteness and aseity so that He cannot create the world, which is ‘a notion that diminishes the grandeur of God’.48 On the contrary, God as Absolute is certainly capable of creating the world in a freedom which is one with necessity. This capability is not any natural development of Himself as in Solov’ev and Hegel, but, here echoing Athanasius and Aquinas, creation is viewed as a work of God, since He has His Being from Himself and can act freely from Himself (the a se of aseity).49 For God as Absolute, and this, as we shall see, is in contradistinction from Himself as Absolute-Relative, no external or internal necessity (N1–2) apart from His freedom exists for Him in se to create the world. The creating of the world is the creative outworking of His free love understood as a synthesis of freedom and necessity. Thus, to reiterate, we may say (only) in relation to God in or 39

40 NA, 50 [BL, 42]. NA, 138ff. [BL, 126ff.]. NA, 37, 145, 148 [BL, 31, 133, 136], i.e. Maximean ‘variations’ (tropoi) of divine ‘themes’ or ‘seeds of being’ (logoi) (NA, 63–5 and see 146–7 [BL, 55–6, 134–5]). 42 43 NA, 150–1 [BL, 138]; pace McDermott 2009, 47. Bulgakov, NA, 138 [BL, 127]. 44 45 SN, 191 [UL, 213]. NA, 153 [BL, 140]. 46 NA, 153 [BL, 141]; On Bulgakov and Maximus: Seiling 2008, ch. 5. 47 48 49 Barth, CD, II/1, 303. Bulgakov, AB, 142 [LG, 120]. FKh, 214 [PE, 199]. 41

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according to Himself (the thesis of the cosmological antinomy) the world need not have been created: ‘In relation to the life of Divinity itself, the world could also not be.’50 Yet we cannot help noticing that this account of the thesis of the cosmological antinomy which holds together divine freedom and at least two ontological possibilities in regard to the world (that the world could and could not be) seems to directly contradict Bulgakov’s account of Absolute Spirit. This account denies that God is free in a creaturely sense insofar as such freedom implies the opposition to necessity and the existence of different possibilities (see ch. 6). But what did Bulgakov mean by the divine ‘nature’? Following Solov’ev and Boehme,51 Bulgakov held that the central theme of Trinitarian teaching was, in Solov’ev’s words, the ‘self-revelation of the all-one Godhead’.52 Bulgakov identifies the Trinity, reminiscent of Barth,53 with revelation insofar as it presupposes a subject, the Father, a predicate, the Son, and, a copula, the Spirit between them: ‘It presupposes that which is revealed, that which reveals, and a certain unity or identity of the two: a mystery and its revelation.’54 God the Father eternally reveals Himself to Himself through His ‘Dyad’, the Son and Spirit, in and as their common nature or substance (ousia). But what does God reveal Himself as? The dynamic mystery of the unity of love. Love, desire for an Other, is above all an activity. In His perfect unchangeable bliss, God is a perfectly free and perfectly necessary act of revealing Himself to Himself as a Triunity of self-giving, self-exhausting, self-receiving, and self-emptying hypostases in, by, and as their common ousia of love.55 (Later, with both Barth and Balthasar, we shall also see the identification of divine Being with love and even, in Balthasar’s case, created Being with love.) God realizes Himself as a unity, as a Triune Personality in, by, and as love-desire through each of the hypostases with their own ‘I’s’ positing one another by denying themselves and going out of themselves into another whereby they unify and identify their I’s56 in a complete self-giving. We have called this movement a dependent freedom (F3). I would argue that in Bulgakov’s account of God in Himself, Absolute Freedom includes a perfect unity of moments of freedom and necessity (F2–N2), while His activity of self-giving (F3) is completely selfgrounded. It is given with an eternal definitiveness so that we end up with what I have called free dependence (N3). Here we see the emergence in Bulgakov of our axis of F3–N3 and we shall return to an account of it below with his intratrinitarian kenoticism. 50

AB, 141 [LG, 119 (revised)]. See Solov’ev, Cht. 8: 121–2 [LDH, 113–14], REU, 242–4 [RUC, 149–51], and Boehme, ‘Apologie’, Part I, 64–9, 16 (see Gallaher 2012b, 220ff. and O’Regan 2002, 31ff.). 52 Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 82 [LDH, 75–6]. 53 Barth, CD, I/1, 295–6; see Papanikolaou 2011. 54 55 Bulgakov, U, 407–8 [C, 360] and compare TF, 317–18. SWG, 23–36. 56 AB, 117–18 [LG, 94–5] and compare G, 2 [1930]: 80–1. 51

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Divine love, for Bulgakov, is not merely a ‘property’ but God’s very revealed substance. However, this substance is not only a ‘pre-eternal act of Love’ which establishes the ‘triunity of the Divine Subject, as the pre-eternal mutuality of love’,57 but, echoing Fichte’s Tathandlung,58 it also is a ‘divine fact, not only as power, but also as its activity, not only as breadth but also as depth’.59 In other words, God as Holy Trinity’s self-manifested ousia or divinity (theotes) is a dynamic love-desire and Bulgakov, like Solov’ev, calls her ‘Sophia’.60 Love-Ousia is, therefore, God’s pre-eternal divine activity (actus purissimus) of self-revelation as a substance of freely but necessarily loving and yearning for Himself as Trinity: ‘But such self-positing of itself in the Other and through the Other is Love as an efficacious act, the ontology of love. God is love, and, as Love, He is the Holy Trinity.’61 Indeed, if Sophia is God’s self-revealed nature (ousia) as divine love-desire, then there is a sense, though Bulgakov is unclear, in which ousia is the unrevealed source. It is the mystery and depth of the undisclosed hypostatic ‘Being’ of God the Father understood as primordial divine dazzling darkness, Divine Nothingness, and the Abyss of Love. An antinomy, therefore, maybe even a ‘fourth theological antinomy’, would seem to exist between ousia, as the unrevealed divine nature, and Sophia, as His selfrevelation or self-revealed nature.62 Of course, we seem to have here the danger of subordinationism and even an abyssal monism (a God beyond God as Trinity) with there being a collapse of the Paternal hypostasis and ousia. However, more often than not Bulgakov simply speaks of one identity: Ousia-Sophia. As God the Father’s revealed nature, Sophia is transparent to the hypostases who reveal her, the dyad of the Son and Spirit, and they live in and by their self-revelation in and as her. Sophia, in this way, becomes hypostatically characterized by the Father as Wisdom (for the Logos)63 and Glory (for the Spirit).64 The Father God first reveals Himself to Himself in Sophia as the Wisdom of the Word, self-knowledge, and He does this by revealing Himself in Sophia in the second hypostasis, the Logos.65 But then God’s self-revelation as Divine Glory follows on His self-revelation as Wisdom because God takes glory in Himself as Wisdom. Thus, God’s self-revelation as Glory reposes as it were on His self-revelation as Wisdom, as the ‘accomplished revelation of

57

58 G, 1 [1928]: 54. See Fichte 1991, I.1ff., 93ff., 1994, 5, 48, and 1998, 1.2, 110. Bulgakov, I, 262 [see IV, 33 (my trans.)]. 60 See K, 246, 259, 267–8 [BB, 136, 142, 146–7] and later AB, 124ff. [LG, 101ff.] and ‘Revelation’ [1937], 177–8; compare Solov’ev, REU, 249 [RUC, 157] and Boehme, ‘Apologie’, 16. 61 Bulgakov, G, 1: 68 and ‘Nature in the Godhead is His eternal life, self-determination, selfpositing, actus purissimus’ (ibid., 59); cf. NA, 50–1 [BL, 43]. 62 In detail: Gallaher 2012b, 218ff. 63 Bulgakov, AB, 130–1 [LG, 107–8], U, 217 [C, 185], and SWG, 41ff. 64 65 AB, 131 [LG, 108]; see Lingua 2000, 92–4. Bulgakov, AB, 131 [LG, 108]. 59

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the Word’.66 But if God’s self-revelation in Wisdom is in the Logos, then it follows that His self-glorification of Himself as Glory about Wisdom is His self-revelation in the Holy Spirit (Jn. 16:13–14) as the third hypostasis.67 The Son or Word and the Spirit form, as was said earlier, a ‘dyad’ and ‘bi-unity’68 where the two by the Spirit reposing on the Word reveal in Sophia the Father as Absolute Love-Desire.69 Besides characterizing Sophia as Wisdom and Glory, Bulgakov, following Solov’ev again, also identifies her with the ‘divine world’70 and the ‘All’ or ‘Allunity’ (Vseedinstvo). As the divine world, Sophia is the personified ‘Prototype of creation’.71 In her, following the divine ideas tradition,72 lies the ‘the panorganism of ideas, the organism of the ideas of all about all and in all’ which are the ‘pre-eternal prototypes of creation’, which He possesses as His own particular content.73 The content of God, the pleroma of the divine world in its panoply of forms, is the divine All. This All is not merely a collection of abstract ‘properties’ of God but the living ‘wholeness’ of God which is the Allunity or the perfect ‘integral wisdom [tselomudrie]’ of God’s total life.74 Most importantly, echoing Solov’ev,75 Sophia is imprinted with the Son’s image through the love of the Spirit between the Father and the Son. This is the image of the heavenly man or Godmanhood, the principle of humanity.76 It is divine, after the Logos, and human, after Sophia, who is divine corporeality as the pre-eternal and all-embracing essence of human corporeality.77 Sophia is, therefore, the ‘self-revelation in bi-unity’ of the Son and Spirit of the Father, that is, ‘she is the self-revelation of the Holy Trinity as the Father in the Son and the Holy Spirit’.78

66

AB, 132 [LG, 109]. AB, 133 [LG, 110]; for pneumatology, see Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 7, Nichols 2005a, 151–96 and Graves 1972. 68 69 See Bulgakov, U, 209–51 [C, 177–218]. U, 217, 446 [C, 185, 394]. 70 AB, 124ff. [LG, 101ff.] and compare Lestvitsa iakovlia [1929], 44 [ Jacob’s Ladder, 28]; see Solov’ev, Cht., 7–8: 116ff. [LDH, 109ff.]. 71 Bulgakov, ‘Summary of Sophiology [=SS]’ [1936], 43. 72 See Plato, Timaeus, 29a–b, 30d–31a, 41, 43, Alcinous, Didaskalikos, 9, 16–17, Origen, First Principles, 1.2.2, 15–16 [SC 252, 92–5, ll.25–62], Comm. Jn., 1.34.243–5, 83 (FC 80) [PG 14.89B–C/SC 120, 180–3], Plotinus, enn. 5: V.7, V.9, 222–31, 286–319, Augustine, div. qu., Q.46, 79–81 (FC 70) [PL 40.29–31/CCSL 44A, 70–3], retr., 1.3.2, 14–15 (FC 60) [CCSL 57, 12–13], Dionysius, DN, 5.8 [PTS 33, 187–8], 101–2, Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1077C–1088A (Constas 2014, 1: 94–111), Aquinas, SG, 3a.47, 109–10, ST, 1.15 and De Ver., 1: 3.1–8, 136–67. 73 Bulgakov, AB, 135, 148 [LG, 112, 126]. 74 AB, 135 and see 131 [LG, 112, 108] and IiI, 317 [HH, 25] and compare Solov’ev, Cht., 4: 48, 58 [LDH, 45, 53], Cht, 5: 70 [LDH, 64] and Cht., 10: 144 [LDH, 135]. 75 See Gallaher 2009a, 622–6. 76 Bulgakov, NA, 130–5 [BL, 118–23]; cf. U, 218, 413–15, 430 [C, 186, 366–8, 378]. 77 ‘Evkharisticheskii Dogmat’ [1930], 24 [‘Eucharistic Dogma’, 128–9] and see AB, 135–40 [LG, 111–17]; compare Solov’ev, Cht., 8: 121, 126 [LDH, 113, 118]. 78 Bulgakov, AB, 133 [LG, 110]. 67

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When God the Father reveals Himself in and as Love by His dyad, as was said earlier, He personalizes His nature uniquely according to the ‘character’ of the hypostasis in question. It appears that this essential ‘personalization’ is possible because Sophia as the revealed divine ousia is ‘not a hypostasis but hypostaticity [ipostasnost’]’.79 What Bulgakov precisely meant by ipostasnost’ is frankly obscure. All things considered, he certainly did not mean crudely that Sophia was literally a fourth member of the Holy Trinity in some sort of crude Gnosticism. This was, however, what was alleged by some during the controversy that raged surrounding his sophiology beginning in the mid1920s and culminating in the condemnations by rival churches and investigations by his own church of the mid-1930s.80 He did indeed describe Sophia in his Svet Nevechernii (1917), following Florensky,81 as a ‘fourth hypostasis’ but would later qualify (not clarify!) this poeticism with the equally difficult notion of ipostasnost’.82 Sophia, Bulgakov explained, is a living intelligent entity or living reality/essence (sushchnost’) in God. She is both the essence of God and the living self-revelation in love of the Trihypostatic Spirit. She is always fully hypostatized in the Holy Trinity83 and, though not a hypostasis but ousia, she might be described loosely as a ‘person’ as she has quasipersonal otherness. She is a divine capacity to be hypostatized by and with divine hypostases. Thus, Bulgakov, rather mysteriously, argues that Sophia ‘responds’ to God’s love of her (has desire for Him) with a reciprocal or requited, although not hypostatic, love.84 The famous phrase, ‘eternal femininity’, means, for Bulgakov, that Sophia is an active-passive activity of lovedesire or ‘reciprocating orientation [otvetnoi obrashchennosti]’.85 Now this difficult conception may mean two things. It may mean simply that she is a quasi-subject insofar as God as Trinity loves Himself in His selfrevelation in Sophia as the object of love-desire or ‘love of Love’,86 and as Sophia is hypostaticity, a reciprocating orientation and eternal femininity, she can desire God in return as a subject. In contrast, it may mean that, insofar as the self-revelation of God in His Divinity is Sophia or Godmanhood, which is hypostatized by the Father through the Son and Spirit, they relate to Him on the basis of or ‘out of the Divine-Humanity, or Sophia’. Sophia is the basis of the hypostatic relations. She is the element and context of personification, 79

IiI, 323 [HH, 41]. On the sophiology controversy: Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 5, Gallaher and Kukota 2005, 6–11, Gallaher 2013c, 29–44, Klimoff 2005, Geffert 2004, 2005, Arjakovsky 2002, 433ff., Eneeva 2001, and Eikalovich 1980. 81 Florensky, S, 349 [PGT, 252]. 82 Bulgakov, SN, 194 [UL, 217]. Later ‘clarified’: IiI, 317 n. 1 [HH, 27 n. 39) and see K, 254 [BB, 140]; see R. Williams, SB, 117ff. and 165ff. 83 See Bulgakov, G, 1: 60–1. 84 AB, 127ff. [LG, 104ff.], IiI, 317–18 [HH, 27–9], and NA, 47–8 [BL, 40]. 85 IiI, 318 n. 2 [HH, 29 n. 46]; cf. Gallaher and Kukota 2005, 14–15. 86 Bulgakov, SN, 193 [UL, 217] and IiI, 316 [HH, 25]. 80

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being love itself. God the Father, then, desires His Son and Spirit and He does this through loving His Divinity as Sophia or Godmanhood and totally giving Himself to it. In response, the Son and Spirit desire the Father in return and in loving Him hypostatize Sophia for Him, and acting as it were for her or through her, ‘the Divine-Humanity loves Him as its source or principle, as God’.87 We saw earlier how God constitutes Himself as a Triune Personality by His self-revelation. This was understood as the activity of Trinitarian selfpositing where every divine hypostasis reveals itself to the Other in, by, and as their common ousia or Sophia/Love by complete self-renouncing, selfemptying, self-giving, and self-receiving to the Other. This divine life of selfpositing by the trihypostatic Spirit in, by, and as Sophia is then simultaneously love-desire and intratrinitarian kenosis: ‘This dynamic [aktual’nyi] self-positing is love: the flames of the divine trihypostases flare up in each of the hypostatic centers and are then united and identified with one another, each going out of itself into the others, in the ardor of self-renouncing personal love.’88 How does Bulgakov understand this intratrinitarian kenotic love-desire? Sacrifice as the self-revelation of love. The Father, as the initial and revealed hypostasis, freely begets His Only-Begotten Son and in this begetting gives His Being away in a free ‘self-renunciation’ and ‘self-emptying’. We have called this a dependent freedom (F3). It is a free self-giving love for and to the Other which is so total and definitive, as a free dependence (N3), that it is a ‘sacrificial ecstasy of all-consuming, jealous Love for the Other’.89 The Son, in turn, has his own sacrifice, which is that He passively but freely receives His Being from His Father as the Only-Begotten with a dependent freedom (F3) (‘the acceptance of birth as begottenness’). In this way, He acknowledges the Father’s deity in His divine generation of Him. (We will see this same filial reception of divine self-generation later with Balthasar.) The Son is utterly emptied (‘self-depletion’) in the name of the Father in a free dependence (N3). He both pre-eternally sacrifices Himself and is sacrified by the Father so that He might be the mute Word of the Other: ‘Sonhood is already a pre-eternal kenosis.’90 This state of the loving ‘mutual sacrifice of begetting’ that Bulgakov is evoking in this ‘begetting-begottenness’ of the Father and Son is both a limitless ‘pre-eternal suffering’ that undergirds the ‘Divine all-blessedness’ and (shades of Hegel) a ‘voluntary hypostatic dying’. This latter condition is an understanding of the concept of death which is liberated from creaturely 87

U, 429–30 [C, 378]; here, see R. Williams, SB, 165–7. Bulgakov, AB, 118 [LG, 94–5] and for kenosis, see AB, 121ff. [LG, 97ff.], G, 1: 68–9, and Radost’ Tserkovnaia, 5–9 [Churchly Joy, 1–7] (see Gavrilyuk 2005, Lingua 2000, 63ff. and esp. 104–6, Coda 1998, and Valentini 1997, 71–93); compare Hegel, PR, III [MS], 77ff., 83ff., 132–3 [Vor., 16ff., 20ff., 68–9], and Schelling, PO, SW, XIV: Lect. 25, 39ff. 89 90 Bulgakov, AB, 121–2 [LG, 98–9]. AB, 122 [LG, 99]. 88

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temporal notions.91 The life of Absolute Freedom includes within it in harmony both a free will to sacrifice or dependent freedom (F3) and a resoluteness of that will or free dependence (N3). God’s life is a ‘Living Love’ but this means it is sacrificial in character, since ‘Love discovers itself in sacrifice, because it is also eternal life, for Life is also Love, just as Love is also Life.’92 This eternal living sacrificial life is the manifestation of ‘the victorious power of love and its joy only through suffering’. The eternal sacrifice would be a tragedy in God if it were not continually resolved ‘in the bliss of the offered and mutually accepted sacrifice, of suffering overcome’.93 The Father and the Son are identified in their common desire for one another through this mutual self-revelatory sacrificial self-renunciation. But this self-revelation of love-desire of the Father-Son, while existing in truth, cannot be accomplished except (drawing on Augustine)94 by the bond of the gift of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and rests on the Son as their ‘mutual love’ in truth and beauty: ‘I am Thou and Thou art I; I am We’ (summarizing Jn. 14:9–10). This procession is no longer a sacrificial act as such but the self-testimony of God’s love and His accomplished self-consciousness of Himself as Trihypostatic love-desire. The Holy Spirit is the union of the two in infinite difference and even ‘distance’, that is, their ‘hypostatic relation’ by whom they reveal themselves to one another as love.95 However, the procession of the Spirit still is a pre-eternal ‘kenotic selfrenunciation’,96 like the Father and the Son. The Spirit actively and freely accepts with a dependent freedom (F3) that He will not proclaim Himself, but, with a resolute free dependence (N3), He only proclaims what the Son says in the name of the Father.97 He is the Face of the Son in His Glory as the Word of the Father but the Glory cannot be seen in itself, like the light of the Sun which shows the Sun but not itself: ‘The Third hypostasis is hypostatic revelation not concerning itself.’98 Bulgakov, not surprisingly, argues that ‘if the cross is the symbol of sacrificial love in general then the Holy Trinity is the strength of the cross manifested in mutual self-renouncement in the innermost depths of the trihypostatic Subject. And so the Holy Cross is the symbol not only of our salvation, but also of the Most Holy Trinity.’ The cross could be said to be a symbol of the Trinity precisely because of the particular self-surrender of each

91 AB, 122–3 [LG, 99–100] (see Ware 2016, 227); compare Hegel, PR, III [MS, 1824, 1827, 1831], 124ff., 219–20, 326, 370 [Vor., 60ff, 150–1, 249–50, 286]. 92 93 Bulgakov, G, 1: 69. AB, 122 [LG, 99]. 94 See Augustine, De Trin. 4.20.29, 5.11.12, 15.17.27, 15.17.31, 15.19.37 (CCSL 50) [Trinity, 174, 197, 418, 420–1, 424–5], s. 71.12.18, 256 [PL 38.453–4], and ep. Jo. 7.6, 108 [SC 75, 322–5] (see Meerson 1998, 180, 182–6, and on Augustine and Bulgakov, see Tataryn 2000, 66–97). 95 Bulgakov, AB, 123 [LG, 100] and compare G, 1: 66ff. (quoting ‘Augustine’ on the Spirit to the Father and Son as ‘amor unitivus amborum’ when it is from Aquinas, ST, 1.36.4.1ad). 96 97 98 Bulgakov, U, 221 [C, 188]. AB, 123 [LG, 100–1]. U, 221 [C, 188].

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of the hypostases, since ‘Love is the discovery of oneself and of what belongs to oneself not through self-affirmation but through self-giving—self-positing through self-renouncement.’99 We shall see later how Balthasar adapted this aspect of Bulgakov’s thought. Here, with the image of the cross as the symbol of the Absolute as Trinity, we are at the very cusp of the other side of the cosmological antinomy, which is the Absolute as Relative. We have seen how for God in His Freedom as Absolute there is a unity in Him of moments of freedom and necessity (F2–N2) and this is expressed in intratrinitarian kenosis as a perfect synthesis of dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). But in this eternal life of self-desire there is no need/necessity of God for the world—the world just as well might not have been, let alone have been redeemed. Indeed, Bulgakov even claims the Absolute as immanent Trinity is not properly speaking called ‘God’ since it is radically transcendent in its Absolute Freedom. However, one wonders whether his describing of the divine life kenotically is witness to a certain confusion between the Absolute and the AbsoluteRelative. In only knowing God as Absolute-Relative, we forever create our vision of the Absolute based on what we know about it in revelation—that is, as Absolute-Relative. Bulgakov contends, as we saw earlier, that if one pursues the Absolute purely in itself without the corresponding assertion of the Absolute Relation-in-Itself, the immanent Trinity, then one will end up in a pure negation, outside of religion itself. Furthermore, the Absolute, if it is to be even thinkable (i.e. have significance), must be relative in its absoluteness or immanent in its transcendence.100 Thus, God as Absolute Self-Relation-inItself, immanent Trinity, is parasitic on or even a projection of God as Absolute-Relative, economic Trinity. Bulgakov’s antinomies appear to blur on closer examination, for the mystery of the Holy Trinity exists only as a mystery revealed by itself in revelation, the relative. Analogical talk of ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ presupposes the existence of a relation to us (energies) or God as Absolute-Relative. It might be argued, then, that God as Trinity in Himself (essence), as a purely immanent absolute relation in itself, not only is unknowable but simply does not exist for us except as a dogmatic abstraction.101 An apophatically consistent Absolute, therefore, would only reflect the thesis of the theological antinomy as a pure Nothingness. However, such a conception would lead to a form of ‘metaphysical suicide’ by not having any created limits by which to define itself.102 Methodologically, radical apophaticism will self-destruct unless it is accompanied by a corresponding

99 G, 1: 68–9 and ‘The Holy Trinity is a substantial pre-eternal act of mutuality in selfrenouncing love, finding that which is being rendered in mutual surrender’ (G, 1: 67). 100 101 U, 407 [C, 360]. AB, 144n [LG, n. 2, 122]; cf. U, 407 [C, 360]. 102 U, 443 [C, 391].

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kataphaticism with a positive notion of God founded on God’s own necessary self-revelation as Creator, economic Trinity.

5.3 GOD AS AN ABSOLUTE-RELATIVE TRINITY OF CREATIVE LOVE ‘God’, for Bulgakov, is not only the Absolute but He is also the AbsoluteRelative, Creator-Redeemer, economic Trinity, the antithesis of the cosmological antinomy. Both self-definitions must be held together in faith. He exists, and here Bulgakov adapts Palamite language to sophiology, in the sense of divine energy, by a freedom where He can remain Himself in renouncing the bliss of His essence by changing the mode by which He enacts that essence. He enters into becoming as ‘a special form of the fullness of Being’, limiting and emptying Himself by embracing change and process in the creation and redemption of the world.103 Bulgakov refers to this second revelatory self-definition of God, using the Idealist jargon, as God’s ‘Beingfor-itself [bytie-dlia-sebia]’.104 In paradoxical language, Bulgakov argues that when God as Absolute, without ceasing to be Absolute, posits in Himself ‘the relative as independent Being—a real, living principle’, He thereby introduces ‘duality’ into the ‘unity of that which is without distinction’. A ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ is established by the Absoute in itself (i.e. in the Absolute).105 Where once there was only ‘absolute self-relation in Himself, the Holy Trinity’,106 now there appears the difference between God and the world. The Absolute stands over against itself as Absolute-Relative, ‘it becomes correlative to itself as relative, for God is correlated to the world, Deus est vox relativa, and, creating the world, the Absolute posits itself as God.’107 Thus, ‘God’ as Absolute immanent Trinity, without ceasing to be transcendent, ‘by the very act of this creation gives birth also to God. God is born with the world and in the world’ and religion, which presupposes divine self-revelation, begins.108 Here, it might be argued, in this vision of creation as divine kenosis, we find an economic expression of the synthesis of F3 and N3 that characterizes the Freedom of God as Absolute expressed in intratrinitarian kenosis. Bulgakov, in this context, appears to fulfil the theological ideal of a balance of divine freedom and necessity towards the world we set forth in our Introduction. The 103

104 AB, 333 [LG, 302]. AB, 251–3 [LG, 222–5]; cf. AB 433 [LG, 404–5]. 106 SN, 167 [see UL, 184 (my trans.)]. I, 264 [see IV, 35 (my trans.)]. 107 SN, 167 [see UL, 184 (my trans.)]. 108 SN, 104 [see UL, 110 (my trans.)]; for divine economy: Coda 1998, 130–49, Lingua 2000, 95ff., Valliere 2000a, 291–371, and Nichols 2005a, 33ff. 105

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world, although it is a free necessity for God, being established on the same kenotic foundation as God Himself, as a union of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), still need not have been. The Absolute Godhead ‘in His own intradivine life remains transcendent for the creature’ and is not under any necessity towards it in His perfect self-giving, self-receiving, and selfemptying (F3–N3). But simultaneously the Absolute freely allows, out of a dependent freedom (F3), the world to be an internal necessity (N2) for Himself. As Absolute-Relative or the Creator, He ‘strips Himself of His absolute transcendentality’ in creation.109 This is described as, echoing Hegel, the ‘Golgotha of the Absolute’ insofar as ‘the world is created by the cross taken upon Himself by God for the sake of love’ which is ‘sacrificebearing love’ and a ‘love-humility’.110 God becomes the world’s CreatorRedeemer in His divine power poured out in creation which is ‘the same Godhead, one, indivisible, everlasting’. He ‘makes Himself God and from the unconditional Absolute becomes relatively Absolute’ and so dependent on the world such that He is absolutely and definitively its God in a free dependence (N3). He ‘gives up in Himself a place for the relative; by an inexpressible act of love-humility He posits it [the relative, creature] next to Himself and outside Himself, limiting Himself by His own creation’.111 However, Bulgakov, it might be argued, is simply repeating the theo-genesis of Hegel, Schelling, and Solov’ev where God as Absolute posits Himself as an Other in whom He can seize Himself externally in the world and even as the world.112 The Other, in this sort of thinking, is needed for God’s ‘selfdevelopment [samorazvitie: self-evolution] or self-completion’, so creation becomes a ‘determinate necessity’ for God.113 Bulgakov foresees this objection and argues that this self-generation of God by God as Creator in and even (in some sense) as the world—‘the idea of God’s becoming God . . . together with becoming of the world’—necessarily follows if one ‘fully accepts Christian revelation’. If the world is to be real not just for itself but also for God, then it must be real with His own reality, and so both temporality and becoming must be real for God. Furthermore, the world as the object of God’s love-desire is even of or in God in that God now not only lives in eternity as non-becoming Being but in time as becoming Being. Bulgakov holds that His own antinomic understanding of God is quite different from the pantheism seen in Idealism. Rather, God becomes ‘not for Himself but for the world’ insofar as there is in God no necessity of self-completion but He becomes as Absolute, God for the world out of a free love of creation (see ch. 6). Furthermore, there is ostensibly

109

Bulgakov, SN, 192 [see UL, 215 (my trans.)]. 111 SN, 168–9 [see UL, 185–6 (my trans.)]. SN, 192 [see UL, 214–15 (my trans.)]. 112 See AB, 120, 141–2, 156 [LG, 96–7, 119–20, 134], I, 261–2 [IV, 30–1], and SN, 178–80 [UL, 195–8]. 113 AB, 142 [LG, 120 (revd)]. 110

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retained here, in contradistinction from Idealism, where God is identified with the world ‘as different states of one immanently evolving principle’, the notion that God as Absolute remains wholly transcendent, utterly free, unchanged in His absoluteness. Nevertheless, He has allowed Himself to be subject to change in the world with the result that creation exerts an internal necessity (N2) on the sheerly free God.114 The immanent Trinity is always present in the economic without (somehow) the immanent being the ‘ground’ to the economic or the economic being a consequence of the immanent.115 Thus, the immanent Trinity is ‘the very same self in Its proper depths and foundation’ but, simultaneously, ‘it also remains other and in this sense transcendent to the life of the “economic” Trinity’.116 If the Absolute reveals itself, as Absolute-Relative, then this presupposes in revelation itself, in the Absolute-Relative, the Absolute as a concrete reality, so even if we can only know God as Absolute through revelation, by the Absolute-Relative, revelation still contains real traces of the transcendent.117 Therefore, the distinction of the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative exists only for creation in its limitation.118 It is not, however, for creation a logical contradiction resulting in absurdity which ‘annuls itself when it is fully clarified’ but for creation (not God) it is ‘an ontological distinction’ expressed in two self-determinations of God that simply cannot be harmonized by rational thought.119 No intradivine distinction exists for God because ‘God is self-identical both in His own supraworldliness, as the absolute Transcendent, and in His own creative energy, as Creator and Pantocrator.’120 If we ask what ‘nature’ lies behind God’s self-determination as Absolute-Relative, we can only reply it is His life as Absolute, as the Absolute is wholly in but beyond Himself as Absolute-Relative. Creation is understood as divine sacrificial self-limitation ‘in the name of love for creation’. It consists (Bulgakov is at his most obscure here) of God as Trinity creating an outside, making limits for Himself, although He is unlimited, and then pouring forth ‘outside’ of these established limits into becoming or ‘extra-divine but divinely posited Being-nonbeing, i.e. creation’.121 To draw on a late-modern ‘sophiology’ to illumine this Bulgakovian intuition, at the ‘heart’ of God is a space, a khora or ‘space’/‘place’ which is ‘not-a-place’ (i.e. ‘space’ in the literal sense), as Fiddes has called it,122 created by the relations of love of the Holy Trinity which Bulgakov calls the Divine Sophia. This is an idea we alluded to when discussing Heidegger’s notion of the belongingtogetherness of difference and identity. Bulgakov is creatively adapting the 114

115 AB, 156–7 [LG, 134]. I, 262 [IV, 31]. I, 251 [IV, 222 (revd)]; compare SN, 144–6, 167 [UL, 156–9, 183–4] and ‘Iuda Iskariot— apostol-predatel’’ [=IAP] [1930–31], 241–2. 117 118 119 U, 409 [C, 361–2]. SN, 192 [UL, 215]. NA, 250 [BL, 229]. 120 121 SN, 192 [see UL, 215 (my trans.)]. Bulgakov, AB, 251 [LG, 223]. 122 See Fiddes 2001b, 35–60, SWKG, 218–65 (esp. 249ff.), 320–1, 325–6. 116

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Lurianic Kabbalistic mythos of tsimtsum (or zimzum) via Solov’ev.123 ‘Nothing’, in this context, for Bulgakov, is a relative not absolute or pure nothingness (me on not ouk on (adapting Schelling’s terminology)), although Bulgakov argues more as one had expected that it is in fact from absolute nothing.124 As a ‘creaturely nothing’, not the divine nothingness of God as NOT-is,125 it is equated with becoming as the state of Being which is incomplete, temporal, awaiting continuation and completion.126 But if this is the case, then from whence is the said Being that can be in such a state of (relative) nothingness, becoming? In a word: God. Creation is envisaged as the spilling out of the love-desire of God as Trinity into nothing, as if into what Fiddes has called a ‘place which is not a place’ of wisdom.127 Bulgakov describes it as the ‘immersion in “becoming”’ of the divine Sophia or ousia, as the ‘Prototype of creation’, in the ‘capacity of created Sophia’.128 This is certainly a version of creatio ex nihilo, although it seems more creatio ex deo, as the ‘nothing’ is in some sense in God. Divine withdrawal as creation, for Bulgakov, makes it possible, not unlike Fiddes’ portrayal again, for the world to dwell in between the relations of God as Trinity. Correspondingly, God as Trinity dwells in the world, to quote Fiddes, as a divine mysterious form of ‘hidden, patient and suffering presence, persisting with created persons in their growth and development, and acting in persuasive and sacrificial love rather than coercion’.129 God trihypostatically ‘makes room’ for creation in His self-giving and self-receiving kenotic life of love.130 He accomplishes this, so Bulgakov relates, by trihypostatically establishing His own essence or Being, His proper divine world, the divine Sophia, All-unity, as ‘becoming divinity’.131 In this context, Bulgakov will often speak of the Divine Sophia in its multiplicity (the ideal All) as the Maximean logoi which he calls the ‘divine’ or ‘ontic seeds’ of the Logos in creation. He identifies these seeds with both the divine ‘ideas’ and the Palamite ‘energies’,132 speaking, for example, of ‘divine ideas-energies’. These divine seeds-ideas-energies are said to be ‘submerged in non-being in the divine act of creation’. Through divine Being positing itself in non-being, nothingness, divine Being acquires, and here Bulgakov borrows a Hegelian notion (Andersein), ‘otherness of Being [inobytie] in the world’.133 123 See Scholem 1955, 260–4, 1974, 129–35 and Solov’ev, REU, 250, 257 [RUC, 157, 167]. Compare Moltmann, TK, 59–60, 108–11, 1993b, 86ff., 155–7, 1996, 296–308 and Schelling’s ‘die Einschließung’ (contraction) in AW, 88ff. [SW, VIII: 317ff.]. For critique, see Fiddes, SWKG, 252–4. On Kabbalism in Bulgakov, see Rubin 2010, 80–2 and Burmistrov 2007, 164–6, but see 163. 124 Bulgakov, U, 222 [C, 189]. 125 See SN, 169–78, esp. 170–5 [UL, 186–95, esp. 188–92]. 126 127 AB, 146–7 [LG, 124–5]. See Fiddes, SWKG, 249–56. 128 129 130 Bulgakov, SS, 43. Fiddes, SWKG, 252 and see 264. SWKG, 254. 131 Bulgakov, AB, 149 [LG, 126]; compare SN, 178–9 [UL, 195–7]. 132 see AB, 149–50 [LG, 127], NA, 21–4 [BL, 17–19]; see Rossum 1993. 133 Bulgakov, IAP, 239; cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 118ff.

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Divine being, being ‘mixed [srastvoril]’ with ‘nothing’ and ‘immersed’ in ‘becoming’, is given ‘another form of Being of one and the same divine world’. This ‘becoming divinity’ is the divine world of Sophia as All-multiplicity (Vsemnozhestvo) or the created Sophia: ‘The Divine Sophia became also the creaturely Sophia. God repeated Himself in creation, so to speak; He reflected Himself in nonbeing.’134 The divine Sophia as the eternal image or Prototype of creation is then reflected in creation in the creaturely Sophia as an image in becoming, Prototype to type, divine Being reflected in creaturely Being which is a sort of becoming. The two are, however, one, with the second Sophia being a mode/image (obraz) of the first.135 As Angelus Silesius puts it: ‘God’s image I. If God would gaze at God, God needs/To turn to me or any of our many breeds.’136 Put in terms of self-revelation, the Father creates the world through revealing Himself through His two hands in and by Sophia. If the divine Sophia is the eternal self-revelation of God, then the created Sophia is His temporal revelation in the world.137 Since Sophia is an ideal intelligible world in God, nothing can be said to be external to God. One can speak of the eternal ‘God’ as Absolute-Relative creating a ‘place’ in Himself for the relative into which He plunges to become God in becoming, ‘creation’ itself in a manner of speaking.138 As the world is eternally in God through Sophia and since ‘God’ is a relative term implying a creation, one must say there never was ‘one point of being’ at which the eternal free act of the Creator was absent from creation or ceased as unneeded, as all Being would then cease to be. One can then dare to say that ‘the Lord is the Creator always now and ever unto ages of ages’ and the ‘creature is co-eternal with [its] Creator’, as time is ‘a face of eternity turned towards the creature as a kind of creaturely eternity’ and ‘light is co-existent with the sun’.139 Here the particular form of the problematic in Bulgakov comes to the fore. If God in His essence is Godmanhood/Divine Sophia, if creation/created Sophia is that same essence in becoming, and if in this ‘submergence’ God eternally accepts the world as an internal necessity (N2) for Himself, then He must create it to be the sort of God He is. Furthermore, it follows that the Incarnation must be the motivating reason behind creation, which is that who God is in Himself (Godmanhood) must be manifested in a world where He will take flesh (N2). The world is both human and divine at its core, made for the Incarnation, as God is divine-human (see ch. 6).140 It would seem that Bulgakov’s response is to simply assert in faith the primordial unity of God as Absolute and as Absolute-Relative, which seems to avoid the question of how God can 134 135 136 137 138 140

Bulgakov, AB, 149 [LG, 126]; see Gavrilyuk 2015, 462 (Bulgakov drawing on Maximus). NA, 70 [BL, 60]. Angelus Silesius, Wanderer, 1.105, 11. See Bulgakov, SS, 43, U, 222ff. [C, 189ff.] and SWG, 67ff. 139 SN, 178 [UL, 196]. SN, 189 [see UL, 209–10 (my trans.)]. See R. Williams, SB, 166, 169.

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be free when creation and Incarnation are internal necessities. Moreover, his assertion of the latter antinomy as his response to the problematic breaks down, as there is a pervasive confusion of the two divine self-definitions. It is not an accident that this account of creation appears prima facie monist and emanationist. Bulgakov was attempting to marry the Christian doctrine of creation (emphasizing freedom) with a sort of quasi-emanationism or divine outpouring/overflowing (izliianie as opposed to strict emanatsiia) (emphasizing necessity).141 This is a form of the Neoplatonist tradition of the self-diffusiveness of the Good but Bulgakov was consciously highlighting its latent pantheism and attempting to Christianize it. The Created Sophia, for Bulgakov, is sometimes identified with the world soul understood as the divine foundation of creation or divine energies142 and sometimes with creation as such.143 Yet this lack of clarity about creation is not crucial for Bulgakov’s system because, following Solov’ev,144 all Being must be a mode of divine Being, so that, properly speaking, ‘The world as the creaturely Sophia is uncreated-created.’145 Creation is not merely implicitly divine but quite explicitly so in its foundation. Bulgakov held that only the Absolute God, Holy Trinity, properly is, having Being (ousia), essence, and existence. God is Absolute, possessing the All, and nothing can limit Him or He would cease to be Absolute but merely relative. There can be nothing alongside of, outside of, or apart from the divine Being of God, Sophia, neither the creature nor the ‘nothing’ out of which it is created, since ‘all belongs to this life and world’ of God as Trinity.146 The world is not only a thing or object in God’s hands but possesses, through God’s self-limitation, its own proper Being, nature, and life. For Bulgakov this ‘created nature does not remain outside God, because ontologically extra-divine Being does not exist at all’.147 Creation abides in God, although it is not God, and God is not bound to it but both transcends it and (as it were) sweeps it up into the pre-eternal gaze of His absoluteness.148 However, the relationship of God to His creation is not one of ‘unilateral action of God towards a world lying outside of Him and alien to Him’. Rather, it is a co-operation (vzaimodeistvie) or synergism of Creator with His creation.149 The only way that such a synergism, with its ‘mutual connectedness and dependence’, can happen is if not only God has a true ‘reality and self-existence [samobytnost’]’150 but creation also has such a reality. It is 141

Bulgakov, NA, 78 [BL, 69] and SN, 167 [UL, 183–4]. 143 NA, 72, 89ff., 188, 192 [BL, 63, 79ff., 172, 176]. NA, 60, 63, 71 [BL, 52, 55, 62]. 144 145 Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 85 [LDH, 78]. Bulgakov, NA, 72 [BL, 63]. 146 NA, 51 [BL, 43] and see NA 128 [BL, 117], AB, 146–7 [LG, 124–5], and SWG, 148. 147 Literally: ‘there is no Being at all that exists outside God’ (IAP, 239). 148 149 IAP, 240–1. ibid., 239 and see NA, 240ff. [BL, 220ff.]. 150 IAP, 239; Samobytnost’=‘autonomy’, ‘uniqueness’, ‘self-sufficiency’, ‘integrality’, and ‘independence’. 142

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for this reason that Bulgakov contends that ‘In order to become self-existent, the world must be divine in its positive foundation.’ Thus, it is only because it is first divine in its substratum that ‘the world maintains its self-existence in the eyes of God, although it is created from nothing.’ Thanks to its creatureliness, the world also maintains its independence of Being, its ‘unbridgeable difference’ in God’s eyes. The world ostensibly has a ‘genuine reality’ because it is both divine in its foundation and creaturely in its temporal becoming. It is determined by God for Himself unto the ages but only because it exists both for God, being dependent on His life and Being, and for itself in the tightest co-operation, seen at its apex in Christ Himself.151 Thus, creaturely realities like temporality are real because they have their true ‘foundation’, ‘root’, and even ‘content’, in eternity, the life of the Trinity—the divine Sophia.152 This is an idea we will later see Balthasar (see 11.2) critically adapting and extending in his correction of Hegel’s application of creaturely modalities to the divine Trinitarian drama. More critically, we shall see, however, in chapter 6 that Bulgakov’s talk of divine-human co-operation seems to be in tension with his own version of determinism, the determinism of love. One way of understanding Bulgakov’s doctrine of creation on this point is in terms of his identification of divine Being with both love-desire and Sophia vis-à-vis creation. Two modes/images of Sophia apparently ‘exist’. The first is primary and divine, that is, the divine world, the ousia of the Holy Trinity as a movement of love. The other mode is secondary and created, that is, the created Being of creation which is the divine love/Sophia of God poured out in becoming. Yet these two modes/images of Sophia are one reality as a unity in difference.153 Bulgakov certainly favours this ‘antinomic’ conception of Sophia, but he stresses that they are one reality. The Created Sophia is the Divine Sophia in becoming and so He can express this in unitary language which emphasizes creation as a mode of God: ‘The one Sophia and the one divine world exist both in God, and in creation, although in different ways: preeternally and in time, absolutely and relatively (as a creature).’154 It would seem that ultimately the antinomic or dialectical approach to ontology, for Bulgakov, is a time-bound way of speaking and that sub specie aeternitatis all Being is divine (creaturely Being as a mode of divine Being). There are, then, in reality not two Sophias but one Sophia. But if this is the case then this would seem to be at odds (without substantial qualifications and extra theological work) with sophiology containing within it a form of the analogy of Being. Creaturely Sophia/Being cannot be said to correspond with divine Sophia/Being, as such a ‘correspondence’ requires real 151

152 IAP, 239–40; see Gallaher 2012b, 216–17. See Bulgakov, NA, 65ff. [BL, 56ff.]. NA, 70 [BL, 60]; cf. AB, 148 [LG, 126]. 154 IAP, 239 and I, 262 [see IV, 32–3 (my trans.)]: ‘God in creation, which is the Divine Sophia’. 153

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difference between the uncreated and the created and these two Sophias are one, not two. Otherwise, how can we say coherently that the love or beauty characteristic of creation both corresponds and is dissimilar to that of God Himself if really they are tacitly one reality? However, we need not play antinomism and analogy off one another but see them as complementary methodologies bringing out, respectively, the difference and continuity and the dissimilarity and similarity of God and creation. Moreover, we shall see, in the case of Barth’s dialecticism, a method very similar to Bulgakov’s antinomism, that a dialectical theological methodology in no way needs to presuppose the ontological modalism found in Bulgakovian sophiology. (See Part II.) In creation generally and, as we shall see, in Christ particularly, one has a certain ‘mutual transparency [vzaimovkhodnost’]’ of God and the world. God enters the world through His creation and redemption of it in Christ and the world enters God through its participation in the divine nature of Christ. This transparency presupposes co-operation between God and creation, the peak of which is the incarnation: ‘God realizes his goals already not apart from creation, but together with it, sparing its creaturely freedom and recognizing its creaturely self-existence . . . This common life of God with the world receives its ultimate clarity in the events of the incarnation.’155 Each of the two Sophias is united in one Being (sushchestvo) and one life, but each preserves, in a certain coincidentia oppositorum, its self-existence/independence (samostoiatel’nost’) and its ‘metaphysical distance’ (so being without confusion) at the same time as it preserves its mutual link with the other (so being without separation), as a result of their ontological identity. Thus, apparently, the truth that Bulgakov is trying to emphasize with his doctrine of creation is that in creation itself can be traced imperfectly the hypostatic union as expressed at Chalcedon. He is developing a sort of Chalcedonian ontology. This trace of Christ in creation is seen in the following antinomic truth: God out of an ecstatic self-emptying love has founded creation as otherness distinct from Himself, so it is both created and temporal, but, in being based on His own divine nature of love-desire, it is also uncreated and pre-eternal in its foundation:156 It is necessary to include the world’s creation in God's own life, coposit the creation with God’s life, correlate God's world-creating act with the act of His self-determination. One must know how to simultaneously unite, identify, and distinguish creation and God’s life, which in fact is possible in the doctrine of Sophia, Divine and creaturely, identical and distinct.157

This sort of metaphysics is not pantheism as an impious pantheistic ‘deification of the world’, Bulgakov claims, but ‘an entirely pious’158 pantheism. It is 155 157

156 IAP, 240–1. NA, 70 [BL, 60]; cf. AB, 148 [LG, 126]. 158 NA, 52 [BL, 44 (revd)]. U, 232 [C, 199–200]; see Lingua 2000, 144–6.

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more precisely called ‘panentheism’, understood as ‘the truth that all is in God or of God’159 or ‘the world is the not-God [ne-Bog] existing in God, God is the not-world [ne-mir] existing in the world. God posits the world outside of Himself, but the world possesses its Being in God.’160 This means quite simply that the hypostatic union is the pre-eminent instance of a more general panentheistic reality in the cosmos.161 We shall see another version of this same insight later in Balthasar. Bulgakov’s relationship to pantheistic thought is far from a simple one and even in On Godmanhood one can see a sort of evolution in his thought. Between Agnets Bozhii (1933) and Nevesta Agntsa (1939; pub. post. 1945), Bulgakov gradually begins to blur the anteriority of the Absolute over the Absolute-Relative. Thus, Bulgakov in 1933 follows Athanasius in arguing for a clear precedence of the immanent Trinity over God’s self-positing as Creator. The first self-definition is primary, whereas the second is ordered after the first. Desire in the Holy Trinity (Being in Himself) is the foundation for God’s love outside Himself (Being-for-Himself), His becoming Creator or God for the world, which is characterized as ‘His creative kenosis’. Thus, the creation of the world may involve the self-positing of God as Creator but it remains a ‘certain work of God’ and not an ‘inner self-positing of the Godhead’ or God’s life of love as Holy Trinity.162 Six years later, with Nevesta Agntsa, it is no longer clear how the Absolute remains the foundation of the economic Trinity, God’s selfmanifestation as God-Creator. Bulgakov certainly still argues that God as Absolute is the ‘ontological premise’ of the fullness of eternal ‘non-kenotic Being’163 in relation to which the kenosis of the Absolute in creation as Absolute-Relative ‘is defined and from which it proceeds’. But this kenosis of God as Absolute-Relative, the coming to be of Himself as God, is now ‘united and co-posited’ with Himself as Absolute. Bulgakov justifies this move by his wish to avoid any hint of a change in divinity in this kenosis, so that the immanent remains self-same in the economic Trinity.164 Now this could simply mean that he still regards Absolute and Absolute-Relative as both valid self-definitions of God, as equi-primordial. However, given the immanentizing trajectory of Nevesta Agntsa and that Bulgakov in this work often elides the two planes of his antinomies, it seems more likely that this talk of the Absolute and Absolute-Relative being ‘united and co-posited’ is a rational clarification resulting in making it no longer clear how God can remain transcendent to Himself in the act of creating, in being Creator. More 159

Bulgakov, IiI, 317 [HH, 27]; cf. SWG, 71–3 and 147. I, 262 [see IV, 32 (my trans.)]. 161 On ‘panentheism’ generally, see Cooper 2006 and Peacocke 2004. On panentheism in Bulgakov, see Gavrilyuk 2015. 162 AB, 150 [LG, 128]. 163 i.e. having no kenosis of worldly becoming moving from Absolute to Absolute-Relative. 164 NA, 251 [BL, 230]. 160

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troubling still, God’s being Creator becomes wholly identified with His preeternal life of love-desire as Holy Trinity so that it is no longer clear how He cannot not create the world, since creation is a determinate necessity of selfcompletion for God. Bulgakov, in other words, has fallen into the trap of Boehme, Schelling, Hegel, and Solov’ev. Bulgakov is continually reducing his antinomies to one of their theses, thereby undermining his own response to the problematic. Thus the cosmological antinomy is reduced to its antithesis of God as Absolute-Relative (‘God in creation’) insofar as God as Absolute (‘God in Himself ’) eternally co-posits Himself as Absolute and Creator, thus wholly immanentizing Divinity. In turn, the sophiological antinomy is reduced to the thesis of the Divine Sophia insofar as creaturely Being (the created Sophia) is simply a different mode/ image of the Divine. Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that the central difficulty in Bulgakov’s system is not that it is antinomic, or even that he reduces all of his antinomies to one of its theses, but that he is not antinomic enough. His cosmological and sophiological antinomies are false antinomies, as the same reality is simply stated twice but in a different mode. AbsoluteRelative is still the Absolute, only eternally positing itself in becoming, just as the Created Sophia is simply the Divine Sophia in the ‘stream of becoming’.165 Bulgakov’s antinomism, which attempts to balance the transcendence and immanence of God, is continually being undermined by the role of Sophia, as a sort of immanentizing drive in Bulgakov’s thought. Sophia, which is ostensibly the idea of the identity and difference of the divine and creaturely, often seems to degenerate in him into a trope for the divine nature of all Being insofar as God not only will be but is all in all. Furthermore, as the Divine Sophia is Godmanhood, and the Created Sophia is this Godmanhood in becoming, when the Absolute determines itself as God, the world must be created not only because God requires a world to define Himself as God but because there must be a world for the Incarnation to take place: that is, the world’s Being qua Being is Godmanhood and this can and shall be manifested. The pantheistic ‘slide’ in Bulgakov leads him to sometimes put under erasure the claim that God need not have created the world (i.e. there is an N2 of the world for God-as-Absolute). He ends up developing his theology in a onesided manner that resolves theological tensions in a rational finalization expressing only one of the theses of the antinomy (e.g. the world is an internal necessity of love-desire (N2) for God as Absolute-Relative). One sees, then, arguably, in Bulgakov’s late theology, a danger of collapsing the Absolute into the Absolute-Relative, importing an internal necessity of the world (N2) into not only the Absolute-Relative but the Absolute itself. In this way, he destroys the antinomy which leads to a pervasive pantheism and determinism in his

165

I, 261 [see IV, 31 (my trans.)]; see Solov’ev, Cht., 11 and 12: 163 [LDH, 155].

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theology. However, to be fair, a case might be made that he has resources in his thought to respond to the pantheistic problems of his own sophiology.166 It would seem that Bulgakov’s theology, which at first we thought might present us the basis of our own response to our problematic, cannot, with its incipient determinism and denial of the possibility that God could have acted otherwise in creation and redemption, allow for a true divine union of F3 with N3 in creation. Creation cannot be said to be established by God on the same kenotic foundation as the Trinity, of a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3), because Bulgakov continually overshadows its giftedness, the fact that God might not have given Himself to it in creation (F3). More positively, Bulgakov’s emphasis on a dialectic of apophaticism and kataphaticism has led us to the truth that we can only know the Absolute Freedom of God as Trinity through His gracious revelation to us in His selfrevelation in Christ. Despite Bulgakov’s failure to establish it properly, Divine Freedom as a synthesis of F3–N3 is already always the grace of God poured out for us in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) because we only know the immanent in the economic Trinity. Furthermore, his sophiology, with its emphasis on creation as a coincidentia oppositorum of the divine and the creaturely, is a flawed attempt to emphasize the fact that all of reality is founded on the God-Man, Jesus Christ. We shall build on these ideas later in the book but first we must enter the heart of the problematic and response in Bulgakov.

166

See Gallaher 2012b, 218–22.

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6 Divine Freedom and the Need of God for Creation Bulgakov’s version of and response to the problematic is found in his antinomism and we shall now deal with both in more detail. We found that the tensions in Bulgakov’s antinomism seem to work against any simple appropriation of his theological response to the problematic to assist us to articulate our ideal of an F3–N3 relationship of God to the world. We want to say that God both (a) need not have created and redeemed the world in His ‘dependent freedom’ (F3) towards the world or ‘could have acted otherwise’, and (b) had to create and redeem it in Christ in His ‘free dependence’ (N3), since ‘it could not be otherwise’. The difficulty is in finding some way of speaking about the immanent Trinity vis-à-vis Christ and creation that balances the freedom of grace and the eternal definitiveness, the necessity, if you will, of the Incarnation for the life of God as Trinity. Here perhaps Bulgakov may still help us through resources found in his Christology.

6.1 THE DIVINE NEED FOR CREATION Bulgakov argues that God as Absolute-Relative does not create the world according to a whim of omnipotence. Freedom, for God for Himself, is not the abstract negative notion of ‘a void filled with limitless arbitrary possibilities’1 upon which God has the power to apply or not apply a particular capacity of His omnipotence. The notion that God’s will is radically indifferent in its freedom, and can choose to create the world or not based on an infinity of divine possibilities, Bulgakov sees as sheer ‘occasionalism’. Bulgakov, therefore, rather uncritically rejects the Scholastic distinction between potentia absoluta and ordinata as simply an instance of nominalism despite the fact that Aquinas, who used it, was no nominalist.2 We will later see Balthasar also rejecting it for 1

Bulgakov, AB, 251 [LG, 222].

2

See Bruce 2013, chs. 1–2.

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similiar reasons (11.3) but Barth critically adapting it (8.1). A divine will which can create the world or not is, Bulgakov argues, ‘the absolute causelessness of indeterminism’ where creation becomes a mere caprice. Such a notion is rooted in the anthropomorphism of Western theology in general, and in Aquinas in particular.3 It is indicative of a theology that distinguishes will and intellect in God and defines them according to completely opposite features.4 In contrast, the freedom of God for Himself is a pre-eternal positive ‘ontological freedom’ whereby God lives by His own positive pre-eternal content which is His nature as the Divine Sophia/love.5 Rather, if one must speak of possibilities in the divine life, then creation and redemption are divine possibilities of love for God but only insofar as there are no unactualized possibilities in His life as God. Bulgakov opposes to the idea of ‘manifold possibilities in God, actualized and unactualized’, the notion of the ‘uniqueness [edinstvenost’] of the ways of God’ which excludes all other unactualized possibilities.6 This ‘uniqueness’ is a characteristic of absoluteness7 and absoluteness is coextensive with the divine life of love-desire which is God’s own ‘ontological self-determination’. He is not constrained by any givenness-necessity, as with a creature, so that He must choose between different possibilities.8 Rather, God as Absolute-Relative is faced only with a ‘single and unique reality’ with creation, which, although different from God, is not less necessary. When He loves in creating and redeeming, He does this in the same way as He exists in His own free life of love. Put in our terminology, God exists as a synthesis of F2 and N2 in which each hypostasis gives itself to the Other (F3) with definitive abandon (N3), that is, with ‘the entire force of free necessity or necessity in freedom’.9 Creation is part of the self-determination of God as Absolute-Relative’s own Being as the Divine Sophia. It has a ‘unique and freely-necessary’ foundation, God Himself, God-Love.10 In creating and redeeming, God cannot fail to be simply who He is, which is Love, divine desire. Thus, the expression of Himself as love in creation necessarily but freely belongs to the fullness of His self-revelation so that He needs creation because, as love, He ‘cannot leave unactualized even a single possibility of love’.11 Some of this rather paradoxical talk—which assumes the ‘belonging-togetherness’ of God and creation—can be explained by the fact that not only is God love and His creation of the world an act of love but the world’s Being is included in Him as a moment of His divine desire.12 In some sense, creation is, without negating its (alleged) infinite difference, that very love-desire itself—the created Sophia. Put simply, all

3 4 6 9 10

Bulgakov, NA, 37–8 [BL, 31–2]; see Marshall 2004 and Hughes 2013. 5 Bulgakov, NA, 37–8 [BL, 31–2]. AB, 251 [LG, 222]. 7 8 NA, 38 [BL, 31]. NA, 9 [BL, 5]. NA, 57 [BL, 48]. NA, 141 [BL, 130]; or: ‘necessity, the free necessity of love’ (NA, 56 [BL, 48]). 11 12 NA, 56 [BL, 48]. NA, 141 [BL, 130]. NA, 57 [BL, 49].

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creaturely Being (created Sophia) is in its foundation divine love/ousia—the divine Sophia. Not surprisingly given our account so far, in God’s act of revelation, for creation is a form of self-revelation, it cannot be said that God as AbsoluteRelative could have simply refrained from creation, as is the case with God as the Absolute. Such a position is unbefitting to the divine essence: God could not have refrained from creating the world, since it flowed from His very life as love. Indeed, if one can even speak of a divine ‘will’ to creation, then such a will would be identified with the freedom God has in being for Himself. It is not a human will that can desire at will, which presupposes arbitrariness, but God’s divine will, which invariably and absolutely desires to create.13 Bulgakov is collapsing love, freedom, and creation. Put in terms of our terminology, for God as Absolute there is no N2 of the world, but for God as Absolute-Relative there is an N2 for the world, but this is a necessity of love-desire and God as love is free love (N2=F2). God, then, creates the world not for Himself but for the love of creation (F2). Yet creation has meaning for God. God may have no need or requirement (potrebnost’) of the world to complete Himself as Absolute but this does not mean ‘that the world is not needed by God in some other sense (besides His own self-completion)’.14 What is this need of God for the world? Bulgakov describes this need or necessity as neither an internal necessity of nature needed for God’s own self-completion (the form of N2 found in Idealism), nor a coercive necessity (N1) from without, ‘for there does not exist any kind of out of-outside [iz-vne] for God’. God, for Bulgakov, is All-Unity and includes all Being.15 Rather, it is a need or necessity not for Himself but for the world itself as a sort of freely chosen (F2) internal necessity (N2) of the world.16 Such a need—and in what follows, Bulgakov is adapting a concept found from Plotinus to Moltmann and Fiddes17—is the need of divine love-desire. Thus, the necessity he is trying to evoke, echoing Schelling and Solov’ev, is the ‘necessity of love, which cannot not love and which manifests and realizes in itself the identity and indistinguishability of freedom and necessity’.18 This divine ‘need’ might be characterized by our axis of F3–N3. God freely chooses to be dependent on the world (F3), to be in need to it, and this dependence is an eternal reality that God cannot simply undo (N3). God is love and ‘it is proper for love to love’ not only in the ‘confines [predely: bounds, limits, frontiers]’ of the divine life of absoluteness, but ‘to expand in love’ ‘beyond [za] these confines’ of that absolute life.19 Although, as 13

14 NA, 38 [BL, 31]. AB, 142 [LG, 120]. 16 AB, 143 [see LG, 121 (my trans.)]. AB, 142 [LG, 120]. 17 See Plotinus, enn., 5: V.4.1, 142–5, 7: VI.8.10, 14–15, 258–61, 274–7, Moltmann, TK, 52–60, 105ff., Fiddes, SWKG, 386–7, and CSG, 63–71. 18 Bulgakov, AB, 143 [LG, 120]; see Moltmann, TK, 107. 19 Bulgakov, AB, 142 [LG, 120]. 15

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we have seen, these ‘confines’ paradoxically exist in God by divine selflimitation, so one is left wondering what Bulgakov may mean. If it were not the case that love was so self-diffusive, then God would be limited by His own absoluteness in self-love or self-affirmation. He would be wrapped up by His own eternal desire and God would not be omnipotent, since He would be trapped by His own limits as absolute. The problem with the notion that ‘love to love must love beyond itself ’ is that it denies that God ‘cannot not love’ to be Himself. This makes any divine dependence on the world solely necessitous and not simultaneously freely gracious with a dependent freedom (F3) according to which things could have been otherwise. However, it does make (though perhaps too strong) a case for a key aspect of divine love-desire upon which we shall draw and which we consider equally and antinomically important as F3 which is free dependence (N3). Divine love-desire for the world is so eternally ‘set’ on its complete self-gift in and to creation (F3) that in some sense it could not be otherwise (N3). ‘Creation’ and ‘God as love’ seem to be synonymous for Bulgakov. ‘GodLove’ (in Bulgakov’s typical styling) ‘needs the world, and it could not have remained uncreated’ not for Himself but for love of the world. He could not have failed to create the world (actualizing this possibility of love) because He needs to create it ‘in order to love, no longer only in His own life, but also outside Himself, in creation’.20 Thus, the presence and relation of creation are a part of the concept of God as love-desire and one cannot speak of creation vis-à-vis God as Absolute-Relative ‘as something accidental, “inessential”, as something that could exist or not exist. It is impossible for it not to exist.’21 Creation and God as love are part of the concept of God as Absolute-Relative and, echoing Hegel,22 without creation God would cease to be God by definition.23 One might argue that this sort of thinking is a tacit reduction on Bulgakov’s part of God as Absolute to God as Absolute-Relative but this reduction is understandable given what might be referred to as Bulgakov’s ‘revelational realism’. By this phrase, we mean that, as we shall see in Barth, he holds that it is impossible to think of God outside of the relations He has established with us.24 The Absolute, as Bulgakov puts it, is an ‘abstraction, conventional abstractness’ in which one examines the essence of God. But concretely such a reality does not exist, for it is relationless and a relation to the world is needed for the concept of ‘God.’25 The Absolute in itself is simply inconceivable without reference to its antithesis, the Absolute-Relative, given that its Trinitarian and sophianic character is always mediated to us through revelation. 20 22 23 24

21 AB, 142 [LG, 120]. AB, 143 [LG, 121]. See Hegel, PR, I [1824], n. 97, 308. ‘God is Love, and therefore He is also the Creator’ (Bulgakov, AB, 152 [LG, 130]). 25 R. Williams, SB, 169. Bulgakov, AB, 143 [LG, 121 (my trans.)].

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Therefore, a defence of Bulgakov might run thus. It is an unreal case to talk about what God might have done, who He might have been. God as God is only what is revealed to us and trusting in His revelation one can assume that His self-expression to us is surely what He already always is. Therefore, if God creates and redeems the world in Christ, then this is an expression of who He eternally is. Who are we to speculate on an ‘abstraction . . . a perpetual possibility’?26 The trouble with such a response is that it ignores the contingency of creation, the fact that everything might not have been, could have been otherwise (F3). Moreover, creation’s contingency is part of God’s own selfrevelation. If we deny that creation need not be, then we obliterate both the notion of grace as a gift that need not be given and God as a freely gracious gift giver. We overshadow, as it were, divine F3 towards the world (‘otherwise’) in our zeal to make the case for a neglected divine N3 towards the world (‘not otherwise’).27 Nor is it fair to argue that the idea of what might not have been given is a conventional abstraction. God has given Himself to us in His selfrevelation in Jesus Christ and this assumes a concrete reality which was once unrevealed and which to give itself had to be first ungiven. Bulgakov at times makes this point himself when he says that the revelation of the Absolute (-Relative) in the world presupposes the self-revelation of the Absolute in itself, as the second is in the first.28 But there is a more structural problem with Bulgakov’s response, which is that theological antinomism appears to be functionally impossible, since one always constructs the thesis of theologia from the antithesis of the economia. One cannot escape the fact that all we can know of God before He is revealed is through revelation. This leads Bulgakov to constantly collapse the Absolute into the Absolute-Relative. Since the Absolute-Relative by definition requires the world, by collapsing the Absolute into the Absolute-Relative, Bulgakov puts under erasure the contingency of creation and the eternal self-completeness of the Trinity. Bulgakov, however, does have a crucial point, and we shall return to it with Barth. If we are to destroy the idolatrous picture of God as Architect where he—‘A self-contemplating shadow/ In enormous labours occupied’29— weighs, measures, and determines from an infinite number of possibilities, worlds or lack of worlds, what he shall cause to be, then we must come to see creation and redemption in Christ as something not accidental to God. Without turning God into a world-principle, we must explain what sort of difference it makes to the Trinity to have the ‘second aureole . . . painted with

26 27 28 29

Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, I, ll.6–8, 117. Compare Fiddes, CSG, 71, 74ff., 119, 121, 132ff., 142, and 262 and SWKG, 292. Bulgakov, U, 409 [C, 361–2]. Blake, ‘Urizen’, Copy G, Object 3, ch. I, 4, ll.24–5.

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man’s image’.30 This is a point we shall see Balthasar take up in Part III and which we shall respond to in our Conclusion.

6 . 2 KE N O S I S A N D E N T H E O S I S IN CREATION AND REDEMPTION God’s love as creation is described by Bulgakov hypostatically, as the kenotic self-giving of the hypostases to creation and each other. In order to understand Bulgakov’s response to the problematic, we need to understand how he ties kenosis in creation and redemption in Christ to the Trinity. In this way, he grounds God’s own life in the economy—being freely bound to the world (N3)—upon His free life of love-desire in Himself (F3).31 Balthasar, who is dependent on Bulgakov, makes a similar theological move. The Father, out of an utterly free self-giving (F3), expands beyond Himself as God for the world. He becomes, in His desire for the world, the Absolute-Relative by sending, with a love that will not turn back (N3), His own Son from the depths of the Godhead into the world. In this way, He repeats in creation, as a free selfexpression, the pre-eternal sacrifice of love of the begetting of His Son. The Son, in turn, freely and dependently (F3) enters creation as the Word of God that creates the world. This ‘entry’ is His definitive (N3) humiliation or selfemptying pre-eternal sacrifice by the Father for the world, which temporally expresses His own begottenness.32 The Holy Spirit, then, with a dependent freedom (F3), goes out into creation from the eternity of the Godhead where He is freely dependent on the Son as the hypostatic love of the Father and the Son (F3–N3). He gives Himself utterly to creation (N3) and ‘becomes, as it were, the becoming of the world, the realization of its content’, as the expression of the Father’s eternal love for His Son in and through creation.33 Finally, the drama attains its denouement in the passion of Christ.34 The Father gifts His Son to death on the cross for the life of the world, freely giving up everything to it (F3), and so surrendering His own Word to nothingness, from which act He cannot turn back (N3). In this fashion, He participates spiritually in this sacrifice of love-desire by ‘a certain image of spiritual co-dying’.35 The Son then freely empties Himself of His divinity (F3) to the point that He becomes in His consciousness de-theized. He addresses His own Father as God, for ‘He is surrounded by the darkness of death, and the consciousness of His Divine Sonhood abandons Him.’ The Son cries out as the God-Man, in the name of creation, to God with whom He is one, ‘to God 30 31 33

Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII, ll.127, 131, 364–5. 32 Compare Fiddes, SWKG, 289–90, 383. Bulgakov, AB, 151 [LG, 129]. 34 35 AB, 152 [LG, 130]. AB, 339ff. [LG, 309ff.]. AB, 344 [LG, 313].

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who never forsakes Him—that He has forsaken Him’36 into the darkness of death (N3). Lastly, the Holy Spirit freely withholds His presence from the Son in His suffering (F3). The Spirit, who is the hypostatic love of the Father with the Son, no longer rests ceaselessly on the God-Man. He turns decisively away from the Son (N3), and, in this fashion, the Spirit has His own kenosis, because ‘not manifesting Oneself to the beloved is kenosis for hypostatic Love’.37 This total kenosis of the Trinity, divine desire expressed in creation and redemption, endures until the Spirit is fully reunited with the Son and the Father through the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. There is, then, a certain spiritual ‘co-passion or co-crucifixion’ of the Father and the Spirit with the incarnate Son, the God-Man for the salvation of the world.38 Bulgakov, however, is explicit that only the Son, Jesus Christ, suffers in the flesh, was crucified, died, and buried, because only He assumed human nature. So, Bulgakov contends, ‘in this sense neither the hypostasis of the Father nor the hypostasis of the Spirit suffers with Him’.39 Yet the non-participation of the Father and Spirit in Christ’s passion would contradict the full sense of the dogma of the Incarnation. By ‘co-crucifixion’, he simply refers to their spiritual participation in the work of redemptive suffering of the Son on the cross and so of His kenosis as he argues can be seen in Philaret Drozdov of Moscow (see ch. 3).40 Yet this in no way, he contends, denies the fact that ‘God in His eternity, as the “immanent Trinity”, is above the world; but the same Holy Trinity, as the Creator, finds itself in an “economic” interrelation with the world.’41 As Kallistos Ware observes, ‘Bulgakov clearly repudiates the Patripassian heresy, which fuses the persons of the Father and Son, whereas Bulgakov carefully distinguishes them, while insisting also on their coworking.’42 Although Bulgakov understands kenosis not exclusively Christologically, he is very clear that it has particular relevance to the hypostasis of the Son. The Son undergoes a ‘kenotic or Christological subordinationism’ in the economy, which has its basis in a sort of purely non-subordinationist kenosis of obedience in the immanent Trinity.43 Indeed, Bulgakov describes Sonhood as being the ‘hypostatic kenosis in the Holy Trinity, and the Son of God is the kenotic hypostasis, the pre-eternal Lamb’.44 If the Father is the begetter and the Son is the begotten, then the Son, in relation to His Father as the perfectly active subject who reveals Himself, is, through the Spirit as the copula, the perfectly

36 38 39 40 41 42 43

37 AB, 343 [LG, 313]. AB, 345 [LG, 314]. AB, 400 and see 345 n. 1, 383, 399ff. [LG, 371 and see 315, n. 56, 353, 370ff.]. AB, 401 [LG, 372]. AB, 345 n. 1, 383 (Drozdov), 401 [LG, 315, n. 56, 353 (Drozdov), 372]. AB, 401 [LG, 372]. Ware 2016, n. 54, 228 (summarizing Bulgakov, AB, 400–1 [LG, 371–2]). 44 AB, 337 [LG, 307]. AB, 200 [LG, 122]; cf. AB 204 [LG, 181].

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passive and obedient predicate, who is revealed by Him.45 Obedience is a key concept in Bulgakov’s understanding of kenosis.46 Bulgakov speaks about the Son’s ‘free obedience’47 to the Father both immanently48 and economically where the human will follows after the divine will of His Father.49 A point of clarification is in order on what precisely Bulgakov meant in this context as the ‘divine will’. Bulgakov believed, critiquing Maximus,50 that the will was properly related not solely to nature but also simultaneously and inseparably to the distinct hypostases which personalized it. He argued, in an unusual teaching, that one must speak in God simultaneously of the divine will proper to the trihypostaticity of the common divine nature and three divine hypostatic wills distinct for each of the three divine hypostases, but these three hypostatic wills are united as one given the common nature.51 We shall see a version of this latter teaching later in Balthasar. In the kenosis of the Incarnation, Bulgakov holds that the Son’s proper hypostatic will is silenced. By His human will following the divine will, Christ follows not His own proper hypostatic will, which is tacit, but, as His own, the hypostatic will of the Father who sent Him. These two divine hypostatic wills of the Father and the Son are, of course, essentially one will of the one God but personalized by the distinct persons. Thus, by Christ’s allowing His human will to follow the Father’s hypostatic will, He is also following His own silenced hypostatic will which is one with the Father’s and the Spirit’s wills given their common nature. Christ transforms His divine self-consciousness ‘into a tabula rasa, as it were, on which the will of the Father who “sent” Him writes its commands, who out of love for the world, did not spare His Only begotten Son’.52 The emphasis on will being tied not just to the divine nature but to the divine persons is Bulgakov’s attempt to more adequately express the salvation drama where the three persons of the one God as ‘willing-ones’ are both united and clearly distinct. He means to avoid the extremes of subordinationism and tritheism. Later in Barth and Balthasar, we shall see obedience and kenosis in both the immanent and the economic Trinity. The divine-human activity of Christ expressed in His obedience, although certainly free, is not free in the sense of its being occasional or capricious. If Christ’s human obedience in drinking the cup of suffering offered to Him is in a perfect divine-human union with his pre-eternal obedience to the Father, then it can be clearly seen that the way of Christ to the cross was not merely 45

See AB, 121 [LG, 98] and compare U, 407–8 [C, 360], TF, 317–18. See AB, 334–50 [LG, 304–20] (subsection: ‘The Filial Obedience’). 47 48 AB, 273 [LG, 245]. AB, 121 [LG, 98]. 49 AB, 382 [LG, 353]; cf. AB, 272ff. [LG, 244ff.]. 50 AB, 95ff. [LG, 75ff.]. (See Maximus, Disputation, 19, 7; 21, 9; 55–62, 22–5 [Disput s Pirrom, 292B, 152; 292D, 154; 301C–4D, 168–70].) 51 Bulgakov, AB, 313–14 n. 1 [untranslated by the English translator]. 52 AB, 313–14 [LG, 284]; cf. AB, 336–7 [LG, 305–6]. 46

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aribitrary. Christ certainly has different human possibilities at his disposal (‘all things are possible to thee’, ‘if it were possible’ (Mk 14:35–6)).53 His selfemptying was a dependent freedom (F3) that could have been otherwise. However, Christ gradually recognized the ‘inevitability [neizbezhnost’]’ of the way to the cross (N3). A consciousness ‘arose in Him as a consequence of the entire experience of His life, together with the spiritual act of steadfastness [reshimost’], as an inner sacrifice-offering [zhertvoprinoshenie], as the will to the cross’. Christ’s will to the cross is grounded in the fact that His sacrifice was established pre-eternally (as a ‘pre-eternal immolation’), although it was ‘revealed in time, as an event of the divine-human life, in which Christ’s human essence, non-illusory and authentic, experienced its times and seasons, and their accomplishments’.54 Creaturely freedom is marked by ‘instability [udoboprevratnost’]’ because it is founded on nothing, and so it easily, though not necessarily, falls prey to temptation. The human will of Christ, however, is divinized to such a degree by His divine will that, although it suffers from creaturely instability and could be tempted by different possibilities put to Him by the devil, it is impossible for Him to give in to temptation. Christ has a ‘created stable instability [tvarnaia neprevratnaia udoboprevratnost’]’ in which we (through Him) can come to participate.55 It is impossible for Christ to give in to temptation because His divine-human life, being a synthesis of dependent freedom and free dependence (F3–N3), as we saw earlier with God as Trinity, ‘is liberated from freedom as arbitrariness or different possibilities; it knows freedom only as an ontological path [put’]’.56 And this inner way of freedom is to follow the ground of all creation, which is sophianic in being obedient sacrificial love. Therefore, despite Bulgakov’s general essentialism (albeit understood in an actualist fashion), eschewing talk of the will of God in favour of talk of God’s nature expanding in love or divine self-positing, in His Christology he clearly argues that God chooses the way of the cross in Christ’s own divine-human decision. He contends that the act of Christ unfolds or is accomplished not only in time as an event, but also above time by being ‘pre-accomplished . . . in the Divine Counsel’. This ‘pre-accomplishment’ finds its temporal parallel in Christ’s will to the cross whereby the cross ‘was already pre-accomplished in His decision’ to go to the cross.57 Arguing in the context of the Ascension, Bulgakov contends that all the events of the divine economy that Christ effects, although new in time, exist in unchangeableness in eternity insofar as there is ‘an ontological identity of the supratemporal and the temporal’ localized in the divine-human activity of Christ.58 Here we are reminded of the retroactive

53 55 57

54 AB, 384 [LG, 355]. AB, 368 [LG, 338 (revd)]. 56 AB, 326 [LG, 295–6 (revd)]. AB, 326 [LG, 327]. 58 AB, 370 [LG, 340]; cf. AB, 74 [LG, 344]. AB, 429 [LG, 400].

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role of the resurrection in Pannenberg’s theology,59 although, in contrast, it is the Ascension for Bulgakov which is crucial. We argued above that Bulgakov’s antinomism is functionally impossible, as the Absolute is always collapsed into the Absolute-Relative. With the notion of the ‘pre-accomplishment’ of the economy in the Divine Counsel being ontologically identical with the temporal reality of the salvific events, one possesses a possible Christological resource in Bulgakov that might be the seed of a response to the problematic. If one accepts, as Bulgakov seems at times to acknowledge, the impossibility of a strict distinction between the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative, then one may argue that the salvific events exist as eternal ideas/seeds ‘pre-accomplished’ in the will of the Absolute. God for the world, as Absolute-Relative, chooses the seeds contained in their eternal foundation in the Absolute but this enactment can only be accomplished temporally in Christ. We shall build on these ideas later. For Bulgakov, the divine economy, being a synthesis of F3–N3, as an expression of divine love-desire, is not only a divine kenosis but also a general entheosis, divinization. It is by this entheosis that God, as the Prototype of creation, the Divine Sophia, becomes all in all in the world as the type of Created Sophia. Since the nature of God is Godmanhood, this must be expressed in a world in which God takes flesh. One can, therefore, interpret entheosis as the gradual accomplishment of Godmanhood in the world necessarily culminating in Christ. Creation, then, is uncreated-created or has a basis in God Himself and indeed is made to be united with God in Christ: ‘Imprinted in the world is the face of the Logos.’60 Given that God is Godmanhood and this entheotic process culminates in Christ, one can trace its gestation above all in man, who is a ‘concentrated world’ or microcosm by being the summit of creation, which itself reflects His headship as an ‘anthropocosmos’.61 Man bears the image of God or the sophianic prototype of Godmanhood in his hypostasis, ‘whereby created Wisdom lies’. He realizes the likeness of this image in his freedom, his divine co-operation with His Creator, but in his freedom he falls prey to temptation and falls, so obscuring the image that is only restored by the Incarnation. In Christ, one has not only the redemption of man but also his deification through Christ’s perfect divine-human co-operation, synergism of divine and creaturely freedoms. Bulgakov elaborated a ‘two-Sophias Christology’.62 Christ’s perfect humanity, which is the created Sophia as worldly ‘type’, ‘becomes completely transparent’ 59 See Pannenberg, SysTh, 2: 303, n. 92, 345, 365, 1968, 135ff., 141, 224, 230, 321–3; compare Moltmann, TK, 160, Jüngel 1983, 363, and T. F. Torrance 2006, 102 and 1996, 204. 60 Bulgakov, AB, 218 [LG, 193]. 61 SS, 43; on anthropology, see Zwahlen 2010, 259–357 and 2012. 62 See Bulgakov, AB, 205–39, 262ff. [LG, 182–211, 235ff.]; see Gallaher 2006a, 170–89, 2009a, 625–6, 633–5, 638–9, 2009b, 544, 546–7.

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to His perfect deity or the Divine Prototype, the Divine Sophia which has ‘kenotically adapt[ed] itself to the measure set by the created Sophia’. In other words, in Christ the created Sophia as type is glorified or deified by being raised by the Spirit to its Heavenly Prototype, the Divine Sophia, in the hypostatic union.63 This raising happens through the kenosis of the divinity. God lowers Himself to the level of humanity and raises it in the exchange of properties (communicatio idiomatum) with the humanity being given the very life of God and the divinity entering into suffering and humiliation. Type is raised to Prototype as man is raised up to God, although God, for Bulgakov, is already tacitly ‘human’, being Godmanhood, and man is already tacitly ‘divine’, as creation is the Created Sophia. Bulgakov does not see this divine-human communication as being ‘asymmetrical’, such that while the human is divinized, the divine is unaffected by the human, which, a traditional opinion says, would only result in its ‘carnification’.64 The work of redemption and deification of creation in Christ is accomplished in co-operation with the Spirit and is actualized at the birth of the Church at Pentecost through which creation becomes transfigured. This deifying work by which God becomes all in all is structured, moreover, by Bulgakov in terms of Christ’s threefold office (munus triplex Christi) as prophet, priest, and king.65 The Incarnation is possible because the hypostasis of the Logos is ‘co-human’, His nature being Godmanhood (Divine Sophia), and so the Logos naturally ‘replaces’ the human hypostasis in the union.66 Man is a triunity of hypostatic spirit/hypostasis/Iness (dukh) with its nature of rational/sensitive soul (dusha)67 and flesh (plot’).68 He is tacitly divine in that he possesses a nature which is the Created Sophia (Godmanhood in becoming) and a hypostasis that has a ‘divine, uncreated origin from “God’s breath”. This spirit is a spark of Divinity.’ There is a certain primordial identity as well as difference (note the antinomy!) between the divine I of the Logos and the human I.69 Man is the ‘sophianic hypostasis of the world’.70 Without any violence to human nature, man can naturally ‘receive’ the hypostasis of the Logos, in place of his own creaturely hypostasis, as he constitutes a perfect ‘ontological “site”’.71 Sophia as the common element between God and man is the ‘ontological bridge’ between both.72 Yet in all of this Bulgakov emphasizes 63

64 Bulgakov, SS, 44. See Meyendorff 1987, 170. Bulgakov, AB, 351–468 [LG, 321–441]. (See Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 1.3.8, 48 (FC 19) and Calvin, Institutes, 1: II.15.1–6, 494–503.) 66 Bulgakov, AB, 209 [LG, 186]. 67 ‘The soul in man is the fullness of his natural, cosmic life, which also contains the higher intellectual faculties of man as a natural creature’ (AB, 213; 212–14 is untranslated in the English and French translations). 68 69 AB, 214. AB, 209 [LG, 186]; cf. AB, 263 [LG, 235]. 70 AB, 210 [LG, 186]. 71 AB, 209 [LG, 186]; avoiding Nestorianism: AB, 213 and O Sofii, 48. 72 AB, 249 [LG, 220]. 65

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the fact that creation is somehow different from God. Bulgakov, therefore, speaks of both the symmetry and the asymmetry between the divine and the human in Christ, though he errs on the side of the former, given his desire to show the positive relation between the two natures.73 Bulgakov’s Christology is, arguably, symmetrical in a yet more technical sense. Georges Florovsky argued that the classical Byzantine synthesis of Christology, seen in the pro-Chalcedonian anti-Monophysite Leontius of Byzantium (c.485–c.543) and Maximus the Confessor (580–662), was a form of ‘assymetrical dyophysitism’.74 Both Florovsky and Bulgakov used Leontius75 based on the massively influential but now widely discredited reading of Friedrich Loofs (1858–1928).76 Leontius, it was said, emphasized the assymetry of Chalcedonian Christology where, while Christ has two complete natures, divine and human, He had only one divine hypostasis and lacked a human hypostasis. In the incarnation, the humanity of Christ along with the divinity was enhypostasized or subsisted in the divine hypostasis of Logos and thereby was eternally united to the eternal Son of God. This assymetrical ‘Orthodox’ Christology, Florovsky alleged, is vastly different from Bulgakov’s symmetrical vision of Christ. For Bulgakov, arguing against Leontius, Christ’s human nature (tacitly divine) eternally existed in the eternal Son of God before the incarnation and the Logos is not just divine but a dual reality: divine-human.77 Chalcedon, for Bulgakov, is absolutely fundamental, but he saw its negative expression in the four a-privatives of its horos as preliminary, and so awaiting its continuation in a truly positive (not simply apophatic) definition that would show the character of the relationship between the two natures.78 Here, with his quest for symmetry between the uncreated and the created, Bulgakov arguably breaks with the basic apophatic thrust of the Orthodox tradition and reverts to Idealism. Bulgakov looks to Sophia as a sort of necessary glue of all that is and he sees it as the positive truth revealed in the horos.79 In Christ, the two natures, divine and human, uncreated and created, are capable of ‘living identification’ in the one life of the hypostatic union. This is precisely because there is ‘something mediating or common which serves as the unalterable foundation for their union’ which is the

73

AB, 220–1 [LG, 195–6]. See Florovsky 1974–89, 8: 297, 9: 191–203, 1933, 257 (using Loofs), 1953, 13, 16 (see Baker 2015, 308–9) and compare Meyendorff 1987, 156. 75 See Daley 1979, Shults 1996; Leontius’ enhypostasia/anhypostasia distinction was used by Bulgakov, Florovsky (Baker 2015, 308–9), and Barth (McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology [=CRDT] [1995], 14–19, 328). 76 See Loofs 1887. 77 See Bulgakov, AB, 81–94 [LG, 63–74] (Leontius); see Gavrilyuk 2013, 152. 78 Bulgakov, AB, 79–80, 220–1 [LG, 61–2, 195–6]. 79 AB, 221ff. [LG, 196ff.]; see Valliere 2000a, 296ff. and Tataryn 2005, 205ff. 74

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‘sophianicity of both the Divine world, i.e., of Christ’s Divine nature, and of the creaturely world, i.e., of His human nature’.80 More positively, if one can say that the world, as the created Sophia, was created based on the love-desire of God, then it would be just as accurate to say this also in regard to the Incarnation, as a coincidentia oppositorum, the union of two loves-desires, divine and created Sophia/Being, which is ‘the second and concluding act of the creation of the world’.81 (Compare Balthasar in ch. 11.) Redemption, therefore, is not understood merely forensically, because in and by it God purposely divinizes the created by supplementing with His own eternity that which is lacking in creaturely becoming. In a way, however, this divinization merely makes explicit the tacit divinity of creation, because Sophia lies on both sides of the uncreated/created divide as united in Christ. Man is called from all eternity in the divine counsel to be saved in Christ as the Lamb slain before the creation of the world and this call ‘to become Godmanhood . . . is the primordial foundation of creation’.82 Vladimir Lossky (following Met. Sergii (Stragorodskii) of Moscow (1867–1944), who condemned Bulgakov’s teaching)83 claimed that Bulgakov’s Christology was a ‘new Apollinarianism’.84 Bulgakov rejected the allegation despite his open but critical sympathy for Apollinarius.85 Of course, the sophiological talk of God’s Being as ‘Godmanhood’ is more than a little reminiscent of the Apollinarian notion of an ‘eternal man’.86 But the claim that Bulgakov, like Apollinarius, held that Christ lacked the ‘reasonable soul [psyche logike]’ (commonly, nous or spirit) of Chalcedon87 is simply inaccurate. Christ for him lacks a human dukh (spirit/hypostasis/Iness), which is replaced by the Logos in his otherwise perfect humanity,88 not a human dusha that is both sensitive and rational soul.89 Moreover, the fact that He lacks human personality/hypostasis/spirit (dukh) and self-consciousness per se seems negligible because it is already included in His divine-human personality and self-consciousness as the Logos incarnate.90 The major problem with Bulgakov’s Christology is its sui generis confusion of the divine and the human. In sophiology, what is wholly man in Christ is at once divine and what is wholly divine is always already human. This led Lossky to observe that, for Bulgakov, Christ has, not two natures that are fully divine and fully human in the unity of one person, but one special new nature of ‘Godmanhood’.91 This makes it (if one insists on a label) an eccentric 80

81 Bulgakov, AB, 222 [LG, 196–7]; cf. AB, 232 [LG, 206]. AB, 374 [LG, 344]. AB, 374 [omitted in English: ‘For humanity is also called to become Godmanhood, which is also the primordial foundation of creation.’]. 83 84 Stragorodskii 1936, 11. Lossky 1936, 64 and see R. Williams 1975, 43–6, 55. 85 Bulgakov, AB, 9–30 [LG, 2–19] and 212–14. 86 Apodeixis, Frag. 32 [Lietzmann 1904, 211] in Behr, NF, 393. 87 88 Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §301, 108. Bulgakov, AB, 263 [LG, 235]. 89 90 91 AB, 213. AB, 262 [LG, 234]. Lossky 1936, 64, 66. 82

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form of Monophysitism. Alternatively, it might be argued that Bulgakov is radically antinomic in his Christology and that he emphasizes both the identity and the difference of the divine and the human in the union. The Christology of sophiology, like so much of Bulgakov, risks pantheism. It verges on the collapse of creation into God and thereby overshadows the gracious freedom of God in the hypostatic union because the Incarnation becomes a sort of inevitable expression in creation of His fundamental sophianicity. Creation, moreover, as all is in God, has no space to be itself other than a sort of doll’s house divinity, a ‘god in nature, a god-world or a godhuman’, since it is already always quasi-divine.92 What need then is there for God to become man if man is already tacitly divine? The hypostatic union seems wholly inevitable and so irrelevant. Furthermore, if the human nature of Christ is tacitly divine, then this means that the human will is also divine. Any type of human exercise of freedom in salvation is always already tacitly an exercise of divinity. Thus, Christ’s laying aside of His human will for His divine will seems a sham, as both wills are modes of divinity. Bulgakov is led to these problems in his positive account of Chalcedon by his ontological monism, which cannot fathom extra-divine Being, and his rationalistic need to explain what connects earth to heaven. He is not content with the sheer facticity, the brazen assertion of the mystery of creation as the miraculous positing by God’s Absolute Freedom of the ‘and’ of ‘God and creation’. God, and here we follow Florovsky, creates an Other with the world, an Other which is a real ‘outside’ for Him who has no outside without (pace Bulgakov) in any way being a supplement to Himself or making Him relative.93 Yet we need not reject Bulgakov’s Christology outright. One positive aspect of it, providing the seeds of a Christological response to the problematic, is that it (at its best) envisions the hypostatic union as a dialectical union of two forms of love/Being that are in a perfect union in differentiation.94 Such a conception is a sort of Christoform or concrete analogy of being and it has much to recommend it. Through it one might argue that divine freedom in Christ involves a continuity of heaven and earth, a union of divine self-giving love to creation that could have been otherwise and a human self-giving love to God that could have not been otherwise, as it only finds its end in the infinite. As we mentioned earlier, sophiology, given its monism or ontological modalism, rules out a standard approach to the analogy of being. Any application of analogy requires a clear, enduring, radical but tension-filled differentiation between divine and creaturely being. The difference between

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Bulgakov, K, 26 [BB, 18]. Florovsky 1949, 55 (for Bulgakov and Florovsky: Gallaher 2011 and 2013b and Gavrilyuk 2013, 114–58 (Contrast Baker 2014)); compare Bulgakov, K, 269 [BB, 149]. 94 See Gallaher 2006a, 183ff. 93

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the uncreated and the created must be ‘tension-filled’, as deification assumes the possibility of a communication of idioms, a real participation in God. The Son, as was mentioned earlier, is not alone in accomplishing entheosis. Sophia as Godmanhood is the Father’s revelation in creation concerning the Son through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the medium of the Incarnation at the Annunciation, when He overshadowed the Theotokos, and at Pentecost a ‘union between heaven and earth, between God and the creature’ is effected ‘in the hypostasis of the Spirit’. The Spirit brings into the world the life of Christ, bringing into a real remembrance the teaching of the Lord in His Church, the Body of Christ, whereby the world is led to the second coming and its general transfiguration and resurrection.95 The Church is not only the community of believers in Christ but also the theandric reality of the Divine Sophia in the Creaturely Sophia. Man is saved, that is, sanctified and deified, in this Body by participating in the hypostatic union. The image/type of God which man bears in his hypostasis as the summit of the Created Sophia is raised to the level of, or identified with, its Prototype in the Divine Sophia ‘in the same way as the two natures were united in Christ’.96 In this way God becomes all in all, beginning in the Church as the Body of Christ and spreading out to embrace the whole created cosmos until the Kingdom comes and there is only the glory of God and the lamp of the Lamb (Rev. 21:23). Thus, the Church is the privileged site of the Sophianic world process by which God becomes all in all or, more technically, the process by which the Created and Divine Sophia are perfectly united.97

6 . 3 SO PH IA N I C D E T E R M I N I S M The Incarnation, for Bulgakov, is a predetermined reality lying behind God’s desire to create, since He is essentially Godmanhood and desires that this is expressed in the world. But where does the Incarnation’s ‘inexorable predeterminedness’ come from?98 Quite simply, despite talk of divine-human cooperation, it comes from the necessity of divine love. Since love/Sophia is covalent with Godmanhood, Christ, as the God-Man who calls us to our own Godmanhood in Him, has become the ‘law of Being for natural humanity’. Bulgakov refers to the force of this law as a true ‘sophianic determinism’ in contradistinction from a ‘false’ determinism opposed to human freedom and 95 Bulgakov, SS, 45; For ecclesiology, see Swierkosz 1980, Valliere 2000a, 347–71, Nichols 2005a, 197–211, Gallaher 2013a. 96 Bulgakov, SS, 46. 97 cf. Solov’ev, Cht., 11 and 12: 171ff. [LDH, 163ff.] and Bulgakov, NA, 274ff. [BL, 253ff.]. 98 AB, 194 [LG, 171].

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creatureliness.99 He denies that this makes Christ’s power become a ‘natural power’ (creating a Christic ‘naturalism’), since Christ is the Resurrection, ‘a specially qualified new energy of life’, which realizes itself through the natural force of humanity in Christ.100 This law of Being, embodied in Christ’s body, the Church, whose influence extends to the whole cosmos, is divine/sophianic love. In the light of Christ, all of human history is given a new direction by the strength of its ‘dynamic pan-Christism’.101 Bulgakov strongly denies that this ‘co-being with Christ’ negates ‘personal freedom’ and makes ‘man a blind instrument’,102 but the law of love in Christ does not depend for its existence on the free assent of any particular individual. Nevertheless, it must be consciously or unconsciously accepted (either as the person of Christ or as the ‘principle of Christ—in relation to conscience, goodness, Divinity’) or rejected (as one might blind oneself, as it were) as reality by the individual.103 One is reminded here of Rahner’s famous notion of ‘anonymous Christianity’104 and indeed both theologies not only risk existentializing Jesus Christ but transforming salvation history into the natural structure of creation. Human freedom, for Bulgakov, is not the content of its own Being but only a mode of its own Being in relation to its own inner reality/Being who is Christ. Christic Being, as the nature of humanity, presents human freedom with a limited number of possibilities beyond which it cannot go, insofar as it is exhausted by the determinate character of the reality given to it.105 The content of all Being (as the divine and created Sophia are one) is not then freedom but the realized love of God in Christ (i.e. Godmanhood). For human Being to attain its end, it must embrace/be embraced by the love of Christ who is both its internal and external reality. To choose nothingness is possible but it is impossible to choose nothingness forever, for human choice is finite and will finally run out of negative possibilities. Furthermore, nothingness is parasitic of Being and all Being ultimately must find its fulfilment in nature that is Christ. Thus, God’s love not only can, but also must, overcome creaturely sin in Christ insofar as that sin is merely a privation of Being and Being is itself the love of God in Christ. The privation of love cannot endure— evil is not an eternal alternative to the good which is Manicheanism—if love is to become ‘all in all’.106 In such a system, hell (if it exists) is a temporary but universal spiritual state of purgation107 (inspired by Origen and Gregory of

99

100 AB, 462 [LG, 435]; cf. SWG, 146–8. AB, 460 [LG, 432]. 102 103 AB, 463 [LG, 435]. AB, 459 [LG, 431]. AB, 463 [LG, 435]. 104 See Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. 6: 30–49, 10: 30–49, 12: 161–78, 14: 280–94, 16: 52–9, and 199–224. 105 Bulgakov, AB, 379, 462 [LG, 349, 435]; cf. SWG, 146–8. 106 AB, 392 [LG, 363], NA, 516ff. [BL, 486ff.], NA, 572–3 [Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, 26–7], Apokalipsis Ioanna [1948], 281–3 and SWG, 148. 107 NA, 534–6 [BL, 501–3], NA, 391 [BL, 361 (revd: ‘universal purgatory with a temporary stay within it’: see Gavrilyuk 2006, 125)] and Apokalipsis Ioanna, 175–6, 198–200, 206–7, 283. 101

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Nyssa). Hell, as an eternal place of torment, is an ontological impossibility as universalism is an internal divine necessity (N2) and not merely an impossible possibility.108 Divine love, in a sense, swamps the world and must necessarily break through the stoniest of hearts if God as love is indeed to be ‘all in all’. Bulgakov claimed that his panentheism was a pious pantheism but not pantheism understood as ‘an impious deification of the world’ or ‘cosmotheism’.109 So too his ‘sophianic determinism’ was a ‘true’ not ‘false determinism’ that was Christocentric and respected human freedom and responsibility.110 Yet it is hard to see how his pious pantheism and sophianic determinism do not have the same end result of impious cosmotheism and false determinism, which is a divine love monism, a free love that must necessarily create the world to love, swallowing up creation and negating human and divine freedom.111 Bulgakov’s sophianic determinism is a species of Christomonism insofar as all Being is a form of love/Sophia—that is, Godmanhood. Creation and redemption enter the theological picture of Bulgakov as a sort of necessary addendum or necessary expression of God’s nature as ‘God-Love’.112 God’s status as Creator (and Redeemer too, insofar as redemption is the completion of creation) comes from being the God who must love to be God. This is the case insofar as love is to be in a self-giving and self-receiving relation with the Other, so that creation is simply a necessary expression (N2) of God’s being as the Absolute-Relative Trihypostatic unisubstantial Spirit who is love-desire (F2). There certainly exists in Bulgakov’s theology what we have called a free dependence (N3), as God cannot but create and redeem the world in Christ. But N3 appears all too often in the absence of F3, a dependent freedom that might have done otherwise. Thus, this free dependence (N3) continually collapses into an internal love determinism (N2) that is devoid of freedom. It may now seem that I am arguing that sophiology is theologically irredeemable but this is not the case at all, for it is crucial in our own constructive response to the problematic. However, prior to laying out the first portion of our own response, we must briefly recapitulate the problematic and response as seen in Bulgakov. Bulgakov attempted to balance God’s freedom with the necessity of His relationship to the world in Christ. God, in Himself, as Absolute, is Trinity in Unity, pre-eternally revealing Himself to Himself as Godmanhood/Sophia/ousia in a pre-eternal movement of self-giving, selfreceiving, and self-emptying hypostatic love whose icon is the cross. In this eternal perfectly actual life of the immanent Trinity there is a perfect union of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). God is in no way impelled 108 See NA, 493–553 [BL, 466–519], NA, 561–75 [Apocatastasis, 7–30] (on Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching), Apokalipsis Ioanna, 211–65, 283, and SWG, 147–8; cf. Gavrilyuk 2006 and Samokishyn 2008. 109 Bulgakov, U, 245 [C, 199–200]; cf. IiI, 317 [HH, 26–7] and NA, 231–2, 249 [BL, 212, 228]. 110 111 AB, 462 [LG, 434–5] and see SWG, 147. Contrast Valliere 2000a, 335–6. 112 See Bulgakov, SN, 193 [UL, 217], IiI, 314–15 [HH, 19–21], and AB, 127 [LG, 105].

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to create, let alone redeem, the world. It could have been otherwise. This is not God’s only self-definition. He also is defined antinomically as being for Himself, as the Absolute-Relative. As the Absolute relative to the world, God with a dependent freedom and a free dependence (F3–N3) empties Himself definitively in His self-revelation in creation, redemption, and divinization. It could not have been otherwise. At least ideally, and this is a crucial intuition of Bulgakov, time-bound creation has the same foundation as God’s own eternal life because the Absolute is in the Absolute-Relative, the immanent is in the economic Trinity. Given this hierarchy, at least from one side of the antinomy, the self-choice of the Absolute in positing itself as Absolute-Relative (and with it creation and redemption) could have been ‘otherwise’. However, in practice the latter intuition and Bulgakov’s response in consequence are obscured due to the collapse of his antinomies. Most crucially, the sophiological antinomy is no real antinomy at all, as the divine Sophia exists in different modes on both sides. It is the hidden motor of all the other antinomies in Bulgakov’s system and the source of his theology’s difficulties. The figure of Sophia, bridging the Absolute and Absolute-Relative as the unity of the divine and creaturely, disturbs Bulgakov’s paradoxical response to the problematic. Blurring the line between God and creation, Sophia opens up an impersonal love determinism where the only God is God as AbsoluteRelative who inevitability and logically becomes a world principle because He is an impersonal love that simply creates to be itself and then floods that creation till there is nothing left in it that is creaturely. Everything becomes not only implicitly but also explicitly divine. We cannot look to sophiology holusbolus for the divine unity of F3 with N3 towards the world since the Absolute is an unacknowledged mask of the Absolute-Relative. It would have been better for Bulgakov to clearly acknowledge that we can only know the immanent through the economic Trinity. Nevertheless, at this very point Bulgakov presents us with a salutary Christological idea mentioned earlier. It may present one way of mediating between the two extremes of a complete identification of the world with God and the conventional abstraction of God as Absolute. This is the notion that what Christ manifests in time through His free divine-human decision to take up the cross is already ‘pre-accomplished’ in the divine counsel,113 which is a perfect synthesis of freedom and necessity structured by our axis. We argued earlier that the Absolute might be viewed as the eternal foundation of the Absolute-Relative and the divine economy. But how might we characterize it relating eternally to the economy? The first constructive blocks of our own response to the problematic involve speculation, albeit based on God’s self-revelation. In the Absolute there already

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AB, 370 [LG, 340].

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always exists all the eternal images of God in reference to the world that subsequently are expressed in His life as Absolute-Relative. These images of God’s economic relationship to the world include all the possibilities of divine life in Christ from creation to Ascension. God’s turning to creation, His selfrevelation as Absolute-Relative, then, eternally exists as a pleroma of living images or modes in the divine counsel of the Absolute. These images exist as free but also absolutely necessary realities (F2–N2), ‘pre-accomplished’ in His life of love-desire, because they are the themes of God’s own divine world of loving self-giving as Trinity as both a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). God as Absolute expresses these images in the world, actualizing them in becoming Absolute-Relative and in this way becomes who He is. However, the key point is surely that for the pleroma of these images to be actualized, expressed in the world, human co-operation is required and this only happens mysteriously in the midst of history in the free act of Christ, human will following divine will, to take up His cross. Here we see the stage on which we can embody God’s choice to create and redeem the world or not: the drama of Christ taking up His cross. It is this free choice of Christ to follow the will of the Father in taking up His cross, to freely become dependent on the world (F3) so that He could not turn back (N3), a choice, however, which need not have been taken, which gifts creation with a sort of gracious necessity. It is a ‘gracious necessity’ insofar as by Christ’s choice that which was a free-yet-necessary image pre-accomplished in the divine counsel is now also a free-yet-necessary reality by grace as the two realities meet and are one. So that which is pre-accomplished in God Himself is accomplished temporally by Christ. In other words, Christ’s divine-human decision is in unity with the divine counsel insofar as He is the Logos incarnate. From the perspective of Christ, that which is pre-accomplished in the preeternal divine counsel is actually dependent on His temporal divine-human decision. God, in other words, kenotically withdraws His omnipotence to allow man in Christ a role in His own creation and redemption and therefore creation is shown to be necessary for God as He freely allows Himself in Christ to be dependent on it for its own creation and redemption. This kind of drama is, of course, paradoxical, even contradictory, not least in terms of time. In order for Christ to make His decision in history, He would need to exist already, and we are claiming that in the Trinity and in creation He makes a divine-human decision not only for the world to be and to be redeemed but also for God to be Creator and this, of course, is the condition for His own constitution as a subject. We earlier suggested (ch. 3) that the notion of divine self-determination is not incoherent. However, it needs further clarification, especially as we wish to focus it in the divine-human activity of Jesus Christ, because any act always already presupposes a subject with a determinate nature and even God cannot determine Himself to be one who must create and redeem in Christ, since this already assumes a prior nature

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from which such a decision is made. The other problem with this is it seems to make creation and God co-eternal at least in the reality of the divine counsel, which seems a sort of tacit pantheism. What is needed is a clearer focus on both the content of the divine-human decision of Christ and the nature of the act itself in relation to both the eternity of God as Trinity and the temporality of the Son of God incarnate, which, as of yet, is most vague. For some of the answers to these difficulties, let us now turn from Bulgakov’s theology of God’s essence as love to Barth’s theology of God’s act as love.

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Part II Divine Self-Determination in Jesus Christ in Karl Barth

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7 Trinity and the Doctrine of Election in Karl Barth The exploration of the problematic and response in Karl Barth (1886–1968) brings us to more familiar ground. We aim to show that Bulgakov and Barth have much more in common than is usually believed. Georges Florovsky was arguing for their commonality as early as the late 1960s. He contends that both men create a ‘supertemporal continuum’ between God and creation, focused on the God-Man, in which ‘real time plays very little role’. In Bulgakov’s Agnets Bozhii (1933), the Son of God is a member of the Holy Trinity and as such ‘is already the Lamb of God sent from eternity’ such that there is one unified story of God and man, ‘a story of God through Man, in Man, and in the cosmos’. In Barth, in turn, in Volume IV of his dogmatics (IV/1 (1953)), we see that the ‘Jesus of history actually has been eternally with the Holy Trinity and the Holy Trinity never existed without Jesus.’ Florovsky claims, mischievously, that he sometimes ‘plays tricks’ on people with English translations of both men by asking them to identify their author and ‘Usually they were wrong.’1 Florovsky was prescient in seeing that both thinkers project the historical Jesus into the Trinity. He does not mention, however, the very different context of Barth’s theology, which is covenantal. In particular, it begins with his famous and controversial claim that Jesus Christ is both eternally the Subject and Object of divine election, the electing God and the elected man.

7.1 TRINITY AND E LECTION In order to understand Barth’s version of the problematic and his response we must understand how he reimagined divine election.2 Central to Barth’s 1 Florovsky, ‘Renewal’ (1968), 5–6 (see Baker 2015, 315–16) and echoed by Meyendorff 1978, 170; compare R. Williams, SB, 169. 2 See Gockel 2006, Kirkland 2016, 167–79, and Dunn and Davis 2016, 278–9.

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systematic theology is his re-envisioning of the doctrine of reconciliation and central to that re-envisioning is his ambivalent attitude towards the extra Calvinisticum.3 This was a pejorative term used by the Lutherans against the teaching of Calvin. In the incarnation, the Logos asarkos or extra carnem, quite apart from his status as Logos ensarkos, was not confined to His humanity— finite and not omnipresent by the communication of idioms—and filled the universe precisely as the Logos asarkos.4 The Lutherans, in contrast, held the intra Lutheranum (from the phrase totus intra carnem et numquam extra carnem) which argued, contrary to the Calvinistic position which allowed (they alleged) a Nestorian splitting of the divine and human natures, that if Christ could fill the heavens, then, presupposing some version of the communicatio idiomatum, it could not be apart from the human nature He took upon Himself as Logos along with His divine nature.5 In 1938 in Church Dogmatics I/2, we see Barth defending, albeit not without critical nuance,6 the extra Calvinisticum as ‘the continuation of all earlier Christology’, citing many passages from the Fathers and Aquinas in defence of Calvin, seeing it as a Calvinist reversion to tradition to meet the ‘innovation’ introduced by Luther and the Lutherans. He writes that the extra was not meant as ‘separative’, in the sense that Christ was separated from His flesh, but ‘distinctive’ in that He was not identified wholly with His flesh, so that ‘with the extra they [the Reformed doctors] also asserted the intra with thoroughgoing seriousness’. There was an important theological point, he argued, which is that they did not want the reality of the logos asarkos ‘abolished or suppressed’ by collapsing it into the reality of the logos ensarkos so that there would be no extra or divinity of the God-Man beyond the intra or humanity. Instead, the logos asarkos, as the terminus a quo or starting point, was regarded as seriously as the logos ensarkos, ‘the terminus ad quem of the incarnation’.7 Here we see a characteristic concern in Barth for the preservation of the incarnation in the fullness of both its divinity and humanity but also an insistence on the freedom of God in the divine economy, where the initiative is always taken first by God and then received by man in Christ. However, by at least 1953 something had changed. Barth’s theology was certainly still one where all Christian doctrine has ‘to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ’ exhibiting a ‘Christological 3

See McCormack 2000, 95–101 and Willis 1966. See McCormack 2000, 95; see Calvin, Institutes, 1: II.13.4, 481 and see 2: IV.17.30, 1402 and Heidelberg Catechism, q. 48, 65–6 (see at Barth, Church Dogmatics [=CD] [1932, 1938–67], I/2, 168); compare Heppe 1950, 440–1, 447 and Westminster Confession, 8.7, 622. 5 See McCormack 2000, 95; see Formula of Concord, Epitome, Article 8, Antithesis 15, 34, 490–1 [Die Bekenntnisschriften, 811] and Schmid 1961, 315–37 (esp. 329–32) but see intraLutheran debate: 333–4. 6 See Barth, CD, I/2, 170. 7 CD, I/2, 169 (completed summer 1937); despite reservations: CD, I/2, 170. 4

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concentration’.8 If anything, this latter position had been radicalized and with this making of Christ as the root of all doctrine it had made his continuing affirmations of divine sovereignty much more complicated to articulate. By 1953, even taking into consideration earlier critical asides, Barth considered, in contrast to 1938, the Calvinistic teaching ‘unsatisfactory’. It allowed a ‘fatal speculation’ to arise about the Being of the Logos asarkos (‘trying to reckon with this “other” god’) apart from the one in whom God has revealed Himself, Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.9 Barth appears to argue that one cannot know God apart (extra carnem) from His revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. Although, as we shall see, and somewhat at cross purposes, he still wished to retain the logos asarkos as the free starting point of the incarnation. Nevertheless, one should never collapse the end point of the incarnation, logos ensarkos, into its starting point or logos asarkos so that one would end up holding (erroneously) that the second person of the Godhead in Himself without His human nature is God the Reconciler.10 The apparent change we observed on the extra Calvinisticum between 1938 and 1953 has to do with Barth’s critique of Calvin, which is actually far more wide-ranging than a mere attack on theological speculation. Bruce McCormack has argued persuasively in his landmark study, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995), that the old paradigm in Barth studies of a decisive ‘turn’ in Barth is untenable.11 This older position, stated famously and influentially in Balthasar’s now classic Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie (19511), held that following Barth’s abandonment of liberalism (usually symbolized by the first two editions of Der Römerbrief (19191, 19222)) there was a ‘turn’ or ‘conversion to analogy’12 from dialectical theology to the analogia fidei. This was said to be marked by his book on Anselm, Fides quaerens intellectum (1931).13 Rather, McCormack argues we need a ‘new paradigm’ for Barth studies which speaks less of ‘turns’ or even ‘breaks’ but of four critical ‘shifts’ of Barth after he had begun Der Römerbrief. The emphasis is put on the methodological continuity of Barth from the time of his break or turn from liberalism in the summer of 1915 until a final sudden shift in June of 1936, when Barth first heard a lecture at an international conference on Calvin in Geneva given by Pierre Maury (1890–1956) entitled ‘Election and Faith’.14 Maury’s lecture, as Barth related, ‘at once made a profound impression on me’,15 for it stood out from the other mostly historical papers at the conference 8

How I Changed My Mind [1969], 43 and see McCormack, CRDT, 454. 10 11 Barth, CD, IV/1, 181. CD, IV/1, 52. McCormack, CRDT, 1–23. 12 Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth [=KB] [19511, 19764], 86–113. 13 KB, 93, 137 and based on Barth, CD II/1, 4 and How I Changed My Mind, 43 (see McCormack, CRDT, n. 1, 1–2). 14 McCormack, CRDT, 20–3 and see Busch 1976, 277–8. 15 Barth, ‘Foreword’ [1957] in Maury, Predestination, 16. 9

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that moved within the traditional formulations of predestination and which were ‘hopelessly embarrassed by their difficulties’. Maury boldly brought out the ‘christological meaning and basis of the doctrine of election’ where Jesus Christ was seen as ‘the original and decisive object of the divine election and rejection’.16 What Maury showed Barth, and he later wrote that ‘it was he who contributed decisively to giving my thoughts on this point their fundamental direction’,17 was that the doctrine of election had to be treated not in abstraction from but within, as McCormack put it, ‘the concrete reality in which it is realized and made known, namely Jesus Christ’.18 This led Barth, McCormack argues, to his reinterpretation of the doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/1 (1940; completed summer 1939). The fruits were first seen in the September 1936 lectures in Debrecen, Hungary on Gottes Gnadenwahl (‘God’s Election of Grace’),19 where election is finally given what Maury had called for, which is ‘a truly Christological grounding’.20 However, in light of Matthias Gockel’s work,21 McCormack has given a ‘modest correction’ to his paradigm. The transition to ‘Barth’s mature doctrine of election was not as sudden or dramatic as I once thought, but took place gradually’ and he now dates this ‘Christological recentring’ of the doctrine of election from the point when Barth began to lecture on the material later to be contained in II/2 (1942) in the winter semester of 1939–40.22 But what was this breakthrough of Barth? Barth argues, going beyond Maury,23 that God determines or elects Himself as the One that loves in freedom to be God for us in Jesus Christ and that this elective moment is one with its content, so that Jesus Christ is both the Subject and Object of the divine election. Barth not only puts divine election at the heart of the doctrine of God, predestination being one of the eternal decrees of God,24 but, in a revolutionary move, does this simultaneously in Christ as both the elector and the elected. ‘Who’ God is, is determined by His eternal selfdetermination to be the God of grace by becoming incarnate through electing both man and Himself in one eternal act.25 It does seem as if there was some sort of ‘shift’ in Barth’s thought on election, especially if one compares the Göttingen Dogmatics (1924–5) and CD I/1 and 2, where he still holds to a (albeit radically actualistic) form of eternal individual double predestination, with chapter VII (§§32–5) of Church Dogmatics II/2.26 But the question is

CD, II/2, 154–5 and see ‘Foreword’, 16. 18 ‘Foreword’, 16 and see McCormack 2007, 64. CRDT, 457. 19 See Barth, Gottes Gnadenwahl [1936] in Gockel 2006, 159–62 and McCormack, CRDT, 458–60. 20 21 CRDT, 457. See Gockel 2006, 158–97. 22 23 McCormack 2007, 64 and 2008a, n. 59, 213. See Gockel 2006, n. 14, 162. 24 See Heppe 1950, 133ff., 147, 150–89, and CRDT, 371. 25 See Jüngel 2001, 75ff., Williams 2007c, 131ff (here, see Myers 2011), and Fiddes, CSG, 67ff., 117ff. 26 Here, see McCormack, CRDT, 371–4, McDonald 2007, and Gockel 2006, 134–57. 16 17

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whether that shift was of the character McCormack alleges. It is precisely here that we enter controversy. McCormack has advanced, beginning explicitly with a now famous essay in The Cambridge Companion to Barth (2000), a highly controversial interpretation of Barth’s theology.27 We do not have the space to enter into a detailed discussion of the subsequent debate28 but a few words are in order. McCormack claims that Barth aimed to go beyond classical metaphysics, becoming a ‘“post-metaphysical” theologian’.29 He does this through a radical historicizing of his Christology but thought through in Trinitarian terms. When Barth argues that divine election is the event whereby God chooses to be God for us in Jesus Christ (Logos ensarkos/incarnatus) what he actually means, when he is being ‘consistent’ with himself, is that this eternal self-election is ‘God’s act of determining himself to be God for us in Jesus Christ which constitutes God as triune’.30 In the ‘primal decision’ of pre-temporal eternity, God is already always ‘by way of anticipation’ what He would become in time (Logos incarnandus).31 He is ‘already what He will become’, since His Being and humanity are one in Jesus history, and that history ‘constitutes the second person of the Trinity’, not after the fact but before it in that what happens in history as God suffers and dies in Jesus Christ—and here we are reminded of sophiology, where God is eternally divine-human, and this reaches out ecstatically into creation culminating in Christ—‘represents the outworking of the event in which God gives himself his Being in eternity. Here God is seen as essentially God-human.’32 If God is God only insofar as He elects to be God for us in Christ, then ‘God is triune for the sake of his revelation.’33 There is, quite simply, no mode or existence in God as trinity above and prior to the eternal act of God’s selfdetermination in which God constitutes Himself as God for us in Christ.34 The only way we can properly speak of the Logos asarkos is as the one Word, Jesus Christ, by anticipation (Logos incarnandus) identified with the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, in time that God has eternally willed to become (Logos incarnatus/ensarkos).35 There is no abstract eternal Word in itself that exists prior to God’s eternal self-determination. That is a myth. Election logically (not ontologically) grounds God’s triunity, or triunity is a function of election,36 so that the eternal act in which God gives Himself His Being as

27 McCormack 2000 (‘Grace and Being: The role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology’) and subsequently 2007 (both reprinted in 2008b, 183–200, 261–77), 2008a, 2009a, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, and 2013. 28 For an overview see Dempsey 2011b, 1–25 and McCormack 2009a. 29 McCormack 2007, 65 and see 2008a, 211. 30 31 McCormack 2007, 67. McCormack 2000, 100. 32 33 McCormack 2009b, 3. McCormack 2000, 101. 34 35 McCormack 2007, 66. McCormack 2007, 63, 67–8, and 2000, 96. 36 McCormack 2007, 67 and see 2000, 103. See clarification at 2013, 119–20.

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is ‘one and the same act’ as the eternal act in which God chooses to be God ‘in the covenant of grace with human beings’ in Christ.37 No eternal subject behind the act needs to be or indeed can be presupposed, since ‘God’s being is a being in the act of electing that constitutes him as triune—and that is all that can be said.’ To presuppose such an anterior subject and to pose related questions such as ‘Would God have been the triune God had he not created the world?’ is nonsense without a tacit metaphysical turn to speculation and natural theology with it.38 McCormack regards his interpretation of Barth as a ‘reconstruction’ of Barth’s basic position.39 He advances many passages in its favour but argues that others, which contradict it, are instances of Barth’s inconsistency with the post-metaphysical thrust of his work.40 He acknowledges that his reading—in seeing God’s Being as self-posited in relation to the divine economy—seems to bring Barth closer to Hegel than is normally thought to be the case but points to Barth’s statement from the 1950s that he enjoyed a little ‘Hegeling’ as evidence that Barth was critically building on Hegelian ideas.41 He holds to there being a difference between the two thinkers,42 but sees his project as building on a whole variety of German critics,43 especially, the famous ‘Hegelian’ reading of Barth by Eberhard Jüngel.44 McCormack acknowledges that there is a degree to which he is developing his own constructive theology alongside and even through his ‘reconstruction’ of Barth. His position is continually evolving due to both his Barth research and the writing of his own systematics.45 Younger theologians have creatively developed McCormack’s thesis: Kevin Hector, Aaron T. Smith, Kevin Diller, and Matthew Bruce.46 But it has been sharply attacked by two eminent figures in Barth studies: Paul Molnar and George Hunsinger. They are particularly disturbed at the Hegelian overtones47 of McCormack’s reading of Barth.48 Many of the widely scattered essays in the 37

38 McCormack 2007, 66. McCormack 2013, 122 and see 2010b, 64. McCormack 2008a, n. 57, 211. 40 McCormack 2007, 77, 2008a, 211–12, 2010a, 220–1, and 2013, 114ff. 41 42 See Busch 1976, 387. McCormack 2007, 69–70. 43 See McCormack 2010a, n. 3, 204 and 2013, n. 57, 120. 44 McCormack 2007, 69–70, 72, 78–9, 2009b, 3, 2010a, 204–5, 207–10, and 2010b, 63, n. 13; see Jüngel 2001 [19651], but for Barth and Hegel, see Pannenberg 1980, Welker 1983, Klouwen 1998, Shanks 2005, 68–80, and Eitel 2008. 45 e.g. ‘With Barth—and beyond Barth’ (McCormack 2010a, 221–4); compare 2009a, 2010b, 2011, 108ff., and 2013, 119–26 (responding to Levering 2011). 46 See Hector 2005 (reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 29–46), 2009, 2012, A. Smith 2009 (reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 201–25), Diller 2013, and Bruce 2013. 47 See Hunsinger 2015, 29, 40, 169–73 (where he says the Hegelian elements in Barth are balanced by the Anselmian elements: 163) and compare Driel 2007, 54 (but see McCormack’s defence at 2007, 69–70). 48 See Molnar 2002, 61–4 (responding to McCormack 1995 and 2000), Molnar 2006 (response to Hector 2005 and reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 47–62), Driel 2007 (response: McCormack 2007), 39

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debate have been collected and published along with some new pieces by different scholars not involved initially in the early discussion in a volume edited by Michael T. Dempsey.49 These critics, with some justification, claim that just too many passages in Barth contradict McCormack’s thesis.50 Moreover, if election precedes the Trinity and grounds it, then it would seem to be impossible to speak of the freedom of God’s gracious gift in Jesus Christ; that is, the thesis negates God’s freedom to be otherwise than he is, in fact, for us in Christ because he need not have redeemed us. Furthermore, such a thesis would reject as irredeemable statements in Barth that hold that the Son of God is strictly speaking Logos asarkos and that God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could exist separately from God’s self-determination to be God for us in Christ. Election under McCormack’s thesis becomes necessary for the Trinity to be Trinity. In addition, creation by extension becomes necessary to God and constitutive of the Triune Being, which is, of course, a version of our problematic. McCormack’s interpretation of Barth, it is alleged, throws into question divine freedom by confusing the ‘right’ ordering of the immanent and the economic Trinity,51 leading to their collapse, which, it might be added, seems as if it comes dangerously close to a form of pantheism. With such a scheme where triunity is constituted by election, then, it is held only the Father would be the subject of election and not Christ (as Barth held). The hypostases of the Son and the Spirit would not take place without the decision of the Father for election—subordinationism results, the Son and the Spirit being bound up with creation and in this way ultimately destroying the eternal koinonia.52 McCormack’s critics maintain that election does not give rise to the Trinity, but the Trinity is ‘election’s essential presupposition and ground’.53 God is absolutely free as the One who loves (immanent Trinity) and by a ‘free overflow of his love’ He eternally determines Himself as the God of grace for us (economic Trinity) in Jesus Christ.54 Although McCormack’s critics do well to point out the passages in Barth that clearly contradict his thesis, their reading of other more troubling passages that support it arguably (until recently)55 tends to smooth over the Molnar 2007 (and reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 63–90), Hunsinger 2008 (response: McCormack 2010a and both reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 91–114, 115–37), Molnar 2010b (review of McCormack 2008b with response: McCormack 2010b), Cassidy 2009, Dempsey 2011a, Molnar 2014, and Hunsinger 2015. 49 See Dempsey 2011b. 50 e.g. ‘the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of God does not rest on the election’ (Barth, CD, II/ 2, 107). 51 See Molnar 2006, 299, 2007, 204, 208–9, 218 and Hunsinger 2008, 189, 194–5. But see McCormack 2010b, 63–4. 52 See Hunsinger 2008, 192ff., 2015, 10–38, 157–62. 53 54 Hunsinger 2008, 179, 2015, 47–72, 157–62. Molnar 2006, 303–4. 55 See Molnar 2014, 59ff.

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ambiguities in Barth’s actualism in favour of a clear rationally consistent orthodox teaching and thereby avoid the problematic in Barth that McCormack attempts to highlight. This chapter and chapter 8 with their dialectical reading of Barth are my contribution to this debate. But what was the traditional position on election, which Barth was reacting against from at least Church Dogmatics II/2 onwards? How precisely did Barth fundamentally alter this position? Traditionally, following certain tendencies that can be seen already in Calvin,56 the teaching of God’s double predestination or the so-called decretum absolutum57 was in practice interpreted in Calvinism as preceding the fact that that election took place in and by Jesus Christ.58 God first ordains men to salvation or damnation and then only subsequently determines that this salvation will take place in the crucified Son of God.59 In contrast, Barth asserted we must say that the whole content of divine predestination and indeed the divine being itself is God’s selfdetermination60 to be a certain kind of God, an electing God,61 who elects and covenants Himself with us in Jesus Christ: ‘God does not first elect and determine man but Himself . . . in such a way that He Himself becomes man. God elects and determines Himself to be the God of man . . . He elects and determines Himself for humiliation.’62 God’s election of Christ is an eternal Gnadenwahl (literally ‘gracious choice’), ‘a primal and basic decision’, in which within His Triune Being He wills to be and in this willing actually is God.63 The content of this decision is Jesus Christ, since the decision is made in Him,64 since God is the One who ‘in His Son or Word elects Himself, and in and with Himself elects His people’.65 Nor can we see this Word here as merely the eternal Son, for Barth tells us that God’s Word and decree in the beginning consist of the fact that He has assumed and bears the name Jesus Christ, so that ‘this name itself is God’s Word and decree at the beginning’.66 Barth identifies Jesus Christ with the Word of John 1:1–2.67 No longer is the content of the eternal divine decree unknown insofar as God is a God whose ways are past finding out, since the decree is revealed, with a definite content, gracious love, and with a definite name in Jesus Christ.

56 cf. Barth, CD, II/2, 63ff.; on the history in Reform theology of the doctrine of election, see Muller 2008. 57 Calvin, Institutes, 2: III.21.5, 926; cf. 2: III.21.7, 209–11 and Heppe 1950, 150–6; see McDonald 2007 for Barth’s earlier (than CD II/1) more traditional position. 58 Calvin, Eternal Predestination of God, 96 and see 102–3 and 127; compare Heppe 1950, 146–7, 163. 59 Calvin, Institutes, 2: III.21.7 940. 60 See Jüngel 2001, 75–123, Colwell 1989, 183–308, Webster 2004a, 83–93, Busch 2004, 106–27. 61 62 63 Gunton 2000, 155. Barth, CD, IV/2, 84. ibid., II/2, 76. 64 65 ibid., II/2, 64. ibid., II/2, 76. 66 67 ibid., II/2, 100. ibid., II/2, 95–9, 101.

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But Barth’s revision of Calvinism is even more radical, for if Jesus Christ is the content of divine election, the divine choice of God in the beginning to be God for us in His self-offering, then Jesus Christ is both ‘the subject and object of this choice’.68 He is first the Subject of this election as ‘electing God’ and then simultaneously the Object of this election as ‘elected man’.69 By Jesus Christ, as God, electing Himself as man, He thereby elects all men ‘in Him’ so that ‘His election is the original and all-inclusive election’.70 Thus, God determines Himself in the election of Jesus Christ, who, as very God, is the elector, in company with the Father and the Spirit, of Himself (‘Primarily God elected or predestinated Himself ’), and, as very man, is the elected (‘And the Other is that God elected man, this man’).71 Christ is God’s manifest grace for all of us as a man wholly obedient to God even unto death on a cross, calling all of us His people to faith in Him and revealing to all of us that we are sons of God, Our Father, in Him.72 In Jesus Christ’s electing to take upon Himself sinful man, we understand that, in God’s eternal counsel, as the content of predestination, God ‘has determined upon man’s acquittal at His own cost’, taking His place so that ‘He Himself should be perishing and abandoned and rejected—the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’73 Thus, the eternal God determines Himself or elects Himself by a specific act in time to eternally not be God without man but to be a particular man, Jesus Christ,74 as Lord of Israel and the Church and in this Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer.75 Christ, as the judge, takes to or upon Himself as the judged76 the ‘rejection of sinful man with all its consequences and elected this man . . . to participation in His own holiness and glory—humiliation for Himself and exaltation for man’.77 Calvinism’s double predestination, in a masterstroke, has been transferred from individual human beings forming the mass of humanity, some damned and some elected for salvation, to a specific human being, Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God. However, Barth sees this choice of grace of a Subject for its Object not merely from above (logos incarnandus) to below (logos incarnatus) but also simultaneously from below to above.78 He sees the whole movement in a profoundly Christocentric fashion, rejecting Calvinism’s decretum absolutum, and looking to the divine-human choice made by Christ Himself as the key to election insofar as ‘There is no such thing as a will of God apart from the will of Jesus Christ.’ He can say the latter because (see ch. 8) with his doctrine of election he is tracing a dialectical movement of continuity and difference between God and creation, a yes and a no, what we have called both a free

68 70 72 73 76

69 ibid., II/2, 102. ibid., II/2, 103 and see 104. 71 ibid., II/2, 117. ibid., II/2, 162. ibid., II/2. 103–6 and see IV/2, 84 and McCormack, CRDT, 459–60. 74 75 Barth, CD, II/2, 167. ibid., IV/2, 100. ibid., II/2, 91. 77 78 ibid., IV/1, 211ff. ibid., IV/2, 31–2. See Driel 2007, 48–50.

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dependence (N3) and a dependent freedom (F3) of God in relation to creation. But the continuity and difference are always seen together dialectically in and through Jesus Christ, since, in emphasizing at first the continuity, we can say that ‘In no depth of the Godhead shall we encounter any other but Him. There is no such thing as Godhead in itself. Godhead is always the Godhead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the Father is the Father of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.’79 Furthermore, Triune Being ‘does not exist and cannot be known as a Being which rests or moves purely within itself ’, since He is not ‘in abstracto Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the triune God’ but He is Trinity insofar as ‘He has foreordained Himself from and to all eternity’ for us in Christ. If we speak of divine Being, then we must immediately speak of the internal act of election and vice versa.80 All concepts from ‘God’ through to ‘atonement’ derive their significance from Jesus Christ and His history so that (at least methodologically) election precedes and grounds the Trinity rather than the Trinity founding election.81 Simultaneously, however, in emphasizing the difference, we must say that both ‘the fact Jesus Christ is the Son of God does not rest on the election’82 and ‘The second “person” of the Godhead in Himself and as such is not God the Reconciler. In Himself and as such He is not revealed to us. In Himself and as such He is not Deus pro nobis, either ontologically or epistemologically.’ Given the latter, it is not surprising that Barth considered that the logos asarkos is a crucial concept for Trinitarian doctrine when it attempts to understand divine revelation in light of its ‘free basis’ in the inner Being and essence of God.83 Furthermore, he is quite clear that God’s eternal willing of Himself and the divine election are two acts, not one, with the first necessary to God and the second a contingent free act.84 This dialectic, albeit shorn of the context of election, is not dissimilar to Bulgakovian antinomism where God as Absolute, Holy Trinity is wholly discontinuous with creation but at once He makes Himself relative to the world in becoming its Creator and Redeemer as Absolute-Relative, economic Trinity which is above all expressed in Jesus Christ. But let us now trace this dialectic in Jesus Christ first by directing our eyes from the eternal Word of the Father above to the incarnate Son below and then, having acknowledged their personal unity, moving again from the incarnate Son below to His Father in heaven above. Seen from above, Jesus Christ as the Son of the Father is the Subject insofar as in free obedience to the will of His Father He eternally elected Himself to be man, or the Son of Man, and as man to do the will of God the Father by going into the far country; since ‘opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt’, this decision of His is also the divine 79 82

Barth, CD, II/2, 115. ibid., II/2, 107.

80

83

ibid., II/2, 79. ibid., IV/1, 52.

81

84

ibid., IV/1, 16–17. ibid., II/1, 590.

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decision of the Father and the Spirit.85 Yet, again from above to below, Jesus Christ is the Object of divine election as man, the electing God creating man over against Himself. But now moving from below to above, in electing the Son of Man, God ‘evokes and awakens faith, and meets and answers that faith as human decision’, so that the Son of Man responds once again as the Subject of election by an obedient following after His Father. This human decision is the decision by the Son of Man to follow obediently the Father God, to choose Him as His God and Father, so that ‘for his part man can and actually does elect God thus attesting and activating himself as elected man’.86 The purpose and meaning of the eternal divine election, we are told, is the fact that man who is the one elected from all eternity in Christ ‘can and does elect God in return’.87 Jesus Christ is then the Subject of election also as its Object. But if Christ elects God as His God and Father, and it is Christ again who elects Himself as man as the Son of the Father, then we might go well beyond Barth and conclude that, insofar as the eternal Son is acting for the Father as Subject, Christ as man is also (through the divine condescension) electing Himself to be God. This is a creative but troubling idea, as it risks confusing the created and the uncreated. Clearly, the whole process of election is a free obedience on both sides, divine and human, for the election of man by God is a free, sovereign decision and initiative of the divine good pleasure88 where the eternal Son is obedient to His Father, and the ‘electing of God alone’ in wholehearted obedience by the Son of Man to His Father in Heaven is likewise ‘wholly free’. In Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God’s eternal decree, we see not ‘merely a temporal event, but the eternal will of God temporally actualized and revealed in that event’.89 God’s eternal decree is the ‘one event’ in the bosom of God of the living God Himself in the beginning of all His ways and this one event is the ‘history, encounter and decision between God and man’ in Jesus Christ where God elects man and this election ‘becomes actual in man’s own electing of God’, so that He is liberated to do God’s will and thereby has individuality and autonomy before God His Father. But if man is freed in this election of God to be autonomous before God, then this incomparable dialogue of two unequal partners in Christ is one where ‘man can and should elect and affirm and activate himself ’.90 Although Barth continually emphasizes the divine sovereignty and initiative in divine election in Christ, one cannot get around the fact, though Barth never uses this language, that if God is elected by man, and indeed, His election of man is said to be temporally actualized and revealed in Jesus Christ, then not only is man the Object of election by God as the Subject in election but God is the Object of election by man as the Subject in election. Divine election, then, is not sufficient as a description of 85 88

ibid., II/2, 65, 105. ibid., II/2, 177.

86

89

ibid., II/2, 177. ibid., II/2, 179.

87

90

ibid., II/2, 178. ibid., II/2, 180.

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God’s gracious choice for us in Christ. To it must be added at least, divinehuman election. Here we arrive at an unusual and radical conclusion. If divine election is only actualized in time, then for God to be God for us He would seem to be freely dependent on man (F3), insofar as man’s attesting of his own election by God in faith, as an election of God, is freely necessary (N3) for God’s own self-determination as God for us in Jesus Christ. This would mean that God, although He is absolutely free, becomes freely dependent on His creation in order to be God for us in Christ, which, following our problematic, gives creation a certain necessity for God. Barth here resembles Bulgakov when Bulgakov speaks of the ontological identity of the supratemporal and the temporal in the events of the divine economy, so that what is effected in time as a new event already always exists in pre-accomplishment91 in the divine counsel as certain images/ideas/possibilities. Might we not then see the content of the act by which Jesus Christ chooses to create and redeem the world as divine election? ‘Election’, that is, understood as Christ’s divine-human self-determination to be God for us which is an act already pre-accomplished in eternity but only manifested in revelation through the kenosis of God in Himself.

7.2 BEING AND ACT —THE AMBIGUITY OF BARTHIAN ACTUALISM The choice of God to be an electing God points to Barth’s ambivalence towards what he regarded as the traditional notion that God acts based on a prior essence. In contrast to what he saw as the traditional notion of an anterior divine essence which is the foundation for all divine activity, Barth argues that Being and act should be held together ‘instead of tearing them apart like the idea of “essence [Wesen]”’.92 I use the word ‘ambivalence’ and not ‘rejection’ for Barth’s relationship to substance/essence language and thinking because Barth not only grudgingly used this language,93 but even presupposes it by assuming an eternal divine Being/love which to be itself necessarily loves. Nevertheless, God’s eternal choice and act of becoming man in time constitute His Being as God, since ‘precisely as the One He is, He acts’.94 Of course, Reformed theology, building on tradition,95 did not deny 91

Bulgakov, AB, 370 [LG, 340]. Barth, CD, II/1, 262 [Die kirchliche Dogmatik [=KD], II/2, 293]. 93 e.g. CD, II/1, 263, 272ff., II/2, 98, 511. 94 ibid., II/1, 26 and see 272; cf. Gunton 1978, 189ff. 95 e.g. Aquinas, ST, 1.25.1co., 1.18.3co (citing Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.7.1072b7) and 2ad; but see related: Aquinas, ST, 1.2.3co, 1.3.1co, 1.4.1co, 1.4.2co, and SG, 1.72, 161. 92

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that God’s essence is an act.96 Barth, however, is not merely saying that God is life itself as a pure act of love, which is the source of all things, but also something quite different. He is, on the one hand, despite himself, echoing Schelling, who saw God’s life as a pure act of self-determination, and, on the other, following after Angelus Silesius and Hegel, in seeing the content of this act as His choice to be with us particularly in Christ. He could say, therefore, that ‘Actus purus is not sufficient as a description of God. To it there must be added at least, “et singularis”.’97 When he says that God’s Being is His act, therefore, he is not making reference to ‘actuality in general’, but stating both an identity and a distinction between God and creation in Christ: ‘in His revelation and in eternity it is a specific act with a definite content’, so that this specific content is ‘personal being’, indeed, the ‘being of a person’, in its divine ‘originality and uniqueness’.98 Here, what God is eternally in eternity and in His work of revelation is His own singular salvific work,99 His revelation to us in the person of Jesus Christ: ‘God is who He is in the act of His revelation.’100 By His eternal choice to be God for us in Jesus Christ, God has determined Himself in fellowship with man,101 although He did not have to so determine Himself, since He already possesses this fellowship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ‘in Himself without us, and therefore without this [fellowship with man], He has that which He seeks and creates between Himself and us’.102 Barth here is in a bit of a bind: on the one hand he wishes to say that what God is in Himself is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the One who eternally lives and loves103 quite apart from living and loving for us in Jesus Christ. This is not dissimilar to what we saw in Bulgakov when he described God as Absolute, Holy Trinity, an eternal self-giving and self-receiving hypostatic movement generating the eternal Sophia as the love of love, actus purissimus. Unlike Bulgakov, however, there is little room to interpret love in Barth as any form of ecstatic divine eros/desire for creation as we wish to do. However, on the other hand, Barth also wishes to say that, precisely because He is God as a free eternal act of love, He has in Himself in His essence (understood as an act), in His own Being as God, the ‘basis and prototype’ of ‘creation, reconciliation, the whole Being, speech and action in which He wills to be our God’. In the famous phrase, God being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is ‘so to speak, ours in advance [sozusagen im voraus der unsrige]’.104 The sozusagen is important here because, although Barth wishes to say that God is God for us eternally, so that all the external works of God are founded on His own Triune life of love, he nevertheless does not wish to imply in saying this that the works of God are necessary to God as an eternal reality in God Himself. 96 98 101 104

97 See Heppe 1950, 57ff. and 133ff. and Barth, CD, II/1, 333. ibid., II/1, 264. 99 100 ibid., II/1, 272. ibid., II/1, 260. ibid., II/1, 257 and 262. 102 103 ibid., II/1, 273. ibid., II/1, 273; cf. II/1, 275. ibid., II/1, 297. ibid., I/1, 383 [KD, I/1, 404] and see CD, IV/2, 345.

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There is a discontinuity between the earlier and later Trinitarian theology precisely on the relationship of God’s ‘work’ to His eternal Being. In his early Trinitarian theology, Barth erred on the side of saying that God’s essence was ultimately incomprehensible insofar as hiddenness applied to the Father but not to the Son. This ultimately made it impossible to get to the immanent Trinity from the divine economy, although Barth still wished to say that God’s essence and work were one, not twofold.105 In contrast, in the later theology he often (but purposely not always) seemed to argue, as McCormack puts it, that ‘the Being of God and humanity are one in the history of Jesus’, leading McCormack to the startling claim that Barth argued that ‘Jesus’ history constitutes the second person of the Trinity.’106 In the earlier theology, again, to the unity of the Father, the Son, and Spirit among themselves corresponds their unity ad extra, but this unity in se is expressed only insofar as in a free decision in God’s work He shows Himself to be ‘revealer, revelation and being revealed, or Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer’. Thus, although the work of God is the essence of God, and the triunity of God is revealed only in God’s work, the work is a ‘grace’ which was given to us freely by Him, and He remains free in this revelation and so ultimately incomprehensible, thereby showing our knowledge of Him, and especially that of His triunity, to be inadequate. What is presented to us concerning His triunity in Scripture and Church doctrine is a creaturely comprehensibility absolutely different from the comprehensibility with which He knows Himself.107 This leads us to the conclusion that God’s essence and work are only ever related analogously. One must say that when we encounter in Scripture the names of Father, Son, and Spirit as the name of the one God, one can only say that in this one God there is ‘something like’ fatherhood and sonship and a third reality common to both.108 Conversely, in the later theology, Barth seems to jettison the analogical relationship entirely, perhaps as an application to the doctrine of God of his critique of the analogia entis, so that who God is in Jesus Christ is who He is in Himself.109 Given the importance of analogy for our own constructive response to the problematic (see Part III), we will now turn to this theme in Barth. Barth, as is well known, rejected the analogy of Being110 as the ‘invention of Antichrist’.111 In God’s basic hiddenness, man is judged by God as lacking any power or capacity in himself which might point to some ‘correspondence and similarity of Being’ with His Creator,112 for we only apprehend what we resemble, ‘But we do not resemble God.’113 In the background, Barth is aiming 105 106 109 110 111 113

See ibid., I/1, 371–5 (following McCormack 2009b, 3 but also see Laats 1997 and 1999). 107 108 McCormack 2009b, 3. Barth, CD, I/1, 371. ibid., I/1, 363. See ibid., II/2, 115 and IV/2, 777. See Louth 2016, K. Johnson 2010, 2011, Oh 2006, 3–16, and Pöhlmann 1965. 112 Barth, CD, I/I, xiii; cf. II/1, 82, 84. ibid., III/2, 220; cf. II/1, 77ff. ibid., II/1, 188.

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his polemic against Erich Przywara (1889–1972),114 who argued that God was ‘in—above humankind’ and that this tension of similarity and dissimilarity of Being was established by God, so any analogy to Him is in and above us ‘from God’s side’.115 Przywara, especially his Analogia Entis (19321, 19622), would come to be an important early influence on Balthasar.116 Both Balthasar and Przywara are inspired by a famous passage from the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) (‘quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest [tanta]117 similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda’) and we shall return to its dialectic of similarity and dissimilarity in chapter 9.118 Given Barth’s hostility to the analogy of Being, it is not surprising that much of Balthasar’s book on Barth was dedicated to the analogia entis.119 In response to Przywara, Barth argued for an analogy of relation and faith which is established when God graciously reaches out and meets us in the God-man Jesus Christ. The similitudo Dei, as Barth argues, must be given to us in each moment, being thereby not a datum or fulfilment but a dandum or promise120 of the Creator and Redeemer Spirit of Christ. If this is the case, then an analogy certainly exists between man and God, but one established by and for God in Christ. It is only when God reaches out and meets us in the God-man Jesus Christ that a similarity of relation is created by His grace, being an analogue to the love God has had for Himself before the ages, which allows us to apprehend Him fully and completely as He determines (i.e. analogia relationis).121 Moreover, it is only in faith as an ‘act of human decision’ by the capacity created by Him in this encounter that we then can be said to know Him (i.e. analogia fidei). This faithful and obedient ‘act’ on man’s part corresponds (graciously) to the act of grace of the ‘divine being as the Living Lord’ and in the correspondence faith is grounded in each moment in God. In God’s gracious act corresponding to our act of faith, God posits Himself as the 114 See ‘Fate and Idea in Theology’ [1929], 33 and see 46 (see McCormack, CRDT, 386–9) and Barth, The Holy Spirit and Christian Life [1930], 3–17 (see K. Johnson 2011, esp. chs. 2–5, 2010 and Betz 2014, 83–115). 115 See K. Johnson 2011, 31–50, 83–93, 122–57, and McCormack, CRDT, 319–21, 383–5. But now see Betz 2014, 53ff. 116 Balthasar, ‘In Retrospect’ [1965], 89; although later distancing himself: Our Task [1984], 37–8; see ‘Die Metaphysik Erich Przywara’ [1933] and ‘Erich Przywara’ [1966]. On Przywara and Balthasar: Zeitz 1988, Oakes 1994, 15–44 and 56–8, Murphy 1993, 508–21 (esp. 516–19), Krenski 1995, 34–52, and Betz 2014, 101–5. On Przywara: Secretan 1997, Biju-Duval 1999, O’Meara 2002, Betz 2005, 2006, and 2014. Bibliography: Wierciński 2006, 357–8. 117 See Balthasar, TD, III, 220–1 esp. n. 51. 118 ‘between the creator and the creature [so great] a similarity cannot be noted without having to be noted between them a greater dissimilarity’ (Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §806, 262). (See Betz 2014, 72–4.) 119 Balthasar, KB, 86ff. (earlier stages of work: xviii) and see Balthasar’s earliest discussion of Barth: Apokalypse, III: 316–91 (on Barth and Balthasar, see Chia 1999, Webster 2004b, Howsare 2005, 77–99, Müller 2006, Bieler 2006a, Wigley 2007, and Long 2014). See Barth and Balthasar, Dialogue [1968]. 120 121 Barth, Holy Spirit, 5. CD, III/2, 220; cf. Table Talk [1953–6], 30.

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object of our faith and us as those who know Him in such faith.122 God, then, lets Himself be known by faith in a created relation which is of ‘His free goodpleasure’. We can find God’s knowability not in any existing capacity we have and take for ourselves, an existing analogy of being, but ‘only in an analogy to be created by God’s grace, the analogy of grace and faith to which we say “Yes” as to the inaccessible which is made accessible to us in incomprehensible reality’.123 Barth’s ‘analogy’ was meant to depart from (his perhaps erroneous conception of) the ‘Catholic’ analogia entis in that it does not aim to speak of a sure, reliable, and known ontological similarity and dissimilarity, and it in no way excludes dialectic but precisely presupposes it, as McCormack has argued.124 At the very moment in which God unveils Himself in the analogy wholly constituted by Him, He then unveils Himself as veiled in and through human language which is made (despite itself) to conform to Him in His knowability: ‘God not only unveils but also veils himself in his revelation, because it is revelation and not revealedness.’125 We can only trust in the correspondence between the knowability of God’s Word as He is for Himself as the selfgrounded divine possibility and the knowability of that same Word for us as a human possibility of grasping the promise in faith. This possibility promised to us takes place graciously through faith. Trust is required, as we only can affirm the divine knowability in its ‘concealment’ in the ‘husk’ of the human possibility ‘that meets us in darkness’, thus emphasizing the radical dissimilarity between the two. The correspondence or similarity is like a stick dipped in water, which we can only see as broken but, ‘though we cannot see it, it is invisibly and yet in truth a completely unbroken stick’.126 Thus, the orderliness and ontological reliability of an analogical approach is continually disturbed by both the ‘breakthrough’ and veiling and unveiling characteristic of dialecticism. One wonders if the aforementioned dialectic of veiling and unveiling (and the lack of any analogia entis) lies behind the ambiguities of Barth’s later actualist doctrine of God, just as we saw was arguably the case with Bulgakov’s late insistence that the Absolute and Absolute-Relative are united and co-posited. Likewise, Barth vacillates between emphasizing the complete identification of God and man in Christ and their complete difference. For example, Barth wishes to say that God is God as Holy Trinity in Himself, but this One God as Holy Trinity is, as he puts it, ‘revealed to us absolutely’ in Jesus Christ. He means that it is this same One God in Jesus Christ who God is in Himself. Thus, he quickly says that ‘He is absolutely the same God in Himself.’127 This is, of course, problematic, because how can God be exactly the same in His free act 122 125 126

123 124 CD, II/1, 26. CD, II/1, 85. McCormack, CRDT, 18, 353. Barth, ‘Fate’, 40 (trans. of McCormack, CRDT, 386–7). 127 Barth, CD, I/1, 242–3. ibid., II/1, 297.

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of loving fellowship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and His self-determination as God for us in Christ without confusing the willing of the free work and the free Being of God?128 It would seem, if one follows this line of thinking, that God must by necessity be God as God in Jesus Christ. To be God in Christ is not other than what God is in His free (but clearly also necessary) act of Himself as Holy Trinity. But if this is the case, then how might the Incarnation be a contingent free gift that need not have been enacted? Barth does, in fact, acknowledge a distinction between God’s necessary willing of Himself and contingent willing of His works,129 but in practice, in expressing the primordiality of divine election, he often seems to blur it. The blurring of the lines between God and creation in God’s divine Being as act leads Barth to some fabulously convoluted writing. He says that God is who He is in His works, but He is the same in Himself before, after, over, and without these works. They are bound to Him but not He to them. He is who He is without them but they are nothing without Him.130 So far, so clear. But Barth does not want to drive a wedge between God’s Being in Himself as act and His Being as act in His works, above all in election as the first and ultimate work in Christ. So he then doubles back and says that ‘He is not, therefore, who He is only in His works. Yet in Himself He is not another than He is in His works.’131 If God is not only who He is in His works, then there must be some difference, some otherness that distinguishes one from the other, between God in Himself, and, what Bulgakov called God for Himself or God as Absolute-Relative. Yet Barth will have none of this, so he appears to accidently contradict himself by saying that God is also in Himself not any other than that which He is in His works. Yet can we not take this ‘contradiction’ as purposeful? That is, might it not be seen as a form of dialecticism in the doctrine of God similar to Bulgakov’s antinomism? Such dialecticism could be seen as Barth’s means of responding to the problematic of freedom and necessity. Indeed, the similarity to Bulgakov here seems quite strong, for Bulgakov wishes to say that the Absolute, eternally turning towards the world, posits Himself as Absolute-Relative, that is, Creator and Redeemer. Yet, for Bulgakov, at least ideally, the Absolute is in the Absolute-Relative, so that God is not other than He is in Himself (immanent Trinity) when He is for Himself (economic Trinity). Yet God is not only God as He is in His works, since He is God as Absolute, who always freely exceeds and is infinitely beyond his activity in creation. It might be said that in this context Barth’s seeming dogmatic drive for consistency obscures the fundamental dialectical position of his doctrine of God, so Bulgakov is at least conceptually clearer. The big difference between the two thinkers is that Barth’s position is focused on the more concrete act of divine election. 128 130

129 The blurring is typical: ibid., II/2, 76. e.g. ibid., II/1, 590 and see earlier I/1, 434. 131 ibid., II/1, 260. ibid., II/1, 260 [KD, II/1, 291].

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Barth focuses on the eternal turning towards the world, which is, and which is not God in His Being as act specified in Jesus Christ.132 This means that Barth’s whole theology is more honestly a theology in light of the economia than that of Bulgakov. It is this economic focus (specifically, on election) we shall build upon in our own response to the problematic. By an ‘eternal choice’, Barth did not aim to negate temporality. God’s eternity surrounds time, embracing it, as it were, at all points because it is pre-temporal (His existence precedes all existents in time), supra-temporal (His existence is above all existents in time), and post-temporal (His existence follows all existents when time will be no more).133 He is in His eternity a ‘pure duration’, not time itself but the ‘absolute basis of time’ and therefore time’s constant accompaniment as a ‘readiness for time’.134 Thus, when we say that God eternally chooses to be God for us in Christ, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, since His Being is an eternal particular event, a willed conscious decision, this must not be understood as an accomplished act in some distant past. Nor should it be seen as an event occurring through external causes or in a relationship external to Godself. Nor, finally, can we speak of it as the ‘mechanical outcome of a process the rationality of which . . . will have to be sought outside itself ’. Rather, it is an event which is true for all times and places, ‘His executed decision—executed once for all in eternity, and anew in every second of our time’, since it is constantly being accomplished in the eternal act which is God’s very personal Being.135 Here again we see the ambiguity of Barthian actualism. Barth wishes to assert the fact that God’s choice to be God for us in Jesus Christ, which is the offering of the Father and the self-offering of the Son, is eternal. He writes of Jesus Christ as being at the beginning as the Word (Jn. 1:1–2), the Subject and Object of the choice,136 and at the beginning of all things in ‘God’s dealings with the reality which is distinct from Him’, as all these things begin in Him. But then Barth immediately corrects himself, as he wishes to maintain the freedom of God, so he says that Christ ‘was not at the beginning of God, for God has no beginning’.137 This, of course, at first seems nonsensical, for it essentially asserts a mysterious distinction between different modes of eternity as pre-temporality. Going with this reasoning, one might identify a first anterior eternity in which God is God in Himself and the second posterior eternity in which He is in Himself in His works in Christ. Nor is it an isolated incident, for Barth in another place speaks of eternity as the ‘pre-time’ or ‘pure divine time’ of the Father and Son in the fellowship of 132

See A. Smith 2009, 23ff. Barth, CD, II/1, 621, 623, 629, and 638; cf. Gunton 1978, 177–85, Roberts 1979, Colwell 1989, 13–182, and Hunsinger 2004. 134 135 Barth, CD, II/1, 615, and 618–19. ibid., II/1, 271. 136 137 ibid., II/2, 101. ibid., II/2, 102. 133

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the Holy Spirit, which is a time when we and the world did not exist, for we are not from eternity. It is in this ‘time’ that all God’s works were decided and determined, including the determination ‘to send this eternal Word into this created world to this created man’. This latter is the free display of the divine grace whose name is Jesus Christ, since everything ‘is determined in Him’ who is ‘before all time, and therefore eternally the Son and the Word of God, God Himself in His turning to the world’. Yet we are told rather confusingly that eternity as pre-time nevertheless ‘bears the name of Jesus Christ’ and that ‘In this turning to the world, and with it to a time distinct from His eternity, this God, Yahweh Sabaoth, is identical with Jesus Christ.’138 Moreover, he is crystal clear that in John 1:1 ‘ho logos is unmistakably substituted for Jesus . . . It is He, Jesus, who is in the beginning with God. It is He who by nature is God.’139 All of this once again appears to be an ‘inconsistency’ in Barth, or, more frankly, a contradiction. How can pre-temporal eternity be so complex? It bears the name of Jesus Christ insofar as God turns to the world and creates a time distinct from His eternity; this name indeed is said to be identical with the sacred name of God. But, simultaneously, it is also said to be the ‘pure divine time’ of the Father and Son in the union of the Spirit when there was no world whatsoever and no Christ. Either Barth is dialectically understanding eternity as, alternatively, at once the eternal movement of God turning towards the world in Christ, and at once the state of satisfied Trinitarian fellowship which is unrevealed and in which God is not turned to the world. Or, eternity is simply the fact that God has always been turning towards the world in Christ.140 Barth is, arguably, and perhaps impossibly, trying to simultaneously distinguish and identify God’s choice of Godself and His choice of creation, of which the latter but not the former is contingent. As a matter of fact, the two acts are simultaneous in Jesus Christ but, in some sense, they ‘need not have been’ simultaneous if God’s grace is not to become simply a necessary part of His own self-development in and through the world.

7.3 GOD AS THE ONE WHO L OVES IN FREEDOM But to say that God eternally chooses to be with us in Christ, that He seeks and creates fellowship with us, putting Himself in relation to us (because He chooses not to be, as it were, a reclusive God)141 is to say that He wishes to seek and create with us what He is in Himself—pure fellowship. God is in 138

ibid., II/1, 622. ibid., II/2, 96 (see Bruce 2013, ch. 4.1 but see Hunsinger 2008, 181–3 and Molnar 2014, 62). 140 141 Barth, CD, II/1, 622. ibid., II/1, 274. 139

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Himself the free act of love, what we have called F2, since ‘He is the One who loves. That He is God—the Godhead of God—consists in the fact that He loves, and it is the expression of His loving that He seeks and creates fellowship with us.’142 In Himself as Trinity, God includes both an eternal prius, a superiority of the Father to His Son and Spirit, and an eternal posterius or obedient subordination of the Son and Spirit to their Father (see 8.1).143 Such a movement of love can be characterized, in our terms, as both a dependent freedom that totally gives itself over to the Other (F3) and an eternal acceptance and commitment of this free self-giving or free dependence (N3). Therefore, the love at work in Christ is not a divine mechanism that falls from above but God’s act only insofar as it is a free choice, since ‘God is in Himself free event, free act and free life’.144 If God determines Himself in Christ and He does this as the One who loves, then we must emphasize that this love is free, since He is the ‘One who loves, in freedom’.145 God, and this is a constant refrain in Barth despite all the tensions, could have chosen otherwise. His free self-giving is contingent, a dependent freedom (F3), and if God did so choose otherwise, He would still have been the God who loves. Free love is always free love: ‘it does not have to do what it does’ and its freedom consists ‘in the fact that it could choose between the being and not being of the world without being any the less love’. Therefore, it did not have to happen that God chose to be God with us in Christ (F3). He is under no external (N1) or internal necessity (N2) to love us in Christ as if ‘in His essence He is under the necessity of having the world as well, outside Himself ’.146 A frequent metaphor of Barth, echoing Bulgakov, is that of the goodness, glory, grace, and love, which is the divine Being (often, ‘a free’) ‘overflowing’ (überfließend) into creation. We cannot say anything higher, he argues, of the ‘inwardness of God’ than that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, love in Himself ‘without and before loving us, and without being forced to love us’. The divine love for us is ‘an overwhelming, overflowing, free love’, the ‘outwardness’ of God to us in revelation by which we learn of the nature of this love of God for us as it is in His inwardness.147 Here there is room to take Barth further and see this excessive love for creation as a divine desire spilling out beyond God’s Triune life. In our terminology, the free self-giving lovedesire of God, which is contingent, could have been otherwise (F3). But it is so utterly committed that, in some sense, it could not be otherwise and must express itself in creation as a free dependence (N3). Of course, this language of ‘overflow’ has a rather emanationist tinge to it. One is reminded of Bulgakov saying that the Ousia-Sophia of God as Absolute-Relative is love, and love to be love must love beyond itself in creation and redemption. Barth is once again forced to balance the pull of 142 145

143 144 ibid., II/1, 275; cf. II/2, 79. ibid., IV/1, 201–2. ibid., II/1, 264. 146 147 ibid., II/1, 257. ibid., II/1, 499. ibid., I/2, 377.

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different forces, freedom and necessity, by arguing that God’s turning to us is ‘an overflowing of His essence’. It both ‘matches’ and ‘belongs to’ the essence, a version of our N3. Realizing this sounds too necessitarian, he quickly clarifies it by saying that the overflow is ‘rooted in Himself alone’ so it ‘is not demanded or presupposed by any necessity, constraint, or obligation, least of all from outside, from our side, or by any law by which God Himself is bound and obligated’.148 Again, we are left with a conceptual mixing of metaphors where Barth is able to emphasize the sheer force of a love, which is itself simply in loving (N3), but, that this love need not be expressed to us, although in fact it is (F3). Yet man is by no means superfluous in this movement, since the ‘hinge’, as it were, in this free overflow of love is the decision of the historic Jesus in receiving this love and affirming it with His own election of God (see 7.1). This key idea of Barth is arguably his most important contribution to a Christological response to a problematic created for Trinitarian theology by Christology itself and one on which we shall build our own constructive response. Like Bulgakov, who identifies Sophia/Ousia with love, and later with Balthasar, for whom uncreated (and created) Being=love, for Barth, the statements ‘God is’ and ‘God loves’ are synonymous: ‘this identity of Being and love’. God would be the One who loves and is loved regardless of whether there were a creature for Him to love or love Him in return. Likewise, in Bulgakov, we are told that for God as Absolute, as a movement of Trinitarian love, the world need not exist. Barth goes further, once more paralleling Bulgakov, and says that it is the ‘purpose’ of God’s Being to love. This seems a rather logically necessitarian thing to say which assumes a prior essence that lies behind all actions. As God loves, He fulfils His purpose, so that all His ‘intentions regarding a being distinct from His own’ can be ‘actualized’ only as ‘purposes of love’. However, once again Barth must withdraw before the abyss of necessity, and he argues that God loves and He does not need, as in Hegel and Schelling, any being distinct from His own to be the object of His love, which is to us, the oxymoronic, ‘free and non-obligatory overflowing’.149 Still, God ‘can and may and must and will love us’, where our Being, our existence, is taken into an internal and essential fellowship with Him, where it is no longer ‘alien to His [existence] but may become and be analogous’.150 But what is such love? God might well be satisfied with Himself, as He is love necessarily in Himself, F2 with N2. Yet precisely as such divine love, out of a free self-giving (F3), He ‘wills Himself together with us. He wills Himself in fellowship with us.’151 Thus, Barth, echoing late Bulgakov,152 purposely blurs the lines between God’s willing of Himself and willing His works. Once again there needs to be a rebalancing. Barth tells us that this willing is a sort of creation out of nothing because it presupposes nothing on our part but creates love in us by 148 151

ibid., II/1, 273. ibid., IV/2, 777.

149 152

150 ibid., IV/2, 755. ibid., IV/2, 757. Bulgakov, NA, 251 [BL, 230].

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being a ‘creative love’.153 The event of God’s free love in Christ is, therefore, radically groundless (F1). It has no necessary ties to this creation or any other (N1). One cannot bind God by asserting that He must be consistent with His essential constancy and faithfulness (N2). God would still be consistent in the fidelity characteristic of His loving, Barth argues, even if He had decided to determine it in another fashion: ‘God could have been true to Himself without giving His faithfulness the determination of faithfulness to us.’154 Yet this collapse of love and Being risks pantheism by Barth’s blurring of the line between the two distinct divine willings of Godself and creation. The divine freedom and necessity of love then would require creation as an internal divine reality for God to be God (as in Origen). In our terms, by Barth’s ‘blurring’ of the two ‘willings’ there comes to be a synthesis of F2–N2 in God that would lead to creation becoming N1 and then N2 for God. But this type of theology also risks its opposite extreme by turning the divine love into a sort of abstract force alien to creation that will be love regardless of its particular determination. If love is divine Being and need not be expressed in faithfulness towards us, then love might just as well be anything one may posit of God from a tsunami to the pain of a child torn apart by hunting dogs.155 In our terms, under this blurring of the divine ‘willings’, the divine Being as love understood as F2–N2 becomes F1–N2, as love is emptied of its particular content and becomes a sheer loving force (the triumph of grace) directed at the world, not unlike Bulgakov’s love determinism. In short, if divine love is radically free indeterminate Being—though Barth always stops at the abyss in returning to Jesus Christ—then it is a blank slate on which one can write whatever one wishes. Barth’s actualism, therefore, is shot through with ambiguities and, arguably, this was perhaps a conscious choice in favour of a dialectical approach to Trinitarian theology. Alternatively, it could be that these ambiguities are inconsistencies (McCormack) or merely apparent and cleared up easily on closer analysis (Molnar and Hunsinger).156 Whatever the case may be, Barth wants to avoid arid speculation about the immanent Trinity157 in order to emphasize both that ‘we cannot elsewhere understand God and who God is’ than in revelation and that ‘He is the same even in Himself, even before and after and over his works, and without them.’158 Yet if God is an act, then what distinguishes the ‘economic act’ of His being with us in Christ from the ‘immanent act’ of the Father’s begetting of the Son? Barth’s (early) response is that the freedom and the love of the immanent act have a ‘superiority [Eminenz]’ over their economic counterpart.159 This seems a rather abstract 153 155 156 158

154 Barth, CD, IV/2, 777. ibid., II/1, 401. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 242–3 and see Hart 2005, 36–44. 157 But see Molnar 2014. Barth, CD, II/1, 261. 159 ibid., II/1, 260. KD, I/1, 456 [CD, I/1, 431].

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and somewhat vague distinction at best. Indeed, Barth never fully clarifies in what this ‘superiority’ consists. We are told that the immanent act cannot be otherwise, since God cannot not be the One who loves in freedom. The economic act, in contrast, could be—although it is not in fact—otherwise, since it is grace and one cannot describe God’s begetting of His Son as grace. These ambiguities might be clarified not only through approaching Barth’s Trinitarian theology dialectically but also through understanding this dialecticism in the context of the tension between divine freedom and necessity. Barth quite traditionally, and like Bulgakov’s understanding of God as the Absolute, argues that the eternal divine movement of love which is the Holy Trinity is one where God wills freely to be God in Himself—F2 in our terminology. But this free life of love is a necessary reality. God is the ‘One who properly and necessarily exists’ and cannot cease to be such—N2 in our terminology.160 However, in contrast, he does not stop at the traditional position in which it is ‘natural or necessary for God to will Himself ’ and in willing Himself being the ‘basis and standard of everything else’. In identifying the act of election with the inner life of God as Trinity, Barth ends up arguing that God’s willing of all things ad extra in willing to be God for us in Christ is also necessary. But it is necessary in presupposing freedom: ‘But He wills freely the possibility and reality of everything else . . . the will of God is free even in His necessity to will Himself, and necessary even in His freedom to will everything else.’161 Now this could mean that God necessarily has the freedom to will in all His activity. Given that for Barth election and self-will coincide, it seems more likely that he also is saying that God’s freedom and necessity coincide162 in willing creation in Christ. God then wills Himself and creation in a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2). But the second willing, which we might call a de facto necessity of divine loving Lordship,163 is ostensibly contingent, although it is unclear why this is the case and what separates it from the first non-contingent willing. This whole scenario, however, is even more complicated. If there is a necessity, albeit a free one, to God’s self-determination to be God for us in Christ and in His willing of everything in Him, then in order for Christ to be incarnate, God must necessarily be Creator (echoing Bulgakov). The necessity for God to be Creator, for Barth, seems to give creation an external necessity (N1) which is internalized in the eternal loving decision (F2) to be God in Christ (N2) (see ch. 8).164 Here we have a Barthian way of expressing the fact that God freely gives Himself to us in dependence in Christ (F3) and this dependence is irrevocable, as God has bound Himself to us for eternity (N3). 160 161 163

CD, II/1, 305 and see I/1, 434, II/1, 280, 283, and IV/2, 40. 162 CD, II/1, 591. e.g. CD, IV/1, 239, II/1, 547–8. 164 See CD, II/1, 301. See CD, III/1, 51.

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Thus, in Barth’s theology, we can characterize God in Himself by our axis (F3–N3). Furthermore, God’s free self-expression in creation in Christ can also be so characterized as a simultaneous dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). We have suggested that the thought of Bulgakov and Barth has a certain similarity despite their manifest great differences. Both men proposed a vision of God in relation to the world which consciously incorporates discontinuity and continuity (antinomism or dialecticism) into the relationship of God as Holy Trinity over against the world in Christ. Furthermore, in both theologians, creation and redemption in the event of Jesus Christ is eternally ‘preaccomplished’ as images/ideas/possibilities (see Bulgakov: 6.3, Barth: 8.1) in the will of the Holy Trinity and temporally actualized and revealed in the salvation drama. With this tentative alignment of Bulgakov and Barth, we can now begin to see a possibility for specifying the content and character of Christ’s divine-human decision for His own creation and redemption (6.3). This act is not vaguely a choice for the creation and redemption of the world. More precisely, it is the eternal-temporal divine-human decision of God to be God for us in Jesus Christ (7.1). In this decision, God is elected by man insofar as Christ as man obediently follows after His heavenly Father who has evoked faith, love, and even a desire for union with and in Him. This faith, love, and desire are in response to God’s eternal election of Himself as a man through the eternal following after His Father by the Son of God. Moreover, this election by Christ of God as His Father is, we suggested, the election of Himself as God, since as the eternal Son of the Father He is the obedient Subject who elects Himself as man and so ‘God for us’. This divine-human dialectical activity is one divine-human event, both freely and sovereignly pre-accomplished in the divine counsel of the Holy Trinity, and also, through a withdrawing of the divine omnipotence, necessarily temporally actualized in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Thus, Christ as the God-man participates in His own constitution as a Subject by eternally electing Himself as the Object of the love-desire of God, and faithfully and necessarily confirming this prior act of God by electing God to be His God. God would not have acted first creating and redeeming the world in Christ unless He already always knew that His Son would as God and man faithfully follow Him by entering into the far country. God in Christ is freely dependent (F3) on man in Christ to confirm the eternal divine election in order that it might be actualized and in this dependence He cannot act otherwise (N3). This proposal gives us a slightly better idea of how a response to the problematic of divine freedom and necessity might be expressed Christocentrically. The content of the act of Christ is election and its character is explicitly divine-human, that is, a decision by God and man at once. But this only responds to part of the question. Given the ambiguities of Barth’s actualism, the relationship of the divine-human act to its ground in the life of the Trinity

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and the relationship of God in Himself to the divine images/ideas/possibilities (Bulgakov: 6.3) are both still unclear. Can the divine-human act of Christ be freely necessary (F3) while there is also a true dependence of God on creation (N3) if we cannot understand how we can say coherently that God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit both could (F3) and could not (N3) have ‘done otherwise’, and both at once? In answering this question, we shall now explore Barth’s dialecticism as the best explanation for the ambiguities of his actualism.

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8 Trinity, Freedom, and Necessity in Karl Barth—A Dialectical Approach There is an option which accounts for the ambiguities of Barthian actualism. Barth purposely allowed logical inconsistency in his theology through his dialecticism. He asserts, on the one hand, an eternal logos asarkos, implying a Trinity existing in love in itself, with divine election as a sort of lesser contingent eternity in which God is freely dependent on His creation in suffering judgement for man (F3). On the other hand, he asserts that there is no God in Himself, no depth of the Trinity in which one will not face Jesus, since God subsists wholly in His electing act of being God for us in Jesus Christ, an event which is characterized by its irrevocableness or free dependence (N3). In this dialectic, Barth is arguably akin to Bulgakovian antinomism in his response to the problematic, but, differently from Bulgakov, he focuses on the free decision of Jesus of Nazareth.

8 . 1 DI A L E C T IC IS M AN D D I V IN E P O S S I B IL I T I E S As is well known, Barth argued early on that theology must be dialectical. In a lecture from late 1922, he describes three ways of attempting the impossible possibility of speaking about God—dogmatism, self-criticism, and dialectic. They are distinguishable only in theory, as in any theologian they are all actively applied. He identifies, however, dialectic, which he calls the way of Paul and the Reformers, as ‘intrinsically’ the best.1 In dialectic one has both human affirmations and negations, and between them lies the unnameable living truth that God becomes man. These affirmations and negations constantly look away towards—but never independently—this living truth as their common presupposition that gives them their proper meaning and significance. However, man is still unable to speak about God, as the living centre is 1

Barth, ‘Word of God’ [1925], 200, 206 (see McCormack, CRDT, 307–14).

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inconceivable and unintuitable, not under human control, as all direct communication concerning it—whether negative or positive—is not about it but either dogma or self-criticism. Therefore, theology is called to make a virtue of its helplessness. It must foreground the fact that it has no control over God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, for only God can speak of God. Theology, in short, must begin with its defeat. It can never properly speak about God. Being in such a circumstance, Barth writes, is like being on a ‘narrow ridge of rock’ where one can only keep walking but can never stand still or one will certainly fall to the right or left.2 One must then keep walking, looking from one side to the other in theology, from affirmations concerning the mystery of God’s revelation in Christ to negations concerning that same mystery and vice versa. We must relate the Yes and the No to one another for clarification: ‘to relate both affirmation and negation to one another, to clarify the yes by the no and the no by the yes, without persisting for longer than a moment in a rigid yes or no’.3 In practice this means, as McCormack put it, ‘the continuous negation of every theological statement through the immediate affirmation of its opposite’.4 We can only right one error of expression by another through what John Henry Newman called a ‘method of antagonism’ in which we steady our minds not so to reach the object but to ‘point them in the right direction; as in an algebraical process we might add and subtract in series, approximating little by little, by saying and unsaying, to a positive result’.5 Barth gives a variety of examples of his method, including that when we speak of God’s glory in creation, then we must immediately speak of His hiddenness, and that when we speak of sin, it is only to point out that we should not know it if it were not forgiven us. Dialectical method in theology, he writes, believes that the question is the answer and the answer is the question.6 Neither the affirmation nor the negation lays claim to being God’s truth as such, but it is the best one can do, which is to witness ‘that truth, which stands in the centre, between every Yes and No. And therefore I have never affirmed without denying and never denied without affirming, for neither affirmation nor denial can be final.’ Barth recognized that many would bewail such thinking, calling it any number of things, including, interestingly, given its importance for Bulgakov, the identity philosophy of Schelling. Such a person, Barth says, will rebel against the positive position, then against the negative, ‘and now against the “irreconcilable contradiction” between the two’.7 One is reminded of Bulgakov’s antinomism, although Barth’s dialectic is focused on the Word’s divine self-revelation. 2 3 4 6

Barth, ‘Word’, 207 and McCormack, CRDT, 311. Barth, ‘Word’ in McCormack, CRDT, 311 (207 older trans.). 5 ibid., 311. Newman 1976, 102 and see Ware 1999, 11–25. 7 Barth, ‘Word’, 206–7. ibid., 208–9.

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Not only is Barth dialectical in the 1920s, for Church Dogmatics is also deeply dialectical and we have discussed this theme earlier in the context of analogy (see 7.2).8 Barth argues, for example in I/1 (1932), that because both the divine content and secular form belong to the Word of God, it is impossible to identify the Word of God—the living centre of his theology of the 1920s—by either the secular form in which the divine content veils itself or the divine content without its secular form.9 Here the affirmation and negation of the earlier dialectic are rearticulated in terms of an often intensely dizzying veiling and unveiling of the Word of God in Christ. When the Word of God is spoken to us, it, as the divine content, is at once only heard, that is, unveiled, in its secularity or secular form in which it was said to us or veiled. But this is but the first moment of the dialectic, for then at once it can also mean that we hear it in its secular form as veiled but really hear it thus as unveiled. The Word’s veiling can change for us into an unveiling, and its unveiling into a veiling, but it is the same Word in itself. However, it is for us two distinct realities unless we receive it as the one reality it is for God Himself by faith. One cannot ‘see’ the form and content at the same time so that one might compare them since there is a fundamental ‘antithesis of form and content’, a distinction which cannot be erased by us without losing the Word itself. How form and content coincide is known only to God but not to us, since we can only see form without content and content without form. No rational synthesis is possible of the two, since faith ‘means recognizing that synthesis cannot be attained and committing it to God and seeking and finding it in Him’.10 This means, quite simply, that there never can be a wholly rationally consistent expression of the mystery of God’s self-revelation. We only perceive this revelation under different aspects, although by faith we know that these aspects are one reality of the incarnate Word. We are reminded here of Bulgakov’s ‘podvig of faith’ that holds the antinomies together despite their conceptual contradiction.11 Methodologically, Bulgakovian ‘antinomism’ and Barthian ‘dialecticism’ are little different. They both aim to hold together in faith theological affirmations that appear on the surface to contradict one another. Furthermore, their fundamental inspiration is Jesus Christ understood as the One who, as the God-Man or God for us become a fellow man, unites, without confusion or separation, divine and human essences. Where their methodologies do differ is in their respective theological presuppositions. The major differences here are: (a) Bulgakov’s embrace of a form of metaphysics (sophiology) understood as a pondering of the difference between God and the world in light of the union of uncreated and created in the person of Christ, and Barth’s conscious rejection of all 8 9 11

See McCormack, CRDT, 312, 464–5, 2008b, 109–80, Cross 2001, and Oh 2006, 17–67. 10 McCormack, CRDT, 464–5. Barth, CD, I/1, 175. Bulgakov, SN, 141 [see UL, 153 (my trans.)].

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forms of metaphysical thinking; (b) the nexus of Bulgakovian antinomism is in the Patristic discourse on apophaticism and kataphaticism, whereas, with Barth, it is within a discourse on Christ and eternal election; and (c) Bulgakov assumes an ultimate ontological modalism or monism in his antinomism, whereas, for Barth, there is a radical and eternal distinction between the uncreated and the created. Both methods, despite these differences, arguably share a central common difficulty when applied to our problematic of freedom and necessity, which is their tendency to simply reiterate the problematic itself. Both thinkers say in different ways that God is and is not bound to His creation in Christ, and that creation and redemption both could and could not have been otherwise. It is for this reason that perhaps (see 8.3, Part III) dialectic/antinomy needs the methodological complement of analogy that we hope can avoid the pitfall of a vicious circularity. Returning to dialectic in Barth, one can now say that revelation, for Barth, cannot mean in the slightest the loss of God’s mystery, because revelation is a revelation of a mystery in which we apprehend God.12 Barth applied this dialectic of veiling and unveiling, as a version of his earlier dialectic of affirmation and negation, to his actualism. There is a ‘very special dialectic of the revelation and Being of God’, he writes, where only in revealing Himself does God conceal Himself. When God speaks and acts, then, His unutterable omnipotence and eternity become real for us and ‘Only as He gives Himself to us as the One who loves does He withdraw from us also in His holy freedom.’13 God unveils Himself in revelation at once (affirmation) as being in His essence ‘the One who loves us and who loves in Himself ’. He is the God who eternally wills to be God for us in Jesus Christ, so that there is no depth of the Godhead in which one does not find Christ, having given Himself with a definitiveness that cannot be undone and so cannot be otherwise (N3). But then at once in this unveiling He veils Himself (negation), for He is likewise ‘free, in His freedom, and therefore as the self-existent One, unconditioned by anything else’.14 Being so free as Holy Trinity, He is free to will or not to be God for us in Christ and so His free loving dependence (F3) could have been otherwise. The distinction, Barth argues, between God in Himself and God in relation to the world cannot have an essential ‘but only a heuristic significance’. The fact that God is known as unveiled to us and unknown as veiled to us, affirmation and negation, at once the One who loves and at once the One who is free, becomes clear to us in the distinction.15 However, neither of the two ‘aspects’ by which we speak of God is ‘self-explanatory’. This is reminiscent of the 1920s when Barth argued that the affirmation and negation could not be independently referred to their centre in the incarnate Word. 12 14

See Barth, CD, I/1, 324 and II/1, 55, 194, 349. 15 ibid., II/1, 349. ibid., II/1, 345.

13

ibid., II/1, 348–9.

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Therefore, by the late 1930s, Barth holds that neither aspect by which we speak of God can be simply assumed by itself, since both need to become clear to us. This clarity only happens in the revelation in Christ by which God moves from being in Himself as wholly free to His being in fellowship with us as the One who has eternally willed to be God for us, ‘thus disclosing the truth of both these aspects, not in the form of a separation but of a distinction, as the same thing in distinguishable forms’.16 In other words, the two forms obtain their meaning through their self-correcting reference to one another in referring to Christ in distinct forms: God in Himself as wholly free and God for creation as the One who loves in His divine self-determination of election. God’s definitive self-determination to be God for us in Christ, His Yes to us, is a determination in which He has always willed Himself together with man. Like Bulgakov, one can say that God would not be God without this relation and that it cannot be otherwise (N3), and, adapting Barth, we can call it a divine de facto necessity.17 Yet it is impossible to understand this ‘Yes’ to creation in Christ without immediately turning dialectically to the ‘No’, the veiling to the unveiling. Here the veiling is that this eternal self-giving in Christ was wholly free and as a choice need not have been chosen (F3). God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is love and a love which could well be satisfied with itself alone or could have been otherwise. God does not need to become incarnate and He would remain Trinity even without any divine election. In other words, the dialectic of election and Trinity in Barth’s theology is a version of the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity. We have been arguing that if we approach the question of the interrelationship of election and the Trinity dialectically, then when we say that God eternally determines Himself to be God for us in Jesus Christ, and that in some sense this could not have been otherwise (N3), we must immediately find some way of seeing the free ground of this action. It was a real choice for God and one that He need not have made and so could have been otherwise (F3). Barth was able to express this side of the dialectic, that which emphasizes most strongly divine freedom, through an analysis of the concrete character of grace. Grace is a gift, a gift ‘in so far as the Giver, i.e., God Himself, makes Himself the gift’,18 whose graciousness depends on the fact that it need not have been given, because God’s gracious turning does not correspond to anything performed by the partner to whom He turns and whom He gifts with Himself.19 God need not give us Himself in Christ. If this fundamental contingency did not exist, then our being loved by Him would be a product of His essence and not grace as a gift that need not have been given.20 But if God need not gift us with Himself, if He could have chosen otherwise than He has in fact chosen in Christ, then this presumes that God indeed has other 16 18

ibid., II/1, 346. ibid., II/1, 354.

17 19

See ibid., II/2, 7; compare I/1, 140: ‘factual necessity’. 20 ibid., II/1, 355. ibid., II/1, 281.

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‘options’. There exist other divine possibilities before Him other than His being God for us in Christ. Here we wish, in a Barthian context, to build on the Bulgakovian notion that certain images/ideas/possibilities of the economia exist pre-accomplished in the divine life and then are actualized in creation and redemption in Christ (see 6.3). Barth presupposes throughout His work and explicitly but critically adapts (rejecting nominalism)21 the traditional scholastic distinction, subsequently appropriated in Lutheran and Reform theology,22 between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata.23 (This distinction is rejected by Bulgakov (6.1) and Balthasar (11.3) because they identified it with nominalism.) Commenting on Aquinas (ST, 1.25.5.1ad), Barth describes God’s potentia absoluta as the infinite power or capacity of God when faced with ‘an infinity of very different inward or even outward possibilities’ to do that which He can choose and do, but does not have to choose and do, and might not actually so choose and do because He does not want to choose and do it. The divine potentia ordinata is the chosen power or capacity which God ‘does actually use and exercise in a definite ordinatio’. Barth says explicitly that this distinction simply describes the freedom of the divine omnipotence.24 The distinction emphasizes both that God always freely chooses a particular capacity of power He applies to a particular internal or external possibility and that this chosen power contrasts with a different capacity (which could have been applied to a different possibility) which He does not use but could use if He so wanted to choose it. Barth adapts this distinction when He speaks of the difference between God’s ‘omnipotence’ (Allmacht) and His ‘omnicausality’ or ‘all-embracing activity’ (Allwirksamkeit).25 God in Himself possesses all power, or, is omnipotent being absolutely free. When, in His infinite love, He takes and binds the other reality which is distinct from Him to Himself in His divine activity, then is manifested that omnipotence in His work—in creation, reconciliation, and redemption—as His omnicausality.26 Omnicausality, like potentia ordinata, is a determinate application of God’s omnipotence or potentia absoluta. Yet God does not cease to be God and omnipotent in Himself by this application. Nor did God need to apply His omnipotence in sheer grace to us as His omnicausality and so He does not lose anything by the application. 21

ibid., II/1, 539-42 (esp. 542). See Oakley 2002, Heppe 1950, 103–4, and Schmid 1961, 127–9. 23 Barth, CD, II/1, 539 and see II/1, 532ff., 551–2, II/2, 606, and IV/1, 194. (See Bruce 2013, ch. 5.) 24 Barth, CD, II/1, 539 [KD, II/1, 606]; Bruce (2013, 314) retranslates this passage. Barth describes potentia absoluta as ‘the power of God to do what he in himself wants and can do (wollen und tun kann), but also what he on the other hand does not want and have to do and what he actually neither wants nor does’ and the potentia ordinata he describes thus: ‘God’s actual power and therefore in a definite ordinatio used and exercised’ (KD, II/1, 606, following Bruce 2013, 314); cf. Davaney 1986, 6–100, Case-Winters 1990, 97–126 (esp. 105–6). 25 26 Barth, CD, II/1, 528–9 [KD, II/1, 593–4]. CD, II/1, 528. 22

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It could indeed have been otherwise. It is imperative that one does not make the mistake of thinking that God’s omnipotence is ‘only as He actually does what He does’, so that God is only God as He elects us in Christ. We need to recognize the omnipotence in the omnicausality, the freedom of His love, so that ‘Absolutely everything depends on whether we distinguish His omnipotence from His omnicausality.’ Yet, and here is Barth’s dialectical turn back to what I have called de facto necessity, in looking at the omnipotence in the omnicausality we must not look to some unknown omnipotent Being beyond the work. God is present wholly in that work as divine love and known to us by His self-revelation,27 so we can say that ‘He is wholly our God, but He is so in the fact that He is not our God only.’28 Thus, when viewed from the side of the dialectic emphasizing freedom, the choice of God to be for us in Christ, as a determinate form of His omnipotence, that is, His omnicausality in creation, redemption, and reconciliation, is gracious (F3) or could have been otherwise. It is gracious precisely because God’s lordship and the divine possibilities ‘before Him’ are anterior to the actual choice of a chosen capacity of lordship applied to a particular internal divine possibility involving created powers.29 Yet, turning to the other side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, God is wholly and eternally our God in this determinate choice. One cannot go beyond it to some other power, as He has chosen to be God for us and not Himself. Once made, the choice cannot have been otherwise (N3). But, turning back again to the other side as one must, He is so as not our God only, since He could have been otherwise (F3). But how precisely is God the One who loves in freedom in Christ? Obedience. We have seen that man in Christ elects God in perfect obedience but we also saw that this mirrored the Son of God’s perfect obedience to the Father in electing man. What does this look like more precisely? Here Barth’s thought is reminiscent of the intratrinitarian kenosis of Bulgakov evoked as the life of God as Absolute, Holy Trinity, and we have argued that both forms of kenoticism (in God and towards the world) can be characterized by the axis F3–N3. Barth argues (7.3) that God in Himself as Trinity, the One who loves in freedom, the perfectly united and co-equal Godhead, includes, ‘without any cleft or differentiation’, a form of eternal humility enacted in obedience.30 In this eternal act of obedience, the Father commands as the First (prius, superiority, the One, etc.) and the Son obeys in humility as the Second (posterius, subordination, the Other, etc.), with the Spirit as the Third ‘who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being’.31 This

27

28 29 ibid., II/1, 527. ibid., II/1, 528. ibid., II/1, 539. ‘it belongs to the inner life of God that there should take place within it obedience’ (ibid., IV/1, 201). 31 ibid., IV/1, 201–2 and see 192ff.; here we see Christology, Trinity, and Election converging: McCormack 2008b, 201–33 (tacit response to Hunsinger 2000 and responded to by Molnar 30

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natural divine lowliness,32 which is the eternal free love of God beyond all ‘subordinationism’, what we have called a synthesis of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), is the foundation for ‘the self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience’.33 It can be expressed in terms of our axis. Here Barth echoes Bulgakov where the intratrinitarian kenosis, structured by our axis, is the foundation of the exinanitio of the whole Trinity in creation and redemption and, above all, Christ Himself, a supreme self-emptying that is characterized by F3–N3. Christ, for Barth, obeys His Father by going into the far country as the omnipotent divine judge, God in the flesh, the divine bearer of our sins, the one suffering the consequences of man’s just judgement (‘the judged’). By entering into our contradiction with God, He bore our sins away, so eliminating our liability to be judged.34 This specific obedience is not a capricious or accidental choice for self-humiliation but ‘a free choice made in recognition of an appointed order’ or divine taxis of following after the authoritatively imposed will of His Father.35 Put in terms of our terminology, the life of God in the economy, as F3–N3, is the perfect expression of the life of God in Himself as Trinity, which is structured by the same axis. We can now understand how Christ’s act of obedience in suffering and dying for us, the act of atonement accomplished in Him, is not only a natural human act but also a natural divine act. In Christ’s act of obedience there is a common actualization of the two natures (communicatio operationum) where ‘The divine expresses and reveals itself wholly in the sphere of the human, and the human serves and attests the divine.’36 Thus, every act in the work of Christ is ‘at one and the same time, but distinctly, both divine and human’.37 Given this divine-human character of the free loving obedience of Christ in doing the work of His Father, we cannot see the free act of suffering and dying effected by Christ, the atonement made in Him, as an accidental event of nature or destiny. This echoes Bulgakov with his account of the ‘inevitability’ of the way of the cross as an expression of the eternal ‘cruciform’ life of the Trinity.38 Christ’s self-sacrifice, for Barth, has a certain necessity that derives from the ‘inner necessity of the freedom of God’:39 ‘Jesus cannot go any other way than this way into the depths, into the far country.’40 Jesus, therefore, is free as God Himself is free insofar as He is the one who ‘executes the resolve and will of the free love of God’, which is to covenant Himself to man in Christ.41

2010a and 2014: now critiquing Barth: esp. 59–64), McCormack 2006, 2011, Jones 2011, Tolliday 2011, and Swain and Allen 2013. 32 33 34 Barth, CD, IV/1, 192. ibid., IV/1, 193. ibid., II/2, 156 and IV/1, 235. 35 36 37 ibid., IV/1, 193. ibid., IV/2, 115. ibid., IV/2, 116. 38 39 Bulgakov, AB, 368 [LG, 338]. Barth, CD, IV/1, 195; cf. ibid., 213 and 239. 40 41 ibid., IV/1, 194. ibid., II/2, 605 and see 606.

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Once the Father orders something (e.g. the Passion), it is executed in obedience by His Son, as the divine fulfilment of a divine decree, which must take place. It must take place because the freedom of God is at one with His necessity and this is manifested in His acts so that the fulfilment of the divine decree will and must take place, and ‘There is no possibility of something quite different happening.’42 Barth tells us that once God chooses His chosen capacity of power, the particular divine possibility of being God for us in Christ, it is a relation ad extra to creation, which is ‘irrevocable, so that once God has willed to enter into it, and has in fact entered into it, He could not be God without it’. We cannot know and have God in any other way but in Jesus Christ, so that apart from Him, God would be an ‘alien God’, since ‘according to the Christian perception’ God is God ‘only in this movement, in the movement towards this man, and in Him and through Him towards other men in their unity as His people’. God is God necessarily but freely only as Jesus Christ, since ‘Without the Son sitting at the right hand of the Father, God would not be God. But the Son is not only very God. He is also called Jesus of Nazareth.’43 It will be clear by now that if the act of Christ in choosing the way of the cross is a divine-human act, then it must be identified with God’s eternal determination of Himself as the covenanting God in Christ. Christ goes into the far country and God determines Himself in Him through the application of a definite capacity of power (potentia ordinata) in the choice of a definite divine possibility amongst ‘an infinity of very different inward or even outward possibilities’.44 Thus, we are told that in Christ obediently entering into His passion, there is no chance of His being controlled by caprice or chance, since His freedom corresponds ‘to the potentia ordinata which is the real freedom and omnipotence of God’45 and because by this ordered power ‘He acts in the freedom of God making use of a possibility grounded in the being of God’ which is to be the covenanting God.46 In short, God’s determination of Himself in free love as God for us is enacted in the divine-human freedom of Jesus Christ crucified and risen, since ‘There is no such thing as a will of God apart from the will of Jesus Christ.’47 The divine-human act is certainly a free act of love, and so we must say it could have been otherwise (F3), but it has a retrospective or de facto necessity by the eternal act of God, and so, dialectically, we must say that it could not have been otherwise (N3). In looking at what God has done in, by, and with the will of Christ, we must say ‘it had to be so’,48 it is certain, assured, and without question,49 but only on the basis of the accomplishment of God’s decision, which affirms ‘It is finished’ (Jn. 19:32). This is Barth’s version of the basic evangelical cry of gratitude: ‘Blessed 42 45 48

43 44 ibid., IV/1, 195 and see II/1, 527. ibid., II/2, 7. ibid., II/1, 539. 46 47 ibid., II/2, 606. ibid., IV/1, 194. ibid., II/2, 115. 49 ibid., II/1, 401–2; cf. IV/1, 213. See ibid., II/2, 115–116.

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assurance, Jesus is mine!’50 This whole book, in a way, is simply a contemporary Orthodox restatement of this hymn. Yet there still remains a difficulty. God has chosen His Being and we are told that with respect to the world God need not have chosen in the way that He did in fact choose. We know, of course, He has the absolute divine power (potentia absoluta) to so choose and will still remain true to Himself as the One who loves in freedom.51 It then appears that there exists and may yet be revealed some unrevealed, wholly unknown, and even contradictory aspect of God other than that given to us in Christ. In other words, despite his protests to the contrary, Barth’s dialecticism, when combined with the notion of divine self-determination, opens up the possibility that God may not be just Deus revelatus but also an essentially different or contradictory Deus absconditus.

8.2 D E FACT O NECESSITY AND DIVINE FREEDOM The ‘Christological concentration’52 of Barth’s theology required him to rethink what theology generally means by necessity and freedom. He did this in light of a Trinitarian dialectic where God is at once the God who primarily wills Himself, then graciously wills to be God for us in Christ and at once is God as Holy Trinity only as the God who is for us in Christ. Following Molnar, in Barth there are at least two senses of divine freedom.53 First, God is free in the ‘negative’ sense that he lacks any constraints other than those He chooses in the freedom of His love. Thus, God is free to create the world because He is under no external or internal constraint or necessity to create it. This is, as it were, a version of F2 that affirms itself by negating the N1 exerted by the world. Barth, however, was also concerned with articulating the ‘positive’ relation of creation to God’s being as the One who loves in freedom. He therefore envisioned a second ‘positive’ understanding of freedom. Barth did not want God to be trapped in Himself, unable to take flesh as Jesus Christ. God must be ‘free also with regard to His freedom’.54 He argues, accordingly, that God is love, containing true otherness in Himself,55 the freedom as Trinity to differentiate himself from Himself, and that this His freedom is in being a God of love (F2).56 However, these two understandings of freedom work together, as Barth emphasizes that God is free both to take flesh and to be God for us, although He need not have done this act (F3). Yet Barth, as we also have 50 51 52 54 56

Crosby, ‘Blessed Assurance’, #24. See Barth CD, II/1, 401, I/1, 434, II/1, 280, 283, 306, and IV/2, 40. 53 How I Changed My Mind, 43. Molnar 2007, 214. 55 Barth, CD, II/1, 303. See ibid., III/1, 196 and II/1, 462, 470, and 473. ibid., I/1, 319–20.

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seen, does not thereby exclude divine necessity but sees it in a dialectical relationship with divine freedom. Barth also has at least two senses of divine necessity. God, above all, is God immutably in that He has a suberabundant loving life as Holy Trinity and He cannot cease to be such. This is what we have referred to as inner necessity (N2) and it coincides with God’s life of loving freedom (F2). God is not the slave of His own immutable life, the bondservant of His necessary existence, which is the ‘inscrutable concrete element in His essence, inscrutable because it never ceases or is exhausted’. He controls this life and is bound to the objects He chooses to know and love insofar as He binds Himself, and in binding He binds irrevocably.57 This means that we cannot ascribe only necessity to the being and essence of God and exclude a radical freedom, a divine contingency, since ‘There is in God both supreme necessity and supreme contingency’ or a synthesis of F2 with N2. This latter element is the divine will which is ‘not limited by any necessity’ of the divine essence, since what God is and does must be understood as His will.58 But since, as we have seen, what God is and does is His will, then when He acts in election with a supremely dependent freedom (F3), He acts simultaneously with a supremely free dependence/necessity, binding Himself in the act (N3) which is our second sense of necessity. We are given a sense of this tension in a characteristically dialectical passage: ‘God is not bound to the world. He binds Himself! The covenant is His eternal will, but His free will.’59 Of course, as we have been at great pains to show, this must be understood dialectically, since if God eternally binds Himself, then He is in some sense always already bound, but we still want to say, to maintain the dialectic, that He is freely bound. God loves us, then, from one side of the dialectic, as one who would still be ‘the One who loves in freedom’ without us and without the world. We are, therefore, taken up into God’s eternal love for Himself. God does not need creation as an object different from Himself to love Himself because He is sufficient to Himself as an object to be loved. God has decided from sheer grace to consider us lovable because He could have just as well decided that we were unlovable. God’s Being is His own and since His Being is His act of loving Himself, we say that He is free in Himself both in not being conditioned by what He creates (transcendence) and in revealing Himself in love as one conditioned—‘He can and will also be conditioned’60—as God with us, Jesus Christ (immanence). This is reminiscent of Bulgakov, where God is said to be both ‘transcendentally immanent or immanently transcendent’.61 The theological picture we have been drawing is, therefore, one where God’s immutability, because it is His act of Being, cannot be thought of as a static essence. It is something like a divine 57 59 61

58 ibid., II/1, 547–8. ibid., II/1, 548. Table Talk, 14 and compare CD, II/1, 260. Bulgakov, SN, 99 [see UL, 103 (my trans.)].

60

ibid., II/1, 303.

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eternal becoming or, as Jüngel famously put it, a Being which is in becoming.62 We shall later see that this notion is appropriated by Balthasar, who writes of a divine ‘Super Becoming’.63 Likewise, Barth’s idea is not dissimilar to Bulgakov’s Sophia/ousia as ipostasnost’ which is an actus purissimus, an eternal activepassive capacity for ceaseless self-giving and personification without danger of God ceasing to be Himself or a Hegelian notion that God had to come to Himself in history as there was an eternal divine ‘lack’. Barth refers to this idea as the ‘holy mutability’ of God, where His constancy consists in the fact that ‘He is always the same in every change.’64 This means that He remains the same even when He takes flesh because He is ‘eternally new’ in Himself possessing an ‘immutable vitality’.65 It is against this background that the divine possibilities from which God chooses need to be thought or God will end up looking capricious, and such theology, as Bulgakov noted, is in danger of anthropocentric ‘occasionalism’.66 However, Barth also has another second understanding of divine necessity which is what we have called de facto, and is something like our N3. De facto necessity differs from what Barth knew as coercive necessity (necessitas coactionis), which is a necessity where one is externally impelled to do a particular action (N1). This cannot be applied to the fact that God determines Himself in Christ ‘because it was His free good-pleasure to do so’.67 Barth continually talks about God’s freedom as not capricious or arbitrary, but as having an ‘inner necessity’.68 God’s lordship or freedom is God’s own and is not dictated from the outside and is ‘conditioned by no higher necessity than that of His own choosing and deciding, willing and doing’.69 He means by God’s freedom having an ‘inner necessity’70 that once God chooses (or more precisely: continually is choosing) the divine capacity we know in Christ, everything in reality has a retrospective or de facto divine necessity.71 The force of the de facto necessity of which we write is directly traceable to the fact of the act of God’s eternal free choice in love to faithfully covenant Himself with us in Christ through His own divine self-election. One cannot get behind, at least from the side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, this eternal choice of God to reveal Himself in Jesus Christ, to some naked Logos asarkos.72 Thus, if one wants to take this necessity entirely seriously, then one must say that God as a God of love had to create the world in Christ in a free dependence (N3), echoing Bulgakov. However, one cannot say this factual or 62

See Jüngel 2001, 75–123, esp. 114–16. 64 Balthasar, Presence and Thought [1942], 153. Barth, CD, II/1, 496. 65 66 ibid., II/1, 500, 512. Bulgakov, NA, 37–8 [BL, 31–2]. 67 68 Barth, CD, II/1, 518; cf. I/1, 434. ibid., IV/1, 195; cf. ibid., 213 and 239. 69 ibid., II/1, 301. 70 See Bruce 2013, ch. 5, McCormack, 2010b, 64, 2013, 123–4, Hector 2005, 261, 2009, 3–4, 2012, and Diller 2013. 71 72 Compare T. F. Torrance 2000, 21–2, 57, 103 and 1978, 66. Barth, CD, II/1, 321. 63

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de facto necessity could not have been otherwise without at once returning to the other part of our dialectic, dependent freedom (F3), where God could have done otherwise. God, therefore, wills before all times to become, in time, Jesus of Nazareth, God for us. God in Himself is then defined eternally as the Father of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.73 Therefore, from one side of the dialectic, one cannot think of God who wills Himself apart from man whom He has chosen in Jesus Christ.74 Barth critically identifies what I have called de facto necessity75 with the traditional Protestant notion of an immutable divine necessity (necessitas immutabilitatis) of the freedom of God’s love, which Barth sees as the free, gracious, and revealed will of God in Christ.76 God’s immutable necessity is the necessity that accrues to the divine economy in Christ after the fact of its ‘decree’ by God as His eternal internal act. Of course, as was said earlier, from the side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, if the act is eternal and absolutely effected, then there never was a ‘time’ when God was not enacting His decree of election. Taken consistently, it is a mistake to speak of an after in after the fact, as this implies a point before the fact. The eternal internal act of divine election is identical to the revealed divine will of grace but distinct ‘in the concreteness which it has by its relation with the created world’ from the nature of God itself. Since everything that happens in reality happens in accordance with or corresponds to the ‘one unalterable divine will’, we are ‘bound . . . and cannot ignore it or live without it’.77 God freely wills to be with us in Christ and so we must acknowledge in Him ‘unalterably the grace of God, but it is also unalterably His will and command and ordinance’.78 To underline the unity of the two acts from the side of the dialectic which emphasizes necessity, Barth is actually using here the very same term (necessitas immutabilitatis) he had earlier used for the immanent act of the Father begetting the Son in order to distinguish it from the economic act of His creation of the world.79 As we have argued earlier, when Barth does attempt to express the difference between the two acts, returning to the other side of the dialectic emphasizing freedom, he speaks of an abstract ‘superiority’ of God’s freedom and love in the immanent act as distinguished from the ‘grace’ of the economic act.80 It is abstract because we are saying nothing concrete when we say that, although we only have God in Christ, this need not have been the case, when it is in fact the case! Yet in order to retain some vestige of freedom the assertion must stand. The matter is further complicated, dialectically, by saying that both acts have an ‘immutable’ necessity when the first immanent act cannot but be the case (i.e. God cannot not be God), whereas the second 73 76 77 80

74 75 ibid., II/2, 115. ibid., II/2, 169. ibid., I/1, 140: ‘factual necessity’. ibid., II/1, 518 and see 522; see Schmid 1961, 181–4 and Heppe 1950, 137ff, 144–5. 78 79 Barth, CD, II/1, 518–19. ibid., II/1, 519. ibid., I/1, 434. ibid., I/1, 433.

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economic act is the case, but need not be the case, although we can say retrospectively that ‘it had to be so’.81 Clearly, if Barth was aiming for terminological consistency, as McCormack and his critics both seem to believe, necessitas immutabilitatis can only be properly applied to the first immanent rather than to the second economic act, since only the first act can never in fact change or be otherwise.

8.3 E LECTION AND DIALECTIC I N TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY Barth argues, from the side of the dialectic which emphasizes necessity, that if God’s willing of Himself is bound up with His choice of man in Jesus Christ, then this requires creation to exist as Calvin’s ‘theatre of God’s glory’:82 ‘God’s glory is what he does in the world, but in order to do what he does, he must have this theatre, this place and realm—heaven and earth, creation, the creature, man himself.’83 Indeed, creation is said to be in the will of God the ‘External Basis of the Covenant’, this covenant with man in Christ being determinative of God’s Being, but more importantly in the divine decree the ‘Covenant is the Internal Basis of Creation’.84 In other words, creation does not exist independently of God’s reconciliation of man with Himself, but it is, as it were, spiritually instrumental by providing the means by which God might redeem us: ‘Creation is the natural ground for redemption, and redemption is the spiritual ground of creation.’85 Therefore, since Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is in ‘God’s eternal counsel [Ratschluß: decree, decision, resolution] in the freedom of His love’, it becomes divinely necessary for God to be Creator, although ‘To be sure, there was no other necessity than that of His own love.’86 God simply must be the Creator of the world if He is to love that creation eternally in Jesus Christ: ‘If by the Son or the Word of God we understand concretely Jesus, the Christ, and therefore very God and very man, as He existed in the counsel [Ratschluß] of God from all eternity and before creation, we can see how far it was not only appropriate and worthy but necessary that God should be Creator.’87 Creation, in Jesus Christ as the elector and the elect, would then seem to have a necessary (de facto) relation to the will and being of God. God has determined Himself to be God for us in 81

82 ibid., II/1, 401. Calvin 1997, 97. Barth, ‘Theological Dialogue’ [1962], 172. 84 CD, III/1, 94ff. and 228ff.; cf. Balthasar, KB, 121ff. and Webster 2004a, 94–112. 85 Barth, ‘Dialogue’, 172 and see Gunton 2000, 156. 86 Barth, CD, III/1, 51—revd: translator has qualified ‘love’ by ‘free’ contrary to KD, III/1, 54; see Bruce 2013, 366 for a new translation. 87 Barth, CD, III/1, 51 [KD, III/1, 54]. 83

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Christ but to be such He must be the Creator of the world, for if there is no world, then there can be no Christ (N3). Yet as Creator He exists, Barth writes, only together ‘with this One who also exists as a man’ whose ‘life-action is identical with that of God Himself, His history with the divine history’ but each and every thing in creation likewise exists together with Christ. This leads us to the unavoidable consequence that God, to be God as He determines Himself, must be the Creator. As Creator, He must be eternally in Christ with us, since He exists with the world ‘in an inviolable and indissoluble co-existence and conjunction’.88 This means quite simply that, like Bulgakov before him, Barth argues that the world is an external necessity for God (N1), which then becomes an internal necessity (N2), on one side of the dialectic, but, on the other side, it is not a necessity at all. God’s self-determination for us in Christ allows for no independent doctrines of creation and providence and of anthropology outside a creation grounded in the covenant and a humanity that is restored in Christ as the second Adam.89 The one doctrine remaining dialectically free of this form of Christocentrism is the doctrine of God, specifically in regard to the teaching concerning the immanent Trinity. Barth appears to have felt that he had at once to bind the doctrine of God to the doctrine of election and, at once, in contrast, to release the immanent Trinity from this Christological concentration. He did this in order that God’s own self-determination in Christ would be free grace rather than His self-completion in creation. God is not tied to us as His object90 and God freely loves us as He loves Himself as an object even if we did not exist as an object different from Him to love.91 Barth, therefore, refuses to wholly identify the Logos ensarkos and the Logos asarkos. More precisely, he refuses to deny that God is Logos asarkos and that there is not some (although abstract) internal divine possibility that He could be not the Word incarnate.92 If Barth had simply, without a dialectical assertion to the contrary, identified the immanent and economic Trinity, then that would mean that the ontological possibility that God need not have been with us in Christ would be eliminated and with it, he believed, the freedom of God as Trinity and the character of grace as a gift which need not have been given.93 The Being of God would have been turned from free love into a ‘worldprinciple’.94 God in Christ, as free grace, is, to borrow a line from T. S. Eliot, ‘more distant than stars and nearer than the eye’.95 McCormack claims an ‘inconsistency’ in Barth’s actualism in regard to the relationship between the immanent Trinity and divine election (see 7.1).96

88 91 94 95 96

89 90 CD, IV/3, 39–40. See McCormack, CRDT, 454. Barth, CD, II/2, 6. 92 93 ibid., II/1, 280. ibid., IV/1, 52. ibid., II/1, 281. ibid., II/1, 321; cf. IV/1, 187 and see Alan Torrance 2000, 87. Eliot, ‘Marina’, l.19, 72. See McCormack 2007, 77, 2008a, 211–12, 2010a, 220–1, and 2013, 114ff.

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McCormack’s judgement is certainly prima facie accurate insofar as Barth simultaneously asserts the necessity and the contingency of the economic Trinity. However, it is arguable that Barth’s ‘inconsistency’ was born neither of ignorance nor of timidity but of an attempt to articulate what he saw as the nature of grace. Grace is both a free gift that need not have been given and the divine givenness of love, which has a de facto necessity, as it is God Himself (F3–N3). Barth retained, therefore, even at the cost of dogmatic coherence, as one moment of his dialectic, some notion of the immanent Trinity. Without such a notion, even if largely abstract, one cannot say, as Molnar has shown, that God is free to choose or not to choose to be our gracious Redeemer.97 Barth argues simultaneously and dialectically that one must not refer to the Logos asarkos, the Word of God in the abstract (i.e. one must not attempt to know God apart from Jesus Christ), and that the Logos asarkos and Logos ensarkos are not one and the same.98 God is God in His act of choosing to be God with us but we cannot claim that this act needed to happen. He could have chosen another divine possibility based on another divine capacity of omnipotence or indeed any of the ‘infinity of very different inward or even outward possibilities’.99 Yet He did not and, returning to the other side of the dialectic, we cannot know God other than the God who gives Himself to us in His love in Jesus Christ and we need not fear that He can be otherwise. He has eternally determined that He will be no other God than the God who loves us freely but necessarily in Christ. Barth’s response to the problematic, therefore, is very similar to Bulgakov’s antinomy between the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative with the Absolute being in the Absolute-Relative, immanent in the economic Trinity. It is to affirm in faith a unity between the different sides of the Trinitarian dialectic that God could and could not have acted otherwise in divine election. But where do we now stand in our quest to construct a contemporary response to the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity? And where do we still have to go? In chapters 6 and 7, we came to see that any response to the problematic must begin with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. However, we only receive this divine content in its secular form, not in its naked divine objectivity, so we must begin with the event in which Christ obediently but freely follows His Father into the far country. This event is the action in which He elects, chooses, and decides that God shall be His God. But in contemplating this movement we then come to see that it is not only a human movement but also a divine one. Christ would not have followed His Father and chosen Him as His own God and Father unless He had always already been called by the Father to elect Himself as man, and, in electing, specifying Himself to be this particular man, Jesus of Nazareth. Christ’s following after the Father in 97 98

cf. Molnar 2002, 62–4, 150ff., 274–7, 312ff., and 2003, 59–66. 99 Barth, CD, IV/1, 52. ibid., II/1, 539.

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choosing Him as His God and in electing Himself as a man was a freely obedient action both temporally and eternally—following Barth and here echoing Bulgakov’s notion of intratrinitarian kenosis—and such an action is one divine-human action as there is one person of Christ. Moreover, it is a freely obedient action because Christ totally depends on the Father in a dependent freedom (F3) in giving Himself totally to Him. Yet Christ cannot turn back from His way into the far country, so the action has a certain necessity or free dependence (N3). Thus, these two actions, involving two wills and two energies, are (in faith) unified as one divine-human activity of God electing man (anterior) and man electing God (posterior) in Jesus Christ, both of which are structured by our axis. We must avoid at all costs any hint of Nestorianism, for there is a union in this divine-human activity of the one person of Christ of the supratemporal and temporal. It is here that we need to take a certain conceptual leap that at first may seem as if we are confusing the uncreated and the created. If it is Christ Himself who elects God to be His God and Father and it is Christ again who for the Father elects Himself to be man as God for us, and this one divine-human election is done in dependent freedom and free dependence (F3–N3), then in some sense, as was suggested earlier, Christ as man also elects Himself as God. This means that (a) election would seem to be a Trinitarian reality; (b) election must involve some sort of divine kenosis in relationship to creation; and (c) that somehow creation comes to participate graciously in this Triune reality while still remaining created and God still remaining uncreated. Let us examine divine kenosis in relationship to creation. If it is Christ Himself who has elected Himself as man and Christ Himself who has elected Himself as God, as the Son of the Father, then we see as in an antinomy/ dialectic that the anterior action, since it is God’s eternal self-determination to be God for us in Christ, is necessarily eternally but freely dependent on the posterior action (F3–N3). This posterior action is that man in Christ receives the anterior action in joy and faithfulness and obediently elects Himself as His God. Building on a point made earlier (7.3), God, from all eternity in a divine kenosis of His Triune being, looks to see if man in Christ will receive His own divine election. Therefore, God’s anterior initiation is freely dependent (F3) on the fact of man’s creation and free posterior response to God. This is a ‘risk’, as man in Christ may refuse to follow the will of the Father, to which God is utterly committed (N3). Thus, God will only create and redeem the world based on the free assent of man in Christ. This means, echoing Bulgakov and Barth, that in anticipation of the act of Christ all the acts of the divine economy are pre-accomplished in the Holy Trinity as images/ideas/possibilities but necessarily temporally actualized and revealed in the event of Jesus Christ, God for us. Furthermore, if God is to be God as Jesus Christ, then once God chooses to be God for us in Christ, then, following Barth, it is de facto necessary that creation exist as the theatre of His

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glory, and if it is necessary that creation exist so that Christ might be born of the Theotokos, then how much more necessary after the fact is it that God is Creator. Christ’s divine-human activity is an obedient action not only humanly but also divinely. The Son eternally and freely, with a love-desire that is both freely dependent and irrevocable (F3–N3), follows the Father in complete self-giving. But this action, understood from its divine initiation, is an action where God out of a radical free ecstatic love has thrown Himself at the mercy of His own creation and awaits its response. Here there are clearly various conceptual problems to which we shall return in subsequent chapters. The most significant of these is how there can be any ‘risk’ or ‘awaiting’ if God knows the result of the act before it is committed. If the Son is responding to His Father eternally in electing Himself as man, then how are we to conceptualize this in a Trinitarian way? One possibility is to say that this movement of the Son electing Himself as man is in response to His own eternal begetting by the Father who has called Him forth for selfgiving obedience through the Father’s own complete donation of Being in begetting Him. This whole movement of a begetting which is a calling forth of obedient love and a loving obedience in response is bound together through the Father’s Spirit who proceeds from Him and rests on the Son. What we are moving towards, building on both Bulgakov and Barth, is that if Christ as a human being in electing God as His God embodies the axis F3–N3 and this axis is also plausibly found expressed in the eternal Son’s election of Himself as a man, we can surely see election itself as something distinctive about God in Himself that is then expressed economically. One can, therefore, make a case that the F3–N3 axis seen in Christ’s election of God as a man, and of the Son’s election of Himself as a man is, going way beyond Barth, founded on the life of the immanent Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) understood as a ‘primordial divine election’. In such an eternal election of the immanent Trinity, each of the hypostases in free self-giving love elects the Other as its very own and receives its own election by the Other. The life of God in Himself as a primordial divine election, structured by our axis, is then expressed in the ‘divine-human (world-oriented) election’ where God, with a dependent freedom and a free dependence (F3–N3), elects Himself as a man in Christ and man elects God in Christ. Divine-human election in Christ, embodying the F3–N3 axis, is an ‘external’ expression of the primordial ‘internal’ relations of the Holy Trinity where self-election takes the form of a free loving selfbestowal of personhood. Put differently, just as Athanasius says that the Son is what is proper or of its own (idios)100 to the Father’s essence and that then graciously God in taking flesh made what is not His own proper to Himself

100

e.g. Athanasius, AA, 1.16.1, l.2, 2.2, 125, 178–9, and 3.6.2, ll.5–6, 312; see Louth 1989.

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(idiopoioumenou),101 so too we can speak of a primordial self-election which is proper to God in His essence and a gracious divine-human election which is not proper to Him but which is made proper to Him, thereby making creation His own. This divine ‘enownment’ of creation, to adapt Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis (see ch. 3), happens through God in Christ eternally electing Himself as a man and man in Christ electing God as His God, which divine-human election, the enowning of God and the enowning of creation in Christ, is then retrospectively identified with the primordial election proper to God. This enowning makes creation God’s own, while remaining wholly itself. Divinehuman election comes to have a retroactive power102 over all of creation and God Himself but only because God eternally condescends to allow it to have power over Him. How we can conceive of this retroactivity of divine-human election will be discussed in the Conclusion. Thus, we begin to see how Christology, while undoubtedly intensifying the problematic of divine freedom and necessity, actually might hint at a context in which F3 and N3 can be held together both in the life of the Trinity and in the life of the world. God’s divine self-determination via election is a freely gracious act at once dialectically utterly definitive and wholly contingent, and so in no way is an arbitrary or ‘Pickwickian’ act,103 but yet a wholly natural expression of who God is as an eternally self-electing Trinity. If we ask what ‘nature’ lies behind God’s self-choice to be for us in Christ, we can reply that it consists in His eternally choosing Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, so that divine election is simply an expression of the divine Being as love-desire. Furthermore, since divine-human election is a free gracious self-expression of a primordial divine election necessary for God to be God and divine-human election participates in the reality of this initial act, then we can speak dialectically at once of God being able to choose otherwise in His selfdetermination and not being able to choose otherwise. Our proposal, in short, is that the antinomy (Bulgakov) or dialectic (Barth) of freedom and necessity is a problematic which cannot be rationally explained, but which might be made more cogent by the identification of election in eternity with election in the history of Jesus of Nazareth. We shall return to the interrelationship of these two elections below. The clear danger of what we are suggesting is that we have too closely aligned the eternal processions with the act of God’s eternal self-determination for us in Christ, thereby risking collapsing the immanent and the economic Trinity, and jeopardizing the divine freedom! Bulgakov and Barth have shown us that one way to extricate ourselves from this dilemma is to speak of this 101

Athanasius, AA, 3.33.3, l.12, 344, and Incarnation, 8.24–5. See Pannenberg, SysTh, 2: 303, n. 92, 345, 365, 1968, 135ff., 141, 224, 230, 321–3, Moltmann, TK, 160, Jüngel 1983, 363, and T. F. Torrance 2006, 102 and 1996, 204. 103 K. Ward 1996, 177–9. 102

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whole movement dialectically or antinomically and, following Barth, to speak of God’s divine self-election, what we have called His divine-human election, as one of the infinite possibilities/images/ideas of the divine life. Indeed, divine-human election might be regarded as a divine possibility which is itself the quintessence of the whole salvation drama of the cross, tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand, and the second and glorious coming again. Thus, God in Christ takes up and actualizes possibilities that are already always ‘pre-accomplished’ (see 6.3) in the Trinity, one of which is divine self-election. What this ‘preaccomplishment’ might mean will be unpacked in later chapters. However, as we mentioned earlier, constant recourse to dialectic or antinomy seems to simply reiterate the problematic. At the extreme, it appears one must say at one and the same time that God and world are mutually self-defining, a tacit pantheism characteristic of the worst excesses of sophiology, and that God is an abstract reality in Himself. We then anthropomorphize this abstraction by conceiving of God having various options, almost as costumes, which He can or cannot try on for size, one of which is to be God for the world in Christ. This seems to transform God as Trinity into the apotheosis of capriciousness. Is there a way out of this dilemma? Perhaps the very problem with our argument up till now is (ironically) its methodological one-sidedness. We have focused exclusively on a dialectical response to our problematic which simply magnifies the mystery of God’s simultaneous identification with us and difference from us in Christ. What, then, may be needed is some form of theological methodology that acknowledges a simultaneous and enduring similarity and dissimilarity. This will include an identity-in-difference between the uncreated and the created which is not the same as a vacillation between sheer identity and stark difference between God and creation. Such a method can be seen perhaps in analogy. To follow through on this suggestion, let us turn to our last dialogue partner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, with his notion of Christ as the concrete analogy of Being.

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Part III Jesus Christ and the Trinitarian Appropriation of the Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity in Hans Urs von Balthasar

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9 The Metaphysics of Love—Four Steps In the last two sections of our work, we came up against a methodological ‘wall’ of sorts in articulating a contemporary response to our problematic. We have understood our problematic as the simultaneous need to uphold both (a) God’s freedom to create and redeem the world in Christ or not and (b) the fact that God has eternally committed Himself to be just such a Creator and Redeemer in Christ. He must create the world if He is to be the sort of God He has chosen to be, thereby giving the world a sort of necessity for Him. The ‘wall’ was that our problematic and the response formulated to it in conjunction with our writers were both dialectical, so that our response seemed to beg the question. We also had found a clue to a proper response to the problematic in the identifying of a Christic decision in history with an eternal decision in God. We suggested that one way out of the methodological conundrum might be to vary our methodology, using not only dialectic but also analogy. In turning to analogy, we wish to articulate a notion of identity that includes within it real difference, that is, similarities and dissimilarities between God and the world can exist only because there is between them simultaneously both an enduring difference and a non-negotiable identity. In this perspective, it would be impossible to say God is dissimilar to the world unless He shared with His creation a continuous similarity, even reaching the point of identity, though being still utterly different. Through the application of analogy, in tandem with dialectic, we might be able to articulate how our axis of F3–N3 can be applied variously, according to its distinct character, to the uncreated and the created without collapsing one into the other but keeping them within a perpetual ‘tension’. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) at this very point provides yet further Christological resources for a response to the problematic. He held that it is only in Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of being’ that we see a summary of the continuities and discontinuities of God and the world. Yet such a move presupposes the need in theology for both analogical and dialectical language, an observation made famous by David Tracy. Tracy claims there are two major conceptual languages in theology, which are inextricably intertwined: the analogical and the dialectical. Analogical

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language or analogy (he uses them interchangeably) is a language of ordered relationships articulating both similarities, via affirmations, and dissimilarities, via negations, evoking a totality of ‘real-similarities-in-real-differences’. Order in these relationships is created by the ‘distinct but similar’ relationship of each analogue ‘to some primary focal meaning, some prime analogue’. In Christian systematics, Tracy claims, reality is constituted as an ordered whole by explicating the analogous relationships, between self, others, world, and God, and relating them all to the event of Jesus Christ as the primary focus for interpreting the whole of reality. In any ordered system there is needed, then, not only a positive but also a negative moment, so that similarities remain similarities-in-difference related in an ordered manner to their primary focus as an ‘uncontrollable event’. Without negations the order and harmony would degenerate into a flattened affirmation, which claims full adequacy, such as when an analogue claims to have an exhaustive, univocal meaning.1 Negations allow for intensification of the relationship of the analogues to their focal meaning of the event in that they negate any ‘slackening’ of the sense of the radical mystery, the uncontrollable character of both the event and the similarities-in-difference of the realities focused on and interpreted by said event.2 Analogy incarnates the intellectual ideal of Scholasticism, itself founded on the Chalcedonian definition, of ‘unity-in-difference, not uniformity’, ‘to distinguish without separation in order to unite without confusion’.3 Thus, within analogy, dialectical language is woven through the necessary recourse to negations in evoking the primary focus—Jesus Christ. However, dialectical language can be separated from its analogical counterpart, as is the case with the negative dialectics of Kierkegaard followed by figures as diverse as Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, and Niebuhr, which emphasizes the fact that the Word of Jesus Christ discloses the infinite qualitative distinction between God and ‘this flawed, guilty, sinful, presumptuous, selfjustifying self ’.4 Here Tracy identifies dialectics with a resounding NO to all attempts to identify the present order, creation with God’s Word. It unmasks, like Bonhoeffer, all ‘cheap grace’, the ‘all-too-easy continuities and differences and relaxed similarities between Christianity and culture, between God and the human, God and world’.5 Yet the very same theologians who revel in the ‘purging fire’ of dialectics, while remaining rooted in the power of its ‘proclamatory negation’, rearticulate the similarities-in-difference, affirming continuities between God and creation using new analogical languages. Here Tracy points us to Barth’s ‘analogy of grace’ language, the YES of the gracious and merciful God revealed in the event of Jesus Christ. However, with every YES there follows a NO, as Barth denies any ‘point of contact’ between the

1 4

2 Tracy 1981, 408–9. ibid., 409. 5 ibid., 415. ibid., 417.

3

ibid., 414.

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uncreated and the created, thereby setting dialectic at the heart of his analogical form.6 What we are led to by our contemplation of these two languages, Tracy alleges, is the awareness that, without the negative, the seam of dialectical language sewn into the analogical, all analogical conceptions ‘eventually collapse into the false harmony, the brittle sterility, the cheap grace of an all-too-canny univocity’. Analogy needs and even presupposes dialectics. Likewise, without the similarities produced by differences and negations, the continuities or emergent harmonies produced by a demand for some new form of analogical language, negative dialectics ‘left to itself, eventually explodes its energies into rage or dissipates them in despair’, leading into the ‘uncanny whirlpool of the chaos of pure equivocity’.7 Although Tracy’s account of dialectics and analogy seems at times to be simply a playing off of the negative to the positive, the No to the Yes, failing to examine how one can have (as in Bulgakov and Barth) a dialectical movement between absolute identification and difference between God and the world in Christ, still his argument is instructive. It shows the need in theology to apply a variety of methodologies according to need. Balthasar, as we shall see Part III,8 was precisely the sort of theologian sensitive to the need to apply both dialectics and analogy to God’s relationship to the world by focusing on the continuities and discontinuities between the uncreated and the created summarized in the living analogy of being who is the person of Jesus Christ.

9.1 BEING AS LOVE — STEP 1 Balthasar’s theology presupposes metaphysics understood as a reflection on the world as it concretely exists,9 because Being is ‘the most noble, the first and most proper effect of God’.10 For a Christian, then, metaphysics is a part of the doctrine of creation but creation always refers to its Creator, just as worldly or creaturely Being cannot be conceived without its reference to its groundless ground in divine infinite Being and finite freedom cannot be fulfilled except in the infinite freedom of God (see ch. 10).11 Balthasar’s metaphysics or account of creaturely Being over against divine Being plays the same crucial role in his thought that sophiology and the doctrine of election played respectively in Bulgakov and Barth. Thus, to understand Balthasar’s response to the 6

7 ibid., 417. ibid., 421. Bibliography: Capol and Müller 2005; secondary literature: Hans Urs von Balthasar— Sekundärliteratur 2016. 9 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord [=GL], IV [1961–9], 28; on Balthasar’s metaphysics: Schrijver 1983, Davies 1998, Bieler 1993, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2011, Healy 2005, 19–90, D. C. Schindler 2004 (see survey: 6–7), 2009, J. Johnson 2013, and O’Regan 2014. 10 11 Balthasar, GL, IV, 404. Theo-Drama [=TD] [1973–83], II, 200ff. 8

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problematic of freedom and necessity we must begin with the contemplation of Being, just as to understand Bulgakov’s thought we must turn to ‘Sophia’ and for Barth to ‘election’. As we shall see, infinite uncreated self-subsistent Being, which is reflected in created non-subsistent Being, and here Balthasar builds on Bulgakov,12 is an eternal self-giving, self-emptying, and self-receiving dance, or rather a drama of concrete relations which are the persons of the Trinity, and this mystery is expressed in God’s kenosis in Christ. Metaphysics serves, therefore, as the basis for a Christocentric reinterpretation of the analogia entis13 where created Being/esse ‘subsists in no other way than in the “refusal-to-cling-to-itself ”, in the emptying of itself into a finite concretion’ in the essents in which it subsists. Reflecting the pure, uncreated Being of God, created Being is ‘that which does not hold onto itself ’,14 which leads Balthasar to speak of Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of being’.15 In Him is synthesized perfectly the reality of both created and divine Being as self-giving, self-receiving, and outwardreaching love that is desirous of the Other. Balthasar saw the analogy of Being as a declaratory kenotic trace in nature (the ‘watermark of divine love’) of the mystery of the self-giving and self-receiving Trinity. This ‘watermark’ on created Being only comes to light with the cross of Christ as ‘the sign of absolute love’, since ‘the light of the Cross makes worldly being intelligible’. It shows how the forms and ways of love that otherwise get lost in ‘trackless thickets’ actually find their foundation in their ‘true transcendent ground’ of the Divine Being/Love-Desire of the Trinity.16 By contemplating Christ, Balthasar aimed to show both the similarity and the dissimilarity of divine and creaturely Being and ultimately the difference and identity between God and the world. Furthermore, metaphysics, for Balthasar, aims to hold fast to the wondrousness of created Being by meditating on Being’s rootedness in beauty, truth, and goodness, the three ‘transcendentals’.17 The means by which Balthasar elaborates this rootedness of creaturely Being in the transcendentals is through the tension between existence and essence. Here, One freely gives itself to the 12

On Bulgakov: Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy [=CL] [1988], 190 and see 345–6, Mysterium Paschale [1984], 35, 46, GL, VII, 213–14, 347, TD, II, 264, III, 313, IV, 278, 313–14, 323, 338, Theo-Logic [=TL] [1985–7], II, 177–8 and III, 27, 34, 53, 169, 213, and 215; cf. Balthasar and Bulgakov: Hallensleben 1999, Nichols 2005b, Baumer 2006, 249–56, J. Martin 2015a, 2015b, and O’Regan 2014, 303–21. 13 See, generally, Hart 2003 and Przywara, Analogia Entis (2014 [19622]). 14 Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 144 (revd) [Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe [1963], 95]. See GL, IV, 38 and ibid., V, 626–7 [Herrlichkeit [=H], III.1.2, 956–7]. 15 A Theology of History [=TH] [1959], n. 5, 69 and see TD, II, 267, III, 220–9, V, 385ff., 509ff. and Epilogue, 89; here influenced (see KB, 328, 387) by Przywara (e.g. Analogia Entis, 304–5) (see Betz 2005–6, 9, 28, 36–40). 16 Balthasar, Love, 142 and see Bieler 2006b, 308. 17 See Saint-Pierre 1998 and D. C. Schindler 2004, 350–421.

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Other, yet depends, in a relation of necessity, on the Other to subsist, which is itself grounded on the groundless ground of God’s free love where freedom (F1–F2) and necessity (N2) coincide.18 This creative tension leads us to one of the key contributions of Balthasar to our study. The fundamental structure of both divine and creaturely giftedness or Being (since Being is love-desire/selfgiving) is the dialectic of freedom and necessity. It will be argued in this section that (a) necessity in Balthasar’s thought is identified with dependence (see ch. 2) and (b) that this structure of ontological giftedness is precisely our axis of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). In divine Being and in the hypostatic union, the dialectic of freedom and necessity is a perfectly unified tension in unity, which is itself an identity. In created Being, the dialectic of freedom and necessity is a ceaseless creative but ultimately unresolved tension and it can be seen in the polarity of existence and essence (see ch. 3). ‘Polarity’, it should be noted, differs from Bulgakov’s antinomism and Barth’s dialectics in that there is here no conceptual contradiction. There is a creative tension in which both poles depend on one another and even interpenetrate. Balthasar is unique in beginning with the F3–N3 dialectic in the world and then exploring it by analogy in God rather than, as is the case with Bulgakov and Barth, the other way around. The polarity and consequent tension of existence and essence is given to us as the experience of wonder as to the contingency/giftedness of creation: ‘Why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?’19 It is approached in four ‘steps’ which manifest a ‘four-fold difference’ that together reveals divine ‘glory’.20 These steps are as follows: (1) the difference between an ‘I’ and a ‘Thou’,21 then (2) between Being and beings,22 then (3) between beings and Being,23 and (4) finally between God and the world.24 This four fold difference itself is a complex elaboration by Balthasar of the Thomistic distinctio realis between esse and essentia.25 The ‘real distinction’, which from early on was central to his work,26 is read in light of a whole variety of sources which we have no space to elaborate, including Erich Przywara (1889–1972), Gustav Siewerth (1903–63), and Ferdinand Ulrich (b. 1931), but especially the Heideggerean ‘die ontologische Differenz, d.h. als die Scheidung zwischen Sein und Seiendem’.27 Aquinas teaches that there exists in a creature a real ‘distinction’ (distinctio realis) or ‘difference (diversitas)’28 (alternatively, a ‘real composition [realis composito]’)29 between ‘whereby he is [ex quo est]’ or the creature’s ‘Being/ 18

Balthasar, TL, I, 240–2. GL, V, 613 (from Heidegger 2000, 8 but see Leibniz, ‘Principles of Nature’, 7, 210). 20 21 Balthasar, GL, V, 615 (revd) [H, III.1.2, 945]. GL, V, 615–18. 22 23 24 ibid., 618–19. ibid., 619–24. ibid., 624–7. 25 See Bieler 1993, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2011, and Buckley 1995. 26 e.g. Balthasar, Apokalypse, III: 436. 27 Heidegger 1975a, 22 and see Balthasar, GL, V, 434. 28 Aquinas, On Hebodomads, c.2, l.200, 24–5; see Wippel 2000, 101–3 and 1999, 99, 122 n. 60 and Cunningham 1988. 29 Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 27.1.8ad, 311. 19

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existence [esse]’ and ‘what is [quod est]’ the creature as such, namely, its essence (essentia).30 The essentia as the receptive principle or the receiver in the distinction (that which acquires esse)31 is given a whole variety of names including ‘ens’, ‘id quod est’, ‘substantia’, ‘forma’, ‘natura’, and ‘res’.32 Esse, as the received principle,33 is not a thing (res), nor is it a being (ens), and so one might wrongly say that esse exists. Yet, further, esse is not a type of essence or even an accident superadded to an essence. Rather, it has no content as such other than that of the essence it actualizes. One may say that esse is something that is of or belongs to a being or thing. And, by belonging to it, it makes it actual.34 Esse is described by Aquinas as ‘the effect common to all agents’, since every secondary agent actualizes a nature or form in its potentiality (i.e. making a thing to be). In this way, the secondary agent perfects that form or being. But it only produces this effect insofar as it is subordinate to and indeed dependent upon the first agent, God, as divine infinite Being, acting by His power: ‘whatever gives being, does so in so far as it acts by the power of God’.35 Balthasar, therefore, argued that for Aquinas esse as the actus essendi, following Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite ( fl. late fifth–early sixth century),36 was ‘a primary, immediate and comprehensive cosmic operation of God’. Being proceeds or emanates from God into all existents so that, when speaking of the processus essendi, we mean the ‘procession of act-uality [Wirk-lichkeit] (it is not, as it were, just a naked being “there”)’.37 Created ‘finite Being’38 in itself (esse commune), as opposed to divine infinite Being upon which it depends, ‘denotes something complete and simple, yet nonsubsistent’, since Being only subsists in essents.39 In contrast, the uncreated Being of God is esse that denotes ‘something’ complete and simple and also subsistent, since God’s existence is His essence (forming an identity) and He needs no essents to subsist. As was said earlier, Balthasar’s elaboration of the Thomistic real distinction above all critically engages with Heidegger’s ‘ontological difference between being and beings’. As Balthasar puts it, ‘Thomas Aquinas is in harmony with Heidegger, with whom he shares the insight into the transcendence of Being and into the fundamental distinction between Being and existent [grundlegende Differenz zwischen Sein und Seiendem], which is fundamental

30

ST, 1.50.2.3ad; compare Hebodomads, c.2, l.200 and On Being and Essence, 4.9 [c.3 in some editions], 58. See Wippel 1979. 31 32 See Aquinas, ST, 1.4.1.3ad. Wippel 1999, 99–100 and n. 61, 122. 33 34 See Aquinas, ST, 1.4.1.3ad. Wippel 1992, 394–5. 35 Aquinas, SG, 3.66, 159; cf. De Pot., 1: 3.7co., 130–3. 36 See Dionysius, DN, 5 [PTS 33, 180–90], 96–103. 37 Balthasar, GL, IV, 401–2 [H, III.1.1, 361]. 38 e.g. GL, V, 626–7, TL, I, 229, Epilogue, 89 and see 48–50 and GL, I, 62, 119, 157–8. 39 ‘esse significat aliquid completum et simplex sed non subsistens’ (Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 1.1co, 4 and see Hebodomads, 2, 18–19). See Balthasar, Epilogue, 47ff.

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for all thought, even though their respective understandings of the nature of this distinction diverge from the first point on.’40 We cannot enter into the complexities of Balthasar’s appropriation and correction of Heidegger for lack of space.41 This engagement with Heidegger is itself mediated through his dialogue with Siewerth and Ulrich on the relation of philosophy and theology.42 However, a brief note is now in order. Heidegger points to the fact that everywhere we look we encounter beings. An example would be a school building which is with its hallways, stairs, classrooms, and their contents like chalk and teachers which also are. Yet we cannot say that we can ‘find this Being within the being’,43 as if Being was a being alongside other beings. Therefore, one must hold to an ontological difference between Being and the beings to which it grants Being. Being seems impossible to conceptualize because, in the moment one tries to lay hold of it, it is as if one were reaching into a ‘void’. It is almost as if it were like nothing if it were not for the fact that it might lead one to say the school and all its contents are not. Alternatively, Being seems just an ‘empty word’,44 that is, the flatus vocis of medieval nominalism. However, such conceptualization, Heidegger argues, reifies Being. It assumes that for something to be (true), something must be out there which corresponds to the word and meaning or essence of Being. This is manifestly not the case with Being. Surely, it would be absurd to hold that the Being of the being of the school is the whole meaning of the word ‘Being’. Rather, by the word ‘Being’, in its meaning and ‘passing through this meaning’, Heidegger points to ‘Being itself—but it is simultaneously not a thing, if by thing we understand any sort of thing’.45 The four fold difference of Balthasar, which attempts to express the Thomist heritage within a Catholic appropriation of Heidegger, aims to be a propaedeutic in four steps/stages (Stufen) for reflection on Being as fundamental giftedness. ‘Reflection’ here is understood as a holding fast to the primal wonder at Being,46 that is, the sense that ‘Being overarches everything sublime and serene; nothing of all this had to be as it is.’47 However, this holding fast to wonder in the contemplation of Being is not an end in itself. Rather, the end 40 GL, V, 434 [H, III.1.2, 773]; for Balthasar Seiendes=Wesen=essentia: H, III.1.2, 951 [see GL, V, 621]. 41 Balthasar and Heidegger: Daigler 1995, O’Regan 1998, 2010 (and the forthcoming second volume of his The Anatomy of Misremembering), Sciglitano 2007, 539–44, and Casale 2009; Heidegger and Aquinas: Caputo 1982, Hemming 2003, McGrath 2006; Heidegger and theology: Hemming 2002, Pattison 2013, Wolfe 2014. 42 See Balthasar, Our Task [1984], 38 and ‘In Retrospect’ [1965], 90–1 and see TL, II, 173–86, GL, IV, 38, 400–7, V, 613–56 (see Bieler 1993, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2011), Wierciński 2006, 351–9, and D. C. Schindler 2004, 7ff.); Siewerth: Tourpe 1998, Schulz 2002, 2005, Wierciński 2003; Ulrich: Bieler 1999a, 2011, Sara 2001, Oster 2004, and Walker 2004. 43 44 45 Heidegger 2000, 36. ibid., 38. ibid., 92. 46 47 Balthasar, GL, V, 615 [H, III.1.2, 945]. ibid., 635; cf. 613.

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of such contemplation is wonder at the beauty of Being which leads to a vision of the ‘totality of beauty’48 or the ‘lighting-bolt of eternal beauty’49 which is the divine glory blazing out from the form of revelation—Christ. He is the ‘most sublime of beauties—a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified’. The fourfold difference helps to unveil the divine beauty of the Crucified by clearing away the underbrush of our vision, so to speak, in order that ‘the ray of the Unconditional breaks through, casting a person down to adoration and transforming him into a believer and a follower’.50 Balthasar argues that the four ‘phases’ were only ever the ‘ever greater extension’ of the same thing present in the initial encounter of the I and the Thou, namely, ‘the first act of consciousness of the awakening child’ which is love.51 Balthasar takes as his example of this first difference of Being the unity in free diversity of love in the dialogue between the mother as ‘Thou’ and the child as ‘I’. The child receives its Being as a gift through the coming to consciousness of its ‘I’ in the loving embrace of its mother’s ‘Thou’.52 If love is the gift of Being, for Balthasar, then it is not surprising that he, echoing Bulgakov and even in some ways Barth, argued that ‘Sein und Liebe sind koextensiv’.53 However, Balthasar holds, unlike Bulgakov, that uncreated Being is totally beyond created Being.54 Unlike Barth, he argues that created Being as an analogy of the divine Being is the ‘creative medium’ through which God revealed Himself to us in Christ crucified.55 One might argue, developing Balthasar constructively, that the dialectic of freedom and necessity can be seen as a ceaseless imperfect tension (see ch. 3) in the mother–child relationship in which each pole gifts the other with Being/ love. This echoes distantly God as Trinity in whom there is a perfect synthetic tension of free self-giving and self-receiving (F3) that is irrevocable in its determination as sacrifice for the Other (N3).56 This ‘ellipse of love’57 includes within it the free self-giving of the mother to her child and the child’s free reception of that love and embrace of the mother (F3). In addition, we can see the mother’s utter dependence (as a form of necessity) on that child in her need to love and care for it as a mother (N3). The infant, in response, is

48

49 ibid., 614. GL, I, 32. ibid., 33; see ‘Earthly beauty and divine glory’ [1983] and GL, I, 124 and 431–2. 51 GL, V, 635. 52 ‘Movement toward God’ [1967], 15–17; see GL, V, 615–18, Love, 76 and Unless You Become Like This Child [1988], 17ff.; a concept drawn from Siewerth (e.g. Siewerth 1957, 30–2 and see Balthasar, TL, II, 177, ‘Balthasar to Siewerth, 2 November 1956’, 8 and ‘Abschied von Gustav Siewerth’ [1964], 162 (see Potworowski 1995)) but compare to Ulrich 1970 (see Pitschl 1995). 53 Balthasar, ‘Der Zugang zur Wirklichkeit Gottes’ [1967], 17; compare Blondel, Action [1893], 405 [443] and Ulrich 1970, 47–111, esp. 29 (see Balthasar, TL, II, 178); Ulrich 1970, n. 9, 29–30 and Balthasar, TL, II, 44, quoting Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §158A, 110, 261–2. 54 e.g. Balthasar, GL, I, 62, 119, 157–8, 459, IV, 393ff., and V, 624–6. 55 56 57 GL, V, 631–2. See TL, I, 240–2. ‘Movement’, 15. 50

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helpless and clings to his mother as the source of his life (N3). Thus, the child gifts Being to his mother in loving her, for she cannot properly be a mother without him. She, in turn, gives Being to him in loving him, for he cannot live without her unique maternal care and attention. Both the I and the Thou in this dialogue find their ground in the free infinite love of God in giving Being to His world. One recalls John Milbank’s words: ‘gift of a gift to a gift’.58 This God chooses to only be God for us as a vulnerable human being in the world. In light of this dialectic, we cannot but affirm that love-desire/Being is both an act (‘It [love] is the meaning of the disclosure of Being as well as its disclosedness.’)59 and a grace/gift: ‘For what is more incomprehensible than the fact that the core of Being consists in love and that its emergence as essence and existence has no ground other than groundless grace?’60 It is hoped that through this constructive interpretation of Balthasar’s thought the structure of both Being as giftedness and what we call ‘freedom’ can begin to become apparent as a tension between freedom and necessity. This will prove important later when we look to the ‘perfect tension’ of freedom and necessity in the divine Being. It will also be crucial in our developing of an analogical complement to dialectic to help us in our constructive response to the problematic. Gift, and by extension, grace itself, will have to be rethought in this scheme so that it is no longer just ‘what need not be given’ (F3). It also ‘had to be given’ (N3) because of a free choice to be dependent or dependent freedom (F3). Dependence is understood as a form of freely willed necessity (see ch. 2). I choose to have my life determined and even impelled by an Other, existing in a free dependence, such that only in and through Him can I properly be (N3). This is a (broadly understood) phenomenological account of our axis F3–N3. It is paramount that we neither arbitrarily separate the identity of both moments nor confuse them and obliterate their difference. One must reach towards a new reality where both moments retain their identity in difference (‘belonging-togetherness’), following Heidegger, in a sort of interpenetration (see ch. 3).

9.2 THE REAL DISTINCTION— STEPS 2– 4 The next step in our four fold ascent is the second difference of (created) Being from beings. Being, for Balthasar, following Aquinas, is perfect fullness. It is the ‘actuality of all acts, and therefore the perfection of all perfections’.61 All existents partake in Being but ‘they never exhaust it nor even, as it were, 58 59 60

Milbank 2005, 90 and see 43ff. Balthasar, Theologik [=ThL], I, 131 [see TL, I, 122] (my trans.). 61 TL, I, 225. Aquinas, De Pot., 3: 7.2.9ad, 12.

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“broach” [anbrechen] it.’62 Creaturely Being is per se ‘finite’ in comparison to divine infinite Being but we can speak of it graciously having a ‘creaturely, free infinity and perfection’.63 Created Being, in its sheer loving freedom (F2), shines out in existents, overarching them in the pure serenity, sublimity, high untouched self-giving of its letting existents be. The existents need not be; indeed, they are accidental to Being. We cannot explicate Being and, despite being created, it is free to manifest itself to us in an infinite number of ways and to actualize an infinite number of entities.64 God’s own infinite Being is not this common or natural finite Being (esse commune) but He mysteriously causes all things in and through created Being.65 The scope and efficacy of His cause is infinite and thereby penetrates into an effect most profoundly.66 Indeed, God, for Balthasar, is not merely totaliter aliter, but, in a favourite appellation67 borrowed from Nicholas of Cusa, Non-Aliud (Non- or NotOther). Cusa’s treatise ‘On God as Not-Other’ is dedicated to the exposition that, while not denying that God is Other to Himself,68 it is impossible to make God as Trinity (‘Not-Other and Not-Other and Not-Other’)69 into ‘other than another’.70 He is not graspable by human understanding, is not other than (=over against) anything and transcends all objects (hence the neuter form: aliud not alius). God is the simple, prior, inexpressible, and unutterable Being of all beings and form of all forms. He bestows all Being as the most infinite, simple, and perfect Form of Being in such a way that He is not any of these beings or any one form.71 Created esse, understood as esse commune, is not exhausted by the essences participating in it. It is ‘the most common first effect and more intimate than all other effects’72 and ‘the proper effect of the first agent’.73 Esse actualizes, by the will of God, what is merely potential by being ‘most perfect of all effects’74 and indeed therefore ‘the highest perfection of all: and the proof is that act is always more perfect than potentiality’.75 In being the actuality of all acts, the most perfect of all effects willed by God Himself, created Being is the ‘highest act [actus ultimus]’ that all essences can participate in and thus subsist but

62

63 Balthasar, GL, V, 618 [H, III.1.2, 948] and see IV, 402. GL, IV, 406. 65 GL, V, 635; cf. TL, II, 179. cf. Aquinas, ST, 1.45.5co and 45.5.1ad. 66 cf. De Pot., 1: 3.7co., 131–2. 67 See Balthasar, Love, 150, GL, V, 626 and TD, II, 193–4, 230, V, 435 and TL, II, 212, 214–15. 68 e.g. ‘ecce enim dico alium esse patrum et alium filium et alium spiritum’ (Tertullian, Adversus Praxean, 9.1, ll.26–7, 97). 69 Cusa, De Li Non Aliud, 2: 5.19, 1117; see Balthasar, GL, V, 205–46, TL, II, 209–18 and ‘Why We Need Nicholas of Cusa’ (2001) (see Hubert 2009). 70 Cusa, De Li Non Aliud, 2: Prop. 18.123, 1165. 71 Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, 1: 8, 464–5, 17, 471 and see De Li Non Aliud, 2: 4.11, 1113; see Balthasar, GL, V, 227–8. 72 Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 3.7co., 130; compare Compendium of Theology, 1.68, 63, and see ST 1.8.1co, 8.1.1ad, 1.45.5co., De Pot., 1: 3.4 co., 101, 3: 7.2co., 10 and 3: 7.2.10ad., 13. 73 74 SG, 3.66, 160. ibid., 3.66, 159. 75 De Pot., 3: 7.2.9ad, 12; compare ST, 1.4.1.3ad. 64

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which ‘does not itself participate in anything’.76 God too does not participate in anything but this is because His existence is His essence and vice versa. As Aquinas puts it (following Boethius (c.480–524)), ‘if there be something which is a subsistent act of existing [ipsum esse subsistens], as we say God is, we assert that it participates in nothing’.77 Created Being in its perfection is an analogy of divine Being.78 It images forth the goodness of the divine Being as ‘the likeness of God’79 (imago dei). Essents, in opening themselves up to Being, furthermore, show forth an implicit desire to be like God: ‘Created existence is itself a likeness to the divine goodness. So in desiring to be, things implicitly desire a likeness to God and God Himself.’80 For Balthasar, Esse has no content other than that essence that it actualizes. It must obtain its ‘explication [Auslegung]’ in beings or a human being aware of it. Therefore, it is impossible to say that Being exists except in the essences that participate in it. The freedom of esse, which is one grounded on love (F2), needs to be understood in relation to its ‘dependence [Angewiesenheit]’ on the essents in which it is actualized.81 Since esse is dependent on essences to actualize itself, one can say, returning to our earlier identification of dependence with necessity, that essences act as a certain necessity upon the free expression of Being. If this is the case, then, in our terminology, the essents are a sort of external necessity (N1) acting upon Being in its loving (as it were) ‘expression’ of itself (F2). This creates an internal ‘need’ or necessity of Being to express itself externally (N2). Thus, in order that Being might be itself, it must give itself away to essents and ultimately to God Himself, to whom it is totally disponible, fully awaiting what comes to it in pure receptivity. Yet we might just as well express this difference at the heart of the act of Being in terms of our axis F3–N3. Being gives itself away to essents in a free contingent love-desire that might not have been given, although it has chosen to be dependent on them (F3). Yet this self-giving of Being is bound to the essents, for it cleaves to the essents in order to subsist in a free dependence (N3). Being, then, does not bring the essents into existence from itself. It cannot release natures from itself as its possibilities like God. Only God, whose existence is His essence, can generate entities, the forms to be actualized, from Himself, as He is a self-subsistent, conscious, free Spirit.82 Being, in contrast, is only the ‘actualising support of natures. It only realises natures insofar as it realises itself in natures. In itself it has no subsistence but inheres in natures.’83 Here, inspired by Heidegger,84 we have moved from pole to pole,

76 77 79 80 82

De Anima, 6.2ad, 96; see Hebodomads, 2, 18–19 and ST, 1.45.5co and 45.5.1ad. 78 De Ani., 6.2ad, 96. De Pot., 1: 3.4.9ad, 106. Siewerth 2005, 50ff.; cf. Balthasar, GL, IV, 400–7. 81 Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 22.2.2ad, 42. Balthasar, GL, V, 619 [H, III.1.2, 949]. 83 84 ibid., V, 624 and 636. ibid., IV, 402–3. Heidegger, OM, 62.

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Being to beings and back again, that is, from the second to a third difference, between beings and Being. For Heidegger, it would seem at first as if Being might prevail in its essence without beings, but, in fact, each never prevails without the other.85 Being not only grounds beings but beings ground Being,86 given their fundamental ‘being-togetherness’.87 They ‘circle’88 one another, making themselves present to man in the tension-filled perdurance (Austrag)89 of the event of appropriation/enownment (Ereignis) of Dasein. In this circling, they are, as it were, like wrestlers held apart and facing each another.90 Alternatively, using another metaphor, Being and beings are like Heraclitus’ ‘counter-stretched harmony’ of the strings of the bow and the lyre, which is both a bringing apart and a bringing together.91 Appropriating this theologically we might say that God and creation, without deifying the ontological difference,92 exist in a tension. God graciously never prevails in His essence in creation and redemption without beings/creation. Beings, in turn, are never without God, as both prevail only in their gracious mutual enownment in Christ (see ch. 3). Developing the Heideggerean insight that Being and beings exist in a mutual self-grounding, Balthasar argued that in creation there exist various ‘intra-worldly antitheses’. These antitheses are all mutually self-dependent, including ‘species and individual, essence and existence, norm and facticity, ground and appearance, inner-worldly necessity and inner-worldly contingency’.93 However, all these antitheses are contingent. Balthasar here echoes both Barth and Bulgakov, who saw a unity of F2–N2 as well as F3–N3 in God expressed in creation and redemption. The antitheses only exist in light of a non-necessary free act of God in creation that expresses the ‘self-grounding divine unity of freedom and necessity’.94 Perhaps the most basic of these antitheses is that of Being and beings (existence and essence). Being and beings exist in a ‘polarity’95 which cannot be closed without dissolving one of the realities into the other. To adapt the language of Heidegger, we may say that for Balthasar the poles exist in dynamic relationship where they belong together, both ‘held toward one another’ but simultaneously ‘borne away from and toward each other’.96 The poles, therefore, are in ‘tension’, being both borne away from each other and held toward each other in created Being and

85

Heidegger 1976, 306 [233]; see Balthasar, GL, V, 447 (following Löwith 1995, 66 and see Steiner 1989, xx, 44, Inwood 1999, 73). 86 87 88 Heidegger, OM, 69. Heidegger 2002a, 30–3. OM, 69. 89 90 ibid., 65ff. See OM, 68–9 [137] and Heidegger 1999, §215, 239, §143, 185–6. 91 Heraclitus, §209 [Fr. 51], Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1993, 192–3. 92 93 Balthasar, GL, V, 447–8 (following Löwith 1995, 67). Balthasar, TL, I, 240. 94 ibid., 241. 95 See Przywara, Analogia Entis [19622] and Polarity [1925] (see D. C. Schindler 2004, 66–95, 167–78 and Betz 2014, 58–61). 96 Heidegger, OM, 65.

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so ‘exist strictly through each other’. They remain always in a ‘reciprocal relation of dependence’.97 Existence freely gives itself away to essents but needs those essents to subsist. Essents, in turn, freely open themselves up to the existence without which they would not be. A movement within Being occurs between these two poles. One cannot give a univocal account of any of the poles, as one is immediately thrown back to the other.98 This state of permanent creative ‘tension’ or ‘oscillation’ (Schwebung or Schwebe and cognates) between Being/existence and essence/beings is arguably most fundamentally a tension between freedom and necessity. The tension of freedom and dependence/necessity between Being/existence and beings/essence is a sort of dialogue of self-giving moving between fullness and emptiness. Esse, despite its richness, can only freely constitute itself or subsist through necessarily inhering in the essences on whom it depends (‘esse non est subsistens, sed inhaerens’).99 It empties itself ‘as letting-be and letting stream [Seinlassen und als Strömenlassen], handing on further’ into finite and concrete essentia to the point of annihilation. The essent ‘responds’ in turn by constituting itself in an ecstatic movement out of itself and ‘therefore through dispossession and poverty becomes capable of salvaging in recognition and affirmation the infinite poverty of the fullness of Being and, within it, that of the God who does not hold on to Himself ’. The dependent freedom of Being (F3), then, which is also a freedom in dependence (N3), is mirrored by the very same ecstatic self-giving of the essents (F3) who need Being to be (N3). However, even more fundamentally, the ‘dialogue’ we are describing in terms of F3–N3 simply reflects who God is in and for Himself as a Triune movement of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). Created Being as free self-giving love is fathomless and is ultimately envelopped (‘within it . . . God’) by ‘radiant and universal love . . . the mantle of the divine Being which encompasses all things’.100 When one gazes at created Being in itself apart from its subsistence in things, one is faced with not only its freedom in giving itself to essents but the necessity of the essents for Being and so Being’s ultimate non-subsistence, its own selfnihilation.101 One must turn to the world where things participate and exist in Being whereby it comes to sub-stand and subsist in them as its subjects102 in order to ‘appease’ the primal wonder at the fact that something is rather than nothing at all. Wonder, therefore, is directed at both sides of the ontological difference and this means the following: ‘the fact that an existent can only become actual through participation in the act of Being points to the complementary antithesis that the fullness of Being attains actuality only in the existent’.103 97 99 101 103

98 Balthasar, TL, I, 105, 150. See ibid., 194–5. 100 Aquinas, De Pot., 3: 7.2.7ad, 12. Balthasar, GL, V, 627 [H, III.1.2, 956]. 102 ibid., 619. GL, IV, 403, glossing Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 1.1co., 4 and 3: 7.2.7ad., 12. Balthasar, GL, V, 619.

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The dependence described shows that esse is not only perfect fullness, ‘wealth’, but simultaneously it is in itself nothing104 or emptiness, utter ‘poverty’, in pouring out itself into essents. Created entities as (the Heideggerean) ‘shepherds of being’ are given the power by God ‘to shelter and tend’ the fullness of the gift of Being in themselves, however poor as limited vessels of infinite Being they may be. Being’s ultimate fullness/wealth and its emptiness/nothingness/poverty (‘the infinite poverty of the fullness of Being’) are different aspects of its derived or creaturely infinity.105 However, at base, worldly Being is profoundly finite, being ‘a “being in nothingness”, a being in movement and becoming’ tending towards the very nihil from which God created it.106 It is only saved from completely falling into nothingness and an endless contradiction between its fullness and emptiness ‘at each instant precisely by the hand of God’. He actualizes it in its subsistence in different essents or creative possibilities.107 Here Balthasar marries the Thomist notion of Being in its activity as perfect fullness and in its non-subsistence as perfect emptiness with the Hegelian notion of Being as indeterminate immediacy and nothing or non-being.108 Being is an analogy or image/likeness of the divine Being due to its perfection, its great wealth, and its poverty: ‘God-like is poverty.’109 In Being’s nonsubsistent need to pour out itself into beings, it images God Himself, who, in the fullness of His subsistent Being, out of a dependent freedom (F3) which is utterly committed to creation (N3), lets everything be as sheer gift because He ‘knows no holding on to Himself ’.110 We must then rise beyond the second and third differences and discern a fourth difference, that is, between God and the world. In the very similarity of Being to God is revealed a greater dissimilarity. God qua Divine Being does not need the world in order to subsist, since His hypostases are one with their shared Being. God would still have been Himself without having created and redeemed the world in Christ. Although, for Balthasar, as for Bulgakov and Barth, this ‘dissimilarity’ does not rule out the fact that God is free to choose (and did in fact choose) to not be God without creation. In this way, He radically identifies Himself with His creation

104

ibid., IV, 404. ibid., V, 627 and see 439, 446–9; see Heidegger 1975b, 184, 1977, 42 and 1998b, 239, 252, 260. 106 Balthasar, TL, I, 251 and see 245. 107 ibid., 251; here Balthasar follows Ulrich: D. C. Schindler 2004, 52–3. On Being as nothingness and fullness, see Meis 2009. 108 Following Siewerth (Balthasar, GL, I, 60, n. 8, TD, II, 266, n. 36, and Siewerth 2005, 62ff. and see Wierciński 2003, 119–23 and 178ff.) and Ulrich (Balthasar, GL, V, 625, n. 2, TD, II, 256–7, and TL, II, 178 and Ulrich 1999, 15–19 and 26ff., 1970, 47–111 (esp. 49) and see Sara 2001, 508ff., Bieler 1999a, xxv–xxxiv and 2011, 322ff.). See Hegel, Science of Logic, Bk. I, ch. I, 82ff. and Encyclopaedia Logic, §§86–7, 136–41 and compare Heidegger 1998a, 94–5, 1998c, 318. 109 110 Angelus Silesius, Wanderer, 1.65, 8. Balthasar, GL, V, 626–7; cf. TD, II, 261. 105

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(see ch. 10). In other words, Balthasar utilizes not only analogy in his response to the problematic but also dialectic. Building on an idea of Ulrich,111 Balthasar sees created Being as both reflecting Christ’s own total free self-giving in emptying himself 112 on the cross and mediating that glory to us.113 This is not surprising, since Christ, as the ‘concrete analogy of Being’, synthesizes in Himself both created and uncreated Being. Created Being reflects God as Trinity in Christ, as all things are made and founded in, through, and by Him (John. 1:3, 10, Col. 1: 15–17 and Heb. 1:2) (see ch. 11). As one of the rabbis put it, ‘The world was created . . . for the sake of the Messiah.’114 Creation, Being itself, serves the gracious mystery of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. The real distinction or ontological difference, therefore, serves revelation by acting in creation as a sort of ‘shadow Gospel’. It is a cruciform ontological preparatio evangelica whereby God in Christ may directly effect His creation through being written into the Being of creatures.115 Being is not, then, merely a proclamatory trace of the cross but, following Ulrich, a ‘pure mediation’ of grace.116 Balthasar described it as the ‘creative medium’ by which God’s grace in Christ reaches creation.117 Ulrich understood this ‘pure mediation’ of Being as a direct pouring forth of God’s grace to His creation whose ontological center is always Christ crucified and risen from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). There is between God and creation no existent serving as a metaxu or medium. Created Being, as the highest act (actus ultimus) of God, is here understood as ‘Nothing’ and God Himself literally participates in this nothing.118 Revelation itself could not have happened in creation if God Himself did not use, given Christ’s headship over all things, the very structures of creatureliness given to us in the act of Being. Or as Ulrich puts it: ‘Grace must always indeed arrive along the path of Being.’119 Thus, there is ‘no “neutral” metaphysics’120 or metaphysics apart from God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Yet there is an even greater mystery which is hinted at in Being (see ch. 10) but only disclosed on the cross. This is that God as Holy Trinity subsists in His Being; indeed, God possesses Himself, is free and necessary as infinite selfsubsisting Being (F2–N2), through each hypostasis emptying itself into the

111

See Ulrich 1999, 68ff., 2001, 99ff. (see Schulz 2002, 407–11). On kenosis in Balthasar: Krenski 1990, O’Hanlon 1990, G. Ward 1999, Lösel 2001, Papanikolaou 2003, Tonstad 2010, J. Martin 2015b, and O’Regan 2014, 165ff., 221–44, 303–21, and 357ff. 113 114 Balthasar, GL, IV, 38. Sanhedrin 98b, 668. 115 116 Balthasar, GL, V, 631; see Davies 1998, 14. Ulrich 1999, 15. 117 Balthasar, GL, V, 631–2. 118 See Ulrich 1999, 15–16, creatively exegeting Aquinas, De Ani., 6.2ad, 96, but compare De Pot., 1: 1.1co., 4 and 3: 7.2.7ad., 12 (see Walker 2004, 470–1, D. C. Schindler 2004, 53, and Bieler 2011, 322ff.). 119 120 Ulrich 1999, 111 and see Schulz 2002, 400–1. Balthasar, GL, V, 655. 112

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other and the other receiving it in love.121 Each hypostasis freely lets the Other be in a ceaseless movement of self-giving and self-receiving gift. In this movement, the One is freely dependent on the Other (F3) and cannot be unless the Other responds, letting itself be in love (N3).122 The Father in begetting the Son is by His giving of Himself, His free letting be of the Son. The Son in turn is Himself by letting Himself be generated, and hence the Father is dependent on His Son’s response. Finally, the Spirit is Himself by letting Himself be the mutuality of the Father and the Son (their ‘we’).123 Within these divine relations (or even distinctions) of self-giving and self-receiving love-desire is nestled creation in Christ (see ch. 11). It is a gift given from each hypostasis to the other.124 Therefore, the real distinction is described by Balthasar as ‘imago trinitatis, since in God each Hypostasis can only be itself insofar as it “lets” the others “be” in equal concreteness’.125 Difference and otherness in divine and created Being, against what Balthasar saw as a tendency in Hegel,126 are not negative but wholly positive.127 I am myself only in my letting the Other be different, as ‘being is love given away’.128 Balthasar affirms the similarity of divine and creaturely Being in the analogia entis. Both divine and creaturely Being subsist by letting-be, affirming difference. Furthermore, both beings and the divine hypostases are one, obtain their oneness of identity, in Being and the divine ousia, respectively.129 In short, the analogia entis is an analogia Trinitatis.130 Nevertheless, one cannot note the similarity of God and Being without immediately noting the ‘ever greater difference between him [God] and creatures’.131 God as Holy Trinity, unlike creaturely Being and beings which are a ‘non-identity’,132 is a true identity in difference. He subsists in Himself as three co-equal hypostases and this is co-extensive with His Being as perfect love.133 Unlike creaturely Being that needs essents in order to subsist, God qua divine Being does not need to go out of Himself to subsist. He has no need to create the world, as His existence is His essence. Divine Being, however, must never be thought of as ‘static’, a complete state of rest. It is ‘a constant vitality, implying that everything is always new’,134 since 121

122 ibid., VII, 211–28 (following Bulgakov). See TD, II, 256–9 and V, 75ff. 124 ibid., II, 256, 259 and V, 87. ibid., V, 507, 521 and see 76. 125 ibid., V, 75. 126 TL, II, 48 and see Hegel, Science of Logic, 118ff., 417–18 (see R. Williams 2007a, 37); see early Hegel discussion: Balthasar, Apokalypse, I: 562–619 (on Balthasar and Hegel: Krenski 1990, 196–205, Dalzell 2000, 171–9, Quash 2005, Schulz 1997, 686–821, 2002, 412ff., 2006 (with bibliography: n. 2, 111), and especially O’Regan 2014). 127 128 See R. Williams 2007b, 79ff. and 2004, 40ff. Ulrich 2001, 107. 129 Balthasar, TL, II, 183; cf. TD, V, 76. 130 See Franks 1998 and Krenski 1990, 129–223 and 345–70. 131 Balthasar, GL, I, 421; cf Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §806, 262 (Lateran IV). 132 133 Balthasar, TL, II, 183. See ibid., 185. 134 TD, V, 511 and see Speyr 1997, 112 at Balthasar, TD, V, 511. 123

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God in his eternal hypostatic generation is ‘“ever-more” even to himself ’.135 The eternal essence or divine Being is a ‘trinitarian happening [trinitarische Geschehen]’.136 Such hypostatic pure activity is a ‘Super Becoming’137 but ‘not ‘becoming [Werden] in an intraworldly sense’. Its excess always surpasses creaturely becoming even as it includes it. It is the ‘inner possibility and reality of becoming’,138 just as the real distinction finds its similar but infinitely dissimilar archetype in the divine life. But how might all of this be applied to our own constructive response to the problematic? Let us now try to see if Balthasar’s analogical approach can assist us in thinking through the dialectic between freedom and necessity.

9.3 THE SIMILARITY/DISSIMILARITY AND I DENTITY/DIFFERENCE OF GOD A N D TH E W O R L D I N CH R I S T There is, as Balthasar has argued, both a similarity and dissimilarity between infinite and finite Being, God and the world.139 We can use this analogical approach in our own response to the problematic of freedom and necessity as a way of making comprehensible, without blunting its paradox, the identity and difference, the dialectic, between the two. The F3–N3 axis can be traced in both God and the world, each according to its kind. This tends to support applying the F3–N3 axis to God’s relationship to the world, as we can thereby trace an identity in the latter relation while maintaining the fundamental difference between the uncreated and the created. We need to return to our earlier distinction between primordial divine election and divine-human election (see 8.3) and see how this distinction can be articulated both analogically and dialectically in Christology. If one responds analogically to our problematic, emphasizing similarity, one can point to the likeness of divine and creaturely Being. Creaturely Being fulfils itself in its freedom by ceaselessly giving itself away and in this way becomes utterly dependent on the infinite free Being of God, thereby being similar to divine everlasting love. This everlasting love of the Trinity, eternal divine self-desire, the uncreated Being of God continually personalized by the divine hypostases in its eternal freedom, is where each of the hypostases gives itself away to the Other in mutual self-election, depending and living utterly

135 137 138 139

136 ThD, 68 [see TD, V, 78 (revd)]. ThD, IV, 58. Presence and Thought [1942], 153. ThD, IV, 59 [see TD, V, 67 (revd)] and see TD, V, 512. I am indebted to Betz 2005, 2006 and compare Gallaher 2006a, 183–7.

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through and for the Other. Creation exists within this movement of free selfelecting love-desire, as a gift of the Father to His Son and the Son with Him to their Spirit. It is set apart eternally for union with God in Christ from before the ages. Yet creaturely Being is dissimilar from divine Being in that it is dependent on essents to subsist, whereas divine Being is at one with its hypostases forming an identity. Furthermore, whereas creation must give itself away to God to be itself, God need not give Himself away to creation. He need not have elected Himself as a man. Nor need He—to be Himself—have enowned divine-human election and with it creation by identifying it with His primordial election. If we respond to the problematic dialectically from that side which emphasizes identity, then we can say that God as God eternally decides to become, and in always deciding always is becoming, a God in and for creation in Christ. Creation is in a sense here implicit in God. Not only, then, is it not surprising but it was even necessary that God had to create the world with whom He might become one, as He is essentially such a divine-human Creator and Redeemer. Yet one must also look at the problematic from the side of difference. Here we see that God might not have become God for us in Christ but could have just self-elected Himself in an ecstatic divine desire as Trinity eternally. Graciously, unfathomably, then, out of a love that is full beyond full He gave Himself to us as a free gift in Christ. He allows us a participation in His own everlasting life of love by enowning us in divine-human election but only as a confirmation of our own enownment of Him. But might one attempt to harmonize these two approaches? More precisely, could not we draw on analogy, the similarity and dissimilarity of God and creation in Christ, as a way of making comprehensible, without blunting its paradoxical power, the identity and difference of God and creation as expressed in the F3–N3 axis? In order to attempt such a harmonization we need, following Barth, to return to the decision of Christ to follow after the Father. This is simultaneously an eternal decision seen in the Son’s electing of Himself as man and the temporal act of Jesus’ electing God to be His God. In divine-human election, we are dealing with not two acts—all traces of Nestorianism must be avoided—but one unified divine-human activity of love-desire, involving both the identity of creation with God and its utter difference from Him. However, as we are finite, this one divine-human act of Christ can only be apprehended discretely as two activities, two movements of love. Christ, following Bulgakov, is the perfect union of these two loves. These two loves can be viewed as two forms of Being, uncreated and created Sophia, if you will, each with its own distinct freedom, infinite and finite. Moreover, each Being is itself, is free as love in perfect personal harmony, in giving itself away to others in the Person of Christ. Let us first examine these two loves separately then together in Christ, showing the similarity and the dissimilarity of God and creation as a way of comprehending their being-togetherness in

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the paradoxical dialectic of sheer identity and difference of the uncreated and created in Christ. First, there is the love or desire of creation (F2) for its Creator, which attains its peak in man. Man, as a necessity of his nature (N2), must find fulfilment of his finite love-desire in the infinite by freely surrendering (F3) his whole being to God and in this surrender becoming utterly dependent (N3) on every word that comes from the mouth of God. This is similar to God Himself, who lives not by bread but by the power of His Word uttered eternally with His Spirit resting on Him in glory. Second, there is the love of the Creator for His creation, His ecstatic outreach to it that reaches its peak in Christ. God becomes love-desire in a new surprising incarnate form, which evokes awe and worship. In this fashion, He images His own eternal Triune life of love where each of the hypostases lives in a free complete self-giving and selfreceiving (F3) by the others that is utterly committed (N3) in mutual self-election. This is a primordial Trinitarian self-election that is a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2). Such a God is ‘a love which like fire dares all things’ as He possesses an eros manikos for His creation.140 He reaches out of Himself ecstatically in and through an eternal divine erotic-agapeistic love for union with His creation.141 This ‘crazy love’ of God for the creature is revealed in His free surrender of His own life for creation on the cross for us (F3). In this surrender, we see how the infinite Creator has become bound to the creation He forms (N3). This involves a paradox of freedom and necessity that is at the centre of both liturgy and the exegesis of the Fathers. In this dialectic of two loves-desires, uncreated and created, we see both God’s difference from creation being expressed in His identity with it, His dissimilarity from us in His similarity to us. We also see His identity or, more precisely, ‘continuity’142 with creation being expressed in His difference from it, similarity with creation in and through His dissimilarity from it. On the one hand, in Christ we see the identity of God with His creation, that is, how the Creator through His grace likens Himself to His creatures, although He is, as Balthasar insists, Non-Aliud. Christ loves and desires His Father just as His Father loves and desires Him through the Spirit. His one desire as the God-Man is to dwell in perfect unity with His Father. As man, Christ necessarily finds the end of His finite freedom in loving the infinite God (F2–N2). As God, Christ, in His infinite freedom, which is at one with His necessity (F2–N2), is not impelled by creation (N1). Just as creation loves Him, God in Christ unfathomably loves it and longs to be united with creation through man (Jn. 17:20–6). Though in the form of God, He empties Himself of His infinite power and glory (F3) and takes on Himself the finite freedom of 140 Cabasilas, Life in Christ, 6.8, 172 and 6.3, 164 [PG 150/SC 361, 2: 6:39, 657A, l.8, 74–5 and 6.16, 648A, l.4, 52–3]. 141 142 Dionysius, DN, 4.12ff. [PTS 33; 157ff.], 81ff. See R. Williams 2005.

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the form of a slave (N3) (Phil. 2:5–7). Thus, the two natures, created and uncreated love-desire, finite and infinite, are perfectly one in Christ in their erotic desire for divine-human unity. Under the rubric of identity, we can even dare say, weaving together Bulgakov with Barth’s notion of de facto necessity, that since God has eternally freely determined Himself as a God of love for us in Christ in His self-election (F3), divine love is divine-human love. This leads us to argue that just like the love of the creature, God necessarily must ecstatically love beyond Himself to be Himself as love (N3) and so He loves divine-humanely by creating and redeeming us in Christ. Yet this sacrificial love (F3) is an entirely free expression—indeed, is even identified with or divinely enowned—of His pre-eternal activity (actus purissimus) where each of the hypostases eternally elects the Other in love. Each of the persons lives in this primordial self-election in and through the others by denying Himself (F3). Bulgakov called this ‘mutual self-renouncement’, whereas Balthasar referred to it as ‘letting the Other be’ and ‘letting the Other go’. Every hypostasis gives itself totally to the Other so that it has no other life (N3). The self-emptying divine dependent freedom seen in divine-human election and then in creation and redemption (F3) that is so utterly committed to the creature that its future is creation’s future (N3) is the perfect free expression of God’s eternal self-electing life of love-desire in, by, and for the Other (F3–N3). On the other hand, in Christ we see God’s difference from His creation. In Gethsemane (Mk 14:32–6), Christ naturally desires as a man to preserve His life (N1). Yet, unlike other men, so that He might follow the end of His divine Being (N2), out of love (F2) He lays aside His human will with its finite freedom to follow the divine will with its infinite freedom. In this way, He shares with His Father in a more radical divine self-sacrificing love expressed in the cross (F3), which is a love that will not turn back in its commitment (N3). Under this same rubric, we must say that in the unchangeable bliss, where there is neither ‘more’ nor ‘less’, as Bulgakov insisted, God’s freedom is perfectly at one with His necessity (F2–N2). For creation, unlike God, its freedom is only at one with its necessity when it finds the end of that freedom outside itself in God. As all our writers argue, to be God is to be free, but this freedom is a necessary reality for God. He is the pure act of love as selfpositing, understood as primordial self-election, so once God freely gives Himself to Himself or to the world, it cannot be otherwise (F3–N3). Yet if God cannot but love Himself, for to be related to Himself is to love Himself, as Bulgakov and Balthasar have argued, this is not the case for the world. God can elect the world in love in Christ, posit a relation with creation in Himself in divine-human election, or not. The divine life is a perfect self-realization in love-desire and so God does not have to create or redeem the world to complete Himself, as Bulgakov argued against Idealism.

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Moving back and forth from the created to the uncreated in an unceasing oscillation or tension, we see God’s identification with us in Christ, His freely willed similarity, and His radical difference from us, His ever-greater dissimilarity. In Christ, we have, as it were, a new form of the analogia entis through a coincidentia oppositorum of two loves-desires structured by the axis F3–N3 where analogy is married with antinomy/dialectic: identity of love and difference of love or, alternatively, similarity and dissimilarity of finite and infinite Being, are in a perfect similarity-in-difference in the God-Man. He is most boundless in His being bound in a free dependence (F3) and most bound in His being boundless in His self-giving dependently free love (N3). But there is still more to be said about the fourth and last step in Balthasar’s metaphysics, the difference between God and the world.

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10 The Trinity, Creation, and Freedom—More on the Fourth Step Having discerned the dialectic of freedom and necessity in created Being in its similarity and dissimilarity from divine Trinitarian Being, let us now go deeper into the Trinitarian logic that undergirds Balthasar’s metaphysics. We shall first examine the infinite freedom of the Trinity and see how it is both similar and dissimilar to the finite freedom of man. But then, turning abruptly from analogy, we shall explore what appears to be a dialectical ‘turn’ in Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology through which the beginning of a form of the problematic and his response shall come to light.

10.1 I NFINITE F REEDOM— FREE DEPENDENT LOVE IN THE TRINITY God as Trinity in His ‘unconditioned freedom’ as ‘actus purus’ grounds the tension-filled difference of Being from beings (second difference) and beings from Being (third difference) out of which glory radiates. He grounds this difference by creating out of a pure act of free love as ‘the guardian and shepherd of this glory’.1 Unlike non-subsistent Being and essents which depend on each other for subsistence,2 God is the sole sufficient groundless ground for ‘both Being and the existent in its possession of form’. He is this ground as absolute subsistent Being, whose existence is His essence, and possesses a radical freedom that is not naturally dependent on some reality apart from Himself.3 God is ‘the highest synthesis, in which all differences are both formed and dissolved’.4 We need, therefore, to gaze further through all

1

2 3 Balthasar, GL, V, 636 and see 621. ibid., 624. ibid., 624–5. CL, 68; On Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology: O’Hanlon 1990, 110–44, Schulz 1997, 737–817, 2009, Krenski 1990, Pesarchick 2000, Dalzell 2000, 161–93, Lösel 2001, Birot 2003, R. Williams 4

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intra-worldly differences (first–third steps), rising still higher to the fourth step and foundational difference of all reality—God and the world. There exists, as we saw earlier, a certain analogy between created and uncreated Being (analogia entis) insofar as in creation there exists a real distinction between existence and essence, and in God, there exists a unityin-difference of His hypostases and His Being.5 Furthermore, created Being, like God in Himself and for creation, pours out itself without measure to the essent it informs in a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). However, created Being, as it is non-subsistent, is a ‘non-identity’ in comparison to the perfect identity of subsistent divine ousia with its hypostases since it is cleaved in two between itself and the essents.6 It needs an essent, which ‘is’ apart from itself, to subsist. Its freedom—like that of God—may be a freedom in dependence (F3–N3), but this freedom is ontologically cleft: an unresolved and imperfect tension of becoming between freedom and necessity. In comparison, Absolute Freedom is a perfect synthesis or tension of these moments. Despite this latter crucial proviso, we can affirm that by contemplating the real distinction as a movement of love as sheer gratuity, there is unveiled Being’s ‘final countenance, which for us receives the name of trinitarian love’.7 God as Trinity gives to the world a touch of His Absolute Freedom and ‘sovereign power of gift’. He is a ‘gifting freedom’8 understood as a ‘freely selfgiving’9 or ‘groundless love’.10 Divine love is said to be ‘groundless’ because the Father’s self-donating begetting of the Logos, as the locus of all truth, is utterly unfathomable.11 In our terminology, Balthasar, like Bulgakov, marries ungrounded freedom (F1) with a free movement of love-desire (F2). All the acts of God are equally the product of this ‘whyless’ love.12 They are an expression of His personal profligate gratuity, liberality, fruitfulness understood as the ‘superabundance of love’13 expressed as the Spirit14 who is spilled out as the mutual gift of the Father and the Son.15 This love is, Balthasar opines, adapting Schelling,16 absolutely unprethinkable.17 One cannot ‘get behind’ or ‘above’ whyless divine love as a free gratuitous self-giving revealed in Christ. Search as one might, one will not find some more primordial ‘reason’ than divine desire itself. So too one cannot get behind God’s act of self-election in Barth or one cannot climb up beyond the Absolute-Relative to the Absolute in Bulgakov.

2004, 2007b, Sciglitano 2007, 545–50, Hanby 2008, Lopez 2008, Oliver 2008, Schenk 2008, Sain 2009, Friesenhahn 2011, 79–174, and Tonstad 2009, 65–135, 2010. 5 6 7 Balthasar, TD, V, 68 and 75. TL, II, 183. GL, I, 158. 8 9 H, III.1.2, 965 [see GL, V, 636 (revd)]. TD, II, 233 and see TL, III, 240. 10 ibid., II, 177; see GL, V, 31ff., TD, II, 260, 272–3, V, 508–9, TL, I, 126 and II, 135–49. 11 12 13 TL, II, 155. GL, V, 31–2. TL, II, 163. 14 15 ibid., 140, 163–4, and 176. ibid., 155–6. 16 See Schelling, PO, SW, XIV: 337ff. (esp. 341). 17 ‘Die Unvordenklichkeit der Liebe’ (Balthasar, ThL, II, 126 [see TL, II, 135]) and see Balthasar’s discussion of Schelling in Apokalypse, I: 204–51.

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God being love is, in His groundlessness (Ungrund), also the primordial ground (Urgrund) of all that is. But as such an ecstatic love, He is beyond anything explicable by finality (e.g. the end of goodness) and propositions (truth). The same danger we saw in Bulgakov and Barth reoccurs: the turning of divine love-desire into a relentless suprarational fiat that is self-defining, swamping reality and in this way transvaluating human standards of goodness and fidelity. It is unclear in this picture how we can trust God’s self-revelation in Christ as a faithful and definitive gift. Balthasar responds (unconvincingly) that God’s truth is based upon the unfathomable groundless ground of love of the Father’s generation of the Son (F1 and F2 together) and the spirating with the Son of the Spirit. However, he baldly asserts that divine generation is not thereby an ‘irrational’ ground where theological truth is conceived as a ‘selfenclosed sphere’.18 This ‘groundless, all-grounding love’ is not ‘blind’ but ‘supremely wise and is thus the ultimate sense of all knowing and all reason’ and in this way can guide all those looking for direction.19 One wonders whether Balthasar has simply avoided the challenge by defining divine Being so broadly that it covers all ontological cases. It ends up being everything and thereby nothing in particular (not even being sui generis), like Bulgakov’s divine Sophia. Balthasar attempts to avoid the temptation of voluntarism, the turning of God’s free love into an irrational exertion of power, a wild voluntaristic divine desire, by conceiving the free love of the hypostases as an ungroundable grounding necessity (N2). This necessity is conceived as being in a perfect synthesis with divine freedom (F1 and F2)—a move we saw earlier with Bulgakov and Barth. Balthasar, reminding us of Bulgakov, frequently will say in his work that divine freedom is beyond all conditions, even those of freedom and necessity. This is because all such conditions are taken up into the divine life where God is perfectly at one with His properties.20 God’s Being is free gratuitous love understood precisely as the unprethinkable act of selfgiving, self-receiving love which always already includes within it its own necessity both in the divine life and in creation and redemption: ‘the absolute freedom of Divine Being, a freedom that, even in God, has no “why”. Both in the trinitarian self-communication and again in the decision to create the world, it is its own necessity [Notwendigkeit]. The decision to create is purely gratuitous, and we cannot get “behind” or “above” it to find some external necessity [liegende Nezessität].’21 But how did Balthasar characterize this whyless unprethinkable life of love of the Trinity? Divine Being, as we saw earlier, is a supra-Becoming, a dynamic ‘trinitarian happening’.22 In it there exists a distinction, reflected in creaturely Being, between the common Being (ousia) shared by all the divine hypostases and 18 21

19 TL, II, 155. ibid., 140–1. TD, V, 508 [ThD, IV, 465].

20

22

ibid., 147. TD, V, 67.

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the different qualities that distinguish them. The hypostases share in their common being but remain united in their uniqueness and particularity. Each hypostasis ‘lets’ the Other ‘be’ or ‘happen’ (or ‘go’) (i.e. Seinlassen, Geschehenlassen)23 in coequal concreteness through a ceaseless self-giving, self-receiving, and self-emptying (F3) that can only be/subsist through its complete reliance on the grace of the Other (N3).24 This movement in God is a state of acceptance and affirmation of the Being by one hypostasis of the other as wholly and positively different (‘letting-be’) through the release of that other hypostasis into Being (‘letting-go’ (Ziehenlassen)).25 Freedom in this Trinitarian vision is found through loving dependence on the Other, and dependence, it will be remembered, is a form of necessity. Balthasar seems to understand freedom and necessity/dependence as poles that live in and through one another just as is the case with our dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). The Father begets the Son with a complete self-giving or dependent freedom (F3) by letting Him be to go free. It might be asked whether the dependent freedom of this begetting has the sense of ‘otherwise’ but we shall leave this question until section 10.2. This complete self-giving of the Father is an ‘active actio’ insofar as ‘the Father causes the Son to be, to “go”; but this also means that the Father “lets go” of him, lets him go free’.26 However, this paternal begetting is dependent on the Son. He consents/lets Himself be begotten with complete free self-abandonment (F3) by ‘holding himself in readiness to be begotten’.27 In this way, He truly lets Himself be—in a ‘passive actio’—through the act of an Other other than Himself, that is, His Father (N3).28 The filial passive actio is a ‘condition’ of the paternal active actio.29 The Father, then, cannot do otherwise than wait for the Son to acknowledge Him as Father, making the Father’s act a free dependence (N3). The same movement of a passive actio, which is necessary for an active actio, can be seen in the generation of the Spirit. The Spirit is breathed forth mutually by the Father and Son, who ‘let Him go’. However, this spiration is only on the basis of the Spirit letting Himself be in this procession so that the Son’s and the Father’s free self-giving and self-receiving (F3) can only be such by their waiting on the response of the Spirit (N3).30 The Father’s begetting of the Son and co-breathing with the Son of the Spirit is free, as it is a gifting of Himself, and necessary, as He is only Father through these relations. The Father’s free generation of the Son and Spirit (with the Son) (F3), because it involves a necessary awaiting on the Other in its release of 23 TD, V, 85 [ThD, 75]; developing “Gelassenheit” (see GL, V, 29ff.; see Quash 2005, 52–84) via Marian (Lk. 1:38) self-surrender and receptivity (Balthasar, GL, V, 38; Mariology: Leahy 2000). 24 25 TD, V, 68 and 75. TD, V, 85–6 [ThD, IV, 75]. 26 27 TD, V, 86. Speyr, WP, 65, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 87. 28 29 30 ibid., 86 and see 85. ibid., 86. ibid., 86.

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that Other, can be seen in its active actio as containing a ‘certain passivity qualified by the “passive actio” of Son and Spirit’31 (N3). The Father to be Father must surrender to the freedom and independence of the Other. He cannot do otherwise, so His free gifting of His Being is totally definitive and eternally bound. This free dependence of the Father on the Son, F3 married with N3, is not just seen in the Trinitarian self-communication. It is also expressed, just as is the case with Bulgakov and Barth, in the divine economy. The Son, in being the perfect image of the Father who has expressed His whole love in Him, is said to be ‘apt to represent the Father’s self-giving in his creation in every respect’. The Father, however, cannot represent His self-giving in creation by Himself because He has given everything (His ‘All’) in and to His Son and so ‘He cannot do more than “pitilessly” hand over this All to the world.’32 Yet in this self-giving of the hypostases, none of them loses itself. They are who they always are by giving themselves away—self-giving is the self-preservation of identity; ekstasis is enstasis.33 This is also the case because in God free loving self-giving assumes free loving reciprocation or self-receiving love. They ‘know and interpenetrate one another’ to the same degree as ‘each of them opens up to the other in absolute freedom’, so there is no overwhelming in this mutual self-knowledge, ‘since each subsists by being let-be’.34 We do not have the space here to enter in to the complex and controversial debate surrounding Balthasar’s use in Trinitarian theology (heavily influenced by Bulgakovean kenoticism)35 of Romantic gender theories, with their emphasis on the interrelation of the male (active) with the female (passive).36 Balthasar sees the Father as dependent on the Son for His manifestation in both the immanent and economic Trinity. He is, then, by no means understood as the possessor of some sort of self-confident assertive rational male authority as unitary source that holds and then gives the Logos His Being.37 Balthasar is far from being naively ‘phallogocentric’ (Derrida). He does not privilege the dominating and initiating patriarchal subject, presence, and unity over the feminine object, ‘lack’ or absence, difference and otherness. Difference/ femininity, for Balthasar, is not merely instrumental to the masculine. Indeed, Balthasar’s discussion in this regard upsets the very gender binarism it initially presupposes and is to the end of emphasizing difference-in-unity (against Hegel) and a destabilizing conception of origin. Moreover, the very person who best embodies the free dependence (N3) and dependent freedom (F3) of 31 ibid., 87; see ibid., 91 for “super-femininity” and “super-masculinity” but contrast CL, 87, 119. 32 33 34 TD, III, 519. TD, II, 256 and V, 74. TD, II, 259. 35 See J. Martin 2015b, 222. 36 See Gardner and Moss 1999, Pesarchick 2000, R. Williams 2004, 44–7, 2007b, 82–5, Beattie 2005, Coakley 2006, 150ff., Sain 2009, Tonstad 2009, 65–135, 2010, and (esp.) J. Martin 2015b. 37 Compare Coakley 2013, 253–9.

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the Trinity, its active-passive receptivity (i.e. Gelassenheit), is the Mother of God with her ‘Yes’ at the Annunciation.38 It is for this reason that any application by him of the gender dialectic of his Trinitarian theology to justifying the Roman Catholic prohibition on woman’s ordination would seem to go counter to his own theo-logic.39 In this context, Balthasar above all resembles Bulgakov, whose understanding of the play of love in the divine hypostases is similarly kenotic but by no means sexist.40 He argues that Sophia-Ousia as God-love is ipostasnost’ or the active-passive capacity to be hypostastized and to hypostasize, to be loved and to respond in love, a perichoretic dance of divine desire. Behind both thinkers perhaps lies a critical appropriation of Schelling41 with his rethinking of the subject-object relationship. Schelling saw this relationship as an interpersonal spiritual encounter unifying the indeterminate and the determinate, infinite and finite, and subjectivity and objectivity. He understood it as the ‘third potency’ (A3) which is ‘being-with-itself ’ and the ‘subject-object’. This third potency is the fulfilment and balance of the first two potencies only insofar as it is always already dependent on their continuing co-operation.42 Balthasar’s kenoticism—his theology of free eternal dependent love—is pushing towards a new vision of divine freedom. The free self-giving and self-receiving of absolute Trinitarian love is a self-constitutive Absolute Freedom that includes within it moments of freedom and moments of necessity/ dependence. Balthasar, drawing on Barth and Bulgakov, is adapting kenoticism to elaborate a vision of Absolute Freedom that, while naturally diffusive, cannot be reduced to a necessitarian emanationism and, while fully selfpossessed, does not end with the nominalist worship of unbridled (and therefore arbitrary) divine power. He wished, as did his predecessors, to develop a form of divine activity/creativity or Absolute Freedom that, while able to be novel (freedom), remained ever self-identical in that each part is dependent on the Other for the generation of the whole (necessity). The freedom of divine love is its own necessity as a perfect union of life in dependence or activity in passivity: ‘This self-giving cannot be motivated by anything other than itself, hence it is boundless love where freedom and necessity coincide and where identity and otherness are one.’43 Thus, Balthasar goes so far as to refer to the real distinction that obtains in Being in the world, where, as we saw earlier, 38 e.g. Balthasar, TD, V, 441 (on ‘Marian principle’), ‘Who is the Church?’ [1961], 157–66, Threefold Garland [1978], 32–3 and on mariology, see Mary: The Church at the Source [1997], 97–176. 39 ‘Women Priests?’ [1979], 187–98 and ‘Uninterrupted Tradition of the Church’ [1977], 99–106 (see Coakley 2006, 150ff.). 40 See J. Martin 2015b. 41 See Balthasar, Apokalypse, I: 205–46 and GL, V, 557–72 (see O’Regan 2014, 236 and J. Martin 2015a). 42 43 See Beach 1994, 125ff. Balthasar, TD, V, 83.

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there is a dialectic of self-giving and reception, as the ‘structural reflection of triune being’,44 because there exists in this creaturely distinction ‘a remote reflection of the mystery of the Trinity’.45 But what of human freedom in relation to the Absolute Freedom we have just detailed?46

10.2 F IN ITE F REEDOM — F R EE D EP E N D EN T LOVE IN MAN Man has a ‘core of freedom’ which has a form of absoluteness in that it cannot be ‘split open’ or compelled, a sort of human F1, but which is ‘an indivisibly intellectual and volitive light . . . an understanding and an affirming’.47 It is because man is free that he is ‘termed the “image and likeness of God”—and this likewise is the concrete thrust of the “analogia entis”’.48 God, and we shall return to this idea below, has bound Himself out of love to man and creation, leaving a space for man to operate by giving him a ‘portion’ of His own Absolute Freedom.49 This is the ‘first pole’ of finite freedom as ‘autoexousion’ or the power to act from within oneself (‘Being-from-within-oneself ’) governing oneself as a king governs his own land (autokratos).50 There is, however, a complementary relativity to this absoluteness of the free will. If freedom is to desire what is right, then it needs not only good counsel, but, in order to grasp and possess the true and good, it needs ‘a joyful and loving consent of the will (complacentia)’.51 Just as God is free in the opening up and going out of the different hypostases to the Other, in the letting be, self-giving, and self-receiving of love (F3–N3), so too man cannot be free merely through securely holding on to himself in the power of his will and uniqueness. He is only himself by going beyond himself in self-surrender.52 I am myself by acknowledging (i.e. consenting to and receiving) in a dependent freedom (F3) that the Other has Being and that it too possesses itself and is unique.53 Thus, I must, indeed, I cannot do otherwise (if I am to be) (N3) than to let the Other be. I must, in a sense, consent to its Being, being dependent on it for my own Being so that without absorbing it into me it complements my particularity: ‘the soul, precisely because it possesses itself in freedom, necessarily lets all beings be on account of a concern for their freedom (as true and real); and only on this basis does it seek a letting of them to be’.54 The Other, then, exercises a sort of external necessity on me 44 46 48 50 53

45 ibid., 75; see TD, II, 209–10. TD, V, p.103. 47 See Dalzell 2000 and Cirelli 2007. Balthasar, TD, II, 210; cf. 223–4. 49 ibid., 123. GL, VII, 214 and TD, IV, 331. 51 52 TD, II, 214–15. TD, 224 and see 242. TD, V, 76. 54 TD, II, 209. ThD, II.1, 217 [see TD, II, 240 (revd)].

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(N1), for I can only be free (F1) and live, love, and desire (F2) insofar as I acknowledge him in all his otherness. He becomes an internal fact of my life (N2). Of course, this sort of anthropology immediately reminds one of Bulgakov, where finite freedom only seizes itself through the existence of an external givenness (=necessity) that must be internalized. This encounter with the Other is the opening to the ‘second pole’ of finite freedom which is the ‘necessary immanence of divine freedom in created freedom’.55 We have been arguing that finite being, like infinite Being, only realizes its freedom in its acknowledgement of dependence on others (F3–N3) who have Being. This dependence consists of being open and consenting to the Being of the Other and participating in their life as one’s own life. Their Being is my Being which is the common Being of all and this common Being is a participating gift of God’s free Infinite Being. One has an opportunity to fulfil oneself in one’s ground by consenting to ‘Being-in-its-totality’ which reveals its true face ‘as that which freely grounds all things, as that which, in infinite freedom, creates finite freedom’.56 Therefore, finite freedom fulfils itself in the (nevertheless) vastly different infinite freedom. This fulfilment is realized through a free and definitive self-giving and self-receiving which cannot be otherwise (F3–N3) by finite freedom’s handing ‘itself over to infinite free Being, to the Being who is the Giver of this free openness’ in the acceptance that others might be.57 I realize myself in God by realizing myself in the neighbour. For infinite Being in its Absolute Freedom gives itself to everything in and through created Being.58 A finite being, therefore, in being self-ruling (F1), is always moving towards its own origin in God to whom it must surrender itself to be (F3–N3), since ‘finite freedom (qua finite) only fulfils itself within infinite freedom [in der unendlichen]’.59 The operative word here is ‘in’, since God’s infinite freedom is not created or finite freedom’s opposite ‘other’ over against it (God is Non-Aliud).60 Man’s created freedom, through the Spirit with His grace, is perfected within the context of Absolute Freedom (which is love-desire) by ‘consenting to that freedom of that divine love that indwells him’61 but which is ‘immanent in it and transcendent beyond it’.62 Yet here we have a great mystery, which is that, in Christ, in His embrace of us in the Holy Trinity, our finite freedom is affirmed as distinct. Our creaturely freedom is ‘Other’ in God’s infinite freedom whose unfathomability, nonotherness, does not become less.63 Balthasar holds that, while God is not ‘Other’ to us, we can graciously be ‘Other’ to Him precisely because He undergirds that otherness.

55 58 59 61 63

56 57 TD, II, n. 64, 232. ibid., 242. ibid., 228; compare TL, I, 242. Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 3.7 co., 130; see Balthasar, GL, IV, 401–2. 60 TD, II, 236 [ThD, II.1, 214]. ibid., 230. 62 TL, III, 240 and see TD, II, 233. ibid., 272 and see 236–7. See ibid., 193–4.

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The relationship of infinite and finite freedom is asymmetric. Infinite freedom qua freedom does not naturally need to fulfil itself in finite freedom, although the finite must naturally fulfil itself in the infinite. It is imperative (see 9.3) that one holds on tightly to both divine and creaturely freedoms. On the one hand, one has God’s transcendent freedom in itself as a perfect synthesis of freedom and necessity/dependence where dependent freedom (F3) is in union with a free dependence (N3). On the other hand, one has a real finite freedom which is an imperfect creative tension between F3–N3 which, though analogically similar to divine freedom, is also radically dissimilar and cannot (lest we fall into pantheism) be collapsed into the infinite, although it finds its ground and cause in it.64 In short, salvation history should be conceived as a theo-drama which requires an ‘interplay of divine and created freedoms’.65 Balthasar repeatedly emphasizes in this line that it is only through the difference and tension between a finite freedom fallen into sin and a holy infinite freedom that there can be any theo-drama whatsoever.66 However, having carefully analogically distinguished divine from creaturely Being, infinite from finite freedom, Balthasar’s argument opens itself up to a dialectical identification of God with His creation through God’s Trinitarian self-binding to the possibility of creation and redemption. It is on this ‘dialectical turn’ from analogy that we shall now focus, for in it comes to the fore the problematic of freedom and necessity and Balthasar’s unique response. Balthasar’s balancing of dialectic and analogy (see chs. 11–12) will be the basis of our own constructive response to the problematic.

10.3 THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF THE TRINITY F O R CR E A T I O N—A D IALECTICAL TURN? In developing his Trinitarian theology, Balthasar drew heavily on the writing of his theological and spiritual ‘partner’, the Swiss mystical writer Adrienne von Speyr (1902–67). Sections of Balthasar’s later writings are catenae of quotations from her works.67 Of particular importance for him was a portion of her Die Welt des Gebetes [The World of Prayer] (1951) entitled ‘Prayer in the Trinity’. Here we find further Christological resources in responding to 64

65 See ibid., 118, 126 and TD, V, 507. ibid., II, 118. ibid., 178; cf. 35–6, 118–19, 126–7, 185, 216. 67 See ‘Short Guide’ [1955], 19, ‘In Retrospect’ [1965], 89, First Glance [1968], 13–14, ‘Another Ten Years’ [1975], 105–7, and Our Task [1984], 13, 73ff., 95ff.; on Balthasar and Speyr: Henrici 1991, 18–28, Roten 1991, Kerr 1998, Krenski 1995, 123–57 and 2006; on Balthasar and Speyr’s religious community, the Johannesgemeinschaft: Task, 117–79 and Greiner 1991; on Speyr: Sindoni 1996 and Sutton 2014 (bibliography: Glance, 102–11 and “Speyr-Werke-Johannes Verlag” (2010)). 66

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the problematic insofar as intratrinitarian kenoticism is developed on the basis of the dialectic of freedom and necessity echoing many sources including Schelling.68 Following Speyr, Balthasar appropriates this dialectic as the internal structure or order (taxis) of the Trinitarian relations.69 Contrary to a Hegelian transcendental logic, the content of the dialectic is wholly constituted and generated by the character of the hypostatic relations. Its significance is quite different from the creaturely forms of the dialectic. The mystery discerned in God draws our creaturely terminology (e.g. ‘freedom’, ‘necessity’, ‘dialectic’, etc.) as well as philosophical systems (e.g. Schelling) to it and transforms it.70 The Father freely but necessarily wills the Son’s generation, with a ‘divine necessity which expresses his spiritual nature . . . lying beyond all creaturely freedom and necessity’.71 Balthasar argues, summarizing Bulgakov, that the Father’s begetting of the Son is an initial kenosis that underpins all subsequent kenoses.72 He gives everything of His Being to the Son (Jn. 17:10) because He refuses to be God for Himself.73 He strips Himself ‘without remainder, of His Godhead and hands it over to the Son’74 as a free but necessary gift. In the free gift to the Son of consubstantial divinity given in His generation, the Son becomes infinitely Other to the Father. His response to His othering by the Father is His own identical responsive ‘self-dispossession’75 by giving Himself back to Him in gratitude76 with a ‘Yes to the primal kenosis of the Father’.77 Building on Bulgakov, the Father’s generation of the Son and the Son’s own self-renunciation in turn create an ‘infinite distance’ between the Father and the Son. This distance is maintained, sealed, and bridged by the subsistent ‘We’ of the Father and Son whom they both breathe out in common as the ‘essence of love’: the Holy Spirit.78 The free but necessary gift of the divine Being of God from God to God is not, in a sense, compulsory. Although it includes the Father’s own ‘necessary will’, a will which is beyond all creaturely notions of freedom and necessity,79 the Father passes on to the Son His will as free and not bound.80 The Son freely adopts this necessary will as His own free will.81 The Son’s own will ‘consists of divine necessity and freedom’.82 In our terminology, the Father’s begetting is 68

Speyr, WP, 28–74 [Welt des Gebetes [1951], 21–66]; see Balthasar, TD, II, 257, V, 87–91, passim, TL, II, 162–3, 288–9, III, 58–9, 163, 226–7, and 236–7; see Glance, 62. 69 See TL, III, 58–9, 163 and TD, V, 88. 70 See Athanasius, AA, 2.3.2–3, 179 [Anatolios 2004, 112]; compare Hilary of Poitiers, De Trin. 4.14 (SC 448, ll.40–41, ll.27–28) (cited at Barth, CD, I/1, 354 and see Busch 2004, 76). 71 Speyr, WP, 58 cited at Balthasar, TL, III, 236 and see 163. 72 TD, IV, 323 and Mysterium, 35; see also GL, VII, 213–14 (generally: 202–35 and compare TD, IV, 319–32). Compare Fiddes, SWKG, 289–90, 383 (see J. Martin 2015a, 2015b). 73 74 75 Balthasar, TD, IV, 324. ibid., 323. ibid., 331. 76 77 78 ibid., 324. ibid., 326. ibid., 324. 79 80 Speyr, WP, 60–1, cited at Balthasar, TL, III, 237. Speyr, WP, 59. 81 ibid., 58–9, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 88. 82 TL, III, 237, summarizing Speyr, WP, 60–1; cf. Balthasar, TD, V, 88.

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primarily a free dependence (N3) whose self-giving cannot be otherwise. This sense of ‘not otherwise’ applies likewise to the Son. He is only the Son as the only-begotten in reference to His unbegotten Father who begot Him. Nevertheless, the paternal will’s necessary quality hides within it a tacit freedom (it is a free dependence (N3)). In the reception of the paternal will, the Son enowns it by freely making His necessary begottenness His own. It is as if, from the point of view of this paternal will, which is ‘filialized’, both the begetting and the begottenness acquire the quality of free self-donation or what we have called a dependent freedom (F3): ‘[it is] as if in their freedom Father and Son recapitulate their natural relationship in order freely to be what they are of necessity’.83 The Son freely binds Himself to the necessary will of His Father and makes it His own necessity. The Son’s free binding of Himself to the necessity of His nature is the means by which He and His Father are no longer bound by it. There exists one freedom of the divine essence, but it is possessed by each hypostasis uniquely84 and in an eternal reciprocity. Balthasar often speaks, in a way that is reminiscent of Bulgakov (see 6.2),85 as if there were an essential will and three hypostatic wills. Each of these hypostatic wills—while not contradicting one another and indeed being essentially one divine will—has its own acting ‘area’ or ‘realm’ of freedom in the Godhead where each hypostasis lets the other be free.86 The divine will, as we shall shortly see, obtains its unity as a result of the ‘integration of the intentions of the Hypostases’ by the Holy Spirit. He definitively recapitulates the will(s) of the Father and the Son in an Absolute Freedom.87 In light of the Son’s eternal self-binding to the Father, we can even say, going beyond Balthasar and Speyr, that in a sense the Father need not have generated the Son. This is the case because the Son need not have accepted this generation and so the generating (Balthasar holds) is in a sense dependent on the generation.88 There is a certain divine sense of ‘otherwise’ in God’s own self-generation89 but it is infinitely dissimilar to the sense of ‘otherwise’ of God’s creation and redemption of the world. As we saw earlier, God’s selfgeneration assumes the pole of a prior non-negotiable necessity (N3) of the Father’s begetting of the Son, which then is balanced by the pole of a filial free act of assent that might not have been (F3). In this act, the Son freely binds Himself to his own necessary begottenness. Only then and retrospectively in light of this latter filial act can we call the Father’s begetting a dependent freedom (F3) since it is dependent on its free reception by the Son (N3)F3). It is for this reason that we described the Father’s self-donation of the Son as initially a dependent freedom (F3), although, strictly speaking, this is a 83 84 86 88

Speyr, WP, 58 and cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 88 and TL, III, 163. 85 TD, V, 485 and see 88. Bulgakov, AB, n. 1, 313–14. 87 Balthasar, TD, II, 257 and 262ff. TD, V, 485. 89 See TD, 87. pace K. Ward 1996, 177–9.

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retrospective filial characterization. In contrast, creation and redemption reverse this relationship (F3)N3). God decides freely to be God for the world, and this might have been otherwise (F3), but only then can we say that His self-giving is not otherwise and had to be so (N3). These issues are crucial to our own constructive response to the problematic and we shall return to them below. The Son, as was just mentioned, beholds the Father’s perpetual begetting of Him and discovers that hidden and veiled within the Father’s necessary will there ‘lies a unique, more personal and active free will which he can use as he sees fit’. By this will He enowns His own divinity. Within this same paternal necessary but tacitly free will, the Son discovers the Father’s ‘active possibilities and possible intentions’, ‘plans’ that concern Him and require His effecting.90 These possibilities are everything ‘which has the nature of purpose’ in the Father that He commits to His Son in His begetting of Him. They are tacit unformed requests, ‘like preludes, beginnings taken up by the Son to be realized’.91 They are the paternal free possibilities and intentions for creation, which Balthasar identifies with Maximus the Confessor’s divine ideas/prototypes/logoi/wills/archetypes.92 We are reminded in this context of Barth’s appeal to divine possibilities (building on the potentia absoluta/ordinata distinction) and Bulgakov’s rejection of the latter tradition. Bulgakov held that all the divine possibilities/images/ideas of love are pre-accomplished in God and realized in creation. As the Son commends His spirit to the Father on the cross (Lk. 23:46) with a dependent freedom (F3) that will not turn back from its self-giving (N3), so too the Father in begetting the Son gives ‘his spirit (his purposes, his work, his creation)’, that is, His ‘plans’, into His Son’s hands with a free dependence that cannot do otherwise (N3). The Son freely receives these plans in His enownment of His begottenness, and along with the Father’s begetting they retrospectively take on the quality of a free self-giving (F3). These Paternal plans envisioned by the Father and taken up and effected by the Son are the realization of the New Covenant through the preparation out of love for the Son by the Old Covenant.93 Thus, these plans are the Father’s entrusting to His Son of ‘the task of saving the world through his Cross’94, which he describes (see ch. 11) as a ‘freely willed “necessity” [frei gewollte “Notwendigkeit”]’.95 It is not only these free possibilities/archetypes of the Father given to His Son in the divine generation that are embraced within the eternal happening of the life of the Trinity but creation itself. Here it is understood as the realization of 90

91 Speyr, WP, 60, 63. ibid., 63–4. Balthasar, TD, V, 509 and see ibid., II, 268–70; see Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1077C–1088A (Constas 2014, 1: 94–111). 93 Speyr, WP, 63–4 [Welt des Gebetes, 55–6]. 94 Balthasar, TD, V, 88–9, commenting on Speyr, WP, 60–5. 95 Balthasar, TD, V, 509 [ThD, IV, 465]. 92

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the possibilities/archetypes and has no other ‘place’ than within the life of God Himself,96 since ‘The world’s becoming has its origin in the sublime transactions between the Persons of the Trinity.’97 The world is ‘sheltered within’ the Trinity in the ‘realm of freedom’ of the Son98 (see ch. 11). The existence of creation in God (in its archetype and its realization) is entirely apt if we remember that the Father’s self-giving in His begetting of His Son is an Ur-kenosis that underpins all subsequent self-emptying both in the Trinity and in creation and redemption. Creation is a ‘new kenosis on God’s part’99 in that the ‘creator’ out of a free self-giving and out-reaching desire (F3) binds Himself to the creature and ‘gives up a part of his freedom to the creature, in the act of creating’,100 so that He cannot turn back (N3). God in Himself is ‘life, love, an eternal fullness of communion’ and He ‘does not need the world in order to have another to love’, as is the case for German Idealism. In creating the world, without any compulsion, He acts ‘in utter freedom, binding himself freely . . . to the work he has begun and will follow through to its conclusion’. God cannot and will not turn back (N3) in creating the world out of free love (F3) but He does this ‘without becoming entangled in its confusion’.101 He becomes freely dependent upon His creation (F3–N3), just as He is freely dependent in His own eternal life of love (F3–N3), both implicitly by creaturely freedom as His first ‘self-limitation’ and explicitly in His ‘second, deeper, limitation’ in making a covenant with Israel (Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc.). This covenant is ‘indissoluble’ whatever may befall His people. Most profoundly, in a third kenosis which is the Incarnation, not just the Son, but the whole Trinity pours forth its Being into the world. Here is manifested the eternal ‘Eucharistic attitude’ of the Son in receiving His Being from the Father through their Spirit ‘in the pro nobis of the Cross and Resurrection for the sake of the world’.102 Therefore, God’s binding of Himself in creation and redemption, His becoming dependent on His creatures out of free love that will not turn back from its self-binding (F3–N3), is a new internal form of His own primordial self-emptying love where each of the hypostases is free in being dependent on the Other (F3–N3). This is despite the fact that creation is a unique reality unto itself apart from God (i.e. ‘external’ to God) and in no way (simply speaking) a ‘piece’ of God, that is, God in creaturely guise. Creation is in God in Christ because God’s own self-communication, as Trinity, is kenotic love just as we saw in earlier forms in Bulgakov and even in Barth. Balthasar has made here a startling move from analogy to dialectic. He began by emphasizing analogically, in his philosophy of Being or metaphysics, the dissimilarity of created from divine Being in that created but not divine 96 99 102

97 TD, V, 61ff. ibid., 80. 100 TD, IV, 328. GL, VII, 214. TD, IV, 331 and see GL, VII, 214.

98

ibid., 373ff. and TD, II, 262ff. 101 TD, III, 529.

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Being is dependent on existents apart from itself to subsist. But he then turns to the dialectical movement of God’s kenotic identity with the world in His sheer difference from it as immanent Trinity. Here we see the problematic come to the fore in Balthasar. God, having eternally bound Himself to the possibility of creation and redemption, now must create and redeem the world in Christ. He writes that it is part of the ‘notion’ of God, as philosophy tells us, that God ‘be free to create a world or not create it’. When God creates man, He is in no way impelled to give him a share of His life. However, the plane of philosophy is transcended ‘without losing its validity’ when God reveals that out of self-limiting divine love He has chosen not to be a God without the world (F3). His revealed ‘inner intention’ is that He ‘willed creation from all eternity’, designing and predestining man ‘as the brother of his eternal Son become man’, so that ‘now’, since He is ‘bound up with the world in the indissoluble bond of the hypostatic union, he will never again be without the world’ (N3).103 God to be God has chosen eternally to not be God without the world (F3) to which He has bound Himself in the Incarnation with a decisiveness that cannot be undone (N3). God must create the world in Christ, but, and on this turns Balthasar’s response to the problematic, only because He has freely chosen (F3) its creation and redemption as a freely willed necessity (N3). As we shall see, this divine self-binding of God to creation is enacted in Absolute Freedom by the Spirit (F3–N3). We see in our exegesis that, as was the case in Bulgakov and Barth, God has an F3–N3 relationship to the world. This economic relationship is simply an expression of God’s own nature as Trinity where each hypostasis gives itself to the Other and lives totally dependent on the Other with a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). Thus, when God decides to be God only as God for the world (F3–N3), there does exist a nature which lies behind this self-choice. This nature is God’s eternal hypostatic life of dependent self-giving (F3–N3). As we argued earlier, this divine life includes a non-Pickwickian notion of self-choice, a sense of ‘otherwise’, which we have called ‘dependent freedom’ (F3) (see ch. 3). However, as we indicated earlier, the sense of ‘otherwise’ differs in God’s self-generation and His self-determination. In God’s self-generation, we presuppose the fact that God could not but be who He is (as it were) initially in generating Himself except with a free dependence (N3). But since God freely chooses to be such a God, we can say retrospectively in a highly qualified sense that He need not have been who He is with a dependent freedom (F3) (N3)F3). Conversely, in God’s selfdetermination as Creator and Redeemer, we presuppose that God might not have been God for the world with a dependent freedom (F3). But, given the irrevocableness of His eternal decision, we can say now that He is such

103

TH, n. 5, 70.

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definitively with a free dependence (N3) (F3)N3). (We shall return constructively to these ideas in our Conclusion.) But where is the Spirit in this ‘divine drama’? The Spirit, as the quintessence and fruit of divine love, divine liberality,104 is the recapitulation105 as an absolute free will of love of the necessary (but tacitly free) will of the Father and the free but necessary will of the Son. In being such a recapitulation, He is the Absolute Freedom of love in which there can be no necessity: ‘This “third” is the quintessence of divine love, its ultimate fruit, which represents the result of the Father’s “necessary” will and the Son’s will (which consists of divine necessity and freedom): the concept of “necessity” cannot be applied in the case of this “third”.’106 In our terminology, if the Father begets the Son with a free dependence (N3) and the Son receives His begottenness with a dependent freedom (F3) which then can be applied retrospectively to the Father, then the Spirit recapitulates both moments of the axis as Absolute Freedom (F3–N3). What we are calling N3 does not fall under Balthasar’s objection to necessity in the Spirit because N3 is included within Absolute Freedom. In being breathed out by the Father and Son, the Spirit not only receives the free possibilities/archetypes of the Father but also enacts them in the Absolute Freedom of love, the ecstatic liberality of divine desire. The Spirit, in recapitulating the will of the Father and the Son, exhibits a ‘complete divine freedom’ that manifests ‘something of the Father’s predominant will and something of the Son’s subordinate will in an original and unified way’. Here superordination (necessity) and subordination (freedom and necessity) are no longer visible, since they are synthesized by an excessive Absolute Freedom of love that both depends on their co-operation and integrates them into a new whole.107 The Spirit owes its Being to the Father and Son and is ready to carry out their ‘plans’ in creation and redemption. They depend on His assistance just as the Father depends on His Son. The Spirit freely does whatever He can devise to ‘promote the love of Father and Son’.108 But here we have something unexpected. Since the Spirit is absolute free love-desire, the fruitful gratuity of the Father and Son’s conjoint love, the expectation of the Father and Son is not only fulfilled, just as the Father counted on the Son and had His ‘experience . . . fulfilled’ in Him, but even ‘over-fulfilled’. God’s love in His Spirit is an excessive, even divinely surprising love (see ch. 11). The Spirit, therefore, as absolute divine free love, an outreaching divine desire, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, F3 with N3, carries out the plans (i.e. the free possibilities/archetypes) of God: 104 106 107 108

105 TL, II, 163 and 176. ibid., III, 58 and 163 (citing Speyr, WP, 58). Balthasar, TL, III, 237 (summarizing Speyr, WP, 60–1) and see Balthasar, TL, III, 58. Speyr, Welt, 53–4 [see WP, 61 (revd)], cited at Balthasar, ThL, III, 51 [see TL, III, 58]. Speyr, WP, 63 cited at Balthasar, TL, III, 59.

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as a love that is free. It is free to choose, within the vast horizons of the divine imagination, the ways in which God’s purposes are to be implemented; this is a new and, as it were, original synthesis. The Spirit blows where he will, even though he can and will blow only within God’s infinite expanses.109

The divine processions may not be subject to any internal (pace Hegel and, arguably, Eckhart)110 or external necessity but they are nevertheless ‘not free in any arbitrary sense’ but ‘arise from a natural or necessary will of God [einem Natur- oder Nezessitätswillen in Gott], which, proceeding from Father to Son and from Father and Son to the Spirit, grounds an irreversible order’ (N3). Where this necessary will is ‘recapitulated’ to its ground in Absolute Freedom there is present ‘a valid “hierarchy” in the absolute freedom of the persons’, since ‘freedom’s primal shape’ is that ‘in order for a will to be free, it must be part of a hierarchy’.111 We see in this position an attempt by Balthasar to think through the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity within the very difference of the divine hypostases viewed kenotically. Since God is absolute free love precisely through these hypostatic differences, one can then conclude that for Balthasar this dialectic, as expressed in the relations, is eternally constitutive of God’s own self-generation of Himself as Absolute Freedom. This Trinitarian approach to our dialectic, its ‘divinization’ as it were, does not give ontological priority to one or the other of freedom and necessity but each presupposes the other like our axis of F3–N3. The philosophy of Being we traced in chapter 9 has shown through analogy that, despite the similarity of created to divine Being, there exists a yet greater dissimilarity. While created Being must subsist in essents ‘external’ to itself, divine Being can create, subsist in the world or not. However, as we have just seen, revelation permits theology to take a dialectical turn. This theological ‘turn’ in Balthasar opens up a form of our problematic, transcending the plane of philosophy without negating its use of analogy. Despite God’s difference from creation as Holy Trinity, He freely becomes identified with it. Being, as we have argued, must fulfil itself in an essent apart from itself, and finite freedom is only fulfilled in infinite freedom. But Balthasar holds that God is free to be akin to His creation in regards to His Being and His freedom as He is free in regards to His freedom being the One who loves in freedom. Thus, Infinite Free Being, God as Trinity, must create and redeem the world in Christ for God to be Himself precisely because, and on this turns Balthasar’s response to the problematic, God has eternally freely chosen to do so.112 However, God in freely but necessarily creating the world 109

TL, III, 237, summarizing Speyr, WP, 61–2 and see Balthasar, TD, V, 89, citing Speyr, WP,

60–5. 110 111 112

See Balthasar, TD, V, 439. ThD, IV, 77 [see TD, V, 88 (revd)], citing Speyr, Welt, 50 [see WP, 57–8]. See Balthasar, TH, n. 5, 70.

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becomes not only Himself in creation, infinite freedom being fulfilled in finite freedom, but more than Himself in the radically free love-desire which is the Absolute Freedom of the Spirit (see ch. 11). If God binds Himself to the world so that it becomes a necessity for Him, albeit freely willed, then does this not mean God ‘needs’ creation? Is this not a tacit pantheism? In chapter 11, we shall see how Balthasar attempted to hold together the world and God, divine freedom and necessity, in and through Christ as the concrete analogy of Being without falling into pantheism.

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11 Christ, Creation, and Divine Possibilities—‘Sheltered within’ the Trinity In the last chapter, Balthasar’s form of the problematic and his unique response to it came into the foreground. God freely accepts the creation and redemption of the world as an eternal necessity for Himself by eternally binding Himself to this possibility in the Father’s generation of the Son and then binding Himself to its reality in creation, covenant, and the Incarnation. God has chosen to be God not without the world He has created and redeemed. But how does one avoid in this theology a tacit collapse of God and creation? Balthasar’s response is found within Christology. Christ is the ‘concrete analogy of Being’, the ultimate mediation between the uncreated and the created, in whom creation exists in all its particularity in the Trinity without ultimately being identical with Him.

11.1 CHRIST AS THE CONCRETE ANA LOGY OF BEING We have argued that an analogy of Being exists between created Being and uncreated Being, God as Trinity. Esse pours itself out into essents on which it freely depends (F3) with no thought for its own self-containment and preservation (N3) just as the divine hypostases give themselves to one another, letting the Other be and go (F3) with such love that they exist only in and for the Other (N3). Both of these realities find their concretion1 in Christ, who as the only Son of the Father gave himself up freely for us (F3), going to the uttermost in His self-giving (N3) by becoming ‘obedient unto death, even death on a cross’ (Phil. 2:6–8). Worldly and Divine Being, in the light of the knowledge of a loving faith in Christ in God, is revealed as quite simply 1

Balthasar, TD, II, 271 and KB, 384; see TH, 17–18.

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kenotic. What we are speaking about is the form of Christ as the ‘central form of revelation’.2 He is the unity or synthesis of an infinitely free divine Being of love and finitely free human or worldly Being/Love3 made in the image of the Trinity. So understood, Christ is the ‘form of all forms’ and so ‘God’s greatest work of art’4 by whose cross we see no longer just beauty, but divine glory itself.5 Christ is the only one who can keep the tensions between heaven and earth together in a unity. He does this by acknowledging that He owes His created Being to another. In this acknowledgement, He transcends the finite freedom of His human will through perfectly submitting it—in the taking up of His cross—to the supremely uncompelled infinite freedom of His divine will and Being: ‘the entire theo-drama has its center in the two wills of Christ, the infinite, divine will and the finite, human will’.6 We must return to a key concept—the simultaneity of a choice in history and eternity. Christ is, uniquely, the perfect synthesis of infinite and finite freedom, divine and human wills, insofar as He is—despite the ‘essential abyss’ between the divine and created natures7—the perfect union of divine and created Being where ‘his finite freedom is so deeply rooted in his infinite freedom that it continually transcends itself toward infinity . . . to receive his mission’.8 Christ’s infinite freedom paradoxically, therefore, indwells finite freedom whereby the finite is perfected in the infinite ‘without the infinite losing itself in the finite or the finite in the infinite’.9 The freedoms, following Chalcedon, are united in Him without confusion and without change but yet indivisibly and inseparably.10 Moreover, in Christ, the healing balm of God’s holy infinite uncompelled freedom redeems the finite freedom that had fallen into sin through His ‘free graciousness’ ‘bind[ing] himself to his creature in the hypostatic union forever and indissolubly’.11 God forsakes Himself because of man’s godlessness without God becoming carnalized and without man becoming lost in a divine agon.12 The free revelation that takes place in the self-emptying of God in the sacrifice on the cross of Jesus Christ (F3), a self-gift that being given cannot return unscathed to the giver (N3), is a Trinitarian one. Christ does not show us ‘divinity’ in the abstract. He manifests the concrete love of the Father and the gift of love of the Holy Spirit, which divine giftedness is a life of free selfsacrifice (F3) that will not turn back in its determination to let the other be and go (N3). In contemplating the revelation of Christ, in cleaving to His life in giving ourselves away, we come to realize that He is an historical event that 2 GL, I, 154; cf. 435–62; on Christology: MacKinnon 1986, O’Hanlon 1990, 9–49, McIntosh 2004, Healy 2005, 91–158, and Schumacher 2007, 137–343. 3 4 Balthasar, ‘Movement’, 17. ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’ [1960], 117 and 118. 5 GL, I, 124 and ‘Revelation’, 113–14; see Nichols 2005b, 14. 6 Balthasar, TD, II, 201 (exegeting Maximus; compare CL, 260–71; on Maximus’ Christology: Bathrellos 2004, 99–174). 7 8 9 Balthasar, TD, III, 220. ibid., 199; cf. TD, II, 185, 194, 201–2. ibid., 201. 10 11 12 Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §302, 108. Balthasar, GL, I, 154. TD, II, 194.

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breaks through every established form of the age. He is in history the ‘eternal happening’ of love,13 divine Being as a ‘Super-Becoming’. This eternal happening in time in Christ is identical with God’s Trinitarian Being understood as a ceaseless self-emptying, self-giving, and self-receiving ‘immense movement of love inside of God’ (F3–N3).14 Here Balthasar is reminiscent of Bulgakov’s idea of the Divine Sophia as the purest act of Trihypostatic love, the living substance of the Absolute (Sophia-Ousia). The Divine Sophia is expressed in creation as the Created Sophia in the Absolute’s being ‘born’ into becoming as ‘God’ (Absolute-Relative) for that creation.15 It also echoes Barth’s notion of God’s ‘holy mutability’ where, since He is ever new, He remains constant in all changes.16 This eternal happening of divine love as expressed in Christ is quite simply Absolute Freedom itself as generated by a dialectic of freedom and necessity, a perfect synthesis of F3–N3. The person of Christ, therefore, is a freely dependent (F3) but utterly necessary (N3) eternal happening of the Triune Being of God in history. In the perfect personal unity of his divine and the human natures, one has ‘the proportion of every interval between God and man’.17 If Christ is the proportion of every interval between God and man, then the most basic of these intervals is that of Being. God gives Being personally to all that He creates in Christ, since ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1:17). In the generation of His Son, God the Father, who with His Son and Spirit is complete, simple, and self-subsistent Being, decides to create the world in Christ. He expresses Himself personally through creation whose Being in itself is complete, simple, but non-subsistent.18 One cannot, however, speak of Christ being a ‘mixture’ of divine and creaturely Being. Rather, the divine Person of the Redeemer effects by an unlimited free act of Being19 a perfect ‘preservative synthesis’ (sunthesis sostike) or ‘unity without confusion’ (henosis asugchutos)20 of His divine nature with human nature. In this fashion, the two natures of Christ are ‘indivisibly’ and ‘unconfusedly’ united in and through the divine hypostasis by a ‘reciprocal indwelling of two distinct poles’ where this mutual ontological presence (perichoresis) ‘not only preserves the Being particular to each element, to the divine and the human natures, but also brings each of them to its perfection in their very difference, even enhancing their difference’.21 Both created Being and divine Being as Non-Aliud are different forms of free selfgiving and self-receiving love-desire, which are structured by our axis F3–N3 (see chs 9–10). This leads us, if we read Balthasar constructively, to something

13 16 18 21

14 15 ibid., V, 67. Presence, 153. See Bulgakov, SN, 104 [UL, 110]. 17 See Barth, CD, II/1, 496. Balthasar, TH, n. 5, 69. 19 20 Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 1.1co, 5. Balthasar, CL, 254. ibid., 233. ibid., 63–4.

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like Bulgakov’s ‘two-Sophias’ Christology, although with the natures retaining their infinite difference (See 9.3). The end of such a union of divine and creaturely Being/Love-desire is that ‘as much as man, enabled by love, has divinized himself for God, to that same extent God is humanized for man by His love for mankind’.22 Yet the very nearness the hypostatic union creates between the two poles of Being/lovedesire—God being for creation with its pinnacle of man and creation through man being for God—could only exist in light of a corresponding increasing in(ter)dependence. The union as a synthesis of loves, where each distinct pole lives in and through the other, reveals ‘the ever-greater difference between created Being and the essentially incomparable God’.23 Christ, therefore, and here Balthasar echoes Bulgakov, is a perfect synthesis in unified tension or coincidentia oppositorum24 of God and the world, created and uncreated Being, the divine and human, the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and the finite, identity and non-identity, the existential and the essential, the universal and concrete particular, and freedom and necessity.25 He is the ‘one synthesis’ in which God has established His relationship to the world and is thereby the ‘measure of and distance from God’. Christ ‘happens’ in history once for all time and ‘is the norm for all that is in the world’, including— in having taken human nature—acting as the ‘standard’ by which God judges each individual man in his worth.26 In this light, Balthasar calls Christ the ‘concrete analogy of being’,27 since only Christ crucified and risen is the ‘adequate sign, surrender, and expression of God within finite Being’.28

1 1 . 2 TH E W O R LD ‘S H E L T E R E D WI T H I N’ CHRIST AND THE TRINITY But if all that is created relates to God in Christ because, as the concrete analogy of Being, all things hold together in Him, then He must in some sense be eternally related to creation. What is Christ’s eternal relationship to creation? The eternal Son is the perfect image of the Father. He contains the perfection of the divine nature most fully and all the free possibilities/ 22 Maximus, Amb. 10.3, PG 91.1113B (Constas 2014, 1:164–5) (cited at CL, 280 and TD, 201–2). See Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101.5, 157 [SC 208, 101.21, 180A, 44–5] and Athanasius, AA, 1.39.1, ll.1–2, 149 [NPNF, 329]; on the exchange of properties: Balthasar, CL, 256–60. 23 24 ibid., 64. ibid., 259 and see 66 and 209. 25 See ibid., 235–75 (esp. 272–4) and TD, II, 201–2; see Olsen 2008, 17–19. 26 Balthasar, ‘Characteristics of Christianity’ [1960], 177–8. 27 TH, n. 5, 70 and ‘he is the analogia entis in concrete form’ (‘Characteristics’, 177); cf. TD, II, 267 and ibid., III, 220–9 and KB, 328ff., 382 and esp. 387. 28 Epilogue, 89.

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archetypes of the Father in His being begotten Son (see 10.3). The Son is ‘He who is’ or the ‘Existing One’ (ho on (Ex. 3:14 (LXX)),29 the inscription found on the halo in most Byzantine icons of Christ, and so it is not surprising that we can trace back to Him the procession of creation—that is, the ideas or prototypes that constitute the world—as an imperfect imitation of the perfection of the divine nature.30 He who is is the ‘perfect image’, ‘exemplar’,31 ‘principium’ and ‘ratio’32 of creation.33 He is the primal Idea (Uridee) of the world as it will really be created in the Father’s generation of Him.34 But He is not this only but also the ‘exemplary cause of all possible worlds’ that could freely be created in that same generative act,35 as ‘the whole Trinity is “spoken” in the Word; and likewise also all creatures’.36 Aquinas, accordingly, held that, when considering the substance of the divine processions within the Godhead (generative power) and the creative procession (creative power)—that is, the free possibilities/archetypes of the Father—one must argue that they ‘do not merely admit of a same common predication, but they are one and the same thing’.37 Balthasar argues, expanding on Aquinas, that, when pondering the divine power in relationship to two different acts, a hierarchy appears where the divine processions are the ‘account and cause of the creature’s procession’.38 It will be remembered that the Father generates the Son with a necessary but tacitly free will (N3) (see 10.3). This will includes His intention that His Son create and redeem the world in Christ. In His generation, the Son freely accepts this will with its intention as a necessity for Himself. This free filial appropriation of the paternal will retrospectively transforms the necessary begetting and begottenness into a free self-giving and self-receiving (F3) and thereby turns the free possibilities into freely willed necessities. The Son in accepting His own begottenness enacts these possibilities/archetypes 29 See Aquinas, In Io. 8, lect. 3, 1179–84, Vol. 2: 118–20, lect. 8, n. 1290, 2: 154 and compare ST, 1.13.11. 30 I Sent., d.10, q. 1, a.1co, quoted at Balthasar, TD, V, 62–3 [ThD, IV, 54–5]. 31 i.e. ‘das Urbild’, ‘die Uridee’, and ‘die exemplarische Idee der Welt’ (ThD, IV, 54 [see TD, V, 62–3] and ThD, II.1, 252 and 245 [see TD, II, 278 and 270]). 32 ‘Grund’ (ThD IV, 54 [see TD, V, 62–3]). 33 Aquinas, I Sent., 10.1.1co, quoted at Balthasar, TD, V, 62–3 [ThD, IV, 54–5]. More broadly: TD, V, 61–5 and TL, III, 222. 34 TL, III, n. 2, 222 (citing Augustine’s Jo. Ev. tr. 21.4.4, 183 (FC 79: this translation mutes the sense: facere) [PL 35.1566/CCSL 36, 214]). 35 Balthasar, TL, III, 222. 36 Aquinas, ST, 1.34.1.3ad (cited at Balthasar, ThL, III, n. 3, 204 [TL, III, n. 3, 222] with interpretative note: ‘auch die möglichen Geschöpfe’). Compare Aquinas, ST, 1.34.3co and 1.45.6.1ad. 37 Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 2.6co, 76 (cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 62); though the divine power is one in the different acts of generation and creation, the effects are wholly different whether of the Son (as an eternal term) or created Being (as a temporal term): De Pot., 1: 2.6.4ad, 76 and ST 1.43.2.3ad. 38 I Sent., 10.1.1co (cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 62–3 [ThD, IV, 54–5]. See also Aquinas, I Sent, 2.1 proem., cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 62).

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contained in the Father’s will with Absolute Freedom through the procession from the Father and Son of their common Spirit (F3–N3). Thus, the taxis of the Trinity is our F3–N3. Now the substance of the power of the Father’s generation of the Son and the substance of the power of His creation and redemption of the world in Christ (through the procession from them both of the Spirit) are a unity. Although they are a unity, they still remain distinct when viewed in relation to the specific act whether of creation or generation. As the substance of the generative and creative power is always already eternal, not temporal (since divine Being is eternal and essential), the substance of the temporal act of creation is one and the same as the substance of the divine procession, as Balthasar writes: ‘once we presuppose the creation, processio within the Godhead and missio outside it are one and the same as far as the Divine Persons are concerned, even at the point where the Son and the Spirit enter the visible realm of creation’.39 God the Father, therefore, does not create the world ‘by “turning outward” but by turning to the Son within the divine life’. The Son is the manifold of all the possibilities/archetypes of creation and the Father’s eternal turning to the Son is His begetting of Him.40 The same Absolute Freedom by which God wills to be eternally what He is, and we have argued that our axis (F3–N3) is its taxis, is the very Absolute Freedom by which He wills that the world shall exist since the missions are founded on the processions. Nevertheless, creation is not God ‘and hence not necessary’. God does not pour Himself out by nature in creation as if God (as in Hegel) was under, what Bulgakov called, a ‘determinate necessity’.41 One must necessarily ‘put a caesura between the eternal Yes uttered by God’s will to himself and his eternal life’ whose ground of freedom is in itself and ‘the Yes which seals the decision to create’ whose ground of freedom is not in itself but God.42 The dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) of God in binding Himself to creation in Christ is at first and at a root founded on the immanent Trinity. We begin with the dependent freedom (F3) of the Father, and His free dependence (N3) on His eternal Son, together with the Son’s freely obedient (F3) and grateful but unswerving turning back to Him (N3). Finally, we have the Spirit’s procession from them both as the fruit of their love who as Absolute Freedom (F3–N3) will carry out their will with an ever surprising novelty. The Son’s eternal freedom, His ‘hypostatic mode of readiness’43 for self-surrender to the Father (F3), which is His freedom that needs and cleaves to the Other as the basis of its life (N3), is the same movement of love. It is the self-same free love, whether it be at the beginning with His begetting (processio) or at the end (creatio as divine missio) where He is ready to go on the most extreme path of self-giving in ‘the Eucharist, Cross, the descent 39 41

40 TD, V, 63 and see 80–1; see Aquinas, I Sent., 16.1.1co. Balthasar, TD, V, 247. 42 43 Bulgakov, AB, 142 [LG, 120]. Balthasar, TD, II, 261. ibid., 278.

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to hell’.44 Thus, despite the chasm between divine and created Being, being created is not foreign to being begotten for God in His grace. Both realities are structured and lie within the perfect life of Absolute Freedom characterized by our axis (F3–N3). We see this fundamental affinity-in-difference in the hypostatic union, since ‘in the Person of the incarnate Son, his being begotten and his being created form a unity, so too the created world is, as it were, drawn into the beginning’.45 Jesus’ consciousness is experienced entirely in terms of His mission.46 The mission of which He is aware, in His eternally free ‘readiness’ to spontaneously ‘offer’ Himself up,47 is the mission of the only Son48 precisely because He is that Son, and ‘his being sent (missio) by the Father is a modality of his proceeding (processio) from the Father’.49 The personal freedom of Christ, therefore, is identical with His mission. However, this mission ‘has no conceivable beginning’ and ‘there can be no suggestion . . . of Jesus’ carrying out some alien decision made prior to the world’s existence’,50 so, although the mission is absolutely free (F3), nevertheless, as a necessity, it ‘must take place’51 (N3). Being created, as we have seen in Balthasar, is not alien to being begotten in God but in fact is founded on the divine relations or processions. When the Son embraces the world ‘definitively’ in His Incarnation, in Christ, by entering into the sphere of time, He does not leave his eternal life behind him52 because ‘The Presence of the Son is the presence of eternity in time.’53 Jesus Christ is ‘the same yesterday and today and for ever’ (Heb. 13:8) and so it is not surprising that not only the eternal Son is said to be the ‘concrete idea’54 or Uridee of creation but Jesus Christ crucified, the incarnate Logos.55 Because of Christ, all the ages and beings within those ages ‘have received their beginning and end in Christ’. Christ is the union between limit and limitlessness, measure and immeasurability, finitude and infinity, creation and its Creator, motion and rest which ‘was conceived before the ages’.56 He is the ‘preconceived goal [telos] for which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing’.57 Balthasar argues that by contemplating Christ’s humanity we shall see how God reveals Himself to man. By contemplating His divinity, we see the idea of man58 and what is the intention of God for His creation.59 And the intention of God for His creation is to unite Himself with

44

ibid., 88 and see Speyr 1993, 199, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 81. 46 Speyr 1972, 11, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 80–1. ibid., III, 224. 47 48 49 50 ibid., IV, 330. ibid., III, 227. TD, III, 226. ibid., 225–6. 51 52 53 54 ibid., 225. TD, V, 247. TD, V, 250. TH, 92–3. 55 See CL, 269ff. and TD, V, 99–109 and 385–94. 56 Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 125) (see Balthasar, CL, 272). 57 Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 125). 58 59 See Balthasar, TD, V, 391. ibid., 392, citing Speyr 1970, 565. 45

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man in Christ and this intention is eternally foreknown, although only manifested at the end of the ages.60 Christ is the archetype of archetypes and, Balthasar tells us, the divine archetype of what is mutable ‘en-shelters’ (in sich bergen) the change of Being in itself.61 In this way, it is related to becoming not as a ‘sphere of supratemporal values’62 but as the truth of becoming which is sheltered within the arms of its Creator and Redeemer.63 The world in both its idea/archetype (Urbild) and its realization (Nachbild/Abbild)64 is therefore said to subsist by an ‘ensheltering’ or ‘sheltering within’ God (Einbergung)65 in Christ. As the ‘primal Idea’ of all creation, Christ is, as Eliot famously put it, the ‘still point of the turning world’66 at and around which the dance of creation takes place. He is (in a sense) ‘unmoving / Only the cause and end of movement’.67 He includes in Himself creation in both the form of its free possibilities/ideas/ archetypes (logoi) and the mutable variations of these ideas (tropoi). Thus, Christ embraces the form of all worldly motion, change, and time without negating the particular’s freedom.68 God is ‘latent’69 in creation in Christ. Creation, headed by man, is ‘allotted its space where the Son is’ through Christ’s dialogue with His Father in the unity of love of their common Spirit because ‘he is its prototype, fashioner and goal’.70 But if indeed all things in heaven and on earth are created in, through, and for Christ (Col. 1:16), then how do we articulate this in terms of Trinitarian theology? We saw earlier (see 10.1) that infinite freedom for Balthasar is constituted by each hypostasis letting the Other be and go, sharing in the common nature with a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). But Balthasar goes further by arguing that if divine freedom is relational, then in what takes place between the hypostases there ‘must be areas of infinite freedom that are already there and do not allow everything to be compressed into an airless unity and identity’. The Father’s act of surrender in begetting the Son has its own area of freedom just as the Son’s act of receiving His begottenness, with all the Father’s free possibilities, has its own area. Finally, the Spirit in proceeding and ‘illuminating the most intimate love’ of the Father 60

Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 and 79–80 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 124–5 and 127–8). 61 Balthasar, ThL, I, 286 [See TL, I, 251] (in sich bergen=‘to contain’ or ‘to entail’ but Balthasar is adapting Heidegger (e.g. 1956, 48–9) so it is ‘to shelter in’, ‘to be kept safe within’, ‘to gather in’, or even ‘to conceal’) and see TL, I, 264–7. 62 63 64 ibid., 251. ibid., 267. ThL, I, 303, 305 [see TL, I, 265, 267]. 65 ThD, IV, 341ff. (glossed ‘Embedded in God’ (TD, V, 373ff.)). Einbergung (=‘bergen’ + ‘in’ with movement) is untranslatable. Perhaps a ‘gathering in’, a ‘bringing into safety’, an ‘incorporation’, a ‘sheltering ingathering’ (Nichols 2000, 224–5), or even a ‘concealing within’. 66 67 Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, II, l.16, 119. ibid., V, ll. 25–6, 122. 68 Balthasar, TD, II, 278; cf. CL, 122, 131–6, Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 125) and Amb. 7, PG 91.1073C (Constas 2014, 1:86–7). 69 70 Balthasar, TD, II, 271ff. ibid., 87–8.

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and Son has its area too.71 Difference in God is both real and positive. If difference is positive for divine Being, then Absolute Freedom must not be thought of just as an essential divine ‘quality’ appropriated without remainder (and any real distinction) by each hypostasis in turn. Instead, divine freedom, and here Balthasar (see 10.3) echoes Bulgakov (see 6.2),72 must be viewed hypostatically as generated eternally by the relations of the hypostases, so that one may speak (even if God had not created and redeemed the world) of ‘realms of freedom within the Godhead’.73 Creation is ensheltered in the Trinity, where it has a certain ‘acting area’74 in the realm of infinite freedom of the Son. In this filial ‘space which is not a space’,75 creation can exercise its finite freedom. The motion of this ‘area’ is governed by ‘the infinite “idea” of the Son, which, as the prototype of creation, uniformly permeates it and, insofar as the creation is in dramatic motion, accompanies it’.76 God’s overarching plan in Christ as the Uridee, His choice to bind Himself freely to creation (F3) and be omnipotently dependent upon it (N3) as an expression of His self same life of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), is grounded in the Trinitarian happening of love. This Triune happening is the mystery of suffering love and it always already takes into positive (salvific) account the change of the creature, its movement into negativity, so that ‘if negativity does arise from the world itself, it can be effectively countered by all the essentially positive features of the life of the Trinity’.77 This Triune mystery is, building on Bulgakov, the ‘fire of suffering love’ in which man’s sin is burned up on the cross. It has burned eternally in God as a blazing passion for the eternal good expressed in the total commitment of the divine persons for one another. This is a cruciform eternal mystery into which God calls us to participate: ‘The mystery of the Cross is the supreme revelation of the Trinity.’78 Therefore, the cross, as the suffering love-desire of God, is prefigured in the life of God as a wholly positive reality. It is then expressed in creation as its dominant form. Whatever extreme movement the particular may make or, to use another metaphor, overgrown paths it may follow, they will be within the rhythm or on the highway of the Trinitarian life expressed in God’s ‘total Idea’, which is the ‘Son’s Cross’.79 This leads us to Balthasar’s controversial attempt, according to the diagnosis of Cyril O’Regan, to correct the systematic ‘misremembering’ by Hegel of the divine drama of the Trinity through its re-envisioning. It is a move arguably that directly builds on Bulgakov (see 5.3). Moreover, it is part of a broader Balthasarian project of the retrieval and reappropriation of the Christian 71 73 75 76 77 79

72 ibid., 257. See Bulgakov, AB, n. 1, 313–14. 74 Balthasar, TD, II, 262ff. ibid., 273. See Fiddes 2001b, 35–60, SWKG, 218–65 (esp. 249ff.), 320–1, 325–6. Balthasar, TD, II, 276–7; compare Fiddes, SWKG, 249–65 and 368–9. 78 Balthasar, TD, V, 99. Threefold Garland, 99 and see TD, V, 268–9. ibid., II, 278.

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tradition that he felt was first decisively distorted by Romanticism.80 Finally, it is—to use reflexively his own words on Solov’ev—meant to be an activity of distillation, for the ‘muddy stream’ of modernity runs through Balthasar’s theology ‘as if through a purifying agent and is distilled in crystal-clear, disinfected waters, answering the needs of his own philosophical spirit’.81 Balthasar argues that all the elements82 that exist in creation which are permeated by potentiality and bear the ‘negativities that result from sin’83 exist in God in a supra-essential, wholly positive, and active fashion. This means that apparent ‘negativities’ such as difference, poverty, distance/space, worship, temporality, possibility, faith, hope, and even, in a highly qualified sense, suffering, abandonment, death, and Godlessness are reflections of purely positive archetypes sheltered within the Trinity,84 since ‘all apparently negative things in the oikonomia can be traced back to, and explained by, positive things in the theologia’.85 As Yeats put it: ‘All things remain in God.’86 Put in terms of analogy, the realities of creation, which presuppose becoming, are both similar to realities in God’s Being as a supra-Becoming but also infinitely dissimilar because in Him there is no potentiality and negativity as such. Thus, the constituent elements of earthly becoming are distant images of the free possibilities/archetypes that constitute the ‘eternal “happening” in God’ which is ‘per se identical with the eternal Being or essence’.87 A few examples are in order. When the Father generates His Son, He holds nothing back and lets go of His divinity to the Son, for He will not be God for Himself alone, and this creates an infinite distance, which is only bridged by the Spirit (see 10.3).88 This ‘infinite distance’ embraces within it ‘all the other distances that are possible within the world of finitude, including the distance of sin’.89 The same distance is likewise described as a sort of ‘(divine) God-lessness (of love, of course)’, which undergirds but is not identical with worldly godlessness.90 Furthermore, the Father’s generation of the Son is said to be a ‘kind of “death”. It is a first, radical “kenosis”’ or a ‘super-death’ that undergirds all subsequent self-emptying in the immanent and economic Trinity as well as all instances of ‘good death’ in creation, above all that of Christ.91 A greater mystery reveals itself through this thinking through creaturely becoming in reference to God. The creature’s ‘No’ to God, its refusal to acknowledge that it owes its freedom to free divine love-desire, is a ‘twisted 80

See O’Regan 2014, Part 2 and compare J. Martin 2015a. Balthasar, GL, III, 292 (see Gallaher 2009a, 638–40); Cyril O’Regan 2014, 313–14 applies this passage to Bulgakov and with Jennifer Martin (2015a, 2015b, 221–3) sees Bulgakov as one of Balthasar’s modern ‘Fathers’. 82 83 Except evil which is nothingness: Balthasar, TD, V, 502–3. ibid., 173. 84 ibid., 173, 394, 506, and see 66–98; compare Bulgakov, NA, 65ff. [BL, 56ff.]. 85 86 Balthasar, TD, V, 516. Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane on God’, l.6, 293–4. 87 88 89 Balthasar, TD, V, 67 and see 512. TD, IV, 323–4. ibid., 323. 90 91 ibid., 324. TD, V, 84 and see 246. 81

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knot’ within the Trinity. This negation is located within the torrent of the allembracing Eucharistic obedient ‘Yes’ of the Son to the Father through the Spirit. So the knot is not merely situated but ultimately surpassed, as the affirmation of divine Being, ecstatic desire is excessive, and the ‘No’ is ‘left behind by the current of love’.92 The eternal generation of the Son by the Father in its ‘supra-godforsakenness’ (or whatever one wishes to call it) embraces within it ‘the day of the Son’s night on the Cross, just as it embraces every day that has been or is yet to come’.93 To adapt a poem of Yeats, ‘“Fair and foul are near of kin,/ And foul needs fair,” I cried.’94 Much of what we have been exegeting is strongly dependent on Bulgakov’s kenotic form of panentheism. However, there exists a major difference. Balthasar puts a greater emphasis on the difference of Uncreated and Created Being than Bulgakov, where (following Schelling) the essential identity of God and the world, the subject and the object, is the point of departure. Somehow the fact that creation is sheltered within God, presumably because God’s Being is a supra-Becoming, never results in any change in God.95 Balthasar, like Bulgakov upon whom he depends,96 is scathing of all notions of divine development from Hegel to Process thought97 as well as the (then) fashionable talk of ‘the pain of God’ (e.g. Kazoh Kitamori (1916–98), Moltmann).98 Here he is attacking the sort of sentiment stated famously by A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947): ‘God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer, who understands.’99 Instead, all worldly drama occurs in, by, and through the divine drama but the two are not identified as in Hegel.100 Given Balthasar’s dependence on this tradition, one feels that, like Bulgakov, he often protests too much and fears its undue influence.101 He argues (pace Idealism) that one must begin with God’s kenosis in the cross—the world drama—then work backwards apophatically to the ‘mystery of the absolute’. One excludes from God ‘all intramundane experience and suffering’ and especially the mythological notion that ‘God has to be involved in the world process’ while simultaneously presupposing the free possibilities/archetypes for such experience are grounded in the Trinity.102 As much of his theology is easily critiqued as falling into a Feuerbachian projection of the aforementioned ‘experience’ into God which then claims the human all too human reality as somehow divine, his

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TD, IV, 329–30; see Fiddes, 2000a, 184–6 and SWKG, 368–9. Speyr 1957, 50, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 263 and see 310, 255, and GL, VII, 215. 94 Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, ll.7–8, 294. 95 96 Balthasar, TD, V, 513. See J. Martin 2015a, 2015b and O’Regan 2014, 303–21. 97 Balthasar, TD, IV, 322ff. and see O’Regan 2014, 357ff. 98 See Balthasar, TD, V, 212–46 (see Goetz 1985, 1986, Kitamori 1966, Moltmann 1995). But see Balthasar, TD, V, 246. 99 Whitehead 1969, 413. 100 e.g. Hegel, Phenomenology, §19, 10, and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 327. 101 102 But see O’Regan 2014, 13ff. Balthasar, TD, IV, 324 and 327. 93

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methodology seems disingenuous at best, impossible at worst. But how might we see this move more positively? One can certainly speak of the immanent Trinity in kenotic terms, as this is part of our experience of God’s self-revelation in Christ, and revelation is always already mediated through human experience and language. Nevertheless, we must constantly confess that in such cases we are using found metaphors that are inextricable from our ‘intramundane experience and suffering’.103 Although these tropes are wholly inadequate to the task, they are being theologically redefined to attempt to express realities that ultimately lie beyond our ken.104 Furthermore, Balthasar, despite his well-known attention to (high) culture, does not always clearly acknowledge the constitutive role of history and human experience in the articulation of revelation.105 In consequence, his theology runs the risk of swallowing up the self-transforming action of the world with its tragedy, ambiguity and human ‘messiness’. One is left with a risk-free divine drama with a clear and definite resolution which is then simply unfolded in becoming but always as a remote and unsatisfactory image of the true activity in God.106 Despite these reservations, Balthasar seems to be getting at the heart of the matter when he argues for the soteriological need to find a Trinitarian ground for God’s self-revelation of Himself as freely dependent (F3) suffering lovedesire that does not turn back in its self-giving (N3). Something, he contends, happens in God—call it the ‘divine Godlessness of love’ if you will—and what matters is founding the posterior on the anterior in a way that not only justifies the ‘possibility and actual occurrence of all suffering in the world, but also justifies God’s sharing in the latter, in which He goes to the length of vicariously taking on man’s God-lessness’.107 Suffering does not exist in God as such but ‘there is something in God that can develop into suffering’,108 a readiness, a pre-sacrificial love that has ever practised in itself all its modalities, tunes, archetypes, or free possibilities. To be sure, perhaps it is Balthasar’s attempt to articulate a renewed understanding of divine possibility as more than merely an abstract potentiality but less than a fully actualized reality that finally justifies the excesses of his thought. It constructively moves the whole enterprise beyond an unconfessed and unbridled elaboration of the Hegelian intuition that God has a theo-drama, and also beyond an Eriugenian-Cusan double-speak that asserts that the world ‘is and is not God’, to a pastoral response to suffering and a contemplation of the free graciousness of God.

103

104 ibid., 324. See Newman 1976, 102. See O’Hanlon 1990, 101ff., 170 but see Dalzell 2000, 253–63. 106 See Quash 163–4, 187–95 but contrast O’Regan 2014, 388ff., 616–17, n. 11 and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 327. 107 108 TD, IV, 324; see Friesenhahn 2011. Balthasar, TD, IV, 328. 105

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11.3 D IVINE P OSSIBILITIES IN THE TRINITY AND T H E ‘SURPRISE ’ OF THE S PIRIT Balthasar wished to avoid two extremes in regard to divine possibilities/ archetypes. On the one hand, he rejects the idea that God chooses arbitrarily from an infinity of worlds one world ‘for good or ill, so to speak’ over another.109 He rules out completely as ‘fruitless’ all Leibnizian speculation concerning possible worlds110 and whether God might have created an even better world.111 For Balthasar, the potentia absoluta/ordinata distinction, which is used by Barth and rejected by Bulgakov, is a disgraceful example of Nominalist speculation where God’s decrees are elevated as ‘absolute’ beyond their sense in themselves and their coherence with all the other decrees.112 On the other hand, he cannot abide the notion that God, wishing to choose some world from amongst different possibilities and being faced with sin and death, had to commit himself to a world in which there was ‘redemption through his blood’ (Eph. 1:7), so that the world order ‘exercised some compulsion on [God’s] freedom’. Nor can it be that God to attain His fullness somehow ‘needs’ the world.113 In contrast to these two extremes, he contends that the only world with which we should be concerned is that of the real world. Revelation, in its concreteness, is exclusively concerned with this ‘real world’, and that world presupposes Christ as the concrete idea of the world (Uridee). There can be no ideas, free possibilities independent from Christ and which contradict Him.114 Everything must cohere with and, in some sense, exist ‘within’ Christ (our ‘acting area’ of freedom being in Him)115 since, as Maximus the Confessor affirms, ‘the one Logos is many logoi and the many are One’.116 Thus, the world God actually chose is the best because He freely chose it in His Absolute Freedom as ‘the adequately clear embodiment of the “idea” of the freely obedient Son’.117 The perfectly free obedience of the Son to His Father (F3) even unto death on a cross (N3) is the ‘concrete universal idea’ of the relationship ‘between heaven and earth in the form of crucified love’.118 However, it is only in our real world that the eternal Son obediently took flesh and died on the Cross and in this way has shown forth ‘the Father’s perfect love for the world’.119 The eternal possibility of that world with its accompanying Cross and Godforsakenness is no mere barren plan of action

109

110 ibid., II, 268. TD, II, 269. 112 ibid., n. 40, 268, citing Aquinas, ST, 1.25.6.3ad. Balthasar, TL, II, 147. 113 114 115 TD, V, 507. ibid., II, 270. ibid., II, 273. 116 Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1081B–C and see 1077C–1080A (Constas 2014, 1:100–1 and see 94–5) cited at Balthasar, CL, 133. 117 118 119 TD, II, 269. ibid., 271. ibid., 270. 111

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for God but a ‘freely willed “necessity”’.120 It finds its ultimate home within the obedient self-giving and self-receiving love of the hypostases. This Trinitarian love, as the nexus of the eternal possibility of the world, can be seen in God the Father’s complete self-giving in generating the Son by His necessary will (N3) with all its possibilities and the Son’s free acceptance or reception of His generation and these possibilities as His own necessity (F3). In this way, the Son accomplishes His Father’s intentions with Absolute Freedom through their Spirit (F3–N3) by freely taking flesh, putting aside His human will for His divine will (F3), and dying for our sake on a cross (N3). This interconnective centre of freely necessary love understood as a theodrama of two wills defines the bounds of the ‘possible’ for Balthasar. The ‘possible’ only has positive theological value insofar as it keeps open, in not contradicting, the real freedoms, both divine and human, in their interrelatedness.121 These preliminary thoughts bring two issues to the foreground. If the world actually chosen by God is the adequate embodiment of the idea of the freely obedient Son, then the divine possibilities concerning that world which cohere around Him must have a twofold character. First, they must (a) be concretely related to the world as it is in fact without being wholly identified with it; and second, as an extension of the first, they must (b) have some sort of ‘substantial’ reality in God beyond an abstract plan of action but which does not result in collapsing God and the world. (a) The divine possibilities are not simple unrealized possibilities for the world which God can or cannot enact as He sees fit, as in at least one stream of the potentia absoluta/ordinata tradition. They are restricted to the things in the world that actually exist and are thence (following Maximus the Confessor) ‘divine willings’ or ‘predispositions’ which have been expressed in the divine economy.122 In this sense, Balthasar is akin to Bulgakov, who argued that all the divine possibilities of love are realized. The world conceived by God as the pleroma of divine possibilities is at no point different from that which is actually created as an expression of the latter. His act of creation was complete already in the eternal contemplation of His will with its Fatherly ‘intentions’.123 Of course, in the perspective of the world, its creation is ‘entirely new, unexpected, unreducible’124 and according to the ‘naked view’ of ‘pure justice’, the possibilities cannot be identified with their expression in the world. But God views the world as it is in light of what He has eternally called it to be in its possibility by a love that includes justice as justice’s wholeness,125 so he sees the world as only the perfect response to what ‘sprang

120

121 TD, V, 509. TD, II, 270. CL, 120 (see Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1085A–C (Constas 2014, 1:106–9 and see n. 30, 481–2) and Dionysius, DN, 5.8 [PTS 33, 188, ll.8–9], 102). 123 124 125 Speyr, WP, 43–4. ibid., 44. Balthasar, TL, I, 266–7. 122

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to life in his eternal contemplation’.126 The possibility concerning the world and its expression as the world are sheltered within God in Christ who takes into account the mutability of all things (see 11.2). Another way of viewing this mystery of the identity-in-difference of the divine possibilities of the world and their realization is to take up Speyr’s description of the divine intentions that ‘are like preludes, beginnings taken up by the Son to be realized’.127 Developing the musical metaphor, one can compare the divine theologia and economia to J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–93) or Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues (Op. 87). The Son eternally takes up the preludes stated by His Father and elaborates them in the world into a fugue through the Spirit. The essence of the subsequent composition, however, can still be traced back to the grounding prelude in God, so the identity and the difference of the prelude and the fugue are maintained. (b) Turning to the next issue, we can argue that in the divine economy we see ‘things with a higher degree of reality’ which ‘initially’ seem to correspond to mere possibilities ‘in a negative sense’ within God Himself. However, although these possibilities are ideas in God, they are not simply bare negative abstractions, since what is realized economically is ‘rooted in an all-embracing divine freedom that for all eternity has been actually performing these “possible” things’.128 Here we are reminded of Bulgakov’s idea that all the images of the divine economy, which God will enact as the Absolute-Relative, already always exist in His divine counsel as pre-accomplished realities129 that are then expressed in creation and redemption. For Balthasar, the possibilities of creation and redemption, which are realized in creation, exist in God’s own eternal life of love, His outreaching desire in a supereminent, even substantial sense, which is related but not identical to their realization. Balthasar called these free quasi-substantial possibilities ‘all the modalities of love . . . which may manifest themselves in the course of a history of salvation involving sinful mankind’.130 As argued earlier (see 10.3 and 11.2), the Son receives these possibilities or modalities of love freely as His own necessity (F3) by binding Himself to the Father’s necessary will (N3), which includes them within it, and the Spirit enacts them with Absolute Freedom (F3–N3). We must, therefore, argue that in Christ, as the incarnate Son of God, we see the ‘infinite possibilities of divine freedom’ of which the creation and redemption of the world in Him form a part. The possibilities, therefore, are ensheltered in Christ within ‘the trinitarian distinctions and are thus free possibilities within the eternal life of love in God that has always been realized’. If these possibilities lie within the divine life, which is always already realized, then God does not need (pace 126 128 130

127 Speyr, WP, 44. ibid., 63, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 88 and TL, III, 226. 129 TD, V, 509. Bulgakov, AB, 370 [LG, 340]. Balthasar, Mysterium, viii–ix.

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Hegel) to posit these possibilities to realize Himself. Yet if the eternal Son always already chooses freely to make these possibilities His own by saying the ‘perfect Yes of thanks to the Father’ in His begetting, then they would seem to be in some sense freely chosen necessities (see 10.3 and 11.2). Indeed, Balthasar, drawing on Maximus the Confessor, argues that this eternal choice of the Son to bind Himself to the possibilities as His own necessities leaves behind the possibility of a gnomic free will (which can act on a possibility or not).131 In other words, despite the great dissimilarity between divine and created Being and the contingency of creation, God has so bound Himself to creation in Christ crucified that, returning to dialectic, one cannot now speak of God without the world to which He is bound in the hypostatic union. Balthasar argues that from all eternity the divine conversation of the Trinity envisages the possibility in Christ as the Uridee of involving a non-divine world in its love.132 It does this precisely through the cross. And the cross presupposes the alienation and refusal of the creature of God and the opening up of a path whereby men can go beyond this refusal and be drawn into God, rooting the world more deeply in God than sin could alienate it from Him. The divine love-desire, as a perfect synthesis of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), includes within it ‘a certain quality of “renunciation” in the eternal trinitarian life’. This can be seen in the eternal self-giving of God the Father, His voluntary but necessary self-renouncement of His own uniqueness in the generation of His Son (N3 and retrospectively F3). In response, the Son eternally and obediently receives His own begottenness (F3) from His Father through their common Spirit as Absolute Freedom (F3–N3). Balthasar refers, following Speyr, to this eternal quasi-renunciation, which he refers to as the idea of the freely obedient Son,133 as a ‘pre-sacrifice’. This ‘pre-sacrifice’ with the emergence of sin turns into the ‘actual redemption’ or ‘sacrifice’ proper of the Cross which is expressed as the same dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3).134 There is nothing hypothetical about this ‘pre-sacrifice’. It is utterly real. Indeed, it was ‘implicit from all eternity in the Son’s decision’ to obey His Father to the uttermost, ‘even if it is only completed historically on the Cross’.135 Here we are reminded of the very same nexus in Bulgakov’s and Barth’s Trinitarian theologies, which both include an eternal obedience of the Son which is expressed in creation. It would seem at first that the actualization of a divine possibility would result in a change in God. However, as we argued earlier (see 9.2, 10.1, and 131

TD, V, 508 and for the gnomic will: CL, 263–71 (see Bathrellos 2004, 148–62). Balthasar, TD, V, 509–10, citing Speyr 1970, 90–2, 1961, 24, 1999, 428, 1956, 345–6, 1948, 229, and 1958, 99. 133 134 Balthasar, TD, II, 269. Speyr 1956, 345, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 510. 135 Speyr 1956, 346, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 511. 132

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11.1), God’s Being is a Super-Becoming.136 The changes in the life of the Son in time are simply a reflection of God’s dynamic ever-changing but changeless eternal life (‘eternal change’) as an ‘eternal capacity for transformation’.137 Divine unity is not rigid, but an ever expanding circle that ‘comes together ever anew in love’.138 This love has a personal name: the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, as the Absolute Freedom of God (F3–N3), His surpassing love,139 is the pneumatic face of the excessive Being/Love-desire of the Holy Trinity. It is not only ‘ever-greater [Je-Größere]’ than man can grasp but also ‘“ever-more [je-mehr]” even to [God] himself ’.140 This divine ‘excess [Überschwang]’ (or ‘exuberance’), the eternal ‘surplus [Überschuß]’ or abundance of the divine life of love, is supremely and vividly alive.141 Hence, God is always three steps beyond the novelties of creation.142 Creation, therefore, can, in a sense, affect Him, even if it never ultimately changes Him. God can always reveal a new face to the world in relation to each movement of its life. Yet God is ever new to creation precisely because He is new even to Himself. God is ahead of creation because He surpasses (without leaving) Himself. He is three steps beyond His creatures since He is always leaping over Himself. The Son never tires of looking at the face of the Father and seeing ever-new aspects of Him ( je-neue).143 From whatever side the Son sees His Father, He sees the whole of Him and ‘by continually finding him . . . continually seeking him’.144 The Son is the primordial expectation and fulfilment of the Father in His generation of Him, for although His expectation of Him is unsurpassable (unübertreffbar), it is being continually surpassed by the fulfilment.145 Likewise, when the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son, as their mutual love or common ecstatic desire for one another, the dyad sees its love surpassed in becoming a triad ‘as it issues forth from them as a third Person, standing bodily before them and expressing their innermost being’.146 The Spirit personally makes the Father and the Son known as the ever-greater divine free love-desire and so He is both fruitfulness and the divine surplus as a hypostasis.147 But if God is a divine ever-more and this self-surpassing outstrips His own expectation in its fulfilment, then we can even dare to say that ‘In his trinitarian life he is continually being surprised by the ever-greater that he

136

137 See Balthasar, Presence, 153. Speyr 1987, 92, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 515. 139 Speyr 1993, 292, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 514. See TL, III, 58, 236–7. 140 ThD, IV, 68 [see TD, V, 78 (revd), citing Speyr 1994, 308, 1970, 80, 569, 575, 1976b, 39–42, 1991, 291, 298, and 1976a, 68] and see Balthasar, TL, III, 237, citing Speyr, WP, 30 (see also WP, 35) and Balthasar, TD, V, 78–91 and 516–21. 141 142 143 ThD, IV, 68 [TD, V, 78–9]. TD, V, 509. ThD, IV, 69 [TD, V, 79]. 144 TD, V, 78, citing Speyr, WP, 248. 145 Balthasar, ThD, IV, 69 [TD, V, 79], citing Speyr, Welt, 23 [see WP, 30] and see Balthasar, TL, III, 237, citing Speyr, WP, 30. 146 147 ibid, 30. TL, III, 30. 138

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is.’148 God surprises Himself. Being free in regard to His freedom, a freedom that is love, He is free in regards to His eternal self-seizure, His knowledge of who He is. And this divine capacity for the joy of surprise not only applies to the immanent Trinity but to God’s activity in the divine economy. The Spirit, knowing the depths of God, all of the divine possibilities willed by the Father and freely accepted by His Son, can provide a ‘surprise’ (Überraschung)149 to even God Himself with his enactment of them in free love in creation and redemption.150 He is the author of the ‘eternal inundation of love’, a union in difference that in its Absolute Freedom, recapitulating the necessary and free will of the Father and the Son, can include even broken creation because it is an ever-greater ‘miracle that fulfills itself beyond all expectations’.151 Through the Spirit, God allows Himself to be surprised and allows Himself to wonder at the world as a gift eternally given and received in gratitude in Jesus Christ. Rowan Williams puts this Balthasarian point well when he evokes the spirit of his great doctoral supervisor, the Anglican theologian and ecumenist A. M. (‘Donald’) Allchin (1930–2010). Allchin loved to repeat a famous line from the Welsh poet and hymn-writer Ann Griffiths (1776–1805), ‘Wonderful, wonderful in the sight of the angels’ (Rhyfedd, rhyfedd gan angylion)152: ‘Perhaps it allows us to say (with conscious boldness) that God ‘wonders’ even over the world he made; that he in and through the incarnate Christ allows himself the joy of surprise as again and again new things are generated by that one word, that one image; a wisdom that lives by welcome and by wonder.’153 The world, the cross, and the Incarnation, therefore, and here we are at the heart of Balthasar’s response to our problematic, are free possibilities existing actually in the divine life. These divine realized possibilities are willed necessarily by the Father (N3) in His begetting of His Son and freely and necessarily accepted by the Son (F3) in His very sacrificial disposition (‘in the hypostatic mode of readiness’).154 They are expressed historically in creation, incarnation, and the cross where Christ follows the Father’s will not His own (Lk. 22:42). Finally, the possibilities are willed through the absolute free love-desire of the Spirit (F3–N3) who brings the divine surprise of the resurrection out of them. The uncreated is dissimilar to the created in that the economia does not change God because of the dynamism of the divine life concretized in the Spirit. However, given God’s free self-binding, one can no more speak of a pure nature than one can of a God who remains wholly untouched by the Incarnation. But this need not lead to a collapse of the immanent and

148 149 150 151 153

ibid., and see Speyr, WP, 28–32 and 50; cf. Balthasar, TD, V, 79–80, 400–1 and TL, III, 227. ThL, III, 218 [TL, III, 237]; cf. TL, III, 227 and see TD, V, 79. See Speyr, WP, 50. Balthasar, TL, III, 236–8, summarizing WP, 30, 58, and 61–3. 152 Speyr 1993, 292, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 515. Allchin 1987, 25. 154 R. Williams 2011. Balthasar, TD, II, 278.

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economic Trinity, for both realities exist in a unity in difference. The economy unfolds sacrificially in the world the enfolded Trinitarian reality of divine lovedesire, specifically, the Son’s eternal pre-sacrificial generation that contains His eternal heavenly will to give up Himself for the life of the world. Put otherwise, suffering, the cross, and death are only a ‘reflection’ or ‘manifestations’ of ‘tremendous realities in the Father, in heaven, in eternal life . . . the love of God that goes to the ultimate’.155 Therefore, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8) corresponds to two realities. Firstly, it corresponds to the eternal theological reality of the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son in the begetting of the Son by the Father and the Son’s letting be of Himself to be begotten, which is a ‘pre-sacrifice’ (a sort of renunciation in the Trinity). Secondly, it corresponds to an economic reality. With the emergence of sin, this Trinitarian love as pre-sacrifice becomes a true renunciation or sacrifice which is fully included in God in the parousia/ Ascension (see our Conclusion). Both realities, as we have been at pains to show, are structured by our axis with the second being an expression of the first. The divine possibilities are foundational variations which are developed into creation and redemption. They form the tissue of the divine relations understood as an obedient sacrificial life of love, so, while the world simpliciter is not necessary, it is much more than merely accidental. To be sure, Balthasar is explicit that the creature is ensheltered in God insofar as it participates in the begetting of God’s own Son, which is a necessity that subsequently is enowned as a free reality.156 Nor does God hold anything back in participation, including a share of God’s paternity.157 Thus, although we are now stepping beyond Balthasar, we might build on Balthasar’s theology by arguing that creation and redemption can be said to be necessary internal realities for God as God (N3) because God in His Absolute Freedom has bound Himself to them as free possibilities (F3). In consequence, in creation and the Incarnation and decisively through the Ascension, the world has becomes ensheltered in God in Christ as the Uridee. In this ensheltering, creation comes to share in the very necessity (N3) of God’s own self-generation as a free gift (F3). But ‘What does God get from the world?’158 Balthasar, it will be remembered, wants to avoid what he understands to be the extremes of God having to create the world out of some primordial need to develop as God and creation simply being created as God wished to effect His own accidental glorification. Creation is an ‘internal gift from each Divine Person to the Other’. It is gifted with a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3) from the Father to 155

Speyr 1948, 229, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 511. 157 ibid., 131, citing Speyr 1961, 227. Balthasar, TL, II, 148–9. 158 ‘Was hat Gott von der Welt?’ (ThD, IV, 463), glossed: ‘What does God gain from the world?’ (TD, V, 506). 156

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the Son and from the Son in Eucharistic gratitude in bringing it back to Him in the Ascension and by the Spirit to them both. Nor because it is a gift should it be seen as a ‘superfluous work’, since both creation and God are ‘gift’.159 The Father in His supreme condescension is in a sense enriched by the Son’s bringing of creation back to Him—the economy is not nothing to God. It is as if when the Father hands all judgement to His Son in the parousia through their Spirit that something new occurs in Him with a new love being set free and a new joy of surprise arising. Heaven is glorified by Christ’s saving deeds and the love of God; His grace is yet more perfected because the love of the Cross supersedes and ultimately absorbs judgement. The law of God becomes no longer death but life itself through the Spirit of Sonship (Rom. 8).160 This enrichment can be understood as a new current in the flow of divine desire, so that creaturely love can be drawn into it, as it were, by a supremely merciful ‘incision’ being made in the divine love to make ‘room’ for the love of the creature.161 Creation is a gift which ‘enriches’ God—albeit an ‘additional gift’. When creatures participate in the joy and glorification of the three hypostases, they obtain thereby an ‘inward share’ of the divine self-exchange. Mirroring this self-exchange, they are able with loving gratitude to take the divine things they have received as an inward ‘share’ together with their creatureliness (‘the gift of being created’) and freely offer (F3) themselves and one another, and their whole life as a divine gift in Christ to God. Their life is only insofar as it is in, by, and for Jesus Christ (N3).162 But if God out of His condescension allows creation to enrich Him as an additional gift and if creation with the cross and Godforsakeness is a divine freely willed necessity, then (going beyond Balthasar) it would seem reasonable to argue that God can be said to need the world to be God (N3) as He has freely chosen this possibility (F3). This need, however, is not for God Himself (his self-development) but for love of the world. However, Balthasar (unlike Bulgakov) is unwilling to take this theological leap, presumably out of fear of jeopardizing God’s Absolute Freedom by (as he saw it) fully jettisoning the doctrine of divine apatheia. However, one feels that in his avoiding of need language but in using other language that implies it, he simply talks around the issue and baulks at the full implications of the fact that God has eternally bound Himself to creation in Christ with a free dependence (N3). Balthasar’s distinctive contribution to the clarifying of the problematic is twofold. First, he has given us a Trinitarian theology in which the Son freely accepts the free possibilities of creation and redemption laid on him by the Father as free necessities and a vision in which the Spirit enacts these possibilities in Absolute Freedom. Second, he has shown how the outworking of the latter Trinitarian theology must be in the placing of the two wills or two 159 161

160 ibid., 507. ibid., 514–16, citing Speyr 1993, 292, 211–12, 161. 162 Speyr 1961, 164, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 515. ibid., 521.

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decisions of Christ—in history and eternity—in the context of an analogy of Being. We shall elaborate these ideas in the Conclusion. A crucial question remains. Is there some way we might speak of God’s need for the world while retaining an o/Orthodox doctrine of God? In our Conclusion, we shall explore this possibility in a sort of unsystematic systematic postscript to this book following a recapitulation and evaluation of our three writers’ responses to the problematic.

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Conclusion The Absolute Freedom of God and the Mystery of Divine Election

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12 Concluding Unsystematic Systematic Postscript 12.1 THE DIALECTIC OF F REEDOM AND NECESSITY: MYSTERY, PROBLEMATIC AND RESPONSE We have arrived at the end of our exploration of the problematic of the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity. We began our work with the mystery of the Father’s ‘everlasting love’ for us (Ps. 103:17, Isa. 54:8, Jer. 31:3) in His Son Jesus Christ through the bond of their common Spirit resting upon Him crucified and risen according to the Scriptures. It was argued that this is a mystery of both divine desire and freedom and necessity and that it could be articulated in the form of a question—‘How can God as Trinity be free in creation and redemption if in His everlasting love for creation He has eternally bound Himself to the world in Christ?’ Furthermore, this question presented us with our theme, as a theological path or way forward, in the form of what we called a problematic. A ‘problematic’ has been understood as an intellectual mystery to which one can respond conceptually. Unlike a problem, it has no ultimate rational resolution and any response simply clarifies the mystery, allowing one to go deeper on the path of the question. By this problematic, we refer to the fact that Christian theology is faced with the simultaneous demand that it affirm the radical ungrounded free love of God as Spirit (2. Cor. 3:17) who ‘alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light’ (1 Tim 6:16) and the fact that this same God has emptied Himself and taken the form of a slave (Phil. 2:5ff.), since out of an everlasting love for humanity He has eternally chosen His only-begotten Son to be Jesus of Nazareth (1 Pet. 1:20), the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8 [KJV]). Because God as God has eternally determined Himself to be God for us as Jesus Christ, the world is given a certain necessity for God because, if there were no world, there would be no Christ. We have used a whole variety of senses of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ depending on the situation and writer, which were codified in chapters 2–3. The meaning of ‘dialectic’, in turn, changes according to the context. It can be

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understood broadly as the interplay of two distinct but mutually defining realities, roughly similar to Balthasar’s polarity, or, as a contradiction between mutually opposed realities, as in Bulgakov’s antinomism and Barth’s own dialecticism. We have held up throughout the study a synthesis or union of dependent freedom (F3) with free dependence (N3), the ‘F3–N3 axis’ or simply ‘axis’, as a means of conceptualizing the inexpressible dynamism of Absolute Freedom understood as the divine life of love-desire both in itself and in reference to the world. This axis has served as a sort of working theological ideal of the conceptual balance that must be struck by the theologian between freedom and necessity in any contemporary response to the problematic. It is to be hoped that, by attempting to respond to our problematic through a critically constructive exposition of the different positions of our writers and our own tentative synthesis of their ideas, we have at least entered more deeply onto the path of our initial question. In this way, we can slowly see the question’s ‘total and original meaning,1 arriving thereby back at the place from which we started, which is the mystery of God’s everlasting love for us in Christ, ‘And know the place for the first time’.2 In knowing this place anew, by having entered so deeply onto the path of the question that we are now attuned to it, and have started on the way to corresponding to the mystery we seek, we are ready to complete the admittedly tentative synthesis we have been attempting to formulate. What we have aimed at is less a wholly new theological position on God and the world than a sort of unsystematic systematic theological response to our problematic, drawing on a selection of ideas from Bulgakov, Barth, and Balthasar. Having summarized the problematic, let us turn to a summary, comparison, and evaluation of the different responses of our writers with particular attention as to how well they accommodate the F3–N3 axis that has guided us throughout our book. On this basis, we will then turn in conclusion to an exploration of the relationship of the two forms of divine election we have proposed as the core of our own constructive response.

12.2 SUMMARY, COMPARISON AND E VALUATION OF THREE THEOLOGIANS

12.2.1 Sergii Bulgakov The tension or dogmatic dialectic of divine freedom and necessity has been traced quite differently in all three of our writers. In the case of Bulgakov, the notion of ‘antinomy’ is central. He proposes such an antinomy between God 1

Heidegger 1956, 40–1.

2

Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, V, l.29, 145.

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as Absolute and Absolute-Relative whose theses must be held together in faith. On the one hand, ‘God’, to the extent that one can speak of Him at all, is Absolute self-relation in Himself, the immanent Trinity, in relation to whom the world need not have been. He is in His Absolute Freedom a movement of self-enclosed eternal divine love-desire, in a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2), and creation exerts no necessity whatsoever upon Him either external or internal (N1–N2), since it need not have been created. As Holy Trinity, each of the hypostases lives through loving the Other by mutual selfabandonment (F3). Each divine Person’s life is constituted wholly in, for, and according to the Other. This self-emptying sacrificial love is such a radical self-renunciation to the Other that the Person cannot turn back once it has given itself. Indeed, in some sense, it has eternally bound itself, since its selfgiving is a sort of eternal voluntary self-depletion, almost akin to death (N3). However, on the other hand, God as Absolute Holy Trinity, a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2), freely posits Himself as relative to an Other, a world, becoming Absolute-Relative or the economic Trinity, the Creator and Redeemer of the world for whom He is their ‘God’. Here God in His Absolute Freedom has freely put Himself in need to the world (F3). The world, as an Other, exerts at first an external necessity (N1) upon Him which then becomes an internal necessity (N2). The Absolute has become God as love for the world and love to love must ecstatically love (N3) beyond itself to be love, namely, create and redeem. The greatest strength of Bulgakov’s system is that, at least ideally, it holds to the fact that even when God is most identified with creation, in the economic Trinity, to the point that He must love it to be Himself, He is at once paradoxically and supra-rationally, as apprehended by faith, utterly free and different from the world. It need not have been created since the immanent (Absolute) is in the economic Trinity (Absolute-Relative). Quite simply, Bulgakov’s system in the abstract holds a great deal of promise for embodying our axis, F3–N3. However, such a vision of a sort of ‘hierarchy’ of divine selfdeterminations or the groundedness of God’s self-revelation in the world upon God’s self-revelation to and in Himself never regrettably goes beyond simple assertion, perhaps because such a unity is beyond human reason. Moreover, in practice, due to the identification of the divine and the creaturely Sophias, and this is the greatest weakness of Bulgakov’s theology, the antinomy between the immanent and the economic Trinity, God in Himself and for Himself, tends to become collapsed into one monistic divine reality that subsumes creation in a form of a love determinism.3 As we have noted, Bulgakov’s ontological modalism or monism makes any sort of embrace of analogy impossible. The Divine Sophia simply is another

3

See Bulgakov, AB, 462 [LG, 435] and SWG, 146–8.

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mode of the Created Sophia making it nonsense to talk about real similarity or dissimilarity as is necessary for an analogy to obtain purchase. In order for an analogia entis to cohere with sophiology, one would need a fundamental rethinking of his doctrine of creation which would allow for a clear and absolute distinction between the uncreated and the created. Bulgakov’s theology has an acute awareness of the necessity of creation for God in Christ, but that this necessity is freely given and could have been ‘otherwise’, as God remains Absolute while being Absolute-Relative, is obscured due to his creeping pantheism. Thus, it is Bulgakov’s poor execution of his own antinomy, undermined by his sophiology, that neuters otherwise quite daring ideas, such as the fact that, since God as Absolute has posited Himself as AbsoluteRelative (F3) in order to be love, He must love beyond Himself (N3). Sadly, the antinomy of the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative in practice is reduced to the latter so that we have no clear sense of God’s dependent freedom (F3) in His self-giving but only His need of creation to be Himself or free dependence (N3). Bulgakov’s theology, then, provides only in the abstract an excellent execution of the F3–N3 axis. In practice, his antinomies are theologically unworkable. God’s dependent freedom (F3) in Bulgakov— which needs to be anchored in some version of God as Absolute—is constantly being assimilated into N3, with God as Absolute-Relative wholly identified with the world and the world-process. This collapse of F3 into N3 creates a divine love monism or what he himself calls a ‘pan-Christism’.4 Despite these difficulties, we observe in Bulgakov’s thought a pattern that can also be traced in Barth and Balthasar. It is that a world-oriented F3–N3 axis, as expressive of Absolute Freedom in relationship to the world, is founded on an eternal enactment in love of the same axis, which takes the form of intratrinitarian kenosis. This rooting of the axis in the Trinitarian relations makes it more persuasive when applied to creation insofar as God’s relationship to the world in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) is simply a free self-revelation of who God already always is. The relationship of love, then, established in Christ between the uncreated and created, far from being arbitrary, is a self-revelation of the trinitarian life, which means that the life of the world is established on the same foundation as God.5 Furthermore, Bulgakov’s thought has been particularly helpful to us in attempting to articulate (9.3) in the context of Balthasar’s thought a new form of the analogia entis viewed in light of the coincidentia oppositorum of God and the world. There is a continuity and discontinuity of the life of God and of creation in the form of two loves-desires, created and uncreated Being, which Bulgakov refers to as two Sophias, infinite and finite in a perfect hypostatic union in Christ where we see at work the F3–N3 axis. Here he arguably is

4

AB, 463 [LG, 435].

5

See R. Williams, SB, 168–9.

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echoed by Balthasar’s Christology (see 11.1). The other idea of Bulgakov which has great wisdom is the notion that all the divine seeds/ideas of the divine economy are pre-accomplished in the divine counsel where God has already always determined Himself for the world in Christ but that God is freely dependent (F3) on creation in Christ to express them in temporality, in the world. God eternally freely needs creation in order to actualize, accomplish His divine plan (F3), and so He is always already bound to creation in Christ. In order to be love, He must love beyond Himself (N3).

12.2.2 Karl Barth One observes a similar pattern to the problematic in Barth, but here, according to our reading of him, it takes the form of a ‘dialectic’. Barth’s dialecticism and Bulgakov’s antinomism, as we argued, are little different as methodologies in the abstract, but are very different in practice given the quite different substantive positions of the thinkers. Barth famously rejects the analogia entis. His own replacement for it (analogia relationis and fidei) is radically dialectical so he does not here provide us with any new methodological variation in responding to the problematic. On one side of the dialectic emphasizing freedom, God as Trinity is a perfect but necessarily free divine love (F2–N2). In this eternal life of love, there is a natural divine lowliness, an eternal obedience of the Son to the Father with the Spirit affirming them both (F3–N3) (here reminiscent of Bulgakov and Balthasar). On this basis, God has chosen irrevocably—elected—to be God for us in Jesus Christ, selfemptying and self-humbling Himself by binding Himself in Christ to creation in a dependent freedom (F3). This is one of an infinite number of free possibilities available to Him. God, however, could have been satisfied with loving Himself alone, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so He in no way had to create and redeem the world in Christ and it exerts no necessity upon Him, even a de facto necessity (N1–3). God could have acted otherwise. On the other side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, God as Trinity, who is in Himself a loving synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2) involving both a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3), has eternally freely chosen to be God for us in Christ (F3). This eternal choice to be a particular man, Jesus Christ, is His election of Himself and us in Christ and since it is an eternal choice, made at every moment, He always already is God for humanity. Thus, there exists a freely chosen de facto necessity of the world for God. There must be a world for God to be God for us in Christ and He must be its Creator since He has become freely dependent on creation and cannot act otherwise (N3). In light of de facto necessity, the free act of God’s self-determination of and for us as Christ loses its sense of ‘otherwise’. It is impossible to speak of God other than the Father of Jesus Christ and the Spirit

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as the Spirit of the Father and Jesus Christ. In our terminology and in a way that is reminiscent of Bulgakov, F3 effectively becomes collapsed into N3, since God’s existence as the Logos asarkos is a pure abstraction. Yet this reality nevertheless must be retained in a bald assertion if we are to maintain the sheer graciousness of God’s self-giving. The greatest strength of Barth’s response is his (broadly speaking) ‘covenantal’ focus on the problematic with his account of God’s eternal election of Himself as a man in Christ, and man’s own choice in Christ’s election of God as his God. It is on this basis that our own constructive theology begins. In focusing so closely on divine election in his later doctrine of God, he sets the issue of Christology at the heart of Trinitarian theology, thereby establishing, despite himself, a tension between God and the world at the heart of his theology, leading to the historicization of his doctrine of God. Nevertheless, Barth, in a way that is often obscured in Bulgakov’s antinomism by his sophiology, manages to balance the emphasis on dependent freedom (F3) with an equally primordial free dependence (N3). In the first aspect, Barth argues that God could have acted otherwise, based on the potentia absoluta/ ordinata distinction. In the second aspect, Barth holds that God has always already been for us in Christ and so could not have acted otherwise. Furthermore, in Barth, we can see N3 of our axis at work with especial clarity. Here his Christological specificity is a great advancement on Bulgakov’s more general approach. God’s self-election of Himself in Christ needs, in order that it might be actualized in revelation, man’s election of God in Christ. The other great achievement of Barth’s response, which we have also adapted, is his idea of the de facto necessity of the world for God in Christ. Once God has chosen to be a certain sort of God, God for us in Christ, and this choice is an eternal choice, one cannot climb up behind Him to another sort of God who is not irrevocably for us in Christ. One must say, therefore, the world had to be created and that God had to be the Creator or there would be no Christ. This idea, which is similar to our notion of free dependence (N3), is akin to Bulgakov’s less Christocentrically focused notion that God to be God as love must love beyond Himself in creation and redemption. However, it more carefully retains the connection of God’s free self-binding of Himself (F3) to the fact that God is bound (N3). All things considered, in Barth’s dialecticism, one is sometimes left with the sense that since God has bound Himself to the world, He is in some sense also simultaneously unbound. If this is the case, then He could very well unbind Himself altogether from creation if He so desired (although He does not so desire). In other words, there exists in Barth’s retention of the logos asarkos, a whisper of a deus absconditus (a tacit voluntarism) that threatens to unravel the deus revelatus in some new yet unrevealed form. The major problem with Barth’s response, if problem it is, is that, like Bulgakov’s antinomism, there is an unsurpassable abyss between God’s free binding of Himself to creation

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(F3), which presupposes that He could have existed otherwise than He in fact does exist, and the fact that once this free self-binding is presupposed, one immediately has to say that one cannot imagine God without creation in Christ, as His self-binding makes the world part of the divine identity (N3). In short, Barth’s response simply begs the question and reinstates the problematic in a more radically Christocentric form. This critique, of course, could apply to a naively dialectical application of our own F3–N3 axis and so we needed to turn to Balthasar for a sort of corrective to, or clarification of, the dialectic of F3–N3 using analogy.

12.2.3 Hans Urs von Balthasar Analogy, in contrast to dialectic, does not simply beg the question of our problematic by emphasizing the need to assert simultaneously God’s complete difference from creation and His identification with it. Rather, it speaks of similarity between two realities and for two realities to be able to be similar there must be an enduring non-negotiable difference that underpins it, which in an analogical mode we speak of as their dissimilarity. God, therefore, is closely akin to His creation in eternally determining Himself for us in Christ, but there also exists an underlying greater dissimilarity between Him who is uncreated and the world which He has formed out of love. We suggested, therefore, drawing on David Tracy, that using analogy to understand our problematic might serve as a complement to antinomy/dialectic. Here we turned to the witness of Balthasar, in whom our problematic involves not only dialectic but also analogy. Balthasar begins with the contemplation of the self-giving of Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of Being’,6 the similarity-in-difference of God and the world in one divine Person, in whom one sees our dialectic in the form of both creaturely Being and the uncreated Being of God as Trinity. Within the field of creation we see, first in the difference between the I and Thou of the mother and her child and then, following that, in the difference between Being and beings and beings and Being, that the dialectic of freedom and necessity can be traced in creation as a polarity. This intra-worldly polarity takes the form of ceaseless tension between two poles where the poles imply one another, are dependent upon, and exist through one another or interpenetrate. The tension is between a selfpossessing integrity that ceaselessly gives itself away in a dependent freedom (F3) and a ceaseless acceptance of this Other in a free dependence (N3) who then gives itself away in turn in dependent freedom, and so on ad infinitum. Here necessity comes to be characterized broadly speaking as dependence. The 6

Balthasar, TH, n. 5, 69.

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axis F3–N3, in a way not found previously in Bulgakov and Barth, is not simply an expression of Absolute Freedom but has a creaturely analogue, thereby being well established in the world. This intra-worldly polarity provides a form of propaedeutic lifting the mind up to the mystery of Christ and from Him to the similar but dissimilar form of the polarity in the Trinity. Taken as a whole, the existence of intra-worldly polarity in creation shows that creaturely Being is kenotic and thereby bears within itself a trace of Christ’s own self-surrender on the cross which is the fundamental event of creation and recreation. Yet we can go yet further here in turning to the similar but yet dissimilar form of the polarity in the divine hypostases. Like creaturely Being, the divine Being of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2), is a ceaseless movement of loving self-giving where each of the hypostases depends on the others in letting the Other go and letting the Other be, and where in turn the Other accepts or receives itself and gives itself away as a free gift. Here, like Bulgakov and Barth, there is an eternal union in love of a self-giving and self-receiving dependent freedom (F3) and irrevocable free dependence of the One on the Other (N3). Yet quite unlike creaturely Being, this polarity involves a perfect tension, for in God not only existence and essence coinhere in a dynamic unity but freedom and necessity itself. Unlike Bulgakov, in Balthasar there is no collapse of F3 into N3 making for the complete identity of divine and creaturely Being. Nor does the great difference between the uncreated and the created make it blasphemous even to compare the one to the other from some neutral ‘point of contact’, as is the case in Barth. Paradoxically in Barth’s theology, this same difference opens up a strange abyss. We observe the creation of a sort of ontological crevasse between the divine F3 towards the world, which assumes the sheer difference of God from the world, and the divine N3 towards the world, which appears to create a total eternal identity of God and creation in Christ. Barth, through his fear of the analogy of Being, ends up losing much of what he had positively gained in his balance of F3–N3 in God’s freedom towards the world through the carefully distinguished but unified divine-human decision/election of Jesus Christ. By contrast, for Balthasar in his account of divine and creaturely Being, it is the unity of the person of Christ Himself as the concrete analogy of Being who serves as the mean of all continuities and discontinuities between God and creation. This allows for God’s establishment in Christ of a gracious similarity and dissimilarity between God, who still remains Non-Aliud, and the world. How do freedom and dependence work out in the relation between God and the world? It is here that Balthasar’s thought is, in the mode of analogy, similar to Bulgakov’s understanding of the person of Christ as a dialectic of two Sophias, two loves-desires. Here we need to turn back to Christ as the concrete analogy of Being. As human, Christ fulfils His finite freedom (F2) only through completely surrendering it in love to God, and becoming utterly dependent upon Him (F3–N3), whereby God, who once was an external

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necessity (N1) for Christ, becomes a freely chosen internal necessity (N2). This divine infinite freedom in which finite freedom is fulfilled is one with necessity (F2–N2) and it is eternally both a dependent freedom and a free dependence (F3–N3). As divine, Christ, in His infinite freedom, as a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2) which is self-giving, self-receiving love (F3–N3), freely gives Himself up in complete self-surrender to and dependence upon (F3) the movement of finite freedom. Once so given, in a free dependence (N3), He will never again be without the world He created and redeemed and can be said to be even more Himself. Christ, as a divine-human unity, thus perfectly embodies the synthesis of F3–N3, absolute divine Freedom, which can be traced in tension in intra-worldly polarity and in perfect union in the Holy Trinity. Yet there is a major dissimilarity between the infinite and the finite in this movement, which is that, following a major strand of Christian theology, God, for Balthasar, like Barth, need not have so given Himself away to be Himself. God’s self-giving only emphasizes what He always already is, whereas creation must do so to be itself. It is here that our problematic proper comes to the foreground in Balthasar and we move in his thought from analogy to a mysterious dialectic. In one sense, God in Christ is similar to creation in Christ in giving Himself away and is dissimilar to creation in that He need not have given Himself away to it to be Himself. But in another sense entirely, He is, despite His difference from it in being uncreated and free in Himself, identified with creation. God is identified with creation insofar as He must give Himself away to it (N3) because He is eternally choosing to do so out of an everlasting desire for creation (F3). We have argued that this mystery has a structure for Balthasar, which is the intratrinitarian dialectic of freedom and necessity, and we have built on this insight in our response. This intratrinitarian dialectic involves: (a) the Father’s necessary generation of the Son in which He gives to Him all His free possibilities concerning creation and redemption, which the Son binds Himself to as freely willed necessities which are then realized in Absolute Freedom by their common Spirit; and (b) the ensheltering of creation in both its possibility and its realization in the realm of freedom of the Son. God the Father from His everlasting love for His Son begets Him with a necessary but tacitly free will (N3) and the Son receives His own begottenness with an obedient joy where He freely enowns it as His own (F3) so that the Father’s act is retrospectively a free self-giving. In the necessary will of the Father are contained His free intentions, including His plans for creation and redemption of the world in Christ. In His being begotten by His Father, the intention to create and redeem the world in Christ is received freely and obediently by His Son (F3) as a freely willed necessity (N3).7 The Son, through

7

Balthasar, TD, V, 509.

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His Spirit, eternally freely chooses to be dependent on the world by being not only its Creator but its Redeemer (F3). Since the relation of dependence on the world is an eternal one, we must say that God has bound Himself to it irrevocably and its future becomes the future of God and so God freely but necessarily must create and redeem it (N3). In eternally and obediently freely binding Himself to His Father’s necessary will, making it His own necessity, all of the Father’s intentions as free possibilities form around Him as the exemplary idea of the world to which all must cohere. This Uridee of the world is described as the idea of the ‘freely obedient Son’,8 Jesus Christ, and God chooses the world in which He becomes incarnate and dies on the cross because it most closely reflects this supraeternal reality. He also describes it as a ‘pre-sacrifice’ which in light of sin and death becomes the actual ‘sacrifice’ of Jesus Christ on the cross.9 Not only the idea of the world is included in God in Christ but its concrete realization. The world is said to be eternally ‘ensheltered’ in the Son’s own divine realm of freedom as an eternal ‘additional gift’ of each of the hypostases to the other.10 This would seem to mean, then, that creation and redemption are both wholly free, as the Son need not have followed this particular intention of His Father in His enownment of His own begottenness, although He does in fact do so (F3), and wholly necessary, since the Son has eternally bound Himself to be incarnate and so He is eternally a God who is to be incarnate (N3). The additional gift of creation in no way changes God, as God through His Spirit, as an impossible synthesis of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), is an excessive Being of love who is ever more even to Himself. The events of the divine economy are fulfilled with such joy for God through the Absolute Freedom of the Spirit that God actually surprises even Himself. Balthasar’s theology is a major advancement on our past models precisely because he critically synthesizes and builds upon the theologies of Bulgakov and Barth. He shows how each of the hypostases uniquely appropriates the dialectic to itself. The Son is characterized by a freely chosen necessity toward the world, whereas the Father is characterized by the necessity of His will which includes His free intentions, and the Spirit, synthesizing both freedom and necessity, is characterized by an absolute freedom beyond both. This move dramatizes in eternity, as it were, the eternal act of the Son in freely taking the world upon himself as a self-imposed burden so that Gethsemane is envisioned as a temporal expression of an eternal drama in God. In this way, one is given a concrete sense of how salvation history is grounded in a transcendent reality and revelation is seen as both a true expression of God’s life at the same time as it avoids collapsing God into history where God cannot determine His

8

ibid., II, 269.

9

TD, V, 510.

10

ibid., 521.

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own life in concretion without becoming incarnate, in the manner of a crude Hegelianism. Balthasar, in this fashion, brilliantly marries two forms of the axis F3–N3 in his account of the Trinity—that of God’s perfect existence in love towards Himself as a dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), and, within the very same eternal nexus of the hypostases, God’s F3–N3 relationship towards the world. Furthermore, Balthasar appears to use both dialectic and analogy. There is dialectic in that He emphasizes that God, in being the uncreated Non-Aliud, is utterly different from the world which He creates and redeems in Christ, but is simultaneously identified with it, in that since He binds Himself to it eternally, one must say that He cannot be a God without it. There is also analogy in that Balthasar carefully shows through his focus on Christ as the concrete analogy of Being how the dialectic of freedom and necessity is similar and dissimilar in God and in creation and with respect to God-in-reference-to-creation and creation-in-reference-to-God. However, there still remain major problems with Balthasar’s account. We point first to his kenotic account of the immanent Trinity that seems, like Bulgakov before him on whom he is strongly dependent, to be an unacknowledged eternalization of the economic Trinity. He is in danger of projecting the Incarnation (along with suffering, history, and temporality) into God Himself,11 leading to the immanent Trinity being subsumed in the economic12 and ultimately the collapse of the uncreated–created distinction.13 In this way, Balthasar’s God risks swallowing up history, as it were, for in Him all the events of history are already always accomplished in a sort of divine agon and merely need to be unfolded in time. At his most extreme, this sort of theology empties history and creation of any true efficacy in the divine economy so that all that creation can give to God is to be an additional gift of one hypostasis to the Other. This is not unlike Bulgakov, following after Solov’ev, who argues that creation is a repetition in becoming of what God eternally is. Nevertheless, Balthasar so desires to maintain God’s freedom and creation’s contingency that, though his theology does speak of God’s free entry into a necessary relationship with creation in Christ (i.e. the F3–N3 axis) and it climaxes in creation’s being embedded in the realm of freedom of the Son, he generally avoids saying outright (unlike Bulgakov and Barth) that God must create and redeem the world in Christ to be the certain sort of God He has chosen eternally to be (N3). Or, more audaciously, he is fearful of asserting that God freely needs the world to be God for the world. Balthasar, therefore, mutes the full power of N3 as divine free dependence and one loses the full 11 See Zizioulas 2010, 9 and 2012, 204ff., T. F. Torrance 1996, 97, 99, 108–9, 198 and 1994, 85, but see 101–2. 12 See Zizioulas 2010, 9 and Kasper 2012, 275–6. 13 See Zizioulas, CO, 201–2, drawing on Congar [1980]1983, 16.

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sense that God has irrevocably given Himself over to creation in Christ. In short, Balthasar’s theology is perhaps overly cautious and does not fully explore some of the profound paradoxes of the relationship of the uncreated and created he himself brings up. Overall, however, Balthasar’s theology, despite its problems, offers the most convincing embodiment of the F3–N3 axis of all our writers but only because he is standing upon the shoulders of Bulgakov and Barth.

12.3 AN UNSYSTEMATIC S YSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF FREEDOM AND NECESSITY We have already attempted, in parallel to our exegesis of our writers, to begin the process of constructively recapitulating Bulgakov, Barth, and Balthasar in an unsystematic systematic response to our problematic. Our aim has been to make the attribution of a world-oriented F3–N3 to God more persuasive by giving an account that gives an overall more cohesive theological picture of Absolute Freedom in itself. To this end, we have argued that there exist two divine elections. This is an idea that is just hinted at in Bulgakov’s identifying of Christ’s decisions in history and eternity. It is more strongly expressed in our reading of Barth’s covenantal theology and it is confirmed in Balthasar’s concept of the two wills of Christ. The first election is divine-human world-oriented election in which God eternally and freely gives Himself to man (F3) by electing Himself as man in Christ. Christ, in turn, elects Himself in eternal response to the Father and this whole Triune self-sacrifice cannot be undone (N3). Correspondingly, man in Christ obediently and freely receives with joy the gift of God (F3) by electing God as His own God and Father in response in history, such that He picks up His cross and goes deep into the far country (N3). This divine-human election in which God determines Himself as God for the world in Christ is neither arbitrary nor compelled. It is a gracious expression of who God primordially is, that is, His nature as Holy Trinity. He is an eternal life of love-desire where each of the hypostases in free self-giving love elects the Other as its very own and receives its own election by the Other. This is our second election, which we have called primordial intra-hypostatic election, and it is absolutely free insofar as it is a perfect union of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). Our axis can be traced quite differently in the two elections, God in reference to the world in the economic Trinity and God in reference to Himself in the immanent Trinity, since there is a similarity and dissimilarity between God and creation. In summary, the problematic of freedom and necessity is made more comprehensible, though not soluble, in the fact that the choice made

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by Christ in history is identifiable with the choice made by the Son in the eternal life of the Trinity. I aim to explicate this claim in the remainder of this Conclusion. Up until now in our constructive response to the problematic, what has been missing is a concrete illustration of just how the poles of the axis F3–N3 are interrelated in the relationship of God and the world in Christ. Such an illustration would show yet further that the axis is an accurate expression of Absolute divine Freedom in reference to the world. To help us accomplish the latter we might argue that if man is elected in Christ by God, then God has to ‘wait’ on man’s election of God in Christ. This is a ‘waiting’ which requires a divine ‘self-blinding’ by God to the response of creation. It is a sort of divine version of ‘faith’ involving ‘risk’ and freely willed ‘need’ for creation.14 The waiting is a creaturely analogue of the Father’s waiting on His Son’s response after He has begotten Him. This ‘waiting’ in divine-human election dramatizes, as it were, the axis F3–N3 and shows how Christology both intensifies the problematic of freedom and necessity for Trinitarian theology and provides a reasonable response, though not a rational solution, to the very ambiguity it creates. It shows how F3 is connected to N3 insofar as God, in electing Himself in Christ, freely but blindly gives Himself to creation in a dependent freedom (F3). But this self-binding which is a self-blinding is at once an irrevocable leap on the part of God, a free dependence (N3), with no guarantee of a positive response on the part of man (we will return to this idea shortly). God puts Himself in ‘need’ to His creation for the completion of the divine plan. This marriage of divine kenoticism in regard to knowledge of future events and divine election makes the application of the F3–N3 to God’s relationship to the world more concrete through showing the interconnection of F3 to N3. We see in thinking on the divine-humanity of Christ that God has deemed to reveal Himself to us, to actualize His own world-oriented self-election, as the ultimately anterior action, only through a free waiting upon man’s free election of Him in Christ, as the posterior action. Thus, in Christ, we see that the impetus of election is from God and that God need not have determined Himself for us, as He would have been Himself regardless of whether He loved us in Christ or not. God’s free self-determination in Christ could have been otherwise as God is Absolute Freedom. God in Himself is the perfect synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2). He is, without reference to creation, a selfelecting life eternally giving itself away (F3) in a definitive self-gift that jumps into the abyss of love with no expectation of return (N3). However, God has chosen to love us, deeply and eternally desires us, has given Himself to us in Christ. He is eternally giving Himself away to creation in a world-oriented election. He has become dependent on it in His infinite freedom (F3) and, in

14

Compare Fiddes 2000b, 171ff., Vanstone 1982, 89–94, and Berdyaev 2009, 100, 159.

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so doing, He puts Himself in free need to man, becoming bound to creation in a free dependence (N3). God’s free gracious love has bound itself to another and, so that there is a world created and redeemed in Christ, could not have been otherwise. In this free dependence (N3), God’s manifestation and actualization of His own world-oriented self-election is at the mercy of His creation. To be Himself, as He has so chosen, He must wait on the response of man in electing Him as His God and Father. Here we see that the anterior supratemporal activity of the Creator (F3) is necessarily dependent (N3) on the posterior temporal activity of the creation: the eternal world-oriented self-election of God as man is necessarily dependent for its temporal actualization and revelation on the historic event of Jesus Christ, God for us electing God to be His God. In this anterior activity, the posterior activity is already always pre-accomplished in anticipation. But its actualization and accomplishment are not a divine decision but a divine-human one, because God will only create and redeem His creation if man in Christ first freely assents to His desire for it to be one with Him. For God to be the sort of God He has chosen to be, which is God for us in Christ, He needs the world but this ‘need’ is not for Himself but for love of the world. As Rilke audaciously observed, human beings are so bound up with God as their Creator and Redeemer that God loses his meaning in losing them.15 Through speaking of God’s self-imposed waiting on man’s response for the accomplishment of His divine-human economy we can see how F3 is linked together inextricably with N3. As soon as we say that God’s plans are dependent on humanity in Christ, then we immediately must say this free dependence (N3) is free (F3) and could have existed otherwise. However, this should not be taken to mean that God’s N3 relationship to the world, although it presupposes F3 towards the world, is somehow not eternal and decisive for God as God as F3, since God has bound Himself and all that is could not be otherwise. On the contrary, despite the taxis or order of the poles, F3 and N3, ‘otherwise’ and ‘not otherwise’ are inextricably bound together in a belonging-togetherness. God has chosen that the necessity of the world should be a part of the actualization of divine freedom, both together constituting Absolute Freedom or the divine life of love-desire. He has chosen that any divine action eternally exists within the compass of Christ Himself and, therefore, to be free, it must of necessity be not merely a divine action but a divine-human action. One can no longer climb back up to some modality of a divine act that is purely divine—and not divine-human—as the limits of divine revelation in Christ are the limits of theological articulation, as all our writers have insisted.

15

See Rilke, ‘What will you do, God, when I die?’ ll. 1–9, 31.

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Nevertheless, this does not mean it is nonsensical to say that God could have done otherwise. Grace presupposes in its concretion the sense that as a gift it is freely given by a Giver who could have not given it, since no gift to be a gift is impelled. Moreover, it presupposes the fact that it is a gift from one who is a Gift-giver and to be a Gift-giver is to shower the Other with love and mercy, since no Gift-giver arbitrarily gifts but the gift is an organic expression of his or her gracious Being. The very order of divine self-determination or world-directed divine-human election, in contradistinction from divine selfgeneration or divine Trinitarian election per se, is one where the contingency of God’s activity, the fact that He might not have so acted (F3), is primary and is the foundation of any positing of an act’s divine-human necessity (N3) (F3)N3). This taxis is reversed in the case of primordial divine election where one presupposes that election had to be the case (N3) and then only retrospectively posits its freedom as an act (F3) that could have been otherwise (N3)F3) (see 10.3). We shall shortly return to this point. But here we must correct ourselves. We argued earlier that from all eternity God, in a divine kenosis of His Being, looks to the outcome of man’s decision in receiving His own divine election in faith, obedience, and love by following after the Father. This waiting on man by God makes God’s anterior initiation dependent on the fact of man’s creation and free posterior response to God (see 8.3). On the contrary, it could be replied to this position that there is no need for the kenosis of the divine Being as so described if God always already knows the outcome of man’s choice in Christ in His foreknowledge. How could man’s act be free if God, with His ever-watchful eye,16 always already knows what it is and acts accordingly? One way of responding to this traditional question is kenotic. It is our theological object that the divine worldoriented election of God of Himself as man might be a true kenosis, a waiting on man that is a genuine self-emptying of all His eternal kingdom, power, and glory. If we wish to articulate this idea of God risking what He is in Himself eternally as a free but necessary self-electing God of love-desire, then we must hypothesize that God draws a veil over the ultimate decision of man in Christ to follow His Father God by electing Him as God. God chooses to create and redeem the world in Christ with no ultimate knowledge that this decision will be actualized in creation, that is, He limits His own foresight as to what man will do in his creative freedom. Only in this way can there be both a true divine kenosis and the preservation of human freedom. Put otherwise, God eternally binds Himself to creation in Christ through His own self-blinding—the selfbinding is a self-blinding. If we hold that in God’s initiation of divine-human election He blinds Himself as to whether the world will positively affirm its own election by

16

See Boethius, Consolation, 5.6, 168 [5.6.38–9, 126].

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electing God (F3–N3), then we can quite naturally see this kenotic act as simply an expression of God’s life as Trinity. We have understood this Triune life as a primordial self-election where each hypostasis lets the other be and lets the other go (F3–N3) in ceaseless self-emptying. However, to have a fully kenotic account of divine-human election as an expression of God’s Trinitarian election we then need to hypothesize, in regard to the divine foreknowledge of creation a ‘space’ which is not a space created by God in God’s own knowledge of Himself. God knows all things in His essence in knowing Himself and wills all things in His essence in willing Himself.17 He wills in His knowledge of Himself a ‘space’ in reference to the union between the human action of Christ in history in electing God as His God with its own human will and activity and the divine decision in eternity to elect man as God with its own divine will and energy—the one divine-human election of the God-Man. The space of which we speak is like a sort of creaturely holy of holies for God in God’s eternal self-knowledge. Behind its curtain, as it were, He refuses to look. The creation of this space is the creation of human freedom. God, out of His all-powerfulness, has gifted it graciously to man who is created and redeemed in Christ and this finite freedom is a portion of the infinite Absolute Freedom. Were God to look behind this curtain of creatureliness, thereby violating human freedom, He would go against His own omnipotence of which this space, as a gift, is a ‘share of being’18 insofar as man is and is called a ‘portion of God’.19 In creating this space of creatureliness in Himself, which is human freedom, and in taking flesh in Christ, out of free love He eternally freely binds Himself (F3). He must respect the freedom of His own humanity in election because this binding is a self-blinding to man-in-Christ’s ultimate decision for or against Him (N3). The peak of God’s own all-powerfulness can be seen in His own all-powerlessness20 in gifting man with a portion of His Absolute Freedom. God as Trinity, as Sarah Coakley writes, possesses ‘a defencelessness which is supremely powerful’.21 This divine gift is a ‘space’ for man to freely act as he wills in Christ, which action is the quintessence and pinnacle of all human activity. The divine all-powerlessness is the taking by God of a sort of ‘divine risk’. God risks by giving His creation in man the possibility of love that it will refuse that love and cause the ruin of itself and God’s plan.22 Such heedless crazy free love is the highest divine gift there is where God puts 17

Aquinas, SG, 1.75, 164–5. See Origen, First Principles, 1.3.6, 35 [SC 252, 154–5, l.161], Dionysius, DN, 5.6 [PTS 33; 184, ll.17–21], 99, and Aquinas, SG, 3a.20, 38. 19 Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1068D and see 1080Bff. (Constas 2014, 1:74–5 and see 96ff.) (exegeting Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 14.7, PG 35.865C). 20 21 Lossky 2001, 73 and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 326. Coakley 2013, 258. 22 Lossky 2001, 73 and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 327 and Pannenberg, SysTh, 2: 48, 166–7, 172, 3: 642–3. 18

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Himself out on a limb for His creation. He trusts it. He has faith in it. Moreover, God’s blinding Himself through creating a lacuna in His own self-knowledge for human freedom in divine-human election is the highest possible self-emptying. It means that God’s own self-election of Himself as man is accomplished with no expectation of return from His beloved creature. This divine self-blinding which is a self-binding results in a divine objective uncertainty which God Himself holds fast to, but He holds fast to it as a divine risk, a sort of divine version of faith, which contradicts the uncertainty.23 If faith, requiring risk, is a sort of infinitely trusting love in which, in a passionate inwardness, we become vulnerable in waiting on the love of the Other with no assurance they will assent to our gift of ourselves, then can we not also speak of the divine passion of Christ, of which His election of God is the culmination, as involving a sort of ‘divine faith’? This ‘divine faith’ of God in man in Christ is the highest truth that there is for an existing person. It is so lofty a truth because through this act of divine faith God risks His own Being by declaring Himself as man to be guilty, in contradiction to Himself as God and therefore subject to loss and destruction as the object of the wrath and judgement of Himself, tasting damnation, death, and hell which should have been the lot of fallen man, not God.24 In this great risk of God in electing Himself to be God for us in Christ, with no provision that His election might not come to naught, we see more concretely the connection of F3 to N3 and how this axis might conceivably constitute Absolute Freedom, in relation to the world. As was said, God eternally and freely binds Himself to creation (F3) by His own worldoriented self-election, a binding which is a self-blinding to His creature’s ultimate response, and in this way creation is shown as de facto necessary to God (N3). Creation is necessary to God, firstly, because God needs a theatre of His glory, a space in which man in Christ may choose or not to have Him as His God. Secondly, it is likewise necessary for God be the Creator, since without a Creator there can be no union by Him with the created. Lastly, God is under a necessity to man in Christ’s election of Him as His God, for without this election God’s own world-oriented self-election cannot be expressed and actualized within creation. But what of the interrelationship of our two elections? Can the two elections dwell together in an identity-in-difference? One possibility is that we might view divine-human election retrospectively or in light of the saving events consequent upon the hypostatic union (i.e. the cross, the tomb, etc.). This divine-human election is the summary of Christ’s mission, the reason for His taking flesh, a necessity He freely takes up, seen diversely, as Balthasar observed,25 in the ‘must’ (dei) of the 12-year-old boy (Lk. 2:49), the healing of the man born blind (Jn. 9:4), and His trajectory towards His passion (Matt. 16:21). What I am 23 24

See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 203–4. 25 See Barth, CD, II/2, 164. Balthasar, TD, III, 225.

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suggesting is that the events which would seem to be the final result of His coming, summarized in His divine-human election, actually pre-exist that election and are its presupposition, though temporally they follow it. More precisely, these events, finding their centre in divine-human election, have existed eternally as divine ideas/possibilities/images and become eternal events pre-accomplished retroactively in God through the Ascension of Christ. In the glorification of Christ in majesty in the Ascension, the Incarnation is firstly supratemporally extended to all time so that all of history is in light of Christ. Secondly, it is graciously extended to the life of God in Himself, His own self-generation as Holy Trinity, in begetting and spiration, since the glorified humanity of Christ enters the abyss of love of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.26 The divine-human election and its expression in all the saving events of Christ’s life in history are taken up in the Ascension into the life of God and applied to God’s own life in Himself. We, therefore, can say retroactively that God decides to be God in and for creation, that creation comes to be in this divine-human activity of Christ—above all in His divine-human election—who is written cross wise into the universe,27 and that the two elections (divine-human and primordial Trinitarian election) dwell together in a unity in difference in God. God decides to be God for us and even, we dare to say, God for Himself in the very fiat of man in Christ electing Him as God in divine-human election. Of course, for such a position to be established would require a detailed elaboration of time’s relationship to eternity in Christ, which we do not have the space to discuss.28 Suffice it to say that our position assumes that all of time is lifted up, restored, and recapitulated in Christ. Although Christ stands at the middle of history, He is its source and beginning—all things eternally dwelling in Him who stands both in history and in eternity—and in the Ascension He allows creation and history to partake of the everlasting life of God.29 Through the Ascension, creation, in the form of its ‘epitome’ in the humanity of Christ, becomes sheltered within God. Thus, we can no longer speak of God without the world, since there is no longer a world ‘outside’ God, but the world is in God in Christ. Christ came down from heaven to earth and raised up ‘Adam’s nature which lay below in Hades’ prison’ and by His Ascension He raises it to heaven so that it now sits with Him on the ‘Father’s throne’.30 The 26

Bulgakov, AB, 377–8, 421–2 [LG, 348, 393]. See Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 5.18.3 (SC, 153), Apostolic Preaching, 34, 62, and Justin Martyr, 1. Apol., 60 (PTS 38; 116–17) (citing Plato, Timaeus, 36b, 49). 28 See Gallaher 2013d, esp. 20ff.; compare Pannenberg 1968, 133–58, 321–3, SysTh, 3: 580–607, Fiddes 2000b, 110–218, Moltmann 1993b, 104–39, 1996, 279–95, and Farrow 1999, 281–98. 29 Compare Moltmann 1995, 246–7, 2007, 80–96, Pannenberg, SysTh, 1: 327–36 and 3: 586–607. 30 ‘Kathisma/Sessional Hymn in Tone 5, Thursday Matins of the Assumption’ (Lash 2008). 27

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‘place’ of this embedding of the world is the realm of freedom of the Son but wondrously, as the life of God is to be ever more, there is no ‘addition’ to God, even though creation has been united with its Creator and then taken up into Him, for God is without beginning and Christ has never been parted from the Father’s bosom ‘which is uncircumscribed; and the heavenly powers accepted no addition to the thrice-holy hymn of praise, but acknowledged you, Lord, as one Son, only-begotten of the Father, even after the incarnation’.31 The Son freely receives His own eternal election by His Father in love and gratitude and affirms His primordial Trinitarian election by electing the Father as His Father. He graciously reaffirms this reception by His own eternal world-oriented self-election as God for us in Christ. And then, by the most extreme act of divine condescension in light of the Ascension, God eternally and graciously identifies His primordial affirmation of Himself in the Trinity with man in Christ’s electing Himself as God. Not only is God’s eternal selfelection as man considered to be a reaffirmation of His own primordial election but likewise man in Christ’s election of God as His God is miraculously acknowledged as if it was His own self-election of Himself as God. In other words, divine-human election, which is a contingent free act that could have been otherwise (F3), participates in the eternal election of the Trinity which is a necessary act which could not be otherwise (N3) and the first comes to receive as a gift the quality of necessity of the second. Such a participative union, by divine condescension, of the eternal election of the Son by the Father with the divine-human election of Christ, is the preeminent instance of divine-human co-operative or synergetic activity of an anterior uncreated power in union and communion with its posterior created power. Human freedom, creatureliness itself, is thereby given a sure reality by being founded eschatologically on the reality of God in Christ. In such a synergy, God freely binds Himself to creation irrevocably (F3–N3) in man in Christ by waiting on man’s election of God, and this latter election—by condescension, in light of the Ascension—is considered one with God’s eternal self-election in the Father’s begetting of His Son. God works with man in Christ not only in the accomplishment of salvation but also in His own self-generation, and so creation in this fashion acts as a sort of additional gift to God. Our axis, therefore, is able to meet the challenge of pantheism by contextualizing absolute divine Freedom within God’s free condescension in allowing divine-human synergy. But how can we hold together the fact that creation and redemption both could and could not be otherwise? We argued that there is a sense in which we may say that God’s selfdetermination in both primordial and divine-human elections could have been ‘otherwise’, showing thereby that as a ‘choice’ our understanding of it ‘Sticheron at the Aposticha, Tone 1, Wednesday Small Matins of the Assumption’ (Lash 2008). 31

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is continuous with what we normally mean by a ‘decision’ (see ch. 3 and 10.3). In the case of primordial election, God the Father eternally and necessarily (N3) chooses His Son in begetting Him and the Son in obedient Eucharistic thanksgiving elects Him in turn by freely receiving (F3) His own begottenness as a necessity. This is an act which could have been ‘otherwise’, since He need not so affirm His natural Being. The Spirit in the same instance of this free selfreception of God’s own self-generation by the Son then is breathed by the Father and rests on His Son in the Absolute Freedom of love-desire (F3–N3). The Son’s free self-reception (F3) which is overshadowed by the Spirit in this way recapitulates the initial natural and necessitous act of the Father as a free self-donation, and the Father, the Son, and the Spirit become freely what they are of necessity (N3). God’s self-determination as God in His primordial election then can retrospectively be said to be open to being ‘otherwise’ and therefore God in a sense freely ‘chooses’ to be God but only insofar as His election is firstly a natural and necessary expression of who He is (N3)F3). As a free gracious moment of the begetting of the Son by the Father and the acceptance of the Son of His begottenness, the Spirit resting on the Son as the crown of their mutual self-election, we find divine-human election in Christ. The Father, when He begets the Son with a necessary (but tacitly free) will, gives Him all that He is, His divine Being. This includes, as a part of His necessary will, all His free intentions, all His determined purposes and plans, above all, His free intention that His Son through their Spirit would elect Himself for us in Christ. The Son, in being begotten by the Father, enowns His own divinity by affirming the Father’s election of Him (see chs. 3 and 8.3). This is His election of the Father and in this free act the Spirit is breathed by the Father and rests on the Son. At this ‘moment’, the Son receives all the Father’s intentions and binds them to Him by choosing—and actualizing through the Spirit—to be Jesus Christ, God for us. The free paternal intentions, however, are plans that the Son can freely take up or not. The Son does indeed freely affirm His own self-election by electing Himself as God for us in Christ through the Spirit but it could have been otherwise. He need not so act to be God (F3). Once the Son binds Himself to this ‘possibility’ or ‘intention’, in the very same act in which He makes ‘free’ (F3) His own natural generation (N3), He determines that He will only be God for us in Jesus Christ (N3). The Father’s primordial self-election of the Son is primarily a fundamental, natural, and necessary act which could not be otherwise and is only free and open to an ‘otherwise’ retrospectively (N3)F3). In the case of divine-human election, however, the order of our axis is reversed (F3)N3) with freedom not necessity being presupposed. Creation ab ovo is a free self-giving of God (F3) and only retrospectively de facto necessary (N3). The paternal intentions are not abstract postulations of possible modes of action of God towards the world. They are realized possibilities like Cusa’s

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divine ‘Actualized-possibilities’32 where the absolute actuality and possibility of a being coincide.33 Within the divine life they exist as modalities of love, which are eternally rehearsed within the free self-giving and self-receiving of the divine hypostases. But these modalities are capacious enough that they can include within them the whole divine economy. Indeed, all the possibilities can be said to be simply expressions of the Son’s perfect obedience to His Father. Expressed differently, taken together they express a pre-sacrificial divine selfemptying love of each of the hypostases to the other which is only actualized in terms of sacrifice in light of sin and death.34 These actualized possibilities include within them all creaturely aspects or modes of Being, including all the pathways that Christ takes from His birth to His Ascension but in a pre-accomplished form that need to be realized in creation. Furthermore, these actualized possibilities are infinite as an expression of the absolute potentiality of the divine Being which is in itself not bound to any particular mode of operation. Above all these intentions include the free possibility that God might elect Himself as God for us in Christ, thereby expressing and confirming in another what He is in Himself, which is a primordially self-electing God. Still, although the possibilities are infinite, all of them conform to the taxis of the Trinity, in which Christ is the Uridee. This is a life of free self-bestowal and acceptance, coequal eternal union in the difference of an anterior reality to a posterior reality, that is, a perfect obedience of the One to the Other confirmed by a third. This third who confirms the gracious exchange of the Father to the Son is the Spirit who rests on Christ, the eternal Son of the Father. He inspires Him in loving gratitude to His Father, who has begotten Him as His only-begotten Son, to freely and eternally accept that He will follow as a necessity a particular free intention of the Father. The Son, therefore, freely reaffirms in choosing to bind Himself by going into the far country His own free but necessary acceptance of His election as an election of God as His Father. The Spirit, simultaneously, freely but necessarily reaffirms in and for creation the very same free resting on the Son by which the Father’s eternal election of the Son in begetting Him is affirmed. Yet this dialogue of affirmation and reaffirmation has only just begun, for we ourselves as humanity, the pinnacle of creation, are called by the Father from before the ages in Christ to become one with Him in His Son. This calling can only be realized if through the Spirit we elect Him, enowning Him, as our God in Christ. In light of the Ascension, as we said earlier, this election of God by man in Christ is then identified by God (‘enowned’) as one with His 32

Cusa, De Possest, 2: 14, 921; cf. Balthasar, GL, V, 215ff. Cusa, De Possest, 25, 927; i.e. possest=posse + est or ‘the-actual-existence-of possibility’ (see n. 23, 959). 34 See Speyr 1956, 345, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 510. 33

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own primordial self-election and so a creaturely reaffirmation of His own selfaffirmation of Himself in the Trinity. Creation, which is external and not proper to God, is made God’s very own by this divine enownment. When God enowns divine-human election, making it proper to Him like His own primordial election, then creation can truly be said to become a ‘portion of God’. In Christ through the Spirit we can therefore participate in God’s primordial election by divine-human election. It is the Spirit, as the Absolute Freedom of divine love-desire, who in resting on Christ inspires Him as the eternal Son of the Father to freely make the necessary but free will of the Father His own necessity (F3–N3) in electing Himself as God for us in Christ. This divine-human election is a reaffirmation of His own divine election by the Father and His election of the Father through their Spirit in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (F3–N3). Finally, it is again the same Spirit, in resting on the Son of Man, by whom we are incorporated into Christ, who inspires Him to respond in loving obedience to freely elect God as His God (F3), embracing the path of the cross (N3). This act of inspiration by God of man allows for a divine ‘surprise’ in two ways. Firstly, although God has voluntarily blinded Himself to the ultimate act of the Son of Man, nevertheless, this in no way rules out His loving persuasion of creation through discovering new ways of coaxing the world back to God through His Spirit.35 Through this persuasion of creation to follow God as its God, the Spirit, working in a synergy with man in Christ, accomplishes, in the Absolute Freedom of love that synthesizes freedom and necessity, the intentions of the Father to which the Son had bound Himself in uniting God with creation. However, in resting on both creation and God in Christ, the Spirit in effecting divine-human unity manages to surprise even God Himself, since divine expectations for unity with creation are surpassed in bringing that creation through the Ascension into the heart of the Trinity. Indeed, when God finds out that the Son of Man affirms Him as His God, it is as if the curtain covering the ultimate decision of the Son of Man, the ‘space’ of creatureliness in God’s self-knowledge, as to whether He would put aside His human will for the sake of His divine will, and by which God voluntarily blinded Himself, is torn in two from top to bottom. God is shaken and split with a bright sadness in His astonishment. His Son will take up His cross and enter into the far country, into the region of dissimilarity, bringing creation up to God. Secondly, in resting on Christ, in drawing creation up to God in Him, the Spirit is the One who in love inspires the Son to continue towards the cross. He then raises Him up in new life and finally takes Him up with all creation back to its Creator. In the Ascension of Christ through His Spirit in His return to

35

Compare Fiddes, SWKG, 161–6.

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the Father God, we can speak, retrospectively as well as retroactively, as a gift, of the surprising election of God by man in Christ as being His very own selfelection as God. Now creation dwells precisely as created in the heart of the Trinity in God in Christ since God has enowned it in response to His divinehuman enownment in Christ. God, in other words, through His Spirit gifts creation by grace in Christ with the very same synthesis of freedom and necessity that He has by nature. This synthesis is seen in His begetting of the Son and spirating of the Spirit. The gift of the synthesis to creation need not have been given. All could have been otherwise. The Son in history need not have taken up the chalice presented to Him by the Father and the eternal Son need not have bound Himself to the particular determinate possibility of creation and redemption in Christ. Thus, creation in Christ, obtaining its height in His election of God as His God, is both a free gift of God which need not have been given but it is a gift which shares in the very same necessity of the Triune life of free love which is seen in the begetting of the Son. We can say, audaciously, that God to be a God of love had to love beyond Himself in creation and redemption. Creation can by grace in Christ give something back to God which is its own creaturely participation in God’s self-generation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. * * * We have discovered that Christology intensifies the problematic of freedom and necessity for the doctrine of God by forcing it to balance God’s freedom in relation to creation and His eternal self-determination to be God for us in Christ. However, Christology, it has been argued, also provides us with tools for a reasonable response—though not a rational explanation—to the problematic. With Bulgakov we affirm that any account of Christology must be understood as a coincidentia oppositorum of two loves-desires, divine and creaturely Being/Sophia. Moreover, God freely needs His creation (F3) so that He might be God for us in Christ and this self-giving is pre-accomplished in eternity as various modes of love but only actualized in time. In needing creation, God cannot but love it since His free self-giving in Christ cannot be otherwise (N3). With Barth we stress the free election of God of Himself for us in Christ in eternity and of God by Christ in history which both could have been otherwise, as there are many possibilities in God, and cannot be otherwise (F3–N3), since God has acted and creation is given thereby a de facto necessity. Furthermore, we are inspired by him to think of election as characterizing the divine life in itself. With Balthasar we perceive, in the begetting of the Son by the Father, the eternal free acceptance (F3) by the Son of the Father’s intention for Him to become incarnate. The Son binds Himself irrevocably to this goal (N3) and the Spirit enacts it in the world. Moreover, also following Balthasar, we find creation to be embedded in God in Christ in both its possibility and its realization. We need to hold both the elections together—primordial and divine-human—in a unity-in-difference. We also

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need to emphasize the unity of the divine-human activity of God in Christ and man in Christ in the eternal election of God in Christ for us and the temporal election of God by man. Following the ideal of Bulgakov and Barth, we resist all attempts to reduce either F3 to N3 or N3 to F3, but with Balthasar we hold that this axis can be applied differently to God and creation according to their similarity and greater dissimilarity. F3 and N3, as the ‘otherwise’ and ‘not otherwise’ of divine life, are primordially moments of Absolute Freedom. We can see analogues of their unity in all creaturely activity and, more basically, in created Being itself. With all three writers, we affirm that creation is founded in its Being on Christ crucified. Finally, drawing on ideas of all three thinkers, we are inspired to speak of creation graciously participating in God’s eternal generation/primordial election, a divinization which, following Balthasar, is a ‘surprise’ even to God Himself. Despite the fact that Christology has resources to respond to the very problematic it had created for Trinitarian theology, our hybrid response to the problematic, employing dialectic and analogy with a Christocentric focus on election, is no definitive ‘solution’ to a determinate problem. There is no resolution that turns the dazzling darkness of incomprehensibility into day being, as it were, the theological equivalent of klieg lights. Quite the contrary is in fact the case. No final rational resolution is indeed possible, as a problematic is merely a conceptual expression of a mystery, and our response aims ultimately to discern the shape of that mystery more clearly so that we might enter more deeply onto the path of theological questioning. Indeed, our response, if it is successful, will actually lead to the darkening of our sight, since in penetrating more deeply into the cloud of what is unseen all that one perceives is how much one cannot see. It is like looking down the opening of a well where the light slowly drains into the shadows and one glimpses in a flash in the blackness a sort of spatter of luminescence indicating a long drop to the bottom. At the very least, a proper theological response to our problematic will reiterate the mystery of God’s everlasting love for us in Jesus Christ, but, at the very most, it will show us how deep that mystery goes.

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Bibliography I have abbreviated the names of some series and journals (see the list: xvii–xix) and the names of a few common publishers (Cambridge University Press=CUP, Catholic University of America Press=CUAP, Oxford University Press=OUP, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press=SVSP, T & T Clark=T&TC, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht=V&R). Superscript numbers with dates refer to editions (e.g. 20002 =2nd edn). Sergii Bulgakov Major Trilogy: ‘O Bogochelovechestve [On Godmanhood]’ I: Agnets Bozhii (1933) (Paris: YMCA-Press) [reprint—use with caution—Moscow: Obshchedostupnyi Pravoslavnyi Universitet, 2000]. The Lamb of God, abridged, trans./ed. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). II: Uteshitel’ (1936) (Paris: YMCA-Press) [reprint—use with caution—Moscow: Obshchedostupnyi Pravoslavnyi Universitet, 2003]. The Comforter, abridged, trans./ed. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). III: Nevesta Agntsa (1945) (Paris: YMCA-Press) [reprint—use with caution— Moscow: Obshchedostupnyi Pravoslavnyi Universitet, 2006]. The Bride of the Lamb, abridged, trans./ed. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) and Sergius Bulgakov: Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, abridged, trans./ed. Boris Jakim (New Haven: Variable Press, 1995), 7–30. Minor Trilogy: On the Deesis I: Kupina neopalimaia (1927) (Paris: YMCA-Press). The Burning Bush, trans./ed. Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). II: Drug zhenikha (1927) (Paris: YMCA-Press). The Friend of the Bridegroom, abridged trans./ed. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). III: Lestvitsa iakovlia (1929) (Paris: YMCA-Press). Jacob’s Ladder, trans./ed. Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Sophia, The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology (1993) [1937], trans. Patrick Thompson, O. Fielding Clarke, and Xenia Braikevitch (Hudson: Lindisfarne Press). ‘Afonskoe delo’ (2003 [1913]), in S. N. Bulgakov: Pro et Contra, ed. D. Burlak (Saint Petersburg: RKhGI), 292–304. Apokalipsis Ioanna (1948) (Paris: YMCA-Press). ‘Chto daet sovremennomu soznaniiu filosofiia Vl. Solov’eva?’ (1903), in Ot Marksizma k Idealismu (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za), 195–262. Dokladnaia Zapiska Mitropolitu Evlogiiu prof. prot. Sergiia Bulgakova (1936) (Paris: YMCA-Press). ‘Evkharisticheskii Dogmat’, Put’, Part I: 20 (1930), 3–46, Part II: 21 (1930), 3–33.

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Absolute: Bulgakov on 10–11, 51, 53, 56, 62–4, 73–6, 88–9, 92–3, 98–9, 132, 133, 137, 139, 187 description of 56–7 dialectics of 57 freedom of 48–9 Hegel on 85, 87, 93, 122, 201, 208, 214 hypostaticity of 73–5, 77–80, 82–3 as immanent Trinity 62–3, 86, 92, 152 in kataphatic theology 62, 63, 71–4 Not-is described 63, 72–3, 87 Schelling on 58, 92, 129 Solov’ev on 55, 56, 57–8, 85, 89, 93 Sophia relationship to 56, 58, 78–81, 86–91, 96–8, 205 as Trinity 73–5, 83, 89, 98; see also Absolute-Relative Absolute Freedom/love-desire, see love-desire/Absolute Freedom Absolute-Relative: Bulgakov on 10–11, 46, 51, 53, 62, 64, 84–9, 92–4, 92 n. 163, 98–9, 132, 133, 136, 187 Hegel on 98 hypostaticity of 96 in kataphatic theology 62, 63 Sophia relationship to 136, 205; see also Absolute activity 191; see also retroactivity actualism 28, 123–4, 128–35, 138, 140–1, 145, 156–7 Allchin, A. M. 220 analogia entis: Balthasar on 9, 131, 131 n. 116, 180, 187, 192, 206 n. 27 Barth on 9, 130–2 Being and 168, 180, 187 of Christ 185, 206 metaphysics and 168; see also analogy of being analogy: axis of F3–N3 and 165 Barth on 131–2, 144, 145, 166 dialectics as tandem with 165–7, 181–2, 185, 194, 201 problematic and 181–5; see also analogia entis

analogy of being: Balthasar on 165, 167–8, 172, 175, 179–80, 187, 198–9, 201–6, 212 Barth on 131, 132 Christ as 203–6, 212; see also analogia entis; analogy Angelus Silesius 35–6, 35 n. 110, 36 n. 111, 88, 129 antinomy/ies: of Bulgakov 7, 45, 46, 54, 63–7, 67 n. 181, 67 n. 184, 83, 93, 104, 112, 126, 140, 144–5 cosmological 71–2, 76–7, 83, 84, 93 Hegel on 26, 47, 65–6 of Kant 26–7, 46–7, 49–50, 64, 66 problematic response and 144–5, 160–1 sophiological 61–2, 69, 70, 70 n. 1, 71–2, 90, 93, 112 Aquinas, Thomas: on Being 17, 76, 169–70, 171, 173, 175 on esse 170 love-desire/Absolute Freedom 75 on possibilities/archetypes 207, 207 n. 37 potentia absoluta 95–6, 147 on real distinction 169, 170 archetype/s 197–8, 200, 207–8, 210, 212, 215; see also possibilities Aristotle 23, 23 n. 2 Arius 14, 15, 32 Ascension 101, 103–4, 113, 221–2, 244–5, 247–9 Athanasius 16–17, 31, 32–3, 76, 92, 159 Augustine 27–8, 82 axis of F3–N3: Being and 169, 173, 175–8 binding and 152, 208, 211 and binds, freely 245, 249 Christ and 205 Christology and 103, 140, 141, 148–9, 157, 159, 249 concrete/ness and 239, 241, 243 description of 37–9, 83 divine-human election connection with 239, 241–2, 245–6, 248 election and 125–6, 128, 152, 184 Father and 196–7, 218, 249 and freedom, finite 192–4

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axis of F3–N3: (cont.) generation and 246 gift/s and 221 God and 245 God and world difference and 173, 175 identity and 165, 181 intratrinitarian kenosis and 84–5, 94, 100–1, 149, 158, 242 letting be and 189, 192 love-desire/Absolute Freedom need as 97–8, 187, 207–8, 210, 215–22, 238, 243, 246 and necessity, de facto 243, 246, 249 needs/neediness and 97 otherwise/not otherwise and 38–9, 239, 240, 241, 249–50 pantheism and 245 possibilities of 200 primordial intra-hypostatic election on 238, 241 problematic and 95, 111–12, 181, 185 self-binding and 198, 199, 239 Son and 196–8, 218, 249 Spirit and 198–201, 216–19, 248–9 taxis and 208, 240, 241 Trinity and 189–91, 193, 198–201, 204–5, 214, 215 Bakhtin, Mikhail 19, 63–4 Balthasar, Hans Urs von: on activity 191 on analogia entis 9, 131, 131 n. 116, 180, 187, 192, 206 n. 27 on analogy as tandem with dialectics 165–7, 181–2, 185, 194, 201 on analogy of being 165, 167–8, 172, 175, 179–80, 187, 198–9, 201–6, 212 on archetypes 197–8, 206–8, 210, 212, 215 on Ascension 221–2 Barth’s interrelation with 9, 168, 169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 191, 205, 215, 218 on begetting the Son 180, 187, 189, 195–7, 207–10, 218, 220–1, 249 on Being 167–9, 178–9, 181, 186–8, 195, 198–202, 203–6, 208–13, 218–19, 222–3 on Beings 170–1, 173–81, 186 on binding 196, 198, 208 on binds, freely 196, 198 biographical information about 6, 45 Bulgakov’s interrelation with 10, 167, 168, 169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 184, 188, 190, 191, 195, 206, 211–13, 216–17 on child and mother 172–3 on Christ 187, 188, 193, 199, 201, 203–6 on Christology 7, 165, 168, 179–81, 188, 203, 215, 217–18, 220–3, 249

on concrete/ness 203, 204, 206, 206 n. 27, 209, 215 on dependence 189, 190, 191, 193, 194 dialectics of 167, 169, 172, 179, 192–3, 195, 198, 201 on dissimilarity 168, 178, 250 on divine-human election 181–2, 184 divinization of 201 on economic Trinity 190, 199, 212, 220–1 on Einbergung or sheltering/ ensheltering 210, 210 n. 65, 213–14, 217, 221 on esse 168, 169–70, 174, 175, 177–8, 203 on essents 168, 170, 175, 177–8, 180, 182, 187, 201, 203 on faith 203–4, 212 on Father 180, 187–90, 195–200, 205–8, 211–13, 215–22 on fourfold difference 169, 171–2, 175–6 on freedom 189–90, 195–8, 207, 216, 220, 222 on freedom, divine 7, 9, 29, 167, 173, 177, 188, 191, 211 on freedom, finite 182–4, 192–4, 200–1, 204, 206 on freedom, infinite 181–4, 193–4, 200–1, 204, 206, 210 on freedom and necessity 172–3, 176–7, 181, 183, 188–9, 191, 193–5, 200 on generation 188–9, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221 on gift/s 172–3, 178, 180, 182, 187–90, 193, 195, 204, 220–2 on God and world difference 170–1, 173, 175–80, 187, 190, 213 on hypostaticity 83 on I and Thou 169, 172 Idealism and 9, 184, 198, 213 on idea or Uridee 207, 209–11, 215–16, 218, 221 on identity 168, 169, 170, 173, 180, 181–4, 217 on immanent Trinity 190, 212, 220–1 on intratrinitarian kenosis 8, 10, 100, 102, 190–1, 194–5, 198 on love 95–6, 137, 172–3, 182–3, 187, 191, 195, 210–11, 219 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 95–8, 173, 182–3, 187–8, 191, 193, 200–2, 207–8, 210–11, 215–22 metaphysics and 167, 168, 179, 198–9 on necessity 169, 172, 195–6, 207, 215–18, 220–2 on needs/neediness 215, 221–2 on obedience 215, 218 on participation 177, 182, 221

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Index on passivity 189–90, 191 on polarity 7, 169, 176 on possibilities 178, 197–8, 200, 206–8, 215–18, 220–3 on primordial divine election 181–4, 187–8, 198, 219, 221 problematic and 6, 7, 9, 165, 167–8, 173, 178–9, 181–5, 199–202, 220, 222–3, 233–8 on real distinction 169, 170, 179, 180, 181, 187, 191–2, 211 on risk 214 on self-binding 198, 199, 220 on similarity 165, 168, 178, 180, 181–3, 250 on Son 180, 187–90, 195–8, 205–13, 215–22 on space for Son 210–11 on Spirit 187, 189–90, 193, 195, 198–202, 205, 208, 210–12, 216–22 on surprise 220, 222, 250 on taxis 195, 208 on tension 168–9, 172–3, 176–7, 185, 204, 206, 228 on Trinity 90, 187, 189–91, 193, 195, 198–201, 204–5, 211, 214, 215 Barth, Karl: actualism of 28, 123–4, 128–35, 138, 140–1, 145, 156–7 on analogia entis 9, 130–2 on analogy 131–2, 144, 145, 166 on analogy of being 131, 132 Angelus Silesius’s interrelationship with 35, 35 n. 110 Balthasar’s interrelation with 9, 168, 169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 191, 205, 215, 218 on begetting the Son 139, 154, 159 on binding 123, 152 biographical information about 6, 45 Bulgakov’s interrelation with 10–11, 10 n. 35, 11 n. 40, 117, 129, 140, 144–5, 157, 215, 218 on Christology 7, 118–19, 128, 158, 218 contradictions and 133, 135, 143, 149 on de facto necessity 139, 146, 148, 150, 153–4, 155, 157, 158–9, 184 dialecticism of 7, 124, 133 dialectics of 7, 124, 126–7, 133, 140, 142–58, 160–1, 166 on divine-human election 160–1 on economic Trinity 157, 199 on election 117–28, 123 n. 50, 142, 145, 146, 148 n. 31, 152–4, 156–61, 167–8, 182, 187 on faith 125, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 144, 157–8 Florovsky’s interrelationship with 10 n. 35, 11

289

on freedom, divine 7, 9, 135–9, 151–2, 191 on freedom and necessity 146, 147, 151, 160, 188 on holy mutability/immutability 152–5, 205 Idealism and 9, 9 n. 24 on immanent Trinity 156–7 on intratrinitarian kenosis 8, 102, 148–9, 157–8, 198 on logos/Logos asarkos 118, 119, 121, 123, 126, 153, 156–7 on logos/Logos ensarkos 118, 119, 121, 156–7 on love 129, 188 on obedience 126, 127, 148 n. 30, 148–9, 150, 159, 218 pantheism of 123, 138, 161 on participation 125 on possibilities 197 on potentia absoluta 147, 147 n. 44, 151, 197, 215–16 on potentia ordinata 147, 147 n. 44, 150, 197, 215–16 on primordial divine election 159–60 problematic and 6, 7, 9, 117, 144–5, 160–1, 231–3, 250 on risk 158–9 on similarity 130–2 on taxis 149 on Trinity 77, 117, 130, 132–3, 139, 146, 149, 151–2, 158 Basil the Great 13 begetting the Son: Balthasar on 180, 187, 189, 195–8, 207–10, 218, 220–1, 249 Barth on 139, 154, 159 Bulgakov on 81, 100, 101–2, 159 divine-human election and 244–7, 249 and freedom, divine 14, 16, 28, 32, 33, 208–9 as necessity 221, 246, 247 obedience as bound with 159 primordial divine election and 246 Being: axis of F3–N3 and 169, 173, 175–8 Balthasar on 167–9, 178–9, 181, 186–8, 195, 198–202, 203–6, 208–13, 218–19, 222–3 Beings and 170–1, 173–81, 186 child and 172–3 Christology and 7, 165, 168, 179, 181, 188 dependence of 193 dissimilarity of 131, 131 n. 118, 132, 168, 178 essents of 168, 170, 175, 177–8, 180, 182, 186, 187, 201, 203

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Index

Being: (cont.) freedom of 167, 177, 181, 220 gift/s of 172–3, 178, 193, 195 God and world difference and 170–1, 173, 175–80, 187 identity of 168, 169, 180, 182 necessity of 169, 172–3, 175–6 as ousia/Ousia 58, 77, 89, 96–7, 153, 180, 187, 188–9 participation in 177 real distinction and 169, 170, 179, 187, 211 space of 23–4 tension and 168–9, 172, 173, 176–7; see also analogy of being Beings 170–1, 173–81, 186 Berdyaev, Nicholas 11 Bernard of Clairvaux 28 binding 73, 123, 152, 196, 198, 208, 211; see also self-binding binds, freely 196, 198, 241–3, 245, 249; see also self-binding Boehme, Jacob 55, 58, 77, 93 Bulgakov, Sergii: on Absolute 10–11, 51, 53, 56, 62–4, 73–6, 88–9, 92–3, 98–9, 132, 133, 137, 139, 187 on Absolute-Relative 10–11, 46, 51, 53, 62, 64, 84–9, 92–4, 92 n. 163, 98–9, 132, 133, 136, 187 on antinomies of Kant 26, 46, 47, 49–50 antinomy of 7, 45, 46, 54, 63–7, 67 n. 181, 67 n. 184, 83, 93, 104, 112, 126, 140, 144–5 on Ascension 101, 103–4, 113 Balthasar’s interrelation with 10, 167, 168, 169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 184, 188, 190, 191, 195, 206, 211–13 Barth’s interrelation with 10–11, 10 n. 35, 11 n. 40, 117, 129, 140, 144–5, 157, 215, 218 on begetting the Son 81, 100, 101–2, 159 biographical information about 6, 45 on Christology 7, 99–108, 105 n. 67, 106 n. 75, 205–6, 218 on contradictions 65, 66, 68 on cosmological antinomy 71–2, 76–7, 83, 84, 93 on desire, divine 96–8, 100–1, 109, 129 on determinism, sophianic 90, 93–4, 109–11 dialectics of 46, 53–4, 65, 143 divinization of 104, 107, 112 on economic Trinity 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, 86, 100, 112, 199 on faith 84, 88 on freedom 46–8 on freedom, divine 7, 9, 29, 136, 191

on freedom and necessity 29, 46–7, 160, 188, 193 on hypostaticity 73–5, 77–80, 82–3 on Idealism 9, 47, 106 on immanent Trinity 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, 86, 92, 112, 152 on intratrinitarian kenosis 8, 10, 81–5, 92, 92 n. 163, 94, 100–2, 148–9, 157–8, 190, 195, 198, 213 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 29, 49, 77, 78–80, 90, 94, 95–6, 98, 137, 188 love/Sophia and 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 188 on necessity, determinate 75, 85, 93, 208 on obedience 101–3, 218 on ousia/Ousia 58, 67, 77–8, 80–1, 87, 89–90, 96–7, 111, 137, 191, 205 on panentheism 91–2, 111 on pantheism 85, 89, 91–4, 108, 111, 114, 213 on participation 91, 101, 108–9 on passivity of Son 81, 101–2 on possibilities 95–6, 99, 103, 110, 113 on potentia absoluta/ordinata 96, 215–16 on primordial divine election 73, 78, 88–9, 92, 105, 107, 107 n. 82 problematic and 6, 7, 9, 46, 53, 61, 93–4, 100, 111–12, 228–31, 250 Schelling’s interrelationship with 48 on similarity 91 on Solov’ev 45, 60–2 on Son 81, 101–2 on Sophia 45–6, 51–4, 61–2, 64, 78–81, 86–91, 93, 104–7, 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 205–6 on sophiological antinomy 61–2, 69, 70, 70 n. 1, 71–2, 90, 93, 112 on sophiology 38, 45, 54, 58, 68–9, 90–1, 94, 167–8 on space of God 86 on theological antinomy 51, 71–2, 73, 78, 83 on Trinity 28, 55, 59, 73–5, 77, 79–81, 89, 117, 146, 149, 158, 211 Calvin, John: on election 124–5 on freedom and necessity connections 28 on logos/Logos asarkos/ensarkos 118 changes: in Christ 210, 211 in God 213, 219, 220 in Son 219 child and mother interrelationship 172–3

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Index Christology: axis of F3–N3 and 103, 140, 141, 148–9, 157, 159, 249 Balthasar on 7, 165, 168, 179–81, 188, 215, 217–18, 220–3, 249 Barth on 7, 118–19, 128, 158, 218 Being and 7, 165, 168, 179, 188 Bulgakov on 7, 99–108, 105 n. 67, 106 n. 75, 218 and freedom, divine 7, 11, 108 God and world difference and 168 identity and 182, 184 kenosis in 100, 104–5, 128, 158, 168, 203–4, 212 love and 7 metaphysics and 168, 179 possibilities of 103, 110, 113, 249 problematic and 7–8, 11, 108–9, 112–14, 140–1, 160, 220, 222–3, 249–50 real distinction and 180, 181 retroactivity and 103–4 similarity and 185 of Sophia 104–9, 205–6 of sophiology 108 tension and 172, 185, 204, 206; see also Jesus Christ; Trinitarian theology; Trinity Cicero 24–5 Coakley, Sarah 242 co-inherence 20 concrete/ness: of axis of F3–N3 239, 241, 243 Christ and 203, 204, 206, 206 n. 27, 209, 215, 239, 241 contradictions 65–6, 68, 133, 135, 143, 149 dependence: of Being 193 of Father 189–90 freedom in 18–19, 20, 36, 40, 139, 140, 141, 152, 189, 191, 194 N3 or free dependence 12 n. 1, 22, 36–8, 49, 62, 85, 111, 113, 136, 137, 139, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 183–5, 189, 195–6, 203, 238–40 passivity and 191 desire, divine 96–8, 100–1, 109, 129; see also love-desire/Absolute Freedom determinate necessity 75, 85, 93, 208 determinism, sophianic 90, 93–4, 109–11 Diadochus of Photiki 13 dialectics: of Absolute 57 analogy as tandem with 165–7, 181–2, 185, 194, 201 of Balthasar 167, 169, 172, 179, 192–3, 195, 198, 201

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of Barth 7, 124, 126–7, 133, 140, 142–58, 160–1, 166 of Bulgakov 46, 53–4, 65, 143 description of 6–7 between freedom and necessity 30, 38, 169 of Hegel 65–6, 195 problematic and 6–7, 144–5, 160–1, 250 of Schelling 30, 143 of Solov’ev 56 of Trinity 195, 201 difference, God and world, see God and world difference dissimilarity: of Being 131, 131 n. 118, 132, 168, 178, 250 description of 40 necessity and 184 problematic and 181; see also similarity divine desire 96–8, 100–1, 109, 129; see also love-desire/Absolute Freedom divine freedom: Balthasar on 7, 9, 29, 167, 173, 177, 188, 191, 211 Barth on 7, 9, 135–9, 151–2, 191 in begetting the Son 14, 16, 28, 32, 33, 208–9 Bulgakov on 7, 9, 29, 136, 191, 211 Christology and 7, 108 description of 6, 13–17 kenosis and 191 love and 48, 111, 135–9 necessity as identified with 6, 29–30, 34 Schelling on 29, 48, 195 in Trinitarian theology 7, 9, 191; see also freedom; God divine-human election: Ascension and 244–5, 247–9 axis of F3–N3 connection with 239, 241–2, 245–6, 248 Balthasar on 181–2, 184 Barth on 160–1 begetting the Son and 244–7, 249 and binds, freely 241–3, 245, 246 Christ and 248–50 description of 238–9 faith and 239, 241, 243 freedom of 238, 245 as gift/s 238, 245, 248–9 kenosis and 241 necessity and 241, 243, 248 needs/neediness and 239–40 obedience and 127, 241, 248 otherwise/not otherwise and 245–6, 249 possibilities and 244, 246–7 self-binding and 239, 241, 243 and self-blinding, divine 239, 241, 242, 243 space and 242–4, 248

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divine-human election: (cont.) Spirit and 248 Trinitarian theology and 239, 241, 242 Trinity and 238–9, 241–2, 244–5, 248–9 waiting in 239, 243; see also election; primordial divine election divine love, see love-desire/Absolute Freedom divine self-blinding 239, 241, 242, 243 divinization 35, 104, 107, 112, 201, 250 Drozdov, Met. Philaret 37, 101 Duns Scotus 15 economic Trinity: Balthasar on 190, 199, 212, 220–1 Barth on 157, 199 Bulgakov on 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, 86, 100, 112, 199 description of 8, 83–4 immanent Trinity relationship to 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, 86, 94, 112 intratrinitarian kenosis and 102 in kataphatic theology 62, 63; see also Trinity Einbergung (sheltering/ensheltering) 210, 210 n. 65, 213–14, 217, 221 election: axis of F3–N3 and 125–6, 128, 152, 184 Barth on 117–28, 123 n. 50, 142, 145, 146, 148 n. 31, 152–4, 156–61, 167–8, 187 binding through 123 Calvin on 124–5 of Christ 117–28, 123 n. 50, 157–61, 182 primordial intra-hypostatic 238, 247–50 problematic and 238–50 of Trinity 123, 126, 161, 181–4 see also divine-human election; primordial divine election Eliot, T. S. 156, 210 enownment (Ereignis) 39–40, 39 n. 131, 160, 176, 247–8 esse 168, 169–70, 174, 175, 177–8, 203 essents 168, 170, 175, 177–8, 180, 182, 186, 187, 201, 203 Eunomius 32 Evenus of Paros 23 faith: Balthasar on 203–4, 212 Barth on 125, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 144, 157–8 Bulgakov on 84, 88 divine-human election and 239, 241, 243 Father: as archetype 197, 206–8 axis of F3–N3 and 196–7, 218, 249 binding of 198, 208, 211

dependence of 189–90 free will of 248 generation by 188–9, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221 gift/s of 180, 182, 187–90 as letting be 180 love and 187, 195 necessity of 195–6, 207, 215–18, 220, 222, 246 possibilities of 197, 200, 206–8 self-binding of 198, 199, 220; see also begetting the Son; God; Son Fichte, J. G. 8–9, 46, 47, 48, 74, 78 Fiddes, Paul S. 19, 38, 39, 86, 87, 97 finite freedom 182–4, 192–4, 200–1, 204, 206; see also freedom; infinite freedom Florensky, Pavel A. 26, 39, 52, 64–5, 67, 68–9, 80 Florovsky, Georges 10 n. 35, 11, 33, 106, 117 fourfold difference 169, 171, 175–6, 178; see also God and world difference Frank, Semen 68 freedom: of Absolute 48–9 axis of F3–N3 and 192–4 of Being 167, 177, 181, 220 of Christ 193, 209, 238 in dependence 18–19, 20, 36, 40, 139, 140, 141, 189, 191, 194 of divine-human election 238, 245 divine-human election and 238 F1–F2 relationship 19, 30, 41, 41, 46, 169, 188 F1 or without ratio 12 n. 1, 13–14, 15, 17, 19–20, 22, 28, 29–30, 40, 41, 46, 47, 56, 60, 75, 138, 192–3 F2 or with ratio 12 n. 1, 13, 16, 17, 19–20, 22, 26–7, 28–30, 32, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 56, 60, 75, 136, 139, 151, 175, 183 F3 or dependent freedom 12 n. 1, 18–20, 22, 35–6, 49, 62, 75, 77, 85, 111, 113, 136, 137, 139, 145–6, 148, 151, 183–5, 189, 203, 207, 238–43, 245–6, 248, 249 finite 182–4, 192–4, 200–1, 204, 206 of free will 12–13, 16, 20, 28, 33, 35, 41 of generation 189–90, 191 of God 13–17, 135–9, 238–40, 242–3, 246, 248, 249 hypostaticity identification with 32 infinite 181–4, 193–4, 200–1, 204, 206, 210 kenosis and 13, 19, 37, 41 of Son 189–90, 195–8, 207, 216, 222, 246 of Spirit 248 Trinity and 7, 20, 186–92; see also axis of F3–N3; divine freedom; freedom and

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Index necessity; necessity; problematic of freedom and necessity freedom and necessity: antinomies of Kant and 26 Balthasar on 172–3, 176–7, 181, 183, 188, 189, 191, 193–5, 200 Barth on 146, 151, 160 Bulgakov on 29, 46–8, 160, 193 description of 12–13, 22, 40–1, 41 dialectics between 30, 38, 169 F1–3 and N1–3 relationship 22 F1–N2 relationship 138, 169 F2–N2 relationship 33–5, 77, 83, 96–7, 111, 113, 137, 138, 139, 152, 183, 193, 239 God as synthesis of 222, 239, 246, 248–9 love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 27–9, 35, 38–41, 41, 94 mystery of 3–4, 5, 6, 227 problematic of 4–7, 11, 227–8, 238–9, 249 Trinity and 3–4 unsystematic systematic theology of 6, 226, 228, 238; see also axis of F3–N3; necessity freely binds 196, 198, 241–3, 245, 249; see also self-binding free will: of Father 248 freedom of 12–13, 16, 20, 28, 33, 35, 41 historical identification of 24–5 love-desire/Absolute Freedom of 27, 49 generation: axis of F3–N3 and 246 of Christ 245 by Father 188–9, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221 freedom and 191 primordial divine election/ 250 primordial divine election and 244–6, 249, 250 of/by Son 188, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221, 246 of Spirit 189, 205, 208, 212, 216, 218–19 of Trinity 207, 216, 221, 244, 249 Geschehenlassen 189 gift/s: axis of F3–N3 and 221 of Being 172–3, 178, 193, 195 Christ as 220, 222, 245 divine-human election as 238, 245, 248–9 of Father 180, 182, 187–90 from God 195, 204, 220–2, 239, 241–4 hypostaticity of 234, 236 of Son 180, 182, 187 God: axis of F3–N3 and 245 and binds, freely 245

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changes in 213, 219, 220 freedom and necessity synthesis in 222, 239, 246, 248–9 freedom of 13–17, 135–9, 238–40, 242–3, 246, 248, 249 as giver of gifts 195, 204, 220–2, 239, 241–4 as love 3–6, 17, 31–2, 129 mutability/immutability of 27–8, 152–5, 205 necessity as applied to 4–7, 9, 24 nn. 13–14, 24–5, 215–16, 221–2, 240, 243 needs/neediness of 35, 38, 61, 97–8, 215, 239–40 participation in/of 91, 108–9, 221 risk of 158–9, 214, 239, 242–3 space of 86, 248 surprise of 220, 248, 250 as Trinity 5–8, 20, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38–9, 121–2; see also Absolute; AbsoluteRelative; begetting the Son; divine desire; divine freedom; divine-human election; divine self-blinding; Father; God and world difference; love-desire/Absolute Freedom; primordial divine election; primordial intra-hypostatic election God and world difference: axis of F3–N3 and 173, 175 Balthasar on 170–1, 173, 175–80, 187, 190, 213 Being and 170–1, 173, 175–80, 187 Christology and 168 description of 165–7 Hegel on 180, 190 identity and 168, 169, 173, 180–3, 213 letting be and 180, 189 Gregory of Nazianzus 25, 62 Gregory of Nyssa 110–11 Hallensleben, Barbara 8 Hegel, G. W. F.: on Absolute 85, 87, 93, 122, 201, 208, 214 on Absolute-Relative 98 on antinomy 26, 47, 65–6 on contradictions 65–6 dialectics of 65–6, 195 on God and world difference 180, 190 on Idealism 8–9, 47, 55 on Trinity 36, 55, 85, 90, 129 Heidegger, Martin 210 n. 61 on Being and Beings 169, 170–1, 173, 175–6, 178 on enownment 39, 160, 176 on Zusammengehörigkeit 39, 48 holy mutability/immutability 27–8, 152–5, 205

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Hunsinger, George 122, 122 n. 47, 138 hypostaticity: of Absolute 73–5, 77–80, 82–3 of Absolute-Relative 96 freedom identification with 32 gift/s and 234, 236 primordial intra-hypostatic election and 238, 247–50 I: Not-I versus 19, 48 Thou and 169, 172 idea (Uridee) 207, 209–11, 215–16, 218, 247 Idealism 8–9, 9 n. 24, 47, 50, 106, 184, 195 identity: axis of F3–N3 and 181 Balthasar on 168, 169, 170, 173, 180, 181–4, 217 Being and 168, 169, 180, 182 Christology and 182, 184 God and world difference and 168, 169, 173, 180–3, 213 problematic and 182–5 immanent Trinity: Absolute as 62–3, 86, 92, 152 Balthasar on 190, 212, 220–1 Barth on 156–7 economic Trinity relationship to 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, 86, 94, 112 intratrinitarian kenosis and 102; see also Trinity infinite freedom 181–4, 193–4, 200–1, 204, 206; see also finite freedom; freedom intratrinitarian kenosis: axis of F3–N3 and 84–5, 94, 100–1, 149, 158, 242 Balthasar on 8, 10, 100, 102, 190–1, 194–5, 198 Barth on 8, 102, 148–9, 157–8, 198 Bulgakov on 8, 10, 81–5, 92, 92 n. 163, 100–2, 148–9, 157–8, 190, 195, 198, 213 economic Trinity and 102 immanent Trinity and 102 love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 81–2, 84; see also kenosis Jesus Christ: analogia entis of 185, 206 as analogy of being 203–6, 212 as archetype 210 Ascension of 101, 103–4, 113, 221–2, 244–5, 247–9 axis of F3–N3 and 205 changes in 210, 211 concrete/ness and 203, 204, 206, 206 n. 27, 209, 215

divine-human election and 248–50 Einbergung or sheltering/ensheltering in 210, 210 n. 65, 217, 221 election of 117–28, 123 n. 50, 157–61, 182 enownment or Ereignis of 247–8 and freedom, finite 204, 206 and freedom, infinite 204, 206 freedom of 193, 209, 238 generation of 245 as gift/s 220, 222, 245 as idea or Uridee 209–10, 215, 247 love-desire/Absolute Freedom in 187, 188, 204 as necessity 248 obedience of 102–3, 126, 148 n. 30, 148–9, 247 participation in/of 91, 125, 182, 249 possibilities of 247, 248 in problematic 4–5 problematic and 199, 201 risk of 158–9 and self-blinding, divine 241 space of 242–3; see also Christology; Son; Trinitarian theology; Trinity John of Damascus 18, 23, 24, 32 John of the Cross 3–4, 5 Jüngel, Eberhard 21, 122, 152–3 Kant, Immanuel: antinomies of 26–7, 46–7, 49–50, 64, 66 on freedom 47 on freedom, divine 34 on Idealism 8–9, 47, 50 on Reason 26–7 Karsavin, Lev 55–6 kataphatic theology 62, 63, 68, 71–4, 83–4 kenosis: in Christology 100, 104–5, 128, 158, 168, 203–4, 212 divine-human election and 241 and freedom, divine 191 freedom and 13, 19, 37, 41 love and 191; see also intratrinitarian kenosis Kierkegaard, Søren 166 Kireevsky, Ivan 63 Kukavin, Valery A. 68 Leontius of Byzantium 106, 106 n. 75 letting be 177, 180, 189, 192, 221 logos/Logos asarkos 118, 119, 121, 123, 126, 153, 156–7 logos/Logos ensarkos 118, 119, 121, 156–7 Loofs, Friedrich 106 Losev, Aleksei 61 Lossky, Vladimir 55–6, 74–5, 107

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Index love: Balthasar on 95–6, 137, 172–3, 182–3, 187, 191 Barth on 129 Father and 187, 195 and freedom, divine 48, 111, 135–9 freedom and 135–9 God as 3–6, 17, 31–2, 129 kenosis and 191 Son and 187, 195, 219 Sophia/ 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 182, 188 of Spirit 187, 195, 210–11, 219 Trinity and 3, 17, 186–92 love-desire/Absolute Freedom: activity and 191 axis of F3–N3 and 97–8, 187, 207–8, 210, 215–22, 238, 243, 246 Balthasar on 95–8, 173, 182–3, 187–8, 191, 200–2, 207–8, 210–11, 215–22 Bulgakov on 29, 49, 77, 78–80, 90, 94, 95–6, 98, 137, 188 in Christ 187, 188, 204 description of 4, 22, 92, 94 Ereignis of 39–40, 39 n. 131 freedom and necessity and 27–9, 35, 38–41, 41, 94 of free will 27, 49 intratrinitarian kenosis and 81–2, 84 passivity of 191 Schelling on 48, 49, 75, 97, 191 scholars on 30–1 Solov’ev on 97 Sophia relationship to 80–1, 96–7, 107 Spirit and 193, 200, 202 Trinity and 4, 75, 77, 92–3; see also desire, divine; love Marcel, Gabriel 5 Maury, Pierre 119–20 Maximus the Confessor 13, 24, 24 n. 12, 87, 102, 106, 197, 215, 216, 218 McCormack, Bruce 119–24, 130, 132, 138, 143, 155–7 metaphysics: analogia entis and 168 Balthasar and 167, 168, 179, 198–9 Christology and 168, 179 Methodius of Olympus 24 Milbank, John 173 Molnar, Paul D. 122, 138, 151, 157 Moltmann, Jürgen 8, 35, 97, 213 mother and child interrelationship 172–3 mystery, definition of 5 mystery of freedom and necessity 3–4, 5, 6, 227; see also freedom and necessity

295

necessity: begetting the Son as 221, 246, 247 of Being 169, 172, 173, 175, 176 of child 172 Christ as 248 determinate 75, 85, 93, 208 dissimilarity and 184 divine-human election and 241, 243, 248 of Father 195–6, 207, 215–18, 220, 222, 246 and freedom, divine 6, 29–30, 34 God’s relation to 4–7, 9, 24 nn. 13–14, 24–5, 215–16, 221–2, 240, 243 N1–N2 relationship 36, 41, 41, 75, 76, 156 N1 or external necessity 12 n. 1, 22, 23 n. 2, 23–7, 28, 33, 35–6, 46–7, 56, 138, 139, 175, 183, 192–3 N2 or internal necessity 12 n. 1, 22, 27–35, 36, 49, 53, 60, 75, 85, 86, 88, 139, 175, 183, 188 N3 or free dependence 12 n. 1, 22, 36–8, 49, 62, 85, 111, 113, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146, 148, 153, 183–5, 189, 195–6, 203, 238–40 ousia/Ousia identification with 32 Trinity as 245, 246, 249; see also axis of F3–N3; problematic of freedom and necessity necessity, de facto: axis of F3–N3 and 243, 246, 249 Barth on 139, 146, 148, 150, 153–4, 155, 157, 158–9, 184 needs/neediness: axis of F3–N3 and 97 description of 18–19, 21 divine-human election and 239–40 of God 35, 38, 61, 97–8, 215, 221–2, 239–40 Newman, John Henry 143 Nicholas of Cusa 63, 64, 174 Not-is (NE-est’) 63, 72–3, 87 obedience: begetting the Son as bound with 159 divine-human election and 127, 241, 247, 248 of Jesus Christ 102–3, 126, 148 n. 30, 148–9, 247 of Son 20, 101–2, 150, 215, 218, 231, 247 of Spirit 248 O’Regan, Cyril 211 Origen 15, 20–1, 24 n. 12, 110, 138 otherwise/not otherwise: axis of F3–N3 and 239, 240, 241, 249–50 divine-human election and 245–6, 249 problematic and 23, 27–8, 33–5, 37–41

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ousia/Ousia: Being as 58, 77, 89, 96–7, 153, 180, 187, 188–9 necessity identification with 32 Sophia as 58, 78, 80–1, 87, 90, 96–7, 111, 136, 137, 153, 191, 205 Palamas, Gregory 51–2 panentheism 91–2, 111, 213 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 31, 103–4 pantheism: axis of F3–N3 and 245 of Barth 123, 138, 161 of Bulgakov 85, 89, 91–4, 108, 111, 114, 213 Solov’ev on 60 Sophia and 51 Parmenides of Elea 24 participation 91, 101, 108–9, 125, 177, 182, 221, 249 passivity 81, 101–2, 189–90, 191 Pasternak, Boris 19 perichoresis 20, 205 Plato 17, 23, 34 polarity: Balthasar on 7, 169, 176, 228 description of 7, 23, 40, 41, 169; see also dissimilarity; similarity possibilities: of axis of F3–N3 200 Balthasar on 178, 197–8, 200, 206–8, 215–18, 220–3 Barth on 197 Bulgakov on 95–6, 99, 103, 110, 113 of Christ 247 of Christology 103, 110, 113, 249 of divine-human election 244, 246–7 of Father 197, 200, 206–8 of primordial divine election 247 of Trinity 197–8; see also archetype/s potentia absoluta 95–6, 147, 147 n. 44, 150, 151, 197, 215–16 potentia ordinata 96, 147, 147 n. 44, 150, 197, 215–16 primordial divine election: Balthasar on 181–4, 187–8, 198, 219, 221 Barth on 159–60 begetting the Son and 246 Bulgakov on 73, 78, 88–9, 92, 105, 107, 107 n. 82 generation/ 250 generation and 244–6, 249, 250 possibilities and 247 Trinitarian theology and 244, 245 Trinity and 245, 247–8; see also divine-human election; election

primordial intra-hypostatic election 238, 241, 247–50; see also primordial divine election problem, definition of 5 problematic of freedom and necessity 4–7, 11, 227–8, 238–9, 249; see also specific scholars Przywara, Erich 130–1, 131 n. 116, 169 Rahner, Karl 45, 110 real distinction 169, 170, 179, 180, 181, 187, 191–2, 211 retroactivity 103–4, 160; see also activity Rilke, Rainer Maria 27, 240 risk 158–9, 214, 239, 242–3 Schelling, F. W. J.: on Absolute 58, 85, 92, 129 Bulgakov’s interrelationship with 48 dialectics of 30, 143 on freedom, divine 29, 48, 195 on Idealism 8–9 on Kant 26, 47 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 48, 49, 75, 97, 191 Solov’ev’s interrelationship with 58–9 on Trinity 55 Seinlassen 189 self-binding: axis of F3–N3 and 198, 199 divine-human election and 239, 241, 243 of Father 198, 199, 220 of Son 196 Trinitarian 194; see also binding; binds, freely self-blinding, divine 239, 241, 242, 243 sheltering/ensheltering (Einbergung) 210, 210 n. 65, 213–14, 217, 221 Siewerth, Gustav 169, 171 similarity: Balthasar on 165, 168, 178, 180, 181–3, 250 Barth on 130–2 Bulgakov on 91 Christology and 185 description of 40; see also dissimilarity Solov’ev, Vladimir: on Absolute 55, 56, 57–8, 85, 89, 93 Bulgakov’s critique of 45, 60–2 dialectics of 56 freedom and God 14 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 97 on pantheism 60 Schelling’s interrelationship with 58–9 on Sophia 46, 52–3, 58–9, 78, 79 on Trinity 55, 59–60, 77

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Index son: surprise of 220, 222 Son: as archetype 206–8, 210 axis of F3–N3 and 196–8, 218, 249 and binds, freely 196, 198 changes in 219 freedom of 189–90, 195–8, 207, 216, 222, 246 generation of/by 188, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221, 246 gift/s of 180, 182, 187 idea or Uridee of 209–10, 211, 215–16, 218 letting be of 180, 221 love and 187, 195, 219 obedience of 20, 101–2, 150, 215, 218, 231, 247 passivity of 81, 101–2, 189–90 self-binding of 196 space and 248 space for 210–11; see also begetting the Son; Father; Jesus Christ Sophia: Absolute relationship to 56, 58, 78–81, 86–91, 96–8, 205 Absolute-Relative relationship to 205 Bulgakov on 45–6, 51–4, 61–2, 64, 78–81, 86–91, 93, 104–7, 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 182, 205–6 Christology of 104–9, 205–6 love/ 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 182, 188 love-desire/Absolute Freedom relationship to 80–1, 96–7, 107 as ousia/Ousia 58, 78, 80–1, 87, 90, 96–7, 111, 136, 137, 153, 191, 205 pantheism and 51 Solov’ev on 46, 52–3, 58–9, 78, 79 Trinity and 79–81 sophiology: antinomy of 61–2, 69, 70, 70 n. 1, 71–2, 90, 93, 112 Bulgakov on 38, 45, 54, 58, 68–9, 90–1, 94, 167–8 Christology of 108 and determinism, sophianic 90, 93–4, 109–11; see also Sophia space 23–4, 86, 210–11, 242–4, 248 Speyr, Adrienne von 194–5, 196, 217 Spinoza, Baruch 34, 58 Spirit: axis of F3–N3 and 198–201, 208, 216–19, 248–9 divine-human election and 248 freedom of 248 generation of 189, 205, 208, 212, 216, 218–19

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love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 193, 200, 202 love of 187, 195, 210–11, 219 obedience of 248 passivity of 189–90 surprise of 220, 222; see also Trinitarian theology; Trinity Stevens, Wallace 30 surprise 220, 222, 248, 250 taxis 149, 195, 208, 240, 241, 247 tension: Being and 168–9, 172, 173, 176–7 Christology and 172, 185, 204, 206 description of 22–3 Thou, I and 169, 172 Tillich, Paul 9, 45, 166 Tracy, David 40, 165–7 Trinitarian theology: description of 130 divine-human election and 239, 241, 242 and freedom, divine 7, 9, 11 primordial divine election and 244, 245 problematic for 239, 250 systematic theology connection with 7–8; see also Christology Trinity: Absolute as 73–5, 83, 89, 98 as archetype 212 axis of F3–N3 and 189–91, 193, 198–201, 204–5, 215 Balthasar on 90, 187, 189–91, 193, 195, 198–201, 204–5, 211, 214 Barth on 77, 117, 130, 132–3, 139, 146, 149, 151–2, 158 binding and 123, 152 Bulgakov on 28, 55, 59, 73–5, 77, 79–81, 89, 117, 146, 149, 158, 211 dialectics of 195, 201 divine-human election and 238–9, 241–2, 244–5, 248–9 election of 123, 126, 161, 181–4 freedom and 7, 20, 186–92 freedom and necessity and 3–4 generation of 207, 216, 221, 244, 249 God as 5–8, 20, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38–9, 121–2 Hegel on 36, 55, 85, 90, 129 love and 3, 17, 186–92 love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 4, 75, 77, 92–3 as necessity 245, 246, 249 possibilities of 197–8 primordial divine election and 245, 247–8 Schelling on 55 Solov’ev on 55, 59–60, 77 Sophia and 79–81

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Trinity: (cont.) taxis of 195, 208, 247 through self-binding 194; see also Christology; Trinitarian theology

Ware, Kallistos 101 Whitehead, A. N. 213 Williams, Charles 20 Williams, Rowan 220

Ulrich, Ferdinand 169, 171, 179 unsystematic systematic theology 6, 226, 228, 238

Yeats, W. B. 212, 213

waiting, in divine-human election 239, 243 Ward, Keith 39, 39 n. 128

Zizioulas, John D. 32, 55–6, 74 Zusammengehörigkeit (belongingtogetherness) 39, 48