The Sophiology Man

The English Dominican Aidan Nichols long ago emerged as one of the most serious Latin interlocutors with and scholars of the Christian East. More than thirty years ago now, he began this exploration with his Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas'ev (1893-1966), drawing on a figure who even today still retains great power and promise and relevance, especially in the area of ecclesiology. I drew on Afanasiev extensively in my book last year, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

That is not to say that all of Nichols' works have been problem-free. His first edition of Rome and the Eastern Churches was a mess, riddled with errors of all sorts. But the second edition was a welcome new version free of the problems of the original.

Nichols is certainly prolific, and here I have noted just a fraction of his books on Eastern themes and figures. He has yet another book out this year on a figure who continues to haunt many Western theologians and ecumenists: Aidan Nichols, The Sophiology Man. The Work of Vladimir Solov'ëv (Gracewing, 2020), 178pp.

About this new book we are told:

This book is an introduction to the personality and thought of the founder of Russian sophiology, the philosophy and theology of 'wisdom', Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ëv. Seen as the single most important philosopher Russia has as yet produced, there has been an explosion of interest in, and writing about, Solov'ëv since the ending of Soviet period constraints in the later 1980s. From the closing years of the twentieth century there has also been an unexpected outbreak of 'philo-sophiology' in the West, to which his philosophical endeavours are highly relevant.

 After an early 'theosophical' stage where his interests were concentrated on an 'integral' or 'holistic' grasp of the true, and a middle 'theocratic' period when his mind was concentrated on how to achieve, for Christendom and global society, the common good, Solov'ëv moved into a late 'theurgical' phase dominated by such themes as nature, art and love (though the good and the true were not forgotten). These topics could perhaps be summed up as anterooms of the third of the great 'transcendentals' of Christian Scholasticism: namely, the beautiful. Solov'ëv did not leave behind a fully coherent body of reflection on the 'Lady' Wisdom celebrated in such sapiential books of the Old Testament as Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon--the 'Sophia' that gives 'sophiology' its name--but Aidan Nichols helps to make his sophianic doctrine, drawn from sources that were a mixture of Christian and Jewish, both traditional and esoteric, intelligible to the reader. He also gives an account of Solov'ëv as an early 'ecumenist', concerned with the reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches - and indeed with the reunion of Christians all round. At the end of his life, his many-sided intellectual, ecclesiastical, political, moral, and aesthetic enterprise metamorphosed into the belief that only divine intervention, in the form of the Parousia of Christ, will ever resolve the myopia, lethargy, folly and other evils of homo sapiens on this planet. Among those evils he identified one attempted 'final solution' --a globalist utopia organized without reference to the incarnate God. It is perhaps his most pertinent word to people today.

Russian Thought on Deification

Published at the end of last year is an impressive new book that adds to the library of books on deification/theosis/divinization which, as I've been tracking on here, have continued to emerge in steady and unrelenting number over the last 15 years especially:  Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 by Ruth Coates (Oxford University Press, 2019), 256 pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Deification in Russian Religious Thought considers the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. In the Christian narrative of the Orthodox Church 'God became human so that humans might become gods'. Ruth Coates shows that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a commensurate response to the apocalyptic dimension of the universally anticipated destruction of the Russian autocracy and the social and religious order that supported it.

Focusing on major works by four prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance--Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky--Coates demonstrates the salience of the deification theme and explores the variety of forms of its expression. She argues that the reception of deification in this period is shaped by the discourse of early Russian cultural modernism, and informed not only by theology, but also by nineteenth-century currents in Russian religious culture and German philosophy, particularly as these are received by the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. In the works that are analysed, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism. At the same time, all the thinkers represented in the book view deification as a project: a practice that should deliver the total transformation and immortalisation of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, and this is what connects them to deification's theological source.

Soloviev and Divinization

Among the "rediscovered" themes and personages of contemporary Eastern Christian scholarship, and Christian theology more generally, we find many recent books devoted to deification/divinization/theosis; and a similar number of recent books devoted to the luminaries of Russian Orthodoxy's so-called Silver Age. A forthcoming book unites both: J. Pilch, Breathing the Spirit with Both Lungs': Deification in the Work of Vladimir Solov'ev (Peeters, 2017),

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

This book is an examination of the teaching of the Russian religious thinker Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) about divine-humanity, the term he used to express the patristic doctrine of deification. The first chapter examines the theme of deification in the patristic tradition and shows the he himself was extremely familiar with the writings of the Church Fathers and the doctrinal teachings of the early Church Councils. The following three chapters are devoted to specific works of Solov'ev which are in detail, Lectures on Divine Humanity, The Spiritual Foundations of Life, and The Justification of the Good. Of these, the latter two have, to date, received little extended scholarly study.

The over-arching thrust of this work is that Solov'ev's concept of deification started as a reflection of the mystical and cosmic expressions of deification characteristic of the late Greek patristic period but develops so to be expressed in the western terminology of grace and focuses on the active implementation of deification in the world, taking the teaching out of its original monastic context. Chapter Two reveals the significant impact of Maximus the Confessor on Solov'ev's thought and identifies the dyothelite Christological model which Maximus develops from the dogmatic definition of the Council of Chalcedon as a crucial hermeneutical principle in Solov'ev's thought. Chapter Three shows the development of Solov'ev's teaching about deification, examining how it expands to embrace different models of deification, adopting western as well as eastern theological approaches and finding its centre in the life of the Church. Finally, Chapter Four shows how Solov'ev's deepening understanding of the western approach to deification through the language of grace is combined with an eastern understanding of human anthropology, enabling him to integrate realistic and moral approaches to deification, and address the whole range of human experience in terms of divine union and the Kingdom of God.

Bulgakov on the Theotokos

In 2012, as editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, I accepted an article from a newly minted young scholar, Walter Sisto, "On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit: Sergius Bulgakov and the Theotokos." After blind review, it was very gladly accepted for publication in 2013, and thus took its place in the very long list of publications focusing on Bulgakov that we have been seeing for some time, some of which I have noted on here since the very beginning.

Now Sisto is out with a new book, The Mother of God in the Theology of Sergius Bulgakov: The Soul Of The World (Routledge, 2017), 270pp.

The publisher tells us the following about this book:

This book explores the Mariology of one of the most unique and fascinating thinkers in the Russian Orthodox tradition, Father Sergius Bulgakov. Bulgakov develops the Russian sophianic mariological tradition initiated by Vladimir Solo’ev and argues that Mary is the "soul of the world" or the pneumatological hypostasis. Mary is the first and greatest disciple to be adopted by the Holy Spirit. By situating Mary within the life and mission of the Holy Spirit, Bulgakov maintains the respect and veneration that Orthodox Christians have for Mary, but also places Mary squarely within the community of disciples. Mary is a model disciple, who reveals that the goal of the spiritual life, spiritual motherhood. In addition, this text reveals the relevance and importance of Bulgakov’s contribution to the contemporary discussion about the role of Mary in the history of salvation.

I have written to the author to see if he would be interested in doing an interview about this book. I shall let you know if he is.

Incidentally, in perusing the back issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies from 2012 (vol. 54, nos.1-2) in which Sisto's piece was published, I note that we also published other significant pieces, including Thomas Weinandy's review of Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: the Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine, which is a splendid book I have used in courses over the years; and then we also published Matthew Levering's review of Marcus Plested's absolutely landmark and not-to-be-missed book Orthodox Readings of Aquinas.

Vladimir Solovyov on Judaism

The University of Notre Dame Press, the largest and most prestigious Catholic publisher of academic works in the world, just sent me their 2016 catalogue, and in it we find such offerings as a new translation of Vladimir Solovyov, The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism, trans. Gregory Yuri Glazov (UND Press, 2016), 456pp.

Forthcoming in May of next year, this book will, the publisher tells us, introduce readers to

Vladimir Solovyov, one of nineteenth-century Russia's greatest Christian philosophers, who was renowned as the leading defender of Jewish civil rights in tsarist Russia in the 1880s. The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism presents an annotated translation of Solovyov's complete oeuvre on the Jewish question, elucidating his terminology and identifying his references to persons, places, and texts, especially from biblical and rabbinic writings. Many texts are provided in English translation by Gregory Yuri Glazov for the first time, including Solovyov's obituary for Joseph Rabinovitch, a pioneer of modern Messianic Judaism, and his letter in the London Times of 1890 advocating for greater Jewish civil rights in Russia, printed alongside a similar petition by Cardinal Manning.

Glazov's introduction presents a summary of Solovyov's life, explains how the texts in this collection were chosen, and provides a survey of Russian Jewish history to help the reader understand the context and evaluate the significance of Solovyov's work. In his extensive commentary in Part II, which draws on key memoirs from family and friends, Glazov paints a rich portrait of Solovyov's encounters with Jews and Judaism and of the religious-philosophical ideas that he both brought to and derived from those encounters. The Burning Bush explains why Jews posthumously accorded Solovyov the accolade of a "righteous gentile," and why his ecumenical hopes and struggles to reconcile Judaism and Christianity and persuade secular authorities to respect conscience and religious freedom still bear prophetic vitality.

"Gregory Glazov's The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism by Vladimir Solovyov is a beautifully conceived and expertly executed volume. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt did the field of modern religious philosophy a great service by bringing Solovyov's sophiological writings together in a single elegant volume. Glazov has done the same for Solovyov's writings on Judaism." —Paul Valliere, McGregor Professor of the Humanities, Butler University