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mind has conceived. Again [in another place] Solomos writes: The difficulty
which an artist experiencesdoes not consist in showing imagination and
passion, but in subordinating these two things, with time and with labour, to the
intelligible meaning of Art (ibid., 15).
The development of artistic theory and practice from the end of the thirteenth
century onwards seemsto have passed through two main stages. The first stage
covers the centuries between the so-called Renaissance and the end of the
eighteenth century. During this stage, art was regarded as a rational process
whereby the artist, through the observation and analysis of natural figures,
works upward, idealizing them, and achieving in the end a balanced and
harmonious design. The artist begins with the natural object and ends with the
abstraction, the formal design. The work of art is not true to nature in quite that
literal way which it was later demanded that it should be, but it is true to the
patterns which the mind, working by observation, experiment, and analysis, can
discover in natural figures. After Masaccio, painting tends to begin with
perspective, with the anatomical construction of nature. Florentine theorists like
Cennino Cenniniin his Libro del Arte, and L.B. Alberti, or Leonardo da
Vinci in his Treatise on Painting, elaborate a theory of vision that is basically
scientific in the empirical and rational sense. The attempt on the part of the artist
to know the rational structure of things is regarding as an act of creation. Art
tends / to become a science which begins with sensory observation and ends
with the pleasing, harmonious, and abstract design that is the idealization of the
natural figures which the artist has observed in the first place. This conception of
art may well be termed classic, for it is similar to that which appears towards the
end of the fifth century B.C. in Greece and continues, with modifications, to be
the guiding conception of the art of Hellenistic and Roman times.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, this conception of art
began to give place to another. According to this new conception, art was
regarded as the expression of feeling, as the true voice of feeling, and its purpose
to rouse in the spectator or reader similar feelings. (-) Art became a sort of
indulgence of the emotions. The process of creation still began with the artists
sensory reaction to natural figures, to nature, but now his purpose was less to
discover the logical design in things and more to give voice to the feelings which
they aroused, to the sentiments and associations which they stimulated. Art was
self-expression, and by the self was understood the emotional self, which, if it
thinks at all, thinks through and with the emotions. (-) This conceptionmay be
called romantic, and it differs from the classic not in quality but only in degree.
For in both conceptions, art begins with individual sensory reactions to natural
forms and figures, and it is only in that while classic art aims to please and
stimulate the individual mind, and romantic above all to please and stimulate
individual feeling, that their ends may be said to differ. In either case, whether it
is the artist or whether it is the spectator or reader we are considering, the
process begins and ends with the individual.
But in that understanding of art which is not classic or / romantic but is
traditional in the sense that it is implicit in traditional cultures, the artistic
process neither begins nor ends with the individual. According to this
understanding, art begins with a supra-individual world that cannot be known
by observation or discursive reasoning but only by contemplation. This is the
world of spiritual realities, of archetypes and of archetypal experience, and it is
the task of the artist to embody this world in his work. The artistic process
begins, then, with the artists intuition of this world, his immediate experience of
it, something which is not possible until he has gone through an inner
development corresponding to the Platonic initiation, in other words, a kind of
dying, that kind of dying to which the philosophers life is dedicated [footnote:
Plato, Phaedo, 67d-e], and which involves a going beyond the purely individual
state. (-) For only to the extent that a work of art correctly imitates its model can
it be said to fulfil its purpose, and such faithfulness can only be attained when
the artist himself has first seen, has first experienced the model as it is. (-)
Likeness means an image akin and equal to its model, in other words, a symbol.
The art of which I am speaking is therefore imitative not of what is presented by
our immediate and natural environment, not of nature in the sense now
usually understood, but of Mother Nature, Natura naturans, Creatrixthat
Nature to find which all her forms must be shattered [ftnote: Meister Eckhart,
ed. Pfeiffer, trans. Evans, London, 1947, Vol. 1, p. 259] (ibid., 17-19).
An adequate symbolism is one in which a certain level of reality is evoked by a
reality of another and corresponding level. The latter is a symbol of the former. In
the art I am now discussing, the reality to which the symbol corresponds is the /
world of what Solomos called the Great Realities, the primordial truths. The
artists purpose wil then be so to arrange his work that its figures, its visibilia, are
adequate symbols of these primordial truths and so capable of re-evoking a
(ibid., 26). [Notice that Sherrard does not comment on the political realities that
Solomos makes reference to. The artist is inspired by Divine Nature (Greece) to
initiate the Greek people (and, by extenstion, humanity) into Truth.]
For she, a divine power and the source of mans life, dwells, where she can see
into the abyss and into the heart of man. Her anxiety and her tragic situation
come therefore not from her doubt as to the resolution of the besieged, which she
knows is fixed; they come rather from her knowledge that the fierce destructive
force, Fate, against which she is powerless, is in its stubborn fury relentless and
unfeeling, and may well overwhelm her children before they attain that liberation
in which her own unity and fulfilment consist. (-) Divine Nature itself, of
which each individual partakes which constitutes his true nature and his
knowledgeof what he really isthis Nature can never be at one with itself, must
always be divided among countless independent and perishable beings, and will
therefore suffer, until these beings, through struggle and sacrifice, deliver it from
that kingdom of Satan of which, while they continue merely separate individual
selves, both it and they are prisoners (ibid., 28).
In Solomoss The Free Besieged, nature is presented as a temptation that will
divert man from his heroic task (ibid., 30).
The Besieged gather in a Church and, in the setting of an Orthodox Liturgy,
ready themselves for martyrdom (or triumph against the Turk) by divesting
themselves of all attachment to anything worldly (ibid., 33).
From depth to depth he fell until there was no other:
Thence he issued invincible (ibid., 34).
Lft sl, 21
...Dr Raine resolutely takes her stand against those critics and practitioners of art
who regard art as some form of individual self-expression... (Sherrard,
Kathleen Raine, 182).
...Dr Raine does not aspire to be a religious poet, at least in the sense that the
devotional poets of the seventeenth century, or Manley Hopkins, are religious
poets. She regards the religious expereince of such poets as 'self-centered',
though 'in no moral or pejorative sense' (p. 15), such as might apply to the writers
of the present time to whom she refers above. Presumably the devotional poets of
the seventeenth century are self-centered because the drama / of which they
write is that of the individual human being--'teh shabby mortal individuality--confronting his destiny in terms of his personal relationship with God. ...[S]uch a
dialogue is precluded because her experience of a supra-individual world is
equated, not with the experience of God as a trans-psychic reality, but with the
experience of the soul. Hence there can be no drama between the indiidual
human soul and the God that it pursues... (ibid., 182-183).
Such [metaphysical] knowledge, 'unknown to textual scholars and literary
historians', is a 'learning of the imagination' (p. 69). It is the 'exact knowledge'
that Yeats speaks of as informing his pursuit of the meaning of Blake's
symbolism, and to which he possessed the key from his studies of tehosophy, the
Cabala and Swedenborg (p. 69) (ibid., 184).
left sl 7
To understand [the transition from Homeric hero to Christian martyr] one has to
recall the process of extreme devaluation of the sphere of worldly action which
has taken place in the West as a result of certain developments in Christian
thought, especially in Christian though strongly influenced by St Augustine.
According to this thought only what possesses form possesses reality, orto put
this another wayonly what possesses form possesses being. God, wh is Being
itself, is also the supreme formal principle. But the material worldthe world of
the senses and even history itselfis so far deprived of formal qualities that it
can virtually be said to lack any true or intrinsic reality and can more properly be
described as non-being. This is tantamount to saying that it can be more
properly assigned to the sphere of the devil, since the devil is par excellence the
negation of being. It is because of this that the world of materialitythe world of
natureand even man himself in so far as through his fall he has severed himself
from God and / attached himself to this world and acts out his history within it,
may be said to be sold into the captivity of the devil. This world, nature, and man
within it, constitute a lump of perdition, dead and decaying carrion, pssessed
only by things rank and gross, and doomed to oblivion (Sherrard, Yeats,
Homer, and the Heroic, 82-83).
...the unbearable tension which results from the continual confrontation of this
dichotomy had in certain artistic circles found a kind of release, or at least relief,
by the mid-nineteenth century in an aesthetic doctrine so rarefied and
sophisticated that it was possible for one of its adepts to remark, in all seriosness,
'AS for
left sl 9
;;;;;
Resulting in his appropriation of idealism as a means to sublimate Marxism, the
problematic of the antinomies of reason motivated Bulgakov to construct his
Sophiology to overcome the impasse between science and traditional faith, while
serving as a basis to reinterpret religious dogmatic issues that have plagued and
divided Christianity, and account substantially for the dogmatic and institutional
disunity found in the Church. Through the use of Sophia as a concept that
grounds the unity of the uncreated and created worlds of experience, Bulgakov's
religious-philosophical doctrine aims to explain the problematic of the
antinomies of reason, particularly as they concern questions of religious
consciousness (Seiling, From Antinomy to Sophiology, 6).
Bugakov used the concept of Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, to refer to that
cosmological being which could be perceived from either a transcendental or an
empirical perspective, an idea he believed was consonant with the traditional
concept of a divine principle which both held within it the unity of all created
being, while expressing plurality (ibid., 7).
The absolute god, who exists in himself, self-contained in his absoluteness, selfsufficing in his majesty, abandons this state and establishes in dependence upon
his own absolute being a relative creaturely being. It is only in relation to this
being that he can be called God. Eternity lays the foundation for time, nonspatial
beings for spatial beings, changelessness for becoming, while God abides "in the
heavens" in his eternity and absoluteness. This state in which the absoluteness of
the Absolute is combined with the relationship joining the world to God, the
divine life in itself on the one hand with its manifestation in the created universe
on the other, constitutes the ultimate antinomy for our reason and knowledge, a
bound which we cannot pass. At this point a fiery sword bars the way to our
reason, which can do no more than recognize the existence of this antinomy,
accepting both its postulates as equally necessary, though by their very essence
mutually exclusive. In practice this antinomy can be expressed for us in the
following proposition: the Absolute reveals itself to us as God; and we learn to know
God as such only on the basis of this his revelation of himself in his tri-personal
being and in his Godhead, that is the Glory and Wisdom [Sophia] of his essence
(Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 6; cit. in Seiling 7-8).
Although Sophia received divinity from God, Sophia is not God but the divine
substance resting at the first order of the created universe. In this way Sophia
functions for Bulgakov in a similar manner that natura sive substantia functioned
forSpinoza (1632-1677). (Seiling, 8).
Bulgakov himself stated that although Sophiology may not be raised to the
status of dogma, and therefore it is not necessary for thinking about certain theological doctrines,
it is nevertheless a helpful method, insofar as it seeks to use a modern, post-Kantian, critical /
means to conceive religious doctrines. Sophiology is one avenue for the application of a
scientific worldview that wishes to examine religious truth statements without contravening the
insights of science and philosophy. Bulgakov was content to allow theological dogmaticians to
wear intellectual blinders when modern or scientific problems arose, so long as they did not
claim to be able to have jurisdiction over the realm of science. Likewise he would gladly
welcome irreligious or scientist worldviews which narrowly focussed on questions of created
nature, so long as such a scientific worldview did not make metaphysical claims, in particular
concerning cosmology (ibid., 8-9).
thought in Russia that did not accept tradition as authoritative over personal and contemporary /
social religious experience. Pavel I. Novgorodtsev (1866-1924), a liberal economist who edited
the collection of essays in which an important essay by Bulgakov appeared concerning the the
[sic] theory of progress, suggested that the idealist movement in Russia held as its central
principle the unconditional significance of personhood [lichnost']. Nikolai Berdiaev also
declared that the philosophy of personhood should be an essential feature of the new religious
consciousness (ibid., 26-27).
Here is one difference between Russian religious philosophy's Sophia and that of Sherrard. The
former was an attempt to integrate insights from Enlightenment culture, be it post-Kantian
philosophy, Marxism, or exact science, with religious truth. Sherrard was, as the book was titled,
Against the Modern World in that he, along with many high and low Esotericists
contemporaries, rejected modern culture almost without reserve: Sophiology was...an attempt
to subsume the necessary insights of Marxism and a scientific worldview in general, concerning
the role of the human in reconstructing social, political and economic conditions. Here he posited
a dual, compatibilist conception of how religion and science were complementary and mutually
necessary. Such attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of science and religion or reason and
revelation are often referred to as neologies, for which a host of examples exist throughout
western religious thought, from Philo and Origen of Alexandria to Thomas Aquinas and
Maimonides, to Spinoza and Leibniz. In the modern period in which German idealism arose we
find further attempts to overcome the apparent conflict between what Kant would call the /
transcendental perspective and that of empirical science (ibid., 29-30).
Whereas [Solovev] sought to explain the connection between the ideal and real in terms of a
dialectic, having certain affinities with Hegel, [Bulgakov] sought to explain the border between
the ideal and the real and how that border separated or distinguished what was ideal from what
was real. In the recent terminology that affirms anti-metaphysical approaches to religious
philosophy, Bulgakov's project was more of a 'metaxology' than a dialectic. Writing at the dawn
of a new era in religious philosophy, Bulgakov considered the old (Solov'ev's idealism) and the
new (Shestov's existentialism), and suggested a middle course (ibid., 30).
Although he was earlier a follower of Hegel, by the time Bulgakov's more mature work
appeared he became much more critical of Hegel and tended to favour Schelling's approaches to
the problems of reason and revelation (ibid.).
Both Kireevskii and Solov'ev found in Maximus the speculative resources to envision a modern
Russian religious philosophy that was both appropriate to traditional Christian doctrine and
responsive to contemporary questions in
philosophy (ibid., 38).
as substance or nature was tailored for a scientific paradigm that defined the concept of God as
the same as substance and nature. Spinoza's God lacked purposive action and was not
providential and therefore such a conception was irreconcilable with the traditional, biblical
doctrine of God. Any so-called supernatural qualities of the divine were denigrated as
superstitious or pre-modern by these scientific concepts of God.
The personalist doctrine of God sought, on the other hand, to undermine any attempt to
define God in terms of substance or essence. Theistic personalism holds that God cannot be
reduced to any concept prior to that of a divine Person, who is totally Other from the created
world. As the instigator of this controversy in the late Enlightenment years Friedrich Jacobi
argued that on one hand, Spinoza's philosophy and concept of God was the most consistent and
rational. However, pantheism denied human autonomy and implied that in practical, ethical
terms, if one actually lived strictly according to a pantheist worldview, the result would be
ethical nihilism, a term Jacobi himself coined (ibid., 50).
There is a parallel between Schelling's attempt to respond to Jacobi's critique of
rationalism, his personalist concept of God, and emphasis on human freedom and the Sophiology
of Bulgakov, which responds to Shestov's existentialist version of the sort of personalism
expounded by Jacobi against Enlightenment rationalism. Just as Jacobi ignited debates in
Germany, Shestov played a similar role in igniting debates about God's essence and personhood
in the Russian Silver Age. However, for Jacobi and for Shestov over a century later, faith was the
sole ground for reason (ibid., 51).
...in the intellectual context of late nineteenth century
Russia, Hegel's appeal to the anti-religious intelligentsia seemed to tower over those of
Schelling, whose later religious philosophical writings had been widely discounted, both in
Germany and Russia. The interest in Schelling was usually connected in Russia with religious
philosophy, and a rejection of western rationalism, which many Russians believed has reached
its pinnacle in Hegel. Such was the context in which the Slavophile writers, such as Kireevskii,
began to develop aspects of Schelling's thought (ibid., 61).
John Scous Eriugena originated the concept of "supernatural grace" as the divine gift of grace
that perfects nature (ibid., 68-69).
The famous study that drew attention to the implicit doctrine of supernatural
grace in western theology was, Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Etudes Historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946) (ibid., 69).
The following is perhaps analogous to Sherrard's orientation. Sherrard believed that the truths of
Orthodoxy are found, though perhaps in a lesser form, in Western philosophy, theology and
literature: Ivan Kireevskii probably did not independently come to the conclusion that the
wisdom
of the Holy Fathers equalled, complemented or even surpassed the "new philosophy" that was
coming out of Germany at the time. It was Ivan's wife Natal'ia Petrovna, who, according to the
"Story of the Conversion of Ivan Vasil'evich," famously provided citations from the Church
Fathers to prove that the greatest insights from modern philosophy - Schelling included - were
already present, with greater depth, in the Orthodox spiritual and intellectual heritage (ibid., 71).
priest-philosopher, promoted both German idealism and Boehmist theosophy. Petr Avseniev
headed a strong tradition of Boehmist theosophical interest that allowed his student and
successor, P. D. Iurkevich, who taught at Moscow University, to pass on the doctrine to the
young Solov'ev. Like Kireevskii these professors, who taught during the early to mid-1800s,
tended both toward Greek Patristics and the theosophy of Boehme (ibid., 92).
Arguing that Adam only became deformed [verstaltet] into masculinity after the Fall when Eve
was created out of him, [Franz von] Baader explains that originally Adam was 'virginally'
comprised of both sexes. The only way to reconstitute himself as the imago Dei is for Adam,
humanity in general, to reunite in himself the two 'sexual potencies' [Geschlechtspotenzen]
(ibid., 94).
After an introductory summary of his critique of the main competing philosophies of his
day he turns to his own proposal in Part 2, Ch.l on "The Three Phases of the Absolute Principle
and the Three Divine Hypostases." Here he defines the first principle as the "potency of being or
relative non-being,"232 which equates with the universal will as universal substance, substratum
or subject. [44] Sophia as the cosmic Soul on one hand and the Logos as the cosmic Intellect
on the other, together play a coordinated role in bringing creation toward its ultimate perfection.
The Logos is the incarnation of Spirit in the ideal process, while Sophia is Spirit in the real
process of creation. The process whereby Spirit is manifest in matter creates love, which is
Sophia's essence. Sophia as a feminine principle, as soul, needs to submit to the divine Logos, as
Intellect; Christ becomes revealed as the perfect union of Sophia and Logos. This bears strong
resemblance to his description of Sophia in the famous Lectures?3*
Solov'ev describes Sophia's role as the material mediation between the "Divine Spirit"
and creation. He considers the incarnation of God to be the union of Intellect and the Divine
Spirit with divided Sophia.235 God needs to materialize himself, to be incarnated. He cannot do
that except by unifying himself interiorly with man, who alone is a being who unites the
spiritual, intelligent and animal nature with material nature. Spirit and divine Intellect are
eternally united with Sophia; but Sophia herself cannot possess material existence except in her
children; thus to be materially unified with Sophia, the Logos and Spirit need to become united /
with her children." [51] Thus "the end and goal of the universal process [is] the complete reunion
of the two worlds or the free and conscious submission of humans to gods." [53] He later
writes:
The goal of the universal process is the production of the perfect social organism,
the Church. The principle of this organism is the interior or free unity. This unity
can only be produced by the submission of the soul to her divine principle, the
Logos. [74]
Solov'ev thus stresses the submission of the universal soul to the Logos. In this way
Sophia, the absolute substance, interacts with humanity toward its perfection through submission
to reason. Despite his resistance to what he criticized as western "abstract principles" Solov'ev's
religious philosophy entailed a clear penchant toward rationalist thought.
Although Sophia was a figure or motif that appeared in various tropes and guises
throughout his writings, one cannot ultimately say that in comparison to Bulgakov, Sophia was a
central idea for Solov'ev. He did produce gestures toward such a systematic concept as Bulgakov
later developed, and these intimations, although somewhat sporadic and of uncertain spurious
quality at times, provided much fodder for the generation of Russian thinkers who succeeded
In Spinoza's Ethics he represented God as a bi-modal nature, both the natura naturans nature that is doing the bearing out of the world of phenomena - and what is termed "substance",
which appears in the world of phenomena as natura naturata - the nature that is borne out or has
been borne out, and presented in empirical reality. The roots of this distinction appear to have /
originated in the work of Eriugena, whose concept of divided, nature likely derived from his
study of Maximus the Confessor (ibid., 132-133). [?]
Rather than discarding both, as Tolstoy and
Marx advocated, Bulgakov sought to combine and juxtapose the insights of theology and
economics, making them conscious of each other, which as Bulgakov had argued earlier, was a
key contribution of Kant's transcendental idealism. If the theologian views an issue from the
transcendental perspective, the economist views it from the empirical perspective and the
philosophy of idealism tries to account for how both of these perspectives relate to a single issue
(ibid., 156).
In its most basic sense Bulgakov defines religion as "an active passing beyond the limits
of the self, a living feeling of the connection the finite and limited self has with what is infinite
and higher, an expansion of our feeling for infinity in the aspiration toward an inaccessible
perfection."410 Religion intuits the knowledge it needs by a method called faith, "a mode of
knowledge without proof [...] the disputability or incontestability of claims that are, as objects of
proof, replete with all the doubt and precariousness intrinsic to our knowledge, constitutes the /
distinctive feature of all religious truths [...] and it is precisely the immediate obviousness of
these truths that makes possible the living connection here between human thought and will."
(ibid., 164-165).
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