PART 2: Towards a Christian Religious Pluralism

The Fantasy

Metaphor Refantazio Will and Prince by Say0ran Arts

Oh Great Seeker, bearer of fantasy empowered… Hear my wish, and come forth from thy epoch of glory to grant me thy guidance. – from Metaphor: ReFantazio

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – Hebrews 11:1

WHEN THE MORNINGSTARS SING TOGETHER

In his essay titled “Masks, Chimaeras, and Portmanteaux: Sergii Bulgakov and the Metaphysics of the Person,” David Bentley Hart argues that if one follows the theological and metaphysical reasoning of Bulgakov to its end “it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that there must be a point in his vision of things where the distinction between the language of image and archetype and that of a yet more original identity begins to seem at most merely formal, and even rather arbitrary.”[1] I fully agree with this argument and therefore intend to argue here, from an essentially Bulgakovian metaphysics of Spirit, that the Christian doctrine of deification/Godmanhood not only implies but necessitates as its rational outworking a metaphysics and doctrine of religious pluralism. This is not to say that Bulgakov himself made these arguments or would have even been favorable towards them in his time, rather I intend to “move forward” with Bulgakov towards this pluralist horizon.

To elucidate this argument however requires a brief summation of Bulgakov’s understanding of the Trinity as Tri-Hypostatic Spirit.[2] For Bulgakov Spirit is Being revealing itself to itself and living in itself, or more specifically, Spirit is threefold unity in the moment of Subject-Hypostasis, the moment of Predicate-Essence or Power, and the moment of their actuality in union as Copula-Life/Energy. Each of these ontological moments in Spirit as such (God) are full and integral unities of the whole of Spirit from the perspective of their mode or ontological moment; for example, in the moment of essence, or of Sophia as the principle of hypostaticity (that is, the entirety of that living content of which hypostasis is actualization), the whole of Spirit as hypostasis-essence-life is found as a unity in the moment of essence. For hypostasis this is also the case and is why Bulgakov develops the idea of the Trinity as Tri-Hypostatic Person. Hypostasis as the subsistence/actualization of Spirit is then a threefold subsistence actualizing the three ontological moments of Spirit (Hypostasis-Essence-Life) as full and integral unities at the moment of hypostasis-subsistence. The result is God as Tri-Hypostatic Person, found to be absolute unity on the level of life, of essence, and even of hypostasis, because on this metaphysics there is no relation of causality let alone a confederacy of separate subjectivities, rather there is one Personhood in three irreducible moments of subsistent unity, subsistent unity as abyssal Subject (Father), Predicate (Son), and Copula (Holy Spirit). Furthermore, remembering that this Tri-Hypostasis is the threefold structure of self-revelatory Spirit, that is, it is the structure of hiddenness and manifestation which simply is personhood, we recognize that each of these irreducible hypostatic moments is irreducible precisely in their activity (for hypostasis is subsistence as unitive actuality) of self-positing (Bulgakov’s term) within one another. The Subject from its inner depth comes to actuality in its Predicate, the hypostatized-Predicate in recognizing and so positing itself in reception of the Subject as its actuality, and the hypostatized-Copula as the actuality of this union which, because the Copula is itself the moment of hypostatic unity as copula, results in an infinite actualization of the structure of Personhood as such. This is the Tri-Hypostatic structure of Spirit as the “I AM.”

A necessary result of the above is that, because when speaking about the Trinity in these metaphysical terms we are talking about the structure of Person as such, Person which is not three or one in any numerical sense (according to normative trinitarian teaching) but is rather infinite I-We-Thou-ness as unity, it is not inimical to Christian metaphysics to accept any number of really divine (that is infinite, eternal, etc.,) faces or unities grounded in this Personhood/Unity-as-Such. In short, any number of divine personalities/eternal theophanies, as manifestations subsisting as person/unity grounded in the Tri-Hypostatic Person, in other terms Gods and God as understood to be manifest in other religions, are not precludable by Christian metaphysics on its own terms, they can only be ruled out by a reactionary appeal to exclusivism. Fr. Pavel Florensky in his own articulation of the Trinity in relation to created hypostases declared:

Outside the Three, there is not one, there is no Subject of the Truth. But more than three? Yes, there can be more than three—through the acceptance of new hypostases into the interior of the life of the Three. But these new hypostases are not members which support the Subject of the Truth, and therefore they are not inwardly necessary for this Subject’s absoluteness…But every fourth hypostasis introduces in the relation to itself of the first three some order or other, thus through itself placing the hypostases into an unequal activity in relation to itself, as the fourth hypostasis. From this one sees that with the fourth hypostasis there begins a completely new essence, whereas the first three were of one essence.[3]

This passage is often interpreted as demarcating a clear ontological line between God and creatures, however on closer inspection this distinction between “the Three” and any “Fourth” also seems to be merely formal and arbitrary. Yes, the three are in a certain sense the only true Hypostasis/es, but even the analogical use of hypostasis or the qualification of creatures as “deified persons” still implies that the fourth are internal to Hypostasis and cannot be ultimately placed on the side of some ontological gap as another essence. To make this argument however requires a further elaboration of the ontology of hypostasis or person, uncreated and created.

Hypostasis is not only the unique I irreducible to essence or physis, or rather, hypostasis is precisely these things as being a subsistent act of hiddenness and manifestation.[4] Hiddenness indicating the subsistence of the essence as the depth of this subjectivity (its uniqueness) which exists in act as manifestation in communion, such that every I perichoretically encompasses and “exists” in all others. The common human essence then is the ground/content of the one human personality in an infinite plurality of hypostases as its multi-subsistence, each subsistence being a subsistent unity of the whole humanity, perichoretically containing the entire multitude of created being in itself as a unity from its perspective. This is the content of the claim that “being is communion,” and evidences that created hypostases and Divine Hypostases are distinct (or “really” separate) only by the addition of finitude, or by “difference of Subject” as Eriugena would say. But can even this distinction be overcome?

It should be noticed that, as above, when dealing with the ontology of hypostases (that is, their “beginning”) the distinction of hypostasis from essence, physis, or these things as individuating properties (e.g., the person of Noah is irreducible to his material instantiation) becomes unimportant. This is because when dealing with ultimate ontology essence is no longer a limiting factor, it isn’t physis, essence is instead the infinite depth of content subsisting as this unique unity called hypostasis. Using Hart’s definition, “hypostasis and nature must remain the two indissoluble sides of a single metaphysical principle: as ontic actualization and ontological axiom.”[5] In short, personhood is hypostasis and nature united in life (subject, predicate, copula), not one or the other in isolation. This is why for Bulgakov deification is something effected through “the spiritual principle” or hypostasis not only, to be clear, because hypostasis unites natures still considered as oppositions and limits (divine nature as infinite vs created as finite),[6] but because the unity of hypostasis is always a subsistence of that infinite nature, of Being, of God, even when our empirical existence is characterized by nature-as-physis reducing person’s manifestation to individuality.

We thus find that ontology and eschatology are one because when talking about the “beginning” of hypostases we are, in fact, also talking about their “end,” that is, their complete state as actualizations of that infinite nature which is their proper content and the ground of their uniqueness not merely as unique “ones” but unique lives. Recognizing that the beginning and end are one, we must also realize that we have left behind the “createdness” of hypostases in the conventional sense altogether. As a subsistent actualization of the divine nature, Being-as-such, St. Maximus’ claim that in deification we become uncreated and like Melchizedek, “without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God (Heb 7:3),” means that hypostases or rational spirits always already are uncreated. Furthermore, as actualizations, as acts of communion, hypostases are ultimately not thrust into being but are synergistically self-creating. To quote Hart’s explication of Bulgakov’s Christianization of Fichte in Hart’s You are Gods:

Finite spirit is, as spirit, always also a self-positing “I,” for both better and worse. And it is only as such an “I” that any free spiritual being could be created by God. God cannot create a free rational creature unless that creature is already free in being created… unless that creature has freely consented to its own creation, and unless that consent is truly constitutive of the act of its creation… no creature can exist as spirit except by its free acceptance of the invitation to arise from nothingness… If the free assent of the spiritual creature to and in its own creation is, again, nothing other than that final act of joyous confession and praise that is at once both the culmination of the creature’s temporal nisus and the eternal origin of the creature’s existence, then universalism… is in fact a necessary premise for any coherent account of spiritual creation.[7]

Thus, we are finally able to locate that ontological ground of the “Fourth” of Florensky. Created hypostases, really uncreated or deified hypostases, are the eternal hypostatization of the Tri-Hypostatic Person of its infinite content as an infinity of subsistent unities or persons which, in their beginning and end are the love of the Tri-Hypostatic Person, and the infinity of deified persons subsist no longer as separate or differentiated, but as the fecund reality of Person/Love as such.[8] There is ultimately no fourth hypostasis apart from or as a supplement to the Trinity; the fourth, and fifth and sixth and on to infinity simply are intimate to, ultimately are the Trinity in its transcendence of one and many. That said, it would be right to say that there is an “ontological moment” of the Fourth as an in-between in which the multiplicity of hypostases look back to the Tri-Unity and down into finitude. This is the ground of the positing of creation as a distinct reality in its becoming, and from this perspective the eternal reality of God as “all in all” is experienced in the way explained by S.L. Frank:

We have already mentioned that the “Thou art” of God is the foundation of “I am.” But this leads us to the fact that God’s “art” is already in a certain sense contained in the depths of my own “am,” or that my “am” is somehow rooted in the “am” of God himself… This relationship… is recognized by the mysticism of the Eastern Orthodox Church as the “deification” of man. In its general form this consciousness of the inner unity of man and God can be called the “God-man” being of man… Man is not only “created” by God, not only exists by the force of God’s reality, but is also “Born of God”… has “heaven” as his birthplace… Insofar as I experience myself as person…my being is revealed to me as essentially eternal, i.e., as originating in eternity and having eternity within it… Furthermore, my Godsonhood has a depper, more intimate aspect, in which not only am I born in God but also (as many mystics say) God Himself is born in me, im my limitation, subjectivity, and imperfection… my being is revealed to me not only as my being in God but also as God’s being in me.[9]

Thus, we have ultimately arrived at a metaphysics which grounds a religious pluralism in the doctrines of Trinity and deification. As intimated previously, the doctrine of the Trinity is not really a doctrine of three persons, it is a doctrine of Person or Personhood as such. It is quite possible, and by the implications of what it means for God to be infinitely fecund Goodness it is necessary, that this divine Personhood must have not only infinite theophanic forms manifesting itself from every angle of its infinite Goodness, but that these must be hypostatic multiplications of itself, the Tri-Hypostatic Person subsisting as infinite unities or persons. In proceeding forth from itself then the Trinity subsists as the “spiritual principle/s” individuating and grounding in infinity every being making up the chain of being, from rocks to plants to rational animals to angels and gods, all of which as proceeding and returning fall on the side of creation or God-in-becoming, but as always in their beginning or as returned they are hypostatizations of the fullness of God from their own perspective and as containing all others in perichoresis (which is love). Likewise, God as Tri-Hypostatic Personhood subsists as the infinite perspectives of himself grounding all religions, including the distinct manifestations they worship him in or as. Christian theology can and should accept not merely that other religions worship God by a sterile philosophical definition, but also in the full integrity of their distinct traditions and divine embodiments.[10]

To my mind, this theological and metaphysical picture of things transcends the oppositions of monotheism and polytheism in following the Nicene tradition’s logic of what deification means, not becoming a god but becoming God. When God asks, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy (Job 38:4, 7),” from the perspective of deification we can read this question as implying an answer of religious pluralism, when the “morningstars” in the beginning (the Son being the beginning) are understood as the infinity of intelligible horizons which are every created hypostases, and which are ultimately all the one intelligible horizon, the one Logos as the many logoi. The plurality of expressions of religion is a response to the fecundity of God in his infinite and united multiplication, and while in the transit of history religions (ways of life and institutions) are all imperfect, are inherently in becoming, in their end they are all the same joyous chorus.

HOW EVERY KNEE SHALL BOW

The most pressing Christian objection to my above articulation of a metaphysics of religious pluralism may be summarized as the argument that I have “compromised the absoluteness and uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” and this objection may be articulated metaphysically by appeal to the popular understanding in Christianity that Jesus is “alone” the person of the Son or Logos, and doctrinally by asserting Jesus’ status as “the way, the truth, and the life” is exclusive of all other religious paradigms necessarily. I believe however that neither of these claims stands up to scrutiny.

Metaphysically, the claim that every creature insofar as it is person or hypostasis or subsistence is ultimately God the Logos as the hypostasis of creation is, for Nicene Christianity, simply a truism. The subsistence, being and life/activity of creation is God as proceeding forth from himself, and in its returning to God, which is the reality of deification, all that the creature ultimately is is God. All that exists just is God, and all that exists as God in manifestation is God subsistent as the Son, ergo Nicene Orthodoxy necessitates the claim that every hypostasis is ultimately the Logos incarnate (which is to say creation is incarnation). Indeed, with the Nicene revolution Jesus Christ in the deification of His humanity could no longer be understood as an intermediary being, an angel, or even as remaining (by the standards of pre-deified human nature) human by natural properties at all, that is, Christ could not be understood to be ultimately composed of opposites. St. Gregory of Nyssa for example famously characterized the unity of Christ, realized in ascension, as follows:

For he who is always in the Father, and always has the Father within himself, and is united to him, is and will be what he was before, and there neither was, is, nor will be any other Son but him. For the first fruits of human nature that he assumed have been mixed with the all-powerful Godhead, like (as one might say using a simile) a drop of vinegar in the boundless sea, and are in the Godhead rather than in their own peculiar characteristics. For a duality of Sons could logically be acknowledged if some heterogeneous nature could be recognized by its own identifying characteristics within the ineffable divinity of the Son… But as all those characteristics that can be seen to be associated with what is mortal have been transformed into the characteristics of the Godhead, no distinction between them can be perceived; for whatever one can see of the Son is divinity, wisdom, power, holiness, and impassibility.[11]

And as is the patristic maxim, what is true of Christ is true of all those deified in him. Thus John Eriugena states, “the Humanity of Christ which after the resurrection was transformed into his Divinity… to that same glory he shall, after the general resurrection, bring his chosen.[12] Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, as explained above, developed his entire Sophiological system around this insight and so rightly declared that, “in the heavenly God-Man, in the light of His Divinity, there is no longer a distinction between His uncreated divine essence,” and consequently that, “if man were capable of freeing himself from his natural essence by the power of spiritual life, he would simply be God, and his life would be fused with the divine life.”[13] Are we then all Jesus Christ? Yes and no and the duality is false. No, insofar as the limits of individuality in our present existence are concerned. Yes, insofar as Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Logos, which all things ultimately are, a fact we recognize sacramentally. And the duality is false because in that ultimate state of deification in which God is all that is, separateness and differentiation do not exist, rather all things in perfect unity and simplicity are that infinitely actual fecundity of Person/Love as such.

The doctrinal concern is also easily answered, though not without posing difficulty for the historically normative attitude of Christianity towards the world and other faiths. That Jesus is the way, truth and life simply must be understood as meaning that Truth and Life are not only perfectly revealed in him (which is not to claim they are perfectly understood or practiced in Christianity), but that whoever seeks, finds, and lives for the Truth and Life has found Jesus and walks in him as the way, regardless of the specifics of their tradition. True, this is not the normative way Christianity has understood its claims, but I believe this understanding follows from a uniting of the metaphysical necessity explored above with the existential necessity of taking history and common human experience seriously. In history we find, no matter how much apologists may argue otherwise, a Jewish and Christian history that is inseparable at every point from the development of religious consciousness of all humanity in its many forms. Likewise, Christianity cannot deny, if it abides by honesty and charity, the reality that the other manifestations of religio are in their unique forms manifestations of and proceeding towards the ultimate intelligible horizon Christianity recognizes, and that on our historical paths we cannot claim a qualitative superiority. To claim that my tradition is the fullness of truth in an exclusivist sense is to forget that my tradition can only lay claim to truth by continually transcending itself as a given, limited, one of many historical reality, and so exclusivism is idolatry. We are all growing, learning, and the only deposit of truth is at the end we strive towards. As Hart says:

For this reason, incidentally, the religion historically called “Christianity” is not a “truth” that exists among and in competition with “false” non-Christian religions… [Christianity] is only one limited trajectory within history’s universal narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely deification… And the invisible Church is at once more original, more ultimate, and more comprehensive than the visible… in its final end it is perfectly coterminous, albeit under the aspect of the created, with the God who is “all in all.” The Church is simply a corporate and historical expression of Christ’s affirmation that “You are gods.” What is true of him is true of us…[14]

The argument may however be raised that Christianity is exclusively true because it identifies the cross and resurrection as contingent facts with Truth and therefore appeals to ontology or reason are wrong in principle. This argument however assumes the (popular) narrative of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection as a snatching of creation (or a limited part of it) out of the jaws of an ultimate death that was a real possibility but was avoided by a contingent historical act. In short, it assumes that creation is not in its beginning and end the fullness of God, that creatures only exist as already returned to and joyously communing with God, rather it assumes creation is of an alien other-essence and that God acts on and towards it basically temporally, anxiously trying to save this alien thing before it goes off into oblivion (though to dwell on these ideas long enough results in them reducing to an ultimate dualism anyways, antithetical to any claims of Incarnation at all). Instead, one should understand the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ as in time manifesting that always already true reality of death’s non-being and of Godmanhood as the truth of being (the Cross then manifesting ontology and the nature of being and not being a mere historical fact arbitrarily asserted as absolutely significant). Christ thus said temporally prior to his crucifixion, “he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him (Lk 20:38),” and Orthodox Christians believe that, despite complete lack of historical or doctrinal knowledge of Christianity, Moses and Melchizedek are supreme examples of deification. Bulgakov succinctly summarizes this truth about history’s relation to eternity:

God in His eternity embraces in a single supratemporal act all the fullness of being, with its spatial and temporal aspects. Here there is no past, present and future, here there is not even creation itself, as emergence, for in Divine eternity even the world is eternal. Here there is not even the Incarnation, as an historic event, for the eternal God in His immutability embraces even the Incarnation. Here all worldly being flows together into a single point. In Divine eternity there is no time, no world, no creation, no Incarnation, no last event, for everything is embraced by it in the pre-eternal act. In Divine life with the world, in creation and providence for it, in synergy with it, all this exists by virtue of divine reality.[15]

Thus, belief in Christ’s salvific economy need not be grounds for exclusivism, rather it is bound up with creation as incarnation as a whole. Furthermore, we have scriptural warrant not to separate the salvific acts of Christ from our own acts of charity or of martyrdom, for Christ is the least of these, and how could it be true in the period of ancient Israel that “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints (Ps 116:15)” if such deaths were not one and the same death with Christ? We therefore should not see participation in Christ as exclusive to Christian faith, sacraments, or persons, rather what we explicitly recognize in cult is to be found, as truth and life, wherever truth and life are found.

What then does it mean that, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Php 2:10-11).” St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, has shown that the submission of all things to God implies no compulsion or inequality but rather means the free realization of every being’s good in and as the Good, and, accepting that, I only need say this in response to the specific question of religious pluralism. In the end that is God there is no exclusion, otherness, or contradiction. Christ is all in all when the perfect divine character revealed in Christ is found to be in all beings, including all Gods, all theophanies of the absolute; when from whatever perspective of whatever hypostasis the face of Christ shines through, and in Christ’s face all are found.

AN APPEAL TO THE GREAT GUARDIAN ANGEL

All the above may, I certainly hope, be edifying to individuals mature or maturing in their intellectual lives of faith, but I have written it in great part through negative inspiration as well as positive, meaning that I have been spurred on to develop my thought down this path by the horrible witness of the corpse of Christendom. Today the Christianity that is normative in most institutions and seemingly most popular where there is growth rather than decline, is a Christianity “moving forward with” all that is regressive, fideistic, authoritarian, exclusivist and anti-humanistic in its legacy under the guise of traditionalism. Such a Christianity is essentially powered by a psychological pathology, a reactionary desire for a framework of absolute certainty to appease rather than grapple with the anxiety of modernity, and such a reactionary casting away of freedom and humanness is not only pure irrationality, the essence of evil passions and dehumanization, it is the seed of tyranny. Christianity as culture war, which framework for understanding it has spread globally, is the submission of Christianity to capitalism, its commodification, and so Christianity as a product must compete with other religions in a game to corner the market on certainty and the metanarrative of civilization. Traditionalism is thus deeply cynical, ultimately nihilistic, an ever shifting for demand yet unreflective reduction of God and man to commodities, believing in a God whose triumph is as the most popular and convincing product among many.

But enough of trying to summarize a decay and cancer that has been analyzed by minds far better. In summary, a religious pluralism as metaphysic and even way of relating to other faiths is worthless for humanity, seed sown on barren soil, if it does not reach a state of being “in the water” for everyone, educated and uneducated, simply a normative way to approach the world even prior to reflective understanding. Furthermore, while the above argued for pluralism and its compatibility with the best of Christianity may establish the possibility of such pluralism as an outworking of potentials inherent in Christianity, the reality is that as an historical institution and legacy Christianity is unwelcoming of this development, cannot feasibly function as the mediating ground for realizing pluralism as unity. Put more clearly, the existential problem of pluralism is the problem of creating a just society in which the multiplicity of human existences, including religious plurality and the cultures it has shaped, is capable of existing as a real unity of and as that multiplicity. The positing of a society in which Christianity is in a privileged ideological position effectively in charge of negotiating this unity, is to posit some form of Christian supremacy which at best would be a colonizing inclusivism. There is also the issue that Christianity, especially today, is in great part (as authoritarianism and fideism) an implicit or explicit denial of humanism, of the human condition as revelation precisely in human creative living multiplicity.

What we require then is a paradigm of existence rooted in a transcendent end/subsistent activity (God subsistent as a certain paradigm and perspective of being) which is capable of being this middle ground in which the various religious traditions of the world can enter into a relation of perichoresis so far as possible, not losing themselves but learning to live “in the other” by accepting a solidarity in living according to and striving towards the ends of this mediatory ground/transcendent end. In my articulation here one should notice that I am trying to apply the metaphysical ideas argued for above to the social/political realm (and to the human condition as such), rooting a pluralist cosmopolitanism in the metaphysical belief that the Tri-Unity in its fecundity can subsist as various and even infinite “forms” of itself as unifying paradigm (that is, as infinite personalities).[16] For this purpose then, and as we are dealing with the realm of finitude in which all religions and cultures are in becoming, and so as finite are contingent actualities, the middle ground and transcendent end for such actualities cannot itself be another one among them which would just be a different kind of tyranny. Instead, it must be the infinite subsisting or hypostatizing itself as the potentiality of every being and form of being to actualize itself in its good. Namely, if one does not object to naming this mediatory paradigm, this transcendent subjectivity of potentiality-in-life is the great guardian angel of creation, the hypostaticity and ideal personality of all existence, Holy Sophia.

To understand what I am arguing for, and assuage any concerns that I am simply spouting vacuity, we must elaborate on the content of this subsistent paradigm. Fundamentally then the essence of this paradigm is as follows; the potentiality of all natures to develop, so far as possible, in their integral good, and that such development is not isolated or merely particular but to be lived as the corporate good such that the good of one in its integrity is the good of all (e.g., Sobornost), so that there is one common life in a multiplicity of equal centers, and that this “life” is itself a paradigm and value rationally and ethically prior to, as grounding all ultimate realization of, every finite actuality.

This paradigm means that human goodness as the infinite actuality of human nature’s potential in all its variety (including the rational and relational, so not accepting ad hoc and reductive natural law theory) comes prior to and must be the context of further divisions of humanity by, for example, religious difference. In short, humanism and humanness, commitment to a common humanity which is perfectly equal and in its various manifestations of life is a deposit of revelation, especially in rationality and empathy, is a common ground in which all religions find the proper perspective from which to strive towards their own perceived universally encompassing (and ultimately perichoretically united) ends. Christians have often found themselves having to choose between being human and being Christian, and often have degraded to the point where charity, love and the search for truth are no longer recognized as what it means to be human or as sacred wherever they are found. This Sophianic paradigm would allow Christianity to accept and live according to the claim that, “vindication of God is to be found in man himself and in the pathways of human existence,”[17] and so recognize that the nature of human being as free, with the relational/political entailments of this reality, are sacred and common ground.

I feel I should clarify, so there is no unfortunate confusion, that none of this entails an absorption of religions into one or a denial of any religion’s universal significance. This paradigm instead functions as a realization of that ground of potentiality which all religions share as manifestations of a common humanity and a common virtue of religio. It is a womb for the growing of every religion along its own path in living dialogue with all others, and so it is inherently anti-reductive just as life is. Just as importantly, it is a paradigm for a world in which the “secular” is not an anti-religious space whose content is the reign of capital, instead the “secular” space becomes the hypostatization of Tzimtzum, the space of potentiality for finitude to grow into infinite actuality. Thus, the secular becomes essentially the space for recognizing the infinity of human being as oriented towards the transcendent from a common ground for the various “ways” of actualizing this infinity. The transcendent could thus returns through the critical adoption and thinking through of modernity and the “secular” becoming the “kenotic.” Such a paradigm, if accepted by the religions of the world, would also demonstrate the absolute falsity of all reductions of humanity, especially the nationalistic, and would hopefully compel by rational and moral force the religions of the world to work for a united humanity and an end to national divisions and systems of inequality.

To invoke Sophia as the subsistence and name for this paradigm and fail to discuss, inevitably inadequately, her relation to the non-human world of flora and fauna and nature spirits seems wrong. However, because this article is already overly long, and because others have dealt with this topic in far greater depth than I could ever hope to, I have decided not to do so. I encourage my readers to read the works mentioned in the immediate footnote.[18]

THIS… IS A FANTASY

*SPOILERS FOR THE GAME METAPHOR: REFANTAZIO* In the videogame titled Metaphor: Refantazio, released by its publisher Atlus in 2024, we play as the character canonically named Will, a young hero in a vibrant but unjust fantasy world tasked with uncovering the truth of the late King’s assassination and restoring the publicly presumed dead and ailing Prince to the throne. This adventure, in the course of which Will accrues many companions, some initially favorable to his cause and some reformed from villainy, takes a drastic turn when the dead King’s spirit rises as a celestial body and, using the “King’s Magic,” declares the next ruler will be the one who manages to win over the hearts of the kingdom’s majority by the promised day. Setting out on this quest Will and his companions tap into the source of the royal magic, brandishing the world’s archetypes as summons and transformations, to try and win the kingdom over to the Prince’s side (who Will is impersonating) and reform the inequalities of society based on cast and race according to the utopian vision Will and the Prince share (embodied in a book evoking Thomas More’s Utopia).

The journey, however, takes another great turn near its end, when our heroes are forced to flee by the main antagonist and return to the place the adventure began, where only Will and his companion fairy had been before, the home of the Elda from where all races came. Having discovered that their world and its many races are the remnants of humanity’s apocalypse after discovering magic, and that this magic is the power inherent to all beings through overcoming their existential anxiety (but which when submitted to transforms them into monsters, a dark magic the antagonist uses as a threat in trying to bring about his fascistic and ultimately apocalyptic ends), they uncover one more secret. Will is not the friend of the Prince, Will is the Prince, the Prince’s idealism and fantasy given form by ensouling his book, tasked to go and grow in the world and become not only a king but the embodiment of kingship, the fantasy of the prince becoming the embodiment of the ideals and imagination of a better world inherent in all people’s hearts. Having reunited with his origin and shedding ignorance to assume his full identity, the Prince returns to battle the antagonist one last time and emerges triumphant, belief in overcoming anxiety through the fantasy of Utopia overcoming all. Finally, there is one last twist; at the beginning of the game we the player are asked to input two names, one for us and one for Will, and at the end it is revealed that the player themselves was the Seeker who authored the book of Utopia.

I promise that the above is not an idle addition to this already lengthy article, though I choose to use the imagery of this game for my own enjoyment. It has a point. The world of Metaphor functions as a microcosm of the concept of the Mundus Imaginalis.[19] It is a world supposedly subsequent to our own apocalypse, yet which in its assimilation of real world and meta-fictional concepts to its own integrity as a world almost seems like the archetypal realm from which our world comes, in short, the world of Metaphor embodies the imaginal as both informing and being given form by the human. The same is true of its protagonist, the Prince, who is the myth of the human spirit given form. His first form as the cursed and ailing prince is the human being as a given material entity, mere individuality enclosed on itself and so “presumed dead.” As the idealist hero Will, however, the prince is alive, which is to say that human being only really exists in its going out of itself as imagination and fantasy, overcoming the anxiety inherent to our existence in history as spirit trapped in givenness by ecstatically reaching towards the transcendent horizon of Utopia. Finally, the Prince is whole when his givenness (the merely material and conditioned aspect of existence) is overcome by sublimation into the identity of the wholly personal being as the incarnation of their end, their fantasy, and as this end is the Utopia which is the Good containing harmoniously all creature’s ends, the Prince (and the human spirit he mythologically embodies) becomes “the King.” The King who is the summit of personality in and as each personality, and so is both uniqueness and absolute freedom, as opposed to a Tyrant (which the antagonist embodies) who as isolated monad is in fact less than a person, is simply a submission to anxiety and a sinking into the surge of givenness.

Thus, I hope the character of my mediatory Holy Sophia is made clearer. She is not the subsistence of divinity as pure potential prior to or without enforming orientation towards its transcendent end, nor is she divinity reduced to this or that actualization of potency within the realm of procession and return between beginning and end, as any such actuality is finite and one of many. Holy Sophia is instead the interplay of potency and act in and as all creatures as ecstatic life, that is, she is the imaginal realm, the Sea of Souls and World-Soul. She is the where and the how and the what, as the who, of all creatures’ coming to be in and through one another through imaginal creation. While in the prior section I tried to articulate her content in ethical and political terms with humanist imagery, here I wish to make clear that all of these perspectives are rooted first in the essence of reality as infinite wonder, and so the essence of the human being (and of pan-humanity including every rational creative spirit) is fantasy.

I have come to find, through self-reflection, that it is this fantasy which has always been most dear to me and underlies my thoughts and motivations (and not only because I draw inspiration from fiction often as much as theology or philosophy). My initial teenage turn towards Orthodoxy and away from reclusive non-denominationalism was spurred on in great part by a feeling that the world and God must just be vaster and more wonderful than I knew. That the God I worshipped had to be just as and more majestic than the gods and heroes of myth, fantasy and comic book films, and that he had to be inclusive of the ideas they conveyed. Likewise, due to the good example of my educators in university, even while under the influence of bad internet company and grappling with the bits of fundamentalism I had brought to my Orthodoxy, my specific preoccupation with the ideas of Sobornost or Catholicity and Personalism was ultimately an obsession with the idea that human activity and person was capable of incarnating and laying hold of infinity and wholeness of being. Since reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot I have retrospectively recognized there was always a part of me that identified with Prince Myshkin’s feeling, “What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join… everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything…”[20] This feeling, while perhaps leading to melancholy at times, is a recognition of the falseness of the limits placed upon us by material givenness, and so of the real infinity of our souls which we actualize in imagination.

Fantasy or Sophia is inherent to all of us and always ready to guide us to become our true selves, “Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets… behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you (Pr 1:20, 23).” This call is the living force at the root of all creaturely growth and in all disciplines, especially theology as creativity and construction of the Christian future. Those who do not recognize tradition as a living and creative thing turn tradition into a hypostatization of anxiety and so turn it toward non-being. Those who do recognize this are the souls that Sophia loves and who change the world, “in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God, and prophets (Wis 7:27).” The difference between them is one of faith, because only the lover of wisdom lives by faith, a faith that is living fantasy, and so has the substance of the end they hope for. In conclusion, this is why I am especially heartened by the works of Jordan Wood, David Armstrong, Timothy Troutner and Andrew Kuiper regarding Reform Catholicism, David Bentley Hart regarding the apocalyptic nature of tradition and Christian Vedanta, and even Oluwaseyi Bello’s work for a real religious pluralism, because in them I see the same working of Sophia as fantasy that drew me to Orthodoxy.

Fr. Sergei Bulgakov asked, "whose world is it, the God-man's or the man-god's, Christ's or the Antichrist's?”[21] If we wish to answer that it is Christ’s, as we must, then we can only do so as lovers of Sophia and fantasy.

FIN.

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[1] David Bentley Hart, “Masks, Chimaeras, and Portmanteaux,” Leaves in the Wind, October 31, 2022.

Masks, Chimaeras, and Portmanteaux:

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[2] I will be drawing on chapter one of Fr. Sergei Bulgakov’s The Lamb of God, as well as David Bentley Hart’s above-mentioned essay, and other treatments of this topic in Bulgakov’s corpus which are influencing my explanation but which I do not cite.

[3] Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 38.

[4] For the uninitiated talk of hypostasis as the unity of a uniqueness irreducible to essence may seem to contradict talk of hypostasis as the actuality/subsistence of essence, but there is no contradiction here. By saying hypostasis “is” we are speaking at the level of being, meaning the level of whatness and intelligibility or of the “predicate,” and even when referring to essence as hyper-ousia (beyond-being) we are still speaking in the register of “is-ness” or predication. To say that hypostasis is irreducible to essence is then simply to recognize the reality of the subject which is necessarily irreducible to but never “other” than its predicate. There is one ultimate reality of Person as subject-predicate-copula, each in its ontological “moment” being the complete unity of Person. But this has all been a summary of what was argued above.

[5] Hart, “Masks, Chimaeras, and Portmanteaux.”

[6] Though, insofar as deification can be said to include the reality that finite existence is not other to deified existence, that finitude is itself a fully integral existence as God, then the hypostasis may be appealed to as eternally uniting infinity and finitude as integral yet interpenetrating realities. This can explain deification as simultaneously a transcendence of finitude to existence in pure intellectual simplicity, as well as a vision of deified life as this world made into a perfect Eden still characterized by the distinctness of finitude.

[7] David Bentley Hart, You are Gods. (Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 121-123.

[8] That the created “I” is ultimately God subsisting as that “I” is also affirmed by Jordan Wood in his creative theological explication of St. Maximus’ Logos-logoi theology in The Whole Mystery of Christ. (Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 127-132. This conclusion, to my mind, just necessarily follows from what the personalist tradition in Orthodox theology understands person to be, and it is unfortunate that for reasons of defective metaphysics (e.g., the limited perspective of Neopatristic thought on creation) and/or mistaken dogmatic commitments most modern Orthodox thinkers have not explicitly stated the obvious conclusion.

[9] S.L. Frank, The Unknowable. Translated by Boris Jakim. (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020), 257-258.

[10] This is, to my mind, also the only way Christianity can even recognize a continuity of divine truth and life in its own history, as the various stages of ancient Israelite, to Second Temple Judaism, to pre and then post-Nicene Christianity evidence such diverse and contradictory ideas of and approaches to deity that an intellectually honest exclusivist would have to argue all of them are mutually exclusive. It should also be noted that I do not mean to put essential metaphysical prerequisites on acknowledging the divine good of other religions. Any practice of virtue manifests the same infinite and united religio. I simply wish to provide a metaphysical perspective of pluralism demonstrating its theological truth and appeal.

[11] Gregory Nyssen, “To Theophilus,” in The Fathers of the Church: St. Gregory of Nyssa Anti-Apollinarian Writings. Translated by Robin Orton. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 266-267.

[12] Johannes Eriugena, Periphyseon. Translated by I.P. Sheldon-Williams & John J. O’Meara. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2020), 139, 539C.

[13] Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Translated by Boris Jakim. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 94, 399.

[14] Hart, You are Gods, 110-111.

[15] Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, Judas Iscariot - Apostle-Betrayer (Kindle Edition). Translation by Mike Whitton. (Published independently, 2017), location 903-912.

[16] Throughout this two-part essay and especially here I have had the work of Oluwaseyi Bello, author of the Substack titled “A Play of Masks,” as a conscious dialogue partner. If one is interested in a highly refined defender and creative mind of the polytheist tradition alive today, I recommend him.

[17] Berdyaev, Self-Knowledge, 301.

[18] For great explications of this perspective and the real need of the world for it see the articles “Divine Animality,” “Democratizing the Image of God,” and “Why Humanity?” by David Armstrong over at A Perennial Digression, as well as Andrew Kuiper’s “Promethean Theurgy and Russian Cosmism” at Naucratic Expeditions.

[19] For an explanation and defense of the reality of the Imaginal Realm see David Armstrong, “Sunday Saunter: Why I Believe in the Mundus Imaginalis,” A Perennial Digression, July 6, 2025.

Sunday Saunter: Why I Believe in the Mundus Imaginalis

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[20] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2001), 423.

[21] Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, xiv.