Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars… she crieth upon the highest places of the city, “Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither”: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, “Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled. Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.”
– Proverbs 9:1-6
Introduction
The Nativity Fast is the period leading up to the Celebration of the Nativity of Christ, or Christmas, and in this period are included the Marian Feasts of the Entrance into the Temple of the Theotokos and the conception of the Theotokos by Sts. Joachim and Anna, demonstrating the unity of Christ and His Mother as the subject of devotion during this period. We should therefore reflect upon the great mystery at the centre of our faith subsisting in two persons, Christ and His Mother, that is, the mystery of how Sophia (Wisdom) has built her house and established her seven pillars, which encompasses the divine predetermination and eschatological culmination of the divine-human economy of history.
In this two-part article I will present my own reflections upon this mystery with special focus on the person of the Virgin Mary (though of course inseparable from her Son) and her “let it be” given at the Annunciation. I will be unabashedly speculative, and not shy away from realities the mystery exposes. Indeed, I think such a mystery compels the full use of our imagination to engage in theological speculation, that this is at the core of our tradition, and that any presentation which would mute such speculation does a disservice to the mystery.
The “Let it be unto Me” of Time and Eternity
In Orthodox tradition the Theotokos is understood to be the culmination of Israel’s preparation in righteousness for the coming of the Messiah, her lineage being gradually purified to produce holy ones until the union of Joachim and Anna would without passion produce the Panagia, the All-Holy. However, if on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers we say God “has shown from them the power of life to us,” we also sing in the Troparion “by faith you justified our ancestors, having betrothed the church beforehand from the shadow of the nations.”[1] In short, if the Theotokos is the culmination of Israel’s holiness it is because she is the very principle and final cause or end of this holiness bringing about the conditions of her own fruition.
Retrocausality is a necessary principle of Orthodox theology because, as Origen explained, “we hold that the future event, which would have taken place even if it had not been prophesied, constitutes the cause of its prediction by the one with foreknowledge (Cels 2.20).” The preeminent example is of course Christ’s work of salvation as well as His eschatological summation of all things. The development of the whole Israelite religion and of all those conditions which are taken up in the saving acts of Christ, only come into being and occur because of and as the realization of Christ’s Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. It is because Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8) that He is crucified on Golgotha; the end (Christ’s reality as the Crucified) is itself the principle which brings about the conditions for and the realization of the content (Christ’s being crucified for us under Pilate) which makes up this end.
The above is necessary to affirm for a proper understanding of the mystery of Christ and was affirmed clearly by the likes of Sts. Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. Indeed, the doctrine of the creation as the procession of the Logos into finitude as the many logoi (incarnation) and return of all into unity with God (deification) is a metaphysics oriented towards this doctrine of revelation that the end is the beginning. The logoi only function as the principles of creatures existence moving towards unity with God because they are already and priorly ontologically this union with God and God’s relation to the creature as united to Himself, or more succinctly, all is accomplished for God eternally as He is eternal, and temporal creaturely existence exists only because for God that procession is eternally returned to and culminated in His own life.
But let us return to the specific mystery of the Theotokos. She, like all other human persons, is not only a creature of natural givenness propagated by material birth. As St. Gregory of Nyssa explains in On the Human Image of God, God creates humanity as a whole simultaneously in His eternity,[2] and this wholeness of humanity in all its distinct persons, explained in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28, is the Body of Christ who is the true humanity or Adam.[3] Generation by physical birth is something that follows after, a concession granted in foreknowledge of the fall by which human individuals are manifest in an order of temporal sequence and physical distance, encumbered by defects and subject to biological originations that can seem like cruel chance. Of course it is not truly cruel chance, rather this all makes up the content of that “whole,” of the image of God which is the principle of temporal finite existence precisely as being the finished and deified humanity including all human persons as Christ’s Body, in which every negative aspect of finite existence in its bondage to sin is overcome and abolished, and human existence is manifest as being the free “yes” of the person with all other persons in Christ to the Father’s summons.
This view of the simultaneously atemporal-temporal nature of the human person is further reinforced and enriched by modern Orthodox theological reflection on the ontology of personhood. For example, Vladimir Lossky argues that person or hypostasis is not reducible to common nature nor to individuality (concrete form and distinguishing features and accidents), but is rather irreducible to nature as the “who” whose nature subsists as his own but which he also transcends.[4] Fr. Dumitru Staniloae goes further in his theology, arguing that persons only exist in and as communion, and that the human person is created with the freedom of self determination, is an absolute existence, in the image of God. His ontology of human personal sobornost is illustrated in a powerful analogy:
The continuity of human nature subsisting concretely in many hypostases can be imagined graphically as a string on which the hypostases appear, one after the other, like different knots. The knots are not separated by total emptiness, but by a thinness or diminution of the nature that appears in the knots in thickened form, that is, in the actualization of all its potencies… The knots communicate through the string and bring one another into existence. They are able to become more and more interior to one another. In a way, each human hypostasis bears the whole of nature as this is made real in the hypostatic knots and the string which unites them. Individual human beings, in the proper sense, cannot be spoken of as if they were concrete expressions of human nature existing in total isolation. Each hypostasis is linked ontologically with the other and this bond finds expression in the need they all have to be in relation. They are thereby characterized as persons…[5]
To summarize, according to Orthodox Personalist theology a person is irreducible to nature and its processes while being the subject and subsistence of its nature, is an absolute subject of self-determination, and exists and is who it is only in relation to all other persons. Like the Holy Trinity, but in a finite modality, the human person is an absolute subject who only exists in the revelation to and reception of revelation from other absolute subjects, and this ontology is an ontology of love. The person only is himself in giving all of himself to the other and vice versa, just as the Son is only who He is as Son of the Father and the Father is only Himself as Father of the Son.
This is, in brief, Orthodox personalist ontology, and to refer to other figures such as Met. John Zizioulas, Christos Yannaras, St. Sophrony Sakharov, etc., would only belabor the summary. However, there is a figure prior to all of these whose contribution to personalist ontology has not received its due until recently, and whose thought brings us to the object of our speculation. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, understanding that the person was fundamentally defined by freedom from givenness in self-determination as a being constituted by love, which can only be free, applied this ontology of person to the question of creation, namely, can God create persons by an imposition of existence in which the person is merely an object? Is creation a matter of dictated otherness? No, was Bulgakov’s firm reply.
Now the question arises: Can a personal spirit, to whom self-positing is proper (I am I or, simply, I am in my self-belonging), be created? Can I, a subject, be not-I, an object, even if only for the Creator Himself?... Rather, it must have been drawn to its own creation, through self-positing. I must have been asked to agree to its own being. But, together with this, I must have been created by God's omnipotence… in the creation of I, I itself was asked to agree to be, and this agreement was I's self-positing, which resounds in I supratemporally, as the witness of its own belonging to itself. From the emptiness of nothing there resounds this yes of the creature that is asked whether it consents to exist… One must conclude that, if this yes were absent, creation too would not exist, and this failed creation, the ouk on not becoming the me on, would sink into the emptiness of nothing, would abide in nonbeing, for all positive being originates from its proto-source, the Creator. Nothing gives its "answering" yes by the power and energy of the divine act of creation.[6]
Following this reasoning, which attempts to think through the problem of creation in light of personalist ontology, the personal creature is not simply dictated its existence as thrust into becoming with an unknown end. This would be nothing else than to say that the creature, depending on where it ends up, may not have had God as its final cause, that is, its principle and end, nor was it ever a personal being, which is simply an absurd notion.[7] No, following Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, whose developments I take to be a faithful continuation in the stream of Origen, Gregory and Maximus, God is the principle and end of any creature He brings into being, and thus in creating a person God creates them from their end which is the principle of their beginning, and this end is none other than their free “yes” to existence. And this “yes,” being the assent to existence as subjects of God’s love who also give themselves fully to God in love, as this is what it means to be created as persons, is nothing other than the subjection of creatures in Christ to the Father by which God is all in all.
But, after all this, what of the Virgin Mary? In the Theotokos we find all of the above condensed into the point of her own personal existence and specifically in her “let it be” at the Annunciation. Who Mary is “is” the Mother of God. As the Son is only who He is as the begotten of the Father, so the Theotokos is only who she is as the Mother of the Son, and this reality was not imposed upon her, rather she freely accepted her own existence, not passively but in an active sacrifice of her whole self, absolute humility, “for whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it (Mtt 16:25).” Furthermore, besides the willfully accepted Crucifixion of her Son, her “let it be” is the only act in human history which was fully personal. That is to say, in a finite action she actualized the fullness of her personhood as self-determination in the Good, fully giving and thus fully realizing herself in communion. If all personal creatures are brought into being from their end in a “yes” to God, this yes for them is the pleroma of their personal reality achieved always for God but for them only in eternity. The content of their lives as persons developing to full realization of personhood (or deification) is full of error and frequent degradation into mere individuality if not bestial existence, even for the saints. The Theotokos, however, is all and only this “yes” to God, absolute perfection just as God is perfect (Mtt 5:48).
Indeed, that the Theotokos’ “let it be” is the final cause drawing along the holiness of Israel to realize itself should not be seen as relativizing the freedom and activity of all those righteous who brought her about in temporality and are related to her eternally. Like the Virgin, all the righteous of Israel, and even all humanity as all will be made righteous (Rom 5:17-19), exist ontologically as a pleroma of eternally realized personhood whose content is the process of this free self-determination in temporality, and she could not exist without their communion. However, the Theotokos as fully realized person, that is, one who is all and only this “yes” to God, is the supreme person among all persons, the one whom God loves and through whom He loves all others as related to her and constituting her personal reality (She is as person Mother of God and of all living). Creation is God’s bringing Mary into being, and along with her all others, and so no being is brought into being that is not Mary (by the logic of persons which transcends the law of identity, such that I is not I but only as Thou). Therefore, the “let it be” of the Virgin is the revelation of the eschatological humanity, which is Christ’s body, and thus the absolute guarantee of the salvation of all.
(TO BE CONTINUED…)
[1] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. Thomas Allan Smith, trans. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 13.
[2] “Now just as any particular human being is encompassed by his bodily dimensions, and his magnitude, commensurate with the appearance of his body, is the measure of his subsistence, so also, I think, that the entire plenitude of humanity was included by the God of all, by the power of his foreknowledge, as in one body, and that this is what the account teaches, saying that And God made the human being, in accordance with the image of God made he him… The human being manifested together with the first formation of the world, and he who shall come to be after consummation of all, both likewise have this: they equally bear in themselves the divine image. For this reason the whole was called one human being, because to the power of God nothing has either passed or is to come, but even that which is looked for is embraced equally with the present by his all-embracing activity. The whole nature, then, extending from the first to the last, is a kind of single image of He Who Is. But the difference between male and female was additionally fashioned last for that which is moulded, I suppose, for this reason.” From Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God. Translated by Fr. John Behr (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023), 231.
[3] Gregory of Nyssa, “In illud: Tunc et ipse filius” Eclectic Orthodoxy, October 4, 2019. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/in-illud-tunc-et-ipse-filius/.
[4] Vladimir Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person” from In the Image and Likeness of God. (New York, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 120-121.
[5] Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God Vol. 1. (Brooklyn, NY: Holy Cross Orthodoxy Press, 1998), 253.
[6] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb. Boris Jakim, trans., (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 85-88. See also the latest defense of this ontology of person or “rational spirit” in David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 119-122.
[7] It is also clear that it has horrifying moral implications if such a view is accepted. After all, how much of humanity would be made up of these non-personal “things”? The very possibility when realized would constitute such an existential and moral terror that one would be driven to spread the faith by every form of violence just to gain some assurance that, at least, those he had “saved” were truly human after all. Freedom and love, the foundation and dignity of personhood, would have no part in this world of nightmare. And needless to say, the God of this world would not be absolute love… but then he would not be person, nor any of his creations either.
Sophia Has Built Her House Part. 1
Sophia Has Built Her House Part. 1
Sophia Has Built Her House Part. 1
Introduction
The Nativity Fast is the period leading up to the Celebration of the Nativity of Christ, or Christmas, and in this period are included the Marian Feasts of the Entrance into the Temple of the Theotokos and the conception of the Theotokos by Sts. Joachim and Anna, demonstrating the unity of Christ and His Mother as the subject of devotion during this period. We should therefore reflect upon the great mystery at the centre of our faith subsisting in two persons, Christ and His Mother, that is, the mystery of how Sophia (Wisdom) has built her house and established her seven pillars, which encompasses the divine predetermination and eschatological culmination of the divine-human economy of history.
In this two-part article I will present my own reflections upon this mystery with special focus on the person of the Virgin Mary (though of course inseparable from her Son) and her “let it be” given at the Annunciation. I will be unabashedly speculative, and not shy away from realities the mystery exposes. Indeed, I think such a mystery compels the full use of our imagination to engage in theological speculation, that this is at the core of our tradition, and that any presentation which would mute such speculation does a disservice to the mystery.
The “Let it be unto Me” of Time and Eternity
In Orthodox tradition the Theotokos is understood to be the culmination of Israel’s preparation in righteousness for the coming of the Messiah, her lineage being gradually purified to produce holy ones until the union of Joachim and Anna would without passion produce the Panagia, the All-Holy. However, if on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers we say God “has shown from them the power of life to us,” we also sing in the Troparion “by faith you justified our ancestors, having betrothed the church beforehand from the shadow of the nations.”[1] In short, if the Theotokos is the culmination of Israel’s holiness it is because she is the very principle and final cause or end of this holiness bringing about the conditions of her own fruition.
Retrocausality is a necessary principle of Orthodox theology because, as Origen explained, “we hold that the future event, which would have taken place even if it had not been prophesied, constitutes the cause of its prediction by the one with foreknowledge (Cels 2.20).” The preeminent example is of course Christ’s work of salvation as well as His eschatological summation of all things. The development of the whole Israelite religion and of all those conditions which are taken up in the saving acts of Christ, only come into being and occur because of and as the realization of Christ’s Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. It is because Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8) that He is crucified on Golgotha; the end (Christ’s reality as the Crucified) is itself the principle which brings about the conditions for and the realization of the content (Christ’s being crucified for us under Pilate) which makes up this end.
The above is necessary to affirm for a proper understanding of the mystery of Christ and was affirmed clearly by the likes of Sts. Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. Indeed, the doctrine of the creation as the procession of the Logos into finitude as the many logoi (incarnation) and return of all into unity with God (deification) is a metaphysics oriented towards this doctrine of revelation that the end is the beginning. The logoi only function as the principles of creatures existence moving towards unity with God because they are already and priorly ontologically this union with God and God’s relation to the creature as united to Himself, or more succinctly, all is accomplished for God eternally as He is eternal, and temporal creaturely existence exists only because for God that procession is eternally returned to and culminated in His own life.
But let us return to the specific mystery of the Theotokos. She, like all other human persons, is not only a creature of natural givenness propagated by material birth. As St. Gregory of Nyssa explains in On the Human Image of God, God creates humanity as a whole simultaneously in His eternity,[2] and this wholeness of humanity in all its distinct persons, explained in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28, is the Body of Christ who is the true humanity or Adam.[3] Generation by physical birth is something that follows after, a concession granted in foreknowledge of the fall by which human individuals are manifest in an order of temporal sequence and physical distance, encumbered by defects and subject to biological originations that can seem like cruel chance. Of course it is not truly cruel chance, rather this all makes up the content of that “whole,” of the image of God which is the principle of temporal finite existence precisely as being the finished and deified humanity including all human persons as Christ’s Body, in which every negative aspect of finite existence in its bondage to sin is overcome and abolished, and human existence is manifest as being the free “yes” of the person with all other persons in Christ to the Father’s summons.
This view of the simultaneously atemporal-temporal nature of the human person is further reinforced and enriched by modern Orthodox theological reflection on the ontology of personhood. For example, Vladimir Lossky argues that person or hypostasis is not reducible to common nature nor to individuality (concrete form and distinguishing features and accidents), but is rather irreducible to nature as the “who” whose nature subsists as his own but which he also transcends.[4] Fr. Dumitru Staniloae goes further in his theology, arguing that persons only exist in and as communion, and that the human person is created with the freedom of self determination, is an absolute existence, in the image of God. His ontology of human personal sobornost is illustrated in a powerful analogy:
To summarize, according to Orthodox Personalist theology a person is irreducible to nature and its processes while being the subject and subsistence of its nature, is an absolute subject of self-determination, and exists and is who it is only in relation to all other persons. Like the Holy Trinity, but in a finite modality, the human person is an absolute subject who only exists in the revelation to and reception of revelation from other absolute subjects, and this ontology is an ontology of love. The person only is himself in giving all of himself to the other and vice versa, just as the Son is only who He is as Son of the Father and the Father is only Himself as Father of the Son.
This is, in brief, Orthodox personalist ontology, and to refer to other figures such as Met. John Zizioulas, Christos Yannaras, St. Sophrony Sakharov, etc., would only belabor the summary. However, there is a figure prior to all of these whose contribution to personalist ontology has not received its due until recently, and whose thought brings us to the object of our speculation. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, understanding that the person was fundamentally defined by freedom from givenness in self-determination as a being constituted by love, which can only be free, applied this ontology of person to the question of creation, namely, can God create persons by an imposition of existence in which the person is merely an object? Is creation a matter of dictated otherness? No, was Bulgakov’s firm reply.
Following this reasoning, which attempts to think through the problem of creation in light of personalist ontology, the personal creature is not simply dictated its existence as thrust into becoming with an unknown end. This would be nothing else than to say that the creature, depending on where it ends up, may not have had God as its final cause, that is, its principle and end, nor was it ever a personal being, which is simply an absurd notion.[7] No, following Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, whose developments I take to be a faithful continuation in the stream of Origen, Gregory and Maximus, God is the principle and end of any creature He brings into being, and thus in creating a person God creates them from their end which is the principle of their beginning, and this end is none other than their free “yes” to existence. And this “yes,” being the assent to existence as subjects of God’s love who also give themselves fully to God in love, as this is what it means to be created as persons, is nothing other than the subjection of creatures in Christ to the Father by which God is all in all.
But, after all this, what of the Virgin Mary? In the Theotokos we find all of the above condensed into the point of her own personal existence and specifically in her “let it be” at the Annunciation. Who Mary is “is” the Mother of God. As the Son is only who He is as the begotten of the Father, so the Theotokos is only who she is as the Mother of the Son, and this reality was not imposed upon her, rather she freely accepted her own existence, not passively but in an active sacrifice of her whole self, absolute humility, “for whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it (Mtt 16:25).” Furthermore, besides the willfully accepted Crucifixion of her Son, her “let it be” is the only act in human history which was fully personal. That is to say, in a finite action she actualized the fullness of her personhood as self-determination in the Good, fully giving and thus fully realizing herself in communion. If all personal creatures are brought into being from their end in a “yes” to God, this yes for them is the pleroma of their personal reality achieved always for God but for them only in eternity. The content of their lives as persons developing to full realization of personhood (or deification) is full of error and frequent degradation into mere individuality if not bestial existence, even for the saints. The Theotokos, however, is all and only this “yes” to God, absolute perfection just as God is perfect (Mtt 5:48).
Indeed, that the Theotokos’ “let it be” is the final cause drawing along the holiness of Israel to realize itself should not be seen as relativizing the freedom and activity of all those righteous who brought her about in temporality and are related to her eternally. Like the Virgin, all the righteous of Israel, and even all humanity as all will be made righteous (Rom 5:17-19), exist ontologically as a pleroma of eternally realized personhood whose content is the process of this free self-determination in temporality, and she could not exist without their communion. However, the Theotokos as fully realized person, that is, one who is all and only this “yes” to God, is the supreme person among all persons, the one whom God loves and through whom He loves all others as related to her and constituting her personal reality (She is as person Mother of God and of all living). Creation is God’s bringing Mary into being, and along with her all others, and so no being is brought into being that is not Mary (by the logic of persons which transcends the law of identity, such that I is not I but only as Thou). Therefore, the “let it be” of the Virgin is the revelation of the eschatological humanity, which is Christ’s body, and thus the absolute guarantee of the salvation of all.
(TO BE CONTINUED…)
[1] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. Thomas Allan Smith, trans. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 13.
[2] “Now just as any particular human being is encompassed by his bodily dimensions, and his magnitude, commensurate with the appearance of his body, is the measure of his subsistence, so also, I think, that the entire plenitude of humanity was included by the God of all, by the power of his foreknowledge, as in one body, and that this is what the account teaches, saying that And God made the human being, in accordance with the image of God made he him… The human being manifested together with the first formation of the world, and he who shall come to be after consummation of all, both likewise have this: they equally bear in themselves the divine image. For this reason the whole was called one human being, because to the power of God nothing has either passed or is to come, but even that which is looked for is embraced equally with the present by his all-embracing activity. The whole nature, then, extending from the first to the last, is a kind of single image of He Who Is. But the difference between male and female was additionally fashioned last for that which is moulded, I suppose, for this reason.” From Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God. Translated by Fr. John Behr (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023), 231.
[3] Gregory of Nyssa, “In illud: Tunc et ipse filius” Eclectic Orthodoxy, October 4, 2019. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/in-illud-tunc-et-ipse-filius/.
[4] Vladimir Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person” from In the Image and Likeness of God. (New York, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 120-121.
[5] Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God Vol. 1. (Brooklyn, NY: Holy Cross Orthodoxy Press, 1998), 253.
[6] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb. Boris Jakim, trans., (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 85-88. See also the latest defense of this ontology of person or “rational spirit” in David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 119-122.
[7] It is also clear that it has horrifying moral implications if such a view is accepted. After all, how much of humanity would be made up of these non-personal “things”? The very possibility when realized would constitute such an existential and moral terror that one would be driven to spread the faith by every form of violence just to gain some assurance that, at least, those he had “saved” were truly human after all. Freedom and love, the foundation and dignity of personhood, would have no part in this world of nightmare. And needless to say, the God of this world would not be absolute love… but then he would not be person, nor any of his creations either.