Back in the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian economist, political philosopher, Orthodox priest, and theologian Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) was a man of vision whose original thinking, commitment to action, and theological acumen nourished the renewal of the Church that continues to bear much fruit even today. Bulgakov engaged in a Christian critique of culture by reflecting theologically on the philosophical and sociological premises that shaped his times, in particular Marxism and German Idealism. He actively promoted dialogue and communion among all Christians, contributing to the birth of the ecumenical movement. Even more decisively, his theological magnum opus, the trilogy On Divine-Humanity, is becoming ever more recognized as a significant scholarly contribution that rekindles some of systematic theology’s most fundamental questions, and offers innovative insights for the future of the theological enterprise. This three-volume work penetrates to the heart of the Christian narrative as a story of the profound relationship between God and creation whose dynamic power is the kenosis and pleroma of love.[1] It explicitly challenges the impersonalism that has dominated most of theological discourse, as it seeks to reinterpret this Christian narrative in our modern times. The power of Bulgakov’s theology is that it attempts to speak not only doctrinally but also pastorally, challenging our contemporary existential emptiness with the hope of God’s free self-offering love, that fulfills our longing for community in imitation of the divine pleroma, the Triune koinonia. Moreover, in the tradition of the Fathers, for whom creation, human reflection and the Scriptures informed each other and narrated the same allegorical story of God’s love for humanity, Bulgakov’s great trilogy echoes a harmonious trust in the unity of experience, reason, and revelation as it retrieves a worldview of wholeness and integrity that speaks to our postmodern hunger desirous of poetry, symbol and re-enchantment.

Bulgakov’s great trilogy, composed in the last decade of his life while serving as Dean of Saint Sergius, the Theological Institute in Paris, is a tightly knit systematic study of anthropology as reflection and revelation of Trinitarian theology.[2] Four radical insights shape his thought: first, influenced by the kenotic Christology of Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius[3] and the Latin emphasis on love exchanged in the Trinity, Bulgakov recognizes self-emptying and triumphant love as the essence of the Triune God; secondly, Bulgakov’s emphasis on the potentiality of creation to become divinized echoes the Irenaean insight that humanity is created in the image of God to become in God’s likeness; thirdly, the centrality of the Christ event, of the God-Man, which is the fulfillment of perfect divine likeness in creation, is understood as a radically Trinitarian event, since the Son shares his mission to reveal the unknowable Father with the Holy Spirit;[4] finally, inspired by the Chalcedonian formula that confesses the unity without confusion of the divine and human natures in the one person of the Christ, Bulgakov postulates the unity without confusion of divine and created natures in the eschatological fulfillment of creation, or divine-humanity. A fifth insight, the fulcrum of Bulgakov’s systematic theology, is Sophia, the Wisdom of God.[5] She is Bulgakov’s symbol for the created becoming of divine-humanity in the image and likeness of the self-revelation of the Father in the Dyad of the Son and the Spirit. She is the hypostasized essence of God and the divine energies that permeate, sustain and transform creation. Sophia is the “face” of God, divine glory that possessed Bulgakov in a series of mystical experiences that led him to his conversion to Orthodoxy.[6] She is an essential symbolic presence in the theologian’s personal spiritual journey that exemplifies his commitment to radical divine personalism. These five insights are fleshed out in Bulgakov’s first two volumes of the great trilogy on Christology and Pneumatology respectively, The Lamb of God and The Comforter, as well as a shorter reflection on Paterology in the epilogue of The Comforter, “The Father.” The third volume, The Bride of the Lamb concludes the theological narrative On Divine-humanity with an extended reflection on anthropology that is born out of a theology of creation and culminates in the Church as symbol of human eschatological becoming. 

This article focuses exclusively on Bulgakov’s Pneumatology as outlined in The Comforter. Literature on Bulgakov’s Pneumatology, perhaps the first major original work on the Holy Spirit in centuries, is still scarce.[7] Hence, this article attempts to highlight the considerable merits of this work for theology and our contemporary Church, in particular its strength as a Trinitarian theologoumenon that accentuates the Holy Spirit’s personal kenosis in God and for creation, paralleling the Son’s begottenness and incarnation. Together with the Son’s kenosis, the Spirit’s procession from the Father (through the Son) and her[8] personal descent in creation at Pentecost, reflect the unity and life of the immanent Trinity as revealed in the economic Trinity. The latter necessitates a thorough reflection on the ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit in creation, while Bulgakov insists that the former demands a re-evaluation and corrective to the impersonalism that continues to plague our theology proper as well as impede the development of a dogma for the procession of the Holy Spirit that today, a millennium after the filioque controversy is still at the icy stage of theological paralysis. In this section, it will be especially helpful to extract some crucial insights from Bulgakov’s analysis of the Fathers’ Trinitarian theology and in particular their Pneumatology. The mediating principle between the kenosis of the Spirit in God and in creation is God’s desire to reveal Godself, and hence the mission of revealing the Father that the Spirit shares with the Son. Bulgakov describes this mission of revelation through the “hypostasized” symbol of the divine Sophia, who as the hidden Dyad of “the two hands of God,” is God’s energies permeating and transforming creation while becoming transparent to it. Creation or the “creaturely Sophia” who carries the potential to reach its fullness and become divinized is the mirror of the “divine Sophia” who is the hypostasized essence of God.

Hence the three-fold structure of this article will reflect Bulgakov’s own three-fold analysis of how the Spirit is truly “God for us”: God in Godself, who sanctifies and inspires creation, through being revealed in divine-human becoming. Bulgakov presents these three movements, as (1) the Spirit’s procession from the Father through the Son (God in Godself), (2) to the mission of the Dyad of the Son and the Spirit (the Pneumatological mission of sanctification and inspiration), (3) for the fulfillment of creation as the manifestation of God’s love (divine-humanity). It would appear that he chooses this order, from divine nature to creaturely becoming, to emphasize how the Father is the only arche, imprinting divine nature onto creation, even if in becoming self-conscious, creation awakens to its desire and call to abide in the Creator who from the beginning gifts it with being. In Bulgakov’s theology, the creaturely abides from the beginning in the divine—yet humanity, as the hypostases of creation, is invited not only to become personally aware of divine love, but to embrace it willingly. Hence the tension between divine love and human freedom becomes a pivotal dance for divine-humanity, and thus essential to Bulgakov’s work. Consequently, in the conclusion of this article I will offer some reflections on Bulgakov’s insights into this fundamental theological tension between human freedom and divine love.

1. Towards a Dogma of the Holy Spirit’s Eternal Procession

Before we can even start evaluating Bulgakov’s Pneumatology, we have to contend with his sobering claim: after two millennia our Christian creeds are incomplete, and the Church still has not finished articulating the revealed truth about the Holy Spirit—nor, consequently, does the Church have the last word on the dogma of the Holy Trinity.[9] This critique of insufficiency becomes especially evident in the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit—or to put it more accurately, vis-à-vis the question of how the three hypostases of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit eternally relate to each other as one God. The article of faith in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father, with the Father and the Son [She] is worshipped and glorified” serves more to emphasize the Spirit’s divinity, and hence her equal status to the Father and to the Son, than to declare how the Spirit relates to the Father and to the Son.[10] Likewise, it is certainly simplistic (and anthropomorphic) to take the words “Father,” “Son” and “begotten” too literally. The Father begets the Son, and the Son is begotten by the Father, but what does this mean for the life of the Trinity? And how does the Spirit relate to both Father and Son even in this begetting? A Trinitarian dogma of faith, rather than a mere binitarian one, demands that we ask such questions, since, as Bulgakov claims, so far the Church has several theologoumena or theological opinions at its disposal, but none that have been formally acknowledged in sensus fidelium, that is, received by the faithful in their life of prayer. On the contrary, no theological division in the Church has proved to be as deeply entrenched as that over the Spirit’s eternal procession, and consequently no pseudo-dogma, whether the filioque, the Photian response of ek monou tou Patros, or the Greek Fathers’ dia tou Huoiu has proved to be as insipid and inconsequential to the liturgical and spiritual life of the Church.

In the western churches mostly entranced by a Christomonism, the filioque, or the theological opinion that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, has led to an almost complete subordination and forgetfulness of the Spirit; has indeed created a Spiritual/spiritual vacuum with faith being reduced to ethics. In the eastern churches, caught up in the tenuous situation of merely opposing a theological opinion without in fact having a convincing alternate one (hence the radical ek monou tou Patros, or from the Father only; and the via media of dia tou Huoiu, or from the Father through the Son), the Spirit has continued to infuse the liturgy and prayer of the faithful, even if with theology lagging behind, and Pneumatology being virtually frozen to a standstill, faith risks becoming plain ritual, and belief mere superstition. The result is a third wave of Christianity that in our times is especially vibrant, but perhaps even more overtly revelatory of the crisis in the universal Church itself: a wave that emphasizes the felt experience of pneumatic charisms and their received extraordinariness; a movement that seeks a naïve return to the primitive Church, to a Christianity before orthodoxy, before structure, even before liturgy—quite simply, a return to Pentecost.

The moment of Pentecost, even if often ecclesially pondered for merely one Sunday in our liturgical calendar, is not only crucial for the Church and divine-humanity, but, as our contemporary Pentecostal and charismatic movements remind us, reveals the Church’s desire for the Holy Spirit, and her duty to reflect on her faith in the Spirit. Consequently, it is the hope that prayer grounded in the experience of Pentecost and theological reflection on the uniqueness of this event will infuse a fresh spirituality in the life of the Church, and a renewed creative energy through which to further illuminate our Trinitarian dogmas. Indeed, Bulgakov’s Pneumatology, or his attempt to present to the Church another persuasive theologoumenon on the procession of the Holy Spirit, is precisely such a Pentecostal/Pneumatic moment in the life of the Church: the theologian’s personal experience of faith nourished by a communal life of prayer, is the only fertile ground for the community to receive its gift and call from the Spirit, and hence to be personally missioned for the building up of the Church (1 Cor 14:12).

In turn, this mission or vocation has four distinct moments: the moment to appropriate the wisdom of the tradition, to reinterpret it critically and intelligently according to the Church’s changing needs, to creatively engage contemporary insights with tradition and thus to be committed to its flourishing and growth for the wellbeing of the present and future ecclesia, and finally, to open up dialogue in the Christian community in the spirit of prayer and mutual love. In Bulgakov’s study on the Holy Spirit these moments are identifiable as his analysis of the Fathers’ Trinitarian and especially Pneumatological reflection, his harsh critique of the last millennium of impoverished Pneumatology, his proposal for a new insight of radical personalism and mutual self-revelation of the divine Persons in conversation with the tradition, and finally the book itself engages the faithful in a process of theological reflection and is the beginning of an ecclesial dialogue. I will thus proceed to ponder in particular Bulgakov’s first and third steps, in an attempt to dialogue with the theologian and hence to be an active participant in the fourth.[11] 

a. Revisiting the Fathers

Two crucial insights emerge from Bulgakov’s reflection on the Fathers’ theology proper and Pneumatology: first, because the Fathers unconsciously (or not) relied on philosophical systems that conceived of the divine impersonally, their reflections on the Holy Trinity remain deficient because of the de facto impersonalism that creeps into their theologies; in addition, the question of the Spirit’s procession was never formally raised by the Fathers, and hence the Church cannot rely solely on their theological reflections to proceed to articulate a dogma on the relationship among the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Consequently, in Bulgakov’s final analysis the two insights dovetail: the contemporary Church needs to offer a corrective to Patristic theology as well as infuse it with a new creative impetus, since we are now living a theological impasse that, a least partially, manifests itself in the Church’s own fragmentation.

It will be sufficient to offer brief comments on Bulgakov’s analysis of the Fathers to show the convincing strength of his argument. However, as a preliminary step (and to aid our thinking), Bulgakov identifies the crucial temptation of all impersonal Trinitarian theology: subordinationism. If one excludes Gnosticism as the first and persistent heresy within the Church, subordinationism made explicit in Arianism, not only threatened to destroy empires both east and west, but even the Christian faith. Nevertheless, even if the Aristotelianism implicit in Arianism led to explicit heresy, subordination was still implicit in both Tertullian’s Stoic foundations, as well as in Origen’s Neoplatonism. Each of these two exponents become in turn the templates onto which are constructed all later Latin and Greek Trinitarian theologies, reaching their orthodox heights in the Patristic period with Augustine and the Cappadocians.

In Tertullian, subordinationism is a necessary consequence of relying on a Stoic understanding of being that is one impersonal substance, both spiritual and material, that has the potential for self-differentiation through relations that arise from within it.[12] This primordial substance is divinity itself, but in creation, and hence in time, it becomes differentiated as the Father who speaks and the Word that is spoken—hence the economic Trinity. This Logos is spoken in and for creation; hence the Son becomes a personal demiurge bridging the divine-created divide of impersonalism-personalism. The Spirit, however, is almost forgotten, except for the proposition that in being another agent of the Father in creation, but also the third person of the Trinity, She immediately becomes subordinate not only to the Father but also to the Son. Tertullian however, maintains the necessary idea that prevents his theology from collapsing into complete Arianism, even if the price is pantheism. Because of Tertullian’s Stoicism, the Trinity necessarily shares the same essence, since there exists only one substance from which all being—including creation—arises. Sharing the same essence however, does not guarantee that the Three Persons are equal in divinity: in fact to posit that idea would be tantamount to arguing that creation is also equal in stature to God. Hence gradual differentiation or emanation is also a reduction in being—and therefore a cosmological subordination of the Son to the Father, and of the Holy Spirit to the Son.

If Tertullian maintains the semblance of orthodoxy, Arianism completely leaps down the rabbit hole of cosmological subordinationism. Although Arianism’s Aristotelianism protects it against pantheism, since the divine is completely transcendent to creation, it still has to face the problem of “what mediates”[13] between the divine and the created. The mediator or demiurge is posited to be the Logos, but in being manifested in creation, he necessarily cannot share in God’s absolutely transcendent essence and hence cannot be God. Accordingly, not only does Arius introduce a subordinate and even creaturely Son, but his philosophical presuppositions of a self-sufficient, monistic and totally transcendent God lead him—for all intends and purposes—to completely “abolish”[14] the Trinity. And of course, if the Son as the demiurge is already a creature, the “Spirit of the Son,” cannot but become “the creature of a creature.”[15]

The problem of cosmological subordinationism is finally resolved in Origen—even if his Neoplatonism does not protect him against ontological subordinationism. Origen is the first to actually pose the question of the immanent Trinity, thus emphasizing that the divine hypostases exist in themselves and not only economically. His weakness is that he tailors his theological presentation of the hypostases on the Neoplatonic impersonal system of progressive emanations. Accordingly, in his Commentary on the Gospel according to John, as Origen’s Father becomes the Neoplatonic One, the First God, “determined” only apophatically as above all Wisdom, all Truth, all Life; the Son becomes the Neoplatonic Mind, who receives his being from the Father and is Wisdom, is Truth, is Life. In turn, the Holy Spirit, as the World Soul, “needs the Son not only for [her] existence but also in order to be wise, rational, just, and so on.”[16] Consequently, the hypostases necessarily become ontologically subordinate to each other, as the Holy Spirit, even if She shares the same essence of the Father and the Son, takes third place in Origen’s schema. In addition, because Origen posits that the Son, who is both Logos and Sophia, takes most of the Spirit’s properties, it is not surprising that Origen ends up with an impoverished Pneumatology—whether immanent or economic.

The crux of this theological problem however, is even deeper. Subordinationism often leads to a de facto absence of Pneumatology, but the real issue is that the Spirit as Third person of the Trinity is often a mere add-on in theologies that do not (and in fact cannot) explain why there are three divine hypostases, and not two, or four, or more. The Holy Spirit is posited as the Third hypostasis of the Holy Trinity only because the experience of faith, the Church’s life of prayer, and the Scriptures attest that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Put simply, the Church believes in the Holy Spirit, but it does not know how to understand this belief, nor how to talk satisfactorily about the three divine Persons in relationship. This deficiency is apparent in Athanasius, for instance, who in his Letter to Serapion[17] is the first real champion to defend the divinity of the Spirit against the Tropicists. Yet his argument, at least for the immanent Trinity, relies solely on homoouisianism, even if economically he recognizes the dual mission of the Son and the Spirit together for the salvation of the world. Thus, even Athanasius, while he presents the role of the Spirit soteriologically if not cosmologically, still has no Pneumatology proper, but “lacks, strictly speaking, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit [herself] as the Third hypostasis of the Holy Trinity.”[18]

The same can be said even of the theological heights of Patristic Trinitarian thought—the works of Augustine and the Cappadocians—which are simultaneously the seeds of all later theology proper, both east and west. These seeds, however, are also very different in their form, and it is not surprising that while both approaches have considerable strengths, they are also plagued by unresolved difficulties that virtually explode in the filioque controversies of the ninth century. Augustine relies primarily on Aristotle, starting from one substance where the three hypostases are distinguished only according to their relations. In the Cappadocians’ theology, however, there is an attempt at “a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Platonism and Neoplatonism”[19]—even if they “stand side by side unharmonized.”[20]

Augustine’s gift to theology proper is both his implicit understanding of the Trinitarian problem per se, that is, of the interrelations among the three hypostases, and his extraordinary insight that the Holy Trinity is love: the One who loves, the One who is loved, and the One who is love. Yet notwithstanding the claim that God is love, Augustine’s Trinitarian theology remains inherently impersonal, since “[i]n themselves the relations do not establish the hypostases (which is also clear from the fact that not all relations—notiones—have this significance) but only accompany and express them. Therefore modalism, or impersonalism, is not overcome in St. Augustine’s doctrine.”[21] Put simply, while in Augustine’s Trinitarian system “one” hypostasis loves, there is nothing inherent to the theology itself to prove or disprove that it is the Father—and only the Father—who loves. Precisely because they are impersonal, the relations are also arbitrary—hence the Persons’ properties become likewise arbitrary.

The same accusation cannot be directed against the Cappadocians whose very theological starting point is the uniqueness of each of the three hypostases, rather than the one essence. Yet is this explicit focus on the three persons sufficient to eliminate the specter of impersonalism? Or does it undermine monotheism? Following Nicaea and the radical homoousianism of Athanasius, the Cappadocians were already familiar with the formula that would protect the oneness of God, that is, the assertion that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are of the same essence. The Cappadocians’ primary task was rather to differentiate terminologically between essence and hypostasis in order to guarantee not only the hypostases’ equal divinity, especially that of the Holy Spirit against the Pneumatomachoi, but also to protect against any subordinationism—cosmological or ontological.

The Cappadocians choose to resolve the pressing issue of distinguishing between essence and hypostasis by resorting to Aristotelianism. However, a new series of issues arises precisely because of the limitations of the philosophical system itself that could not accommodate easily the radical newness of Trinitarian doctrine, or of one Personhood who is three Persons. These limitations are threefold and mutually dependent: Aristotelianism’s understanding of essence as transcendent, unknowable and radically impersonal; the word hypostasis that in itself is also “devoid of personalistic meaning;”[22] and the paradoxical claim that concrete substance exists if it has a particular property and hence is hypostatic, (that is, “ousia is defined in terms of hypostatic properties”[23]):

The concept “hypostasis” is considered by the Cappadocians not in a personalistic but in a material sense. Decisive here is Aristotle’s doctrine of prōtē ousia [first substance], i.e., of concrete being in which alone does concrete substance exist, and outside of which it is a mere abstraction (deutera ousia [second substance]). This concrete reality is established by a particular character of a thing thanks to which hypostasis arises in ousia. […] The Aristotelian distinction between ousia and hypostasis with reference to the Holy Trinity postulates for its realization the unity of the divine substance on the one hand and, on the other hand, hypostatic properties that would concretize this essence into trihypostatic being;[24]

On one hand, therefore, the Cappadocians can profess a radical apophaticism since by Aristotelian definition the essence of God is totally transcendent.[25] At the same time, however, insofar as the Cappadocians also choose to start their theology kataphatically through positing the hypostases—and hence by reflecting on specific hypostatic properties,[26]—strictly speaking, they also risk fragmenting that one substance into three substances, each becoming a concretized essence because of its specific hypostatic property.[27] Thus the real risk becomes of postulating tritheism rather than a triunity; or three equal hypostases (and hence substances), rather than one God. Indeed, as Bulgakov highlights:

[I]s it possible, on the basis of Aristotelianism, to express the dogma not of common possession [of the ousia], and not of separate possession, but precisely of consubstantiality? […] Within the limits of Aristotelian categories, within which the Cappadocians confined their theology, there truly is no place for divine triunity, for trihypostatic consubstantiality. It remains a philosophical unsubstantiated postulate.[28]

Needless to say, the Cappadocians not only want to safeguard monotheism, but even emphasize dogmatically the unity of (impersonal) essence—or at least the common substantial possession—of the three hypostases, who are equal in divinity precisely because of their special “ineffable communion” that makes them co-essential.[29] In turn, and to strengthen their claim to homoousionism, divine triunity is also postulated through the principle of monarchy, where based on the order, or taxis, of the hypostases known from revelation, the Father is distinguished as the only arche of the Trinity, in contrast to the other two hypostases who do have a beginning in the Father himself. These ideas however, that are not immune to subordinationism, remain undeveloped in the Cappadocians—even if they are picked up by later theologians.

In conclusion, the Cappadocians’ important achievement of articulating a Trinitarian theology that is still received as the apex of orthodoxy—three hypostases united in one essence—enables Bulgakov to sharpen his own critique of our current theology proper. He recognizes that the primary weakness of the Cappadocians’ theology is not only that their hypostases remain unconnected from each other, and hence, were it not for Scriptural revelation there would be no way of containing the Trinity to three Persons, but precisely their doctrine “remains unfinished” because it posits a unity of ousia only and not of hypostases. In order to be a truly personal doctrine, a true triunity should not only espouse three—and necessarily three—Persons united in one nature, but simultaneously “the trihypostatizedness of the divine Person.”[30] Dogmatically speaking, the Trinity is not only three Is, but also a triune I; it is not only a unity in nature, but also a unity of Personhood, a trihypostatic One. The alternative is what we ended up with in the history of Christian dogma, and what becomes evident from the Cappadocian system: “As one, the trihypostatic Divinity is only the divine It, not the trihypostatic I, the divine triunity;”[31] as one, God remains impersonal and not Person. Accordingly, unless we posit a trihypostatic I, the one God professed as Person in the Scriptures (Elohim-YHWH), becomes paradoxically an impersonal essence.

The Trinity is not a simple juxtaposition of three, distinct but united externally (by analogy with three lights that merge into one another). Such a trinity is, first of all, not self-enclosed; rather it is open for continuation: the juxtaposition presupposes a series continuing into (bad) infinity, although it can be broken off at any number of terms, in particular at three. […] But the Holy Trinity is not three, but a triunity; and It is not a series but an enclosed whole, which has the fullness of Its being, Its power, precisely in trinitarity. It is necessary to understand the necessity of this trinitarity—not more and not less—of the hypostases. And one must take as one’s starting point this necessity when considering the Holy Trinity-Unity, as well as the separate hypostases, and in particular when considering the Third hypostasis and [her] place in the Holy Trinity.[32]

The effects of this de facto impersonalism are in fact evident in the life of the Church. As Bulgakov postulates, the “victim” of Trinitarian impersonalism is the Person of the Holy Spirit, who as the “last” of a series of Persons united together by an impersonally ousia, “perplexed” Patristic theology. Thus, her subtle hiddenness, her non-overt revealedness, become not only forgotten or ignored, but, as the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, has dejectedly witnessed for centuries, the Spirit herself is subsumed under Christ (or the Church as the body of Christ). In the hierarchy the Spirit herself morphed into a “thing,” grace, that just like oil lubricates the ecclesiastical engine; while in popular piety, the Holy Spirit degenerated into “the three white things”: the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary, and the Pope.[33] And yet the very serious risk, or actual erosion to the faith is not simply misdirected piety or puffed up ecclesiology or even institutionalism, but implicit heresy: Christ and the Church relegating the Triune God.  This is the very betrayal of the Christian vocation, for when the Spirit disappears from the Church, there is no divinization, no People of God, no real ecclesia. When the Church loses experiential and theological consciousness of the Spirit its prayer loses its power, it ceases to have the gift of discernment, and it fails in its mission to be light of the world and salt of the earth.

Yet as Bulgakov augurs, “the time has now come to consider the Holy Spirit, for all the questions of the dogmatics of the present day chiefly concern Pneumatology.”[34]

b. Bulgakov’s Radical Personalism as a response to the Filioque Controversy

Apart from the obvious disastrous effect of the filioque controversy to fan the schismatic fire that fragmented the visible unity of the Church, Bulgakov asserts that an even deeper consequence was the very problematic that was implicitly assumed in the issue, which subsequently became the Church’s theological myopia up to our time. Put simply the filioque controversy provides three answers (irrespective of the validity of each) to the question: from whom does the Spirit originate? It also assumes that at least two of the answers, the filioque and the ek monou tou Patros are mutually exclusive, positing the third, “from the Father through the Son” as an irenic middle way. Yet if the real problematic is the mutual relationships among the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, where the Persons are equally divine and eternal, and hence have no beginning, is origination, or causality, the right question to ask? And from where does this question originate (pun intended), in the first place?

In the Patristic period origination was the only doctrine to be considered to attempt to explain how the three Persons relate to each other. Taking their cue from the Johannine Prologue’s the “Father’s only Son” and “God the only Son” (Jn 1:14, 18), both Augustine and the Cappadocians posited that the Father begets the Son and hence that the Son is begotten by the Father. Latin Trinitarian theology presented this revealed truth as relations in the immanent Trinity, while the Greeks postulated it as justification for the monarchy of the Father.[35] Hence, unsurprisingly, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed origination was also extended to the Spirit as a descriptive statement to attest to her divinity. The Holy Spirit is God because She also shares the same ousia as the Father (and the Son). Hence, just like the Son, She originates from the Father (and the Son)—even if her origination is different (perhaps impersonal?) from that of the Son, and is called “procession.” The controversy, arising first with Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in the ninth century, is on the question of whether to stress the personal, hence hypostatic, properties of the Father who alone is the principle of monarchy, and therefore the only source or aitia of the other hypostases, or instead the one ousia which, as the Latins insisted, properly belongs in common to the Father and to the Son (and technically also to the Holy Spirit). The even more basic issue, of course, was that while the Greeks needed the Paternal arche as symbol of unity in the Trinity, since their Persons were otherwise disconnected from each other, the Latins did not, because their Trinitarian starting point was the one ousia out of which the Hypostases arise as relations.

Two languages, two symbols, could does not be reconciled because, “[f]ollowing  Latin theology, Photius considered the problem of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the point of view of the source of [her] origination, and he diverged from the Latin theologians only by a different interpretation of this source.”[36] Neither side emphasized that the deeper question of the relationships among the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was perhaps broader than mere origination or causality, with its distinct disadvantage of implicit subordinationism. Instead Photius’ “anti-Latin ek monou tou Patros is the Latin Filioque with a minus sign. It is, so to speak, a non-Filioque or an anti-Filioque, whereas the patristic doctrine is neither the one nor the other, but a third thing, although the expression given to it is embryonic and frequently contradictory.”[37]

Bulgakov suggests a way out of this impasse, which in turn attempts to solve the “problem of trinitarity as such” without which “the problem of the Third hypostasis as such cannot be posed in a fundamental manner.”[38] These two problems are in fact one: “that of the (ontological) place of the Third hypostasis in the triunity of the Holy Trinity.”[39] Trinitarity cannot be reduced to origination or causality, just as divine unity cannot be based only on an impersonal ousia. Instead, inspired by Augustine and the later Latin tradition of Trinitarian love as epitomized in the monk Richard of St. Victor, together with the Greek insight of perichoresis or mutual indwelling, Bulgakov bases his Trinitarian theology on the revelation of who God is in Godself: as Scripture attests, “God is Spirit” (Jn 4:24) and “God is love” (1Jn 4:8,16). Ontologically “God is Spirit-Love”: and since “it is proper to spirit to have a personal consciousness, a hypostasis, and a nature as its self-revelation,”[40] we can confidently posit that God is not only Persons/Person who is/are self-conscious, but that love is the being of God and God’s self-revelation. In turn “the life of spirit consists in the living out of this personal self-revelation in its nature;”[41] hence God’s life, or the Persons’/Person’s love is revealed, mirrored, manifested in love itself, the nature of God.

Consequently, the crux of Bulgakov’s problem becomes divine personhood and the quality of God’s self-consciousness personally mirrored as God’s self-revelation, as love. The problem of divine hypostases and ousia, of the three Persons, their relationships, and their nature as love, becomes thus one and the same theological problem—which can only be resolved through the radicality of personhood that must always posit community and not monism, even in God’s uniqueness as the divine absolute subject:

The trinitarity of the hypostases in the divine Person results, first of all, from the nature of the personal self-consciousness, which is not fully manifested in the self-enclosed, singular I, but postulates thou, [s]he, we, you, i.e., not uni-hypostatizedness, but multi-hypostatizedness, with the latter defined typologically and essentially as tri-hypostatizedness. I presupposes, as its self-affirmation, thou or co-I; and as its confirmation, so to speak, it presupposes [s]he, and is definitely realized only in we (or you); i.e., ontologically it is not unique, although it is one. In creaturely, relative being, I is posited not only in itself but also outside itself; it is extrapolated and thereby limited. Despite its seeming absoluteness, I is not capable of actualizing its I-ness in itself and must, so to speak, become convinced of its own being by looking into the mirror of other I’s. Without such a mirror, it disappears for itself, stops being conscious of itself in its I-ness.

But in the Divine Absolute subject, which is one and genuinely unique according to its own kind, all altero-positings of I cannot be actualized outside of it, because of the absence of all “outside,” but must be contained in itself, so that it itself is for itself simultaneously I, thou, [s]he, and therefore we and you. Furthermore, none of these three positing of I—as I, thou and [s]he—can be defined solely from a single centre, from I alone, which would be only I, I itself, for which the other I’s would be only thou and [s]he (and we and you, and even they). They must independently exist for themselves as I, fully centred each upon itself, being at the same time thou and [s]he, each for the other.

Thus in the one absolute I there exist three I’s, as fully equal centres of I, completely transparent for one another and belonging to the fullness of the reality of this Absolute self-I, of this genuine triune I that has nothing and co-posits nothing outside itself … this triunity. These are three hypostases, three personal centres, each of which is an equi-personal I, hypostatizing Divinity, the divine nature. But this equi-personal I never posits itself in separation from the other equi-personal I’s, or even as one of three I’s (which would transform the trinity into a community or harmony of three—a tritheism); rather it posits itself in the other I’s, is co-posited with them. And there results a unique but also triune divine I, for trinitarity is not only trinity but also unity.[42]

Bulgakov thus establishes a “unity-trinity,” the Absolute I who is the “total identity of personal self-consciousness;” and the “trinity-unity,” the three I’s who are necessary for “total identity of personal self-consciousness.”[43] The three I’s are the three equally divine but distinct hypostases, and the Absolute I is the Holy Trinity, is the One Personal God. Apart from its self-consciousness, however, “every spirit” also possesses “the knowledge of its nature or its self-revelation;” and love is the act of revealing oneself in the divine nature (that is love itself) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—and of the Absolute I, the Holy Trinity. The divine Spirit knows its nature completely—the divine nature is completely transparent to God, is completely manifesting of God who is Persons/Person; hence the knowledge of nature (or nature itself, which in God is the same thing) must also be personal, must also be hypostasized. This hypostasized (personal without being a person) nature of God, the mirror of God’s self-knowledge, and God’s complete self-revelation, is Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The Wisdom of God is thus the hypostasized nature of God, or the personal love of God.

Finally, spirit also has “life in this nature, the living-out of this knowledge as its own reality and life.”[44] The life of God is love itself; the living out of love perichoretically, mutually, in the Trihypostatic I—and hence in the fullness of being where love can never be reduced to self-love. Thus “the life of this trine, triune subject is love, by virtue of which it is three, while being one in the divine self-identity.”[45] It is one because love is the complete self-revelation, the perichoresis, the one Wisdom, the one nature of the I-thou-s/he; of the Holy Trinity. Yet it is three because love requires mutuality and distinctiveness: hence each hypostasis loves differently, loves particularily, and the divine Persons are not interchangeable.

The distinctiveness of the Persons is precisely that which allows theology to be Paterology, Christology and Pneumatology—not simply as relations in the triune God, or as Persons disconnected from each other, but as Persons-in-relationship whose essence is mutual self-revelation as love for one another, each according to their distinct personhood. As revealed in the Scriptures, the relationship between the Father and the Son, as the one who begets and the other who is begotten, is thus not about mere origination, but rather about how the Father and the Son love, and love each other:

The relation of “generation” precisely expresses—from the side of the Father—the self-revelation of the Father not in and through himself, but in and through the Son; whereas from the side of the Son it expresses his self-revelation through but not for himself and thus not in himself, but in the Father: the Father engenders, the Son is ungendered. […] The Father is the subject, the Principle; the Son is the predicate, the Word.[46]

The self-revelation of the Father, as the kenosis of the Father’s love/nature/Wisdom thus happens in the Son, who in receiving the Father’s nature, in becoming the Father’s image, in turn sacrifices himself to return all to the Father, thus emptying himself of his selfhood and becoming the Word of the one who speaks but remains in unfathomable Silence. The Father is revealed; the Son reveals. Yet this revelation in truth, this manifesting of the Father’s self-consciousness, is insufficient. If Absolute Spirit is the three-fold self-consciousness, self-revelation, self-life, and the Father’s consciousness “is revealed in his ousia-Sophia through the Son”[47] as truth, then the Father’s life, (or technically-speaking, the common life/love of the Father and the Son, or from the Father through the Son), the living in the ousia, is the completeness and fulfillment of self-revelation, the triumph of love, the lived revelation as beauty, the hypostatic “copula between the subject and the predicate,”[48] the Holy Spirit. The Spirit empties her own selfhood, becomes the “and,” who is the life of the Father and the Son, even if, properly speaking, the movement is from the Father as the First hypostasis, through the Son, who reveals the Father in truth, and their mutuality is revealed/lived as beauty in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is thus the Third hypostasis and “in a certain sense [She] is also the Final hypostasis,”[49] because her very personhood implies the other two, and is the completion of the self-revelation of divine Spirit, or the Spirit of the Father and the Son, as the “Holy Sprit” par excellence:

The Holy Spirit, as the Third hypostasis, represents the intra-Trinitarian completion of the sacrificial love of the Father and the Son, as the joy of this sacrifice, as its bliss, as love triumphant. In this lies [her] significance as the Comforter, not only with regard to the world but also in intra-Trinitarian life. If God who is in the Holy Trinity [nature/life/Wisdom] is love, the Holy Spirit is then the Love of love. [She] is the hypostatic Joy of the Father in the Son and of the Son in the Father; [She] is Their Joy in [her herself] and [her] joy in [her herself] and in Them. For both the Father and the Son love not only one another with hypostatic Love, with the Holy Spirit, but They also love hypostatic Love [her]self, hypostatic Joy [her]self, the Comforter; and are comforted by [her].[50]

In conclusion, Bulgakov’s Trinitarian reflections postulate that the particularity of the hypostases as well as their taxis, or order, in the Trinity, is not based on a “criterion of origination,” but rather on “the guiding principle” of “self-revelation.”[51] In addition, the trihypostatic divine self-revelation is the consubstantiality who is Sophia:

This interrelation is defined as trine: the Father is revealed in the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit; the Son is revealed in the generation from the Father and in the reception of the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is revealed in the procession from the Father and the reposing upon the Son. […] In this trine interrelation, God possesses his nature-ousia and lives by it as by Sophia, in the consubstantiality and unity of his life. This Trihypostatic mode of the self-revelation of Divinity, concretely qualified for each of the hypostases, at the same time does not differentiate them with regard to equal divinity, for each of the hypostases is equally necessary in this ring of triune revelation, is—in the sense of its equal essentiality in this self-revelation—the first, and the second, and the last, irreplaceable and unique in its special mode and in all the concreteness of the triunity. The principle of trihypostatic self-revelation overcomes and abolishes all subordinationism.[52]

Paterology is thus the Father’s self-revelation in the hypostasized ousia, through the truth revealed in the Son of self-sacrificial love, and the beauty lived in the Holy Spirit of blissful love. The Father is the revealed hypostasis; the Son and the Spirit are the revealing ones. In turn, the particularity of immanent Christology is that the Son receives all from the Father, and is the Father’s Word, while living the joy of the Holy Spirit who comforts him with the Father. Finally the particularity of Pneumatology is that the Spirit is the very life of love of the Father and the Son, and hence their bliss and glory. She reveals not herself, but the glory of the Father as offered to the Son and returned to the Father. The three Persons are in a mutual relationship of self-offering: the Father chooses hiddenness, and empties his consciousness and life, his Word and Beauty; the Son chooses self-sacrifice in becoming the Word of the Father, even if He receives the comfort of the Spirit; the Spirit empties her very being and becomes the copula, the Love of the Father and the Son, completely transparent to the life of the Trinity.

2. Between God and Creation: The Sophianic mission of the Dyad of the Son and the Holy Spirit to reveal the Father

So far we have discussed God in Godself as immanent Trinity, but God is also God for us, God with us, in the economic Trinity. This being “with,” the being “for,” the connection between divinity and creation, is where the particularity of Bulgakov’s theology becomes most evident. It is the heart of his Sophiology, his theology of the Wisdom of God, that while in the immanent Trinity is God’s transparent self-revelation as truth and beauty, as the completeness of the divine life of love, in the economic Trinity She is God’s self-revelation, the same truth and beauty, the same nature of love, but that in creation remains obfuscated and is still in the process of becoming, of being revealed in all its power and glory. God’s self-revelation to the created realm and hence in creation, is in itself the becoming of creation, the process and energy of creativity. God creates, and in creating the fullness of created potentiality, God externalizes Godself in what will become a created reflection of Godself: creation that is divinized, a divine-humanity. Indeed it cannot but be divinized in its very essence, because creation is always dependent on God’s being for its existence, but while God’s being is unchangeable, fully hypostatized and transparent to God’s self-revealedness in the immanent Trinity, divine Sophia that sustains creation is emptied to become the creaturely Sophia: a becoming, a divine potentiality, a consciousness, a revealedness, and a life that is in the process of discovering, of manifesting, of receiving divine love. Thus Sophia, God’s self-revelation that is both divine and creaturely is this pleroma-in-becoming, and becoming-to-pleroma. She is the “boundary” between divinity and creatureliness, in being the antinomy of God’s self-revelation in and to creation, as creation itself becomes the manifestation of God. Sophia is both divine (pleroma) and creaturely (becoming); both in God (divine nature) and in creation (created nature); both transparent (love perfectly and divinely revealed) and opaque (love imperfectly revealed because of creaturely limitation and human sinfulness).

As God’s self-revelation, Sophia is the Father’s revelation through the Son and the Holy Spirit. She is the Word and Glory of the Father as uttered through the Son and lived through the Holy Spirit to be the very consubstantiality of God, the very Wisdom of God. However, while in the immanent Trinity, the hypostases are completely transparent in the fullness of their ousia to each other, economically they limit their revelation of the Father not only as the creaturely Sophia, that is, in the ousia, but also hypostatically. Consequently, as the Word and Glory of the Father they also make him manifest gradually and limitedly, in a way that does not overwhelm creation which in its becoming, in its contingency, is always opaque to the divine. 

Moreover, divine Sophia, as reflection of the creaturely Sophia, manifests the kenosis proper to each Person that is repeated and revealed in creation. Hence, we can speak theologically of the kenotic movements of the Persons in God through their revealed kenosis in creation, in salvation history—even if the immanent Trinity that is made manifest in the economic Trinity remains always shrouded in impenetrable mystery that cannot be extinguished in creation. The particular Pneumatological kenosis in divine Sophia is thus a blueprint for the Spirit’s kenosis in creation (and vice-versa), and hence for who the Spirit is for us.

a. The Holy Spirit in the Divine Sophia

As the self-revelation of God as distinct hypostases and trihypostatically, Sophia is the revealedness of the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit, as Word and Glory, as Truth and Beauty, as the divine life of kenotic love. She is the hypostasized ousia or spirituality of God, the divine Sophia. Put in alternate words, Sophia is “two inseparable acts: self-depletion, which is the kenosis in birth; and self-inspiration which is the glory of the procession. In other words, it contains dying and resurrection, self-depleting ideality and self-accomplishing reality.”[53] The theology proper to the Holy Spirit in the divine Sophia, or the immanent Trinity, is thus the reflection on the act of inspiration as glory, of the fulfillment of divine life as love. The Spirit completes, fulfills, actualizes and returns, what is mutually exchanged in self-depletion between the Father and the Son. And to complete, to fulfill, to actualize, to return, to become the bridge of triumphant love between and the Father and the Son, Love itself who is loved and exchanged, the Holy Spirit as Person “entirely dissolves in trihypostatic love.”[54]

For the Father loves not only the Son but also the Holy Spirit, and He loves Them by the ecstatic love of “procession;” and the Son loves not only the Father but also the Holy Spirit; and He loves Them by a triumphantly ardent love (“I and my Father are one [John 10:30]). The Father loves himself in the Son while the Son loves himself in the Father, but Both love hypostatic Love [herself]. The Father “proceeds” into this Love, and the Son “reposes” in [her], embracing and receiving [her] as his own being in the Father. And this hypostatic Love, in turn, loves the Father and the Son, Whose hypostatic unity [She] is, the hypostasis of Love. The human understanding is given the capacity to know these aspects of the being of the Spirit only discursively, by successively passing from one definition to another, for it knows love only as a state or attribute of a hypostasis, not as a hypostasis in itself.[55]

The “dissolving” of Love in the Persons who love, as well as the mystery itself of being a Person who is Love and not only loves, makes the Holy Spirit particularly “inaccessible” and “unrevealed”[56] to human experience and reason. Properly speaking, “the Third hypostasis is hypostatic Love, although deprived of all selfhood.”[57] The particular kenosis of the Spirit is not only the offering of self in love, but “precisely […] hypostatic self-abolition”[58]:

[I]t is spiration and procession, hypostatic depletion and self-acquisition, kenosis and glorification. The character of the Third hypostasis, of Love, is expressed in this “in-between” being, with the inclusion in it of the hypostases who love and who are loved. That is why its hypostatizedness is, as it were, a non-hypostatizedness, a complete transparence for the other hypostases, a non-selfhood. In this sense, Love is Humility: Before this special “impersonality” of the Third hypostasis, the first two hypostases appear as personalities with selfhood, as it were, as subject and object, or subject and predicate, for which the Third hypostasis is only a copula and is deprived, as it were, of its own content.[59]

This means that the Spirit never shows her own “face”: in its revealedness of the Father in Sophia, Spirit-glory is always manifested through the Son, on whom She reposes. The revealing Dyad is “inseparable”—and yet, it is also “inconfusable.” If the Second hypostasis is the Word of the Father, the “content” or “Idea of ideas,” the Spirit is the one who actualizes this Word or Idea and it becomes “beauty.” What the Father knows and makes known in the Son, is actually lived in the Spirit. Hence the Spirit is, quite literally, “the hypostatic revelation not concerning itself,”[60] where the Spirit is “eclipsed” in the face of the glorified Son who is the Image of the Father—even if the Son would remain invisible, lost in his self-depletion, without the triumphant glory of the Spirit that reposes on him and makes him resplendent. The Spirit is thus like the light that is necessary for us to see, but is never really seen in herself. This mutual indwelling of the Son and the Holy Spirit, however, is what enables God’s self-revelation, the Wisdom that is love, to be one: “The Sophia is one, but there are two sophianic hypostases, which reveal one subject, but in a double manner: uni-dyadically, without separation and without confusion.”[61]

b. The Holy Spirit in the Creaturely Sophia

This inseparable but inconfusable duality of the Son and the Spirit is precisely what permits and celebrates the duality in human nature called to reveal divinity. Thus, in establishing that the creaturely Sophia is the mirror-in-becoming of divine Sophia, of the revealing Dyad of the Son and the Spirit sophianically, that is as the Wisdom of God that is truth and beauty, Word and Glory, Bulgakov also shows how human creation in the image and likeness of God is also Dyadic, is also dual, is properly male and female. Not the male or the female only is the created image and likeness of God, but their inseparability and inconfusability. As the male parallels thought and idea, the female accomplishes it, actualizes it as beauty.[62] The human spirit is thus both male and female, even if the individual creature is gendered as man or woman. Consequently, our personhood, our human becoming presupposes a communal becoming where the human spirit as male-female can become transparent in the very flesh of men and women to manifest the sophianic divine: the Wisdom of God that is self-emptying love, revealed as truth and beauty, in the mutual loving, pleromic relationships of human beings.

This initial eschatological reflection on created duality is important because creation in and of itself carries the seeds of its becoming, and is only known in its fullest splendor in the end times. This is presupposed in the very divine act of creating which precedes creation itself. By God’s will, God creates, and in creating there is an extra-divine being, a being outside of God whose existence depends on God. This being, however, is “nothing,” it is the cosmos as silence and emptiness, just as the Father who properly is Creator, is Silence but also arche. The cosmos is willed, is caused, but remains unknowable, unmanifesting, properly “nothing,” until the “two hands of God,” the Son and the Spirit, reveal the Father in creation. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen 1:1-2a). The initial creation is the heavens, the angelic realm that knows no becoming, and the earth whose creation is historical and unfolds in time, starting from the creative act “Let there be…”[63] Yet this act remains an image of kenotic Silence unless the Breathed Word (the Son and the Spirit) reveal it. This revelation of the Father’s act is however sophianic: it is the self-revelation of the Son and the Spirit that reveals the Father. Hence, it is not properly speaking, the Persons of the Son and the Spirit, but their self-revelation in Sophia, that acts “as the divine foundation of the world, which has its hypostatic Creator or Principle in the Father.”[64]

The Father is thus creator of the world in and through the divine Sophia, the Word spoken and the Spirit breathed, just as the world itself, the creaturely Sophia, whose foundation is sophianic divinity, becomes in time a gradual revelation of God, to become, just like the heavens, a completed creatureliness, a pleromic icon of God. The sophianic presence of the Son guarantees an order, a reason, to creation. As the spoken Word rather than the Personal Logos, the Son remains transcendent to creation, even if He is its fashioner in Sophia. The Logos is thus the potter of creation, insofar as He moulds according to the will of the Father, the arche and Creator. Yet the Logos’ work in Sophia remains incomplete, unless the Spirit, also in Sophia, and hence as transcendent, actualizes it. The Spirit is the “Lord and Giver of life,”[65] the Creator Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, and hence the one who breathes sophianically in creation, clothing it in beauty—the beauty resplendent of the Logos’ face.

The creative seeds in the world, or logoi spermatokoi, planted by the demiourgos, the artisan of the world, can thus only arise, grow and mature in the cosmourgos, the “Artist,”[66] the Adorner, the Giver of life. The world becomes in the creative power of the Holy Spirit, who nourishes the earth as if She were its “mother.” In the creaturely Sophia, the Spirit unfolds creation in the image fashioned as, and by the Logos:

In the fullness of its being and in its connectedness as a multi-unity, the world is an image of the Logos, in Whom there cannot be more or less and nothing can be added or taken away. All the meanings of the world are initiated in it, although they are not yet manifested. This male element of meanings and Meaning corresponds to the revelation of the Logos as the sophianic Word. This static immobility of fullness does not yet determine the being of the Logos in the creaturely Sophia, however. The Logos is being accomplished, is receiving the life-force of being from the Holy Spirit reposing upon him. In the divine Sophia this accomplishment is a single, supra-eternal act in which there is no place for more or less, no place for becoming. By contrast, in the creaturely Sophia there is a place for such an accomplishment, which is becoming and knows more or less for itself. … This dynamics of life corresponds to the domain of the Holy Spirit in the creaturely Sophia, to [the Spirit’s] life-giving force.[67]

This sophianic force of the Holy Spirit actualizing the design of the Logos, guarantees that the energies of God completely permeate creation. Thus, in a hymn-like prose dedicated to the sophianic Holy Spirit, Bulgakov declares a radical panentheism.[68] God is in the world yet always transcending the world, even if divine energy, the only creating energy, is the very foundation of the world, of the creaturely Sophia in its becoming:

This Spirit is the natural energy of the world which can never be extinguished or interrupted in the world, but always bears within itself the principle of the growth of creative activity.

This Spirit is “our mother, the moist earth,”[69] out of which all things grow and into which all things return for new life.

The Spirit is the life of the vegetative and animal world “after their kind.”

The Spirit is the life of the human race in the image and likeness of God. …

The Spirit is the world itself in all its being—on the pathways from chaos to cosmos.[70]

The elemental power of creation, the “nothing” of the Father’s original will to being outside of God in Godself, is this chaos becoming tamed in accordance with divine Reason, the sophianic Logos, and by being orchestrated into life by the sophianic Holy Spirit. The world itself, however, as natura, as gradual becoming, remains darkness and light, death and life, nothingness and fullness, silence and poetry (the Beautified Word, the Creative Word), until it reaches its pleroma.[71] Creation is nature, which is being sanctified into becoming, into possessing in its matter a spiritual beauty that reveals in hiddenness, in and of itself, the glory of God:

Creation can become spirit-bearing and will be so after the Transfiguration of the world, under a new heaven and on a new earth. […] Sanctification, i.e., the communication of the grace of the Holy Spirit, is possible only by virtue of a general spiritual receptivity, attested by the initial movement of the Holy Spirit upon the face of the waters; and this sanctification will not end during the further existence of the world. The Holy Spirit is bestowed upon the world in the creaturely Sophia, through the divine Sophia. We have here the action of the Holy Spirit, of [her] force, but without [her] hypostatic revelation. The force of the Holy Spirit acts here impersonally.[72]

Accordingly, in the creaturely Sophia, the action of the Spirit (and the Logos) is impersonal because while nature is clothed in the beauty of the Spirit, in its not being spirit, nature itself remains impersonal and hence not free to be in relationship with God. Creation, as a distinct being from God, can only be in relationship with God, if it in itself possesses spirit, a created spirit, but a spirit who is free to know itself, reveal itself, and live purposefully. In the world, this spirit is the human being: an enfleshed spirit, created distinctively in the “image and likeness of God,” and for this reason he/she, the male-female duality, is free to act in the resemblance of the Father, to imitate the Son as the Icon of divinity, and to love kenotically in the Holy Spirit. Humanity is the personal presence in the world, who while being of the world does not belong to it (Jn 15:9), but is rather called to transcend it and to labor for its fullness by receiving God’s self-revelation in the world.

This is the reason why the extraordinary happens in creation: in the two hypostases of the Son and the Spirit, God personally reaches out to creation and bridges the chasm once and for all between divinity and creation. Although the very foundation of the earth is the divine Sophia, as creaturely Sophia, as revelation of the nature of God in its becoming, it remains blind to God in Godself, to God as Person and Persons. Nature, therefore, also needs to become humanized, to become a divinized humanity in order to reveal fully God’s being as personal, to properly reveal the Father. Hence in the incarnation, the Son of God empties himself of his glory, to become flesh, to become Christ, anointed by the Spirit, thus bridging the chasm by becoming one-of-us, an enfleshed spirit—even if He is the enfleshed Divine Spirit par excellence. The Son however, cannot reveal the Father on his own even in creation. The hypostatic descent of the Son must be accompanied by the hypostatic descent of the Holy Spirit; for the conversion of humanity, the becoming of the created spirit/s in the image of the Son, happens only in the personal “inspiration” or reception of the Holy Spirit. In fulfilling the image and likeness to which they were created, men and women actualize themselves, to humanize creation and thus become children of God, recipients of the Father’s love.

3.The Holy Spirit’s Kenosis for us: Sanctification in Creation and Inspiration for Divine-Humanity

The kenosis of the Holy Spirit in the immanent Trinity, her becoming copula of the Father and the Son, their hypostatic Love, is paralleled in the created realm: the Spirit’s sophianic sanctification of the world, and her personal descent in creation for the inspiration of humanity—to become copula that binds in love all human relationships in the self-offering love of friendship. Thus from the beginning of creation the Holy Spirit is the Artist, the Giver of life, bathing creation in beauty; but in the fullness of time, in the Christ event, the Holy Spirit accompanies the descent of the Son and is poured on all flesh (Acts 2:17). In turn, the apex of time of the earthly ministry of Jesus becomes a special moment for the labor of the Spirit in creation: a personal labor, but shrouded in a special hiddenness. Each of these three kenotic moments of the Spirit in creation—since the beginning of time, in the life of the man Jesus, and in Pentecost—will be pondered in turn.

a. The Sophianic action of the Holy Spirit

That matter is energy and energy is matter is one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our times. It also retells the story in contemporary language of how God’s Ruah swept over “nothing,” over tohu-bohu, birthing “life.” The inherent “potentiality” or energy created by the Father is breathed upon, preparing “nothing” to receive its form, to be molded into matter, to become the rich diversity that mirrors the beauty of God. In the Spirit, matter becomes, evolves, is crafted, according to its design given by the Logos. Breath is the energy inherent in matter, “exist[ing] in the very flesh of the world, in the matter of the world,”[73] enabling it with the dynamism to gradually become “something,” beauty, the rich diversity of creatures. The Spirit who fulfills, who completes, empties herself in an ongoing sophianic action towards creation’s fulfilment, towards creation’s completion, but that requires the very participation of creation according to its particular freedom or “measure”: “This multistage or gradual character of being is proper to the life of the world, for the creative ‘let there be’ always resounds in the world in its different forms; creation is always the future too, not only nata, but also natura.”[74] Not only the apparent, but also the imagined—since the transcendence of this divine imagination is the telos of creation; its becoming not only natura, but supranatura, the resplendence of God.

Creation’s becoming super-nature is the energies of the creaturely Sophia becoming transparent to their divine being, the divine Sophia, through the sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not only Giver of life, but Sanctifier, breathing into nature to infuse it as “the transfiguration of creation, a ‘new heaven and a new earth.’”[75] This preview of the “new earth,” of the sanctification of all matter, happens in the sacramental life of the Church, where matter is literally infused with supernatural grace to become a sacred object, consecrated bread and wine, holy water, myrrh or oil, blessed icons, and sanctified worship spaces.[76] Matter, with its inherent “natural grace of the Spirit,” receives supernatural grace to become a created symbol of divine gift, a sign of God’s complete penetration of creation in the end times. Yet the Spirit’s gift of natural vivification is the very “precondition” for supernatural sanctification: it is because God is Creator, and creation belongs to God, that it can recognize and be filled with God’s powerful recreating energies:

Matter’s receptivity to spirit has as its precondition the creaturely descent of the Spirit, [her] kenosis in creation. Creation has the Spirit of God from its very origin, and is spirit-bearing in this sense, although this spirit-bearingness knows its measure. But this measure is nonetheless such that it already contains the force of the being of creation. And in virtue of this natural or, more precisely, sophianic spirit-bearingness, creation is capable of receiving Spirit through sanctification. The similar receives the similar, and without this similarity, the very concept of sanctification becomes incomprehensible and contradictory.[77]

The natural world is soaked in the sanctifying energies of the Spirit, just as it has life because of the vivifying energies of the Spirit. “Life” thus takes the dual connotation of biological life and spiritual life, of the natural unfoldedness of creation’s giftedness, and its authentic becoming as a mirror of God’s divine ousia. The former enables it to become, to have being, according to its freedom or potential; the latter to transcend that very creaturely potentiality to truly become infused with divine splendor. Creaturely beauty is transfigured as divinized beauty; matter becomes truly sacred, a transparent mirror to the divine:

In sanctification we have a descent of the Holy Spirit and a communication of [her] force to natural and spirit-bearing creation: the creaturely Sophia is united here with the divine Sophia, the Holy Spirit with the spirit of God in creation. A mysterious “transmutation” of matter occurs here, not only in the Eucharist, but in all sacramental acts: matter is taken out of this world and borne into the world of grace of the future age, where God will be all in all. There occurs a mysterious, i.e. invisible, transfiguration of creation, in which the latter, while ontologically remaining itself, becomes transparent for the Spirit, receives the faculty of communion with God, is deified. Thus, in this permeability of matter for the Spirit and the resulting “communication of properties” or perichoresis (to use a term of Christological theology), we have an inseparable and inconfusable unity of creaturely and divine life. […] This is the deification of creation, under the necessary condition of the conservation of its being.[78]

Likewise, just as the self-revelation of the immanent Trinity is not only in the ousia, but the Son and the Holy Spirit personally, in their very hypostasis reveal the Father, so God’s self-revelation in the sanctified creaturely Sophia has its hypostatic mirror in the creature, who as spiritual being, as person, carries the potential and the vocation to truly manifest the divine as Person/Persons. Man and woman are purposefully created in the image of God to become resplendent in God’s likeness, to perfect the reflection of God’s personhood in creation. And the transcendence of humanity from its naturally evolving divine image to divine likeness is precisely our becoming supernatural, divinized, persons-in-relationship. It is an act of receiving the Holy Spirit, of being “in-Spir-ed,” Anointed with the Unction of God to become Godlike:

If sanctification is proper to creaturely matter, then inspiration is proper to the human spirit and is a divine-human act, a manifestation of eternal divine-humanity in creaturely divine-humanity. This divine-human act, however, is expressed here not in divine incarnation, the union of the fullness of the divine nature with the human nature, but in divine inspiration, that is, in the mutual permeation of the human spirit and the Holy Spirit, also without separation and without confusion. [79]

Bulgakov rightly differentiates between “incarnation,” divine personhood who takes created flesh, and “inspiration,” creaturely personhood who receives the divine Spirit. In the former case, the Son empties himself of his glory to become one perfect human being, the very fullness of divine-humanity; in the latter case humanity is transcended to divinity through the transfiguring presence of the Holy Spirit. Yet in both cases, natures—created and divine—remain “in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”[80] Bulgakov observes that “[w]e have this to the highest degree in the Virgin Mary, who is not only a spirit-bearing vessel but also the hypostatic image of the Holy Spirit. We also have this, in varying degrees, in the images of spirit-bearing saints,”[81] who are the holy ecclesia. As Irenaeus teaches, “Where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace,”[82] and the Spirit is revealed as spiritual Beauty in the life of those transfigured to become in the “likeness of God,” free to love with God’s own self-emptying delight in the other:

Divine inspiration gives [the saints] a hypostatic illumination and suppresses the egotistical centres of their human hypostases, as it were, making them exist not for themselves, but only for the Holy Spirit. This is the gracious death of the personal I for a new life by the Holy Spirit. This also corresponds to the personal character of the Third hypostasis, which does not exist for [herself], as it were, and becomes transparent for the other hypostases. The Third hypostasis reveals Christ, the hypostasis of the Son. This is also what the spirit-bearing apostle confirms: “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20).[83]

The Church and its holiness are prefigured in all times, even if their potential for pleroma becomes possible only in the personal advent of the Son in the Christ and of the Spirit in Pentecost. Accordingly just as before the Christ event the Logos was manifested-in-hiddenness in the theophanies and “words” that accompanied the Chosen People, so the Spirit “has spoken through the Prophets,”[84] through the ones who were the anointed of God: prophets, kings and priests. The Dyadic relationship of the Son and the Spirit in the divine Sophia is always intact, and the story of the Hebrews leading to the birth of Christ witnesses to the revelation of divine Sophia as Word-and-Beauty acting in creation and preparing the way for the personal descent of the Son and the Holy Spirit.[85] Likewise, in fulfillment of the covenant with Adam and Noah in the beginning of creation and its first natural recreation after the flood, even the Gentiles are offered signs of God’s sophianic presence in nature and as supernatural grace revealed in the extraordinary deeds of holy men and women, like Confucius and the Buddha, who are pagan prophets through whom the Word is spoken in the power of the Spirit. While not as directly revelatory as the journey of the Chosen People to bear the Christ, the whole world was groaning in labor, secretly and unconsciously preparing for the birth of the Messiah, the fullness of divine-humanity, the perfect Icon of God.[86]

b. The Holy Spirit in the Incarnation

In the ecclesia or community of saints, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Therefore, the entire history of humanity, Hebrew and pagan, is recapitulated in the personal descent of the Son and the Spirit for the eschatological pleroma of creation “so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). This history reaches its pinnacle in the incarnation among the Jews, and the pouring of the Spirit on all flesh. In both events the eternal Dyadic relationship of the Son and the Holy Spirit is revealed—even if the Spirit is eclipsed in the incarnation, and the Son is already ascended at Pentecost. The personal revelation of the Spirit will be pondered in turn for each of these two mysteries.

It is in the gospel according to Luke that we have the clearest personal revelation of the Spirit at “the beginning of the incarnation”: “in making the Spirit-bearer, Mary, [her] receptacle, the Holy Spirit makes her womb fruitful, accomplishing ‘the ineffable triumph of conception without seed.’”[87] Mary, in being “full of grace,” receives in the Annunciation the personal descent of the Son and the Spirit, since the Spirit “reposes” eternally upon the Son. Indeed, “[i]t was only by virtue of this descent of the Holy Spirit that the coming down of the Word could be manifested,”[88] since the Spirit accomplishes, glorifies, the self-emptying of the Son in the flesh. Nevertheless, just as the conception is but the beginning of the event of the incarnation of the God-Man, so is “this Pentecost of the Annunciation, […] although hypostatic, […] partial and limited as far as the domain of [the Spirit’s] action is concerned. It is entirely focused upon the Virgin Mary […] [who] does not belong to the world in its entirety […] [even if] only Mary is the Spirit-bearing receptacle unknown to the world, the sealed source, the sacred ark enclosed in the Holy of Holies.”[89]

 This special role of the Virgin to be “full of grace,” the “favored one” of God, grants her to receive “the fullness of the Holy Spirit with the indivisible totality of [the Spirit’s] gifts […] [even if] Mary’s reception and assimilation of these gifts were also characterized—according to the general law of life in the Spirit—by degrees of growth.”[90] Mary is made holy by the power of the Spirit, but she also grows in holiness, unlike her Son whose “human nature was completely deified,”[91] who is God. This ongoing potentiality to holiness through the reception of the hypostatic Spirit, of the Giver in her Gifts, is revealed in Mary as the epitome of our human divinization, of our creaturely sainthood. Accordingly the power of the Annunciation event, of the conception, is that it not only reveals divine kenosis in the incarnation, but also the pleroma-in-becoming of human inspiration:[92]

The human person of Mary the Spirit-bearer attests, together with the God-Man, that it is the combination of the incarnation of the Logos and the Holy Spirit’s inhabitation of a human being that constitutes the divine incarnation. The divine incarnation is not limited to the descent from heaven of the Word, but also includes the descent from heaven of the Holy Spirit; it presupposes not only the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ but also their bihypostatic interpenetration of the Virgin Mary. Mary is not only the hypostatic humanity of Christ; she is also the hypostatic receptacle of the Holy Spirit. The Dyadic character of the interrelation of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the divine incarnation is expressed in the fact that the latter comprises two divine hypostatic manifestations of the Son and the Spirit: in Christ and the Virgin Mary.[93]

Unlike the Son however, whose incarnation is limited to one flesh, the New Adam who is the prototype for all humanity, the Spirit desires to abide in, to inspire, all flesh. The second time that “the heavens were opened” and “the Spirit of God [descended] like a dove and [alighted]” (Mt 3:16) was at the new birth of the God-Man as the “Christ”—the Anointed One of God, fully inspired by God’s Ruah. As incarnate Messiah, and not only as Son of God, Jesus receives his own Pentecost, his own personal descent of the Holy Spirit that now reposes upon his flesh, and empowers him to do extraordinary deeds of power, to reveal the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, a foretaste of the end times. Christ, the man Jesus, becomes a Spirit-bearer, even if in him the Spirit’s gifts although given in their fullness, are shadowed by the Son’s kenosis. The Christ’s glory (or the glory of the Spirit upon him) is made palpable to his disciples only in the Transfiguration, a preview of the eschatological “new earth” (Mt 17:1-7), and of his majestic ascent into heaven when his divine kenosis finally ends.

Before the glorification, however, the Son’s self-emptying in the Christ becomes particularly palpable in his death, even if “the body of Christ in the grave, which does not know corruption, is preserved from the latter by the Holy Spirit reposing upon him.”[94] Likewise, the Spirit accompanied Christ’s descent into hell, in a supra-temporal event that continues in all time, as the Spirit, Giver of life, penetrates with the Son the abode of death, to invite to new life. This new life is triumphant once and for all in the Christ’s own new life: his resurrection of the flesh in the power of the Holy Spirit—even if as the Son receives back his glory from the Father by the Spirit reposing upon him after the triumph of his kenosis, He also has the power to raise himself from the dead.[95] As the gospel of John reminds us, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father” (10:17-18).

Here emerges the important distinction between the personal kenosis in creation of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. While for the Son it is a “kenosis of hypostasis and in this sense it is a ‘coming down from heaven’ with the abandonment of the latter,” and hence the giving up of glory, for the Spirit it is a “kenosis of action,” as her power to accomplish in fullness is limited to unfoldedness in time so as to respect our human freedom of becoming. Thus “[the Holy Spirit’s] descent at the Pentecost unites heaven and earth, erects a ladder between them,”[96] even if the gradual human climbing of that ladder in the power of the Holy Spirit remains incomplete until the end times. Hence, while the Son’s kenosis of hypostasis approaches its end in the resurrection, to become complete in his glorification when “he ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father,”[97] the Spirit’s kenosis of action becomes more manifest as She prepares to descend on all flesh to accompany all men and women until the eschaton. Through her self-emptying She will remain restrainedly active in creation, until all humanity, all flesh accepts the gift of transfiguration and the Spirit’s labor of recreation will be complete. The Spirit will then be revealed in the entirety of Beauty and Glory that is proper to her, just as the Incarnate Son will return in the parousia to have his throne on earth.

c. Pentecost and Eschatological Hope

It is perhaps not surprising that apart from the Lukan Pentecost of the Annunciation, the widely attested Christic Pentecost of his baptism, and the Acts of the Apostles’ Pentecost of all flesh, the gospel of John narrates yet another Pentecost of the descent of the Spirit on Jesus’ friends. The resurrected Christ, who in his returned glorification after his kenosis has the power to send the Spirit together with the Father, breathes onto his disciples to mission them as his ambassadors and send them to the world in his name (Jn 20:22-23). This is in fulfillment of the promise that the Other Paraclete, “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (Jn 14:26). The disciples on whom the risen Christ breathes the Spirit receive the power and wisdom to become apostles, the first ecclesia, witnesses of the Christ, because they have also been anointed by the Spirit to become spirit-bearers, saints, for the imitation of all humanity. The Spirit rests on them, and as copula between the Father and the Son, She binds them as “friends” in the Lord (Jn 15:15), who will be recognized by their love for one another: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:34b-35).

The apostles thus become leaven of the gospel in the world for the transfiguration of the world. Accordingly “if previously the Holy Spirit was sent into the world by the Father upon the Son in order to accomplish the incarnation, [She] is now sent into the world by the Son in virtue of the accomplished incarnation”[98] to bring about “life”: the fullness of life as children of God among all men and women. Following the disciples’ inspiration and missioning, and the Son’s ascension and glorification, the Spirit herself hypostatically descends in her glory to bind heaven and earth and fulfill Joel’s prophecy:

In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy (Acts 2:17-18, Joel 2: 28-29).

The fulfillment of the prophecy will come to pass in the fullness of time when the whole world receives the Spirit’s gifts. Thus, the descent of the Spirit, while “completely analogous to the descent from heaven of the Logos,”[99] has nonetheless a very distinct function. While humanity personally encounters and recognizes the Logos-made-flesh in the Christ, since the Christ’s revelation of the Father as iconic manifests his hidden “face,” the pleroma of human becoming, the Holy Spirit remains faceless even in her personal descent under the symbols of “tongues of fire” and “mighty wind.” Instead She accomplishes the revelation of the Father in time, laboring towards the fullness of creation, by transfiguring through her gifts the created realm to divine-humanity. When the Spirit is poured on all flesh, the power of the event is the unfolding of a magnanimous giftedness where in time all will receive directly the gifts of the Spirit; that is, all flesh will symbolically “prophecy.” The Spirit’s gifts will no longer reach only the few chosen ones; rather the mighty wind will blow on all creation just as it did in the beginning when She transformed “nothing” to creative power:

This constitutes the fundamental difference between the Old Testament outpourings of the Holy Spirit in [her] separate gifts and the Pentecost: the outpourings of the gifts were sent, so to speak, from heaven, transcendentally; the outpourings in the Pentecost are sent by the hypostatic Holy Spirit [herself], descending from heaven into the world. That is, the outpourings in the Pentecost are immanent to the world. […] The hypostasis cannot be seen and worshipped, as the shepherds and magi could worship the Logos come down from heaven, the divine infant Jesus lying in the manger. The invisible presence of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit is manifested only in a particular abundance of gifts that were known also outside Pentecost.[100]

This is the paradox of Pentecost: the Spirit descends, but She remains invisible; the Spirit offers gifts immanently, but that were also available transcendentally—even if not to the same measure. Yet the extraordinariness of the event is that She challenges humanity for our greatest feat ever, and She accompanies us in our mission revealed in the Christ, the God-Man. The purpose of Pentecost is precisely to begin the unfolding of the end—creation’s end resplendent as divine-humanity. This is where the Spirit’s descent in Pentecost is revealed to be Dyadic: She does not descend on her own, but She descends with the now Incarnate Son to actualize the becoming of his Body, the ecclesia, as the communion of saints. This is “the life of Christ in humanity and the life of humanity in Christ”[101] accomplished in the Spirit who reposes on the Son, and transfigures humanity in its becoming as the glorified life of the Christ, to reveal the Father. Only “the Grace-giver [herself], the true Holy Spirit, has the power to continue and complete the work of Christ’s divine-humanity”[102]—the work of revelation of the Father in the created flesh of human beings. The Spirit reveals, teaches and reminds us of Christ to transform humanity into divine-humanity. But what the Christ reveals in fullness, the Spirit accomplishes to fullness in her long kenosis in creation until the end of time.

This is what is accomplished by the Holy Spirit by [her] descent, by means of which [She] bestows upon humanity the life of Christ in its fullness, inspiring humanity with this life. […]

The deification of all creation occurs. The incarnation of Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit are two aspects of one and the same act: the act of divine-humanity. Heavenly divine-humanity, Sophia, uniting itself here with creaturely divine-humanity and being ontologically joined with the latter in the God-Man, reveals itself as the supreme meaning and goal of creation. […]

The Pentecost is directed toward eschatological culminations, as is the Ascension, whose promise consists in the fact that the One who ascended to heaven will come again by descending from heaven. […] In this eschatological aspect, the Pentecost has not yet come; more precisely, it has not been accomplished, for its accomplishment is only at its beginning. […] But the beginning, especially in the language of prophecies, already contains the final accomplishment.[103]

This is the tension of the already-but-not-yet: the Spirit is actualizing human fulfillment as divine-humanity, but the “already” only prefigures the extraordinariness of the “not-yet”: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor 13:12a). The “face-to-face” quality of divine-humanity is the perfection of