WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Micah Miller: The Metaphysics of Marriage in the Sophiology of Sergei Bulgakov

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

WRFH host Alexandra Comus talks with Micah Miller about his CSP thesis, "Until They Are Oned to Him: The Metaphysics of Marriage in the Sophiology of Sergei Bulgakov."From 05/2025.

Hello, this is Alexandra Comus on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. And today I'm with Michael Miller to interview him on his CSP thesis. Hi, Alexandra. Hi, thanks for coming on here. Yeah, I'm thrilled to. And you did Sergey Bogakov. Can you tell us a bit about that and what your thesis is called? More of what went into it?

My thesis was on the metaphysics of marriage in the sociology of Sergei Bulkakov. So it's probably best to just kind of unpack that one in a time. one in a time. Bolgakov was a ex-Marxist scholar who fled Russia during the October revolution, so around the turn of the 18th to 19th century. And he was a, he journeyed from Marxism back into Orthodox Christianity and took up the torch of sociology from a lot of the mystic figures in the Western tradition like Meister Eckhart or Yaqa, Burma. The Reason that I fell in love with Bulgakov is because philosophy often has kind of a weird approach towards God.

It seems like there's kind of two different ways that often goes about talking about God. One is the, to treat God kind of a demiurge, some sort of beginning principle that we just throw into creation to help explain things. But then we don't really let him actually guide the course of how we think the world really works from there on. The other way is what happens in figures like Aquinas, coming out of the Aristotelian or Neoplatonic tradition, where God turns into sort of an abstract, solve everything principle. He's the good. He's the principle of the forms. He is the ultimate principle of being, but all of those are a little abstract. The God of the Geps. Yeah, that's the issue. And so what Bulgakov does

that I think is really, really wonderful is he makes a metaphysics that is incredibly explicitly Trinitarian. From the very roots of it, his focus is on the unity of the three persons of the Trinity, and how that unity comes out into a worked-out philosophical system. So it's kind of hard to say whether he's a theologian or a philosopher, because he sits kind of right in between those two camps. And as far as the people he's working with, he's right in between them as well. Okay, and how does this follow from his economic background?

Yeah, so he starts as one of the major Marxist scholars in Russia. But his viewpoint is essentially about how originally he thinks Marxism is the way of saving the world. And when he flees Russia, he ends up having a mystical experience near the death of his son. And he realizes his need for the spiritual dynamics of the world as well. But his view of economics is kind of a classical view. It's not just as we might think of it as markets and exchange, but it's the entire business of the world. So, sophology is largely about how the Trinity gives us the foundations for the business of

the world, for the operations of the day-to-day life of things here, which is, in fact, why I decided to talk in my thesis specifically about marriage and how the Trinity provides a foundation, a grounding for understanding what it really is. really means for two persons to become one. Excellent. So how does that go in terms of being related to marriage? Well, the Trinity is already a example, I guess, or the example of multiple things functioning in unity, of three becoming one.

But within the Trinity, you have kind of a fundamental original unity. It's always a unity in itself. where in creation we're always at disunity. We're always individuated from each other. I am myself and you are you and we are actually separate beings. But the only real source of our being is God's being. And that means that from the beginning, from our origin, we have a trajectory that's directed back towards God.

Just the nature of our being is oriented towards his being. And so in Bulgakov's thought, the way of all creation is to approach back and towards a kind of fundamental unity that preserves the freedom of individual beings, but has them pressed so close together that they become one. And that is a, that kind of view of the trajectory of the entire world is one that mirrors the way that we speak about marriage very well, which is that in marriage, two lives become so pressed together. that they are considered as one. It's not like when we say the two will become one flesh, oftentimes that seems like mere poetic kind of nonsense, because obviously our flesh is still separate. But I think what it's getting at is this idea that the flesh of you

is referring to your entire life. And your life is not simply your body. Your life is all of the things that you're up to in the world to borrow that little Heidegarian phrase, I guess. So it refers to the noose and the soul and everything. Yeah, every single aspect of you in the world. And all of the aspects of you in the world in marriage are brought together. They're overlapped to the point where it's really hard to distinguish them.

Your vocation, your business, your opinions, your thoughts, the things that you love, everything about the two people starts to be muddled together and become indistinguishable. And it's not like the two are gone. It's that they're becoming so pressed together. And the other element that I think helps to respect, that helps to clarify that from Bulgakov's thought is that that's a progression. All of becoming is a progressive thing towards being. And marriage is a progression. It's not that at the vow of marriage, you instantly become one.

It's that marriage is a journey of two becoming one. So every act of like self-sacrifice that happens in marriage is a furthering of that becoming one, which is why you can see. when marriages fail, it's because the people are seizing their own life for themselves, usually, in some way, one of the people or both of them are taking their hold of their own life and not allowing it to be a shared life together. I see. So also with, well, to use another Heideggerianism, would Bogakov actually say, because he followed from Heidegger,

that your designs actually do become one, or does he run into the problem of, well, it seems a rather difficult to solve problem wherein every person has their own design or their own way of being in the world. And it's very difficult to fully share in that because you ultimately cannot experience the other, or at least the perspective of the other.

Well, so two things there. Volgakov is writing in about 19, between about 1914, I think he dies in the 1930s. Wait, no, so he doesn't, yeah. So he's not really interacting with Heidegger in that way. But I think he's interacting with a lot of the figures that were inspiring, Heidegger, that were prefacing his career as well. I think he's not taking the turn towards Zazine quite in the same way that Heidegger does.

Because he is already accounting for being in kind of a bottom up way. Heidegger is using Dazine as a way of digging down into being. But for Bulgakov, in some ways the question of being is already answered to at least a degree in that we know it stems from the unity of the Trinity. And that already provides a lot of principles there. And one of those principles is the principle of a kind of subjectivity in hypothesis. So hypothesis meaning roughly a personhood, the I am, L. element of a person, which in the Trinity there are the three hypotheses acting in unity. But the weird thing in the Trinity is that you have three hypotheses acting in unity such that

the father can say I am and the son can say I am and the spirit can say I am and each of them can recognize both I and thou and even he. So they can recognize first, second, and third person there. But in their mutual interaction, they actually kind of collapse into a singular I am of the Godhead, such that there is some sort of way in which they have a true shared perspective experiencing as the other. And I think that's the promise for the unity of lesser beings too, that at some point the I am of you, since the completion of that statement of the I am is the same thing.

The I is attaching to the same nature. Whatever the empty gap on the other end of I am is is saying the same thing. So I am, in a sense, you and you are me. Eventually, if people become unified as closely as Bulgakov is picturing, then there's a sort of collapsing of their subjectivity too. Interesting. And does that extend to suffering as well? Because it seems that the suffering of the son would be still somewhat distanced from the father,

even though they would probably be together enough that it would still affect the father as profoundly as it would the son, perhaps. I don't know. Yeah, this is actually an area of some controversy surrounding Bulgakov, because he introduces, normally people introduce kinetic suffering into the dynamic of the Trinity only with reference to incarnation. So the sun pours himself out in the incarnation and enters into, he empties his own divinity.

And that's a kind of giving up and it can be described as a kind of suffering on the behalf of mankind. But Bulgakov actually allows for that suffering within the inter-Trinitaries, the inner Trinitarian world before incarnation, which is controversial. And the way he does that is by saying that there's one divine nature, which he names Sophia, the wisdom of God, and all three of the divine persons share Sophia, but they each participate in a way where they are constantly giving it up as well. So the father is kind of the origin point of Sophia.

He's the first principle. He's the primordial driving will of the God-Hawks. head. But he doesn't actually possess Sophia for himself. He empties himself of it so that Sophia can be made imminent and real and present by the son. So there's a kind of sacrifice already there. But then later on, the son does the same sort of thing later on, not in temporal sense, but in a kind of a sequence of metaphysics. The son also empties himself of having Sophia for himself so that he can reveal the father. So both of them are already giving up. They're already self-sacrificing in a way that Bulgakov describes as being somewhat a kind of divine suffering.

And what do you mean about this self-emptying? Because it also is problematic to say that God is bereft of something then, because it seems that he's more overflowing with of goodness. So this is working with the Greek word canosis, which comes from the root cano, so to pour out. And in its original sense, it literally would have just meant to like empty a jug. And when it's applied in the spiritual sense, it's including the same concept. connotation of everything that is there is being poured out. So canosis implies all of your self-interest, all of your holding on to a thing as I is gone. So it is not necessarily the loss of being. It's not like God becomes less. Not ego death or something. Yeah, it's not as if God is becoming nothing.

It's that each member of the Trinity for himself is no longer laying, claim to what is. So with reference to the father, there's a way in which the nature is becoming nothing because he is giving it up entirely. But that does not mean that the godhead itself is diminishing in some way. So the reason that he's willing to express this suffering is because canosis and kinetic love is viewed as being fundamentally necessary for the production of more things. So you empty in order to be more fruitful. The father empties so. The father empties so that the nature can be revealed by the sun, so it can become imminent. And the sun empties so that this father can be revealed.

And just like Christ empties himself in the incarnation so that he can save the world. What's the rule of the spirit then? The spirit's a complicated one in here. It participates in the kinetic love in a way, but Bulgakov talks about it in two separate sorts of ways. The first one is as a, the hypothesis of the the love of the father and the son. So that the I-M of the Spirit attaches itself to the love of the Father for the Son

and the responsive love of the Son for the Father, which is a little bit strange to think of. The second way is that the Spirit and the Son are required together to reveal the Father, which actually will bring us back later to the subject of marriage. Because it's in both of them together acting in unity that the nature of God is revealed. the sun gives kind of the structuring principle. He's the halagos of the situation. The Greek order, logic, rationality, the principle.

And then that form, if you will, is taken by the spirit to be given glory. It is made good. It is made beautiful and desirable, which is this inextricable kind of property that we can't lay hold of nearly as easily, which is, which reflects, well, the fact that it's really hard to lay hold of what the Spirit is functioning in. So together, they present God in his fullness in an imminent way as good and desirable and beautiful and fully what he is. That actually provides this beautiful line for understanding human revealing, because we are

put into the world to reveal God, both in ourselves and in the world around us. And this helps to explain this kind of theological question. of, okay, so then why is there a woman? Why is they're not just man? And it's because in some primordial sense, it would be wrong for man to be alone. Because in revealing God, there has to be that duality.

There has to be that binary revealing. There's, in the Trinity, the revealing is done by a diad. And in humanity, it's done by a diad as well. Which I don't think necessarily means everyone has to be married. But I do think it means that humanity as a whole, requires both that male element and that female element, which I think do loosely map onto in the proclivities of men and women towards structuring and making desirable. Okay. I mean, this is going to sound strange. And it seems to be, well, mostly contrary to human nature. I'm not going to get into, you know, but there are, you know, why don't we have a more?

more trinitarian structure in this too then? Yeah, this was actually a question asked at my thesis defense. So why not have a third member? Wouldn't that more accurately reflect the Trinity? And I think it's basically that it comes down to this fact that the spirit in the sun are revealing. And in order to reveal, there has to exist something that is being revealed beforehand. And that something is God the Father. But that means that in a way, God the father himself is never present there except through the

father and the son. So I mentioned during my defense, it's like you would have a group of three people, but you never see or hear from one of them because that individual, that absence is important for revealing to happen. So for the husband and wife or for male and female, there is already that third member, but that third member is God being revealed. Is it similar to the queering concept? I think that's very deeply related, yeah.

Okay. There is an empty space that allows for this. There has to go, there has to have something go before in order to actually come forth into reality through them. All right. And in order to get out that, Bulgakov distinguishes between the two kinds of negation in Greek. So Greek can negate using the word ooh or uke and may. So negation via uke, such as uke on, would mean actually nothing. The actual absence of anything, a real nothingness that has no good to it.

It's a kind of an ontological impossibility maybe, but the actual non-being. This is maybe what is brought about by sin, possibly, is an approach towards that. Okay. The other kind of nothingness is me on, which is a nothingness that implies possibility and that implies something could be there. So it applies in Greek towards kind of a subjunctive tone. It's not, but the fact that it's not means it could be. And that's really important because that's how the world that we live in functions.

There's always this possibility of growth and becoming, which is what distinguishes us from God, and that God is already, he is, and we are becoming. So we function in this world of meaon, and that means that at first God has to actually create nothing. He has to create possibility itself and the absence, the window of possibility, because in God, there is no mayon, there is no unrealized possibility. There is all realization. So God has to, this is another mode of emptying that has to happen in creation.

He has to create space for the world within his window. And this, I think, actually maps quite well to the sorts of things that Heidegger talks about, about unrevealing. Yeah. Or revealing or uncovering. Where you have to already have this created possibility of a thing becoming uncovered, of it being revealed. which is very intangible. We can't touch that. That possibility is always implicit in everything, but never present in anything.

And I guess the existence of Yukon for God would be, that would be the difference between whether you're a universalist or not, probably. It definitely relates to it in some degree. Bulgakov himself is almost certainly a universalist. His tendencies at least go that direction. I think probably even further than that he falls into the camp of what's called Apocadasatis, which is the total reunification of all things to God,

maybe even spiritual beings. I haven't read his writing about angels as thoroughly yet. Oh, interesting. But it's the idea that all things are, in the end, eventually return to God, which does not actually mean necessarily he thinks that there is no such thing as hell, but I am pretty sure he would not affirm a permanent

state of hell or permanent state of unbeing? Yeah, well, it isn't, I mean, that, there's an argument for that in the Bible, he will be all and all. Yeah, and Bulgakov is not very out of line with the Orthodox tradition. There are a lot of other thinkers who would assert similar things there. Yeah. He's very, very contested or contestable in the Orthodox Church, though. He is.

During his life, he had to face some charges of heresy. mainly because the introduction of Sophia into the Trinity by introducing Sophia as a principle, it seems as if he's creating a fourth thing in the Trinity. And in fact, in the way that he talks about Sophia, he oftentimes says it has a kind of hypothesis. So he's creating almost a fourth person of the Trinity. And he gets accused of this, them saying that we, the Trinity is three, you cannot have this fourth principle.

I think that this is an element that is more problematic in his early work and becomes more mellow in his later work in the way he talks about Sophia. He walks back some of the discussion of her as a person or a hypothesis later on. And it's not like that's totally absent. But I think that what he's getting at is that he is talking about the unity itself, the total I am of the godhood, godhead, is rooted in a, there is in a way kind of a fourth thing that appears, which is God itself, God himself, rather than talking about Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.

This has been Michael Miller on Radio Freehousdale 101.7. Thank you.