The Lamb of God by Sergius Bulgakov

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 677 This is an important volume that expands our understanding of Western philosophers and their relationship to the Aristotelian and Christian traditions. Of particular historical interest are those essays that take a creative approach to familiar figures (Plato, Augustine, Plotinus, and Descartes), those that offer new critical insights into key thinkers (Aristotle, Henry of Ghent, Montaigne) and those whose discussion enhances the topic under consideration (Dante, Aquinas, Kant, and Nietzsche). The two final essays, both offering contemporary perspectives, are certainly welcome contributions; they move the volume beyond the trajectory of a purely historical study. The volume would have been even more interesting had there been essays representing Eastern, Jewish, or Islamic philosophical approaches to this aspect of human experience. And, while the volume itself may not exhaust the subject in the sense that it offers any type of solution to the phenomenon of the weak will (as Macintyre argues, there may not be one), it does expand and enhance our understanding of and appreciation for individual philosophers and for the rich legacy of reflection on a topic of enduring interest. Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California MARY BETH INGHAM, C.S.J. The Lamb of God. By SERGIUS BULGAKOV. Translated by BORIS ]AKIM. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. Pp. 472. $34.00 (paper). ISBN 978-08028 -2779-1. This translation of Agnets Bozhyi, first published in 1933, is the first volume of the "great trilogy," On the Divine Humanity (the second volume deals with the Holy Spirit and the third with the Church and the Last Things). It contains Bulgakov's Christology, and so is essential to understanding the controversy over his sophiological reconstruction of Christian doctrine. After the long triumph of the neo-patristic movement spearheaded by Georges Florovsky, moreover, it is essential for understanding today's renewed current of sophiological theology in Orthodox circles and beyond. In the life of the spirit, after all, resurrection always follows death. The book is introduced by a long (ninety pages) historical essay on patristic and conciliar Christology, from Apollinarius of Laodicea to Constantinople III. There follow five chapters, the first on the divine Sophia, the second on creaturely sophia, the third on the constitution of Christ, the fourth on the kenosis of Christ, and the last on the work of Christ. (I will return to the introduction.) The first chapter is perforce Trinitarian, and declares the relation of the uncreated Sophia to the divine persons. The divine Sophia is God as 678 BOOK REVIEWS manifested to himself; it is the content of the life of God, and contains the intelligibility of the All, united in a One-it is the All-Unity. What Bulgakov is reacting to and trying to correct is an abstract view of the essence of God, a view in which there are only "attributes" of God, a view in virtue of which the persons will be thought to act capriciously according to some Enlightenment notion of freedom. It is in this chapter that we find some of the formulations that caused V. Lossky to accuse Bulgakov of confusing the persons and the nature. God, for Bulgakov, is "one tri-hypostatic Person." This sounds bad, until we realize that "person" here means subjectivity, and that Bulgakov is saying there is one tri-hypostatic consciousness or subjectivity in God. It is also in this chapter that the relations of the person are conceived very much in the terms of the economy. Thus, the procession of the Son is the self-emptying or kenosis of the Father. There is an inner-Trinitarian sacrifice already before the foundation of the world. Those who have read Balthasar will have already made up their minds about the virtues and vices of proceeding in this way, but it is helpful to see it developed in another theology of comparable ambition and scope. It is not until the second chapter that Bulgakov begins to realize the systematic potential of his sophiology. Creaturely sophia is the expression of the divine Sophia; the world is the expression of the interior content of the life of God, in which the All-Unity becomes multiplied into the many creatures and their manifold relations to one another. Among...