Abstract
John Betz here proposes ‘analogical’ metaphysics as the shared metaphysics both of Catholic and Protestant traditions, as well as of the Christian West as a whole and its separated brethren in the Christian East. Analogical metaphysics is the ‘common’ metaphysical basis of Christian faith. It is the only metaphysics implied by Christian revelation in Scripture and the only one suited to the task of theology. It also implies a basic Christian ontology of personhood: we must become (existentially realize) what we are (essentially). Professor Betz first presents the metaphysics of the analogia entis in Western theology, as represented by Erich Przywara. He emphasizes that the analogia entis is a working-out of the God-creation relationship implied by Christian revelation, and that historically it has been articulated on the basis of scripture and dogma, and not independently of them. After developing further the ontology of personhood, Professor Betz takes up Russian sophiology in order to demonstrate the formal compatibility between the analogical metaphysics of the West and the sophiological metaphysics of the Christian East. Betz’s tentative conclusion is that there is such a thing as a common Christian metaphysics, notwithstanding its various manifestations and accentuations. His proposal, then, aims to contribute to ecumenical dialogue by showing that the metaphysical visions of the churches are similar and that their material metaphysical differences are ultimately complementary within a single, universal Christian metaphysics of creation and deification.
γένοι᾽ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών (‘Learn and become who you are’. Pindar, Second Pythian Ode, verse 72, in The Odes of Pindar, trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien (Yale University Press, 1991). Accessed via Perseus Project 1.0.)
This material has also appeared in another form in a 2019 Modern Theology article entitled, ‘Mere Metaphysics: an Ecumenical Proposal’.
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Notes
- 1.
By East and West I mean here, chiefly, the ancient churches of Rome and the Orthodox East, though it is my contention that the metaphysics here proposed, inasmuch as it is commended by Scripture, is also the implicit metaphysics of the Protestant tradition. Indeed, it is precisely Anglicans, such as Rowan Williams and John Milbank, who are at the forefront of the ecumenical conversation between the East and the West. For an important volume in this direction, with contributions from Williams and Milbank, see Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider, eds., Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
- 2.
I follow John Milbank in this regard. See, for example, ‘Between Purgation and Illumination’, in Kenneth Surin, ed., Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 189; Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, p. 18.
- 3.
My emphasis. See Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 56.
- 4.
Wrestling with Angels, p. 73. To some, admittedly, such a task may still sound too Hegelian. For in the very task of explicating the faith in philosophical terms is one not perhaps surreptitiously or at least unconsciously reconfiguring it in philosophical terms? Is one not turning wine back into water? In other words, when faith and reason meet, which is being turned into which? Certainly, in view of Hegel one must be on guard lest what thought brings to faith serves not its glorification but, however inadvertently, its corruption. But there is also the danger to which our agnostic age seems especially prone, namely, out of false humility failing to think what revelation shows us, as though revelation were either not given to be thought, nor worthy of it—as though the Logos did not call reason, too, to himself. Could it really be that the Logos did not invite his disciples to participate—with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind—in himself in whom ‘are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Colossians 2:2)? Or are we to say that even such knowledge as has been given to us is forbidden to us? Surely not, if, as Paul says, ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 2:16) and are to be ‘enriched in him … with all knowledge’ (1 Corinthians 1:5).
- 5.
For example, does original sin abolish the analogy between primary and secondary causality, such that, with regard to salvation, creatures cannot even freely respond to the offer of grace in Christ? Does it mean that the world has no relation to God except through Christ? If so, then it is hard indeed to speak any longer of a common metaphysics. But there is also a prophetic point to such questions, which rings through in Barth’s legitimate concerns about the analogia entis. For if all confessions affirm that the world is created through Christ and saved only through Christ, who is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, of creation, what point is there, Barth provocatively asks, in speaking of a metaphysical relation on purely philosophical grounds? And so the question really comes down to the following: (1) whether, granted a fallen state, one can still speak of a vitiated analogia entis, i.e., whether there remains in humanity an imago Dei, however deeply entombed by sin, which Christ came to redeem and call forth like Lazarus—in short, whether the analogia entis retains a provisional validity even in a state of extreme alienation introduced by sin; or whether the ontological bonds were totally broken, so much so that the creature in an alienated state is no longer a creature, and the prodigal is no longer, in any sense, a prodigal son; and (2) whether the metaphysical order, constituted by the relation between primary and secondary causality, is, however damaged by original sin, and absent any immaculate conception, still operative enough to allow for a creature to respond freely to Christ under the promptings of the grace of Christ.
- 6.
See Otto Hermann Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1967). The ecumenical implications of this great study have perhaps not yet reached their full potential.
- 7.
For a masterful overview of the Russian context and, more particularly, of Florovsky’s critique of Bulgakov, see Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 114–131.
- 8.
While Barth’s famous rejection of the analogia entis is found in the preface to the Church Dogmatics, where he declares the analogia entis to be the real sticking point between the confessions, the clearest account of his reason for rejecting it can be found in the following passage from Church Dogmatics II/2, p. 530. ‘This presupposition of the Roman Catholic construction is in every respect unacceptable. Strong opposition must be made to the idea that the metaphysics of being, the starting-point of this line of thought, is the place from which we can do the work of Christian theology, from which we can see and describe grace and nature, revelation and reason, God and man, both as they are in themselves and in their mutual relationship. The harmony in which they are coordinated within this system is surreptitious. For what has that metaphysics of being to do with the God who is the basis and Lord of the Church? If this God is He who in Jesus Christ became man, revealing Himself and reconciling the world with Himself, it follows that the relationship between Him and man consists in the event in which God accepted man out of pure, free compassion, in which He drew him to Himself out of pure kindness, but first and last in the eternal decree of the covenant of grace, in God’s eternal predestination. It is not with the theory of the relationship between creaturely and creative being, but with the theory of this divine praxis, with the consideration and conception of this divine act, of its eternal decree and its temporal execution, that theology … must deal. But since it has to deal with this theory, preoccupation with the relationship between creaturely and creative being, the doctrine of the “analogy” subsisting between the two, has necessarily to be condemned as a perilous distraction.’ For all citations to the Church Dogmatics, see the T&T Clark edition (Edinburgh: 1957–1975).
- 9.
For a standard Barthian account, see George Hunsinger, Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). Given the unfortunate spectacle of the rabies theologorum throughout history, one cannot help but sympathize with Hunsinger’s suggestion about reading Barth (and in the past I myself could have been more charitable), but one would hope that such charity would also be extended to Barth’s opponents, such as Przywara, who are not infrequently dismissed by Barth and his disciples without a proper hearing. Hunsinger’s remarkably brief appendix, entitled ‘Analogia Entis in Balthasar and Barth’, is a case in point. This is not to say that these readings of Barth are not an otherwise wonderful and reliable guide, but his reading of the analogia entis (like Barth’s own) is unfortunately a grotesque caricature, which perpetuates the myth that for Balthasar (and, presumably, for Przywara as well), God is a kind of ‘being’ related to the creature by a ‘common scale’. This is nonsense. Firstly, for Catholic theology, God is not ‘a being’, or even the highest being, but Being Itself (Ipsum Esse subsistens), compared to whom, as Thomas says in De potentia q. 1., a. 1, the being of creatures, being a gift, is esse completum et simplex sed non subsistens. For this reason alone, there is no common scale. On the contrary, the maior dissimilitudo of Lateran IV (for both Przywara and Balthasar) rests upon a radical and ultimate incommensurability between God—who is a se—and creaturely being, which is utterly relative. In no sense, therefore, does Catholic theology fail to honor God’s transcendence or aseity. This is a canard that simulates ecumenical differences where, in fact, there are none, and obscures the truth of the Catholic faith. Furthermore, the notion that Barth’s actualism is somehow an alternative to Balthasar’s (and Przywara’s) metaphysics belies the fact that the term actualism is itself a quintessentially metaphysical, Aristotelian term. In this respect Barth’s theology is the mirror image of Heidegger’s philosophy: Heidegger borrows from theology and pretends to be doing pure philosophy; Barth borrows from philosophy and pretends to be doing pure theology—as in, just for starters, his metaphysical preference for the term ‘modes of being’ (Seinsweisen) for the Trinitarian persons.
- 10.
As Balthasar put it in 1940, ‘As a Catholic theologian I was not in every respect satisfied by your contesting of the analogia entis, since it seemed to me that you were not always confronting definitive, but only preliminary Catholic positions …’ See Manfred Lochbrunner, Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Theologen-Kollegen (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 2009), p. 267. See also p. 270, where, in a subsequent letter, written after their first personal encounter, Balthasar laments that Barth had taken aim at relatively minor Catholic theologians—Bartmann, Diekamp, Fehr et al.—instead of wrestling more honestly and more respectably with a major theologian like Przywara. Had Barth done so, Balthasar suggests, his main reservations about the analogia entis would have been allayed. For the articles that led to his book on Barth, see Balthasar, ‘Analogie und Dialektik. Zur Klärung der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Karl Barths’, Divus Thomas 22 (1944): pp. 171–216; ‘Analogie und Natur. Zur Klärung der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Karl Barths’, Divus Thomas 23 (1945): pp. 3–56; The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. E. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992).
- 11.
In sum, Barth objects to the analogia entis on the interrelated grounds that (1) it coordinates God and creation in terms of a metaphysics of being, and not (at least at first) in terms of faith in Christ; (2) that it coordinates God and creation by means of a human theory, one of a given state of affairs, and not in terms of divine praxis and the unforeseeable event of divine revelation; and (3) that it is an attempt to think the reality of the God-world relation on the basis of creaturely being prior to and—so it would seem—independently of God’s self-revelation and self-gift in Christ, which can be the only real ground of any relation between God and the world in the first place.
- 12.
For Przywara’s later formulation of this maxim, see ‘Der Grundsatz, “Gratia non destruit sed supponit et perficit naturam”. Eine ideengeschichtliche Interpretation’, Scholastik 17 (1942).
- 13.
Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §6, p. 238; ‘No matter how it may be with his humanity and personality, man has completely lost the capacity for God. Hence we fail to see how there comes into view here any common basis of discussion for philosophical and theological anthropology, any occasion for the common exhibition of at least the possibility of enquiring about God’ (ibid.).
- 14.
Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §17, p. 280.
- 15.
See Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
- 16.
Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, § 15, p. 188.: ‘And this human nature, the only one we know and the only one there actually is, has of itself no capacity for being adopted by God’s Word into unity with Himself, i.e., into personal unity with God. Upon this human nature a mystery must be wrought in order that this may be made possible. And this mystery must consist in its receiving the capacity for God which it does not possess’; cf. p. 199: ‘God Himself creates a possibility, a power, a capacity, and assigns it to man, where otherwise there would be sheer impossibility.’ Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §6, p. 277.
- 17.
Ibid, p. 247: ‘Man must be set aside and God himself presented as the original subject, as the primary power, as the creator of the possibility of knowledge of God’s word.’ Cf. the epistemology of Newman, who, in various analogues of his ‘illative sense’, which he elaborates in his Grammar of Assent, speaks of a ‘collection of weak evidences’ and of a ‘cable’ made up of various strands, each of which, in and of itself, is weak and can be broken, but together are strong. See Ian Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman (London: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 50.
- 18.
See Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum. Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms, eds. Eberhard Jüngel and Ingolf U. Dalferth (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), p. 28.
- 19.
It is therefore highly debatable that Anselm, the author not only of the Proslogion, but of the more obviously apologetic, if not downright rationalistic, Monologion, can be pressed into Barth’s service as a model for this kind of theology.
- 20.
This is not to deny that one can retrospectively engage in the task of natural theology, or that the task of natural theology does not have a certain, albeit limited, apologetic value. It is simply to say that a Christian metaphysics is ultimately conducted from the standpoint of faith as a service to the faith, and not as something that would somehow, independent of it, have priority over it or dictate its terms as Barth feared. See in this regard Balthasar’s letter to Barth (May 4, 1940), in which he denies that the metaphysics of the analogia entis is a purely philosophical metaphysics: ‘In concreto, therefore, the analogia is in no sense a philosophical but rather a purely theological principle, within which one may nevertheless (retrospectively) sketch out a sphere of nature … Such knowledge is not idle speculation, forbidden, as it were, by the existential character of revelation, but rather an indispensable moment within the full understanding of what the concrete relation to God is.’ Quoted in Lochbrunner, Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Theologen-Kollegen, p. 275.
- 21.
There are indeed, as Fergus Kerr has keenly noted, many versions of Thomas. See Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 210: ‘Thomas’ thought, perhaps over a range of issues, contains within itself the Janus-like ambiguities that generate the competing interpretations which can never be reconciled.’ Przywara noted this ambiguity as well and credited it to the greatness of Thomas, whom he considered more of an ‘aporetic thinker’, aware of the abiding tensions of creaturely thought and being (and so of the analogia entis), than a founder of a single school. Cf. Przywara, ‘Thomas von Aquin als Problematiker’, Stimmen der Zeit 109 (June 1925): pp. 188–99, reprinted in Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2 (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1929), pp. 906–929; and Przywara, Humanitas: Der Mensch Gestern und Morgen (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1952), p. 741.
- 22.
The closest Barth comes to a conciliatory position is in his favorable reception of Söhngen’s two articles on the subject (Curch Dogmatics II/1, pp. 81–82); in the end, however, Barth is consistent: if there is to be an analogia entis then it can have no purchase outside of an analogia fidei; that is, any analogia entis that could be elaborated in terms of the first model is ruled out. For two of the best discussions of this subject, see Keith Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T&T Clark, 2010); Benjamin Dahlke, Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal, and Vatican II (London: T&T Clark, 2012), p. 80.
- 23.
Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, c. 1 (April 24, 1870).
- 24.
‘God is above all things by the excellence of his nature, but is in all things as the cause of their being.’ See Summa theologiae I, q. 8, a. 1, ad 1. Cf. Augustine, De potentia, q. 3, a. 7, corp.; De veritate q. 8, a. 16, ad 12.
- 25.
‘[Since] God reveals himself as at once a God of blessed, mystical intimacy and a God of the coolest distance, the fundamental disposition of the believing soul should be one of “fearing love and loving fear”—a fear that springs from love inasmuch as love fears to lose the beloved; and a love that through fear maintains a holy sobriety and a tender reverence’ (Przywara, Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 543). Cf. Schriften, vol. 2, p. 22: ‘God in creatures, and therefore love; God above and beyond creatures, and therefore fear: “loving fear and fearing love”.’ Cf. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 188, sermo 22, no. 6. Cf. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), p. 322: ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; till you see him to be a consuming fire, and approach him with reverence and godly fear, as being sinners, you are not even in sight of the strait gate. I do not wish you to be able to point to any particular time when you renounced the world (as it is called), and were converted; this is a deceit. Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.’ Przywara also formulates this in terms of the combination of intimate trust (Vertrauen) and reverence (Ehrfurcht). See ‘Grundhaltungen der Seele 2. Ehrfurcht’, in Seele. Monatschrift im Dienste christlicher Lebensgestaltung 6 (1924): pp. 299–303.
- 26.
See, especially, his 1940 essay, ‘The Scope of Analogy as a Fundamental Catholic Form’, in Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. David Bentley Hart and John Betz (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), pp. 348–99.
- 27.
At issue, specifically, was the difference between God’s natural unity as Trinity and the spiritual unity of believers through grace, which Joachim perhaps inadvertently threatened to elide (as though the Trinity were just like a relation of human persons), along with the difference between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity (as though the Trinity could be identified with the stages of an historical process culminating in an ‘age of the Spirit’).
- 28.
See Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 43rd ed., ed. Peter Hünermann (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2012), no. 806 (p. 269).
- 29.
For an obvious foundation for the doctrine in Thomas, see Summa theologiae I, q. 4, a. 3; De potentia q. 7, a. 5 ad 7; Scriptum super sententiis I, d. 8, q. 1, a. 3, sed contra 1; II, d. 4, q. 1, a. 1, corp. Thanks to Richard Cross for the latter references.
- 30.
See Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2, pp. 909–10. The importance of this distinction, which has tremendous implications for how we understand creation, is that it registers both the secondary agency of creatures, who possess a certain autonomy relative to God, and the primary agency of God who is sovereign within secondary causes, conducting them toward final end. It is the mystery, in short, of divine providence and sovereignty in the midst of creaturely freedom.
- 31.
See Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2, pp. 926–7. See also Kant Heute: Eine Sichtung (München: Oldenbourg, 1930), p. 7, where Przywara suggests that the Thomists as well as Scotists depart from the true position of Thomas himself: whereas the Thomists tend to separate essence and existence, the Scotists tend to collapse them. The position of Thomas, he holds, and which he regards as a true middle (between Thomists and Scotists), is not that of a ‘real separation’ (Realgeschiedenheit), but that of a ‘real distinction’ (Realverschiedenheit) or ‘real tension’ (Real-Spannung).
- 32.
Aristotle, Metaphysics V.6, 1016b.
- 33.
See Analogia Entis, p. 265, quoting Expositions on the Psalms 109, no. 20: ‘A torrent … is gathered, overflows, thunders, runs and in running runs off’; and De libero arbitrio III, 7, 21: ‘Before they might be they are not, and when they are they are fleeing away, and when they have fled they no longer are.’ May it never be said that Heidegger was the first thinker of temporality or understood better than Augustine what it meant to exist. See Cyril O’Regan, ‘Answering Back: Augustine’s Critique of Heidegger’, in Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty, ed. Fran O’Rourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 134–184.
- 34.
Summa theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4, corp.; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 121, no. 12; and Confessions XII, 6. See Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 190.
- 35.
Augustine, De potentia, q. 1, a. 1 corp. ‘… esse significat aliquid completum et simplex sed non subsistens…’
- 36.
If one wishes to look for the analogia entis in the Christian East one needs to look no further than §23 of The Life of Moses. Thus, if one rejects the analogia entis one is rejecting something that Gregory of Nyssa also taught.
- 37.
Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 38, no. 6.
- 38.
Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 65, no. 1.
- 39.
See Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 62, no. 16. Deus semper maior I–III (Freiburg: Herder, 1938–9).
- 40.
See again ‘Grundhaltungen der Seele 2. Ehrfurcht’.
- 41.
For all of Heidegger’s talk of openness and ‘the open’, his ontology actually forecloses this difference, along with the very question of God, who enters into his thought at the end of the day (i.e., in his late 1966 interview with Der Spiegel) only as a mythological ‘god’ on the horizon of Being, which is metaphysically prior and ultimate. As for Heidegger’s distinction between Being and beings, it is already implied in the real distinction and the gratuity of existence in every being—though, admittedly, when the real distinction is reduced to a formula it can easily lose its existential import, and to this extent Heidegger has a point. A proper understanding of the real distinction should therefore require that one first appreciate the full mystery of being before explaining it away.
- 42.
In this regard it is notable that Przywara, following the important but overlooked work of Parthenius Minges, ‘Beitrag zur Lehre des Duns Scotus über die Univokation des Seinsbegriffs’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 20 (1907): pp. 306–323; and his ‘Zur Unterscheidung zwischen Wesenheit und Dasein in den Geschöpfen’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 29 (1916): pp. 51–62, esp. 61, does not problematize Soctus’ doctrine of the univocity of being insofar as this is a conceptual univocity—a matter of logic, rather than ontology. For even if Scotus’ conceptual univocity opened the door to a univocal ontology, which would eventually be embraced by so anti-Christian a thinker as Deleuze, this was clearly not his intention, which was simply to avoid the conceptual equivocation he took Henry of Ghent’s position to entail. For Przywara’s appreciation of Scotus, especially regarding individuation, see his Schriften, vol. 2, passim.
- 43.
Confessions I, 4. See Przywara, Schriften, vol. 1, 367: ‘God is a God who unites the greatest surging of life with the greatest tranquility, who is Activity and Rest, as Augustine says. Thus you will become aware of him in that tranquility that is the unmoved depth of the surging of love.’
- 44.
Herein lies the all-important difference between Przywara’s understanding of the analogia entis and every attempt to infer God directly from, say, the mere existence of the world or any essential creaturely perfection. For Przywara every direct analogy from existence or essence is by the very terms of the analogia entis eo ipso excluded.
- 45.
Admittedly, this is where Przywara’s teutonic vocabulary can get a little arcane—and pithy to the point of unintelligibility. It begins to make more sense, though, in light of Aristotle’s term en-tel-echy, according to which the telic form or shape (morphē), which is ‘in’ a substance making it what it is, is also that to which the substance, in dynamic self-transcendence, is underway (as in the oakness of the oak tree that is at once ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the existing acorn). But it implies still more: it implies not just the tensions between Plato and Aristotle, but the whole range of dynamic and dramatic tension between the ideal and the real, between the a priori and the a posteriori, between the immutable and the mutable, between Truth (with a capital T) and history in all its relativity and flux: between, to put it in figurative terms, Parmenides and Heraclitus. The key concept of von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is arguably the drama between divine and creaturely freedom. But the analogia entis is its metaphysical presupposition and possibility: the metaphysical scaffolding of the creaturely stage. And this is why, at the end of the day, the analogia entis had to be defended against Barth as a non-negotiable: because it is precisely here that we see, in metaphysical terms, that the creaturely can tragically fail to be what it is.
- 46.
See Przywara, ‘Die Problematik der Neuscholastik’, Kant-Studien 33 (1928): p. 81. Nietzsche’s case presents an ironic analogy: while he abjures divine transcendence, he nevertheless longs, like few others, for human transcendence, speaking himself of the human being as a being-in-transition, as an Übergang. See Also Sprach Zarathustra, Preface, §4.
- 47.
For Przywara’s engagement with Heidegger precisely on this score, see his Crucis Mysterium. Das christliche Heute (Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh-Paderborn, 1939).
- 48.
Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, trans. and eds. Edward V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 13.
- 49.
To be sure, in the case of Heidegger, the call is no longer to live according to reason, as for the ancients, or of reason to itself (as for Kant), but the formal nature of the imperative, and the formal coordination of ethics and ontology, remains the same.
- 50.
See Paul Ricouer’s Gifford Lectures, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Thanks to Oliver Davies for a helpful discussion in this regard.
- 51.
See Adversus Haereses V, 6. For an important discussion, see Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), pp. 117–136, esp. pp. 130–136.
- 52.
Many thanks to Avi Winitzer for helpful conversations about the meaning of the Hebrew, particularly, about the more concrete sense of ‘image’ (selem), with its roots in the royal statuary of ancient Mesopotamia, as opposed to the more abstract sense of ‘likeness’ (from the feminine noun demuth). Fortuitously, this accords precisely with a personalist metaphysics of essence in-and-beyond existence, which one could render here more concretely and biblically as ‘likeness in-and-beyond image’.
- 53.
See, for example, Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995), p. 51.
- 54.
Augustine, De Trinitate XIV, 17, 24; in The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), p. 392. Augustine is referring here to 1 John 3:2.
- 55.
See Theo Kobusch, ‘Metaphysik als Lebensform’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Beatitudes. An English Version with commentary and Supporting Studies. Proceedings of the Eighth International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Paderborn, 14–18 September, 1998), eds. Hubertus R. Drobner and Albert Viciano (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 467–485.
- 56.
Augustine, Sermo 272.
- 57.
I hasten to add that this formulation is so comprehensive as to pertain not only to individuals, but also to the Church, whose essence (to be the bride of Christ) is given and deferred, like the kingdom, which is ‘already’ and ‘not yet’.
- 58.
See Jan van Ruusbroec, Werken III, Een Spieghel der Eeuwigher Salicheit, ed. L. Reypens, (Tielt: Lannoo, 1947), p. 167.
- 59.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’.
- 60.
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 93.
- 61.
For Balthasar’s appreciative but qualified appropriation, see Jennifer Newsome Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).
- 62.
For Pryzwara’s reading of Berdyaev’s The Meaning of History, see Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 1, pp. 342–373, esp. pp. 349–351; for passing references to Bulgakov, see ‘The Scope of Analogy as a Fundamental Catholic Form’, in Analogia Entis, p. 360.
- 63.
Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. Peter Zouboff (San Rafael: Semantron, 2007), p. 155.
- 64.
As Rowan Williams puts it in Sergii Bulgakov: Toward a Russian Political Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 119: ‘Sophia is the concrete presence of the ideal world—primarily in the mind or purpose of God, derivatively therefore in the created order itself.’
- 65.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 253.
- 66.
Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 161.
- 67.
In the words of the symbolist poet, A. K. Tolstoy (1817–1875), recalled with slight inaccuracy by Solovyov, ‘And I understood with a prophetic heart/ That all that is born from the Word, /Pouring out the rays of love, /Thirsts to return to him again. / And every stream of life, /Submissive to the law of love, /Rushes irrepressibly to God’s loins/With all the strength of being. / And sound and light are everywhere, /And there is only one principle for all the worlds, /And there is nothing in nature/That would not breathe with love.’ Quoted in Kornblatt, Divine Sophia, p. 89.
- 68.
Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, p. 56.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 97.
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Betz, J. (2019). Christian Metaphysics: Between East and West. In: Mezei, B., Vale, M. (eds) Philosophies of Christianity. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_10
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