Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's leading Orthodox theologian. His other books include Relics and Miracles, The Unfading Light, The Burning Bush, The Lamb of God, The Comforter, Jacob's Ladder, and Churchly Joy (all Eerdmans).

Boris Jakim (1949-2024) was renowned for his translations of Russian religious thought into English. His published translations include works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sergius Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and Vladimir Solovyov.

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THE BRIDE OF THE LAMB

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Translator's Introduction..............................................ixTo the Reader..........................................................xvii1. The Creation of the World "Out of Nothing"..........................32. Creaturely Freedom..................................................1253. Evil................................................................1474. God and Creaturely Freedom..........................................1935 The Church...........................................................2536. History.............................................................3157. Death and the State after Death.....................................3498. Parousia, Resurrection, and the City of God.........................379Index..................................................................527

Chapter One

1. Cosmism

In the Christian understanding of the relation existing between God and the world, it is first necessary to exclude two polar opposites: pantheistic, or atheistic, monism on the one hand and the dualistic conception of creation on the other. According to the monistic doctrine, the world is self-sufficient and can be understood from itself. In the depths of its immanence it realizes the fullness of itself, for there it contains the hidden roots of its own being. The substance of the world is its unique and final foundation. However we understand it, whether materialistically as matter or energy, or spiritualistically as a spiritual monad or system of monads, common to all forms of monism is this self-enclosedness and self-sufficiency of the world, and its absoluteness in this sense. This worldview is essentially cosmotheism, speculative or mystical, or simply atheism, which denies the existence of a divine being above the world or in the world.

This worldview denies the very problem of the origin of the world, since one cannot speak of the origin of an absolute being. This being is eternal, even if its fullness is realized only in time. Here, it can be a question of the relation of noumenal and phenomenal being, substance and the empirical. In general, there is room for all kinds of distinctions within this self-enclosed worldview. Thus, different forms of monism are possible — from the mystico-poetical perception of the world to its prosaically empirical, mechanistically materialistic conception. Here, one can even have the development of a mysticism that is capable of assuming not only a poetic but even a subjectively religious form. However, the monistic worldview too is atheistic, insofar as it does not recognize the supramundane, transcendent God, closes itself off from Him in autonomous being, and thus loses the true idea of the world. The true idea of the world exists only in the relation of the world to the supramundane divine principle.

Because different layers or depths can be distinguished in immanent being, pantheism can fail to be conscious of itself in its cosmotheism as an atheism. History knows religiophilosophical systems that were considered to be profoundly religious, both by their own adepts and by their successors. Stoicism and especially Neoplatonism, Brahmanism and Buddhism, and modern theosophy and anthroposophy are examples of such systems. These doctrines have the common and distinctive feature that the idea of the creation of the world by the supramundane God is alien to them. They sometimes admit the creation of the world, but only in the sense of its self-formation, through its higher powers ("hierarchies") in relation to the lower ones. They speak of the emergence of a number of worlds within the depths of a single cosmic whole. This is a cosmic evolution whose origin is unknown but which, in its "avatars," is proceeding to infinity. But this auto-evolution of the world does not change anything in the fundamental cosmism of this worldview. The main feature distinguishing it from Christian cosmology is the absence of the idea of the createdness of the world, and this absence is, of course, rooted in the denial of the existence of the Creator. The fundamental relation between the Creator and creation, with the entire complex problematic this relation implies, is absent in pantheism. For pantheism, the world is self-evident and does not need an explanation for itself.

2. Dualism

At the opposite pole to cosmism or cosmotheism is dualism. Dualism is characterized by the recognition of the createdness of the world. However, for dualism the world is created not by one creator but by two: "Nature was created together by a white god and a somber black god." The conception of this second principle has its roots in morality and theodicy. It comes from the need to explain the evil and imperfection in the world, but a metaphysical or ontological theme is also important here. Insofar as it is not-God, even though it has its foundation in God as its Creator, the world cannot do without a point of reference or support outside of God or alongside God.

It is this point that lies at the basis of the world's extra-divine being. What we find here is a peculiar application of the law of identity, which is negatively expressed in the law of contradiction (and the law of the "excluded middle"). In the fullness of His divine being, God is only God. He is enclosed and as if limited in His being by His own divinity. There is thus no place in divinity for the world in its separateness. What remains for the world is to search for pou sto, an ontological place for itself (Plato's ekmageion) outside of or alongside divinity. This leads to the postulate of a certain divine altero-being, a second god, whose face is wholly turned toward the world. This second divinity is conceived either in various mythological images of the original mother-matter, Tiamat, whatever the character of these concrete mythological images may be in different religions, or in dualistic ditheism, which recognizes two not only different but, in a certain sense, even opposite gods, gods who fight against and complement each other; for example, Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Persian religions. We find the same thing in gnostic doctrines. It is easy to see the religious absurdity of such a dualism, which is only a masked form of atheism: Two gods are not gods, for they mutually annul each other. Inherent in the idea of God is absoluteness and, thus, uniqueness. If alongside the first god there must necessarily be a second, this means that the first is not a god. The idea of two gods (not resembling in any way the doctrine of the divine tri-unity, or the Holy Trinity) is an expression of a poverty of thought, of thought that has come to a dead end and seeks a way out of this dead end in the absurd. For this reason there is not a single significant philosophical system that is dualistic. Even polytheism, insofar as it is a heno-polytheism (Olympus), appears to be a higher worldview than dualism with its dead-end character. In polytheism we have the idea of the multiplicity of the divine world, which in its fullness becomes a kind of multi-unity, a divine pleroma. The fundamental lie of polytheism consists in the illegitimate hypostatization of the rays of this pleroma as gods; however, when polytheism is understood as creaturely hierarchies or as an intelligent heaven it...