What is Man?

IC XC
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NI KA

A couple of questions asked of a friend last week resulted in a struggle to read Bulgakov. Look, I’m not wise enough to navigate even a quarter of a percent of what he’s saying, but his text does give me some things on which to meditate and – in this case – to talk about to my Therapist. A slow page at a time, working my way through The Comforter, I am on page 18 after a week of trying (well, 6 days). There is a free PDF of an earlier translation out there, but here’s the Amazon link. Anyway… page 18.

Two ideas have leapt out: first is the idea that, contrary to Western conceptions of the Trinity, it’s not enough to think of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” as each 1/3 of the Trinity. On page 6, sed contra, Bulgakov says, “They are equal to one another in Divinity and at the same time each is equal in Divinity to the entire Holy Trinity in Its unity and indivisibility.” In short, there is no way to divide infinity: there is only one infinity (God) and yet the Father is infinity, the Son is infinity, the Holy Spirit is Infinity. There is not a bigger and a smaller infinity, or an infinity minus one… but only infinity.

The second idea is that Bulgakov speaks contra Aquinas against the idea that the Three Hypostases of the Trinity are defined by their relationships: that the Father is father because he is the Father of the Son, who is son because he is the Son of the Father, etc. This, says Bulgakov, results in a conception that they are each “other, other, other” and, in a sense, three different species of God. The final result being that there is some sort of a non-personal divine “substance” or apersonal substance, actually, that precedes the differentiation (by the relationships). The author then goes off somewhere the reader cannot yet follow. But it was these two ideas… there’s a way in which the Father is Father in his personal hypostasis that has nothing to do with being “father of the son”. The Father is exactly being Father.

And it was this second idea that tracked me into a reading of Ephesians 3:14-15. “for this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.”

We are used to saying that men (genetic, real males, that is) express fatherhood: some as actual parents, and others in different ways (teachers, spiritual fathers, etc). Yes, there are males in almost all species of earthly life, but humanity is the apex of God’s creation. We have choices to make. A priest said to me, once, “You are in your 50s, it’s time to step up and be a father.” It was, at that time, not something I was doing. But reading Bulgakov as far as I am able has led me to ask if this formulation mightn’t be backwards: perhaps it is better to say, “Men are what Fatherhood is doing in humans.” There is a way in which the ontological quality of Fatherhood – expressed in God the Father – is manifesting as men. Again, this is not a biological issue: not all men can (or will) have children. But all men are Fatherhood being expressed. It’s not a choice to be a father (or not), but rather a failure to be a man in the fullest sense.