Глава первая. София Божественная

The nature of the spirit is characterized by personal self-awareness: I am Jehovah, says the Lord. The spirit is, first of all, a personality, as personal self-consciousness, I. The impersonal (“unconscious”) spirit is a contradiction. But this I is not an abstract, unconnected, empty self-consciousness for itself (even the dreaming I of Hinduism has this dream within itself, lives in it). It is a living and living self: I am this, as the subject of some objectivity, the subject of some predicate, the container of some content. The living self has its own life, there is its source - and completeness, and beginning, and end. This means that the personal spirit has within itself its own nature, in which it lives, constantly realizing itself through it, being defined, revealing itself to itself. The echo of the indissoluble unity of personal self-consciousness, self and nature, which grounds the life of the personal spirit, is the ultimate intuition of the spirit about itself and at the same time the initial ontological axiom. It is contained in Revelation, and it is also attested by the Church in the basic dogmatic teaching that God has personality in the basic dogmatic teaching that God has personality and nature, ὑπόστασις φύσις, or οὐσία. According to this, God is a hypostasis, having His own nature, and it is in this sense that he is a personal spirit, living and living. This definition of personal spirit applies to every spirit, divine, angelic and human. The distinctive property of the Divine spirit is that He is not only personal, but also a trinitarian spirit, a trinitarian personality, but having one nature and, accordingly, one (not common, but precisely one) life, just as there is one nature and life of every one-hypostatic spirit. The nature of the spirit can be considered in two ways: it is the source of every particular manifestation of life, ascending to self-consciousness, a dark depth that feeds the roots of being, unilluminated by personal self-consciousness (“subconsciousness” or “superconsciousness”, or extraconsciousness, not-yet-consciousness), a generally unconscious and at the same time preconscious principle in the personal spirit. Without this source, without potentiality, which can and constantly becomes actuality, natura naturata, entering consciousness, the personal spirit would be empty, devoid of content. He would not be alive and living, but only an abstract self-consciousness. (Fichte takes it as such in his Ich-Philosophie). But nature is also the very life of the spirit, as its completed self-revelation, natura naturata, as the content of the life of the spirit, and in this sense its true predicate. Between n. naturans and n. naturata there is a vital identity. However, here a modal difference is also revealed in the life of the spirit, since the same natural content exists for it, on the one hand, as an act of its own life, creative self-revelation, and on the other, as a fact of some reality that lies before it - its own existence in itself, in itself. It is not independent of the I, since it is its own act, creatively posited by the I in itself and for itself; however, in its reality, in being in itself, it is also a fact, independent of the self, which lies before it. A living and living spirit reveals itself to itself in a certain objective reality that has its own reality. The spirit lives in it as in its own home, in its subject-objectivity. The concept of nature is taken here in an indefinite sense, as the potentiality of the life of the spirit, outside it, as personal self-consciousness, lying, but belonging to it and for it, and revealed in it. In this sense, the nature of the personal spirit, as the predicate of all predicates, can be defined as its world: the personality lives in the world as in its own nature, which it masters as it is revealed or realized in personal self-consciousness. The world is that very necessary not - I, which Fichte postulated, however, understood not in the negative sense only of the boundaries of the I - for I, as a subject for all predicates, living and living, has no boundaries for itself - but in the positive sense of objective reality, which becomes for the I a subjective experience, a personal life. We are coming, that is. to the conclusion that the personality, as the conscious center of being, presupposes for itself the existence of the world as its nature, - not yet - personal, however, not outside of personal, but so far only impersonal existence. The personal spirit is not closed in on itself (like the Leibnizian monad), but is open to the world, and the world thereby becomes a precondition for the personal spirit, as a living and living personality, for the spirit lives not by its own self, but by its inherent nature. The latter should be understood here in the broadest sense, as a non-self that is part of the self, living in it, including here the psychological world, external nature, and, what is especially important, other living personalities, other selves, as co-selves or others. Likewise, the life of the spirit, the entry of the non-I into the I, or the expansion of the I into the non-I, presupposes more than just a passive contemplative attitude towards the world. This is not at all characteristic of the nature of the personal spirit with its actuality (I myself, as Fichte rightly pointed out, is an effective self-position, Thathandlung), and the life of the spirit is an effective penetration into the world as into its own nature. So, the personal spirit, which in itself must find both the basis and completeness of its being, turns out to be conditioned in its life by the world or non-spirit, although it is capable, entering the life of the spirit, in this sense of becoming its nature. And by the force of this, the spirit for itself turns out to be not free, but conditioned, not absolute, but correlative, becoming spirit. It is not revealed that we will be (John 3:2), but until this limit is reached, the personal spirit in its life does not have completeness and adequacy; on the contrary, it is constrained by relativity and limitation, which, however, is not able to abolish the indestructible selfhood of the spirit. This conditionality is the stamp of creatureliness that lies on every created spirit, both human and angelic. In particular, the human spirit is becoming, but has not yet become itself, a part of itself, and, moreover, still a small one. Nevertheless, this created spirit has in itself the features of the Absolute Spirit, it is an image of the Divine Prototype, and only from it can it be understood both in all the sublimity and absoluteness of its purpose, and in all the relativity of its becoming, unfinished existence. The spirit, although created, is characterized by a special created eternity and even uncreatedness. God himself, having created the body of man from the “dust of the earth,” that is, uniting it with created nature as his own world, from himself “breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). The secret of the creation of the created spirit is that God gave hypostatic existence to this “breath”, the outpouring of His nature. “For by Him we live and move and exist,” “we are His race” (Acts 17:28). Spiritual existence is rooted in the eternity of God, the created spirit is similar to it and uncreated, and it carries within itself the consciousness of both this eternity and this uncreatedness, as well as its general divinity, which is why spiritual self-consciousness is essentially God-consciousness. Moreover, he recognizes himself as a self-founding, self-positing being. It is I who begin myself, and I posit, and I belong to myself in my ownness; I am not a thing, and no one can posit my self except myself, I create myself for myself. Hypostatic self-consciousness also includes self-positing: God, calling forth His breath into hypostatic existence, hypostasizing the rays of His own glory, does this in a single eternal act together with hypostasis itself. God’s creativity seems to ask the created self whether it is me? whether it has the will to live, and listens to the response of creation. However, isn’t the spirit’s own life extinguished in its naturalness, given to it from the outside and even, in a certain sense, as if imposed? Isn’t spirituality itself lost so much that man can become “flesh” (Gen. 6:3), and God himself “repents” of his creation (7)? “These are natural people who have no spirit” (Jude 1:9). Such a possibility exists for a person due to the ontological complexity of his nature, which unites the eternal spirit and created nature, the breath of God in the dust of the earth, although it no longer exists for angelic spirits (as well as demonic ones) due to the relative simplicity and their spiritual self-evidence (the absence of “subconsciousness,” i.e., naturalness or “flesh”). Even fallen angels, who become demons and cleave to sinful human flesh, remain imprisoned in their spirituality, and “spiritual life” is the only possible one for them. Man, by his very constitution, is not only spiritual but also spiritual-physical or natural; not only his spirit lives in him, but also nature, the latter, moreover, with its own life. Nature is not spiritual, but only spiritual and physical. It is alive and living (and it also applies to it that the life-giving God “did not create death”), and this life has for itself its own sensitivity, its own consciousness of different degrees, its own “soulfulness.” In nature we have all the steps from the completely dormant, for us inconspicuous life of minerals and generally “inorganic” substances, through the life of the plant world, to the endless variants of organic life with its consciousness. This animal consciousness, which, however, is not spiritual, although individual, remains inaccessible to us in its limitations. No matter how close the animal in its “spiritual” consciousness is to man, there remains between them an uncrossable line of spiritual self-consciousness characteristic of man (just as man in his corporeality and complexity is transcendental to the angelic disembodied spirit, with which he comes into contact only in his spirituality). But with the natural side of his being, man comes into contact with the animal world; he is an animal, although not only an animal. A person is capable of immersing himself in this animality to such an extent that spiritual self-awareness seems to fade away in him, and he recognizes himself only as an animal, and wants to come “from a monkey.” In such a state, a person forgets so much about his heavenly homeland that he is sincerely perplexed when he hears speeches about spirituality. This possibility is a consequence of the property of the created spirit that for it its own nature is not exhausted by its own spiritual world, but includes potentially the entire created world, into which all windows and doors are open to it. He can lose his temper through these doors to such an extent that the external nature in man becomes the only reality for him. Through this loss of self, a person ceases to see himself as a spirit, loses consciousness of his own spirituality, and where spiritual-physicality actually exists, he sees only mental-physicality or simply “flesh”. However, this state of “flesh” for a person is still spiritual self-determination, the state of his spirit, although relegated to externality. But a person’s spiritual nature, his “spiritual life,” can become for him an experienced self-evidence, a fact of self-awareness. Man sees and knows himself both in his eternity and in his createdness, both in his spirituality and in his naturalness. It is a mistake to think that “spiritual life”, the self-consciousness of the spirit, breaks or abolishes the connection of the spirit with the nature living in it, and makes it unnatural (dreaming) or anti-natural (disembodied). Quite the contrary, spirituality increases the feeling of connection with the natural world, but it also gives consciousness of one’s own depth of spirit, not only the nature of the world, but also the spiritual nature. For the spirit - every spirit, incarnate or disembodied - necessarily has its own spiritual nature, although it manifests itself in its life in the natural world. Without this own nature, the spirit would be only a dim candle of self-consciousness (“transcendental self” in Kant), illuminating world existence, but not living in it as an embodied spirit. Where does this spiritual nature come from, and what is it? It is divine in origin, since the “sons of men” are also “sons of God”, born not of flesh and blood, but of God (John 1:18), by spiritual birth: “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (3:6). And just as “God gives the spirit without measure,” then this spiritual life, that is, life in God and by God, this deification of man, has many steps for itself, there is an endless ascent. This spiritual life of the sons of God does not make them uninvolved in the natural life of the sons of men; on the contrary, this duality of natures in man, his original God-humanity, makes possible the deification of life, the inseparable and unmerged communion of both natures in man. If man were able to free himself from natural nature by the power of spiritual life, he would simply be God, and his life would merge with the divine life. However, although this is also accessible to him (for “you are naturally gods”), it is only as a created, and precisely a natural-created spirit, and to which it is given to raise all creation to the image of spiritual existence. Thus, through the spiritual principle, nature in man becomes belonging to the spirit, spiritualized. God is Spirit and, as such, has personal self-consciousness, “hypostasis,” and nature, “ousia,” and this inseparable union of nature and hypostasis is the life of the Divine in itself, which is at the same time both personally conscious and naturally concrete. This relationship between hypostasis and nature, their inextricable connection, is characteristic equally of both the divine and the created spirit. However, there is a significant difference between them. In relation to hypostasis, God, as the Absolute Subject, is a trinitarian Personality, which in a single personal self-consciousness unites all the modes of the personal principle: I, you, he, we, you, while a single-hypostatic personality has all these modes, except I, outside itself, in other personalities, and is limited and conditioned by them in its existence. The personal principle, the hypostasis, manifested to the end and realized to its fullness, is a trinitarian personality, in which personal unity is revealed in the reality of three hypostatic centers or hypostases, in a trinity, which is the divine number, not three, not one, but precisely the trinity, the Trinity. Such hypostatic being is realized not statically, as the individual self-consciousness of a separate, self-eaten self resting in its self-givenness (although here too this staticity and self-completeness is only apparent, for every I comes out in you, we, you), but actually, as an eternal act of triple self-positing in another. This actual self-positing is love: the flames of the divine trinity flare up in each of the hypostatic centers, only to unite, identify with each other, in the procession from oneself into another, in fiery self-denying personal love: A statically single-hypostatic personality is the center of self-affirmation and repulsion - ego-centric. Dynamically, the personality realizes itself as the initial beginning of self-denying love, the descent into another self. The Holy Trinity as a person is precisely such an actual personal principle. In it, the static existence of each personal center is the initial beginning of the actual procession, in which personal self-affirmation is removed and overcome, and the Personality is realized as a ring of this triple self-propelled love. Therefore, about the Divine Personality, first of all, it must be said that She, as trinitarian, is equally real both in one hypostasis and in three, is the pre-eternally realized reciprocity of love, which completely overcomes personal isolation and identifies the three into one, and yet itself exists by the real existence of these personal centers. 245 The Trinitarian Deity is a single Person, despite this trinitarianism, or rather precisely because of it, and in this unity of His personality (which, however, is not mono-hypostasis), the divine spirit does not formally differ from the created spirit. And the Divine Person lives, realizing His life in His nature. The one trinitarian Divine Person has His own divine nature - this is the main church definition. The Trinitarian God has His one nature, and He has this nature equally: both as the Divine trinity in His individuality, and as each hypostasis in His being, being “consubstantial” not only with the Son of the Father (which was exactly what was argued about in the Arian era), but also with the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. The three hypostases do not have their nature together, not in common possession, and, however, not each for himself (which is tritheism), but as one for all, and not common only and equally similar for everyone (which would be not homoousity, but omiusity). Rationally, this can only be expressed in unequal equalities: I. a). The Holy Trinity is different from each hypostasis, unequal to it; b) St. The Trinity is equally divine to each hypostasis, therefore equal to it; II. a) St. The Trinity has one nature; b) each hypostasis also has a single nature; trace, the possession of a single nature is equal and different for St. Trinity and separate hypostasis. These rational contradictions to which this thought leads are explained by the fact that rational thinking deals with static quantities, external in their complete facticity, whereas here it has to deal with acts that are dealt with in their dynamism and continuity and therefore are not amenable to rational thinking and are not exhausted by its schemes. There is a fundamental difference in the relation of the Divine Person to His nature from what we know about the created spirit. For the latter, his own nature is an inexhaustible and even inexhaustible given, a certain μὴ ὄν, a possibility that constantly becomes reality, a darkness from which new images emerge. In this sense, the created spirit remains and is not revealed and unknown to itself; it does not exhaust itself, but only becomes itself. Becoming is synonymous with creatureliness. The created spirit, since it lives, always acquires a new content of being for itself, and its own nature is therefore both given and given for it, that non-self that belongs to its self only in ontological predestination, but not yet in reality; Therefore, through this non-I, the I is not only revealed, but also limited. It cannot be realized by self-positing (as Fichte tried to do through the absolute Tathandlung), which, in a certain sense, is the self-positing of the personal self. The non-I is the limit for the I, being clearly in potency, i.e. That is, the I is destined to enter into life, into its possession, it remains given to the I. A person in his “I” carries also an “I”; he is opaque to himself and completely unknown. In this sense, he is not self-positing, but is a creation, although his personality is connected with his nature according to the type of self-positing spirit. The relationship between person and nature in the Divine spirit is determined differently. There is no givenness or unrealization in it; the Divine Spirit is completely and completely transparent to itself. His nature is not for him non-self, like a boundary, or non-actualized potency. God knows Himself with absolute, exhaustive knowledge, “The Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10). Therefore, although nature in God is other than hypostasis, it is all hypostasized, realized in the personal life of the Divine, revealed and realized. “God is light and in Him there is no darkness” (1 John 1:5), in particular maeonal darkness, the night twilight of half-being. No opposition or even just a distinction between consciousness and nature in God in this sense can be allowed, because this would mean the limitation of divine life and would contradict its all-bliss, immutability and completeness. In the same sense, in the life of the Divine there can be no place for any “subconsciousness,” much less “superconsciousness.” If the personality in the Divine has a nature, then this nature is completely personal, and therefore in God there cannot be conceived such a divine “nature” (like Schelling’s meonal “freedom”), which would be for God a potentiality, a kind of Urgrund, and from which the world arises through its inner self-revelation, and through it God is realized (in Boehme, in Schelling or, in the dialectical self-revelation of thought, in Hegel), the Divine nature is completely and completely The end belongs to God, personally realized in Him, as His eternal “power and divinity” (Rom. 1:30). But due to this realization, nature in God, even if it should be distinguished from His personality, should not be opposed to it, like another principle, the “fourth” in the Holy Spirit. Trinity, “Divinity” in God (such was the teaching of Joachim of Floria and Gilbert of Porretan, which was rightly condemned in this sense by the Catholic Church. 246 Divine nature cannot quadruple the trinity Divinity, because nature cannot be categorically compared, “counted” with the hypostases, being different, original, along with the hypostases, the beginning. It is completely is transparent to the Divine hypostases and is identified with them, however, preserving its own existence, nature is pre-eternally hypostasized in God, as the adequate life of the hypostases, and the hypostases are eternally connected in their life with nature, being, however, different from it 247. This transparency of nature for the hypostases, its complete adequacy, is realized in the unity of trinitarian life, corresponding to the trinitarian nature of the Divine personality. God has a nature of personal self-position, but a personal trinitarian nature. The nature of God is the single nature of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and each hypostasis has it in its own way, for itself and for other hypostases within the Trinity circle. The beginning (ἀρχὴ) of the nature of the Divinity, as well as the entire Holy Trinity, is God the Father. He has His own nature, and this possession of it is a hypostatic, co-hypostatic and inter-hypostatic act. The Father finds Himself, as His nature, not in Himself and for Himself, but proceeding from Himself, giving birth to the Son, like the Father. Fatherhood is the image of love in which the lover wants to have himself not in himself, but outside himself, so that this other, but identified with him, self, can give his own, reveal his in spiritual birth, in the Son, who is the living image of the Father. In His life, and not in Himself, the Father lives, giving birth, that is, starting from Himself, revealing Himself. The Father's love is ecstatic, fiery, conceiving, effective. Incomprehensible to the created spirit is the birth of the Son by the Father, the Personality of the Personality. This birthing force is the ecstasy of leaving oneself, a kind of self-emptying, which is at the same time the realization of Oneself through this birth. The Father realizes His nature, hypostatically transparent, in the hypostasis of the Son, who is His Word, “the image (χαρακτὴρ) of His hypostasis” (Ev. 1:3). In His nature the Father has Himself as the hypostatic Word, His Word, and He is His speaker. So, in the first position, the hypostatic nature of God is the hypostatic Word of the Father, which is spoken by the Father in the Son. “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor the Father except the Son” (Matthew 11:27). Birth for the Father is self-emptying, giving of Himself and His Other, the sacrificial ecstasy of all-burning Love, jealous of the Other. “Love is strong as death and jealousy as hell, it is a very strong flame (of God)” (P. P. 8, 6). The Father gives birth, the Son is born - two images of birth, active and passive. Here we must understand, of course, not the emergence of the non-existent from the non-existent, for the Divine hypostases are equal. The Father is the cause (αἰτία) of the Son not in the sense of His origin, but only of the eternal relationship: begotten and begetter, opener and revealed, subject and predicate. However, while on the Father's side there is active birth, on the Son's side there is passive birth, obedient birth. The Son, as the Son, has Himself and His own, not as Himself and His own, but as the Father, but the image of the Father. Spiritual sonship consists in this, that the Son empties himself in the name of the Father. Sonship is already an eternal kenosis, the Son is not the flame of the Father’s fire, but the quiet Light of holy glory. The love of the Son is the sacrificial, self-denying humility of the Lamb of God, pre-established “before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:19). And if the Father wants to have Himself outside of Himself, in the Son, then the Son does not want to have Himself for Himself, sacrifices His personal selfhood to the Father, and, being the Word, He becomes, as it were, mute for Himself, making Himself the Word of the Father - being rich, becomes poor, sacrificially falls silent in the bosom of the Father. The sacrifice of the Father's love is self-denial, self-emptying in the birth of the Son; the sacrifice of Filial love is self-exhaustion in being born from the Father, in accepting birth as birth; both are not only an eternal fact, but also an act for both parties. The sacrifice of love in its reality is eternal suffering - suffering not of limitation, which is incompatible with the absoluteness of divine life, but of the authenticity of the sacrifice and its immensity. This suffering of sacrifice not only does not contradict God’s all-bliss, but, on the contrary, is the basis for this all-bliss, which would be empty and unreal if it were not based on genuine sacrifice, the reality of suffering. If God is love, then He is also sacrifice, which only through suffering reveals the conquering power of love and its joy. 248 This mutual sacrifice of birth, self-emptying and self-exhaustion, would be a tragedy in God if it remained self-sufficient. But it is eternally resolved in the bliss of a sacrifice made and mutually accepted, suffering overcome. It never exists unresolved, although it cannot be separated or excluded from this bliss" as its hidden basis. The bliss of God cannot be understood as selfish and empty narcissism, similar to selfish human happiness, and the fullness of love requires a real sacrifice, not an apparent one. God is not the duality of the Father-Son, but the Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which is the joy of sacrificial love, its bliss and fulfillment. The Father, giving birth to the Son, and in this birth proceeding from Himself, does not yet have the Begotten as the Begotten, as the object of His love and joy, just as torment and human birth lead to joy, but in themselves they are not yet joy. Therefore, the relationship of the Father to the Son is twofold: for Him the Son is not only begotten, but also begotten, “the beloved only begotten Son.” And the relationship of the Son to the Father is equally twofold; the Father for Him is not only the Parent, but also the Father in whom His own life is hidden: he who saw Me saw the Father - I am in the Father and the Father in Me, I am You, and You are I, I am We. This identity of the Father and the Son, Their self-identification in love, is realized by the hypostatic act in the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father to the Son (or “through” the Son). Since the Father and the Son are mutually cognized in self-denying love, as an act performed, Their mutual existence for each other has only an ideal character. It acquires reality only in the accomplished act, birth - birth. This reality of the Divine nature, ideally already revealed in the paternity of the Father and the sonship of the Son, is realized by the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and resting on the Son and uniting them both. This is the mutual love of the Father and the Son among themselves and the joy of this love, the accomplished self-disclosure of the Divine in His nature, not only in Truth, but also in Beauty. What is taking place here is no longer a sacrificial act, but a triumphant self-testimony of love and self-knowledge of the nature of God - not birth, but procession. The Holy Spirit comes from the Father and is received by the Son. He is the “third” person of the Holy Trinity, for he establishes the reciprocity of the Father and the Son. God ideally defines His nature in the birth of the Speaking Father, His Eternal Word. The reality of this nature is experienced through the Holy Spirit. There is no self-determination in God that is not hypostatic. Therefore, the recognition of one’s nature as reality is a hypostatic act of the outflow of the Holy Spirit. In it, the relationship of the Holy Spirit is determined not only between the Father and Himself, but also between the Father and the Son. This hypostatic relationship is Their mutual love. The Holy Spirit loves the Son, because it “rests” on Him, together with Him, in an inseparable duality, it reveals the Father, and loves the Father as the source of love, the First Author, the Spirit, the Holy. He himself does not reveal either the Son to the Father or the Father to the Son, but He unites them in the reality of the Divine nature. It may be said in this sense, in relation to His “origin,” that it is not active, but passive; The Holy Spirit comes out, flows out. He does not reveal Himself, for He does not have His own special content; He proclaims what the Son says on behalf of the Father, is the Spirit of Truth, and not the Truth itself. In Him and through Him the Depth of God becomes transparent, as all-real Truth and Beauty. The Trinitarian God has His nature as a triune and one-triple act of love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the unified nature of the three hypostases. 249 The Spirit has personality and nature, and the Divine Spirit also has a trinitarian Personality and His one nature, which, being completely transparent to the personality, is itself completely personal, or hypostasized. However, this does not detract from her special character as a nature, or Divinity 250 (θεότης). It is the Divine world in God, who, as alive and living, has His own life and its source in the Divine nature or “the depths of God.” Sometimes the Divinity or nature in God is rejected for the sole reason that in God everything is personal, and His entire nature is permeated with rays of self-consciousness, hypostasized. However, this means impoverishing His being, reducing it to abstract personal self-consciousness, that is, making it poorer than the created spirit. But this being, transparent to self-consciousness, still exists in itself, just as our nature exists in us, not only because it is still an unrealized given and unilluminated depth, but also because it becomes an achievement of consciousness and enters our conscious life. The nature of God will not be diminished in its existence from the fact that all of it is exhaustively realized in the Divine consciousness. It exists not only for this self-consciousness, but also in itself, as ens realissimum, as οὐσία. This power of God can be understood as the life of God and the power of God, that is, something completely simple and in this sense of super-quality, not only in the sense of its transcendence in relation to creation (apophatic moment), but also in the sense of the completeness of that absolute white ray, which is indecomposable into color rays, but contains them in itself (cataphatic moment). However, this transcendence for the creature does not diminish the Divinity and does not impoverish His nature in itself. Divine nature is not only the power of life, but also content, the absolute content of absolute life with all its “properties,” the property of all properties. It is appropriate for this content to include the All, for no restrictions are appropriate in relation to the Divine, and this All cannot be understood as an aggregate, or a juxtaposition of an infinite number of elements of the All, but as their organic internal integrity, whole-wisdom in unity - All as unity and unity as the All, All-Unity, the Life of God is this positive All-Unity, and All-Unity is the nature of God. In this capacity, the nature of God, as the absolute content of the life of God, is what is called in the Word of God (Prov. Sol. 8, 22 ff. and parallel texts): the Wisdom of God, Sophia. Thus, the Divine Sophia is nothing more than the nature of God, ousia, understood not only as strength and depth, but also as revealing content, as All-Unity. 251 When we talk about the Divinity of God, we understand at the same time His nature both as an undiscovered depth, the source of life, and as open - life itself, and both the source of life and the very? life are identical, just as Usia and Sophia are identical. Usually Usia is thought of as a Divine reality, while Sophia is only a property or a set of properties inherent in this reality, arising or manifesting only in the presence of a certain relationship, namely to the created world. There is no basis for such distinction and division. The Divinity, and like Sophia, is ens realissimum to the same extent as Usia, insofar as the source of life cannot be separated from its revelation or opposed to it. The Divine Usia, like Sophia, is the All-Unity, which is the life of God, and which itself lives in God with all Divine reality, and God, having Usia, thereby has her as Sophia. God is Usia: Deus est Divinitas, ὁ Θεὸς θεότης ἑστιν, although not vice versa: Usia is not (personal) God, the Divinity is not the Divine Person. Likewise, God is Sophia, Sophia is Divine, there is God in His self-revelation, Deus revelatus (although also not vice versa: Sophia is not God, ὁ Θεὸς, but only θεὸς or Θεὸς she cannot be equated with the Divine Person, and therefore, in particular, with the Logos. Equality, which here expresses a concrete, vital sameness, is irreversible, just as the subject and predicate are irreversible. Only abstract, mathematical and in this sense empty equalities are reversible: a = b, and b = a. So, God is Divinity, Usia is Sophia. It follows that in God there is not only a Person (and Persons), but also a Divinity, which is not a person, although it belongs to the Person (and Persons), and is completely hypostasized. Therefore, it is both personal and not personal. This is precisely the church dogma about the union of the Hypostasis and Usiya in God: Usiya itself is not a person, although in God it exists only personally. If we consider Usia only in the aspect of personal existence, we actually abolish it. It belongs at the same time to both a personal - in relation to the Person - and a non-personal - in itself - existence: although at no moment of its existence it does not exist outside the personality, separately from it, but at no moment does it merge with it, because otherwise the personality loses itself, becomes unnatural, turns into an empty abstract self, and is not a living spirit living in its nature. Therefore, we must talk about nature not only as existing in God, Usia - Sophia, but also independently as about the Divinity, or the Divine world in itself, existing not only in God, but also for God. Therefore, it can be said about him not only that God is Divinity, but also that He has a Divinity that exists in itself, although not for itself (that is, not personally, not as a “fourth hypostasis”). What can be said about Usia as about Sophia? about nature as about content? about the Divine as the Divine world? In content, this is Everything; in the way of being - this is All-Unity, Chastity; according to the power of being, it is a living and ever-living principle. Its reality is equal to the reality of God Himself (for it is God in His self-revelation), its life is equal to the life of God Himself (for it is His own life), Its originality is equal to the originality of God Himself (for in addition to the Divine, the very idea of ​​God turns into an abstract concept). Sophia is Pleroma, the Divine world, existing in God and for God, eternal and uncreated, in which God lives in the Holy Trinity. And this divine world contains within itself everything that the Holy Trinity reveals about itself, is the Image of God in God himself, the self-Icon of the Divine (according to the teachings of St. John of Damascus). He has the life of the Divine in him. Therefore, it is not only a thought about the divine world, ideal, but not realized and therefore abstract (Plato’s κόσμος νοητός), and is not only a dumb feeling of it, devoid of separateness and transparency of being, but is a real and fully realized divine Idea, the idea of ​​all ideas, realized as Beauty, in ideal images of beauty. The icon of the Divine is divine self-art, life in ideal images and in the reality of these images. Usia Sophia is a living principle, and lives such a deep life that no created life can be compared with her. She is the Life of life, and the fundamental principle of all created life. She is the divine life in God, Who is love. Therefore, divine life is love, which is the power of this life: Everything is connected in All-Unity, diverse, all-diverse and at the same time one, by the power of love, as one in many and many in one, as all in everything. This is an organic image of plurality, in which unity is not established by the abstraction of specific properties (like Aristotle’s “one in many things”), and polyunity is not abolished by concreteness. Love in the life of God is an all-pervading, all-concrete multi-unity, like a spiritual organism. This image of unity is not given to us in our rational logic, which corresponds to the state of decay of the sinful world. This world knows reality only as mutual repulsion, and multiplicity only as extra- and juxtaposition, and therefore its logic has only an abstract concept of the universal, without the ability to think about the concrete universal. Therefore, the very idea of ​​​​divine all-concrete all-unity remains abstract for her. However, it is also for us a necessary ontological postulate of both thoughts and feelings in our attitude to life, not as it is given, but as it is given - the universal cosmic conciliarity of concrete all-unity in divine love. Love is not only the binding force of the unity of the Divine world in itself, but it is also its connection with the hypostatic God. The connective in our abstract logic of the world is the indifferent glue that formally connects the subject and the predicate. But there is a connection in the judgment: God is Usia or Sophia, or the Divine world, which means not a formal logical relationship, but an ontological connection of love. God is Sophia means that God, hypostatic love, loves Sophia, and she loves God with reciprocal, although not hypostatic, love. 252 Love is and means. In Sophia, God loves Himself in His self-revelation, loves His own, existing in itself, objectified and materialized. But Sophia, this self-revelation, loves the hypostatic God-Love with reciprocal love, she not only belongs to God, but is God, that is, she loves the trinitarian God. This image of God’s love for Sophia and, conversely, Sophia for God needs special clarification, for the same expression to love covers here three (or even four) different images of a single love. First of all, one should distinguish the image of hypostatic love, face to face, which is love in its own sense, as the basis of the trinitarian unity of the Holy Trinity; in relation to this trinity, it is first of all said that God is love. We have an example of such love in personal love between people, as well as in church love. Next, one should distinguish hypostatic love for a non-hypostatic, but hypostatic principle: this is God’s love for Sophia, as His self-revelation, for the divine world. In the created, sinful world, love for one’s own, that is, in essence, for oneself, receives the character of selfishness and passion, due to which this is valued not in essence and not in dignity, but precisely as one’s own; there is egoistic narcissism in one’s own image, “narcissism.” Here lies the beginning of the fall of Satan, who admired himself, loved his own selfish, self-affirming love. However, even in a sinful world there can be righteous love for one’s own, impartial, but on the basis of its objective value, for the sake of which real self-sacrifice is manifested with forgetfulness of oneself. So the creator loves his creation, so the doer loves his work for its own sake, although he does not separate himself from it, and in a certain sense even identifies himself with it. Here the image of God's love for Sophia is imprinted on man. The third image of love is Sophia’s reciprocal love for God, as the internal connection of the Divine trinitarian person with His nature. From the side of nature - Usia, like Sophia - here, of course, there is no place for personal love, which we knew in the first two images of love, because there is no face: Sophia is not the “fourth hypostasis,” just as she is not a hypostasis at all. And, however, she also loves, otherwise we cannot understand her relationship to God, because mere factual ownership or possession in itself does not correspond to God’s nature - in the life of the spirit there is no place for materiality or facticity. Obviously, it remains to recognize the special image of non-hypostatic love in relation to the hypostasis, and this is precisely the relationship of the Divine Sophia to the triune divine Person. Sophia loves God without being a hypostasis herself. What could this mean? Sophia is not a hypostatic being, but she is a living and living being. The divine world lives, for nothing non-living in God can be conceived. This living being is hypostasized in God as His personal nature and life, but for this hypostasis it must be in itself ens realissimum, live in itself, so to speak, the most vital life. The power of life, its fire, is love, and to live in God means to love. Non-hypostatic love cannot know that self-denying, sacrificial self-position that expresses divine trinitarian love, this cycle of personal exhaustion to fill oneself in another. Her nature is different: she can only belong, surrendering, loving, and in this surrendering, “feminine” love, realize the power of life, the bliss of love. Sophia's love in this (but only in this) sense is feminine. The biblical images of wife and bride, applied to the Church, in their original source belong precisely here. But Sophia’s self-giving to God precisely means her hypostasis. 253 However, in order to responsibly accept this idea of ​​God’s love for Sophia and Sophia’s reciprocal love for God, without which God is inevitably conceived as unnatural (and this constitutes the worst heresy in the very first and original dogma about God), one must fully recognize the reality of the divine world, without evading this recognition under various pretexts into idealistic and spiritualistic nebulae. Sophia, as the divine world, is in God and in a certain sense stands before God and is possessed by Him in all its divine reality and authenticity. Whoever encroaches on belittling this reality is encroaching on belittling the reality of the very being of God. But along with the reality of this Divine world, we must firmly remember its spirituality, for God is Spirit, and nothing non-spiritual can be attributed to Him. Consequently, the divine world in Sophia is a spiritual reality. In order to be real, and precisely the most all-real, this world must be spiritual. Reality in general is not at all connected, as it seems to many, with materiality and materiality, to which the angels are alien, and because of this they do not tolerate derogation in their reality. Reality is, to the highest degree, characteristic of God himself, existing in the Holy Trinity: we cannot talk about His unreality, due only to the fact that there can be no talk here of any material and substantial principle. Consequently, there is spiritual reality as the prototype of reality in general. The reality of the Divine world is that it exists in God as the self-revelation of the entire Holy Trinity - the Father, revealing Himself in the Word and showing Everything in Him, and in the Holy Spirit, doing this Everything for the Father and the Son. There cannot be any other or greater reality at all, and the question is only about whether this self-revelation exists only for God, as His personal, “subjective” representation, or whether it really exists in itself, in order to be for God.” Those who profess that the Holy Trinity has a single nature will hardly dare to such subjectivism. Is it really possible to admit that this one nature remains unrevealed in God and for God, like his self-revelation or Sophia? To recognize the reality of the Divine world, which establishes the possibility of Sophia’s reciprocal love for the Divine Person, means to recognize in Sophia, as in the Divine world, in a certain sense, one’s own life, non-hypostatic, of course, but natural, but, nevertheless, having its own natural (although by no means hypostatic) center or coherence. The whole life of this world, with its spiritual reality, is centered by love as a total unity, as an all-organism, and in this sense as a spiritual body living a single, but at the same time all-united life. This organizing principle of the spiritual body, this centering force of the spiritual whole organism, is love, as the inner life of this body. Here we once again encounter the concept of love in a new, already fourth, image. In such love there is no longer any personal principle, for if Sophia is not a person, then her inner life is not personal. Love manifests itself here extra-personally, as a connecting and organizing principle, as a universal mutual attraction and structure of divine ideas existing in the divine world. This is not mechanical gravity, which cannot have a place in a spiritual organism, this is internal attraction and interpenetration of what is akin in diversity and unified in its nature. Love is here the natural structure of the divine world. The Divine world is the objective principle of the life of God, the existence of Being. He is this life itself, and through him the principles of the extradivine are by no means introduced into the Divinity. This life of God in His Divinity, or the Divine world, as an objective, living and living principle, is what in the Word of God is generally called Sophia or the Wisdom of God (Job, 28; Proverbs Sol. 8-9; Pres. Sol. 7-11, Pres. Isa. with Sir. 1, 24). In understanding it as; The Deity in God can be distinguished into two aspects, according to the Word of God. She is actually Sophia (Chokmah), as the revelation of the Wisdom of God, and she is Glory, as the revelation of God’s Beauty and All-Bliss. In Sophia the content of the Divine nature is revealed, as the All and the All-Unity. In this sense, it is the revelation of the Logos, the Word, who says everything: “all this was.” The Word-Logos is the principle of meaning, content, distinction, multiplicity, and at the same time the principle of connection, correlation, unity. This is the Divine Thought thinking itself, νόησις τῆς νοήσεως, having itself as its subject and content. Thought here is identical with its subject, the word with its content, and the all-pervading connection of thought is the connection of all-unity, 254 the very wisdom of being. Diversity and “logical” coherence, differentiation and interpenetration in the dialectics of thought, positing and identifying itself, the essential content of thought and its “logical” transparency - the bright and cloudless world of divine ideas - such is the kingdom of Logos. Wisdom, as wisdom, is inherent in the entire Holy Trinity and all its hypostases. Wisdom, as the content of all meanings, is also the self-consciousness of the Trinity God. However, as in St. In the Trinity, the unity of life is established with the special self-determination of each of the hypostases, and in this case, Wisdom, as the Logos, is the primary self-revelation of the Second Hypostasis, as the Father’s Word and the Father’s Wisdom. The Father speaks His Word in the Son, and reveals His Wisdom in Him. Sophia, as Wisdom, is the self-revelation of the Logos, through the self-determination of the Second Hypostasis, 255 which is why the incarnate Logos, Christ, is called (1 Cor. 1:24) “God’s power and God’s Wisdom.” However, Sophia, as the Divine world, as the fullness of the Divinity τῆς θεότητας (Col. 2:9), is not only Wisdom, but also the Glory of God. The Glory of God, one of the most common expressions in relation to God in the Old and New Testaments, should be understood, first of all, not in the subjective sense of the glorification of someone by someone, in particular God by creation, for the Glory of God exists outside of relation to creation, as something extra-divine. It exists in God himself and regardless of creation (“before even the world did not exist” John 17:5), as an intra-divine principle. God is glorified in Himself; glory belongs to God not only as doxology, but as His inherent Glory, which is spoken of in the Word of God. At the same time, Glory is described in massive religious images, as the appearance of the Divine itself: to Moses on Sinai, to the people in the tabernacle and in the temple of Solomon, to Isaiah and Ezekiel in visions. 256 Her appearance to the prophet Ezekiel most fully expresses the essence of Glory as Sophia. Fame, by its very concept, cannot be objectless and meaningless; it is intentional as glory about something, has its own object, given for it. And, according to this, the Glory of God is the Glory of God about His Divinity as revealed. This is God’s joy in Himself, admiration, consolation, vision of Himself in Beauty, and such an attitude must be thought of in essence, that is, apart from any partiality inherent in created selfishness. God has Glory in that which is worthy of glory, that which is glorious in itself. Such self-glorification in a single hypostatic created being is inevitably egocentric, and further selfish, partial, since love for one’s own here is inseparable from love for oneself, that is, self-love (however, here, as we have already indicated, a certain self-detachment is achievable in loving one’s own, in recognizing it as a value). But in the trinitarian God, by virtue of this trinity, all selfishness or egocentric self-affirmation is excluded, and Glory is here as irreducible and essential in the self-revelation of the Divine as Wisdom or the Word. In other words, what is revealed in the Word as Wisdom is glorious, worthy of glory and has Glory. This is the all-bliss of God, the joy of Divine life as self-knowledge and self-revelation. The Glory of God expresses the divine self-relation of God to His Wisdom - it has its own subject. She is therefore not the first, but the second in self-revelation of the Deity (of course, here we have not chronological, but ontological distinctions). It can be said that the Glory in the Godhead follows the Wisdom of the Word, and does not precede it. Glory is the Glory of Wisdom; it rests on the accomplished Revelation of the Word. She makes it tangible, valuable, desired, joyful, complete, adequate. The appearance and revelation of Glory is thus inseparable from the revelation of the Wisdom of the Word; it is one and identical with it in the Divine Sophia itself, just as Sophia herself is one and inseparable. This makes it absolutely clear that if Sophia, as the Wisdom of the Word, as the Logos, is the self-revelation of God in the Second Hypostasis, then Glory is the Self-revelation of God in the Third Hypostasis. In other words, Sophia, like Glory, belongs to the Holy Spirit. At the same time, the relationship between the Word and the Holy Spirit is revealed as between the Second and Third Hypostases: first the Word and then the Spirit. The Spirit rests on the Word, the Word and the Holy Spirit, their duality and dual unity, in the Divine Sophia reveal the Father. And therefore it is said about the Trinity God: “For Thine is the kingdom (of the Father) and the power (of the Son) and the glory (of the Holy Spirit) forever” (Matthew 6:13). In hypostatic existence, the Word and the Holy Spirit are “separately personal,” but in the Divine Sophia, as the self-revelation of the Holy Trinity, they are different, but inseparable. They are different, since the Son is a different hypostasis than the Holy Spirit, and the image of His revelation is different than the Holy Spirit, but this revelation itself, as an objective principle, as the Divine world, the Wisdom of God, is one: in Sophia the Father is revealed through the Son and the Holy Spirit in His Divinity. Therefore, with the same reason we can say that the Logos in His revelation is the Divine Sophia (although also not vice versa: one cannot say that the Divine Sophia is the Logos), as well as that the Holy Spirit is the Divine Sophia, the “Spirit of Wisdom”, in His Revelation (although also not the other way around: it cannot be said that Sophia is the Holy Spirit). But on the same basis we can say that neither the Logos nor the Holy Spirit, as such, in their separateness, is the Divine Sophia, for Sophia is Their self-revelation in duality, relating to the Father, that is, the self-revelation of the Holy Trinity, as the Father in the Son and the Holy Spirit. With this definition of the relationship of the Divine Sophia to the individual hypostases of the Holy Trinity, the main position of the dogma about the Holy Trinity is specifically revealed. Trinity: here we have the separation and distinction of hypostases while maintaining the equivalence and divinity of each hypostasis. The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the entire Holy Trinity, are equally God, no more and no less. But at the same time, the Holy Trinity is not identical with a separate hypostasis, just as individual hypostases are not identical with each other, although they are equally honorable and equally divine: equality with inequality, identity with distinction. 257 But just as this is in hypostatic existence, so it is in Divine life and self-revelation, in Divine Sophia. 258 The latter can be defined both in relation to the entire Holy Trinity in its unity, but we do not separate it, and to each of the hypostases, but we do not merge them and do not dissect them. However, at the same time, the special character of each hypostasis remains in full force, as well as their mutual relationship within the Holy Trinity. The second hypostasis is revealed in the Divine Sophia by His hypostatic character not only as the Word and Wisdom, but also as the Son. We remember that sonship in itself is a kind of pre-eternal kenosis of the Son, self-exhaustion in love for the Father, the hypostatic sacrifice of the Lamb. This same sacrifice of the Lamb is revealed in the Divine Sophia - no longer as the personal self-determination of the Son in relation to the Father, but also as His natural self-position in the self-revelation of the Divinity, in Sophia. The Son gives Himself as the Word of Everything and about Everything to the Divine world, serves the self-revealing Divinity, posits Himself as the content of this self-revelation. He sacrifices Himself to the Father, and His own to the divine world, being sacrificially exhausted in everything and to the end. The Divine world is in its first position, therefore, there is the Word, in which all things were. The stamp of the self-revealing hypostatic love of the Father who gives birth and the Son who is born, the Prototype and the Image, also lies on the Divine world, in the Divine Sophia; The self-revelation of God is a matter of sacrificial love, in which the Father is a loving priest, and the Son is a loving victim, revealing the Father. The Divine world in its content is sealed by the Lamb, the Word of God. In this one can see new confirmation that in a certain sense the Logos is Sophia. But the Divine world is not only the revelation of the Logos, because it is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, resting on the Logos, who reveals Himself, and responds to the exhaustion of the Logos with glorification (the consolation of the Comforter). In this sense, if the Logos can be called the “demiurge” in the divine world, then the Holy Spirit is its cosmourg, Comforter and Decorator, the Glory of the Word. There remains one more, final, definition of the Divine Sophia, which simultaneously follows from the above-mentioned definitions of the divine world, but is also a reflection of the created world. By its content? Sophia, or the Divine world, is the whole organism of ideas - everything about everything and in everything - Chastity. She has life in herself, although not for herself, for she is hypostasized in God. How should we understand this divine organism, or this spiritual body, which is the revelation of the Glory of God? It is a kind of living essence, a living, spiritual, although hypostatic being, the Divinity of God, living a holistic, but at the same time differentiated, qualitative life. What is it? Is it indefinable in the concepts of the created world, as completely transcendental to it and expressible only outside of apophatic theology (via negationis), or is it accessible to created consciousness - men and angels - and in a positive definition, so that cataphatic theology is possible about this? The latter is possible not through human ascent into the divine world, which would be completely unbearable and inaccessible to created consciousness, but only through descent from the Divine world to the created world, that is, God’s own self-revelation, moreover, such that can be accepted by man, is accessible to him. This accessibility is based, of course, only on the fact that the divine being becomes, to a certain extent, human, and why man, out of himself and through himself, through his self-knowledge, joins in the knowledge of God. The well-known primordial identity on which man’s cognition of God is based, as a kind of identification with Him (there is no other way here), is a necessary condition for this, besides which God remains ultimately transcendental to man, and we can only think and say about Him that He is not, keeping silent about what He is. Such self-revelation can only be God's own work in the creation of man. This self-revelation was accomplished by God as the basis of the existence of humanity, in it, and of all creation. Man was created by God in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and this image is ens realissimum in man, who through this becomes a created god. This ens realissimum establishes a bridge of ontological identification between the Creator and creation through the deification of the latter, and it already initially establishes a positive relationship between the Image and the Prototype. This can only be understood in the sense of some, only relative, analogical identity, although it has its own special path of development, its own eras or eons, but is already inherent in man and predetermined. This identity means not only the divinity of man, but also a certain humanity of God - “we are His race” (Acts 17:28). There is something in man that must be directly related to the essence of God, and this something is not any separate feature, but his very humanity, which is the image of God. Man, as a created spirit, has a personality (hypostasis) and his own nature, just as God has a Personality (trinitarian) and His nature, Divinity, Divine Sophia, the Divine world, the All-organism of ideas of Divine existence. The divine nature must be understood in positive relation to human nature, as it exists in the fullness of its powers, capabilities and tasks, although not yet manifested in the life of the whole old Adam, but already revealed in the life of the New Adam. Humanity in ourselves is a still unrevealed and only unfolding essence, which will be revealed only when “God is all in all.” The original axiom of revelation is precisely that there is a correspondence between Divinity and humanity. In other words, this means that the Divine Sophia, as an all-organism of ideas, is the pre-eternal Humanity in God, as the Divine prototype and the basis for human existence. The Divine Sophia, as Humanity, or its principle, is not yet a Man. The latter is a hypostasis Living in its nature, which is humanity. Thus, Sophia itself, as a non-hypostatic (but only hypostatic) entity, does not yet express the complete image of a person who necessarily needs a hypostasis. He receives it from God at his creation as an “inspiration of the Divine spirit” and through this he becomes a living person in his soul, and in whom, for whom and through whom his humanity lives. But this humanity, obviously, already has the ability to hypostasize, and in this it is also marked with the stamp of its Prototype. The Divine Sophia, not being a hypostasis, is nevertheless never without-hypostasis or extra-hypostatic, she is eternally hypostasized, and the immediate hypostasis for her is not the Father, although He is revealed in the Divine Sophia, but the Logos, who reveals the Father as a demiurgic hypostasis. It can be said about Him that He is the pre-eternal Man, the human Prototype before the creation of the world, and in His image man was created. In this sense, He is repeatedly called by the apostles and in the Gospel the Heavenly Man, or simply Man, the Son of God and the Son of Man in all the mysterious relationships of these names. 259 And, as the First Man, He is also the Lamb slain before the creation of the world, that is, predestined to become an earthly man. This idea is fundamental for Christology, soteriology and anthropology in their unity: Sophia is the pre-eternal Humanity, 260 and the Logos is the Divine Man. God-manhood and God-man, that is, the humanity of the Divine, like the divinity of humanity, are given pre-eternally in God. Logos, the Second Hypostasis, is the own hypostasis of God-manhood in God. However, we know that the Holy Spirit also rests on the Word, giving reality to the world of the Divine ideas of the Logos. The relationship of the Third Hypostasis to the pre-eternal God-manhood is therefore expressed not in the fact that it is a hypostatic center for it, but in the fact that it realizes, reveals for the Son, and through that for the Father, God-manhood as a divine reality that receives the Logos and contains Him. In this sense, the Logos as God-man and the Holy Spirit as God-man differ in the pre-eternal God-manhood (to which the analogy in the life of the world is Christ, as the God-man, and the Church, as God-manhood). Consequently, there is a difference in the hypostatic relationship of the Logos and the Holy Spirit to God-manhood: the Logos is addressed to it directly by His hypostasis and is its “Head”; the Holy Spirit is addressed to the God-manhood that has already been revealed through the Logos, receiving and life-giving it, not as His hypostatic revelation, but as the revelation of the Logos. The character of the Third Hypostasis here remains the same as in the Holy Trinity: it shows the Father not itself, but the Son, and the Son not itself, but the Father, itself hypostatically transparent in this movement of love. And in God-manhood she, as it were, merges with him in his being for the Son, and through this also for the Father. In this sense, the relationship of the Second and Third hypostases in the single God-manhood can be expressed in such a way that Their inseparable Two is God-manhood, like the revelation of the Father in the Holy Trinity, the divine Sophia. This character of the Second and Third Hypostases in relation to God-Humanity can also be expressed as the ratio of two spiritual principles in the Divine, which in the created human world are reflected as the ratio of male and female. The image of God in man is revealed in its fullness precisely in the union of both principles (“and God created man, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” Gen. 1:27). In the human world, the fullness of this love is revealed as the love of a mother, sister, wife and bride in relation to a son, brother, groom and husband, and moreover, a daughter to her father, and it is these images that are applied to Christ and the Mother of God and the Church: Most Holy. The Mother of God is the Mother of Christ, but she is also blessed as his Unmarried Bride (or, according to the Song of Songs, “my sister bride”). The Church, which has a personal focus in the Mother of God, is “the wife and bride of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:21), and the most decisive comparison of the feminine principle in the human spirit with the Holy Spirit is contained in the final part of the Apocalypse: “The Spirit and the Bride say: come” (22:17). This is said about the Church, as about the accomplished God-manhood, in its relation to the Lamb, the Logos-Christ. It follows from this that the hypostatic relationship of the Logos and the Holy Spirit in Their general revelation in God-Humanity contains a special image of love, personally qualified, and this quality can be expressed in created language in analogies of the images of love of the male and female principles (and, of course, any attacks of thought in the direction of sex and sensual images in general must be eliminated in advance). And just as the hypostasis of the Logos is the hypostasis of Christ, who was incarnated as a male child and became at the age of a “perfect man,” so the hypostasis of the Spirit is most fully revealed to us in the Mother of God and becomes reality for us in the Church, which is “Spirit and Bride.” As for the hypostasis of the Father, although in human (more precisely in the divine-human) language it is referred to in the masculine gender (father, but not mother), this usage is explained rather by the absence of a corresponding word that has nothing to do with the distinction between masculine and feminine: the masculine gender here is masculinum majestatis, used to exalt the Fatherland of God, but not as an attempt to define it. This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the Fatherland of the Father is “motherless” in relation to the Son and, moreover, is not limited to the birth (of the masculine principle), but also includes the procession (of the feminine principle), itself remaining outside of this distinction, which exists only in the comparison of both differing principles. From here it also follows that the Father’s hypostasis, as “all-guilty”, “initial”, revealing itself in the Son and the Holy Spirit - in God-manhood - itself remains in a certain sense transcendental to him, that is, it cannot be defined in terms of God-manhood. The Father is neither God-man, like the Son, nor God-man, like the Holy One. The Spirit, although He is revealed in God-manhood, has His own image in it, is the universal Beginning. 261 In this we can see the reason why the Father, although he sends the Son into the world, and then the Holy Spirit, does not personally appear in the divine-human world. He shows Himself only in the Son (“seeing Me in the form of the Father”) through the Holy Spirit, who reveals the Son. The Father is God-manhood in the sense that the subject is the predicate, but He is not it - in the same sense: the subject is revealed in the predicate, but is necessarily different from it, is not identified with it, is transcendental to it. It must be added in conclusion that the definition of the Divine nature as pre-eternal Humanity, or, which in this case is the same thing, God-Humanity, is reflected from the created world, from created humanity. It is in this sense only an analogy, but understood realistically, that is, not only with the observance of all differences in state, but also with the preservation of identity in the essence. We know man only as a creation, and therefore it may seem difficult to ascend from creation to the understanding of God. However, one can also go the completely opposite way: “as above, so below,” namely, starting from the Divinity, to understand man as a cryptogram of the Divine. And this is directly commanded by revelation, which proclaims that man has the image of God, i.e. that humanity in the world presupposes God-Humanity. And this idea should not be given over to militant atheism, which perverts it by paving the way in the opposite direction, comprehending not man from the Divine, but the Divinity from man. But when applied to God-Humanity, it is necessary to eliminate all properties associated with the natural-material existence of created humanity in the ways of its development, and it is necessary to think of it, indeed, as οὐσία, i.e. as a spiritual, intense essence, in itself, as a noumena, containing all the phenomena that reveal it. To the God-manhood in God belongs all the absolute spirituality inherent in the Divine. This is the “energy” of the Divine, which has for itself infinitely multiple radiations of ousia (the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas on energies, for which he was accused of polytheism). However, this does not interfere with the fact that in God the God-manhood, as a revelation of the Divine, can also be understood as the body of the Divine, absolutely spiritual and in this sense incorporeal, but fulfilling what the body, as such, is characteristic of: being a revelation of the spirit living in it and, moreover, in a certain sense, living by it. Thus, we receive a series of equalities in which one and the same quantity, the nature of God, ousia, receives its definitions as the Divine Sophia. Sophia is the Wisdom of God, is the Glory of God, is Humanity in God, is God-manhood, is the Body of God (or, which is also the “robe” of the Divine), is the Divine world existing in God “before” creation. All this contains a “sufficient basis” for creation, according to the principle: “as above, so below” - in other words, for its sophia. For this, as well as for what follows in this chapter, see in general my “Chapters on Trinity” (Orthodox Thought, I-II), the contents of which I will not repeat. The Council of Rheims in 1148 against Gilbert confirms that simplicem naturam divinitatis esse Deum, and divinitas sit Deus, et Deus divinitas. A similar thing was established at the IV Lateran Council in 1215 against Joachim Fl., who quadrupled St. Trinity – non quam Trinitatem quam quaternitatem astruebat in Deo (Denz. 190, n. 431; cp. 191, n. 432). This thesis about the hypostasis of nature in God is of fundamental importance for sophiology. No one will dare to deny the very existence of nature in God on the basis of this hypostasis, and no one will see the quadrupling of the Divine in this recognition of its reality. Meanwhile, this theological nonsense arises whenever we talk about the same nature as Sophia. Let those possessed by this delirium think about this basic relationship between personality and nature in the Divine, because it contains the key to everything that follows. They talk lightheartedly about ousia in St. The Trinity, without fear of any quadrupling, but the panic of this quadrupling arises “with them whenever this same nature is considered as Sophia. This sacrifice can also be defined as free hypostatic dying, if only we free the concept of death from its meaning in temporary created life, which has nothing in common with spiritual dying, as a manifestation of eternal divine life. The question of the nature of the Third Hypostasis is touched upon here only in necessary connection. It will be examined independently in the second part of this essay: The Comforter This distinction between God and Deity is of great importance in Palamite disputes and definitions. Wisdom in this sense is not only a “property” or one of the “properties” that finds a place for itself in the corresponding scholastic headings of dogmatic theology, but it is a “property of properties” in which they all find their justification. She is Divine Being, which is not only a quality-free (for it is of a higher quality), but also an all-qualitative All-Unity. Wed. chapter about Sophia in “The Never-Evening Light”. Moscow. 1917. Wed. my Essay “Hypostasis and Hypostasis” (in the collection dedicated to P. B. Struve). What Hegel attributed to thought as the only beginning of being is here completely true when applied to the Divine Sophia as the Logos. Wed. my book: Die Tragödie der Philosophie. 1927. In iconography there is the Sophia icon, which expresses precisely this thought: the Eternal Youth, the Word of the Father, the Unsleeping Eye. This is not an icon of Christ in adolescence, but precisely the Logos, as Wisdom. On the Glory of God comparison of texts cf. excursion in my book “Burning Bush”. As stated in the symbol known as St. Athanasius: “This is the Catholic faith: let us honor the individual God in the Trinity and the Trinity in the unit, below the merging hypostases, below the being dividing. There is another hypostasis of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. But the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one Divinity, equal to glory, co-essential with majesty. Like the Father, like the Son, like the Holy Spirit... And in this Trinity there is nothing first or last: nothing more or less.” This reveals the trinitarian and sophiological inconsistency of completely equating Sophia with only one person, namely the Logos. If only the Logos is Wisdom, then (contrary to the general church and patristic tradition) other Persons are alien to Wisdom. If Wisdom belongs to only one Person, it means that the Divine trinity is dissected, and in its place tranquility is established, and on this supposedly Christian Olympus the gods are divided into specialties, as on the pagan one. Thus, the one nature, life and self-revelation of the Holy Trinity is abolished. That. the denial of the Divine Sophia by reducing her to the attribute of the Logos is, first of all, an anti-Trinitarian heresy, and then, as we will see, a Christological heresy. Wed. God-inspired bold words of St. Paul: “a gift by the grace of one Man, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:15); “The first man is from the earth, the second man (the Lord) is from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47). This also includes the words of the Lord from the Gospel of John: “the Son of Man who came down from heaven” (3:13). This idea was expressed in the youthfully brilliant “Readings on God-Humanity” by V. Solovyov, who, unfortunately, did not develop his insightful thoughts into theological teaching, but rather clouded and distorted them with Gnostic images. In this sense we understand the text of Eph. 3:15: “Father, from whom the whole family in heaven and on earth is named.”