Plotinus on Divine Simplicity

Gavrilyuk attends to divine simplicity according to the third‐century AD pagan philosopher Plotinus. He shows that Plotinus draws his doctrine of divine simplicity from the earlier Greco‐Roman philosophical tradition, in which the nature of the “first principle” was highly contested. Aristotle offers a history of the early debate, with Anaxagoras being the first to glimpse the first principle’s simplicity. The Platonist philosophers conceived of the first principle as incorporeal, and on these grounds linked the first principle to simplicity. For his part, Aristotle associated simplicity with the absoluteness of pure actuality. The Stoics, with their essentially material understanding of the divine, ignored or denied divine simplicity. Plotinus draws upon the reception of Aristotle that is found in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Numenius, and Ammonius. According to Gavrilyuk, the signal contribution of Plotinus consists in setting forth the strongest possible doctrine of divine simplicity. Indeed, for Plotinus God’s utter simplicity means that God cannot even be thought, because thinking requires the duality of subject‐object. Plotinus conceives of the divine One as above divine Mind (nous), since the latter contains a unified plurality but not the perfect simplicity that marks the unknowable One. Gavilyuk ends his essay with an account of the qualifications made to divine simplicity by philosophers and theologians who are less radical in their doctrine than is Plotinus. He emphasizes that the Enneads’s key metaphysical insight, utterly ruling out any kind of composition from the One, has the benefit of being supremely intellectually coherent and elegant.     

Universal Salvation in the Eschatology of Sergius Bulgakov

Bulgakov's deeply original and controversial eschatology remainslargely unexplored in modern scholarship. Following the universalistinsights of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, Bulgakov construedhell as a state of self-inflicted torment necessary to purifythe resurrected individual from evil. His arguments againstthe eternity of hell are as follows: the permanence of hellentails the eternal dualism of good and evil; the grace andmercy of God cannot be permanently resisted by free creatures;perpetual punishment is not commensurable with the finite crimescommitted in time; the idea of perpetual retributive punishmentleads to an anthropomorphic and unworthy image of a vengefulGod; the ontological and moral unity of humanity does not allowfor the eternal separation of humankind into the two separategroups of the saved and of the permanently damned. This articlelays out Bulgakov's vision of the universal salvation; investigatesthe roots of this vision in patristic thought; places Bulgakov'sproposal in the context of the nineteenth–twentieth-centuryRussian eschatology; and offers a critical evaluation of Bulgakov'sarguments against the eternity of hell.     

Bulgakov's Account of Creation: Neglected Aspects,Critics and Contemporary Relevance

The article focuses on a central, yet neglected dimension of the ‘Sophia Debate’ in twentieth‐century Russian Orthodox theology: Bulgakov's panentheistic account of creation and its critique by Nikolai Lossky. Bulgakov understood the doctrine of creation to be negatively defined as creatio ex nihilo and positively defined as creatio ex Deo. Bulgakov's sophiology seeks to relate God and the world through the intermediate concept of Sophia, balancing an account of God's being in the world with an account of the world's eternal foundation in God. Lossky objected that Bulgakov's account underemphasizes novelty, contingency and the free character of creation. Lossky's objections notwithstanding, Bulgakov's version of panentheism – especially its trinitarian, antinomian and kenotic dimensions – finds significant points of contact with contemporary accounts of creation.     

How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology: The Contribution of Ivan Popov

In contemporary scholarship, deification is so universally assumed to have been an abiding feature of the Eastern Orthodox tradition that it strains historical imagination to conceive of a time when the idea of deification would have been largely forgotten. This article demonstrates that the rediscovery of deification as a structurally indispensable concept of patristic thought was made by the Russian patristic scholar Ivan Popov in a trilogy of essays published in 1903-1909. The article considers different cultural registers within which the deification motif surfaced in the nineteenth century: the Greek Philokalia and its Slavonic and Russian editions, Dostoevsky’s prophecy about the self-divinization of humanity in revolutionary socialism, the Spiritual Diary of St. John of Krondstadt, and Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of Godmanhood. While these sources held a great potential for the theoretical development of deification, the importance of deification for Orthodox theology was not appreciated in nineteenth-century Orthodox academic theology. The situation changed dramatically after Popov (who briefly studied with Harnack in Germany) published his essays arguing for the centrality of deification in patristic thought, providing a detailed analysis of the concept in the fourth-century patristic authors (dwelling at length on Athanasius and the Macarian Homilies), and offering a taxonomy of the two main types of deification: realistic and idealistic. This article discusses Popov’s influence on Pavel Florensky, Sergei Epifanovich, Lev Karsavin, Georges Florovsky, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, and Vladimir Lossky.