Informal Introduction.

The impetus for this endeavour came after a personal encounter with Rublev’s Trinity in July 2019, at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow on my second trip to Russia as part of an Eastern Orthodox pilgrimage. Due to heavy crowds during the mid-afternoon, my first viewing was interrupted. But after circling around the gallery again to fetch my roommate, the chamber had emptied, and we were granted a decent amount of time to truly mediate on the masterwork in perpetuity.

The icon is premised upon the visitation of three spiritual beings to Abraham and Sarah to announce the birth of their son, Isaac, while they are camping near the oaks of Mamre, as related in Genesis 18:1–2. Around a square table are seated three angelic persons in the shape of a triangle. On the table is a eucharistic chalice of wine, with the central figure, as the Son, giving a blessing over it. He is cloaked in a heavy reddish-brown garment of blood-stained earth. To the right, wearing blue and green garments, is the Holy Spirit who works over sky and water. While to the left is the Father, shimmering in a near transparent veil. Above the Father is a building, representing both Abraham and Sarah’s dwelling, but more importantly, the house of Creation. Behind the son is a tender oak sprouting as the Tree of Life. Above the Holy Spirit is a mountain of spiritual upliftment.

Rublev was not the first to depict this scene, but his triumph was in his reductionism, stripping the narrative of its overloaded detail to focus on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The special layout is crucial to this, with the figures gesturing towards each other with love, reverence, and obedience. This manifests a poetic aura of harmony and serenity that draws the viewer in, as if by invitation, to participate in the rhythmical movement of the divine life as a communion in love. While outwardly genteel, there is a fearful symmetry to this circular moment that generates an unseen and incomprehensible vortex of power lurking beneath the surface.

By freezing the gestures of the figures, Rublev dispenses with naturalism and evacuates time and space to give us a vision of eternity. While in the soft emotion of their facial expressions, the figures portray a profound empathy and fathomless knowledge of each other’s motives. It is this interpenetrating relationality (perichoresis) that constitutes the three persons of the Holy Trinity as one God.

Having spoken with a professional theologian about my ideas on the nature of God and reality, he advised that I write them down. For, if nothing else, the process of using my philosophical beliefs explore the nature of God and His relationship to Creation would lead me closer to Him, in all His majestic wonder.

Formal Introduction.

The purpose of this essay is to interpret the wisdom and teachings of Eastern Orthodox Christianity using the philosophical insights of speculative empiricism. God willing, this will lay the groundwork for an Eastern Orthodox process theology. And more specifically, to establishing a fundamental ontotheological groundwork for the being of God and ground of Creation.

In contrast to classical or traditional Christian theology which is predicated upon a substantialist conception of reality where change is accidental and subordinate to invariant functions, quantities, and properties, the direction here will be towards presenting an ontotheology defined by events, occurrences, and processes.

This asserting can be summed-up concisely in the following statements:

1. While God is eternal, He is never still.
2. The truth of being is becoming.

Before beginning the main body of my discussion, I will provide a brief account of Eastern Orthodox Christianity theology and speculative empiricist philosophy which inform the thinking behind the project.

Eastern Orthodox Theology and Speculative Empiricism in Comparison.

Citing the Nicene Creed, the Eastern Orthodox Church declares itself the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church established on Earth by Jesus Christ and His Apostles. As a living tradition with a hermeneutic structure based upon scriptural interpretation, personal revelation, and oral testament, the Eastern Orthodox Church has always recognised a gradual development regarding the articulation of its teachings. While it does not endorse the belief that established truths are subject to change, it does accept that how such truths are disclosed are determined by the enigmatic movements of the Holy Spirit through time, history, and experience.

Eastern Orthodoxy is not a legalistic and dogmatic faith but a mystical and existential way of being. Though the Church is unwavering in its dogmatism, it does not insist upon matters of faith which have not been specifically defined. To make absolute assertions in the face of a God who is radically incomprehensible is an exercise of mortal folly. Thus, individuals are permitted to hold theologoumena: private theological opinions, probable truths, or pious traditions that may be theologically dubious or imperfect.

To this extent, within Eastern Orthodoxy theology there is creative and vibrant atmosphere of debate and discussion encompassing various spiritual traditions, cultural movements, and philosophical perspectives.

In a letter exchanged with Bishop George Bell during the interwar period, Saint Nikolai Velimirovich unintentionally outlined a speculative empiricist doctrine of Eastern Orthodox Christianity when he wrote that:

Our religion is founded on spiritual experience, seen and heard as surely as any physical fact in this world. Not theory, not philosophy, not human emotions, but experience…Our soul is the living bridge between this world and the invisible. With our soul we can be in touch with God and with His angels and with the Saints by the spiritual experience which the Saints and the Church has confirmed and verified. (GBNV, P32)

Indeed, this statement very much echoes the methodological assertion by William James in his preface to The Meaning of Truth that “the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience” (MT, p3). As James admits elsewhere in A Pluralistic Universe, he developed his philosophy of radical empiricism with the realisation that neither formal logic nor discursive thinking could ever truly explicate the reality of concrete experience as it is disclosed to an embodied and acting subject embedded within a lifeworld. As he himself states:

I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly and squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, expedience, concreteness, immediacy, use what words you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. (PU, LV).

The quibble here is not with concepts and logic per se, but their application and efficacy. For James, concepts and logic are but a “map which the mind frames out” (SSP, p73), with their utility dependent upon their ability to describe and order our immediate environment. In his Principles of Psychology, he writes that “the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conceptions are purely teleological weapons of the mind” (PP2, p335). Concepts are merely reflexive constructs of a given aspect of reality captured by our intentionality within space and time, though they are indispensable for the codifying and transmission of experience and information.

As far as the speculative empiricist is concerned, concepts and logic cannot encapsulate what they seek to describe in any absolute sense. There is always another means of scrutiny and categorisation, another way in which a thing can come to presence. As James himself states, “All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all, are equally true ways. There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another” (PP2, p333, his emphasis). Thus concepts “characterise us more than they characterise the thing” (PP2, p334). As James notes elsewhere in his Pragmatism essays: “The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything” (P, p33).

Furthermore, concepts are only established as retroactively posited reconstructions of previous experience. Indeed, in his Essays in Radical Empiricism, James references Kierkegaard’s musing via Professor Hoffding that “It is perfectly true, as philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards” (KPJ, p161). Thus, only by focusing upon the “immediate flux of life…Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding the world forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life.” (ERE, p33–80).

Philosophy for James goes awry when we confuse our conceptual cartography for the actual topography of reality. As he asserts in A Pluralistic Universe:

That secret of a continuous life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic. Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it. (PU, LV)

The universe then, is neither a collection of facts nor cluster of mental representations, but the formative medium from which the subject-object dichotomy arises. This is what James identifies as “pure experience,” the “one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed” (ERE, p5). Elsewhere in Some Problems in Philosophy, he describes this “immediate sensible life” as a “blooming buzzing confusion, as free from contradiction in its ‘much-at-onceness’ as it is alive and evidently there” (SPP, p50). It is from this “aboriginal sensible muchness” that we carve out the abstractions of our everyday life (Ibid).

To define the metaphysical assumptions of radical, speculative, or transcendental empiricism about the nature of reality and experience, I would codify it them in the three following principles:

1. A cosmological shift away from ontological foundations, such as materialism and idealism, towards a dynamic universe of experience, concern, and feeling. Including an emphasis on events, occurrences, and becoming over substance, stability, and being.
2. Every aspect of experience must be accounted for, not merely high-grade forms of perceptual subjectivity. This is to say that experience runs all the way down, and that intentional consciousness presupposes, and is parasitic upon, more elemental configurations of subject-object relations. Thus, without levelling the hierarchy of distinctions between the bewildering complexity of experiences that constitute reality, a certain commonality with nature can be affirmed where subjectivity differs by degree, not in kind.
3. The objective of thinking should be orientated not be motivated by describing matters of fact but in discovering the conditions through which something new is invented and enters the world, of deepening the possibilities immanent in an existing situation. As such, disciplines such as art, philosophy, and science are simply different means of expressing, explaining, and organising reality in the flux of becoming. Art is the qualitative expression of the world through sensation and sentiment, philosophy explains the reality through the application and exercise of reason and logic, and science theoretically organises actuality through experimentation and observation.

In Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today, His All-Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew-I spoke of the relationship between the Creator and his creatures, human and otherwise, as a “seamless garment of God’s vast creation” (EM, p143). Perhaps this aboriginal field of immediate givenness is the one primal stuff of pure experience?

For myself personally, the affinity between Eastern Orthodox thinking and that of the speculative empiricist can be epitomised in the following quotes:

In his Process and Reality, A.N. Whitehead, the architect of process metaphysics and the philosophy of the organism, described the ultimate constituents of reality in the subsequent manner:

‘Actual entities’– also termed ‘actual occasions’ –are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space… The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. (PR, p18)

Meanwhile, in Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios, we find the venerable Father evoking the exhortations of Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov when he advises to:

Take delight in all things that surround us. All things teach us and lead us to God. All thing around us are droplets of the love of God — both things animate and inanimate, the plants the animals, the birds and mountains, the sea the sunset, the starry sky…For a person to become a Christian he must first have a poetic soul…Poetic hearts embrace love and sense it deeply. (WBL, p218)

Pure Experience as the Being of the Holy Trinity.

Patristic theological teaching regarding the Holy Trinity asserts that the Father is distinguished from the other persons (hypostases) by the fact that He eternally begets the Son and eternally gives forth the Holy Spirit. The Son is differentiated in that He is begotten of the Father from whom alone the Holy Spirit proceeds.

Each unoriginated person of the Holy Trinity constitutes the corporate subject of God through their mutual positing of one another in a communion of love (koinonia). They are resolutely open to one another in absolute transparency and receptivity, yet this mutual in-dwelling (perichoresis) does not dimmish their individuality. In short, the being (ousia) of the Holy Trinity is the mutual communion in love between the three divine persons who are at once and the same time expressions of a pure movement of divine repetition, forever moving in a dynamic relation from potentiality into actuality.

Their unity in action can be described as follows:

1. The Father is the primordial cause from which all possibility arises.
2. The Son is the creative and redeeming cause who affirmatively actualizes (or incarnates) such potentiality.
3. While the Holy Spirit is the perfecting cause sustaining the eternal conversion of potentiality into actuality.

In short, the Father leads the call of creativity, to which the Son responds, and Holy Spirit prompts and sustains. In this way, the divine community of the Holy Trinity presides over Creation from three relationally distinct perspectives:

1. The Father: Origination and possibility.
2. The Son: affirmation and actualisation.
3. The Holy Spirit: Continuation and elicitation.

It is this communion in love that I wish to identify with what William James would term an “instant field of the present…what I call the “pure experience.” It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet…it is plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that” (ERE, p12).

Thus, we can describe this communion in love as a formative experiential medium of integration and differentiation, and can be said to possess the following attributes:

1. Concrete: It is integral and unified whole.
2. Primordial: It anticipates and precedes the subject-object dichotomy.
3. Creative: It contains an absolute wealth of possibility.

Pure Experience as the Ground of Creation.

In articulating his doctrine of radical empiricism, James described it as a “mosaic philosophy” (ERE, p20/33). However, “there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement” (ERE, p33). Thus, there is no solid foundation to the world, it is experience all the way down, with each discrete unit of experience acting as the basis for another.

In juxtaposing absolute idealism to traditional empiricism, James describes the former as an “aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish are swimming,” while the latter resembles “one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another” (ERE, p21). Opposed to the transparent connectedness of the aquarium, the decorated skull is an imperfect unity of differential elements which are characterised by discontinuity and mixture.

The mosaic nature of speculative empiricism accepts that domains of absolute consistency, such as the aquarium, contained with braider regions of hybrid totality, such as the Dyak head. Each domain of consistency may possess its grades of unity or internal connectivity, but such unity and connectivity need not necessarily extend to adjacent pieces of the mosaic. The experiential reality is thus a hybrid unity composed from numerous grades of unity, each subject to their own logic. What makes a grade of unity consistent is the existence of a shared form of internal connectivity or consistency that consolidates the plurality of experiences composing it.

As James explains in Some Problems in Philosophy, the universe is an infinity of interconnected and superimposed networks or grades of unity:

We ourselves are constantly adding connections of things, labor unions, establishing postal, consular, mercantile, railroad, telegraph, colonial and other systems that bind us and things together in even wider reticulations…From the point of view of these partial systems, the world hangs together from next to next in a variety of ways, so that when you are off of one thing you can always be on something else, without ever dropping out of your world. (SPP, p130–131)

Rather than concentric whole with its parts fused together, the world for James is an “innumerable little hangings-together of the world’s parts within the larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of operation, within the wider universe” (P, p620). These grades unity and domains of consistency are what I will identify as hypostases, to borrow a term from Eastern Orthodox theology that signifies an enduring entity of being. Etymologically, hypostatis means to stand under, or to endure in time.

The weakest form of a hypostasis would be empty space where there mutual implication between its constituent components but little consistency and interconnectivity. Such weak hypostasis can be incorporated into the constitution of more complex and structured hypostases. But with the dissolution of that ensemble, they too go out of existence. These are what can be called passive hypostases.

An active hypostasis, by contrast, is one where the interrelated agency of the constituent components ensures the moment-to-moment reproduction of that assemblage. This is to say that it displays a character of sobornost where there is an organic altruism and mutual presupposition via a communion through common value that sustains the hypostasis historically through time and space

There are two types of active hypostases, inorganic and organic. Inorganic hypostases are what would be registered phenomenologically as inanimate objects and entities, such as stones, crystals, planets, etc. Despite their complexity and consistency, these multiplicities are defined by an overwhelming monotony and repetition in their reproduction. For example, rocks, crystal, and planets can persist for millions and billions of years. Organic hypostases, on the other hand, are defined by their intensive nature and imbued with dynamic, responsive, and adaptive capabilities. In short, these are living creatures such as bacteria, fungus, cells, plants, animals, and humans, etc.

Applying this logic, the Kingdom of God as the divine life of the Holy Trinity, can be conceived as an infinite and absolute hypostasis containing with in the finite and evolving hypostasis of Creation which is informed and sustained by His uncreated energies (energeaia). As such, creatio ex nihilo can be seen a voluntary and sacrificial act on behalf of God to extend the communion in love beyond the confines of the Holy Trinity to allow participation in the divine life. This upholds the ontological integrity of both the divine life and Creation as distinct realities, whilst permitting mutual interaction and influence between the two.

It is by this means that the absolutely transcendent God who challenged Job with the question: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? (Job 38:4, NKJV), is simultaneously the radically immanent deity that Paul spoke of as whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28, NKJV).

Difference and Identity in Eastern Orthodox Theology.

Within Byzantine theology, difference and identity are explained using the following triad of terms:

1. Logos/Logoi: The identity and purpose of a being or entity.
2. Tropos/Tropoi: The actualisation of a being or entity’s potential within the parameters defined by the logos/logoi.
3. Hypostases: A being or entity in its individual and particular existence.

The functioning of this terminology to describe difference and identity can be articulated using the subsequent examples:

1. God is a Holy Trinity (hypostasis) of the three persons (hypostases), who all share the same nature and being (logos/ousia) through their mutual communion in love (tropos).
2. A human being is creature imbued with definitive characteristics (logos), each of whom is an individual person (hypostasis), and capable of both good and evil (tropos).

While there is great scope for freedom and activity here, such thinking remains mired with the subject-predicate thinking of Ancient Greek substantialism which arrests the potential of becoming. A reconstruction of Eastern Orthodox theology will now be offered from the perspective of speculative empiricism with a view to unleashing the true constructivism and organicism of Creation.

Creation as a Process Reality.

As modes of existing and ways of acting, the tropoi can now be elevated from accidental aspects of being to the ultimate constituents of reality, for they are the carriers of innovation, manifestation, modification, and variation.

As activities of realisation, in their constant flux of emergence, structuring, and perishing, these temporal minima are the building blocks of reality through entertaining and patterning possibilities into actualities. Along with God, the tropoi are the co-creators and co-participants in the universe.

It is through the logoi that God informs the universe, driving it to ever further heights of creativity and expression. The logoi are not static forms, but express God’s providential intentions for Creation. As such, they are products of the singular Logos and represent divine intentionality outside of God and His immanence in the world. Creation is dependent upon the volition of God who creates at the appropriate time (kairos). The logoi then, are not part of the divine intellect, but rather express His providential love, will and desire. As providential intentions, the logoi are neither identical with God nor Creation, ensuring an ontological gap. The logoi are interwoven into the fabric of the aboriginal field of immediate givenness that is the cosmos, not as actual, but potential.

As formative causes and carriers of definition, the logoi function as pure potentials offering themselves for actualisation by tropoi in their becoming. While God sets the initial intentions for the cosmos through the logoi, it is the tropoi who incarnate the potentialities through care, concern, and feeling in their affective interpretation.

Mediating between the logoi and tropoi are hypostases in their varying grades of consistency and levels of complexity. They provide a relational network and structure for the constituent tropoi which facilitates the moment-to-moment transmission of content and information, ensuring a consistent passage from past to future. Creation, as a hypostasis, is nothing but a mosaic universe of various interacting, interconnected, and overlapping hypostases.

There are two fundamental types of hypostases: active and passive:

1. Passive Hypostasis: Perhaps the weakest form of a hypostasis would be empty space where there is mutual implication between the constituent tropoi but little consistency. Such weak hypostasis can be incorporated into the constitution of more complex and structured hypostases. But with the dissolution of that ensemble, they too go out of existence.
2. Active Hypostasis: Within this type, the interrelated agency of the constituent tropoi ensure the moment-to-moment reproduction of that assemblage. This is to say that an active hypostasis displays a character of sobornost where there is an organic altruism and mutual presupposition via a communion through common value that sustains the hypostases historically from generation-to-generation of tropoi, transmitting content and information for interpretation.

There are two types of active hypostases: inorganic and organic:

1. Inorganic hypostases: These are what would be registered phenomenologically as inanimate objects and entities, such as stones, crystals, planets, etc. Despite their complexity and consistency, these multiplicities are defined by an overwhelming monotony and repetition in their reproduction, being characterized by harmony (agape). For example, rocks, crystal, and planets can persist for million and billions of years.
2. Organic hypostases: These are defined by an intensive nature (eros) of adaptability, dynamism, and responsiveness that permits the creation of functional and perceptual relations of meaning and significance with a lived environment. In other words, organic hypostases are living creatures such as bacteria, fungus, cells, plants, animals, and humans, etc.

In delineating the different types of hypostases, the trajectory of a great chain of being becomes apparent. From this, three conclusions can be drawn:

1. Experience runs all the way down.
2. High-grade perceptual experience capable of creating value, exercising purpose, and generating intensity is parasitic upon more elementary forms of phenomenal experience. This is to say, that consciousness differs by degree, not in kind.
3. The inherent goodness of Creation lies not in its actuality, but its potentiality. Not in its being, but its becoming.

In sustaining Creation through His uncreated energies and informing it through His providential intentions, God as a pure movement of divine repetition is constantly generating the circumstances by which the actuality of His being is distilled into the potentiality of Creation, evolving the universe from abstract or invisible potentiality to concrete visible actuality.

On the God-World Relationship.

God does not impinge upon Creation coercively but sustains and informs it persuasively.

This relationship was never truer than during the event of the Annunciation. Rather than compelling Mary serve as the vehicle of His Incarnation, violating the ontological freedom of Creation, God patiently waited for her volitionary and voluntary consent. In a pang of existential angst, Mary could have rejected the offer but instead, as St. Luke tell us, she said: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (1 Luke 38, NKJV). In this way the Theotokos was not merely a passive instrument in the Incarnation but a positive and creative participant in the story of the universe. She is the supreme example cooperation (synergeia) between God and His Creation.

Through the logoi as an aspect of His uncreated energies (energeaia) that sustain and inform Creation, God provides providential intentions for the world which are the incarnated by the tropoi as activities of realisation. Thus, God is the catalyst for the self-creativity of the universe. While visible production belongs to the world, through the logoi God provides invisible resources of harmony and intensity that orchestrate the disparate rhythms of Creation into a consonant symphony.

In short, Creation is the passage from invisible to visible, while God moves from visible to invisible. In is this reciprocal dialogue that allowed St. Paul to state: “For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building” (1 Cor. 3:9, KJV).

At all times during this dialogue all three persons of the Holy Trinity are mutual engaged in the creative process through their communion in love as a pure movement of divine repetition. The Father is the primordial font of possibilities which he offers to the Son. The Son affirms and actualises these potentials. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit is the prompter and evaluator who sustains the conversion of possibility into actuality, being active during all phases of the process. Through His exercise of rationality via the logoi as a catalyst for creativity, God originates the tropoi as activities of realisation and modes of expression. God’s omnipotence then, is less that of a monarch and more that of an artist.

Creatio ex nihilo is a voluntary and sacrificial act on behalf of God to extend participation in the divine life beyond the confines of the Holy Trinity as a communion in love. As a spatial and temporal medium of becoming, God has three primary providential intentions for Creation. These are as follows:

1. Creation of Value: The more God distils the actuality of His being into the potentiality of His divine intentions, the more the universe evolves from abstract or invisible potentiality to concrete visible actuality. Thus, all beings and entities possess some degree of value to the extent that they exist as horizons of possibility.
2. Exercise of Purpose: As God providentially intends cooperation (synergeia) between Himself and Creation, He does not impinge upon the cosmos coercively but sustains and informs it persuasively, functioning as the catalyst for self-creativity in the universe. While visible production belongs to the world, God provides the invisible resources for creativity through His providential intentions (logoi) which are affectively interpreted through activities of realisation (tropoi).
3. Intensification of Experience: As all beings and entities, and Creation itself, exist as horizons of possibility, God providentially intends to intensify experience by creating the circumstances through which affective interpretation becomes available. Overall intensification of subjectivity is achieved by balancing diversity and contrast (eros) with harmony and stability (agape) to facilitate the production of meaning, reference, significance, and value. This accounts for the existence of suffering and inequality within the cosmos. There can be no beauty and goodness without pain and sorrow.

Appendix One: The Possibility of Life Eternal.

To conclude this essay, I will discuss how it is possible for God to issue a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1).

Eternal life is made possible by the fact that whenever a hypostasis within created reality comes to an end, the final generation of its constituent tropoi as activities of realization, pass into the uncreated realm both subjectively and objectively. That is, as becoming and being. Whereas all previous generations of tropoi within a hypostasis perish and leave only their communion through common value, the final generation resumes on a new trajectory with the entire transmission of content and sentiment recorded within the treasury of God (Matthew 6:19–21).

Thus, the last created generation of tropoi is resurrected as the first uncreated generation in a passage of continuity and presented not just with its own individual history, but also the plenitude of eternity. As such, a hypostasis can be said to come to rest in God with its life history is complete. Having accrued the absolute creative wealth of Creation within the divine treasury, God is then capable of positing a renewed cosmos.

Appendix Two: On Sophia and Sophiological Thinking.

As a small aside, I want to approach the controversial school of thinking within Russian Orthodox Christianity called Sophiology. Such teachings hold that divine wisdom (Sophia) can be identified with the essence of God as a Holy Trinity, and that such Sophia finds expression within Creation. Sophiological thinking is prominent within the work of Russian Renaissance theologians such as Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) and Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), all of whom I greatly admire.

I will say at once, that critics of sophiology are wrong to consider the feminine principle of Sophia as divine wisdom as a fourth hypostasis within the Holy Trinity. That is, as a fourth person in the communion in love. However, the requisite for Sophia is also excessive and unnecessary, as much of this work is assumed and achieved by the activities of the Holy Spirit as a potency for continuity and elicitation.

This said, within the system I have provided above, what I have termed as the formative experiential medium that functions as both the being of God and ground of Creation can, for the sophiologist, provide a personal identity and function for Sophia.

Provided that being and becoming are not distinct realms but two moments of the same process that is coming-to-be, Sophia can provide a territory for connection for the dynamic interplay between ideality and actuality. As a metaphysical space containing all possible relations and where events are inscribed as both actual and potential, Sophia can operates a an active field of decision and realm of giveness where the decisive acts of realisation are made. In this way, Sophia can be described as the universal depth of relationality facilitating the passage between past, present and future.

In short, as a facilitator of dialogue between potential and actual, Sophia is the feminine wetnurse of all novelty and creation. It is not passive, but provides an active space where values are selected, as such, it can be said to possess a personal identity. In providing an all-embracing matrix of relationality, Sophia permits the immanent means by which structural formations arise through repetition and difference. Initially existing in God as a divine facilitator of dialogue between the three persons of the Holy Trinity in their being as a communion in love, through the voluntary and sacrificial act of Creation, Sophia exists in a creaturely form as the ground of the spatial and temporal cosmos.

Appendix Three: The Incarnation and Theosis.

Theosis was made possible by the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and is the highest achievable possibility for a created being.

Creation is delimited and finite spatial and temporal space within the infinite and eternal reality of God, which is sustained by his uncreated energies (energeaia) and informed by His providential intentions (logoi). This upholds the ontological integrity of both the divine life of the Holy Trinity and Creation as distinct realities while permitting interactivity between the two. In His incarnate human form, Christ perfectly and harmoniously united these two realities in a single hypostasis.

During His earthly life, the created aspect of His nature was more evident, through all-too human suffering. While after the Resurrection, in His episodic appearances to the Apostles, the divine aspect was more apparent, even to point that the disciples did not immediately recognise Him. By dying on the Cross and descending to Hell, Christ was able to incorporate and transcend the finitude of created existence, with all its suffering and inequality, into His own divinity. Then, with His Ascension to Heaven, this finitude was incorporated into the being of the Holy Trinity, fully suturing, and affirming the interactive link between God and Creation. Thus, the life of Christ, from Conception to Ascension, was nothing but a process of incorporating the concrete experiential totality of Creation into the divine life of the Holy Trinity.

The achievement of theosis is no mere academic or armchair pursuit but can only come through the travails of a life lived and experienced in concrete facticity. What is crucial to understand, however, is that whether a layman, priest, or monk, all are equally engaged in a similar spiritual struggle. They are simply different means of achieving the same end.

Theosis was made possible by the Incarnation of Jesus Christ Whose embodied life within the world sutured the ontological void between God and Creation by incorporating the suffering and inequality of finite existence in its concrete experiential totality into the divine life of the Holy Trinity.

Even after enduring ridicule, deprivation, persecution, and execution in His earthly life, in an act of cosmic vandalism, Christ descended to the depths of Hell to fully experience and comprehend the absolute nadir of created reality before ascending to Heaven. Therefore, He is best placed to offer redemption and eternal life not just to human beings but the whole of Creation which is incorporated in Him.

Through His birth, life, death, and resurrection, Christ redeemed fallen humanity and revealed God’s plan for a new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21:1) by allowing the providential intentions of God to determine His subjectivity absolutely. This provided an experience of freedom unavailable to created beings that was liberated from the imbalances of judgement that undermine human consciousness in its ressentiment, habituation, and objectification.

Attentive to the Father in His creative call to possibility and guided by the elicitation of the Holy Spirit as a perfecting cause, Christ as the Incarnate Son was able to affirm and actualise the providential intentions of the Holy Trinity as a communion in love. Thus, He implicitly inaugurated a new affective style of being where freedom was not predicated upon narrow and unsympathetic individualism but dependent upon God through an expansive and inclusive relationship with Creation.

Sources and References.

~(GBNV) George Bell and Nikolai Velimirovich: The Story of a Friendship by Dr. Muriel Heppell (Lazarica Press 2001).

~(MT) The Meaning of Truth (Anodos Books 2017) by William James.

~(PU) A Pluralistic Universe (CreateSpace 2015) by William James.

~(SPP) Some Problems in Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction in Philosophy (Longmans, Green and Co. 1916).

~(PP2) Principles of Psychology: Volume 2 (Dover 2000) by William James.

~(P) Pragmatism and Other Writings (Penguin Classics 2000) by William James.

~(KPJ) Papers and Journals: A Selection (Penguin 1996) by Soren Kierkegaard.

~(ERE) Essays in Radical Empiricism (CreateSpace 2017) by William James.

~(EM) Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today (Doubleday 2008) by His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

~ (PR) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (The Free Press 1978) by A.N. Whitehead.

~ (WBL) Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios (Denis Harvey 2005) by St. Porphyrios.

~ (OIP) On the Inscription of the Psalms (Hellenic College Press) by St. Gregory of Nyssa (acquired online).