Delivered at the conference entitled, “Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Identity and the Challenges of Pluralism and Sexual Diversity in a Secular Age,” in Oxford, England on August 17, 2019. The conference was conducted under modified Chatham House Rule. Participants are permitted to state who was present and to report what was said, but not to connect the two. This confidentiality is enforced to allow participants to speak freely about controversial issues in ways that might be otherwise detrimental to their careers and/or wellbeing. Participants are free to release publicly their own presentations.
In the late 1920s and early 30s, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov published his minor trilogy, followed by Lamb of God, the first book of his major trilogy. In these works, Bulgakov gradually fleshes out an anthropology that associates Mary with a feminine principle and the Holy Spirit, and Christ with a masculine principle and the Logos. He writes: “And just as the hypostasis of the Logos is the hypostasis of Christ, made incarnate in a male infant and reaching maturity as a 'perfect man,' so the hypostasis of the Spirit is fully revealed for us in the Mother of God and becomes a reality for us in the Church, which is the 'Spirit and Bride.'"[1] What begins with Christ and Mary is further extended to all men and women at the hypostatic level. The masculine and feminine principles manifest as the visible image in humanity of the invisible God in a way analogous to the Son and the Spirit who manifest the image of the invisible Father.
Key to Bulgakov’s argument is a reading of Gn 1:27, And God created the human being in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them, that interprets the “image of God” as synonymous with “male and female.” For Bulgakov, the duality of masculine and feminine principles, taken together, constitutes the imago dei borne by humanity.[2]
I pause here to note that this reading exists among a line of Orthodox thinkers down to our own time that includes Vladimir Soloviev, Bulgakov, Pavel Evdokimov, and Fr. Thomas Hopko.[3] Perhaps most recently, Bradley Nassif invokes this argument in a post on Public Orthodoxy against same-sex marriage.[4]
Returning to our narrative, Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow saw no utility in Bulgakov’s claims of masculine and feminine principles in the Godhead, nor in tying those principles back to a duality of sexes in humanity. As part of his condemnation of elements of Bulgakov’s sophiology, Sergius noted that this particular teaching offered a temptation to deify the sexual life as had some early gnostics and “spiritual Christians.”[5] Bulgakov’s teaching about the Godhead, Sergius proclaimed, “has nothing in common with Church tradition and does not belong to Christ’s Orthodox Church.”[6]
In writing his own argument against Bulgakov’s emerging sophiology, Vladimir Lossky accuses his opponent of a category error.[7] Bulgakov, Lossky claims, has confused the personal with the natural, or to use more common metaphysical terminology, that which belongs to the hypostasis with that which is common to a shared physis.[8] Lossky supports his claim with two arguments.
First, turning to Gn 1:27, Lossky asserts that the proper reading of the passage affirms that both male and female are created in the image of God. Rather than pointing to masculine and feminine principles within the Godhead as Bulgakov suggests, the passage affirms that the imago dei is shared by each human person, regardless of any difference in the appearance of the nature of Adam and Eve. Both Adam and Eve, and by extension all human persons, are created in God’s image.[9]
An analogy, Lossky reminds us, is fitting only when it is correctly defined. To illustrate his point, he turns to an oft-repeated analogy between the Trinity and the first human family. As the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds from the Father, so also a human son is born and Eve is drawn from Adam’s rib.[10] The analogy illustrates how various persons can share a common nature.[11] However, if taken too far, this analogy also produces a category error, confusing that which is proper to divine hypostases (the procession of the Spirit from the Father) with that which is proper to the common human nature (the origination of Eve from Adam).[12] Bulgakov’s own confusion between hypostatic and natural qualities is the result of just such an incorrect analogical formulation.
Second, Lossky claims that Bulgakov has transferred a quality of the Second Adam (maleness, or more generally, sexedness) to the qualities of the Second Hypostasis of the Trinity.[13] Bulgakov has forgotten, Lossky claims, that sex is predicated of human nature, a nature the Christ shares with the rest of humanity.[14] However, it has no place in the divine nature. This becomes clearer when we recall that the hypostasis of Christ is the hypostasis of the Logos. In Christ there is no human hypostasis. Since there is no sex in the Godhead, Christ’s sexedness must be predicated of his human nature rather than his divine hypostasis.
At this point, some of us are probably scratching our heads and wondering what just happened. To understand Lossky’s point, we must first understand the way in which he is using the terms person and hypostasis (Russian lichnost’ and ipostas’ respectively).[15] While the English words person and hypostasis have long been used as synonyms in Trinitarian theology, the term hypostasis when used to refer to human beings has generally meant simply a concrete instantiation of an the otherwise abstract human nature.[16] However, Lossky and many other thinkers of his milieu, use the language of philosophical personalism to get at an aspect of human existence they claim has been obscured with the rise of Western discourses.
Personalism, like the gender essentialism I discussed in February, has its roots in modern philosophical traditions.[17] It developed in response to both individualist and collectivist political notions that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to the personalists, individualism prioritizes the autonomy of the individual above any group or society. Individualism’s fruits include the late capitalism in which most of us now live. In opposition to individualism, various collectivist philosophies prioritize groups of people over the individual. On the right, collectivist philosophies have appeared under the guises of Nazism and Fascism, on the left as Marxism.[18] Each is willing to sacrifice the person for the sake of the collective values the system promotes. Personalism suggests that there is a middle way between the rampant egoism of individualism in which personal desires reign supreme and the collectivist philosophies that prioritize the state, a particular people group, or the workers’ paradise with little regard to unique persons.[19]
Lossky’s personalism is a synthesis of many sources. In addition to philosophical personalists such as Nikolai Berdiaev and his own father, Nikolai Lossky, the younger Lossky also draws on the French personalists of his new homeland. Like his earlier teacher Lev Karsavin, he frames his understanding of human persons in parallel to the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. And under the influence of both neo-Thomist conversation partners such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, as well as the neo-patristic synthesis of Fr. Georges Florovsky, Lossky formulates his personalist insights in the language and concepts of both late-antique and medieval theologians.
Key to understanding personalist arguments is the distinction between the individual and the person. As Lossky explains, the human individual is a concrete instantiation of the human nature. It is known by the collection of attributes that it draws from the common nature: hair and eye color, height and body type, a combination of gestures, talents, and skills. The individual claims that this collection of attributes is somehow unique to themself. However, any one of these attributes, all drawn from the common human nature, can be found in an array of other human beings. Given enough human beings, no individual is unique, as the list of attributes that make it up can eventually be found in another individual. In theory everyone has a doppelganger. However, should I meet my double, there is a difference: I am not he, nor is he I. This is where we discover personhood.
Lossky models his concept of the human person on the divine persons of the Trinity. Because they are consubstantial, there is no property attributed to one divine person that the other divine persons do not share. There is no economic activity in this world in which the divine persons are not coparticipants. Each human person, like its Trinitarian counterpart, shares the entirety of the human nature. Whereas individuals are symptomatic of the fallen world, parceling out human characteristics in restrictive ways, each person relinquishes any exclusive claims to that which all humanity naturally possesses.
What distinguishes the divine persons is an apophatic principle. The Father is not the Son or the Spirit. The Son is not the Father or the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father or the Son. So also with human persons. According to Lossky, all human persons possess the one common human nature in its entirety, yet they are distinguishable as persons by virtue of not being any other person. Each is “a singular creature, absolutely unique, not leading to anything else, distinct from everything, defined by nothing, rationally unknowable.”[20]
Finally, the person is free from its nature rather than being determined by it.[21] No combination of characteristics of the nature is sufficient to dictate who the person is or how it will act.
In the fallen world, we regularly encounter individuals, human beings among whom the common human nature has been divided. Personhood is not a given. Rather, persons only appear in relationship with other persons, and then only by releasing any claim to exclusive ownership of elements of the shared human nature. In this way, we become persons through an ascesis of self-giving reminiscent of the description provided by Fr. John Behr in his project on what it means to become a human being.[22]
Lossky has remarkably little to say about human sexuality. He rejects Gregory of Nyssa’s speculative argument that sexual reproduction is an addition to the original human nature given to us in God’s foreknowledge of the fall.[23] Rather, he follows Maximus Confessor’s idea that the human being’s original vocation was to be a link that holds together a series of divisions in the created order and between creation and the Uncreated.[24] Lossky further claims that in seeing “that they were naked,” Adam and Eve objectified each other and broke their common human nature to become two individuals. Their original unity was replaced by external relations.[25] Maximus writes that by his virgin birth, Christ overcomes this division of the sexes. To this, Lossky adds the redemption of eros is thereafter made possible through the cultivation of chastity in either Christian marriage or monasticism (with a quick nod to the latter as potentially the primary).[26] In these sanctioned relationships, the Orthodox Church has found meaningful ways to engage in self-giving love that leads toward theosis.
Takeaways
Lossky’s objective for the essay in which he addresses human sexuality is to provide an exposition of the traditional Orthodox faith. His point is not to offer a constructive theology that would address same-sex relationships. As a man of his time, such a question would most likely never have crossed his mind. However, in the moments I have left, I’d like to point out a few ramifications of Lossky’s personalism and how it might relate to our conference.
While we primarily know one another as individuals in this world, the goal of Orthodox practice is personal union with God. For Lossky, this process takes place in the unfolding realization of our personhood. In becoming full persons, each of us enters relationships with other persons, beginning with Christ himself who became incarnate, inaugurating the deification of all creation.
Following Lossky’s metaphysics, sex and gender are not hypostatic (personal), but rather are characteristic of our common human nature. We are all sexed and gendered beings, including those who choose the monastic vocation and attempt to live as angels in this life. Locating sexedness and genderedness on the level of nature rather than hypostasis undercuts gender essentialist claims regarding roles and functions assigned to men or women respectively.
Our shared nature is also reflected in our embodiedness. Each embryo grows the same tissues in the initial stages of development. Those tissues can produce both typical male and typical female reproductive tracts. It is only under the influence of different hormones (which all of us have in different proportions) that, in most cases (though certainly not all), one tissue atrophies while the other develops, giving each concrete human being a distinctive urogenital and reproductive configuration.[27]
Contrary to all forms of essentialism, Lossky’s human person exceeds the sum of the characteristics that it shares with the common human nature. The human person is free in its actions to pursue its unique vocation in the creation. To this end, I suggest that not only is gender essentialism too constricting for the human person, but so also are the categories of sexuality developed over the past two centuries. While labels such as woman or man, homosexual or heterosexual, gay or straight may in themselves be useful for in particular scenarios, they have a tendency to obscure the person and can, if enforced by a social group (including the gathered individuals of the institutional church), interfere with the freedom of each person to follow its unique vocation.
If you like your gender and/or sexuality, keep it… with a couple of caveats. If a gender role becomes a hinderance to a vocational call, then this should lead us to a reexamination of the label’s utility and weaknesses. Additionally, if a gender role or sexual identity leads to the objectification of another, then it is a Christian imperative to resist that dynamic. According to Lossky, sin caused the first humans to objectify one another’s bodies and to thus break their internal unity and become individuals.[28] The temptation to objectification, whether in a sexual way or any other, is common to us all.
Undetermined by their nature, persons are free to enter a variety of erotic relationships. As Lossky notes, in the Orthodox faith, the cultivation of sexual chastity has been limited to sanctioned sexual acts within sacramental marriage and the sublimation of sexual life in monasticism. The open question is whether other relational forms may also foster virtue and move persons toward theosis.[29] As Aristotle Papanikolaou has suggested, we need to have an honest discussion about sex that goes beyond a list of proscribed and permissible acts.[30] How might we constructively talk about healthy erotic relationships that move beyond our historic understandings of consecrated virginity and sacramental, opposite-sex marriage?
[1] Sergey Nikolayevich Bulgakov, Agnets Bozhiy - O bogochelovechestve - Chast' I [The Lamb of God: On God-Manhood, Part I] (Paris: YMCA Press, 1933), 138; The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 115. Quoted by both Met. Sergius and Lossky in Vladimir Lossky, "Spor o Sofii [Controversy about Sophia]," in Bogovidenie [Vision of God] (Moscow: ACT, 2006), 37, 98.
[2] Bulgakov, Agnets Bozhiy, 138; Lamb of God, 115.
[3] In an online workshop this past February leading up to this conference, I outlined a genealogy of source materials that inspired the German Romantics of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the creation myth told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium; the Kabbalistic idea of male and female coupled souls who descend and are born into separate bodies, later to be reunited in marriage; the mysticism of Jakob Böhme and the split of humanity into male and female when the original, androgynous Adam turned away from Sophia. Russian religious thinkers such as Vladimir Soloviev and Bulgakov were aware of these various streams and incorporated them into their works. To this mix we may add further notions of gender from the German psychoanalytic tradition. Nikolai Berdiaev cites Freud, while Pavel Evdokimov takes inspiration from Jungian archetypes. While Fr. Thomas Hopko openly rejects Bulgakov’s sophiology, he nonetheless champions the idea that the man and woman are analogs of the Son and the Spirit, functioning in the created order as the two hands of the invisible Father. I have written a more detailed account of the genealogy of gender essentialism in Orthodox thought in the third chapter of my dissertation, which our organizers made available before the conference. See chapter 3 of Bryce E. Rich, "Beyond Male and Female: Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy" (University of Chicago, 2017).
[4] https://publicorthodoxy.org/2017/08/22/trinity-and-gay-marriage/
[5] The gnostics that Sergius refers to are Sethian and Valentinian Christians. The “spiritual Christians” are sects in Russia that had rejected Orthodox liturgy and hierarchy while embracing folk traditions.
[6] Lossky, "Spor," 98, my translation.
[7] For this presentation, I go to Lossky because his early theological reflections have a direct influence on the later personalism of Christos Yannaras and, so it would seem, an indirect influence on the work of John Zizioulas. As a side note, let me say out from the outset that I have no desire to step into the personalist debates sparked by Zizioulas’s own later theological reflections. I leave that to the presentation by [redacted to preserve Chatham House Rule]. I will only briefly mention that while Zizioulas offers an ontology that is both helpful and, in some circles, controversial, Lossky’s approach is fundamentally apophatic. It is his apophaticism that I find intriguing, as I hope to convey in my remarks.
[8] Lossky, "Spor," 38, 39.
[9] Ibid., 38. Lossky also points out that Bulgakov misquotes Gn 1:27 as reading, “male and female created he him [sic]” rather than “created he them.”
[10] Lossky mentions that this analogy appears in Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit by St. Photius. See ibid. However, later Orthodox theologians will allude to Methodius of Olympus’s Symp. dec. virg. 3.8.34-36. An English translation is found in Henry Barclay Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church: A Study of Christian Teaching in the Age of the Fathers (London: Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1912), 147.
[11] This is, for example, how this analogy functions for Gregory of Nazianzus. See Orationes 31 (Theologica V, De Spiritu sancto) 11.
[12] Lossky, "Spor," 38.
[13] Bulgakov would agree with this assessment. In a previous essay, Bulgakov argues that the male principle enters the Godhead as a personal attribute (ἰδίωμα) of the Son. See Sergey Nikolayevich Bulgakov, "Muzhskoe i zhenskoe v bozhestve," in S. N. Bulgakov: Religiozno-filosofskiy put', ed. A. P. Kozyrev (Moscow: Russkiy Put', 2003), 346.
[14] Lossky, "Spor," 39.
[15] In everyday speech, lichnost’ translates as “personality.” For a discussion of the difficulties in translating personalist terminology from Russian to English, see Dominic Rubin, The Life and Thought of Lev Karsavin: "Strength Made Perfect in Weakness...", On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics (New York: Rodopi, 2013), 251, n.38.
[16] In Latin theological discourse, Boethius (6th century) defines a person as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” Persona est substantia individua rationalis naturae. Lib. c. Eut., III. For human persons, this has generally stood as the definition.
[17] See footnote 4 above.
[18] Speaking specifically of the Russian context, Paul Gavrilyuk includes populism, socialism, Marxism, positivism, utilitarianism, and economic materialism among the collectivist philosophies that shaped Russian philosophical and theological discourses. Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 83.
[19] For a more detailed description of the origins of personalism, see chapter 1 of Juan Manuel Burgos, An Introduction to Personalism, trans. R. T. Allen (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018).
[20] Vladimir Lossky, "Lichnost' i mysl' Svyateyshego Patriarkha Sergiya [Personality and Thought of the Most Holy Patriarch Sergius]," in Patriarkh Segiy i ego dukhovnoe nasledstvo [Patriarch Sergius and His Spiritual Legacy] (Moscow: Moscow Patriarchate, 1947), 268. For an English translation see "The Personality and Thought of Patriarch Sergius," Diakonia 6 (1971): 169.
[21] The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: J. Clarke, 1957), 122.
[22] John Behr, "From Adam to Christ: From Male and Female to Being Human," The Wheel, no. 13/14 (2018).
[23] Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (Crestwood: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1978), 77. Nyssen’s argument is found in his De hominis opificio.
[24] Ambigua 41.
[25] Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 77.
[26] The two paths of marriage and monachism are united only in the person of Mary, who is both mother and virgin. Ibid.
[27] For a fuller description of this process, see Claire Ainsworth, "Sex Redefined," Nature 518, no. 7539 (2015): 288-89. Online see https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943.
[28] Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 77.
[29] Hopko affirms that “same-sex love, when properly experienced and purely expressed, is always God’s sacred gift.” He further writes, “When same-sex love is pure and godly, it grows, blossoms, and is ultimately fulfilled in God’s coming kingdom…” Thomas Hopko, Christian Faith and Same-Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections (Ben Lomond: Conciliar Press, 2006), 45. Taking Hopko’s comments into account, we can say that at least some Orthodox can acknowledge that same-sex love is not in itself a bad thing. Where the current disagreement lies is what counts as “properly experienced and purely expressed.” It is my personal contention that the proscriptions of scripture and the fathers address particular historical phenomena (e.g., pederasty, rape) within a strictly hierarchical context that cannot be generalized to our current situation. See the February presentation by David Heith-Stade, “Sexuality in the Modern World and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition,” See online at https://www.academia.edu/40140202/Sexuality_in_the_modern_world_and_the_Eastern_Orthodox_tradition.
[30] See Papanikolaou, "Sex, Marriage, and Theosis," The Wheel, no. Spring/Summer (2018). Also available online at https://www.academia.edu/37025999/Sex_Marriage_and_Theosis.
