Wisdom’s Fire, Radiant and Unfading. Part I.

Royal colors shine through the clouds at dawn,
Red, purple and blue envelop the sky,
Petitioning those under its watch to look on,
To lift their eyes to the heavens on high.

The dread night is over, its terrors overcome,
The bright sun has gently arisen in glory,
Nurturing the soul, so what once was numb,
Feels eucatastrophic joy at the end of the story.

In his essay, “On Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien gives to his readers one of his keenest insights: the relationship between fairy stories with the evangelium. He explains how fairy stories find themselves contained within the one universal story of the Gospel, granting them not only a foundation on which to stand, but also an explanation as to their ability to greatly affect the human soul. While many literary critics consider fairy stories to be mere escapist fantasies, this is not, as they would claim, a weakness. Rather, this is their strength. Those of us who are mired by the tragedies of life need hope, hope that the meaning of life is not found in mere catastrophe but what lies beyond catastrophe with what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe.  It is the consolation which is found beyond the tragic, the joy of unexpected success which brings about a “happy ending”:

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairly-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorry and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of world, poignant as grief.[1]

In their structure, fairy stories tend to follow the outline of the evangelium. Elements of grief, assumed by the evangelium with the cross, are followed by joy, the joy of the resurrection. This relationship to the evangelium makes them to be realistic forms of literature, no matter what their detractors suggest. Life is filled with tragedy and hope, expected destruction and unexpected restoration. Fairy stories reveal the order of grace which surrounds us. “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation for the sorrow of the world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to the question, ‘Is it true?”[2]

Dyscatastrophe, with an eucatastrophic ending, is the story of history, because it is the story of Christ. “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”[3] The Gospel, through Christ, gives to us the revelation of God. The Trinity acts in and through the economy of the Incarnation. The economic Trinity points to the transcendent mystery of the Immanent Trinity. All that is revealed in the economy of Christ is true about the Trinity, although the mystery of the Trinity transcends that revelation in its interior life. Through his life and work, Christ directs us to the Trinity so that we can share in the great and awesome mystery of the divine life. History is the reflection of eternity, where what is contained in the heart of Being itself is mixed with time, making for the historical Theo-Drama.

Since God is love, this drama must be seen as the drama of love. This explains why history is filled with the constant mix of tragedy and release. In the economic revelation of God, we see history is centered upon death and resurrection, of self-giving and restoration of the God-man. Christ, who loves us, gave his all for us. Christ’s love for us comes from his love for the Father. He was sent to the world because of the Father’s love for us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 RSV). The world, because it exists in time, is given the Son in time, who gives himself to us in time. He willingly goes to the cross and gives the fullness of his being for us in time. But the cross itself is a reflection of the eternal self-giving love the Son has for the Father. He has eternally given himself over to the Father in eternity. And it is because he gives himself entirely to the Father, so that he has entirely died to his self, he finds himself restored in the reciprocal love the Father has for him. “But where the beloved responds in love, in him at least the lover leads a life.”[4] The Father, likewise, eternally loves the Son, and has given himself entirely over to the Son by begetting him. The Father and the Son, by giving each other their complete selves to each other, exist through love. It is the nature of love to give and receive in this fashion:

And whoever loves, dies. For his attention, oblivious of himself, is always turned to his beloved. If he does not think of himself he certainly does not think in himself. And therefore a soul thus affected does not function in itself, since the special function of the soul is thought itself. He who does not function in himself does not exist in himself either. For these two, function and existence, are equivalent to each other. Neither is there existence without function, nor does function go beyond existence itself. Nor can anyone function where he does not exist, and wherever he exists, he functions. Therefore the soul of a lover does not exist in itself because it does not function in itself. If it does not exist in itself, it also does not live in itself. He who does not live is dead. Therefore anyone who loves is dead in himself. But at least he lived in another? Certainly.[5]

The resurrection in history is but the revelation of the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father, where the Son is eternally restored to his person by the love of the Father. The eternal act between the Father and the Son, because it is an act of love, is fruitful and generates creation. It must be understood that creation, as well as history, are but representations of this eternal act of love, an act of love which reveals the nature of God (Sophia)[6] as love:

The self-revelation of the Holy Trinity is realized in such a way that God the Father, Who is the initial hypostasis and contains the fullness of the divine nature or Sophia as Love, renounce, in His self-revelation, this fullness for or in Himself, and goes out of Himself by the “generation” of the Son. The Son then is the hypostatic self-revelation of the nature of the Father, or the hypostatic Sophia, the self-consciousness or hypostatization of the Divine ousia of the Father; the Son is present before the Father as His Truth and Word, His knowledge of Himself in the Son: “no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; and neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son” (Matt. 11:27). [7]

It is, however, because their very nature is love, that is, self-giving and sacrificial, we find the prototype of all suffering found in the very heart of Being:

The sacrifice of love, in its reality, is pre-eternal suffering – not the suffering of limitation (which is incompatible with the absoluteness of divine life) but the suffering of the authenticity of sacrifice and its immensity. This suffering of sacrifice not only does not contradict the Divine all-blessedness but, on the contrary, is its foundation, for this all-blessedness would be empty and unreal if it were not based on authentic sacrifice, on the reality of suffering. If God is love, He is also sacrifice, which manifests the victorious power of love and its joy only through suffering.[8]

This sacrificial love is not contaminated by anything which is not love; it is pure, and so the “suffering” (a word which must be understood only analogously to suffering as we know it in the world) leads to a fruitful and joyful completion. The self-giving is allowed to end without annihilation.  It is the joy of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who allows their love to find completion. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is in a sense, this completion:

The Holy Spirit, as the Third hypostasis, represents the intratrinitarian completion of the sacrificial love of the Father and the Son, as the joy of this sacrifice, as its bliss, as love triumphant. In this lies His significance as the Comforter, not only with regard to the world but also in the intratrinitarian life. If God who is in the Holy Trinity is love, the Holy Spirit is then the Love of love.[9]

Love in the Trinity is triumphant and joyful, because it finds itself complete. The Holy Spirit completes the transfer of love from the Father to the Son, and the Son to the Father. The Spirit makes sure it is an eternal self-giving which grows and abounds, that such love is eternally fruitful and does not go unrequited. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and through such love, they both love the love which is shared, a love which comes from their very nature, Sophia, and revealed in the Spirit as their companion and comforter. The Spirit is the one who shares their love with them by being that love in its bounty. The Spirit reveals what love is to the Father and the Son, and thus, is entirely transparent it self, revealing the nature of the Godhead, the love contained in the Godhead, to the Godhead in eternity through the way it has hypostatized the divine ousia. As the bounty of love, the continuation of love as flows out over itself for all eternity, the Spirit is therefore rightfully the Spirit of Life in history, where that overflow of love is found in the flow of time generated by the Godhead through the movement of the Spirit.

The act of creation, where something is created, can thus be understood when we understood the nature of love. Because God is love, creation exists. This love is the foundation and end of creation, where its purpose and essence is found. Though we must understand God’s omnipotence means God is free, the world can be said to be “necessary” for God, that is, God follows his own nature and creates out of love:

God needs the world, it could not have remained uncreated. But God needs the world not for Himself but for the world itself. God is love, and it is proper for love to love and to expand in love. And for divine love it is proper not only to be realized within the confines of Divinity but also to expand beyond these confines. Otherwise, self-absoluteness itself becomes a limit for the Absolute, a limit of self-love or self-affirmation, and that would attest to the limitedness of the Absolute’s omnipotence – to its impotence, as it were, beyond the limits of itself.[10]

God’s actions are not unreasonable and therefore follow through God’s own nature, the nature of love. Love is the heart of Being, the essence of what God is; the eternal act of God is the eternal act of love. Creation is made in the image of this love; it is a created love, created Sophia, made in the image of God’s uncreated love, uncreated Sophia. The world established in love, and called open itself up by self-giving in order share in the eternal glory of God. Because it is love, created in the eternal image of love, it contains within itself tragedy and the potentiality for the bountiful joy of restoration. However, it is only by following the path of uncreated love, in dying to the self, that the joy of the resurrection is found; until one completely unites oneself in the image of love, that which is left as unlove becomes the foundation for evil and the suffering which comes from it. Death has come to the world through the sin, because, by sin, by the attempt to halt the pathway of love, the Spirit has been quenched. History is meant to be transcended through our entrance into eternity through a life of love; it is entered, now, in tragedy due to sin, and it is only because of the unmerited love of God for us that God has taken this modality into himself. Death remains, but its sting has been taken, for death has been transformed, so that it can become the means by which we enter into eternal life instead of being the means by which we perish for all eternity.

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in Poems and Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 175.

[2] Ibid., 178.

[3] Ibid., 179.

[4] Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium of Love. Trans. Sears Jayne (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1994), 57.

[5] Ibid.  55.

[6] Uncreated Sophia is the essence of God, the divine ousia. God’s Divine Simplicity means all that one can predicate to God (such as good, beautiful, wise) is actually all one in God as God’s eternal, simple nature, a nature which revelation names as Wisdom and demonstrates as Love.

[7] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2004), 63.

[8] Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2008), 99.

[9] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter, 66.

[10] Sergius Bulgakov, Lamb of God, 120.