from Issue 77, Advent 2024
There are two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace.’ Thus begins Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), a coming-of-age film chronicling the spiritual and domestic struggles of a Texan family in the 1950s. Animating the drama is the austere patriarch figure, played brilliantly by a crew-cut Brad Pitt, whose private failures as an aspiring concert pianist take their toll on his wife and children. With our perspective tidily framed by the opening dichotomy, we watch each character as they decide between that which ‘doesn’t try to please itself’ and that which ‘only wants to please itself’. But is the question of Grace and Nature a zero-sum game?
We are currently enjoying a ‘Bulgakovian moment’ in contemporary theology. Despite being condemned by the Patriarchate of Moscow for his writing, Russian Orthodox thinker Sergius Bulgakov is finally being recognised for his unique insights into Christian thought, complex as they can sometimes be. It is, perhaps, this difficulty that has sparked some controversy, as more traditionalist readers of his work find fault with his shocking, brilliant and elusive ideas about Sophia, the Wisdom of God. To elaborate as best possible this tricky (and historically polyvalent) term, a useful starting point might be Jordan Daniel Wood’s definition: ‘the divine splendor, the Shekinah, the entire content of the divine essence resplendently manifest and brilliantly burning with love in and among the Three Persons.’ As this rather majestic language would suggest, it is, in fact, a word that originates in scripture, specifically Proverbs: ‘The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.’ (Prov. 3:19-20 NRSV).
Bulgakov attempts with Sophia to bring together ‘Lord’ and ‘earth’, Creator and Creation, without introducing a fourth figure into the Trinity (as his detractors would argue) or collapsing into the kind of dualism that Malick promulgates in The Tree of Life. But how exactly does he avoid these two pitfalls? Giving a full account of Bulgakov’s sophiological metaphysics is, of course, beyond the scope of this piece. But one facet of his approach provides us an alternative to the more common, binary arguments about Nature and Grace. It is the aspect of his thought that draws not only on his immediate intellectual predecessors (like Vladimir Solovyov) but earlier patristic figures too. It is the idea of Sophia as symbol for the presence of God in our creaturely world. It is the very experience we can all attest to when material existence appears to announce divinity itself, as the unspeakable beauty of a sunset or the wonder of a new-born’s laughter. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew it well, writing that ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’.
Robert de la Noval, a leading scholar on Bulgakov, takes this notion further when he argues that Sophia is the ‘condition for the possibility of the incarnation of God as a human being’. With our charged world comes the possibility of the Logos made flesh, which logically means, for Bulgakov himself, that ‘man possesses in himself an uncreated-created principle, he pertains to the eternity of the divine world. Belonging to the created-animal world, he is at the same time god by grace.’ Not to be misunderstood as a vague form of pantheism, or worse a form of self-divinising heresy, Sophia is the created world’s yearning for God.
It would be an oversimplification to characterise Nature and Grace in The Tree of Life as simply either/or. In one of the most poignant moments of the film, following the death of his son, Pitt’s character (positioned largely as the embodiment of Nature so far) chastises himself for the way he has treated his boy: ‘When he was sitting next to me at the piano, I criticised the way he turned the pages.’ In a rare moment of self-awareness and humility, he goes to on to lament that he made his son ‘feel shame, my shame’. Here, Malick deftly brings together the two ways of Nature and Grace he had suggested in the beginning were divergent paths. If Malick’s step here is tentative, Bulgakov may offer us a fuller vision. After losing his own son prematurely, he articulated perfectly what may happen when you open your human heart to grace: ‘For the only time in my life I understood what it means to love not with a human, self-loving, and mercenary love, but with that divine love with which Christ loves us. It was as if the curtain separating me from others fell and all the gloom, bitterness, offense, animosity, and suffering in their hearts was revealed to me.’
