Russian creative religious thought has introduced the idea of Divine Humanity. As in Jesus-Christ, the God-man, there occurred an individual incarnation of God in man, so similarly in humanity there should occur a collective incarnation of God. —Nikolai Berdyaev
In November of 1947, as I was finishing my studies at Dartmouth, Eugen was good enough to give me a letter of introduction to Berdyaev. I hoped to meet the great Russian when I went to Paris, where I’d be doing graduate work on Russian history at the Sorbonne. Indeed, I hoped Berdyaev would provide some guidance to me for the paper I planned to be writing there. When I wrote to him in November, asking if I might meet him, I attached Eugen’s letter as well as an outline of my proposed paper. That led on to what I describe below.
Paris – April 11, 1948 – Of all the roles I might play in life, my present one seems about the least likely. By now I could have become a graduate student in New York, or maybe a chicken farmer in Vermont, but never a Russian Orthodox seminarian in Paris. Yet, for the past three weeks, I’ve been going every Tuesday to the Institute St. Sergius where I’m auditing Father Alexander Schmemann’s course on church history. My classmates, all dressed in black, are studying for the priesthood.
Unfortunately for me, Schmemann lectures in Russian, and I miss at least a third of what he says. Since I founded the Russian Club at Dartmouth in 1946, I’ve become fluent in ordinary conversation, but Schmemann’s theological vocabulary is often beyond me.
Still, I’ve gotten the main points. Saint Sergius, after whom this seminary is named, might be called Russia’s spiritual father. A fourteenth-century monk, he built the Trinity Monastery about fifty miles north of Moscow. Eventually, what became known as the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery also became a sort of Vatican for the Russian Orthodox Church. It was the first Russian monastery to be consecrated to the Trinity, something quite new in Christendom—and a sign of Orthodoxy’s special focus on that image.
Now that I’ve had three classes, I’m wondering how much longer I can last. At least I’ve met one good friend. Igor Spassky, who sits on my left in class, is twenty-seven, comes from a Russian priest’s family, and knew a lot of Orthodox Church history even before studying it. And, unlike some of the more conservative students, Igor is enthusiastic about my old mentor, Nikolai Berdyaev. In fact, he’s begun to write a book on Berdyaev, basing it on postwar discussion meetings he’d attended with the “last” great Russian philosopher.
Naturally I told him about my own book on the Cross of Reality. Igor may be helpful with that; two weeks ago I gave him typescript copies of the first few chapters to look over, plus some notes for a chapter that I plan to write here, one that would relate Eugen’s way of thinking about God to Berdyaev’s. My new status as a “seminarian” should help with that task.
Tomorrow I’ll have my fourth class at St. Sergius and Igor will be joining me afterwards for lunch. Of course, I’m looking forward to his comments on my book.
Two weeks ago he took me to my first Orthodox service at the seminary. With its a cappella singing, that service was an overwhelming experience for me. Those voices went not simply into my ears but into my whole body, creating an inner resonance from head to toe. Feeling as if I were back in the earliest years of the church, I was so moved that I joined the congregation in crossing myself. I’d never made that sign before, and I was astonished to find myself doing it without embarrassment.
It’s quite a metro ride to St. Sergius from my left bank apartment on Boulevard Raspail. My wife Libby and I arrived there in mid-February. Besides this weekly class at St. Sergius, I’m taking two courses at the University of Paris, better known as “the Sorbonne.”
After this year in Paris, we may go to New York where I’d enter Columbia’s Russian Institute and prepare for the sort of career I’ve been imagining ever since Buchenwald: becoming a Russia specialist, and aiming for the State Department.
On the other hand, these peaceful months in Paris could be interrupted at any moment by a phone call from Berlin, where East-West tensions are mounting daily. Last December, just as we’d completed plans to come here, an old friend from Camp William James days got in touch with me—and offered me a job. Enno Hobbing, born in Berlin, had graduated from Harvard in 1940—and then, after meeting Eugen, became involved with setting up the camp. Now he’s in Berlin again, as editor in chief of Die Neue Zeitung (“The New Newspaper”), the US government newspaper for the German public. Enno wanted to know if I’d consider joining him in Berlin as managing editor of the paper, which has a staff of 70 Germans. I’d said I was interested indeed, but would have to think about the issue of interrupting my Russian studies.
A Call to Berdyaev
Now I’m thinking back to the day I telephoned Berdyaev, March 25, just over two weeks ago. It was a momentous phone call, one I’d kept postponing until I got my courses at the Sorbonne well under way. I’d been looking forward to this call since last fall, having written the great man—and gotten an answer!
With my letter I’d attached an outline of the project I wanted to pursue in Paris, a paper on the “Russian Idea.” My paper would describe how Russian philosophy, which is essentially a religious philosophy, originated in the 1840s with Kireevsky and Khomyakov. I’d go on to describe how it culminated in Solovyov and Berdyaev—and had then been welcomed in the West. Berdyaev replied that he’d be glad to meet me. Undoubtedly that note I attached from Eugen had helped, since Eugen had known him in Berlin in 1922, right after his expulsion from the Soviet Union.
I’d stopped staring at the phone, picked it up, and dialed Berdyaev’s number in the suburb of Clamart. In seconds I’d be hearing his voice, talking to the man who was the real reason I’d come to Paris, this prophet whose work I’d been reading since 1940. His housekeeper answered the telephone, and I asked for him. “I’m sorry,” she replied, “Nikolai Alexandrovitch died two days ago.” Because I’d hesitated I’d just missed him.
The next day I’d gone to St. Sergius seminary, met Father Schmemann, and enrolled in his weekly history course, on a trial basis. Schmemann was only a few years older than his students but already an impressive man. It had seemed to me that, with Berdyaev gone, I’d want to contact other Russian thinkers in Paris—and St. Sergius seemed a good place to start.
In fact, Schmemann’s course on church history dovetailed nicely with the modern history course I was taking at the Sorbonne, one that covered Russia’s “Silver Age.” Here’s my capsule picture of that amazing period:
Russia’s Silver Age
That Russia had a 19th century “Golden Age,” in literature and other arts, from the time of Pushkin (1799-1837) down to Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Tolstoy (1828-1910) is widely known. What is less well known is that, from about 1895 to 1922, there was a similar spiritual ferment, a period now known as “The Silver Age.” Those years saw an incredible burst of creativity in all of Russia’s arts, literature, religion, and philosophy. Such a powerful burst, indeed, that it continued through the war and past the revolution. Vladimir Solovyov, who died at age forty-seven in 1900, is considered the founding father of this period because he inspired its secular writers, poets, and artists as much as its renaissance of religious and philosophical thought. His most admired work was Lectures on Divine Humanity, drawn from a series of lectures he delivered from 1878 to 1881. These lectures, which attracted both Dostoevsky and his spiritual opponent Tolstoy, were a landmark event in Russia’s intellectual life.
Nikolai Berdyaev, as a key successor to Solovyov, in 1905 had helped organize “The Religious-Philosophical Vladimir Solovyov Society.” This Moscow group was founded by Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), the famed socialist-turned-priest, who later came to Paris and founded the Institute St. Sergius. The Solovyov Society, which brought together many of Russia’s leading religious and secular intellectuals, played an important role during the Silver Age; its discussions concentrated on how Russia could integrate Western and Slavophile thinking into a new Russian self-identity. The society’s members were so respected that, after the 1917 revolution, Lenin was unsure what to do with them. Finally, in 1922, he loaded them and their families onto a ship in what was then the port of Petrograd—and sent them to exile in Germany.
One of the few Solovyov Society members who missed that ship was a young priest named Pavel Florensky (1882-1937). A close friend of Bulgakov’s, Florensky was not only a priest; he was also an outstanding physical scientist, one whose lectures on electricity at Moscow University seemed so vital to the new Soviet government that they didn’t want to interrupt him. Despite the fact that he insisted on lecturing in his black priestly robes! Later he was arrested—and died in a concentration camp. Many now call him a “Russian Leonardo,” so wide and innovative was his range of thought.
When one takes the thinkers and writers of Russia’s Golden and Silver ages together, one sees how they created a full century of religious, artistic, and philosophical innovation. Most of it occurred either within or on the fringes of the Orthodox Church. Thus, it is not too much to say that this was a period of Orthodox reformation.
Panentheism vs. Theism
April 12, 1948 - As we’d planned, Igor met me for lunch today at Chez Nicole, our favorite little bistro, just down the street from St. Sergius. Of course, we began our conversation with my book; Igor said he likes the opening chapters— but they’ve raised many questions for him.
He was astonished by the degree to which Berdyaev and Eugen are twins on many themes. More than most philosophers, they’re concerned with what the machine age has done to our consciousness, fragmenting our sense of time and our selves. Neither has any use for metaphysical abstraction from concrete experience. Both seek to interpret religious categories, especially the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, in terms which will speak to today’s secular minds. And both envision their work as leading beyond philosophy—to take form as a new science, a new discipline.
As we finished lunch, Igor looked up at me and said, “You know, Clint, I’ve wanted to ask you why you’re so committed to Russia. Do you have Russian ancestors?”
I replied that my ancestors were lowland Scots, and explained how my commitment to Russia had begun at Buchenwald. Talking to the Russian prisoners, I found myself being changed from an innocent, optimistic American into a worldly-wise “Euro-American,” or perhaps a citizen of the planet. I felt as if I’d been sucked into the maelstrom of Russian history; it was no longer ‘over there,’ outside me, an object of study. It seemed to become my responsibility. Now that we and the Russians both have hydrogen bombs, our very survival may depend on how well we know each other.
“Aha,” said Igor. “I can easily see why Buchenwald could have led you to take Russia so seriously. And that brings up a further question. Did Rosenstock-Huessy share your interest in Russia?”
“He did, indeed. And how that came about is a fascinating story. Eugen’s friend Hans Ehrenberg, who was Franz Rosenzweig’s cousin, introduced both of them to Russian philosophy. Ehrenberg himself was a convert to Christianity; in fact he became a Lutheran minister. Last fall at Dartmouth Eugen had me translate one of Ehrenberg’s most important essays, “The Russification of Europe or the Question of the Trinity.” It appears as the epilogue to a highly significant book, Eastern Christianity, in which Ehrenberg collected key essays by Russian thinkers, from Pushkin’s friend Chaadayev to Solovyov and Berdyaev.”
When I noticed Igor smiling, I asked him if he’d ever heard of the book. He had, indeed, and hoped there’d soon be a French edition. Then he asked me if I’d read the selection from Bulgakov.
“Certainly,” I replied.
“More to the point, did you understand it?”
“I think so. But I’m still struggling with what he wrote about Sophia and panentheism. Are those concepts related?”
“Yes, they are,” Igor replied. “In fact, I’ll be writing about their relationship in my Berdyaev book, as I discuss his predecessors. I say that Solovyov and Bulgakov were both trying to get beyond traditional theism, which Berdyaev calls ‘abstract monotheism.’ I say that panentheism, the term used by Bulgakov to describe his thought, is just a more formal name for what Solovyov meant by divine humanity and Sophia.
“All three of those names relate to the same idea: God’s incarnation in all humanity. Theism describes a God who is essentially outside us: the ‘wholly other.’ The heresy of pantheism describes a God who is everywhere, just the same as all the forces of nature. But panentheism is not heretical at all. By adding that little preposition ‘en,’ it suggests God as in us and us in God. It’s really a term intended to express, in one word, what St. Paul said: God is he in whom ‘we live, and move, and have our being.’ Berdyaev once captured this understanding of God, in Spirit and Reality, by saying that the Holy Spirit is incarnated in human life—and that we might therefore think of God as being “like a whole humanity.”
Igor then asked me if I’d read Spirit and Reality—and I replied that I hadn’t but would certainly make it a point to do so.
“Of course, Berdyaev’s thinking is well ahead of what most of our classmates at St. Sergius would accept,” Igor said.
“That’s for sure,” I agreed. “And you’ve helped me understand why Solovyov tried to revive Sophia as a name for how God is embodied in humankind. But do you recall what Ehrenberg said about that in Eastern Christianity?”
“No, what did he say?” Igor asked.
“Well, I’m not surprised you missed it,” I replied. “It was in a footnote. He called Sophia an ‘artificial’ and ‘gnostic’ idea. He said that the ‘natural’ intermediary between God and man, the real source of revelation, was speech, as presented by the ‘speech thinkers,’ of whom he mentioned Eugen, Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner, and himself.”
“I guess I should be a more careful reader of footnotes,” Igor said. He cocked his head to one side again, raised his eyebrows, and smiled broadly. “You know, Clint,” he said, “you really must have Russian blood in you. Only a Russian could sit at a Parisian café and discuss the meaning of the Holy Spirit and Sophia. Or at least that’s what I’d thought until this noon.”
The Russian Idea
May 8, 1948 – I’m soaking up the sun on my favorite bench in Luxembourg Garden, a glorious green park that’s within easy walking distance of our apartment. I’m thinking about this last month in Paris, our third in this “city of light” where the Goddess of Reason was actually enthroned as a statue soon after the revolution of 1789. My, how her Enlightenment has radiated! Tomorrow will be my seventh Tuesday luncheon with Igor, even though my weakness in theological Russian has forced me to drop out of Schmemann’s class.
Besides my classes at the Sorbonne and St. Sergius, I’ve done some valuable proselytizing for Eugen. He sent me here with two copies of Out of Revolution, one for Berdyaev and the other for Emmanuel Mounier. Last week at lunch I made my delivery to Mounier, a prominent Catholic writer and editor of the journal Esprit.
And Spirit is a good title for his magazine. Mounier’s “personalism,” like Berdyaev’s “religious existentialism,” goes in the same direction as Eugen’s thought. I sometimes wonder if Eugen—or his students—shouldn’t package his work as another “ism,” but I know he hates the idea. He says that all “isms” are “frozen” ways of thinking. By the same token, he probably wouldn’t like his thought to be described as panentheistic. However, I think it’s excusable; he’s certainly more panentheistic than theistic.
During lunch with Mounier, we had a good discussion of Eugen’s thought. Then he asked me about Berdyaev.
“I’m a bit surprised that he agreed to meet with you,” he said. “I knew him quite well; he was a collaborator on our magazine. How did you approach him?”
“Professor Rosenstock-Huessy was good enough to add a note to the letter I sent him. And I attached an outline of the research project I wanted to pursue in Paris.”
“And what is that project?”
“I’m writing a paper on the ‘Russian Idea.’ I present what seem to me four key elements in it, four ways of thinking in which Russia has led the way. I’m dealing with Vladimir Solovyov’s ‘Divine Humanity’ and what I call Berdyaev’s ‘Trinitarian thinking.’ Then, in their predecessors, I discuss Alexei Khomyakov’s understanding of sobornost, which is commonly translated as ‘conciliarity,’ and what Ivan Kireevsky called ‘tselsnost,’ wholeness.”
“And what did Kireevsky mean by that?”
“He meant integrating everything we know, including both religion and science. He had an intuition that the Orthodox tradition, when updated, could provide us with what he called ‘tselnoye znaniye,’ integral knowledge.”
“And you say that your professor Rosenstock-Huessy advised you to read these Russians?”
“Yes, and it’s not surprising. After all, Kireevsky, who’s considered the founder of Russian philosophy, said that we can achieve integral knowledge only when we take four different approaches to the truth. Objective, rational thought is just one of those four. Reading him, I sensed that he had an early intuition of Rosenstock-Huessy’s Cross of Reality. In my paper I call Kireevsky’s thought ‘supra-rational.” That’s my own term—and it’s one that I’d also use to describe Rosenstock-Huessy’s thinking.” I also explain that these Russians were not ivory tower thinkers; they all had social goals.”
“Well, I think your approach to these subjects would interest readers of Esprit. After all, our core readers are Catholic socialists. If you did a short version of your paper as an article written for the lay reader, we might be able to use it.”
“I’ll give it a shot, and try to have something to you by July.”
“No promise, of course, and no more than five thousand words.”
Humor and Language
I got up from the bench and went to a nearby bistro for some tea. When I returned to the bench, I took out of my briefcase a book I’ve brought with me to Paris. I’m rereading Eugen’s The Christian Future. Published in 1946, it’s certainly the most accessible of his books, yet, like Out of Revolution, it’s never taken off. We who’ve attended Eugen’s courses do not find him a difficult thinker at all, but his fellow faculty members at Dartmouth are puzzled by him, as are most academics. He refuses to speak their cold, objective, disengaged language, so they’ll have nothing to do with him. It’s almost as if he sought their rejection, preferring for us, the next generation, to be the ones who’d give life to his thought.
But here there’s another problem. The circle of his devoted students is often too devoted. Some are like disciples, wanting to start a closed cult that focuses only on what Eugen says, overlooking the fact that it’s really up to them to say it differently. My parents, who are now among Eugen and his wife Margrit’s best friends, have helped me avoid this trap, as has Libby. One of our unspoken marriage vows was that I’d not be a Rosenstock-Huessy cultist.
These thoughts take me back to the Dartmouth campus of two years ago. In spring of 1946 I’d plunged back into extracurricular activities. Since writing and editing had been my best skills since Exeter days, it seemed only natural that I assemble a small group of students to start up Jack-O-Lantern, the college humor magazine which had ceased publication during the war. Our success was immediate, largely because we had the bright idea of having it serve not only the role of humor magazine (indecent cartoons) but also the role of campus literary magazine (decent poetry and stories).
Unfortunately, I sensed that Eugen wasn’t happy with my Jack-O career. He had me typed for sterner stuff. Undoubtedly he failed to see that, at Jack-O, I was confirming his insights on language: that whenever we write or speak successfully, in any genre, even humor, we employ all four kinds of speech. Future-creating imperatives, subjective lyrics of our inner experience, narrative memory, and objective rationality invade each paragraph and sentence.
In fact I’ve always thought that one of the best ways to show that the Cross of Reality is a true model of the human condition, not some abstract theory, is to point out that all literature and theater express themselves in just those four primary kinds of speech. First, there is the dramatic, heavy, and imperative in style, challenging us to move toward the future. Second, we have the lyric, which is light, personal, and includes comedy. Its inner orientation is subjective. Third, comes the epic, the historical narrative, such as the Iliad or the Odyssey. Fourth, and finally, we have the prosaic, the outward and objective presentation of life, which many call the “realistic.”
It’s not simply that literature and theater divide into those four ways of speaking. Almost every human language has at least four moods which change the verbs of any sentence. In English we have the imperative “Go!”; the subjunctive “were I to go?”; the narrative “I am going”; and the indicative “he went.”
In humor we show that we can juggle with those different kinds of speech; we play with them. Indeed, at Jack-O it became clearer to me that humor is a vital kind of speech, lubricating, as it were, the transmission of all the others. As serious a philosopher as Solovyov wrote a humorous satire about himself—and once defined man as the “laughing animal.” Then Eugen himself could not resist punning. So perhaps I was not straying as far off the path as my professor thought.
I decided to major in philosophy, partly because I wanted to take all four courses that Eugen taught. And partly because I knew that this would lead me to reading his own sources of inspiration, such challengers of conventional wisdom as Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche—and challengers to his understanding of language, his contemporaries Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The problem with Heidegger, I concluded, is that he mystifies speech. Identifying language with “being,” he implies that “being” itself speaks, almost independently of us. The problem with Wittgenstein is that he sees language as something to be analyzed, treating it objectively as a “game,” not recognizing it as our deadly-serious means of survival.
Nietzsche, with his “God is dead,” is assumed to be an opponent by many Christians, but Eugen agreed with him. Eugen says that exclamation “was a true accusation of…. the clergy of our departmentalized religion.” He adds, “Probably no one between 1870 and 1917 did more than Nietzsche to resuscitate God in the hearts of men.”
The Tasks of the Three Millennia
Now I’m thinking again about Eugen and Berdyaev—and how they both concentrated on understanding the meaning of “spirit.” Indeed, they imagined that the third millennium should be born under the sign of a new understanding of the spirit. Thus, they were both attracted to Friedrich Schelling’s description of the three millennia of the Christian era.
Inspired partly by Schelling (1755-1854), Eugen developed his own interpretation of the tasks of the three millennia.
The first millennium was devoted to a full realization of how we were made in the image of God: to the Son. This was accomplished through the establishment of the Christian church and the recognition of Christ as the center point of history.
The second millennium was devoted to a full realization of how the planet earth was created as our common home: to the Father. This was accomplished through the establishment of science as our means of understanding creation, the natural world.
It remains for the third millennium to be devoted to a full realization of how we create a peaceful global society: to the Spirit. This will be accomplished as we establish new, unheard-of institutions. They may well be small groups of intersocietal pioneers, people who will teach us to speak the one language of humankind.
May 16, 1948 – I’m sitting on my sunny bench in the Luxembourg Garden again, and thinking how well my conversations with Igor have replaced my classes at St. Sergius—and have given me new insights on Berdyaev. I’ve now read his Spirit and Reality, and have been mulling over the section where he wrote about God as being “like a whole humanity.” Of course, he’s building on Solovyov’s conception of divine humanity.
Yesterday I boiled down my several notes on that and typed them up into one:
God is like a Whole Humanity
In those concise words, Berdyaev suggests how we can get beyond our anthropomorphic and theistic idea of God as a supreme being. “Whole humanity” evidently includes all creation, the earth and universe, since humanity could certainly not exist without this physical setting, this space. Similarly, “whole humanity” includes all time, since we are not whole unless we include our beginnings and our end. And “whole” also points to what makes us whole: in religious terms, the Spirit. Berdyaev’s proposal is in the tradition of Eastern Christianity, which has always been more panentheistic than theistic, imagining us in God and God in us.
To relate Eugen’s thought with Berdyaev’s, we became human beings as we learned to speak. It is living speech, the dialogue which human beings have with each other, that moved us, over the millennia of evolution, from being inhuman mammals to finally becoming members of whole humanity. We might say that we became cells in God’s body. And we might think of those cells as “sentences.” We are each a sentence in the story of whole humanity, a humanity which becomes holy as speech makes it whole.
If God is like a whole humanity, then he is not aloof from our suffering. Such a God would be involved in the experience of war and revolution that we’ve had in the last century, indeed in the last millennium.
Perhaps we could even say that God only knows himself in us, only enjoys himself in us, and has no other being than his life in us. That is, if we imagine ourselves as the leading edge of all creation.
Finally, I should answer the objection that “whole humanity” may sound impersonal, something like Comte’s lifeless “great being.” But God imagined this way still addresses us personally. That is, all the generations that have gone before us, all over the world, down to our own parents, have spoken the Word that addresses us now, summoning us as thou, moving us to respond as I.
Now, as I reread that note this afternoon, I think it’s the closest I’ve ever come to expressing what I’d like to say about God. But I’d want to add a sort of p.s. to it. There’s no such thing as a perfect or precise statement about God. Whatever we say needs to be expressed as metaphor. Indeed, the more important a subject, the more varied should be our statements about it.
The Trinity and the Cross of Reality
May 24, 1948 – This afternoon I had one of those moments when there’s a click—and things seem to fall in place.
As I was walking around the central fountain in the Luxembourg Garden, I was thinking about those two great icons that had formed in my mind: the Trinity and the Cross of Reality. Both seemed universal, pertaining to all of reality, yet one was completely religious and the other completely secular. How could I relate them to each other?
First I thought about how differently the Trinity is imagined in the Eastern Church from how it is imagined in the West. Orthodoxy sees the Trinity in much more intimate and personal terms than the Western churches do. Father, Son, and Spirit are not distant divine objects but persons whom we represent at every moment of our lives. That Eastern experienced Trinity contrasts with the Western more distant and formal one. Thomas Aquinas said “that God is threefold and one is solely an item of belief and it can in no way be demonstrated.”
With that difference in mind, I began to think about how I could relate the Eastern version of the Trinity, the experienced one, to the Cross of Reality. And then it came to me!
It is the Holy Spirit which inspires us in the imperative, calling us to the future. That is revelation. We hear ourselves addressed as thou.
The Son is our subjective and personal reply, as I. Subjective speech makes us of aware of our personal responsibility for bringing our inspirations down to earth—and thus redeeming the world.
Next, we represent the Father as we take creative action. When we make ourselves heard in the narrative of history, we participate in the Father’s creation. As in marriage, we must act with others, thereby forming a we.
Finally, when our listening, speaking, and acting is completed and visible in the day-to-day world, others can speak about it—objectively. They can see how some part of the world was redeemed by our actions. They now describe us as he, she, or they.
On the Cross of Reality, these relationships appear as follows:
Son – Redemption
The Inner Space of the Person
Subjective speech
I
Father – Creation Spirit – Revelation
Past Time + Future Time
We Thou
The World
The Outer Space of the World
The World’s Redemption
He, she, they
As I thought further about these relationships, it seemed to me that we might say that the name “God” does not refer to “a being who exists” somewhere outside us but to that trinity of powers which we assume as we speak our times and spaces into a whole. We represent and complete the Trinity’s actions as we bring these divine powers down to the earth of the objective world, the world of times and spaces. The three divine Persons, which were once known to us as items of belief, could now be recognized as categories of being and becoming fully human. We represent them whenever we speak beyond the limited frame of our natural body as the mammal homo sapiens.
To put it more succinctly the name God may not refer to the object of our religious thought; it may refer to the subject of our lives. That is, it may refer to what we are capable of representing when we bring reality to full expression in the world. In that case, God does not simply “exist”; instead, he “speaks,” and he speaks primarily in us.
The Trinity in all Religions
Of course, it’s not only Christians who bear this Trinitarian image within themselves. All members of our race were born with it, and possess it, whether they are religious or not. We sin when we distort or destroy that image in ourselves.
This image of the Trinity is found not only in all persons; it seems to be present in almost all religions. God is generally perceived as both a father-like Creator and a source of Spirit, the Word of truth. Then there is usually a Son, a third vital Person, often a human being, who is either the religion’s founder or a major figure in its story.
For example, Hinduism has its Krishna, a mythological figure who’s still imagined as having lived on earth. The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita are like emanations of the Spirit, the holy Word. And Brahman is the God-head, the Creator, the ground of the divine.
Islam has Mohammed as the Son; while he’s certainly not worshipped, he’s central to the faith. As he heard Allah’s Word and dictated the Koran, that was certainly an action of the Spirit in him.
Buddhism has the Buddha; while he thought of himself only as a spiritual teacher, many of his followers tend to worship him and give him God-like attributes. His teachings are treated as divinely-inspired Word.
Judaism has Moses and anticipates a Messiah. The Torah is read as God’s Word.
Christianity has Jesus, God’s Son, as the Messiah, the Word become flesh. The Bible is read as God’s Word, written by men inspired by the Spirit.
Thus, in those five major religions we have, in various degrees, a Trinity of Creator Father, faithful Son, and Spirit.
I have some class notes about how Eugen described the Son in even more universal terms. He said that we recognize the Son whenever we see how the spoken word comes to be embodied in a person’s life. Of course, he meant the spoken word of high speech, speech which seeks to tell the truth, establish relations with others, and to make peace. Such vital words come to us as vocatives and imperatives, commands, and prophecies. We live the life of the Son when we hear those prophecies and make promises to fulfill them. That has been the goal of all high speech and ritual from the beginning of history.
When I looked over those notes, I saw how Eugen had managed to link the Trinity with the Cross of Reality—without saying that he was doing so. The spoken word, commands, and prophecies are how we hear the Spirit’s imperatives toward the future. Promises to fulfill those prophecies are our subjective, inward replies as Son. Ritual refers to those ceremonies through which we tell the narrative of the Father’s past creation. And the word embodied in a person’s life is how the three persons of the Trinity are present in our daily lives—in the world.
I hope it’s clear that this secular interpretation of the Trinity is not a Gnostic rationalization of the mysteries. In fact, it emphasizes why any religion’s Trinity will always remain a mystery, even when we understand it in a non-religious sense. Berdyaev puts it well when he writes: “the life of man and of the world is an inner moment of the mystery of the Trinity.”
The mystery remains in the sense that it describes an active process, and one cannot predict the outcome of such a process. At any time, between any two or three persons, in any group, new inspiration may take an unexpected turn. It remains the mystery of interpreting the strange past, experiencing the creative present, and having faith in the unknown future. It is our participation in this process that separates us from the natural world, the one we know objectively.
June 20, 1948 – This noon I had my farewell lunch with Igor. I’d told him two weeks ago that I’d accepted Enno’s offer of the job in Berlin and would be leaving Paris June 24. The Russian’s are about to seal off the city from the West. What Walter Lippmann has begun to call the “Cold War” is about to see its first battle. And George Kennan’s containment policy is about to get its first test.
Of course, Igor and I plunged into our usual topics, ignoring the fact that we may never see each other again. I told him that I’d made great progress on my article for Esprit. I was planning to title it “Between and West: Rediscovering the Gifts of the Russian Spirit.” In fact, I was now thinking of expanding the article into a little book, one that would make clear how the Logos-word thinking of Russian philosophy was not only ripe for discovery in the West but had already been welcomed by the Western dialogical thinkers, particularly by Eugen and Hans Ehrenberg.
I also told Igor that our discussion of Berdyaev’s ideas in Spirit and Reality had enabled me to finish my chapter on religion in my book about the Cross of Reality.
We continued to discuss that cross and Eugen’s metanomics for a while. Then Igor looked at me and said, “This is all a far cry from Schmemann’s lectures on St. Sergius and his Trinity Monastery, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think it is,” I replied. “In fact, it was to practice this new discipline that I came to your seminary. I wanted to know more than the objective facts about Russia. I wanted to be immersed in the narrative of her past and to catch her subjective inner spirit. Armed with those perspectives, in the course of my writings, I expect to show that Russia’s future has as much to do with St. Sergius as it does with Lenin. In fact, more. Someday Lenin’s revolution will subside, and a new generation will want to reconnect with the past that he and Stalin obliterated. I’d like to speak to that new generation.”
“So would I,” Igor said. “Let’s promise to meet again in Moscow one day—and get our books published there. They’ll need Berdyaev when they get over Stalin, and they’ll need Bulgakov, Solovyov, and all the rest. Right down to your beloved Kireevsky.”
At 2:30 Igor and I were talked out and had to go. As we stood, I told my seminary friend, “Yes, we should meet in Moscow, Igor, or even better at the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery. Then we might find the Trinity Cathedral where St. Sergius lies buried . . . and stand together at his tomb. Or perhaps even kneel.”
To continue, click: Chapter 7 From Theism to Panentheism