THEOLOGY O F T H E IN-BETWEEN

Andrew Louth, Darlington

All religious systems - and many philosophical systems - are com

cerned with relating the world that we know to some other realm the realm of the gods, or God Himself, or maybe with a state that transcends this world and our experience of it: something like this I take
the Buddhist notion of nirvana to be. The nature of this world is easily recognizable: it is characterized by death, corruption or decay and
instability, sometimes in moral terms by sin. The nature of the other
world is often just the mirror image of this: it is free from death, corruption and decay, and also from sin and its effects. A famous example
of this is found in ?latos Phaedo, where at one point Socrates says:
Would you say then. Cebes, that the result of our whole discussion
amounts to this: on the one hand we have that which is divine, immortal,
i^estfuctible, of a single form, accessible to thought, ever constant and
abiding true to itself; and the soul is very like that: on the other hand we
have that which is human, mortal, destructible, of many forms, inaccessible to thought, never constant nor abiding true to itself; and the body is
very like that? {Phaedo ^OAB)'

This introduces several other elements into the contrast: the One
opposed to the many, that which can be understood, and that which
is too unstable to be understood, the spiritual (soul) opposed to the
material (body); furthermore there is the notion, implicit in this, that
the human stands on the frontier between these two worlds, belonging
to both, and therefore capable of relating them in some way.
Once one starts to work with this idea of two realms, one to which
we belong, one to which we aspire, one inevitably becomes concerned
with what it is that relates these two worlds, with what I call the in
'

Translation by R. Hackforth, in ,
/
?ress, 1972, 84.

P h a ed o , Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity

THEOLOGYOFTHE IN-BETWEEN223236(CV2013/3: 223-236)

ANDREW LOUTH

between: , ?lat indeed uses this very term, , the

things in between. Aristotle tells us that , the concepts
below the Forms in the simile of the divided line in the Republic, were
called by Plato (Met. 987b14-18). In the Symposium, we
learn from Diotima that everything daimonic [ ] is between
( ) the divine and the m ortal (1S ymp. 202E). Diotima goes on
to explain the power o f the daimons as:
Interpreting and cenveying human things to the gods and divine things
to humans; petitions and saerifices from below, eommands and responses
from above; being in the middle it eomplements both, so that the whole
is bound together. Through [the daimons] all divination passes, and the
whole craft of priesthood concerning sacrifice and rites and incantations
and all interpretation of oracles and magic. God does not mingle with
the human, but through the daimons all conversation and communication from the gods to humans, or from humans to the gods, takes place,
whether waking or sleeping. (Symp. 202E-203A)

The m atematicals (numbers, geometrieal figures) are between the

world of the senses and the world of the Forms, because they apply to
the sensible world, where we discern numbers and shapes, but partake
of the realm of the Forms, because they are concerned with real knowledge, . The daimons are presented as intermediary brings
between gods and humans, spiritual but capable of change. Later Platonism - Fhilo, Flotinos and the Neoplatonists - has a developed interest in the realm in-between. It would, however, take us too far from
our main interest to pursue that now, at least directly, but it would,
I think, be useful to look at some of the analogies used by the Neoplatonists to relate this world to that, the many to the One.
For the Neoplatonists, everything proceeds from the One and seeks
to return, in a circular process of rest or remaining () - procession
( ) - return ( ). In general terms, this understanding of how everything derives from the One is usually called emanationism. It is often misconceived, and given a rather materialist interpretation, as if it meant that everything derived its being from the one
by some kind of How, that then reverted. In fact the analogy of flowing
from a source was not one that the Neoplatonists made much use of.

THEOLOGY OFTHE N -B E^EEN

rather they made use of what are fundamentally mathematieal analogies. These analogies find an eeho in the Christian Fathers, and I want
to illustrate these ideas, not from the Neoplatonists themselves, but
from the Fathers of the Church, as they are our prineipal eoncern.
What needs to be illustrated by these analogies is how everything
that is is derived from the One, without in any way compromising the
oneness of the One. So the One cannot be diminished by emanation
(so, for example, we must not think in terms of something flowing from
the One, and depleting it, as it werc), nor can the One be thought of as
one among many.
The most popular analogies for rest - procession - return arc geometrical. There is the analogy of the centre o f the circle, from which
emerge the radii, which join the centre of the circle to the circumference. It is an analogy we find in M ximos. In the first chapter of
the Mystagogia, he had compared the Church to God, as his image,
because it embraces and gathers all together, speaking of Christ, he
co n tin u e
It is he who encloses in himself all beings by the one, simple, and infinitely
wise power of his goodness. As the centre of straight lines that radiate
from him he does not allow by the one, simple and single cause and power
the origins of beings to become disjoined at their limit but rather cfrcums c r ih e s their extension in a cirele and leads back to himself the d is tin c t iv e
elements of being brought into being by h im

Christ, then, is seen as the centre of a circle, with the radii of the circle communicating with the ever-widening circumference o f the circle,
and not only doing that, but preserving it as the cfrcumference of a circle and so related to the centre that defines it.
Another circular image is found in Dionysios the Arcopagite. As he
begins his account of the Mystery of the Synaxis, or Communion, he
tells of the hierarch, or bishop, standing at the altar, praying, and then
coming out from the altar and going round the church censing it. He
interprets this circular movement of censing thus:
2

M axim o he C onfessor, M ysta g o g ia 1, ed. C. B oudignon, CCSL 69, lines 187-93;

trans. (m odified) by G.
B erhold in M axim us the C onfessor, S e le c ted W ritings,
London: SPC K , 1985, 187.

c.

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The thearchic blessedness transcending all goes forth into communion

with the sacred beings who participate in him, never coming outside his
essentially unmoved stability and establishment, but illuminating in measure all godlike beings around him, while really remaining quite unmoved
from his own sameness.3

Dionysios seems to be envisaging a circle, going out from a point

and returning, the circle reaching out to manifold reality (though the
language sometimes s u g e s ts acircle moving out to its circumference).
All of these images see the source, at rest in oneness and stillness,
relating by some process of movement to the realm of all things, held
to the centre, and to their integrity, by the attention of the One. It is
a powerful image, and its power resides, not just in its metaphysical
adequacy, but also in the ontological signifieance it lends to the movement of the Divine Liturgy, as well as to the sense of contemplation
as being our way of responding to the attention of the One. In this
relationship, there is movement across the realm of the in-between.
In Christian theology, all this is complicated by the doctrine of ereation out of nothing. Instead of seeing beings related to their origin by
a kind o f steady diminution of being, being itself is related by creation
directly to God the Creator. There is nothing between God and creatures, no intervening being, beneath the Creator, but transcending the
creatures. It is this perception, it is often maintained, that lies at the
heart of the so-called Arian ontroversy. Though the historical story
may be more complicated, it was recognition of the radical implications
of the doctrine of creation out of nothing - , *nihilo that provoked the Arian crisis, both Arius and Athanasius agreeing on
the radical implications of this doctrine, but drawing different conclusions: Arius preserving a hierarchy within the created order, with the
Logos at its pinnacle, Athanasius, quite radically, rejecting any notion
of hierarchy within the created order, seeing the Logos as uncreated,
, with the Father.
ft seems to me, however, that the radical implications of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo have been interpreted in a variety of ways,
and that is because the doctrine of creation out of nothing, while it
Dny.ios the A reopagite, E cclesia stica l H ierarchy 3 .2.3, ed. Giinther H eil, PTS 36,
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1 9 9 1 ,8 2 . 1 7 -2 1 .

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THEOLOGY OFTHE IN-BETWEEN

slves definitively ne question, gives rise t thers. The problem that

it slves concerns the nature of G ods relation t the cosmos. The
implication of the doctrine of creation out of nothing is that God and
creatures are radically incommensurable. As St Gregory ?alamas put
it, in the fourteenth century, [God] is not a being, if the others are
beings; and if he is a being, the others are not beings.^ There is no
great chain of being with God at the top and creatures arranged hierarchically beneath him: God is , as ?lato put it,
^ , in the expression popularized by Dionysios the Areopagite. Nonetheless, it is hardly the case that Christian theologians,
after Arius, see the creatures of the cosmos as radically on a level, in
virtue o f creation out of nothing. Athanasius may hold to that, but later
supporters of Nicaea are not so clear. Gregory of Nyssa, for exampie, explicitly maintains that the supreme division of all beings is that
between what is perceived by the intellect and what is perceived by the
senses:^ the ?]atonic division between the spiritual or intellectual and
the material or sensible is still important for Gregory. Nevertheless, the
division between uncreated and created is fundamental for him, indeed
Gregory is one who explored more deeply than many what this might
entail, so when he calls foe division between the intellectual and sensible supreme, , we should interpret him as meaning that the
divide between uncreated and created is not between entities that can
be classed together as beings: it is between beings and God, who
is beyond being. Nonetheless, Gregory is keen to incorporate the Platonic hierarchy into his Christian metaphysics based on creation out
of nothing: the ascent into the intellectual is in some way a drawing
nearer to God, though in no unambiguous manner.
A more serious apparent consequence of the doctrine of creation
out of nothing is that it seems to create an impassable gulf between
God and the created order: they have nothing in common, so God
is utterly unknowable (it is this that Gregory explores in his various
works). Goes this leave the created order bereft of God? And if not,
how is God present to it? This problem of the status of the created order
was raised in correspondence between ?hilip Sherrard and Metrpoli4

Gregory Palamas, C apita CL ? 8 , ed. and trans. Robert E. Sin kew iez, Studies and
Texts 83, Toronto: Pontifical Institute o f M ediaeval Studies, 1988, 173.

Gregory o f N yssa, C ontra Eunomium I, 270, ed. Jaeger, I, 2 0- 19 ,0 3.

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ANDREW LOUTH

tan John Zizioulas, in response to an artiele by Metropolitan John in

1982 in Synaxis, and published in later issues of Synaxis. One fundamental issue raised by Sherrard was that M etropolitan Johns exposition of the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing seemed to
entail an undestanding of creation cut off from God. For Sherrard,
as he makes clear in other places, it was precisely this emailment of
a creation bereft o f God that had led to the ecological crisis we have
brought upon ourselves.
Metropolitan Johns presentation of the meaning of the doctrine of
creation is very much that of his mentor, Fr Georges Florovsky, for
whom the doctrine of creation out of nothing is fundamental. He saw it
as a perception fundamental to Christian Orthodoxy as it took shape in
the fourth and fifth century. He often discusses this doctrine in connexion with St Athanasios, for w hom the doctrine was indeed fundamental
in his opposition to Arianism, as 1 have already suggested; in one of his
later articles - a paper given at the Third International Fatristics Conference in 1959, and published in 1962 - he professedly discusses the
doctrine o f creation out of nothing in relation to the Alexandrian saint.
He finds the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in Athanasios at the beginning, even before the Arian controversy, in his work On the Incarnation. Here he finds a vision of an ultimate and radical cleavage or hiatus between the absolute being of God and the contingent existence of
the W orld : the Being ofG od eternal and immutable, beyond death and
corruption, while the created order is intrinsically mutable, marked by
death, change and corruption. The whole creation is only held in being
at all by the Word of God, who binds it together and provides coherence. The Word of God, being truly God, is absolutely transcendent
over the world, but it is present to and active in the world by its powers. So Florovsky summarizes that [t]he world owes its very existence
to G ods sovereign wifi and goodness and stands, over the abyss of its
own nothingness and impotence, solely by His quickening Grace as it were, sola gratia. But the Grace abides in the world . What is
striking about this mature presentation by Florovsky of his thought on
creation is his emphasis on the way in which it is through the Word that
6

228

G eorges Florovsky, St A thanasius' C oncept o f Creation , in G. Florovsky, A spects

o fC h u rch H isto ry, B elm ont, M A: Nordland Fublishing Company, 1 9 7 5 ,3 9 -6 2 , 2 8 3 285 (notes); here 51.

THEOLOGY OFTHE'IN-BETWEEN

creation comes into being and is sustained in being - the Word being
present to and active in the created order his powers: it is the Word,
who became incarnate, who is at the centre of A thanasios vision, as
Florovsky expounds it.
Earlier on, Florovsky had discussed in much greater detail his understanding of creation in an article, Creation and Creaturehood, originally published in 1928. Early on in the article, he notes that the notion
of creation out of nothing was unknown, and indeed incomprehensible,
to classical philosophy; it is a doctrine that grew out of reflection on
the Biblical witness to God and the world (even though the doctrine is
hardly expressed explicitly in the Scriptures themselves). It means that
the universe, the world, might not have existed: it is contingent, it is
not self-sufficient. It is also radically new:
In creation something absolutely new, an extra-divine reality is posited
and built up. It is precisely in this that the supremely great and incomprehensible miracle of creation consists - that an other springs up, that
heterogeneous drops of creation exist side by side with the illimitable and
infinite Ocean ofheing. as St Gregory of Nazianzus says of God.7

There is then an absolute contrast between the uncreated God and

creation out of nothing. Florovsky illustrates this fundamental antinomy of creation in a vivid image drawn from a sermon by St Fhilaret,
the great ^ tr o p o lita n of Moscow in the nineteenth century: the ereative Word is like an adamantine bridge, upon which creatures stand
balanced beneath the abyss o f divine infinitude, and above that of their
own nothingness.^
This new thing, creation, is manifested in creaturely freedom, which
is more than simply the possibility of choice, but as it were enacts the
fundamental choice faced by creatures, poised on Fhilarets adamantine bridge, between the infinity of God and the infinity of nothingness. There is, as Florovsky puts it, the possibility of metaphysical
suicide - not self-annihilation, however, for creation is G ods gift and
7 G eorges Florovsky, Creation and Creaturehood, in G. Florovsky, C reation an d
R edem ption , B elm ont, M A: Nordland Fublishing Company, 1976, 4 3 -7 8 , 2 6 9 -2 7 9
(notes); here 46.
8 Philaret (D rozdov) o f M oscow , Izbrannye Trudy, P is m a, V ospom inaniya, M oscow ,
2 0 0 3 , 268; my ow n translation. Florovsky quotes : C reation a n d R edem ption , 45.

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ANDREW LOUTH

is indestructible. Creaturely freedom is but a reflection of the Divine

freedom with which the world was created, a divine freedom diffieult
to conceive, and easily compromised, as Florovsky maintains was the
case with Origen, for whom God, as Fantokrator, needed the universe,
ta panta, over which to rule. Not so, for the Fathers and Florovsky:
God creates the world in radical freedom. In his later article, Florovsky
quotes with approval a remark of Gilsons: it is quite true that a Creator is an eminently Christian God, but a God whose very existence
it is to be a creator is not a Christian God at
.fr is to God that
the created order, through the human, who is a little cosmos, a microcosm, has to respond with its own freedom. It is through responding to
G ods presence in creation in his energies that creation moves towards
its goal, which is deification, union with God.
Fr Georges Florovsky - and following him, M etropolitan Zizioulas sees the infinite gulf between Creator and creation bridged by G ods
creative Word, and this bridging is manifest in powers, , that
abide in the created order. Florovsky reaches back to Athanasios, and
finds there the distinction between Gods unknowable essence and the
energies (or activities) through which he is known, which was raised to
a dogmatic principle by St Gregory Falamas in the hesychast controversy; the distinction that for Falamas reconciles an experiential knowledge of God with his unknowability serves for them to reach across the
gulf that exists between God and creatures drawn into being by his will
out of nothing, (fr is interesting to note that Zizioulas does not follow his mentor, Florovsky, here, and makes little use of the distinction
between essence and energies in G od.10) Florovsky insists that this
means that Grace abides in foe world, fr was precisely this conviction that creation is graced, and not godless, that was the inspiration
behind Fr Sergei Bulgakovs doctrine of Sophia, the W isdom of God,
his sophiology, and it is not diffieult to see Florovskys movement of
9 Florovsky, A sp e c ts, 41.

Lack o f interest in, or use of, the essen ce/en em ies distinction is striking in M etrpolitan John, given the way it has been pieked up by so many Orthodox theologians in
the twentieth century. However, my im pression is that his distance from Florovsky
over this is not that great, as Florovsky h im seif seem s to me to make little use o f the
distinction either.

tem pted by the thought that Florovsky appeals to this Falamite

distinction in this context, because B ulgakov had referred to it in support o fh is sophiology.

THEOLOGY OFTHE IN-BETWEEN

thought both the articles mentioned at as direeted against Bulgakov.

Florovsky does this in a positive vein: by providing the desired reconciliation of God and the cosmos by a route that is, to his mind, perfectly
Orthodox, and does not require recourse to the doctrine o f Sophia, the
W isdom of God.
We need to notice two things about Florovskys approach. First of
all, his citation of St Fhilarets comparison of the creative Word to an
adamantine bridge on which creatures stand poised between the infinity of God and the infinity of their own nothingness. The Word of
God makes possible an in-between, poised between two infinities,
one infinitely full, the other infinitely empty. It is precisely this sense
of an in-between, that both separates and unites, that is the central
inspiration of Bulgakovs sophiology. It is, I think, most compellingly
expressed in his account of his experience in the Church of Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople, then a mosque, in lanuary 1923, at the very
beginning of his exile from Russia. In an account of this experience in
his Autobiographical Sketches, he spoke of the sense oflight and inner
transparency, in which the soul discovers its freedom, and continues:
This is indeed Sophia, the real unity of the world in the Logos, the COinherence of all with all, the world of divine ideas, . It
is Plato baptized by the Hellenic genius of Byzantium - it is his world,
his lofty realm to which souls ascend for the contemplation of Ideas. The
pagan Sophia of Plato beholds herself mirrored in the Christian Sophia,
the divine Wisdom. Truly, the church of Hagia Sophia is the artistic, tangible proof and manifestation of Hagia Sophia - of the Sophianic nature of
the world and the cosmic nature of Sophia. It is neither heaven nor earth,
but foe vault of heaven above the earth. We perceive here neither God

man, but divinity, foe divine veil thrown over the world. How true was
our ancestors feeling in this temple, how right they were in saying that
they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth! Indeed they
were neither in heaven nor on earth, they were in Hagia Sophia - between
foe two: this is foe of Platos philosophical intuition."

'Peot. Sergii Bulgakov, A vtobiograficheskie Zam etki, Paris: Y M C A -Press, 9 9 ,

9 4 -9 5 (B nglish translation by N atalie Duddington and James Pain in A B ulgakov
A nthology. Sergius B ulgakov 1 8 7 1 -1 9 4 4 , edited by Jam es Pain 1
N icolas Zernov,
London: SPCK, 1976, 1 3 -1 4 ).

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ANDREW LOUTH

Sophia, for Bulgakov, functions like Florovskys creative Word,

which is hardly surprising, given that the biblical roots of Bulgakovs
sophiology are to be found in ?roverbs 8, which speaks of the role of
W isdom in creation, the one who was with him fitting all together,
the one in whom he took delight (Prov. 8:30, LXX).
The second point to notice is that Bulgakov and Florovsky both
appeal to Gregory Palamas. This is explicit in Florovskys Greature
and creaturehood,^ while throughout his major trilogy On Godmanhood and the Divine Sophia, Bulgakov frequently remarks that his
sophiology can be justified by reference to Palamas doctrine of the
divine energies. There are, in fact, a couple of striking passages in
Palamas where he refers to the realm o f the energies (or activities) of
God, or his powers, , as , in-between: If you take
away what is in between toe u n ^rticip ated and the participants, you
distance us from God, and make out of what binds together in the middie a chasm great and unpassable between Him and the generation and
arrangement of what has come into being ('Triads III.2.24); There
is something in between what has come toto being and that impartiepable beyond-beingness, not one only, but m an y ... (!Triads 111.2.25).
The energies and powers of God, which are many, form an in-between
realm between God and the creatures, for Palamas, and that in-between
relates us to God, brings him close.
Florovsky admits something in-between, but is reluctant to develop
it - we shall come back to that. In Bulgakov, with ^
^ justification
from Palamas, there is an in-between realm, constituted for him by the
Hivine Wisdom, Sophia. W here all agree is in wanting to work out
a doctrine of creation that preserves the freedom of both God and the
creature - part o f the meaning o f creation ex nihilo for Florovsky (and
Zizioulas) - without separating them, without depriving the created
order of God, of his indwelling presence. To explore this, we need to
be able to say something about this in-between realm.
1 started by raising the question o f the in-between in general terms,
as a concern of any religious way of thinking, and suggested some of
the ways in which toe in-between realm is considered in Plato, in particular, pointing to his doctrine of the Forms and of daimons. Let us
12 S ee Florovsky, C reation a n d R edem ption , 67.

THEOLOGY OFTHE N -BE e e N

now 100^ more direetly at Christianity and see what sense of the inbetween there is there. There is plenty to consider when we think of
sueh an in-between realm: angels, saints, Mary, the Mother of God,
the very notion of prayer and intercession, graee, the sacraments o f the
Church, icons - all these function as an in-between realm, in terms
of which we explore our relationship with God; we might add to this
conceptual structures such as the doctrine of analogy, analoga entis,
in Thomism, and, of course, the distinction between G ods essence
and energies in Palamite theology, and certainly political notions both the Byzantine notion of the Emperor as imitator of the Creator
Word of God, and the Western medieval development of the Papacy,
are attempts to negotiate the in-between realm that relates God and
human society. Above all there is Christ, who is him self our peace,
who has made both one, breaking down the middle wall of partition
(Eph. 2:14), our great high priest, who has passed into the heavens
(Heb. 4:14), to take just two images from the New Testament. W hat
strikes me, looking at this list, is how contentious all these issues have
been amongst Christians. Grace, which always heals what is weak and
fills up what is lacking, has been a constant cause of division, from the
Pelagian controversy in the West in the fifth century, through the later
Middle Ages when concepts of created grace and uncreated grace
are alleged to have separated East and West, to the Reformation, where,
to the Protestants, the very idea of grace was called in (question by what
they held to be a very cluttered in-between. There seems to be a constant struggle between those who negotiate the in-between with ease, if
not enthusiasm, delighting in the prayers of the saints, the sacraments
of the Church, icons and the protection o f the M other of God, and others who are suspicious of all this and want to identify grace exclusively
with Christ, and Christ alone. (It is interesting to note how Florovsky
reaches for some of the slogans of the Reformation in his opposition
to Bulgakov.) I would suggest that one o f the strengths of Bulgakovs
sophiology is the way in which it seems to enable him to explore the
realm of the in-between - the doctrine of the Church, sacraments, the
Mother of God, icons, with a freedom which is impressive.
There is, however, one point of Er Florovskys I want to recall in
conclusion. 1 noted that his presentation o f the essence-energies distinction is focused on Christ in a way that is not always the case: the

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ANDREW LOUTH

powers through which God is manifest in the world are, according to

Florovskys interpretation of Athanasios, the powers of the Word who
became incarnate. we follow that up, that suggests that we should see
the essence-energies distinction not primarily as a philosophical doctrine, as it is usually presented, but as something that flows from the
presence of the Creator Logos in his creation, a presence fulfilled in
the Incarnation, a presence that is not just a m et^hysical immanence,
but a presence that restores the disintegration and disharmony we find
in the cosmos as a result of humans failing in their role as microcosm.
Does not this suggest that the realm o f the in-between is to be seen as
something established by Christ in his Incarnation and the ?aschal mytery, rather than something independent into which Christ has to be fitted? Put like that, the whole realm o f the in-between is established and
can be explored with confidence, so that exploring the role of angels,
the intercession of the M other of God and the saints, the nature of the
Sacraments, and especially the Divine Liturgy, Icons, and also issues
that are not often explicitly thought o fin this context, like the role of the
intellect in prayer (central for any understanding of prayer in the Byzantine tradition, which owes so much to Evagrios), where, 1 suspect, the
two models we started with - the s ^ itu ^ -m a te ria l division and the
u re a te d -c re a te d division - grate against each other in some kind of
way: all this is not thought of as some sort of alternative to Christ, but
rather established by Dim. And similarly for philosophical and political ways of negotiating the in-between. Indeed, one might reflect that,
rooted in Christ, the ideas that concern the in-between have concrete
and personal reality, and are saved from being merely philosophical
theories - as the essence/energies distinction is often presented -
mythological tales - the fate of sophiology in some thinkers, not, in
my view, with Bulgakov, but palpably so in Solovev.
I want to close w ith a long quotation from Gregory Palamas:
Since the Son of God, in his ineffable love for mankind, has not only
united Bis divine hypostasis to our nature, and taking a body with a rational soul, has appeared on earth and lived among men; but, more that this splendid a miracle! - Be unites himself to the human hypostases themselves, and mingling Himself with every believer by the communion of
his holy body, becomes one body with us and makes us into a temple of

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THEOLOGY O F TH EIN-BETWEEN

his whole Godhead; for the fullness of the Godhead dwells eorporeally
in him; how then should he not enlighten the souls of those who partake
worthily, surrounding them with light through the divine splendour of his
body which is in us, just as his light shone on the bodies of the disciples on
Thabor? It is true that then the body that possessed the source of the light
of grace was not yet mingled with our bodies; it enlightened from outside
those who approached worthily and caused the light to enter their souls
through the sight of their eyes. But today it is mingled with us, it dwells
in us and, naturally, it enlightens our souls from within... One alone can
see God; that is, Christ. We must be united with Christ - and how close
a union it is! - in order to see God.13

Summary: All religious systems, and most philosophical systems, are

concerned with negotiating the relationship between the world in which
we live with its instability and imperfection and some kind ofultim ate
that transcends these qualities, bn doing so, most
/ these attempts
make.some use ofsom e category o fthe in-between demons, angels,
or conceptual structures that mediate between the provisional and the
absolute (e.g., P latos r a ). The great monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and slam - all hold to the doctrine o f
creation ex nihilo, that created the universe out ofnothing. This
might seem to make any notion o fth e in-between impossible, as the
law
/ the excluded middle rules out any being neither created nor
uncreated. Nevertheless, most Christian worldviews (and the same
is
? o f many Jewish Muslim worldviews) make room fo r some
notion
/ the in-between, and provoke reactions that try eliminate it. The rest o fth e paper discusses one example o f such a com
troversy: the sophiological controversy in twentieth-century Russian
thought, in which Fr Sergii Bulgakovs sophiology was opposed by
Fr Georges Florovsky. In this paper, the nature o fthis disagreement is
analysed, and reconciliation is proposed in which Christ, the man, is understood embrace the uncreated/created /

?,making
possible, as Bulgakov sees more clearly than Florovsky, the notion
/
an in-between, populated by Sophia, but also angel, the Mother /
, .
aims, sacraments, and other form s ofm ediation that do not con

c.

13 Quoted from a unedited text provided by Fr John M eyendorff in

M ller and
G. Philips, The Theology o fG r a c e a n d the (E cum enical M ovem ent, London: M owbray, 196 ], 3 4 -3 5 (I havent tracked it down in Palam as works yet).

235

ANDREW LOUTH

flict with, diminish, Christs mediation, but are rather established

by it.
Keywords: Sophiology - Russian Religious Thought - mediation creation ex nihilo

236


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