Musings from Bulgakov’s Holy Grail

I had this book on my amazon wish list for over a year. It is proving to be everything I hoped it would be.

Bulgakov argues that when Longinus’ spear pierced Christ’s side, the blood and water imparted a mode of Christ’s humanity to the earth and in a real sense, the earth becomes the Holy Grail, for it caught the blood of Christ. This is noteworthy because it helps solve the antinomy of Christ being with his disciples “always” while remaining in bodily form at the right hand of the Father.

This is not Nestorianism, for Nestorianism posited a duality of the hypostases in Christ, not a duality of the human nature of Christ.

The Holy Grail is not the Eucharist. The Eucharist, while a mystery, is not hidden from the Church. The Holy Grail (whether in reality or in legend) is hidden from the general eye. As I understand Bulgakov, I think he is saying that the “Holy Grail” dissolves the barrier between heaven and earth. It transports nature into paradise and makes it a “holy flesh” (44).

This can explain the “holy sites” found throughout Christendom (I am not referring to pilgrimages et al; that’s another question). I refer to the places that seem like an aperture into the next dimension, paradise. The English spiritual tradition is particularly noted (cf especially Celtic Christianities). Earlier Irish theologians called this “thin space,” where the veil between heaven and earth is quite thin or non-existent. John Milbank refers to the possibility of could be other “beings” within different folds of our reality. He points to the early Irish theologians for examples,

Recently Celtic scholar John Carey has shown how perfectly orthodox Irish poet-theologians of the very early Middle Ages contrsued the Celtic gods as semi-fallen angels or else as unfallen human beings still mysteriously present in our world, as well as in some cases as evil demons (the more usual option elsewhere). Indeed, few people up till the seventeenth century were so naive as to suppose that Venus simply “does not exist,” while the resurrected Jesus simply “does exist.” People in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance much more tended to acknowledge different levels of reality: for residually surviving gods, for angels, and for God himself

Milbank, “Alternative Protestantisms.”

While many university professors laugh at this, this was common parlance until the 18th century (and to embarrass some Reformed folks, Luther believed that his local forests had goblins or demons in it–and Luther was probably right). Milbank writes again,

I have always insisted, after St Paul, that death as well as sin is an intruder upon the original creation and that, after the fall, sinister cosmic forces became (literally) in charge of the world.

Milbank, Foreword to Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 17. Of course, Christ’s death and resurrection qualifies the degree to which this is now true. But I am trying to highlight while even though the Creator/creature distinction is true (I’ve never denied it), the universe is not simply “flat” creation over here with “God” somewhere way up there. It simply cannot be this way. I have to ask, if that is true, what connects God to his creation? Can God interact with his creation? Even better, how (can?) creation participate in God? I think this is what Milbank and others mean when he speaks of “a suspended creation.”

Milbank,

If Christianity refuses “the conflict of the gods,” it does not refuse “other gods” (sometimes spoken of by the church fathers as synonymous with angels) intimated by other traditions, simply because these can in no way impinge upon, but rather confirm, the sovereignty of the One God who is beyond mere oneness and manyness…

Likewise, following the great Russians, RO increasingly insists that the Triune God is the God who in himself brings about the other to God who must also be “created” God (Milbank is following Bulgakov’s reference to Proverbs 8’s “created Sophia;” he is not saying that God is a creature or finite; cf Eriugena). In this case, as the Wisdom literature of the Bible suggests, the gift of God to creation must first be received psychically (by angels and whatever psychic powers sustain the entire cosmos in being) and then to a lesser degree by human beings