Status Updates From The Bride of the Lamb

Bulgakov rejects the Thomistic/Aristotelian notion of God as a "first cause" of the world on the grounds that this ultimately swallows up both creaturely freedom and the world's ontological reality. God doesn't "cause" the world any more than He "causes" Himself, because the world is nothing other than the divine essence posited in creaturely becoming. The world is a living icon, not a manufacture.

“The lower a given genus stands on the organic ladder of life, the more fully it will actualize itself ... In contrast, the highest form of creation, namely, man...is most marked by imperfection and limitation. Therefore, man has a history...attest[ing] to man’s imperfection in every given epoch, as well as to his being called to perfection through self-creation...the high calling of the children of God.”

“In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge creates the world while contemplating ideas, that is, the Divine Sophia, out of different mixtures of being with nonbeing, that is, within the limits of the creaturely world.... This demiurge is, of course, not God, but man; and this image defines the place of man in the world as a creaturely god, who creates not out of nothing, but who creates...the creaturely Sophia.”

“Freedom does not arise and does not begin. It is beginningless and genuinely bears the image of God’s beginninglessness: creaturely freedom is in the image of divine freedom. This means that creaturely freedom is not created but is included in God’s creative act itself. In other words, creaturely freedom is not an object of creation, but creation itself, a divine-human creative act.”

"In creation...there can be nothing that does not have a seed, theme, or foundation in the Divine Sophia...[that] is new for God Himself. But, at the same time...there is nothing that is not new in its own way for the world...the entire being of the world bears the stamp of self-creativity."

Eternity (God) enters into infinity (creation), filling it with eternal life without abridging or annulling it.

(Prof wanted us to start on pg. 33.)