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God. Provider
Divine Providence with Regard to the World
In the works of
Fr. Sergei Bulgakov
Creator always maintains a relationship to creation
God is always the Creator;
that is, He creates creation and therefore has it for Himself. Therefore,
He always maintains a relationship to creation:
for creation, He is not only the Creator but also the Provider.
However, it is important to emphasize once again the difference between creation and providence. In creation, the world receives the determination of its being. In providence, this determination of its being, one and unalterable, is not renewed;
but that which was given once and for all is fulfilled and, so to speak, confirmed by God.
Nor does providence violate the divine sabbath, which corresponds to the fullness of creation in the Six Days. Rather, it imparts to the sabbath a durational, all-temporal, actual character.
God's providence toward creatures is accomplished by the power of sophianicity proper to them. But just as the world's creation has its principle in the Father,
"the Creator of heaven and earth,"
who creates the world by the Son and the Holy Spirit in Sophia, so also providential action with regard to the world is accomplished by the
"Almighty"
Father, through the Son and the Holy Spirit. …
Just as the world is created by the Holy Trinity in Sophia, so it is preserved by the Holy Trinity.
Creation is God's self-positing to extra-divine being
God is the Creator in His self-revelation for creation, but His own being in Himself as the Absolute lies beyond this distinction and is transcendent for the world. For creation God's own being is therefore felt as an absolute non (alpha privativum)
or supra (trans, hyper)
with respect to any ontic determination. Therefore, the very relation between God and the world, between Creator and Provider, is, first of all,
the Absolute's own self-determination, His revelation in Himself as divine Love.
But creation perceives this relation not with its creaturely originality, which is precreaturely and extra-creaturely nothing, a pure zero, absolute emptiness, but by the divine power implanted in it. In this sense, this relation is divinity's own life in Himself and
"outside"
Himself, as the Divine and the creaturely Sophia.
The creaturely Sophia is God's extra-divine life and being, that is, His life and being in creation.
All that is exists by God's power and, in this (but of course only in this and precisely in this)
sense, it is divine.
The world is a creaturely divinity, and creation is God's self-positing to extra-divine being.
Therefore, the world has in itself its own metaphysical elasticity. The world is correlated with God, no longer as a metaphysically empty place, or a pure nothing, but as the creaturely Sophia, as divine life that has issued into nothing and acquired an identity in its own extra-divine being, in the creaturely world.
Through this perversion, the world, despite the sophianic roots of its being, can resist the ways of God. It therefore requires protection and guidance. This guidance is accomplished by God through the service of the angels. Because of its blindness and elemental character, nonhypostatic or preconscious nature cannot have a direct relation with God. Its relation with God is accomplished through servant spirits, who by their proper nature are predestined precisely to this service. … Being open to divine inspirations, they are also conductors of natural energies, accomplishers of God's thought about creation. They implement the sophianic protection of creation;
and this is precisely what is called divine providence in nature.
See also
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