I have ventured again into high theology and philosophy by reading from St. Cyrill of Alexandria, and the, so far, 12 days of the Bulgakov Conference. I remember as a young child, through either a documentary or a movie recreation, being captivated by Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest. I totally got his motivation and the necessity and importance of successfully making it to the top even with the consequence of frostbite. It had to be done, I guess, because it was there. Thirty some odd years later, with adult pragmatism, I have been on the other side of thinking it vanity and recklessness to continue to do such a thing. Now making the trek seems almost touristy, copy-cat-ish, and full of selfish ambition which can lead to risking the lives of others, including rescue workers. I don’t think it needs to keep being done, but Hillary was different when I was a child. He somehow did need to do it, just as Columbus needed to sail off the edge of the world and Lewis and Clark needed to go up the Missouri river and find the Columbia River route to the west coast.

What to do with these places after they are revealed to the “civilized world”? And what about the Nepalese, Tibetans and “Indians” who already knew? Wiki just revealed that the British began to survey mountains in India in 1808 to learn the “the locations and names of the world’s highest mountains.” I wonder if they were inspired by Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 mapping of the American west? The same article says this about how “Everest” was chosen as its name,

“With the height now established, what to name the peak was clearly the next challenge. While the survey was anxious to preserve local names if possible (e.g., Kangchenjunga and Dhaulagiri were local names), Waugh argued that he was unable to find any commonly used local name. Waugh’s search for a local name was hampered by Nepal and Tibet being closed to foreigners at the time. Many local names existed, with perhaps the best known in Tibet for several centuries being Chomolungma, which had appeared on a 1733 map published in Paris by the French geographer D’Anville. However, Waugh argued that with the plethora of local names, it would be difficult to favour one specific name over all others. So, he decided that Peak XV should be named after George Everest, his predecessor as Surveyor General of India.^[6][9] He wrote:

I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel Sir George Everest to assign to every geographical object its true local or native appellation. But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, whose native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal. In the meantime the privilege as well as the duty devolves on me to assign…a name whereby it may be known among citizens and geographers and become a household word among civilized nations.^[10]

George Everest opposed the name suggested by Waugh and told the Royal Geographical Society in 1857 that Everest could not be written in Hindi nor pronounced by “the native of India”. Waugh’s proposed name prevailed despite the objections, and in 1865, the Royal Geographical Society officially adopted Mount Everest as the name for the highest mountain in the world.

The Tibetan name for Mount Everest is Chomolungma or Qomolangma (ཇོ་མོ་གླིང་མ, which means “Saint Mother”), and the Chinese transliteration is Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng (simplified Chinese: 珠穆朗玛峰; traditional Chinese: 珠穆朗瑪峰), which refers to Earth Mother; the Chinese translation is Shèngmǔ Fēng (simplified Chinese: 圣母峰; traditional Chinese: 聖母峰), which refers to Holy Mother. According to English accounts of the mid-19th century, the local name in Darjeeling for Mount Everest was Deodungha, or “Holy Mountain”.^[11]“

So, we are taught that we (westerners) have a right and a need to know (and then exploit, but that is another topic). My intention at the beginning of writing this was to compare how I feel reading the above mentioned works to experiencing oxygen deprivation at high altitudes. In fact I am taking a break right now to catch my breath with an article and a half still to go on the Bulgakov conference. But the issue of “needing to know” is also an important one in dealing with the Church Fathers and Bulgakov. In fact this post, of the many, deals with that very issue, but first let me say that the other posts deal with the specific assertions made by Bulgakov in both critical, and fascinated, value-finding ways.

I see the problems of a pre-incarnate Sophia who is a blend of the created and uncreated, and possibly not enough respect with proper humility shown regarding the created and uncreated, and not enough prerequisite focus on purification and repentance. I also see the gnostic element, and how prelest can result. Moscow was right to discount some of what Bulgakov said. But the risk-taker, explorer part of me still sees light in Bulgakov. Similar to Derrida, also criticized for his gnostic elements, Bulgakov invites us to open ourselves to the unknown. He is more positive though than Derrida, who was an atheist, in claiming the ability to know the unknown. The post I referenced in the previous paragraph, with this important message, [A disclaimer to our readers: We are not in the following dialogue discussing Sophia as an aspect of the Trinity, but Sophia in her creaturely dimension, created wisdom.], compares Sophia with important literary and philosophical aspects of western thought, while admitting that western theology really doesn’t have anything to compare it to. I have felt that western culture has been severely limited by its devisions, categorizations and segregations of the arts and sciences and thus our hearts with our heads, but that the reality in the human heart cannot be squelched, however frustrated by this division.

I’m running out of steam here, and feel inadequate to explain or summarize what the above writers have done with Bulgakov, maybe I’ll try to write what I think is important about St. Cyrill later as it is somewhat related, but I want to say that underneath the errors of Bulgakov, he does provide encouragement and oxygen to keep ascending the heights, as controversial as even undertaking that is. I feel that it is important to realize who we are created to be. I have allowed myself to be somewhat experimental, maybe even a bit too leap off the cliff to see if the angels will catch me. But what I appreciate about the post on day 10 is that I think we who call ourselves Christians have been sold an error that we have to choose between knowledge or love. This is a false dialectic that is explained much better by Joshua Delpech-Ramey than I can hope to. Like when studying St. Maximus, I have to really slow down and try to absorb this stuff, but I think it is good exercise.