Sergei Bulgakov:
Between Two Worlds in Sophia
Ruth Nares
St Chad’s College
M.A. in Theological Research
14, 947 words
June 20
Lenin was not a man given to acts of mercy or forgiveness, and it
is therefore, in the words of Nicholas Zernov, an ‘unsolved mystery’
why the former, in 1922, signed a decree for expulsion abroad for a
group of Russian intellectuals which included several leading
members of the religious renaissance, who consequently found
themselves quite literally shipped out of Russia.
1
It is possible, as Zernov comments,1 that in this unusual
decision flickered the last spark of humanism which Lenin probably
retained. Whatever the circumstances and motives were, the
consequences were momentous for Russia and the whole Church.
1
Nicholas Zernov,The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (,London: Darton
Longman & Todd, 1963), 327. (Hereafter referred to as Russian Religious Renaissance)
2
Lenin, the implacable enemy of the group, saved for
posterity some of Russia's most outstanding men who in their
personal history incorporated the heroic and tragic story of the
whole Order. Instead of banishing them to a slow death in a
concentration camp, he gave them a chance to express their
Christian convictions freely and make them known to the world at
large.2
Sergei Bulgakov, at the age of 51, was among these exiles.
In this dissertation it will only be possible to give in brief the
relevant backdrop to this event, to show to some degree the milieu and
context from which he came, which pertain both to his earlier and
later thought – insofar as to situate his work and outlook – with
specific regard to his exposition on Sophia, or Wisdom of God.
Throughout his earlier years, however there were certain
‘milestones’, which whilst being triggered in external ‘events’ (if they
can be called such, often in ostensibly ‘ordinary circumstances’ – one
was during a journey, another in a visit to an art gallery), were
profound (inner) spiritual experiences, one could say revelations – the
vision of which brought about a whole shift in consciousness, leading
to a new paradigmatic view. These experiences remained with
Bulgakov throughout his life, and one cannot overestimate their
significance and importance, in the way they shaped the very
foundations of his thought and world view. It is for this reason that
they will be set out here.
He was born in 1871, was the son of a priest and his own
2
Russian Religious Renaissance: 327-8. In the use of the word ‘Order’, Zernov is referring to the
Intelligentsia.
3
description probably speaks the most eloquently:
I was born in a priest's family, and the Levite blood of six
generations flowed in my veins. I grew up near the parish Church
of St Sergius, in the gracious atmosphere of its prayers and
within the sound of its bells. The aesthetic, moral and everyday
recollections of my childhood are bound up with the life of that
parish Church. Within its walls my heart rejoiced in prayer and
mourned the departed. Until I was an adolescent I was faithful to
my upbringing as a son of the Church. In my early adolescence,
during my first or second year at the Seminary, I went through a
religious crisis, painful but not tragic, which ended in my losing
religious faith for many many years... How did I come to lose my
faith? I lost it without noticing it myself. It occurred as something
self-evident and unavoidable when the poetry of my childhood
was squeezed out of my life by the prose of seminary education....
In losing religious faith I naturally and, as it were, automatically
adopted the revolutionary mood then prevalent among the
intelligentsia... [E]ven as a Marxist in a state of spiritual
barbarism, I always longed for religion and I was never indifferent
to faith.3
It was this highly formalised, closed system of theological
education that in a sense propelled him first into the preparatory
school at Yalets and in 1890 to Moscow University's Faculty of Law.
Although more at home in the humanities and philosophy, Bulgakov
saw the law and social sciences as providing a better medium and
instrument for changing society. Completing his undergraduate and
Master's degrees in 1894 and 1897 respectively, he was invited to
teach there as a lecturer and from 1898 to 1900 went to Germany for
postgraduate studies.
It was during these frenetic and purposeful student days - some
3
‘Autobiographical Notes’, in A Bulgakov Anthology, Eds. James Pain and Nicholas Zernov. (London
SPCK 1976), 3.
4
time in 1895 - Bulgakov had a profound transcendent experience,
prefiguring in a sense a return to faith, and finding echoes in later
experiences. (It may well have coloured his perspective on the agragian
policy of his later thesis, and presages likewise a deep personal crisis):
It was dusk. We were riding through the southern steppe,
basking in the honeyed odors of grass and hay, golden in the rays
of the serene sunset. In the distance we could see the blue hills
of the Caucasus. This was the first time I had seen them. And as
I gazed greedily into the unfolding hills, breathing in air and light,
I received nature's revelation. My soul had, although with a dull,
aching pain, become accustomed to seeing nature as nothing
more than a dead, arid desert wearing a mask of beauty; my soul
could not reconcile itself to a nature without God. And then, at
that moment, my soul began to tremble in unease and happiness:
what if there is? ... if it is not a desert, , not lies, not a mask,
not death, but if He is there, the divine and loving Father with His
forgiveness and His love... My heart pounded to the rhythm of the
moving train as we rushed towards this fading gold and these
graying mountains.4
These ‘tremors in his soul’ could be said to graphically illustrate
an experience of not simply ‘a crack between two worlds’ but a
collision between two world views. Nature in the utilitarian Marxist
outlook, there to be exploited, over and against a beauty that was not
a mask but literally imbued with sophianic beauty, the Sophia that
was there “before the creation of the world.” An experience therefore,
that shook the foundation of his being.
4
Cited in Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, London, (Cornell University Press, 1997),
39.
5
Three years later, in the spring of 1898 - a few months after
marrying Elena Tokmakova, on 14 January, he paid a visit to the
Zwinger gallery in Dresden "to do my duty as a tourist. My knowledge
of European painting was negligible."5It became the scene of another
spiritual revelation. "The eyes of the Queen of Heaven pierced my
soul. I cried joyful yet bitter tears." The Madonna's eyes, the depth of
their "purity and conscious sacrifice" made him dizzy, and "ice melted
on my heart, and some kind of knot in my life was resolved."6 "I ran
there everyday to pray and weep in front of the Virgin, and few
experiences in my life were more blessed than those unexpected
tears."7
This second experience then came not from nature and the
sophianic beauty of creation, but from a true encounter with the
Mother of God.8
These moments, whilst of prime and lasting significance were
not representative of Bulgakov's time in Germany. Having begun his
journey on a waive of enthusiasm (“culture”, comfort, Social
Democracy!), two years later, he returned home from abroad “having
lost firm soil under my feet, my faith in my ideals broken.  I worked
5
Cited in Michael Plekon, Living Icons, Notre Dame, Indiana (University of Notre Dame Press,
2002), 36.
6
The Cross and the Sickle, 44
7
Living Icons, 36. Cf. also Fr. Andrew Louth, ‘Sergii Bulgakov and the Mother of God’, St
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly,
8
(2005) 1 & 2, 145-163.
Paul Evdokimov, theologian and student of Bulgakov in Paris, was later to write: “Sergius Bulgakov
considered it to be his particular task to constantly remind others of the dogmatic content embodied
in the veneration of the Theotokos.” Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World, Crestwood,
NY (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press: 1994), 223. This reifies what became one of Bulgakov’s
fundamental tenets: the holding together of dogma and experience.
6
stubbornly with my head, posing ‘problem’ after ‘problem, but
internally I no longer had any means to believe, to live to love.”
9
He
did not find his meetings with leaders of the German and Austrian
Social Democratic movements inspiring, and found the literary level of
German politics far inferior to the russian Novoe slovo. Even with
meeting respected scholars, such as Stammler, "produced a nasty
impression - such a slavish thirst for acclaim, such self-deification,
that it makes me nauseous."
10
One can also note here, however, that
Bulgakov was fulfilling a pattern common it seems among the Russian
intelligentsia abroad in this era, which he acknowledges:
9
10
Cited in C. Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, London (Cornell University Press: 1997), 40
The Cross and the Sickle, 40
7
Fascination with the West, to the point of denying
everything Russian, cooling toward the West, while not destroying
the full acknowledgement of its cultural power, faith in the future
of Russia and work for this future... provides, as it were, a
schema of the normal development of the soul of a Russian
intelligent, and in the regularity of these phases lies a deep moral
necessity.11
Catherine Evtuhov writes that Bulgakov's evolution was
punctuated by sharp shifts in worldview, by radical turning points from Marxism to idealism, from idealism to religious philosophy, from
religious philosophy to church proper and then to theology. "The early
moments in the Caucasus and in Dresden established a pattern for
these crises or conversions: each such shift was presaged by a fleeting
vision, a transcendent moment in which a new approach to the world
was born.”12 This 'new approach' as she writes infers a somewhat
startling turnaround, and I would argue more that these moments
served to initiate a slower, gestational process at work almost
unconsciously, involving a long and often painful struggle. As we have
seen above, when he returned to Russia in 1900, he was a state of
spiritual crisis. The foundations of his Marxist worldview were
cracking, yet these moments of revelation did not yet translate into or
provide alternatives.
11
The Cross and the Sickle, 43
12
The Cross and the Sickle, 45
8
It is not within the bounds of this essay to catalogue or
comment in detail on the whole evolution of Bulgakov's thought or his
achievements, except in tracing his religious ‘renaissance’ along with
the idea of Sophia and her functions. However as we have seen so far,
these revelatory moments were turning points, and can be said to
undergird his ensuing spiritual and philosophical direction. The point
to be made here is that his understanding is experiential rather than
theoretical, and he was to build on Soloviev's insistence that “it is in
our inner experience we find the true essence of things". His rendering
of Soloviev's argument hence became more than a philosophical
criticism, and as Evtuhov points out "it was a call to arms, an appeal
to his fellows to abandon their rigid vision of historical progress and
ask themselves what they should do for the good of humanity."13
His 1900 study, Capitalism and Agriculture,for which he was not
granted his doctorate, put him at odds with orthodox Marxist theory,
but it opened a faculty position at the Kiev Polytechnic Insitute, and
the five years he spent there was pivotal for his political and
philosophical thought, working with Piotr Struve and Nicolai Berdyaev,
(even though, unlike them, he continued to proclaim a commitment to
socialism). However the early 1900's see Bulgakov is shifting his
ground in terms of the very questions he is asking. He discovered
Dostoevsky (despised & little read amongst the 'progressive'
intelligentsia until the turn of the century, with the exception of
Soloviev), and his lectures posed questions on the struggles of
13
The Cross and the Sickle, 59. Whilst Idealism was a passing stage for Bulgakov, it was more of
an attitude than a ‘philosophical position’. It meant to him an acknowledgement of ethical problems
(encompassing a moral stance) in which the sanctity and dignity of human beings were affirmed,
over and above belief in progress and the ultimate ends of history.
9
conscience, personal responsibility and questions of good and evil and
the goal of human existence- in a word - ethics. This very much
prefigures his later basis of ethics as a call to active co-operation, on a
larger scale, with the sophianic transfiguration of the world, and the
sense of human vocation.
It was not until 1908 that he actually returned to the
sacramental life of the church, at the hermitage of St Zossima. He had
gone as a companion of a friend. "Secretly I hoped I might meet God.
But my determination deserted me and while I was at Vespers I
remained cold and unfeeling." He left the church and walked "in deep
distress" towards the guesthouse,
"seeing nothing around me, and suddenly found myself in
front of the elder's cell. I had been led there. I intended to go in
another direction but absent-mindedly made a wrong turn in the
confusion of my distress. A miracle had happened to me. I
realized it then without any doubt. The father, seeing his prodigal
son, ran to meet me. I heard from the elder that all human sin
was like a drop of water in comparison to the ocean of divine love.
I left him,pardoned and reconciled, trembling and in tears.
Feeling myself returned as on wings within the precincts of the
Church. .... The next morning at the Eucharist I knew that I was
a participant in the Covenant, that our Lord hung on the cross
and shed his blood for me and because of me....14
These milestones to his conversion were so crucial to his understanding of the meaning of his life that Bulgakov included them,
14
Cited in Living Icons 36-37. It was also around this time that Bulgakov became friends with
Pavel Florensky. (Cf. Rosenthal, ‘The Nature and Function of Sophia’, in Russian Religious Thought,
Eds. Judith Deuitsch Kornblatt Richard F. Gustafson. Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin Press, ,
1996). 157. Cf. also Andrew Louth, ‘Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God’, St Vladimir’s
Theological Quarterly
(2005)
10
anonymously, at the beginning of his 1917 study Unfading Light, and
also, anonymously, an account of the death of his son Ivashechka, at
the age of three.15 Bulgakov was extremely reticent with respect to his
personal life, but as Evtuhov notes he spoke and wrote of this
particular event over and over in letters to friends. Ivashechka’s
funeral brought another revelation of the existence of God
 my lovely, my pure boy! As we carried you up the steep
hill, and then followed the hot and dusty road, we suddenly
turned off into a shady park, as if we had entered into the Garden
of Eden;... the church, as lovely as you, looked at us with its
colored windows as it waited for you. I had not known it before,
and, like a miraculous vision, the church stood before us... Your
mother fell crying "The sky has opened!" She thought she was
dying and saw heaven... And the sky had opened, it had
witnessed our apocalypse.
15
Michael Plekon is mistaken here in calling him his eldest son, he was in fact his second son.
11
I felt, almost saw, our rise to heaven. Pink and white
oleanders surrounded you like the flowers of paradise,, waiting to
bend over you, to guard your coffin So this was it! Everything
became clear, ... We thought that events took place only below, in
the heat, and didn't know that these heights existed, and were, it
turned out, waiting for us... And far below, far away we left the
heat, suffering, pain, death - and really that was not important,
for there is this, and it is now open to us.16
Evtuhov cites excerpts from several letters he later wrote to
friends, of the time at his son’s bedside when, he wrote, he had never
before experienced such agony, although the hour of death "was so
wonderful, God's presence so tangible", the revelations by his coffin
"cannnot be compared with anything... and my entire life was
illumined by this light, all the corners of my sinful soul, so that I was
as if blinded by this light..."17
The chronicling of these very personal above revelatory
experiences may present a one-sided or diminished view in terms of
Bulgakov’s intense involvement in practical politics and tireless
journalistic activities, since he occupied the chair of Political Economy
at the Institute of Commerce in Moscow University from 1906 to 1911
(when he resigned in protest against Government interference in the
university's affairs.) He also served as representative (for the Orel
district, as an independent Christian Socialist) for the Second Duma in
16
The Cross and the Sickle, 134. Evtuhov states that this event was “the nearest Bulgakov ever
came to a full blown mystical experience.”
17
The Cross and the Sickle, 135. This boy was in Bulgakov’s words “entirely extraordinary”,(134)
and he always remembered that he was born on Christmas Eve “when the bells were ringing for the
liturgy.” He took this identification further in writing to a friend, “The messenger of heaven has risen
to heaven.” Ivashechka’s death as Evthov writes, became for Bulgakov “a direct and personal
experience of Christ’s Resurrection.” 135.
12
1907. The elections to this duma acquired an almost apocalyptic
aura, as an article Bulgakov addressed to the Russian clergy implies,
remind them that “an important historical moment is drawing near”:
Wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing, or even undisguised,
strive to make you the tools of their unclean aims, and by the
same token, enemies of your people, your flock, the poor, hungry,
and helpless. The members of that pogrom-terrorist organization,
the Union of the Russian People, will inundate you (and are
already doing so), with masked or direct exhortations Do not
believe them, however highly they may be placed, for in them
speaks the “prince of darkness”.18
Bulgakov had expressed his expectations of the elections with
even greater force in Narod, where he set up a context of perverted
patriotism, censorship, surveillance, mistrust, repression. Thus the
reason for that historical crisis is that
we have rejected the path of truth, which is also the path of
law, that we have abandoned those moral and juridical principles
on which the contemporary state is based, that we, considering
our-selves a Christian state, have entered onto the path of
political Islam and Turkish despotism.19
If the government was not restored to a legal basis
an abyss will open before us, we stand before the beginning
of a revolution the likes of which history has not yet known and
before which the horrors of the French Revolution and those we
have so far experienced will turn out to be only the precursors of
approaching evils.20
18
The Cross and the Sickle, 119. This was in December 1906
19
The Cross and the Sickle,119 (April 1906)
20
The Cross and the Sickle,119
13
One wonders whether Bulgakov himself knew how prophetic his
words were, in his expression of the pervasive sense of approaching
evil.21 His voice was also one of many to call for a council of the
Orthodox Church to supplement the new secular representative body
(freely elected). As it was, and as Bulgakov opined, “the voice of the
Church was practically not heard from the podium in the Second
Duma”.22 His experience of Stolypin’s “revolution from above” was not
for him mere political defeat - the closing of the Second Duma
signalled to him the futility of politics in general. In the post-1907
political arena he was again between two worlds, which appeared to
him a naked conflict of “reactionary black-hundredism” and “the left
parties’ intelligentsia psychology”.”23 He remained an elector for the
Duma but declined to submit his own candidacy. In describing his
disillusionment in politics in 1913 he commented, “I believe that
Russia will be saved not by new parties but by new people, who must
come to replace this transitional period. I am far from optimism and
inclined to deep anxiety over Russia’s fate. But I believe in the great
calling and great future of Russia.”24 I cite the above to give a flavour
of the backdrop against which Bulgakov’s thought is forged.
21
He was equally prophetic in 1909 when he predicted the coming fratricidal struggle among the
Russian radicals after their victory over the Empire. He singled out one article of their creed as
being fraught with the greatest danger – the cult of the hero-saviour. He wrote in Vekhi that
because there could be no room for more than one saviour, all rivals must be annihilated. Only by
destroying all competitors could a dictator maintain his claims to be the sole benefactor of mankind.
Cf. Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance, 309-330. Cf. also Rowan Williams, ‘Heroism and
the Spiritual Struggle’ in Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Political Theology, 55-112.
22
The Cross and the Sickle, 124
23
The Cross and the Sickle, 127. Cf also Rowan Williams in Sergii Bulgakov, 59-61
24
The Cross and the Sickle, 127-8.
14
Overall we return to Bulgakov's insistence on the need for a
kind of personal conversion, among the intelligentsia - rediscovery
of the disciplines of personal growth and maturation through a
deepened moral and spiritual self-awareness. This as Williams
comments “may sound quietist, or it may speak of the necessary
conditions for any serious and reflective public engagement.”25 It
was for Bulgakov podvizhnichestvo, the spiritual struggle, the
podvig of Russian tradition in the ascetic sense, (counteracting
the liabilities of ‘heroic maximalism’), which for him was anything
but a passive or world renouncing ascesis.
25
Sergii Bulgakov, 67
15
It was during this period that Bulgakov immersed himself
in re-reading Soloviev. Where he had been attracted to the general
characteristics of wholeness and a religious world view in
Soloviev’s philosophy, his new reading engaged him in genuine
philosophic analysis and developing more specific ideas. "Instead
of seeing in Soloviev a set of instructions for the intelligentsia as
he had done in 1903, he immersed himself so completely in
Soloviev's philosophy that it became an inseparable part of
himself.”26 (We will see later in this essay how he viewed this in
his latter period in Paris)
This new reading posed problems that in a sense defined the
structure of Bulgakov's own interests, and he believed that Soloviev
had found a necessary resolution to the "two nightmares" of
contemporary philosophy - "mechanistic materialism" and idealistic
subjectivism". Bulgakov argued that modern philosophy suffered from
the alienation of subject and object (introduced by Enlightenment
rationalism), which led to unsatisfactory approaches to materialism,
which turned the world into a "soulless machine". Meanwhile idealism
avoided the problem by retreating into abstract theory and refusing to
make contact with the external world. Finding a solution to these
approaches was to become a central axis of Bulgakov's thought.
Is it possible to have a worldview on whose basis one might
be a materialist - that is, conceive oneself as in real unity with
nature and humankind - yet at the same time affirm the
26
The Cross and the Sickle, 137. It was also in the same year (March 1909) that the sensational
collection of articles Vekhi appeared. (Founded by Bulgakov and Gershenzon. Its other contributors
were Berdiaev, Struve and Frank.) By August he was so taken up in his own personal tragedy that
he could not attend to Vekhi’s second edition, which he delegated to Gershenzon.
16
independence of the human spirit with its particular needs, its
postulates about supernatural, divine being, illuminating and
making sense of natural life?27
27
Cited in The Cross and the Sickle, 138, from Sergei Bulgakov, ‘Priroda v filosofii V. Solovieva’.
17
Soloviev's image of nature as a living breathing entity sketched
at least an outline in answer, and Bulgakov elaborates on it: "The fate
of nature, suffering and awaiting its liberation, is henceforth connected
with the fate of man, who 'subdues' it.”28 It was in following on from
this, that Bulgakov for the first time picked up Soloviev's discussion of
Sophia, the Divine Wisdom - which was to become not only the
cornerstone not only for his Philosophy of Economy, but worldview and
later theology. It also becomes clear that the mystical experience
accompanying his son's death and his new reading of Soloviev had an
integrative function. The scattered remnants of his turn-of-the
century worldview were recrystallising in a new pattern. His 'insights'
(if one may term them such) at Ivashechka's funeral, as Evthov
comments, centre on a specifically Christian and classically Russian
image - the lovely, jewel-like church set in a drab countryside. His
thought of this period sought its roots in Russian history, Russian
culture, Russian philosophy and Russian life, and a preoccupation
emerges of the essential religiousness of the Russian people and
society.29
This as we have seen is contextual in his own rapprochement
with Christianity, and disillusion with both “the West” and with
politics; the issue for him now was the attitude of Christianity towards
the world. Belief in science had attained the level of religion, yet
28
The Cross and the Sickle, 138
29
It would also be true to say that Bulgakov’s search for a new social philosophy was part of
a broader movement that historians tend to summarize as the ‘revolt against positivism ’
(coinciding with European contemporaries). But it is also true as Evtuhov writes, that he
spoke for “an entire generation of Russian intellectuals”, figures such as “Dmitri
Merezhkovsky,  Berdiaev, Petr Struve and Semen Frank”. (& v IMPportant see p 9 – fits
with later ‘proposals’. )
18
because science did not (and could not) address the problems of
religion, its ‘elevation’ would provide false direction for humanity.
Both Bulgakov and his friend Pavel Florensky believed that overcoming
secular ideologies entailed developing a renovated Orthodoxy which
would sanctify life in this world and endow every human being with
dignity, and human activity with meaning. Such a project required
considerations of the ontological foundations and the nature of both
Orthodoxy and creation, which led them both to Sophia.
Creation is crucial to understanding Bulgakov’s sophiology, and
he devotes almost the first half of The Bride of the Lamb to a treatise on
the nature of created beings and the relationship between Creator and
creation, with specific aspects of creatio ex nihilo. This is sketched out
– somewhat more crudely in The Unfading Light:
In structuring for itself a world that will be external to itself,
the Godhead ipso facto establishes between itself and the world a
kind of frontier; and this frontier, which by definition stands
between God and the world, creator and creature, is neither the
one nor the other, but somehow quite distinct, simultaneously
itself united with and divided from both God and creation (a kind
of metaxu in Plato’s sense). This angel of creation, the beginning
of the ways of God, is ‘holy wisdom’, Sophia. It is the loving of
love.30
In looking at the whole ‘problematic’ of creation in the Bride of
the Lamb however, Bulgakov transfers the question to another plane –
moving as he calls it from the static to the dynamic. To reach this
point he provides a whole vista spanning both Plato and Aristotle in
whom, he asserts, we find ‘Divinity without God’. In Plato, where the
30
‘The Unfading Light’ (excerpt), in Sergii Bulgakov, ed. Rowan Williams, T&T Clarke, Edinburgh
1999, 134.
19
createdness of the world finds no role in his ideas – the ideas ‘hover in
the sophianic photosphere’ above the world in eternal Divine Sophia,
and are ‘duplicated’ as it were in the empirical world31. We find no
answer to overcome this ‘ontological haitus’, and Platonism remains
‘only an abstract sophiology’, which slides into idealism or monism.
Aristotle on the other hand transposed these ideas from the domain of
the Divine Sophia to the domain of the creaturely Sophia, in a system
of ‘sophiological cosmology’. ‘God’ (the Prime Mover) and the world
merge to the point of indistinguishability, where in the final analysis
Aristotle equates God with the world. Sophiology can be justified not
in itself but “only in connection with theology” [his emphasis], when the
former occupies its proper place in the latter, “but does not supplant
it.” At the same time, ancient religion and philosophy attested “so
powerfully to the sophianicity of the world, that their contribution has
yet to be illuminated in its full significance. In a word, Plato and
Aristotle were “both right and both wrong in their onesidedness of
thesis and antithesis.” As he writes elsewhere:
31
Bulgakov writes that the attempt to ‘complete Platonism’ with creation by a demiurge, (in the
Timaeus), is ‘like a torso without a face and head’.
20
It is necessary to avoid both the Scylla of pantheism, in which the
world is in danger of sinking in the ocean of divinity, and the
Charybdis of abstract cosmism, in which the world’s being loses
its connectedness with divinity.32
32
The Bride of the Lamb, 34.
21
We may recall here Tertullian’s well-known and querulous statement
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” - in which the issues of
matter and spirit, transcendence and immanence, history and eternity,
and creator and creature – are implicit. However, notwithstanding the
solid groundwork laid down by Irenaeus, positing the freedom of
God,33 taken up by Athansius’ moulding of a central point that God’s
Will and his nature are separate, Bulgakov questions the idea of
contingency. He concludes that while patristic and scholastic
doctrines converge in the necessity of accepting the paradigms or ideas
of creaturely being in God, they are incomplete because of a lack of
sophiology, with an “accidental” character attributed to the ideas. “
patristics affirmed only the general notion of the creation of the world
by God’s free will, in contradistinction to the necessity that reigns in
divinity’s internal self-determinations (such, for example, is St.
Athanasius the Great’s statement of the question in his christology).”34
Bulgakov continues in this vein, stating that to define the real
significance of these ideas one must conceive them as divine life, “the
self-revelation of God in Divine Sophia, or as the divine world, which
exists in God for God. Only from this conception can one obtain a
foundation for creation.”35 Without this, he states, “theology is
doomed to  occasionalism in both the East and the West.  We
find an anthropomorphism in the acceptance of this dishonourable
doctrine of (and even opposition) in God between necessity and
freedom.”36 These latter are permissible, he writes, only for creaturely
33
In that he cannot be limited by the material, cf. Genesis 2:19 and Adv. Haer. IV 20, 1-2_
34
Bride of the Lamb, 29
35
Bride of the Lamb, 30
36
Bride of the Lamb, 30. See below
22
limitedness, and the “antinomic conjugacy of freedom and necessity”
not only determine creaturely life, but “the very distinction and
opposition between the two finds its origin here.”37 For God, “all is
equally necessary and equally free”, and “occasionalism is not
appropriate to God’s magnificence and absoluteness.”38
37
Bride of the Lamb, 30
38
Bride of the Lamb,31
23
The world’s creation according to Bulgakov then, is “God’s own life,
inseparable from personal divinity, as his self-revelation”, and he
emphasises the importance in understanding the Divine Sophia, as
divinity in God, in her connection with the hypostases of the Trinity.
As divinity, she does not have her own hypostasis, but is eternally
hypostatized in the Holy Trinity and cannot exist otherwise. She
belongs to the tri-hypostases as their life and self-revelation.39 Thus
Bulgakov writes that the Divine Sophia is God’s exhaustive selfrevelation [his emphasis], the fullness of divinity, and therefore has
absolute content.40 There can be no positive principle of being that
does not enter into this fullness of sophianic life and revelation.”41
Hence as Bulgakov later states,
“One must, once and for all, overcome the deadening abstractness
that is afraid of realism in thought and prefers the abstract
nominalism of ‘properties’ to essences. One must understand that
the sophianic All belongs to God’s life, enters into and participates
in God’s life, divinely lives.  The logic and beauty of creation are
God’s love, love’s power of the cross of the mutual sacrificial selfrenunciation of the hypostases, as well as the kenosis of all,
through which this all finds itself in its fullness and glory. God is
love.”42
If God is love, he continues, and the creation of the world is love,
(whereby the world’s being is included in God’s love), “who then can
exclude it from God’s love, impiously thinking that God does not have
to love in this way and can do without this kind of love, thinking that,
for God, this kind of love is superfluous and accidental? Who will be
39
Bride of the Lamb, 38-39
40
Bride of the Lamb, 39
41
Bride of the Lamb, 39
42
Bride of the Lamb, 39
24
so audacious and impious as to limit God’s love”.43 We are given
and directed, he adds, to differentiate the modes of love, but not love
itself.
43
Bride of the Lamb 49
25
From this Bulgakov moves directly to what is for him the axiom of
revelation: God is the Creator and the Creator is God. This direct
identification is, as Bulgakov reminds us, indisputably confirmed by
Scripture. “The scholastic intricacies that aim to distinguish in God
God Himself from God in necessity and freedom, God from the creator,
are utterly alien to Scripture.”44 Moreover, he is Creator by virtue of
inner necessity of his nature, divine love, which is exhaustive and
includes all its modes, just as essentially He is the Holy Trinity. The
relation of the hypostases to God’s nature, Sophia, is just as kenotic
as their interhypostatic self-determination, “since the Divine Sophia
herself, in her content as the divine world, is the kenotic self-positing
of the three hypostases.” Thus, Bulgakov follows, the Divine Sophia is
not only the divine “project” of the world, “she is much more. She is
the very foundation of the world.”45
Without here going into the ‘unpatristic-ness’ of Bulgakov’s technical
explications, we cannot pass by biblical Sophia (or Holy Wisdom) and
the theological ‘raw material’ in which the tradition of the Church is
rooted. It is here as Bulgakov points out, that “the liturgical
consciousness is superior to the dogmatic”.
In the Liturgy it could even be said that it is not by accident that it is
the Deacon who proclaims and invokes Wisdom, for it is the Deacon
who constantly moves between the Sanctuary, the place of ‘the Holy of
Holies’ and out towards the people, between the inner and the outer,
through the doors of the iconostasis which represents the veil between
two worlds. This is the ‘place’ and role of the deacon, in constant
44
Bride of the Lamb, 45
26
movement between realms, and it is he who proclaims Wisdom (Sofia),
inscribing her, as it were, on the act of worship.46
Biblically, as we know from the Old Testament, Wisdom is personified
in the classic passage of Proverbs 8:22-31. Wisdom as a quality is
also to be found throughout Proverbs 1-10. Very significantly we find
an ontological interpretation in the Song of Solomon Chapter 7, where
Wisdom is treated as the master-craftsman (or fashioner) of all (he ton
panton technetes), and also as the “spirit of Wisdom”. She is the
“breath of the power of God  flowing from the glory of the Almighty”,
“the brightness of the everlasting light, spotless mirror of the power of
God (tou theou energeias), and the image of goodness. Her spirit is
“intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, distinct
beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure”. “For wisdom is more mobile
than any motion, because of her pureness she pervades all things.”
In Chapters 10-12 Wisdom is also represented as not only present
before the creation of the world, but as a power which continually
protects and preserves it. In Ecclesiasticus her portrayal is similar
(e.g. 1.1, 1.9), and Chapter 24 is a doxology of Wisdom, where she tells
of her glory: “I came forth from the mouth of the most High, and
covered the earth like a mist.” (24:3), and verses 13-17 have particular
beauty.
In the New Testament there are comparatively numerous texts in
which Wisdom is understood as a property. (e.g. 2 Peter 3:15; Rom.
11:33; 1 Cor. 1:17, 20-30; Eph. 1:8, 17; 3:10; Col. 1:9, 28; 2:3, 3:16,
45
Bride of the Lamb, 50
46
The first time, “Wisdom! Let us attend” is just before the choir sings “Come, let us worship and fall
down before Christ”. Wisdom is then proclaimed before and after the prokeimenon.
27
Rev. 5:12. 7:12. This principle is applied christologically in 1 Cor. 1:24
(and cf. Luke 11:49), but there are two instances without this relation
– in Matt. 11:19 and (correlatively) Luke 7:35, where “Wisdom is
justified of all her children”. (Read literally as ‘recognised as just –
those who are open to receive her revelation’). This can only be
understood in the light of, or in connection with Old Testament
Wisdom. Side by side then we find a revelation of the personal being
of God, a ‘doctrine’ of divine Wisdom either in God or with God.
In the Old Testament we also find the striking figure of Shekinah – the
Glory of God, for which again there are numerous instances.47 God’s
Glory fills the tabernacle like a could (Exod. 40:34-35; similarly in
Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 8:10-11); most markedly in God’s
appearance to Moses on Mount Sinai in a cloud of Glory (Exod. 24:1618), and especially in Exodus 33:18-23, where the Glory of God is
contrasted with the “Face” of God (“for no one shall see me and live”).
After Isaiah’s vision of the Lord on his Throne, (Isa 6:1) we get the
monumental figure of God’s Glory in the vision of Ezekiel (1-2), whose
vision is perceived not only sensibly, but in time and place, as
something which moves, comes nearer, or withdraws. (3:12-13; 8:4;
9:3; 11:22-23; 40:2-5). In all these instances, the Glory of God is
represented as a divine principle: it differs #from God’s personal being,
but is inseparably bound up with it. As Bulgakov writes, “it is not
God, but divinity”, and the same thing could be said about Glory as
about Wisdom. From this he draws the tentative conclusion that “God
has, or possesses, or is characterised by, Glory and Wisdom, which
cannot be separated from him since they represent his dynamic self-
47
Eg. Exodus 16:7-10; 5 Lev. 9:16, 23; Numb. 14:10; 16:19, 42, 22:6
28
revelation in creative action, and also in his own life.”48
In terms of distinguishing these aspects or principles of God, Bulgakov
‘formulates’ the following: Wisdom concerns their content, Glory their
manifestation, or to put it another way “Wisdom is the matter of glory,
glory the form of Wisdom.”49
Bulgakov found in one sense, his ‘ultimate’ form of Wisdom not quite
in blazing clouds of glory but in a “revelation in stone”, when, newly
exiled, he visited the former Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople
in 1923. (It was then still a mosque.) He was overwhelmed by the
airiness, light and grace of the building, and its harmony penetrated to
the depths of his being.
 A sea of light pours from above and dominates all this space,
enclosed yet free. The grace of the columns and the beauty of
their marble lace, the royal dignity – not luxury, but regality – of
the golden walls and the marvellous ornamentation: it captivates
and melts the heart, subdues and convinces. It creates a sense of
inner transparency; the weightiness and limitations of the small
and suffering self disappear; the self is gone, the soul is healed of
it, losing itself in these arches and merging with them. It
becomes the world: I am in the world and the world is in me
48
Sophia the Wisdom of God, 30-31.
49
Sophia the Wisdom of God, 33-34. And again he follows on from this, that if the divinity of God
constitutes the divine Sophia, (or glory), at the same time “we assume that it is also the ousia:
“Ousia=Sophia=Glory.” In qualification he emphasises that “Ousia-Sophia” is distinct from the
hypostases, though it cannot exist apart from them and is eternally hypostasised in them.
29
This is indeed Sophia, the real unity of the world in the Logos, the
co-inherence of all with all It is Plato baptized by the Hellenic
genius of Byzantium.  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.50
In reliving with heightened intensity the echoes of earlier ‘moments’,
he felt his “freedom in Sophia as a release from the endless slavery”,
and in the midst of these sensations, he experienced a new vision.
Standing in the heartland and source of Orthodox Christianity, he was
struck by the dignity and grace of the Muslims who then prayed there,
he felt the ‘misguidedness of wartime Slavophile dreams’ of restoring a
cross to Hagia Sophia, and their ‘misunderstanding of Sophia’s true
ecumenical mission’:  ‘a new, true third Rome, in which before the
end the church must appear in its fullness and entirety. Whilst
instantly chiding himself (‘the time for such visions was over, for
“launching new schemes”), in the end he could not resist. The powerful
vision had won him over, as “something absolute, self-evident, and
irrefutable”51 and he concluded ‘that in this vision lay the voice of the
church’.
Bulgakov’s preceding above-quoted (i.e. for footnote 51) experience, is
also, as Fr. Andrew Louth remarks, in his view “one of the clearest of
Bulgakov’s statements about Sophia, its clarity perhaps due to the fact
that he is not trying to define it, or defend it against misconception,
but simply evoke it.” Whilst, as he says, its Platonic roots are evident,
50
‘Autobiographical Notes’ in A Bulgakov Anthology, 13-14.
51
‘Autobiographical Notes’, 13
30
what has grown from these roots is a sense of heaven as a
canopy lightly touching the earth – a canopy, or a veil, the pokrov
that the Mother of God holds over the world. The emphasis on
lightness, gentleness, is a symbol of the way the divine holds the
creaturely in being, which also suggests something of the holiness
of the world – there is no sharp contrast between a godless world
and a divine grace or power. Nature is reconciled with God.52
There is a sense in which this last of Bulgakov’s revelatory
experiences, sums up or contains all the others. At the same time,
and as he later wrote, “The dome of St Sophia crowns and as it were
summarizes all the theological creativity of the epoch of the
Ecumenical Councils.”53
From the time of the epoch in which it was built, churches dedicated
to Sophia began to be built both in Byzantium and in Slavonic
countries, with a wealth of mysterious and elusive symbolism, and yet
Byzantine theology has left behind no explanation. Kiev, the first
capital of Russia, was the first to adorn itself, in the 11th century, with
a cathedral of St. Sophia, and then a growing number of churches
were dedicated thus as the influence spread north – in Moscow,
Novgorod, Yaroslav, and other towns.
52
Andrew Louth, ‘Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God’, ( St Vladimir’s Theological
Quarterly, 2005, 1-2} 151.
53
Sophia the Wisdom of God, 2.
31
These churches generally have their feast-days on feasts of the Mother
of God, - in Kiev, on the day of her Nativity, in Novgorod on the day of
her Assumption. We may note that at the beginning of the Akathistos
Hymn, a Kontakion is sung “To thee, our leader in battle and
defender” celebrating the deliverance of Constantinople from its
enemies through the aid of the Mother of God.54 In a broader sense, it
expresses the sense of continuing dependence on the protecting
intercession of the Mother of God. It is possible therefore that the later
churches dedicated to St. Sophia followed this in what became a
tradition in the connection with the Mother of God. In the Akathistos
hymn itself, she is (amidst a multitude of attributes rendered in
unsurpassable poetry) also hailed as “wisdom surpassing the
knowledge of the wise”, and as “casket of wisdom.” Overall it does not
seem surprising that Sophia is associated with the Mother of God,
both historically in the dedication of churches as above, liturgically,
and (as we will see below in Fr Andrew Louth’s exploration), as SpiritBearer and as Bride.
Fr Andrew Louth shows how the Sophianic dimension finds expression
for Bulgakov through the theme of the Annunciation, wherein the
Mother of God’s obedience to the Holy Spirit deepens her union with
the Spirit. It is through this depth of union that she conceives and
becomes “truly Mother of God”. As beloved Bride, Bulgakov illustrates
54
Most probably as Bishop Kallistos writes, the Kontakion was written by Patriarch Sergios to
celebrate the escape of the Byzantine capital from the attack of the Persians and Avars in 626,
(the Akathistos hymn being almost certainly more ancient). It is suggested that the Kontakion and
the hymn were also sung at the thanksgiving celebrations after the other, later deliverances of
Constantinople. The Church of Hagia Sophia would have been the symbol of the centre of
Constantinople. The Lenten Triodion, (Faber & Faber, London, 1984) 55.
32
the relationship with reference to the Song of Songs. Thus “Mary as
Mother of God becomes the mother of the whole human race, and as
bride becomes in her person identical with the Church.”55 We then see
how Bulgakov appeals directly to the notion of the Divine Wisdom:
55
Cited in ‘Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 160
Cf. also The Bride of the Lamb, 411, 415, 526
33
“And if the fulness of creation, its truth and beauty, its
intellectual glory, is divine Sophia, as the revelation of the Holy
Trinity, this comes to be repeated with reference to the Mother of
God. The Mother of God is sophianic to the highest degree. She
is the fulness of Sophia in creation and in this sense she is
created Sophia.56
Here Bulgakov recalls the words of the Lord at the end of his Sermon
on the Mount, - “Wisdom – sofiva, is justified of all her children”,
(Matt. 11:19) which he states refers “precisely to the Mother of God.
Sophia is the foundation, the pillar and ground of the truth, in its
fulness revealing the Mother of God, and in this sense she is, as it
were, the personal expression of Sophia in creation, the personal form
of the earthly Church.”57
The Dormition also provides us with another example of the Church’s
Tradition or liturgical consciousness, in not being accounted for in the
New Testament, although as Bulgakov reminds even Tradition is silent
about much of the life of the Mother of God on earth and after death.
However this silence as he remarks is not complete, “for it is broken by
an iconographic gesture”: on icons of the Last Judgement, she sits at
the right hand of her Son, and the idea of the Mother of God
interceding at the Last Judgment is confirmed in several liturgical
texts.
56
Cited in ‘Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God’ 160
57
‘Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God’, 160
34
Bulgakov writes that the personal destiny of the Mother of God places
her outside the action of the parousia, since this action was already
accomplished in her Dormition and Assumption. The Lord Himself
came down from heaven to receive her soul and to resurrect her body.
She will not be judged, but neither does she judge – she bestows
mercy, like a mother. Her appearance, as “the woman robed in the
sun” (Rev. 12) signifies the beginning of the resurrection of the dead,
because, he writes, she who is resurrected herself can appear only to
resurrected humankind, together with the resurrected Lord.58
The abiding of the Mother of God in heaven evidently does not
signify the same thing as the presence of the Lord at the right hand
of the Father. He abides in the heavens as “One of the Holy
Trinity) (as a troparion says), as God in the interior of the Trinity.
But since she is a creature, the Most Holy Mother of God does not
ascend into this heaven of heavens. Christ faces her in his
humanity. As the highest of all the creatures, She abides at the
boundary of heaven and creation. She is the peak of the world,
which touches heaven. She is sanctified by the entire power of the
Divine Sophia, of the revelation of the Holy Trinity. But she herself
remains the creaturely Sophia. 
In the parousia, one therefore finds conjoined in Christ and the
Mother of God the manifestation of Divinity itself, of the Divine
Sophia, in Christ, and Her manifestation in creation.
Bulgakov is entirely consistent here, and this is also perhaps his
clearest illustration of the divine and creaturely Sophia. It is in his
‘representations’, rather than in his repetitive and at times dense
technical linguistic lyricism that we find a resonance with his
intuition. This should perhaps not be surprising, since it underwrites
Fr Boris Bobrinskoy’s comment, that what Fr. Bulgakov was struggling
58
The Bride of the Lamb, 414. Although, Bulgakov writes, the Lord appeared on earth after his
resurrection and in a glorified body, he “did not then yet appear in glory”.
35
to express is the inexpressible.59 This latter can only be
communicated in the icons, the sacraments, the liturgical texts, and
also in sacred spaces such as the sweeping expanse of the dome of the
Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. One might say that in all Bulgakov’s
experiences of revelation, he ‘occupied’ a space between two worlds. It
is also in the icon of Holy Wisdom that one can say, as Paul
Evdokimov does, that two worlds intersect.
Another aspect of both Sophia and the Mother of God, not yet
mentioned, is their at home-ness in Russia. As Nicholas Zernov
observes of Russian Christians, (and as we have seen above), the
Mother of God was
59
Michael Plekon, Living Icons, 44
36
the one human being who achieved an ideal harmony between
spirit, soul and body, and was therefore able to give birth to the
God-man in her a creature became the genuine partner of the
creator and the goal of evolution was at least reached. This loving
veneration of the Mother of God is the expression of Russian
insight into the mysteries of creation and redemption. Professor
Fedotov writes: “Differing from Greece, where the Theotokos was
an object of theological discussion, the Russians stressed not the
first, but the last part of the compound name – not ‘Theo’ but
‘tokos’. The parent, the birth-giver, the mother, was the centre of
Russian devotion.60
It was a trend of thought which indicated for the Russians that not
only the spirit but the flesh could be holy, and that the natural order
was good and blessed, (the stain of sin affecting it only temporarily).
We find it full-blooded in the veins of Dostoevsky, in Fr Zosima from
The Brothers Karamazov, whose religion, Mochulsky wrote, is inspired
by the recognition of the divine foundation of the universe and of the
God-like nature of mankind. He believes in the mystical oneness of
the cosmos. We find it in the person of Sonya, in Crime and
Punishment, as a figure of wisdom, especially in her salvific aspect.
Her ‘reply’ to Raskolnikov’s first overture to her was to confront him
with the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, the most radical of
Jesus’s miracles. Pointing another way, she discloses the image of
Christ. (In the ensuing imagery, the man-God, [the protagonist of the
story], tries to face down the God-man.)
60
The Russian Religious Renaissance, 287 We also find a reflection of this in the fact that
Bulgakov often made more than verbal play of the phrases Mother of God (Bogomater’)
and matter of God (Bogomateriia).
37
We also find the link between the Mother of God and mother earth,
deep rooted in its Russian-ness, expressed by Dostoevsky with
particular force, in The Possessed. The crippled Maria Timofeevna
relates her conversation with an old nun, who had the gift of prophecy.
The nun asked Maria "What is the Mother of God? What do you
think?” Maria Timofeevna answered: “The great Mother, the hope of
the human race.” “Yes”, confirmed the nun, “the Mother of God is the
great mother, the damp earth, and therein lies great joy for men; and
when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep you will rejoice in
everything at once and your sorrows will be no more. Such is the
prophecy.”61
Bulgakov echoes this near the very end of The Bride of the Lamb,
speaking of the heart of the Mother of God pierced by the sword
because of Her compassionate love. “Her maternal intercession is
effected starting with the Dread Judgment, which is the beginning, not
the end, of the judgment. And the ‘Mother of God’s way of sorrows’
revealed to the vision of the Russian people, continues.” Moreover,
“There can be no final rejection of creation by God’s love, just as there
can be no final abandonment of creation by the ‘pitying heart’ of the
Church’s love.”62
61
See The Possessed, part I, chap 4
62
The Bride of the Lamb, 515.
38
With all of the above taken as a whole, it is clear that Bulgakov’s
Sophia is maternal, which is very different from Soloviev’s Sophia who
is a ‘young girl’, infused with the erotic. It was Soloviev’s philosophy of
“religious materialism”, which Bulgakov asserted in 1910, was
Soloviev’s major epistemological innovation, and which provided in
part Bulgakov’s political, sociological and economic springboard, (see
above, p.12)63 He argued that “the philosophy of economy is a part of
general philosophy and therefore not some illegitimate daughter of
political economy”64, and maintained that economics involves a
definite attitude of man to the world, since economic activity is a
process of interaction between man and the cosmos. The economic
process has a supra-historical goal – the restoration of cosmic unity,
the ‘sophianisation’ of the world. Sophia was as Rosenthal comments,
Bulgakov’s “dogmatic base, the axiom of an Orthodox theology slated
to include every aspect of life, including economics, with each aspect
subordinated to a higher goal.”65
His starting point was the original state in which man and God, and
man and nature lived in perfect harmony, sundered by the
63
It is worth noting here a point which Fr Myroslaw Tataryn makes, that Bulgakov’s conversion from
atheism to Orthodoxy was integral to understanding the motivation for his thought. His journey (at
this time) was “primarily a search for a holistic, intellectually coherent perspective which would
overcome any fatalistic or deterministic aspects. In addition, it had to be respectful of the unique
historic contribution of the Russian soul.” He also cites Paul Evdokimov, who argued that it was
ultimately this perspective that was capable of assisting the Russian people in their historic struggle
for freedom and justice. Tataryn, ‘Sergius Bulgakov: Time for a New Look’ in St Vadimir’s
Theological Quarterly, REF
64
Rosenthal, ‘The Nature and Function of Sophia’ in Russian Religious Thought, 158
65
Rosenthal, ‘The Nature and Function of Sophia’, 159 Bulgakov still wanted to abolish poverty, but
at this time he broadened the concept of wealth to include not only material goods, but culture,
39
“metaphysical catastrophe” of the Fall, which dislocated the organic
unity of all. The world as he says is “alienated from Sophia in its
current condition but not in its essence.”66 However even in its
chaotic state living in struggle and disharmony, it retains its
connectedness and partakes of the light of Sophia. “Shining with the
light of the Logos”, Sophia who was there before the creation of the
world enters the world of dark chaos and brings it into cosmos.
knowledge and science.
66
The Philosophy of Economy, 149
40
The chaotic elements are linked to a universal whole, illuminated
by life that shines within it; and man, though as an individual he
is torn from his sophic unity, retains his sophic roots and
becomes the instrument for bringing Sophia to nature. The
current stage of struggle between entropic and organizing forces
is comprehensible only as a violation of sophia’s primordial unity,
in which the metaphysical center of being become displaced.
This decentralisation results in the world’s being plunged into the
process of becoming, of subjection to time, to contradictions,
evolution, economy.67
It could be said then, that the economic process is sophian in nature,
antisophian in its existence, and the world Sophia-in-potential. The
dual definition of filosofiia khoziaistva depends in part on language,
since khoziaistvo means both household and economy, so the
connotations are of the life of a giant household, with several layers of
meaning. It also refers to the process (as in the Russian verb, where a
process and its outcome are construed as an integral whole).
67
The Philosophy of Economy, 149-50
41
In these above ‘layers of meaning’ otherwise themes, Bulgakov was
concerned above all with constructing a worldview that addressed the
real concerns of life in the world, treating human beings as active
creatures, interacting with the world around them. What he termed
an interaction of the disciples of philosophy and political economy was
a restatement of Russian philosophy’s preoccupation with life, and in
this he had a rich tradition on which to draw. His emphasis on the
inner relation or “spirit” refuted Western economy’s emphasis
(including Marx) on external forms of social structure. The Russian
intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century is describable in terms
familiar in the history of Western thought – Enlightenment,
Romanticism, positivism, modernism. However as Evtuhov points out,
it “remained original and independent in the manner in which it
assimilated and combined ideas, in the questions that it singled out as
important, the elements it inserted from more ancient Russian or
Byzantine sources, and its approaches to the business of
philosophizing itself.”68 The point to be made here, as Evtuhov does
also, is that Bulgakov can only be meaningfully interpreted if one
takes these elements of his inheritance into account.
One can affirm that The Philosoophy of Economy is a continuation of
Schelling’s ‘natural philosophy’,
69affirm
some identity with Romantic
ideas, and the necessity of going beyond the narrow epistemological
limits imposed by Kant, whilst also affirming that Bulgakov was
following a pattern of Russian thought. As Evtuhov comments, to the
Slavophiles the question of the external world was less a philosophical
68
‘Introduction’ to The Philosophy of Economy 17-18
69
Cf The Philosophy of Economy p 93, where he puts Schelling side by side with Soloviev’s
42
problem than a fundamental attitude. Instead of the Enlightenment’s
emphasis on the thinking subject as a problem to be solved, the
Slavophiles perceived “undue concentration” on the subject as a
symptom of a broader crisis of rationalism that had struck all of
Western thought including, Evtuhov asserts, Romanticism. (Schelling
could at least be credited with having perceived the bankruptcy of
Western rationalism.) Once again Bulgakov emphasised the inner
relation of man and nature, and the spirit of a system.
The Slavophiles, in a fusion of the Romantic penchant for organicity
with principles of Orthodox Christian theology, stated that the inner
form and spirit were more essential categories than the abstract,
logical external factors, of institutions or types of government - and
that it had fallen to Russia (as opposed to the corrupt and rationalised
West) to develop this principle for the benefit of humanity.
The development of approaches and concepts that were inextricably
woven with the ideas they expressed found an easy acceptance in, for
example, understanding of the terms sign, signifier and signified (which
as Evtuhov points out are essential to a reading of contemporary
structuralist philosophy). Whilst these ideas may come from Silver
Age symbolism (and Romanticism), I would argue also that this
understanding could be ‘genetically’ rooted in appreciation of and
participation in the Divine Liturgy and the ‘fact’ of iconography.
thought, finding a ‘congenial’ correspondance.
43
In Russian society, for the Slavophiles, what was important was not its
external forms.70 Western European societies, they suggested, were
based on a formality of personal relations, and social life was limited to
a battle of parties and interests. The essence of Russian life, in
contrast, could be found in a deeper community based on true
Christianity.71 This may sound a naïve or idealistic ‘version’ to twentyfirst century ears, but there is a point here, which Nicholas Zernov
also makes, in commenting on the difference between the Russian and
Western interpretations of man and of his place in the universe. “The
West treats man primarily as the citizen of an organized society. A
Russian Christian sees himself rather as a son of mother earth. He is
the summit of the animal and plant world and represents the most
advanced expression of cosmic life. For an Orthodox the Church is not
a society or an institution but the fullness of creation”72
70
For example, as Evtuhov illustrates, “The foreign traveler in Russia would be likely to perceive the
bureaucratic and administrative structures that were actually quite superficial and of little import to the
manner in which life was actually experienced.” The Philosoophy of Economy, 23
71
The Philosophy of Economy, 24.
72
Russian Religious Renaissance, 281. This may need qualifying, which Zernov does elsewhere, in
writing that the Church “contained so many contrasts that almost any description of it, however
contradictory, could be accepted as being at least partly true.” The point perhaps to be made here
is that (before the revolution) “The Orthodox Church permeated every side of Russian life, personal,
family, social and national.
44
Thus as Evtuhov writes, this emphasis on internal social structures
took its cue simultaneously from the antihierarchical theological
principles of Russian Orthodoxy and from an organicism characteristic
of Romanticism. Specifically, it found powerful expression in the
concept of sobornost’, with the idea of community and wholeness.
This emphasis on collectivity, on humanity as a whole, had become, as
Bulgakov remarked, a “distinguishing characteristic” of Russian
thought.73 The value of sobornost’ was also that this very sense of
community and wholeness actually permitted the full development of a
person’s integral personality, as opposed to the one-sided emphasis
encouraged by a rationalistic society. There is a lack of tension
between the individual and the collective in the notion of sobornost.
The respect for the individual is founded on a different basis. In
Bulgakov’s vision he seeks to affirm and preserve human dignity
through the daily activity in a process that unites human beings with
their fellows. This notion of human dignity – the centre of his
philosophy – is quite different to classic liberalism’s focus on the rights
of the individual.
As we have seen, Bulgakov’s philosophy was formulated within the
context of western thought and Russian Orthodoxy, and as Evtuhov
comments, needs to be integrated back into these two traditions.
Whilst it does not address social or government structures, the
articulation of the role of dignity and creativity and inner spirit and
community can complement liberal social theory. This is, in part, why
his work “has acquired a new immediacy in recent years.”74 The
particular force of his social philosophy “brings together religion and a
73
The Philosophy of Economy 130,
45
theory of khoziaistvo, or economic life”, grounded in Sophia. “His
vision of history as a cycle of Fall and Resurrection, death and rebirth,
reflects a very deep theme of the Russian cultural consciousness.”75
74
The Philosophy of Economy, 30
75
The Philosophy of Economy, 30
46
As well as this, his description of khoziaistvo, as the life of a large
household, “amounts to the clearest philosophical articulation of a
mode of economic existence that in the 1990’s became characteristic of
the management of Russia’s cities, farms and enterprises.”76
Bulgakov’s sophic economy is among the ideas that can provide
material for discussion in the present reevaluation of ideologies and
institutions, involving philosophical reorientation in restructuring
markets, and political and administrative institutions.
This may all sound a far cry from the Bulgakov of the 1930’s and the
latter part of the 1920’s, in Paris. One might say, however, that the
last twenty years of his life were a playing out of his vision of Hagia
Sophia, in the great church dedicated to her in Constantinople, which,
as I have commented on, had a sense of a summing up all his previous
experiences. It was following this, during the time he was in Prague,
that he was invited by Metropolitan Evlogii to the appointment of Dean
of the Institute of St Sergius in Paris.
76
The Philosophy of Economy, 31.
47
At the end of his first year in Paris, Bulgakov was confined to bed with
a very sever fever, where he felt himself burning up in “a furnace of
fire”. Feeling the full weight of his sins, he “wandered from trial to
trial, to be saved only at the last moment by his guardian angel and
restored to life.”77 It was apparently only afterwards that he fully
understood what had happened to him. His salvation, he recounts,
was given to him as part of an apprehension of the mystery of death.
"I died”, he wrote, “and found myself beyond the edge of this world.”78
This experience left an indelible mark on his being;79 his dissolved self
re-emerged in a new way and the ‘Silver Age intelligent’, with all the
sense of responsibility and importance with which he had plunged into
religious, political and social activism occupied a space with both new
frontiers and boundaries.80
This ‘death’ was by all accounts an emancipation, where he became
free to repent and pray and to be a passive observer of past life.
Evtuhov takes this further. “I am suggesting, in other words, that
Bulgakov’s theology was written by his passive, observing soul
77
The Cross and the Sickle, 235
78
The Cross and the Sickle, 235. “ I lost the sense of a limited place in space and time I utterly
lost the consciousness that my body, my sensual self fitted on the bed, because it flowed out into
other rooms and into space in general” The Bride of the Lamb (published posthumously), in
Section II entitled ‘The Church, History and the Afterlife’, contains probably the most profound section
of the book, on Death and the State after Death.
79
The Cross and the Sickle, 235 “I felt like a newborn, because a break took place in my life, the
liberating hand of death has passed through it.”
80
His activities were more exclusively bounded by the world of the émigré church. This of course
incorporated his position as Dean of the Institute of St Serge, not to mention a high profile in the
Russian Student Christian Movement and the Fellowshiof St Alban & St Sergius, as well as lecturing
internationally, but by all comparison it was the life of a contemplative in the capacity of priest and
theologian.
48
suspended in the intermediate space of the afterlife. His was not
simply the voice of an émigré priest; it was a voice from the beyond.”81
As Bulgakov himself wrote to his friend Georges Florovsky soon after
his illness, “It seems to me, partly, that many things finished burning,
while others burned up completely in my fever.”82 These included, he
makes clear in following on, his old relation to Vladimir Soloviev**
81
The Cross and the Sickle, 237
82
The Cross and the Sickle, 237. These included, he makes clear in following on, his old relation
to Vladimir Soloviev, ****
49
Two intuitions – twin items of faith – continuously guided and
comforted Sergei Bulgakov on his journey the reality of the primacy
and ubiquity of revelation, and the fact of interdependence and
interconnection of all things. It is the same wisdom, the apprehension
of Sophia, that is manifested in creation and in the Bible, in nature
and in the Church. In the words of Lev Zander, “true love of wisdom,
true philo-Sophia must take everything into account: it cannot be
based upon any particular set of facts, but has to reckon with the
fullness of God’s revelation in the world.”83 In a word which Bulgakov
coined, it is panentheism. The following contains the dynamic kernel
of much of what he later developed
The divine triunity, God-as-love, complete in itself, sufficient to
itself  substantive love, posits (in the metaphysical sense) an
object for this divine love beyond itself; it loves this object and
pours into it the the lifegiving power of the the trihypostatic love
itself. Of course this object of love is not simply an abstract idea,
or a lifeless mirror; it can only be a living being It is impossible
to think of Sophia, as no more than an ideal representation,
devoid of all concrete life and the power of being  supremely real
Sophia is not only the object of love, but the subject of love
directed towards a corresponding love, and in this mutual love it
receives all things and is all things.84
Bulgakov wrote this the year before he was ordained. Why - he was
later to ask in the mid-1930’s, did Bishop Feodor (who ordained him)
or Patriarch Tikhon (who gave his blessing for Bulgakov’s ordination)85
- why did they not raise any objection to or ‘complain’ of Bulgakov’s
83
Cited in the Foreward to Sophia The Wisdom of God, xvi
84
‘The Unfading Light’ (excerpt) in Sergii Bulgakov, ed. Rowan Williams. 134
85
With a smile, Patriarch Tikhon said to Bulgakov: “You are more useful to us in a frock-coat than in
a cassock.” See the account of Bulgakov’s ordination in ‘Autobiographical Notes’, in A Bulgakov
Anthology, 7-9
50
work and views on the grounds of ‘heresy’? If Bulgakov had left
politics behind, politics did not leave him behind (albeit ‘ecclesiastical’
politics, but even here, the ‘ecclesiastical’ could be questionable).
The irreplaceable Patriarch Tikhon had been arrested in 1922 and
died three years later. In Paris Metropolitan Evlogii had been put
under severe strain in relations with Metropolitan Sergi, the locum
tenens of the vacant patriarchate, who had requested émigré clergy to
sign a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet Government in 1927.86 The
crunch came in 1930 when Evlogii, at the invitation of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, took part in prayers for the suffering Christians of
Russia. Sergi interpreted this as an act of disloyalty to the Soviet
government. The diocesan conference convoked in Paris gave strong
support to its Bishop, and it was decided to accept temporarily the
jurisdiction of the Ecumenical patriarch, until such time when political
dictatorship in Russia made it possible to return to canonical
obedience. However there was a minority of people and clergy, known
as the adherents of the Moscow jurisdiction who disapproved of this
decision. Among them was Vladimir Lossky, who was also a founding
figure of the Brotherhood of St Photius, made up of a small group of
younger theologians who maintained their allegiance to Moscow. They
were also consciously in revolt against what they saw as Russian
sentimentality and slavophilism. Georges Florovsky was more or less
at odds with both parties.87
In 1935 Metropolitan Sergii requested a report on Bulgakov’s theology.
86
For a much fuller survey of all this, see Russian Religious Renaissance, 210-249.
87
Cf. in detail Alexis Klimoff, ‘Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy’ in St Vladimir’s
51
The report (penned by Lossky) was highly critical, and the Russian
bishops in communion with Sergii issued a condemnation of
Bulgakov’s sophiology (and other aspects of his teaching). He was
accused of ‘gnosticism’ and of confusing natural attributes with
hypostatic existence in the divine life. (Bulgakov had already met this
criticism);88 his anthropology was also condemned, and the
ambiguous language about an ‘uncreated’ human spirit was
(‘predictably’, as Rowan Williams writes) brought into evidence.
Theological Quarterly,***
88
ijn his ‘Ipostas’ i Ipostasnost’: Scholia k Svetu Nevechernemu’ which he wrote in Prague in 1924.
Cf Anastassy Brandon and Irina Kukota, ‘Protopresbyter Sergii Bulgakov: Hypostasis and
Hypostaticity: Scholia to The Unfading Light, in St Vladimir’s Theological quarterly ***
52
Bulgakov’s and Evlogii’s response was the issue of a substantial
pamphlet, objecting not just to misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Bulgakov's views, but to the procedure followed.
“There should be no condemnations pronounced from on high by
hierarchical authority (this is stigmatised as a ‘papal’ tactic). The
Orthodox Church works by doctrinal consensus, not hierarchical
decree.”89 The reply is clearly illustrative, as Rowan Williams
comments, of the gulf between the Russian bishops and the Christian
intelligentsia. The latter had learned their theology not from textbooks
but from the speculative and imaginative writers of the late nineteenth
century, including Khomyakov and Soloviev– “not to mention
Dostoevsky, with his parable of the Grand Inquisitor, denouncing the
mechanics of ecclesiastical authoritarianism.” (One may also be
reminded that Lossky detested Dostoevsky’s books.)
However it was not only the Moscow Patriarchate but the Karlovci
Synod Abroad who condemned Father Sergei’s teachings on Sophia.
Metropolitan Evlogii had no desire to condone the charges, but neither
could he ignore them. To investigate the matter he set up a theological
commission of ten persons. Aware of a potential charge of bias, he
took pains to include on his commission persons known to disagree
with Bulgakov’s theological speculations. Florovsky was deeply
reluctant and asked to be allowed to stay out. The reply of the
Metropolitan was “You must be on the commission, otherwise it will be
in vain.”90
89
Williams, Sergii Bulgakov, 174.
90
Andrew Blane (ed.) Georges Florovsky, Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman, (St
53
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY: 1993). 66
54
For reasons that are not at all clear, the majority report of this
commission, which was favourable to Bulgakov, was never submitted,
while a paper by Florovsky and Chetverikov was presented to Evlogii.
Whilst they held back from declaring Bulgakov materially heretical, it
it was sufficiently critical for Evlogii and his bishops to request a
formal clarification from Bulgakov. This did not affect Bulgakov’s
reputation or his relations with Evlogii, but as Rowan Williams
comments, it was read in a very sinister light by some of Bulgakov's
allies.91 What is clear is that the two people for whom it was the most
painful were Florovsky and Bulgakov.92
It is evident through various letters that have come to light that there
was profound disagreement between Bulgakov and Florovsky on their
divergent views on the legacy of Soloviev (with the inherent
sophiological implications). Judging from the dates of some of these,
the following part of a letter from Bulgakov to Florovsky, after the
former’s illness and ‘death’ in 1925, is in the same context:
I have nothing to defend ideologically  in Vladimir Soloviev; I felt
this most obviously for myself at his memorial service. There is
an emotional-psychological difference, apart from the fact that he
remains for me one of the “fathers”. There are regularly
appearing “transcendental illusions” in the mental (not spiritual)
sphere which simply melt when one enters the spiritual life. In
Soloviev I can see a certain religious immaturity, with its
properties  Tel quel he is simply religiously unconvincing and
91
Williams, Sergii Bulgakov
92
No action was taken against his person by either the Synod or by Moscow since he did not
belong to either jurisdiction. Andrew Blane writes that a retractio was asked of Father Bulgakov,
which is not in fact true. Cf. Bryn Geffert‘The Charges of Heresy against Sergii Bulgakov. The
Majority and Minority Reports of Evlogii’s Commission and the Final Report of the Bishops’
Conference’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly,***
55
unauthoritative, not an elder, but merely a writer True life in
the Church signifies not just overcoming, but becoming free of or
outgrowing Soloviev; here he gives no nourishment.93
93
Cited by Evthov, The Cross and the Sickle, (Cornell University Press, London 1997) 238
56
This may appear an almost ruthless ‘writing off’ of one who was more
than a writer or philosopher: “prophet of the new religious
renaissance", a man whose ideas were not to be simply interpreted or
analysed but, as we have seen ‘”absorbed, lived, brought to life.”94 (See
above, p.12) It may be that he was squaring his own position or
shoring up his new ‘boundaries’ (mentioned above, p.35). It shows
however, that for Father Bulgakov there was no longer room for
multiple interpretations, for confusing feminine beauty or the ‘eternal
feminine’ with the wisdom that, according to Proverbs, was with God
before the creation of the world. She had been replaced by the
ecumenical, spiritual Divine Wisdom he had experienced in
Constantinople. The ‘other worlds’ he had shared with contemporaries
in Russia now seemed mere “transcendental illusions”. As Evtuhov
later writes, from around this time “the Silver Age appeared shrouded
in fog in Bulgakov’s memory, and he seems to have experienced a sort
of amnesia about the early years of the century in Russia.”95
Be that as it may, Soloviev had stood for much that had been
quintessential to Bulgakov’s thought. Florovsky on the other hand
viewed Soloviev’s influence on Russian intellectual history as
“unequivocally pernicious”, and his opinions in his letters to Bulgakov
on the subject could hardly be more plainly expressed.96
94
The Cross and the Sickle,238. It is worth noting that the late Fr. Alexander Men (1935-1990)
drew quite extensively on Soloviev’s thought. (Cf. Elizabeth Roberts & Ann Shukman [Eds.]
Christianity for the Twenty-First Century. The Life and Work of Alexander Men. (London, SCM Press:
1996)
95
The Cross and the Sickle, 240
96
Alexis Klimoff, ‘Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy’. St Vladimir’s Theological
57
Quarterly ***
58
More importantly, implicit in this is Florovsky’s rejection of sophiology,
(although he adopted an entirely different strategy of approach in his
printed works). As Alexis Klimoff observes, “it is particularly startling
to discover that there seems to be absolutely nothing” in Florovsky’s
lifetime corpus of published writing that could qualify as an explicit
attack on sophiology.97 The closest Florovsky came to direct criticism,
claims Klimoff, was in two early essays in1921 and 1922, where he
takes issue with what he believes is Soloviev’s inadequate
understanding of sin, evil and tragedy, and argues that Soloviev’s
conclusion is based on the profoundly mistaken notion that Divine
Wisdom can be grasped by human reason. The contrary is true, states
Florovsky, since the Divine Wisdom must remain unknowable in
principle.
However, after Florovsky’s meeting with Bulgakov (i.e. after the mid
1920’s, although they had met in Prague), Klimoff observes that
Florovsky’s writings abound in what can be characterised as indirect
criticism of sophiology. “These are scholarly studies which aim to
expose weaknesses in the theoretical or historical underpinnings of the
Sophiological edifice, doing so, however, without referring to
Sophiological teaching by name. The overall intent is nevertheless
quite unmistakable, ”98 Klimoff goes on to relate that the late Fr
John Meyendorff “has argued that Sophiology was in fact the principle
motivating factor throughout Florovsky’s scholarly career.” Meyendorff
recalled a frequent comment in Florovsky’s lectures on patrology at the
Institute in Paris (where Meyendorff had been a student). The great
theologians of the early Christian centuries, Florovsky had constantly
97
‘Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy’, 75
59
reminded his listeners, were almost invariably moved to theologise by
the need to oppose some heretical teaching. In the same way,
Meyendorff contended, Florovsky was spurred to produce many of his
works in protest again Sophiology and the non-Orthodox influences.
98
‘Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy. 76
60
Klimoff then gives several illustrative examples. In Florovsky’s
Creation and Creaturehood of 1928, there is no mention of Sophia,
Soloviev, or Bulgakov. However Florovsky stresses the radically free
nature of the act of creation in traditional Christian thought (God had
no need to create the world), as well as the “utter and ultimate hiatus”
between God and the created world.99 As we have seen in my above
paper this cuts at the roots of Bulgakov’s sophiological ‘system’, since
it is grounded in a specific theory of creation (which does not reconcile
with patristic views on this subject.)
Klimoff cites another example where at a 1930 conference in Bulgaria,
Florovsky presented a detailed account of the historical context in
which churches were dedicated to St Sophia, and icons associated
with Sophia were venerated. Without here going into the details, the
essay, Klimoff asserts, appears to be a point by point rejoinder to
Bulgakov’s attempt to establish the traditionality, furthermore in
conclusion denying sophiology any authentically Orthodox roots.
In the same year Florovsky published a theoretical article focussing on
what he considered the irreconcilable differences between the abstract
categories of German idealistic philosophy and the historically
grounded concepts of Christian belief. The opposition of historicism to
abstract theorising, Klimoff comments, would soon become one of
Florovsky’s principle criteria “in evaluating religious constructs like
Sophiology.”100
99
100
‘ Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy, 77
‘Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy’, 78 It seems odd that Klimoff does not
61
mention Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology, which is very much in the same vein or scheme.
62
In view of the above, it would be difficult to argue with Fr John
Meyendorff’s assessment of what he called the principal motivating
factor throughout Florovsky’s career. Although Florovsky never
mentioned the name of Bulgakov in his published polemics, it could
hardly be more clear where he stands regarding his sophiology.
Although Florovsky took the stance of taking pains not be drawn into
the controversy, Klimoff comments that “his papers reveal just how far
removed he was from any detached scholarly view of the matter.”101
In the very highly charged atmosphere in Paris during the winter of
1935-6, the only person who behaved “with extraordinary dignity and
generosity” was Bulgakov himself. Father Georges also writes “I would
insist on one thing”, in reflecting on this difficult experience, “The only
man who never became angry with me was Father Bulgakov. I think
he suffered very much, but he never became an enemy, and this is the
measure of the man.”102
In contrast to Florovsky’s position, Vladimir Lossky’s approach was
one of open critique on Bulgakov. Rowan Williams raises some salient
points in terms of this: Lossky, like Bulgakov himself, regards the
debate as being about procedures and canonical proprieties just as
much as doctrine in the strict sense. Lossky accused Bulgakov of a
‘dilettante’ attitude to the Church and its proper canonical
requirements: a priest should submit with proper humility to a
‘disciplinary order’; Bulgakov is behaving as if he were still an
independent theologian, showing he has failed to grasp what tradition
really is – as have most of his generation of ‘convert intelligentsia’. As
101
G.F. and the Sophiological Controversy’. 85
63
Rowan Williams comments, this is “a disagreeably shrill attack” and
worse still if read in tandem with Bulgakov’s account of what his
ordination meant.103
102
Andrew Blane (ed.) Georges Florovsky, 68.
103
Rowan Williams, Sergii Bulgakov, 176
64
Lossky’s real theological worry, as Williams writes, is that “if theology
comes to be dominated by speculation of vaguely philosophical
parentage, it will never truly be itself.”104 But perhaps the most basic
disagreement between Bulgakov and his critics (especially Lossky), as
Rowan Williams points out, is whether the unifying metaphor of
Sophia is “necessary or desirable”. However, as he contends, this
misses much of what is most carefully delineated in Bulgakov’s mature
sophiology. The Philosophy of Economy made plain “how the Good
can be conceived as one in all the historical plurality of human
action.”105 By the time of writing The Lamb of God, and The Bride of
the Lamb, Sophia, rather than standing ‘between’ God and the world,
is now the divine capacity for love, “eternally realised, mirrored in the
created world and historically realised in redeemed humanity.”106
Bulgakov’s vision of the Church, as we have seen, also holds the
balance between ‘western’ individualism and oppressive
collectivism.107 Above all, as Williams comments, the most common
and easy misunderstanding of Bulgakov’s language is precisely to take
him as talking about a kind of heavenly individual rather than divine
action and created process. Whilst his idiom can encourage misunderstanding, by 1935 “perhaps his readers should have been better
attuned.”108
104
Sergii Bulgakov,176. One does need to remember that in the 1930s the protest against a
cultural captivity for theology, for anyone aware of what was going on in Germany, carried validity.
105
Sergii Bulgakov, 178
106
Sergii Bulgakov,178
107
Which is to say, and as we have seen, when distorted self-love breaks the ‘sophianic’ whole into
excluding fragments, the redemptive work of God and Spirit enables the revelation of the wholeness
of things. This redemption changes our perception, leading to knowledge that we can exist as
selves only in communion with other selves.
108
Sergii Bulgakov, 181
65
Paul Valliere puts much of the dispute down to a clash of interests in
what he calls the neopatristic school (represented by Lossky), and
Bulgakov’s ‘liberal tradition’. This latter I believe is an ‘unfortunate’ if
inaccurate or misleading term or description, in setting these schools
in a polarised grid. However the highlighting of this aspect serves to
make one look closer at the ‘provenance’ of the schools of thought. As
Williams writes elsewhere, when we trace the implications of
neopatristic theology, it becomes clear that its agenda and intellectual
roots are not fully accounted for by dependence simply on the Greek
Fathers. In terms of Lossky,
the themes closes to his heart have remarkable resonance with
some of the concerns of precisely those he had begun by
attacking; Bulgakov and earlier “sophiologists” had also written of
the personal, of the lack of an adequate theology of the personal
in Western thought, of the centrality of communion in thinking
about the Church.109
Likewise,
Bulgakov is never concerned to set up speculation over against
patristic or Byzantine tradition; he simply wants a measure of
honesty about those areas where earlier theology does not even
begin to address certain substantial issues. He insists, in a way
with which it is hard to quarrel, that the theology of the Spirit is
undeveloped in patristic thought, and that there is practically
nothing in the tradition that explicitly deals with social and
political questions. His aim is to suggest ways of responding in
these areas which will be grounded in a robust Chalcedonian
belief.110
Rowan Williams, ‘Russian Theology: Challenge and Invitation’ ( Star: February 2002, 11-14)
109
12.
110
Rowan Williams, ‘Russian Theology: Challenge and Invitation’ ( Star: February 2002, 11-14) 13.
66
Perhaps it is possible that the polarised debate of the mid 1930s,
crystallised as it is in a sense, will eventually bring us to a more
‘balanced’ way in theology, between the apophatic (negative) way which
Lossky espoused, and the cataphatic, or affirmative way which
Bulgakov points us towards. Perhaps it is in a place between these
two ‘worlds’ that we can be the most creative in our theology and in
the way in which we approach it. I take theology here in the true sense
of the word – which is to say - worship.
Bulgakov moved constantly, and in more than one sense, ‘between two
worlds’ as we have seen. Fr. Michael Plekon makes the observation
that St Seraphim of Sarov “may indeed by an image of the
transformations a soul must pass through, the transcendence of all
categories and positions, to the simple and direct humanity that true
holiness looks like.” And that perhaps “Father Bulgakov  serves as
an image of the other, the struggling side of this ‘new being’, of the
‘hidden holiness’ of our time.”111
Fr Alexander Schmemann remembers the early morning liturgies
Bulgakov celebrated in Paris, during the time of the Nazi occupation.
“.. one had the impression the liturgy was being celebrated for the first
time.  There was something of a unity with all creation, something
pre-eternal, cosmic, what the words in the liturgy “awesome and
glorious suggest.  for his theology at its very depths, was precisely
and above all liturgical”112
Nicholas Zernov’s testimony perhaps carries the most weight: “Father
111
Living Icons, 41.
67
Bulgakov marked out the road along which Russian religious thought
is likely to proceed in the future.” His concentration on the problem of
the divine foundation of the created world,
which he associated with Sophiology, the teaching about Holy
Wisdom as the prototype of the universe, is symptomatic, for he
came to grips with the most difficult and vital task of
contemporary theology: the co-ordination of the biblical version of
the creation with the cosmic picture projected by modern science.
Bulgakov, however, stood so much ahead of his own generation
that a full appreciation of him must wait for some time113
Zernov has been prophetic in other instances, and there are stirrings
already, one might say beginnings, or green shoots. Bulgakov’s senior
Bishop in Paris, Metropolitan Evlogii, wrote, in the context of the
Sophia controversy
112
Cited in Plekon, Living Icons, 43.
113
Russian Religious Renaissance, 144. And, Zernov continues, “in his own days he was more
attacked and criticised than followed and understood.
68
I consider patience to be a great creative force. One must know
how to wait for the shoots to appear from the sown earth, and
then, blessing the new plants, one must take all possible
measures to help them grow, heating them with the warmth and
love of prayer; but even here patience is needed: the process of
growth is mysterious, and there is no point in forcing it artificially
in the hope of a rapid flowering, you just end up interfering; one
can only try to create conditions conducive to development.
Everything alive in the Church is born in this way, grows, flowers
and bears fruit in this way. This is a great mystery of the
Church.114
In the words of Father Bulgakov himself, whose firmness of faith was
never undermined:
so firm is my hope, so apocalyptic my attitude towards life, that
I am supreme and joyous in my expectation
‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus!’115
114
Quoted by Paul Valliere (from Put’ moei zhuzni) in Modern Russian Theology, (Edinburgh: T&T
Clarke, 2000), 289.
115
‘Autobiographical Notes’, 20-21.
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