The Land of Unlikeness

Part II:  A Brief Introduction to Sergei Bulgakov, by Cynthia Nielsen

In the previous post, I mentioned two experiences that helped bring Bulgakov back to the Orthodox Church.  In this post, we encounter the third experience, viz., the death of Bulgakov’s  four year old son in the summer of 1909.  At his son’s funeral, Bulgakov had a strong sense that “his child lived in the life of the Resurrection” (p. 602).  This experience moved him to re-read Soloviev’s works in which the theme of wisdom (created and uncreated) is prominent.  Bulgakov develops his theme of “the Wisdom of God as the foundation and goal of all earthly reality” and begins to employ it in his writings on economics and philosophy.  In his book, The Philosophy of Economy (1912), Bulgakov argues that even though our labor is toilsome, the economic process is meaningful because it participates in the Divine Wisdom.  Moreover, our struggles in nature also involve (besides pain and difficulties) joy and beauty, if we, as followers of Christ, realize that human beings possess a “hidden potential for perfection [and so must] work to resurrect nature, to endow it once again with the life and meaning it had in Eden.”¹  For Bulgakov, the most mundane human activities have value and are redeemable “by the Christian message of the fall and resurrection of man and, with man, nature.  We have a common task and it is universal resurrection out of fall, bringing resurrection-life into everything” (p. 603).

By 1917, Bulgakov was recognized in Russia as a gifted Orthodox intellectual and was elected a member of the Russian Church Council-a council which had the massive responsibility of picking up the pieces after the fateful February Revolution (1917).  However, with the subsequent October Revolution and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, the Orthodox Church came under great persecution, and Bulgakov, now ordained as a priest, was forced the following year (1918) to flee (p. 603, 604).  He found a temporary place of rest in the Crimea, but this was soon taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1922.  As a result, Bulgakov, as were many intellectuals, was forced to leave and eventually made his way to Paris where he lived his remaining years (1925-1944).  In Paris, Bulgakov became a founding member of the theological institute, Saint-Serge, where he taught for a number of years (p. 604).  During his time in the Crimea, Bulgakov briefly entertained becoming a Catholic; however, this period of doubt ended in a strengthening of his own Orthodox roots. Nonetheless, Bulgakov was extremely ecumenically minded and interacted with a number of Anglicans and other Protestants. Describing Bulgakov’s ecumenical activities, Nichols writes:

“In 1927 he helped found - in England - the Anglican-Orthodox Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and in the years 1933 to 1935 published some remarkable articles in English in the journal of that Fellowship, arguing that Orthodoxy remained in what he called an “invisible, mysterious communion with Catholicism” (p. 604).

Although Bulgakov was well-known as a theologian-in part due to the publication of his “Little Trilogy”:  The Friend of the Bridegroom, The Burning Bush, and Jacob’s Ladder-in 1935 Bulgakov was charged with heresy by two Russian jurisdictions (both of which were not his own jurisdiction, the Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarch for Western Europe, in which Bulgakov remained in good standing) [p. 604, 605].  The charge against Bulgakov, which he strongly denied, was that “Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is in effect a fourth person of the Holy Trinity” (p. 605).

In the years 1933-1936, Bulgakov wrote his “Great Triology”:  The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb.  He became ill with cancer of the throat in 1939 and died on July 12, 1944, not long after the completion of his final book, The Apocalypse of John.

Nichols, Fr. Aidan.  “Wisdom from Above? The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov,” New Blackfriars 85, (2004): 598-613.

1. C. Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, p. 147, as found in “Wisdom from Above,” p. 603.↩