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Bulgakov: wrestling with Soloviev’s heritage
Th e fi rst “spiritual child” of Soloviev whom we will consider is Sergei Bulgakov. To begin with we will trace the general development of the man who has been called “arguably the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century” and the “greatest Orthodox theologian since Gregory Palamas,”1 paying attention to his links with Soloviev. Th en, we will turn to his treatment of the Jewish question in its various forms.
As the superlative epithets just quoted show, Bulgakov is a fi gure of monumental importance in modern Orthodox theology. Although many would qualify the high praise given him by his admirers due to signifi cant disagreements with key aspects of his theological outlook, this does not detract from the fact that a central position in Orthodox thought is occupied by Bulgakov, whose extensively stated views on the Jewish question would thus be of interest even if they did occupy the crucial role in his theology that he attributed to them.
In 1890, the last decade of Soloviev’s life, Sergei Bulgakov was only a twenty-one-year old youth, just fi nishing his gymnasium education. In 1895, he was nearing the end of his studies at Moscow university, where he had become an adherent of “legal Marxism.” By 1900, he had written two works on Marxist economics:
Markets in capitalist production and Capitalism and agriculture – not, one would imagine, a very prepossessing start for a future world-famous theologian.
1 Catherine Evtuhov, “Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolayevich,” in Encyclopedia of Russian History. Th e Gale Group Inc. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. (October 4, 2009). http://
www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404100184.html; and Constantin Andronikov, the translator of Bulgakov’s works into French (quoted in Krassen Stanchev, “Sergei Bulgakov and the spirit of capitalism,” in Journal of Markets and Morality, Volume 11, number 1, Spring 2008.) Boris Jakim, Bulgakov’s most recent English translator, refers to him as “the twentieth century’s most profound Orthodox systematic theologian” (Introduction to Sergei Bulgakov, Th e Lamb of God, translated by Boris Jakim. (Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008), p.x.) On the other hand, another notable French heir of Russian theology, Olivier Clément, maintained that the 20th century saw only three great theologians: Fr. Dumitru Staniloae (a Romanian), Fr. Justin Popovich (a Serbian), and Vladimir Lossky. Th e latter was Clemént’s own teacher, and the main critic of the orthodoxy of Bulgakov’s thought. Clément’s vs. Evtuhov’s and Andronikov’s evaluations show that Bulgakov’s status within Orthodoxy still has not been resolved, due to his sophiology, which will be examined below. (As we will see in the chapter on Berdyaev, another contemporary Orthodox fi gure assigns the epithet of “greatest Orthodox theologian since Palamas” to Berdyaev – a sign of the enthusiasm Russian thought continues to inspire in (some parts of) the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church; though such an evaluation, I believe, would be far rarer.)
However, that was soon to change – in a pattern that recapitulated Soloviev’s own move from materialism to religion. Having relocated to Kiev to take up a position as a lecturer in politics and law at the technical university there, Bulgakov became interested in Kantian philosophy and moved his orientation from “Marxism to Idealism” (as the title of an anthology he edited at the time was called). In 1902, he fi nally discovered Soloviev with a vengeance, and in 1903 he wrote an article called “What can the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev give to contemporary consciousness?”2
In this and a string of other articles, Bulgakov fi rst hammered out the foundations of his own vision of Christianity: he was particularly drawn to Soloviev’s personality and his commitment to a universal Christianity, as well as his emphasis on Christian politics. Whereas Soloviev’s Christian action had taken the form of a theocratic vision of unity between the Christian churches, Bulgakov at fi rst linked the concept of Christian politics to a fusion of socialism and Christianity, in an attempt to weld together two aspects of his life that still struggled within him.
Although the 1905 Revolution graphically brought home to him just how unsympathetic the beliefs and deeds of the radical faction were to his new mentality3, he continued to believe that Soloviev’s vision was best implemented in a combination of Christianity and social action. He even presented himself for election as a representative of his native region at the fi rst state Duma4 in 1907.
Having been selected, he stood on a non-party platform, representing something that he called Christian socialism, a socialism that would be free of atheism, and fi lled with Orthodoxy, the “Russian socialism” as Dostoyevsky had called it.
Th is was the fi rst of many positions that Bulgakov would defend in his life that attracted controversy and misunderstanding. For in the categories of the time, it was taken for granted that if a member of the Duma professed Orthodoxy, then his political outlook was conservative and monarchist; and if he professed socialism, then he was ipso facto against the old order. In fact, Bulgakov soon came to see the sense of this dichotomy, and while he could never fully accept the polarity of Christianity and social action, he later rejected his naïve blend of opposites in the strongest terms, calling his project of that time “social-idiotism.”
Others, like Blok and Bely, however, would only much later, and under the tragic pressure of the events of the second Revolution, come to a similar judgment about the infelicity of spiritual politics in the Solovievan style – as they saw it5.
2 Sergei Bulgakov, “Chto dayot sovremennomu soznaniyu fi losofi a Vladimira Solovieva?” in Voprosy fi losofi i i psykhologii, No.66 (1903).
3 Later, we will quote extracts from Bulgakov’s diary that describe his reaction to the fi rst Russian revolution.
4 One of the constitutional concessions ceded by the government aft er the 1905 Revolution.
5 Th e writers Blok and Bely, and the poet-novelist-philosopher Dmitri Merezhkovsky were at the heart of the symbolist movement, and all interepreted Soloviev’s mysticism in a revolutionary way – as a call to create a new Christian Kingdom of
Bulgakov’s stint in real politics, though, was an eff ective catalyst in speeding up that disillusionment, and by the end of the decade, he was turning to another aspect of Soloviev’s heritage, one that would also get him into deep waters of a diff erent sort in the coming years: sophiology. 1912 was the year in which Bulgakov fi rst outlined his thoughts on Sophia, in a book called Th e Philosophy of Economics. Now political action was to be much gentler and slower, and connected to “mystical action,” namely the “sophianization” of the world.
In 1917, Bulgakov developed this idea in Th e Unfading Light. By then, a veritable metamorphosis had occurred in the soul of the former Marxist and devotee of Kantianism: by the time the October Revolution was drawing near, Bulgakov was embracing a mystical religious concept of the Russian monarchy, with extreme reverence for the Tsar as offi ce and as a person, despite his personal failings. As he saw it, the soul of Russia and the monarchy of Russia were intertwined: the fall of one would mean the fall of the other. Much of his energy was taken up now with uncovering the essentially atheistic, anti-religious, even demonic character of his former Marxist beliefs, and that of the radicals intent on implementing that ideology in Russia. As we will see, this gradual
“sophianization” of his thought was to have a radical impact on his evaluation of Jewry and Judaism as well, casting at fi rst a negative but then a positive light on his attitudes6.
Th e year aft er the Revolution, Bulgakov was ordained to the priesthood, succumbing as he put it, to the call of his Levitical blood7. Th is signaled in an even more obvious way his complete opposition to the new Soviet regime, to whom he was now an offi cial enemy8. But the priesthood would also put him God on earth. Bulgakov, and Soloviev’s nephew Sergei Soloviev, came to repudiate this approach. In fact, this millenarianism came to be seen as Judaic by Bulgakov, as we will see in the next section.
6 Ch.4 discusses how the mysticism of Pavel Florensky was connected to his attitude towards Jews. In the 1910s Bulgakov and Florensky were very close, and both were working on a sophiology that would bring Soloviev closer to Orthodoxy. Florensky’s return to the Church from an atheist youth was more rapid than Bulgakov’s; though eleven years younger than him, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1913, fi ve years earlier than his friend. Florensky’s and Bulgakov’s Sophia-oriented all-unity with its conservative social and political outlook led to a number of similarities in their evaluation of Judaism and Jewry. Th e most obvious diff erence is that Florensky’s
“Judeology” was uncompromisingly anti-Semitic; the nature of Bulgakov’s thoughts on Judaism will become clear shortly.
7 In the sense of continuing the priesthood of his father and grandfather. Th is is an interesting observation, given his thoughts on blood, nation and Judaism discussed below. He even writes, “I was a Jew from Jews” (p.48) of his pure Levitical lineage, echoing St. Paul’s language, and reminiscent of Soloviev’s self-image as a “Jew.”
Incidentally, present at his ordination were two Jewish friends who will be the subject of the next chapter, Mikhail Gershenzon and Lev Shestov.
8 As a priest in Soviet Russia, he had to forthwith resign his teaching position at Moscow University, and he moved back to the Ukraine where he was second priest
into opposition with aspects of his own intellectual past, and not just Marxism and materialism. While the teaching of Sophia would remain close to his heart, Bulgakov came to reject the philosophical enterprise per se, so that Soloviev’s vision of an integrated philosophy came to seem to him a mistaken enterprise.
More and more, he began to mine his thought, as he put it, from the Eucharistic cup. Th eology, and not philosophy, would be his path henceforth.
In his last philosophical work, aptly titled Th e Tragedy of Philosophy (1921), he writes of the exhaustion of philosophy, and its failure to live up to its essentially religious roots and inspiration. In sum, “the history of philosophy can be shown to be and interpreted as religious heresiology.” In its place must come theology, based on religious experience, which needs to be shored up against subjectivity and individualism by being brought into harmony with Church tradition. As such anything that lay outside of that tradition could have no place in Christianity. If Christianity was to be living and new, it would have to fi nd a way forward into the future without philosophy.
Certainly Western attempts to improve Christianity - the Renaissance, the Reformation and humanism – were more and more to be considered by Bulgakov to be part of that same heretical tradition as philosophy. But ironically, his own attempt to expand and reapply the Tradition for the salvation of contemporary man through an extension and deepening of Soloviev’s sophiology, was itself to be branded heresy,9 and some have questioned whether Bulgakov escaped from philosophy at all, seeing in his work the German Romanticism of Hegel and Schelling10.
Interestingly, at this time Bulgakov was also recapitulating another phase of his early spiritual mentor: the temptations of Catholicism. Even though he was at this point immersed in his Russianness, including a Slavophile-tinted distrust of the West, and was a monarchist in mourning, in another sense he was confronted by a similar situation as Soloviev: the seeming weakness of his native Russian church, and its inability to hold its own in the world, a fact which contrasted with the perceived strength and organization of the Roman church in the West.
Living through the Civil War as it raged in all its bloodiness and brutality in the Ukraine from 1918-1922, seeing the Church attacked from within (by the collaborationist Living Church) and without (by the Bolsheviks), Bulgakov came close to despair and believed that the Russian Church did not have the resources to survive its fi rst persecution on native soil. Only the organizing principle of the Papacy could save Christ’s church, and he wrote a series of articles in which he struggled with these questions11.
By the time of his exile in 1923, though, he had overcome this temptation12, at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Kiev.
9 For details, see the discussion in the section on sophiology below.
10 Th is is a charge that has been made against other Russian religious thinkers like Frank, Florensky, and Karsavin, and will be discussed at the relevant places.
11 U sten Khersonisa (manuscript, Yalta, 1923) reprinted in Simvol, Paris, 1991, No.25.
12 On the fi rst stage of his exile, he resided briefl y in Constantinople, he was subjected
and although he never consider himself anti-Catholic, it may be said that by the time he settled in Paris he had a great confi dence in what Orthodoxy could give to the West, suff ering as he saw it from humanism, atheistic socialism, the distortion of the Papacy and the consequent Reformation, as well as another temptation that he himself had overcome, scientism13.
However, these years in the Ukraine will form a central focus of our examination of Bulgakov below, for a diff erent reason: there he was subject to another temptation, that of anti-Semitism. Th e former Pale of Settlement in which he was living had been abolished by decree of the the Provisional government on March 20, 1917 and the Soviet regime’s continuation of a pro-Jewish policy caused many Jews to experience sympathy for the Bolsheviks. Th us Bulgakov and Jewry – at least as he perceived it – found themselves on diff erent sides of the political barricades. Given the apocalyptic nature of that political struggle, and the mystical turn of Bulgakov’s mind, for him that opposition soon exploded beyond politics and into theology.
In 1923, the regime expelled Bulgakov as an undesirable, a decision which spared him the harsher sentences that would be handed out to dissidents aft er Lenin’s death. Arriving in Paris along with many other expellees, he threw himself into organizing Orthodox life among the Russian émigré community, and also representing Orthodoxy in ecumenical dialogue with Protestants and Catholics.
He helped found the St Sergius Institute, which opened in Paris in 1925 with Bulgakov as its rector. He also took a guiding role in the formation of the Russian Christian Youth Movement14. Both the institute and the movement were to Jesuit missionizing, which actually helped him to overcome his infatuation for good. Th enceforth, he was to look at his Roman temptation as a necessary dialectical stage in his developing conception of the Church, and as a “preventative inoculation” for the future. Bulgakov’s development contrasts interestingly with that of Sergei Soloviev, the philosopher’s nephew, who had been close to his uncle at the end of his life, and a central fi gure in the dissemination of his heritage. Initially, S.Soloviev was, like Bulgakov, close to the spirit of the ‘new religious consciousness’
preached in Soloviev’s name by the symbolists: Bely (to become S.Soloviev’s brother-in-law), Blok (S.Soloviev’s second cousin), and Merezhkovsky. Th en, like Bulgakov, he rejected the unchristian elements of Merezhkovsky’s ‘third testament’ and the neo-pagan veneration of Sophia. He was ordained an Orthodox priest, but aft er the Revolution he converted to Catholicism, eventually being ordained a Catholic priest. Later, he suff ered psychological traumas which eventually led to his death.
(Further reading: P.P.Gaidenko, “Vladimir Soloviev i fi losofi a serebraynogo veka,”
ch.10 on S.Soloviev.)
13 In Svet Nevecherniy (Th e Unfading Light), he refers to his liberation due to his growing faith from “a panicky fear of…scientism and its Sanhedrin.” (It will be noted, in passing, how Sanhedrin is a negative term – by default. Th is is indicative of the general unthinking atmosphere of anti-Jewishness in which not just Russia, but the whole of Christian Europe was soaked).
14 Many well-known Orthodox fi gures in the West were graduates of the Institute or the Youth Movement, and some were Bulgakov’s spiritual children, for example: Lev
to become a beacon of Orthodoxy in the West: Soloviev had once expressed the regret that Khomiakov, the leading Christian Slavophile, had never founded a school, a defi ciency that Soloviev himself did not rectify. In that sense, Bulgakov answered a need, and though by that time, there was much in Soloviev’s heritage that Bulgakov could not accept, the ties that connected them were in many ways still strong.
Bulgakov was prolifi c both in his old role as a philosopher and then in his new role as theologian. His purely theological works start with Th e Burning Bush (1927), which explores aspects of the Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God.
Later works treat miracles15, angels16, and the power of the Name of Christ17. Th e culmination of Bulgakov’s theological work is the trilogy exploring the Divine-humanity18, whose last volume Th e Bride of the Lamb, which is heavy in sophiological content, was published at the same time as his fi nal essays on the Jewish Question, during the Second World War.
Bulgakov died in 1944, aft er suff ering for three years from throat cancer.
Th ose who were present at his death-bed reported how his face shone aft er death and those who saw him lying in repose were fi lled with a great sense of inner peace.
Th e Jews in Bulgakov’s thought: a preview of the main problem
Having looked at Bulgakov’s general development, it is time to focus on his evolving attitudes to Jews and Judaism. Th e nature of our treatment will be shaped by a problem which ultimately confronts the reader of these writings. Broadly
Zander, Paul Evdokimov, Nicolai Afanasiev (who was present at Vatican II and had some infl uence on the “return to the Fathers” movement in Catholicism), Mother Maria Skobtsova, and the nun and original icon-painter Joanna Reitlinger. Another giant of Orthodoxy in the West, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, fi rst came into contact with Bulgakov in the Youth Movement. During Soviet times, he was greatly revered in Russia by underground Christians (as he still is aft er the fall of the regime), so that Bulgakov’s infl uence extended indirectly back to his homeland.
Bulgakov himself is widely studied today in Russia, though controversy continues to surround his sophiology.
15 Sergei Bulgakov, O chudesakh yevangelskikh. Moscow: Russkiy Put’, 1994.
16 Lestvitsa yakovleva, in Sergei Bulgakov, Malaya trilogia. (Kupina neopalimaya. Drug zhenikha. Lestvitsa Iakovlya.) Moscow: Obshchedostupniy pravoslavnii universitet, osnovannii protoiereem Aleksandrom Menem, 2008.
17 Sergei Bulgakov, Filosofi a imeni, Moscow: Nauka, 1998.
18 Consisting of 3 volumes: Th e Lamb of God (1933), devoted to Christology; Th e Comforter (1935) devoted to pneumatology; and Th e Bride of the Lamb (1942), devoted to anthropology, or the doctrine of the church – ecclesiology – understood as Sophia. Two of these volumes are available in an English translation by Boris
18 Consisting of 3 volumes: Th e Lamb of God (1933), devoted to Christology; Th e Comforter (1935) devoted to pneumatology; and Th e Bride of the Lamb (1942), devoted to anthropology, or the doctrine of the church – ecclesiology – understood as Sophia. Two of these volumes are available in an English translation by Boris