Sergei Bulgakov

In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Nikolayevich and the family name is Bulgakov.

The Reverend Sergei Bulgakov
Bulgakov in the 1920s
Born	Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov 28 July 1871 Livny, Oryol Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	12 July 1944(1944-07-12) (aged 72) Paris, Provisional Government of the French Republic
Alma mater	Imperial Moscow University
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Russian philosophy
School	Christian philosophy Sophiology
Main interests	Philosophy of religion

Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov (/bʊlˈɡɑːkəf/; Russian: Серге́й Никола́евич Булга́ков; 28 July [O.S. 16 July] 1871 – 13 July 1944) was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, and economist. Orthodox writer and scholar David Bentley Hart has said that Bulgakov was "the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century." Father Sergei Bulgakov also served as a spiritual father and confessor to Mother Maria Skobtsova (who was canonized a saint by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 16 January 2004).

Bulgakov is best known for his teaching about Sophia the Wisdom of God, which received mixed reception; it was condemned by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1935, but without accusations of heresy.

Biography

Early life: 1871–1889

Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was born on 16 July 1871 to the family of a rural Orthodox priest (Nikolai Bulgakov) in the town of Livny, Oryol Governorate, in Russia. The family produced Orthodox priests for six generations, beginning in the sixteenth century with their ancestor Bulgak, a Tatar from whom the family name derives. Metropolitan Macarius Bulgakov (1816–1882), one of the major Eastern Orthodox theologians of his days, and one of the most important Russian church historians, was a distant relative.

In 1884, Bulgakov graduated from the Livny Theological School. At the age of fourteen, Bulgakov entered the Oryol Theological Seminary. In 1888, however, Bulgakov quit the seminary after a loss of his faith. In the same year, he attempted suicide. Bulgakov later noted that his passion for priesthood waned as he grew disenchanted with Orthodoxy because his teachers were unable to answer his questions. After Bulgakov quit the seminary, he entered Yelets Classical Gymnasium to prepare for the law faculty of the Imperial Moscow University. Among his teachers there was Vasily Rozanov.

Legal Marxism: 1890–1897

In 1890, Bulgakov entered the Imperial Moscow University where he chose to study political economy and law. As he reflected years later, however, literature and philosophy were his natural inclination and he had no interest in law. Bulgakov only chose to study law because it seemed more likely to contribute to his country's redemption. After his graduation from the Law Faculty of the Imperial Moscow University in 1894, he began graduate studies at the university and taught for two years at the Moscow Commercial Institute. It was during his graduate studies when Bulgakov studied with the economist Alexander Chuprov, on whose recommendation Bulgakov was retained at the Department of Political Economy of Statistics to prepare for the professorship. Bulgakov's thought during his studies with Chuprov has generally been seen through the lens of the Marxist-Populist debate. From this perspective, he has been labeled a "legal Marxist."

In 1895, Bulgakov began teaching political economy at the Imperial Moscow Technical School. In the same year, he published a review of Karl Marx's unfinished third volume of Das Kapital, and authored an essay in 1896, "On the Regularity of Social Phenomena." In the following year, Bulgakov published a study "On Markets in Capitalist Conditions of Production." It was these writings that originally established Bulgakov as a significant representative of Marxism in Russia. During his years as a legal Marxist, he had met with Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Victor Adler, and Georgi Plekhanov.

From Marxism to Idealism: 1898–1902

On 14 January 1898, shortly before embarking for Western Europe, Bulgakov married Yelena Tokmakova, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Yelena was the daughter of Ivan Tokmakov, owner of the Oleiz estate in Crimea.

In 1898, Bulgakov received a scholarship for a two-year internship in Western Europe. He left for Germany, where he tested the results of his research in personal correspondence with representatives of German Social Democracy. The result of his research was a two-volume dissertation, Capitalism and Agriculture, released in 1900. The dissertation was intended to test the application of Marx's theory of capitalist societies to agriculture. Bulgakov examined the entire agricultural history of Germany, the United States, Ireland, France, and England. The thesis ended by declaring that Marx's analysis of capitalism, limited by features of the English economy, did not integrate this system with an economic theory of agriculture, and was not a realistic, universal account of capitalist society. Originally intended to be defended as a doctoral dissertation, the work did not receive the highest rating from the Academic Council of Moscow University and was defended as a master's thesis.

In 1900 Bulgakov presented his finished dissertation for examination. It was this examination that led Bulgakov to being a privatdozent at the Kiev University of St. Vladimir and Professor of Political Economy at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1901. It was evident in lectures such as "Ivan Karamazov as a philosophical type" delivered in Kiev that Bulgakov had already distanced himself from Marxism. At the time of Bulgakov teaching about Dostoevsky, the counterweight to Marxism in 20th century Russia was neo-Kantianism; heavily influenced by neo-Kantianism, Bulgakov returned to idealism and believed in the significance of the historical role of the valuese of goodness and beauty. However, it was the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, who he began to read in 1902, that Bulgakov considered to be the highest synthesis of philosophical thought; this philosophy considered the vital principle of Christianity to be the organizing principle of social creativity. Bulgakov's idealism eventually led him back to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Bulgakov presented the individual stages of his philosophical development in his collection From Marxism to Idealism, published in Saint Petersburg in 1903.

Political turmoil: 1903–1909

1907 caricature of Bulgakov as a member of the State Duma

Together with Pyotr Struve, Bulgakov published the journal Liberation; together, they were co-founders of the illegal political organization Union of Liberation in 1903. After the Revolution of 1905, its members formed the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, which held the most seats in the representative assemblies, the First and Second Dumas (1906–1907). Bulgakov did not join the Kadets and instead unsuccessfully attempted to form his own organization, the Union of Christian Politics, which advocated Christian socialism and collaborated with the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle.

Amidst the chaos of 1905, Bulgakov made the acquaintance of Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), with whom he would establish a long-lasting friendship. Bulgakov and Florensky were among founding members of the Vladimir Soloviev Memorial Religious-Philosophical Society, which was founded in Moscow at the end of 1905.

In 1905 Bulgakov, along with the Brotherhood of Christian Struggle, bishops, priests, and many others, supported the call for a council of the Orthodox Church in support of social reforms. In 1906, a preconciliar commission prepared six volumes of information for the council. Nicholas II thwarted the planned council, but the information would be put to use when it eventually did convene eleven years later.

In 1906, Bulgakov was editor of the Kiev newspaper Narod. After its closure, he returned from Kiev to Moscow. He taught at Moscow University as a privatdozent in the department of political economy and statistics of the Law Faculty, and was also professor at the Moscow Commercial Institute until 1918.

He was elected to the Second State Duma in 1906 as a non-partisan "Christian socialist" deputy from the Oryol Governorate. In June 1907, the Second State Duma dissolved after barely five months in session.

After the dissolution of the Second State Duma, Bulgakov lost what remaining zeal he had for direct political involvement. Another major factor in his eventual separation from the Union of Liberation was the increasingly anti-Christian direction being championed by leading representatives of left-liberal politics.

During 1904–1909, his focus shifted to an explicitly Christian perspective. Bulgakov also changed his attitude towards the controversial Nicholas II. He believed Nicholas II was responsible for the social problems plaguing Russia. However, Bulgakov also did not appreciate the increasing radicalization of the leftists in Russia and their abandonment of Russian Orthodoxy in favor of a purely secular state; on the contrary, it caused him to uphold the positive value of governance by Nicholas II, even as he continued to detest him, accusing him of promoting the revolution and bringing about the demise of the royal family. Bulgakov continued to struggle with the meaning of political power as he wrote Unfading Light.

Mikhail Nesterov's Philosophers (1917), Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov (right)

In the summer of 1909, Bulgakov's four-year-old son Ivan died. At the funeral, Bulgakov had a profound religious experience that is generally regarded as his final step in his journey back to Orthodoxy. Bulgakov would later contemplate the meaning of death in his later works, including Unfading Light.

Academia and journalism: 1910–1917

In 1911, Bulgakov left the Moscow University among a large group of liberal-minded university teachers in protest against the policies of the Minister of Public Education Lev Kasso. The following years were the period of Bulgakov's greatest social and journalistic activity. He participated in many endeavors that marked a religious and philosophical revival, such as the journals Novy put' and Voprosy religii, the collections Questions of Religion, About Vladimir Soloviev, On the Religion of Leo Tolstoy, Problems of Idealism, and Milestones, the works Religion of the Vladimir Soloviev Memorial Philosophical Society, and the publishing house Put', where the most important works of Russian religious thought were published in 1911-1917. In his work during this period, he transitioned from lectures and articles on topics of religion and culture (the most important of which he collected in the two-volume book Two Cities, published 1911) to original philosophical developments.

In 1911, Bulgakov was elected fellow chairman of the Alexander Chuprov Society for the Development of Social Sciences and a member of the Commission on Church Law at the Moscow Law Society.

In 1913, Bulgakov defended his doctoral dissertation on political economy, Philosophy of Economics, at Moscow University, in which he put forward Christianity as a universal process, the subject of which is Sophia - the world soul, creative nature, ideal humanity. He was elected full professor of political economy at Moscow University.

In 1917, Bulgakov became a delegate of the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity and a member of the All-Russian Local Council of the Orthodox Russian Church, the Religious and Educational Conference under the Cathedral Council, the Commission for Familiarization with the Financial Situation of the Council, and the VI, VII, IX, and XX Departments. He was an author of the Patriarchal Message on Accession to the Throne. From December 1917, he was a member of the Supreme Church Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Priesthood and October Revolution: 1917–1921

In June 1918, Bulgakov was ordained a deacon and then a priest. He quickly rose to prominence in church circles. He took part in the All-Russia Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church that elected patriarch Tikhon of Moscow. Bulgakov rejected the October Revolution and responded to it with the dialogues At the Feast of the Gods ("На пиру богов", 1918), writtein in a style similar to the Three Talks of Vladimir Soloviev.

In July 1918, Bulgakov left Moscow, first going to Kiev then joining his wife and children in Koreiz in Crimea. For the next two years, he was a member of the Tauride Diocesan Council in Simferopol and a professor of political economy and theology at the Tauride University in Simferopol. In the works Philosophy of the Name (written in 1920, published in 1953) and The Tragedy of Philosophy (written in 1920, published in 1928), written at that time, he revised his view of the relationship between philosophy and dogmatics of Christianity, coming to the conclusion that Christian speculation can be expressed without distortion exclusively in the form of dogmatic theology. Dismissed from the university after the Bolsheviks came to Crimea. When the Bolsheviks captured Crimea in 1920, Bulgakov was dismissed from his teaching position at the university.

In 1921, Bulgakov became archpriest and assistant rector of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Yalta. In September 1922, he was arrested on charges of political unreliability.

Emigration to Prague: 1922-1924

In 1922, Bulgakov was included in a list of scientific and cultural figures subject to deportation, compiled by the State Political Directorate on the initiative of Vladimir Lenin. On 30 December 1922, he was deported to Constantinople on one of the so-called philosophers' ships without the right to return to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After a short stay in Constantinople, he arrived in Prague. In May 1923, with the blessing of Metropolitan Eulogius Georgiyevsky, he served in Prague's St. Nicholas Cathedral and took the position of professor in the department of church law and theology at the Law Faculty of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin.

Bulgakov involved himself in the spiritual leadership of Russian youth and participated in the ecumenical movement. He was founder and leader of the Brotherhood of St. Sophia, created with the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, and an organizer and participant in the congresses of the Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM). He participated in the first congresses of the RSCM in Přerov, Czechoslovakia and Argeron, France, and continued to supervise it.

Paris: 1925-1944

In 1925 he helped found St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (l'Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge) in Paris, France. While living in Paris, he completed two dogmatic trilogies on Sophiology — the first, The Burning Bush (1926), The Friend of the Bridegroom (1927), Jacob’s Ladder (1929); the second, The Lamb of God, The Comforter, The Bride of the Lamb (1939). It is in The Bride of the Lamb that Bulgakov argues for apokatastasis. Bulgakov states that humankind will "ultimately be justified." He also argues in this book for a supramundane fall, saying that "empirical history begins precisely with the fall, which is its starting premise."

After the publication of his book, Lamb of God, Bulgakov was accused of teachings contrary to Orthodox dogma by the Metropolitan Sergius I of Moscow, in 1935, and recommended his exclusion from the Church until he amended his "dangerous" views. The Karlovtsy Synod (i.e., Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) also joined in this condemnation. Metropolitan Evlogy set up a committee in Paris to investigate Bulgakov's orthodoxy, which reached a preliminary conclusion that his thought was free from heresy. However, an official conclusion was never reached.

He was the head of this institute and Professor of Dogmatic Theology until his death from throat cancer on 12 July 1944. His last work was devoted to the Apocalypse. He was buried in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery in the southern suburbs of Paris.

Selected works

• Bulgakov, Sergius (2002). The Lamb of God. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. p. 531. ISBN 0-8028-2779-9.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2004). The Comforter. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co. p. 398. ISBN 0-8028-2112-X.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2002). Bride of the Lamb. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co. p. 531. ISBN 0-567-08871-5.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2009). The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co. p. 191. ISBN 978-0-8028-4574-0.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2003). The Friend of the Bridegroom: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Forerunner. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co. p. 190. ISBN 0-8028-4979-2.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (1988). The Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. p. 195. ISBN 0-88141-051-9.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (1993). Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-940262-60-7.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (1997). The Holy Grail and the Eucharist. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books. p. 156. ISBN 0-940262-81-9.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2008). Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co. p. 147. ISBN 978-0-8028-4834-5.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2010). Jacob's ladder: on angels. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2011). Relics and Miracles. Two Theological Essays. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2012). Icons and The Name of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co.
• Bulgakov, Sergius (2012). Unfading Light. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish. Co.
• Bulgakov, Sergei (1899). A Contribution to the Question of the Capitalist Evolution of Agriculture. Published in nos. 1–3 of the magazine Nachalo in January–March 1899.
• Bulgakov, Sergei (1969). Father Sergius Bulgakov, 1871–1944: a collection of articles. London: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, [1969]
• Bulgakov, Sergei (2000). Philosophy of Economy. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300079906.
• Bulgakov, S. N. (1995). Apocatastasis and transfiguration : comprising his essay "On the question of the apocatastasis of the Fallen Spirits" (B. Jakim, Trans.). New Haven: Variable Press.
• James Z. Pain, Nicolas (Ed.) (1976), Sergius Bulgakov. A Bulgakov Anthology. London.
• Rowan Williams (Ed.) (1999), Sergii Bulgakov. Towards a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd.

See also

• Eastern Orthodox Christian theology
• Imiaslavie
• Liberation theology
• List of Russian philosophers
• Political theology
• Theophilus of Antioch

Further reading

• R. Williams, Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology (1999) Continuum.
• N. Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (1963)
• L. Zander, God and the world (2 vols. 1948) [Russian text] (a survey of Bulgakov's thought)
• Императорский Московский университет, 1755-1917: Энциклопедический словарь [Imperial Moscow University, 1755-1917: Encyclopedic Dictionary.] (in Russian). Moscow: ROSSPEN. 2010. ISBN 978-5-8243-1429-8.
• Paul Valliere, "Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov : Orthodox theology in a new key." (2000) Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
• Robert F. Slesinksi, "The Theology of Sergius Bulgakov" (2017) New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press
• Brandon Gallaher, "Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology" Oxford 2016: Oxford University Press [on Sergii Bulgakov, Karl Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar]
• Walter N. Sisto, "The Mother of God in the Theology of Sergius Bulgakov. The Soul of the World." (2017) London: Routledge.
• Mikhail Sergeev, "Sophiology in Russian Orthodoxy: Solov'ev, Bulgakov, Losskii, and Berdiaev." (2006) Lewiston N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press.
• Catherine Evtuhov, "The cross and the sickle. Sergei Bulgakov and the fate of Russian religious philosophy." (1997) Ithaca etc.: Cornell University Press.
• Sergij Bulgakov, "Bibliographie. Werke, Briefwechsel und Übersetzungen" (B. Hallensleben & R. Zwahlen Eds. Vol. 3). (2017) Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. (Bibliography with Russian titles and German translation.)

External links

• Works by Sergei Bulgakov at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Sergei Bulgakov (in Russian)
• «Unfading Light» (in Russian)
• Sergius Bulgakov Society – Extensive collection of links to Bulgakov resources
• – Sergij Bulgakov Research Center; List of English translations including pdf-downloads
• Forschungsstelle Sergij Bulgakov (dt.)