Bulgakov’s ecumenical thought
ANASTASSY GALAHER
Charisma as curse
We normally do not think of personal charisma as a curse. Nor do
we normally think of being an original thinker as a strike against
one’s character. However, in the case of Fr Sergii Bulgakov, it is
arguable that the mesmerising nature of his personality distracted
attention from a sober evaluation of his theology. What is
mentioned repeatedly in the reminiscences of Bulgakov is the
overwhelming impact of his character, quite distinct, that is, from
the content and quality of his economic, philosophical and
theological work.
E. L. Mascall is typical in this regard in remembering
Bulgakov as ‘one who was a prophet rather than a systematic
thinker’1. Yet what is even more puzzling than this reduction of
Bulgakov to the role of ‘prophet’ is the fact that Bulgakov was
simultaneously a theological systematiser par excellence.
However, when Bulgakov’s theology gained widespread attention,
apart from a few disciples who attempted to link the thought to the
person, 2 the connection of the man to the system he built was
evaded. People complained that his sophiological system was
obscure, 3 unnecessary 4 and, most famously, gnostic, 5 and therefore
heretical. 6
Given the extremely political environment surrounding
the 1935 ‘Sophiological controversy’, in which three different
Russian church jurisdictions and many personalities clashed, a
precise evaluation of the ostensible subject of the controversy –
Bulgakov’s theology – is yet to be written, 7 let alone its relation to
the man who created it. It remains unclear what the relation of the
man was to his thought. Yet perhaps one window into this relation
may be found in his ecumenical involvement.
Ecumenism by its very nature is theology in action since it is
our conception of the Church that motivates whether we reach out 27
to other Christians or not. If we do reach out to other Christians,
then how precisely we go about this process is determined by how
we understand the divisions that separate Christians vis-à-vis the
Church. Arguably the most important, and characteristic,
expression of Bulgakov’s ecumenical thought can be found in his
June 1933 proposals for partial or limited intercommunion between
the Anglican and Orthodox Churches in the Fellowship of St Alban
and St Sergius. However, before trying to understand these
‘prophetic proposals’, as Militza Zernov described them, 8 and the
long road which led up to them, it would be wise to give a brief
sketch of the dynamic personality which animated them. I am
speaking of Bulgakov’s ‘obsessive presence’, 9 as Juliana
Schmemann has described it. This presence happened to be most
manifest, as we shall see, when Bulgakov was celebrating the
Liturgy.
‘The enigma of Fr Sergii’
The Schmemanns are a case in point when it comes to their
ambivalent response to Bulgakov as man and thinker. Neither Fr
Alexander nor his wife Juliana Schmemann was ever a disciple of
Bulgakov. Indeed, Fr Schmemann was decidedly puzzled by
Bulgakov’s dual nature as man and thinker. He believed on the one
hand that Bulgakov’s sophiology was, arguably, an idealistic
growth on Orthodoxy but, on the other hand, he felt that this
‘heresy’ was only apparent since Bulgakov had never really
adequately expressed himself, and that beneath Bulgakov’s
sophiological meanderings was the heavenly light of Truth itself,
impeded by his attempts to systematise it. He referred to this as the
‘enigma of Fr Sergii’. 10 Thus at one point in his reminiscences
about Bulgakov, entitled ‘Three Images’, he writes, ‘Let us even
admit that his teaching was “heretical” and that one must condemn
him’. 11 But, a few pages down, he asserts the essential Orthodoxy
of Bulgakov which his system almost obscured: ‘I felt with my
whole being that this man was not a heretic, but that, on the
contrary, he radiated that which is most important and most
authentic in Orthodoxy’. 12
Despite Fr Schmemann’s ambivalence about Bulgakov, both
of the Schmemanns faithfully attended Bulgakov’s 7 am Thursday
Liturgies in 1940 while Fr Schmemann was a student of
Bulgakov’s at the Institute of St Serge in Paris. Fr Schmemann
specifically lauds Bulgakov’s person in contrast to his teaching,
which he claims that he is not competent to discuss. To be sure, he
writes that during his seminars with Bulgakov he spent more time
looking at Bulgakov than listening to him. 13 Thus what sticks out
in Fr Schmemann’s mind is the spiritual presence of Bulgakov as a
person, despite his strange teaching, 14 and this was for him
expressed pre-eminently in his service at the altar. Here he saw
Bulgakov as an ancient priest or Old Testamental High Priest
serving with such beauty that it was always as if he were serving
the Liturgy for the first time. 15 Juliana Schmemann backs up the impression of Bulgakov as a highly charismatic personality given by her husband. She only knew Bulgakov at one remove and was not really familiar with his writings. Yes, she had heard of the controversy that Bulgakov wrote of a certain Sophia who was almost a ‘separate divinity’. 16
Yet despite the fact that his teaching seems to have been slightly
suspect in her mind, she remembers him at the Thursday morning
Liturgies serving alone, reverent to the point that she never saw
him smile, croaking through a voice apparatus in his oesophagus
due to his throat cancer, wearing light vestments because of his
health, and moving as if he were floating just above the ground. An
‘ecstasy’ surrounded Bulgakov in these Liturgies, the more so
since the disciples who attended them treated him like a guru. 17
Spiritual intoxication does not make for a grounded faith: Juliana
Schmemann remembers that when Bulgakov died in 1944 many of
his followers stopped going to church.
Ecumenical thought in action
It is not my object to elaborate Bulgakov’s theological
system, but to examine its historical development through the lens
of his ecumenical thought in action. 18 I wish to determine whether
there was indeed a systematic theology behind what many regarded
as a ‘dangerous, not glorious’ 19 proposal for reunion through
intercommunion and to try to trace this theology’s development in
Bulgakov’s life. What is the connection of Bulgakov’s ecumenical
theology to Bulgakov the man? Was the intercommunion proposal
a vague, albeit prophetic, call for reunification of the Churches or
an incorrect intimation of unity of the Church at and through the
chalice which is in contrast to Bulgakov’s personal sanctity? Is it
possible that through attempting to tie Bulgakov’s life to his
thought we may bridge the gap dividing the man and the thinker?
Or was Berdyaev right, as we learn from A. F. Doobie-Bateman,
when he said, ‘Fr Sergii wants to be a theologian, not a visionary;
and that is his great difficulty’? 20 Could it be that Bulgakov’s
prophetic status has been exaggerated and that he is simply a great
theologian whose place in modern thought has yet to be fully
acknowledged? Perhaps none of these alternatives holds the key to
understanding Bulgakov. For Bulgakov is like Kierkegaard’s
Abraham, the quintessential man of faith, and Bulgakov’s dual
identity, as man of faith and man of ideas, must remain to us an
irreducible enigma. However, prior to examining Bulgakovian
‘partial intercommunion’ in part two of this study it would be wise
to follow the personal path that led Bulgakov up to his proposal.
From Russian Levite to Marxist 21
Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was born in Livny (Orel
province) on 16 July 1871 to a family from the Russian clerical
caste that could trace its ‘Levite blood’ 22 back to the time of Ivan
the Terrible. Bulgakov attended the local parochial school for three
years and then in 1884 was sent to the theological seminary in
Orel. However, at thirteen years old, his first year of seminary, he
had a religious crisis. This was brought about predominantly by a
period of deep questioning which the textbook theology of the
seminary could not answer. Meeting various people whose
humanism was typical of the ‘intelligentsia’ of the day increased
Bulgakov’s alienation. In the summer of 1888, at seventeen years
old, he left the seminary, refusing to go onto the theological
academy for additional training. After two years of preparation for
university he entered the faculty of law of Moscow university in
autumn of 1890, where until 1894 he studied law, economics,
philology, philosophy and literature.
Having graduated from the university with distinction,
Bulgakov immediately began graduate studies in political economy
while teaching part-time at the Moscow technical school. On
entering university in 1890 he had become interested in Marxism
and in 1895 he published a review of the third volume of Das
Kapital, published posthumously by Engels from Marx’s papers
and concerning ‘The process of capitalist production as a whole’. 23
In the same year, while travelling across the southern steppes at
sunset Bulgakov caught sight of the Caucasian mountains and had
a mystical experience, 24 a revelation of beauty, which he later saw
as his first encounter with Sophia. Unperturbed by such
movements in his spiritual depths, his first major article appeared
in 1896, entitled ‘O zakonomernosti sotsial’nykh iavlenii’, which
continued his Marxist bent of thought in arguing for history’s
regularity according to historical-material laws. 25 The following
year in Moscow appeared his first book O rynkakh pri
kapitalisticheskom proizvodstve [Concerning Markets in Capitalist
Conditions of Production], which propelled him to the status of
one of the most influential Russian Marxists of his day. In January
of 1898, he married Elena Tokmakova and their first child, a
daughter (Maria), was born in November of the same year.
The year 1898 was eventful for Bulgakov academically as
well as personally, for the university sent him, accompanied by his
family, for a two-year study trip to Europe in preparation for a
future professorship in political economy. He visited France,
England and, particularly, Germany, ‘the land of Marxism and
Social Democracy’, 26 in order to do work on issues surrounding
Marxist land reforms for the thesis which he hoped would win him
a doctorate. During this time, through the recommendation of
Plekhanov, he met Kautsky and other social democratic and
Marxist leaders, including Bebel, Braun and Adler. While visiting
the art gallery in Dresden in 1898 he had a second mystical
experience in viewing Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Gazing at this
painting, he felt that it was looking into his very soul and, being
moved to tears, began to pray. Not surprisingly, Bulgakov was
gradually becoming disillusioned with the materialism of Marxist
thought and in his research in Europe he discovered that the
proposed land reforms of Lenin and Plekhanov did not make
economic sense, largely due to the faulty thinking of Marx on
which they were based. 27 Bulgakov’s thesis, published at St
Petersburg in 1900 in two volumes as Kapitalizm i zemledelenie
[Capitalism and Agriculture], did not win him a doctorate, as he
had intended, but only a master’s degree.
From Marxism to Idealism
Yet this minor setback did not stop him. In 1901 he was hired
to teach political economy at the Kiev school of polytechnology
while also lecturing at the university of Kiev. His public lectures
while in Kiev were so popular with young people that he attracted
to them as many as one thousand or more people at a time. Here he
remained till 1906, studying Dostoevsky and Solov’ev 28 who were
instrumental in moving him more towards his later sophiological
thinking. The universalist character of sophiology would bear fruit
in his later ecumenical work.
In 1902 Bulgakov published an article entitled
‘Samoderzhavie i pravoslavie’ [‘Autocracy and Orthodoxy’] in the
journal Osvobozhdenie which was the organ of what would later
become the socialist coalition, the Union of Liberation. 29 This
article foreshadowed both his involvement in the reformist 1917
all-Russian church council and his later ecumenical attempts to
break down Christian denominational barriers. In the article
Bulgakov called for a reformation of the Church as a part of the
process of political liberation. Political revolution in Russia would
be ‘a fundamental ecclesiastical reform’ since ‘the revolution will
simultaneously be a reformation’. 30 The Church was strangled by
caesaro-papism and had become a decrepit organisation held back
by ritualism and eighteenth-century dogma instead of being a
dynamic body capable of ecclesiastical democracy. Bulgakov
advocated a form of socialist Christianity which embraced those
outside the Church: ‘true Orthodoxy requires its sons to unite with
all those, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, religious and atheist, who
protest and resist autocracy, with all those who struggle for
freedom’. 31 The influence of Dostoevsky and Solov’ev in moving him
from Marxism to a socialist form of Christianity can be seen in his
essays (1896-1902) collected in 1903, Ot marksizma k idealizmu
[From Marxism to Idealism]. In a lecture of 1901 in Kiev that
attracted wide attention also in Moscow and St Petersburg, he
spoke approvingly of Ivan Karamazov’s doubts about the ‘theory
of progress’ which, ‘also apply to socialism, considered not merely
as an economic theory but as a general view of the world, indeed
as a religion’. 32 From Solov’ev he learned of Christianity as a
‘positive or supra-national universalism’ which did not reject
nationality like certain (Marxist) ‘negative, cosmopolitan, non-
national’ types of universalism. 33 On 2 – 4 August 1903 he attended an illegal conference on the banks of lake Constance where, along with Peter Struve, he helped found a broad-based non-revolutionary reformist coalition that has been mentioned earlier -- the Union of Liberation. 34
In 1905 this short-lived coalition published a manifesto entitled
‘Christian Brotherhood of Struggle’. When the edict of Nicholas II
granting religious freedom came in 1905 along with an abortive
revolution, Bulgakov accepted both events as an opportunity for
reform towards a Christian socialism. But through the social
catastrophe of 1905 he was able to overcome ‘the revolutionary
temptation’. 35 Bulgakov’s break with Marxism was secure by 1906. He
was now professor of economy at Moscow’s commercial institute
and lecturer at the university, when he argued, in his ‘Karl Marks
kak religioznyi tip’ [‘Karl Marx as a Religious Type’], that Marx’s
basic ‘religious motive’ was ‘militant atheism’ and this was ‘bound
to coarsen the socialist movement’ whereby ‘class hatred takes the
place of universal human love’. 36 In 1906 and 1907 he attempted to
put such universal Christian love into action while serving briefly
as a deputy in the representative assembly, the second Duma, of
1907 and in attempting to establish a Christian Socialist group
which had, amongst its many aims, the desire, as Evtuhov puts it,
‘to unite all Christians regardless of denomination’. 37 However, he
soon became disillusioned by the sectarian infighting and
extremism of the left and realised that a Christian presence in
politics was a remote ideal. 38
Returning to his father’s house
Such searching after heaven on earth could only end in
disillusionment or in a deeper and more permanent return to the
Church. It was such a return that took place in the autumn of 1908
at a remote northern skete. Here he met a starets who received him
like the father who saw the prodigal son at a distance ‘and ran and
embraced him and kissed him’ (Luke 15:20). He told Bulgakov
that his sins were like drops of water in the ocean of the divine
love. Bulgakov left pardoned, reconciled, trembling and cleansed
by his tears. At the skete’s church the next morning he sealed his
conversion with participation in 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; that the most blessed meal was being prepared by the
priest for me, and that the gospel narrative about the feast in
the house of Simon the leper and about the woman who loved
much was addressed to me. It was on that day when I partook
of the blessed Body and Blood of my Lord. 39
Spurred by his new found hope in the Church, in 1909 he
contributed an article to the well known collection Vekhi: sbornik
statei o russkoi intelligentsii [Landmarks: A collection of essays on
the Russian intelligentsia] along with six other Christian converts
from Marxism (notably Nicolas Berdiaev, Semen Frank and Peter
Struve) who were dissatisfied with the intelligentsia of their day.
Bulgakov’s essay was entitled ‘Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo (Iz
razmyshlenii o religioznoi prirode russkoi intelligentsii)’
[‘Heroism and the spiritual struggle (reflections on the religious
nature of the Russian intelligentsia)’]40 , and in it he reflected on the
religious ideals of the Russian intelligentsia. He concluded that the
revolution ‘has not achieved what people expected from it’. 41 The
revolution had brought neither national reconciliation nor a
renewed state or economy, but crime and moral chaos. Without
Christian faith, he argued, revolution would only produce a
tyrannical regime. The true bearers of the folk consciousness of
Russia -- Dostoevsky, the Slavophiles and Solov’ev--understood
that the basis of the nation was ‘religio-cultural “messianism”’. 42
This messianic ideal was the conception of Russian Christianity
bringing together all peoples into a true form of internationalism,
which did not reject cultural particularity, that is,
the idea of a universal mission for the Russian Church or
Russian culture. Such an understanding of the national ideal in
no way leads to nationalistic exclusivity; on the contrary, it
alone can provide a positive image on which to ground the idea
of a brotherhood of nations, rather than a non-national,
atomistic ideal of world citizenship or the ‘proletariat’ of all
nations’, who would cut themselves loose from their roots. 43
He called the Russian intelligentsia, therefore, to return to Christ,
to the house of their fathers, the Church, as indeed he himself had
the year before, since ‘He stands at the door and knocks--at the
door of the heart of the intelligentsia, that proud and disobedient
heart. Will his knocking ever be heard?’ 44
Sophia: in dialogue with Florenskii
Bulgakov had not become a staunch member of the
ecclesiastical establishment--far from it. Indeed, he still held, as he