Theologian · Contemporary
Sergius Bulgakov
1871–1944 · Sophiology; Russian religious philosophy
An Orthodox priest of the Paris emigration whose sophiology was condemned by the Moscow Patriarchate and the Karlovci Synod in 1935 but never by his own jurisdiction; he was drawn toward Rome in 1922–23 and then withdrew, and spent his last twenty years in ecumenical work with Anglicans and Catholics.
A Marxist economist who returned to the Church and was ordained in 1918, Bulgakov was expelled from Russia in 1922 and became dean of the St. Sergius Institute in Paris. Philosophy of Economy (1912) read human labor as a sophianic participation in God's creative work; Unfading Light (1917) set out his doctrine of Sophia, the divine Wisdom that is God's own nature as revealed and lived, with a creaturely Sophia as the world's ground. The great trilogy, The Lamb of God, The Comforter and The Bride of the Lamb, is a complete dogmatics built on kenosis: the Son's self-emptying begins within the Trinity, the Incarnation was willed from eternity and not only because of sin, and the end of all things is the restoration of all, with hell a self-chosen state that cannot be the last word. He also wrote on icons, the name of God, the Mother of God and the papacy.
Why he matters: Hans Urs von Balthasar took his idea of an inner-trinitarian kenosis into Theo-Drama, and Aidan Nichols has written a Catholic primer on him; his reading of the Incarnation as the eternal purpose of creation is the Scotist thesis in Orthodox dress, and his essay At the Walls of Chersonesus is the most searching Orthodox case ever made for union with Rome, written by a man who then stepped back from it.
Where to be careful
Sophia as a near-hypostatic reality in God, a creaturely Sophia as the world's ground, and his openly panentheistic language test the limits of Lateran IV and Vatican I on simplicity and creation from nothing, and his hope for the restoration of all stands nearer Origen than the Church's teaching on eternal hell (CCC 1035); he rejected the primacy defined in Pastor Aeternus after his own approach to it. His Marian devotion, his doctrine of the Eucharist and his Christology of the God-man are Catholic in substance, and the 1935 condemnations came from jurisdictions he did not belong to.
Reading
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The Lamb of GodSergius Bulgakov · The Christology of the trilogy: kenosis, the God-man, and the Incarnation willed from eternity.
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The Bride of the LambSergius Bulgakov · Church, creation and the last things, with his argument for the restoration of all.
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Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei BulgakovAidan Nichols · A Dominican's sympathetic and critical introduction.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.