Alexander Bukharev: The Monk Who Returned to the World

Alexander Matveevich Bukharev (1822–1871) — Archimandrite Feodor — was a brilliant Russian academic theologian who in 1863 asked to be released from his monastic vows, married, and lived out his short remaining life as a layman under civil and ecclesiastical disability. Behr-Sigel began a Sorbonne doctorate on him in 1951 at the suggestion of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, defended it more than twenty years later, and published it in 1977 with a preface by Olivier Clément. She called him a prophet, and she meant the word in its biblical sense.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

The Thesis

In 1951 Behr-Sigel began doctoral research at the Sorbonne under the Slavicist Pierre Pascal, on the nineteenth-century Russian theologian Alexander Bukharev — a subject suggested to her by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007). She was forty-four, teaching school in provincial France and raising three children. She defended the thesis more than twenty years later, at the University of Nancy, and published it in 1977 as Alexandre Boukharev, un théologien de l’Église orthodoxe russe en dialogue avec le monde moderne (Paris: Beauchesne), with a preface by Olivier Clément and including a selection of twenty-nine letters from Bukharev to Valerian and Alexandra Lavrski (bibliographic record, Beauchesne, 1977; reviews in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 58/3, 1978, and Revue philosophique de Louvain 77/36, 1979).

A doctorate begun at forty-four and published at seventy, on a Russian theologian whom almost nobody in the West had heard of, is not a career move. It is the work of someone who had found a subject she could not put down.

Who Bukharev Was

Behr-Sigel’s own summary of his life, in her essay “Un prophète orthodoxe, Alexandre Boukharev,” runs as follows.

He was born in 1822 to a poor village deacon, pursued brilliant theological studies, and seemed destined for high ecclesiastical office under the patronage of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow. He was tonsured a monk, took the name Feodor, and became an archimandrite and a professor — first at the Moscow Theological Academy, then at Kazan (Behr-Sigel, “Un prophète orthodoxe, Alexandre Boukharev, 1822–1871,” reproduced at pagesorthodoxes.net).

His life turned on the fate of a book. Bukharev had written a commentary on the Apocalypse and other works arguing for a Christianity in living contact with the whole of modern culture; his manuscripts were blocked by the censorship of the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1863 he asked to be released from the monastic state — the technical term is laicization — and married. The consequence was ruin in the terms of his society: he lost his academic rank, his ecclesiastical standing, and civil rights, and lived his remaining eight years in poverty, dying in 1871 (Behr-Sigel, “Un prophète orthodoxe,” pagesorthodoxes.net; and Alexandre Boukharev, Beauchesne, 1977).

Behr-Sigel insists that this was not an act of impulse or of rebellion against the ascetic life. Her account is that he was “convinced of not being able in conscience to remain in false relations of submission” to superiors who were, as he judged, indifferent to the word of God, and that he sought instead a witness through an engaged and secular life (Behr-Sigel, “Un prophète orthodoxe,” pagesorthodoxes.net).

[Disputed: how Bukharev's laicization should be assessed. This collection records Behr-Sigel's reading — a theologically motivated act of conscience — and notes that it is a reading, offered by a sympathetic interpreter more than a century later. The Russian Church of the 1860s treated the abandonment of monastic vows as a grave matter, and the disabilities imposed on him were the ordinary consequence of that judgment rather than a persecution. Orthodox readers who regard monastic vows as binding will find in Bukharev a tragedy rather than a prophecy, and Behr-Sigel's own text does not conceal the cost or claim that the Church was simply wrong to impose it. His works were rehabilitated in Russian religious thought at the turn of the twentieth century, notably in the circle around the *Novy Put'* review, and his reputation among Russian religious philosophers is the reason Bulgakov proposed him as a subject.]

What He Taught

Bukharev’s theology is kenotic — organized around the self-emptying of God in the Incarnation (Philippians 2:5–8) and around what follows from it for the Christian’s relation to the world.

Behr-Sigel states his central intuition in a phrase she quotes from him: “God descending and spreading over all that is human, earthly, and humanity progressively rising toward God” (Behr-Sigel, “Un prophète orthodoxe,” pagesorthodoxes.net). The Incarnation is not an episode with a limited object but the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, whose descent embraces the whole of human reality — including art, science, literature, politics, and the ordinary secular life of a nineteenth-century Russian. From this Bukharev drew the conclusion that scandalized his contemporaries: that a Christianity which withdraws from culture into ecclesiastical enclosure has misunderstood the kenosis on which it rests.

His most famous work bears the programmatic title On Orthodoxy in Relation to the Modern World (O pravoslavii v otnoshenii k sovremennosti, 1860). The concern is unmistakably that of the Paris emigration a century later — Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Paul Evdokimov, St. Maria of Paris — which is why Bulgakov proposed him and why Olivier Clément prefaced the book.

Why She Called Him a Prophet

Behr-Sigel locates Bukharev within the biblical category of prophecy, and defines the category carefully. The prophet is the one who “decrypts the signs of the times” and announces God’s judgment and grace, calling the Church to authentic witness rather than to institutional sclerosis; the prophets oppose “the external form being sought for itself,” insisting that it “has its truth higher and beyond itself” (Behr-Sigel, “Un prophète orthodoxe,” pagesorthodoxes.net).

The phrase “signs of the times” (Matthew 16:3) is not accidental. It became the title of the English collection of her essays, Discerning the Signs of the Times (SVS Press, 2001), and of the French volume Discerner les signes des temps (Cerf, 2002). The category she found in Bukharev in the 1950s is the one under which she filed her own later work.

Three features of her use of “prophet” should be marked, since the word is often loose.

It is intra-ecclesial. The prophet in her sense speaks to the Church and from within it. Bukharev did not leave the Orthodox Church; he left the monastic state, and he continued to write as an Orthodox theologian under disability. Behr-Sigel’s own practice was the same: she stayed, was buried from an Orthodox church, and never proposed to found anything.

It is costly. Her prophet is defined partly by what he suffers at the hands of the institution he addresses. This is a real category of Christian experience and also, it must be said, a self-protective one: any criticism of the prophet can be absorbed as further proof of the prophecy. Readers should notice the structure, in her account of Bukharev and in later accounts of her.

It is not a warrant. She nowhere argues that a prophet’s rejection establishes his rightness, and she was not naive about Bukharev’s judgment; her thesis is a scholarly study with a critical apparatus, not a vindication. Bukharev, on her account, saw something true about the kenotic reach of the Incarnation and was destroyed for saying it badly at the wrong moment. That is not the same as saying he was right about everything, and she does not say it.

The Line From Bukharev to Her Own Work

The connections are direct enough that they should be stated, and cautious enough that they should be stated as connections rather than proofs.

The kenotic ground. If God’s self-emptying reaches into all that is human, then no region of human life is outside the Church’s concern and no human being is outside the reach of the divine descent. Behr-Sigel’s later insistence that women are not a special theological case but human persons addressed by God has this shape.

The refusal of the merely institutional. Bukharev’s charge is that ecclesiastical form sought for its own sake becomes an idol. Behr-Sigel’s charge against the standard arguments for the male priesthood is not that the practice is wrong but that the reasons given for it are theologically defective — that they defend a form with arguments the form does not need and cannot bear (see The Question She Raised). Whether she was right about that is the whole controversy.

The dialogue with the modern world. Bukharev’s subtitle in her rendering — a theologian of the Russian Orthodox Church in dialogue with the modern world — is the description she would have accepted for herself. Her critics use the same phrase against her: dialogue with modernity, on their reading, is the road by which modernity’s assumptions enter the Church (see The Orthodox Criticism). This is a real and unresolved argument in Orthodox thought, and Bukharev is one of its origin points.

References

Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Alexandre Boukharev, un théologien de l’Église orthodoxe russe en dialogue avec le monde moderne. Introduction et lettres à Valérien et Alexandra Lavrski. Preface by Olivier Clément. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977 (series Beauchesne religions). (The doctoral thesis; twenty-nine letters.)
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. “Un prophète orthodoxe: Alexandre Boukharev (1822–1871).” Reproduced at pagesorthodoxes.net (“Pages orthodoxes la Transfiguration”). (Bukharev’s origins, the blocked manuscripts, the laicization of 1863, the loss of rank and civil rights, the kenotic intuition, and her definition of the prophet.)
Reviews of Alexandre Boukharev: Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 58, no. 3 (1978); Revue philosophique de Louvain 77, no. 36 (1979), 576 (both indexed at persee.fr).
Bukharev, Alexander (Archimandrite Feodor). O pravoslavii v otnoshenii k sovremennosti [On Orthodoxy in Relation to the Modern World]. St. Petersburg, 1860.
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007. (Thesis begun 1951 at the Sorbonne under Pierre Pascal, on Bulgakov’s suggestion; defended at Nancy; published 1977.)
Scripture: Philippians 2:5–8; Matthew 16:3.