The Colleague and the Critic

Florovsky’s objection to Bulgakov was methodological before it was doctrinal. He held that sophiology was the last and most brilliant phase of a two-century “Western captivity” — Schelling and Böhme received through Solovyov and given an Orthodox vocabulary — and that the remedy was not a counter-system but the recovery of the Fathers’ own doctrine of creation. The two men remained colleagues throughout, in an institution too small for either to avoid the other.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Setting

The St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris was a converted German Lutheran property on the rue de Crimée with a faculty of perhaps a dozen, no endowment, and students who were often refugees. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov — former Marxist economist, professor, priest from 1918, expelled from Russia in 1922 — was its dominant intellectual figure and, from 1940, its dean. Fr. Georges Florovsky was a younger colleague appointed to teach patristics in the mid-1920s (see The Founding of St Sergius and Emigration, Prague, and the Paris Chair).

They were not enemies in the ordinary sense. They served together, taught the same students, sat on the same commissions, and appeared in the same volumes. Florovsky’s public conduct toward Bulgakov was, throughout, formally correct. What he thought of Bulgakov’s theology he put in print without putting Bulgakov’s name to it.

The First Break: Intercommunion, 1933

The earliest documented collision is not about sophiology at all. Within the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Bulgakov proposed in 1933 a form of partial Eucharistic intercommunion between Orthodox and Anglicans — a limited sacramental fellowship that would anticipate and help produce full unity. Florovsky opposed it, on the ground that Eucharistic communion presupposes agreement in the faith and cannot be used as an instrument to bring it about (Père Stéphane Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, stephanebigham.com).

The disagreement is worth noticing because it shows the shape of the difference before doctrine entered. Bulgakov’s instinct was that the Spirit’s work outruns the Church’s canonical order and that bold acts can be prophetic. Florovsky’s instinct was that the order is the Spirit’s work and that boldness of that kind mistakes desire for discernment. Everything else between them follows the same pattern.

The Objection, Precisely

Florovsky’s case against sophiology, as it can be reconstructed from Ways of Russian Theology, from “Creation and Creaturehood,” and from the scholarly literature, is methodological in its primary form and doctrinal in its consequence.

The Methodological Charge

Sophiology is the terminal phase of the Western captivity. Its intellectual ancestry runs through Vladimir Solovyov to Schelling and, behind him, to Jakob Böhme and the German theosophic tradition — a metaphysics of the Absolute’s self-differentiation, of a divine ground that is not yet God, of the world as a moment in the divine life. Bulgakov, on this reading, took a genuine Orthodox question and answered it in a vocabulary and with a set of assumptions that came from post-Kantian German philosophy, then translated the answer into patristic-sounding language (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris, 1937, concluding chapters; Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, chs. 4–6; and see The Critics: Lossky, Florovsky, and After).

The force of this charge is not “Bulgakov read German philosophers” — everyone had. It is that the architecture of the system, the questions it treats as fundamental and the moves it finds natural, are the architecture of German idealism; and that a system’s architecture is not neutral with respect to its content. This is the same claim Florovsky makes about Christian Hellenism in reverse: conceptual media carry commitments (see Christian Hellenism and the Mind of the Fathers).

The Doctrinal Consequence

If the architecture is idealist, the consequence is a blurring of the Creator–creature distinction. Bulgakov’s Sophia — divine Sophia and creaturely Sophia, the divine nature as disclosed and the world’s ground in God — occupies, in Florovsky’s judgment, a position that patristic ontology has no place for. Not a fourth hypostasis, on Bulgakov’s own insistence; but also not simply the divine essence, and not a creature. And Florovsky’s whole doctrine of creation is built on the claim that there is no third thing (see Creation and Creaturehood).

The Constructive Answer

This is what distinguishes Florovsky from the other critics, and it is the reason his objection has worn better than Seraphim (Sobolev)’s.

Bulgakov was answering a real question: how is the world grounded in God? How can creation be neither an arbitrary product nor a necessary emanation? How is God genuinely related to what He has made? A refutation that leaves that question unanswered has not done the work.

Florovsky’s answer, given in “Creation and Creaturehood” and elsewhere, is that the Fathers already answered it: creation ex nihilo by the free will of God, distinguished from the generation of the Son from His essence (Athanasius); the eternal logoi of created things in God, uncreated and yet not the creature (Maximus); and the essence–energies distinction, by which God really communicates Himself without being confounded with the world (Palamas and the councils of the fourteenth century). Take these together and the sophiological supplement is unnecessary (Florovsky, “Creation and Creaturehood,” in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100; see St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Gregory Palamas).

Vladimir Lossky pressed the same essence–energies point more polemically and, unlike Florovsky, named Bulgakov: he belonged to the Moscow Patriarchal jurisdiction and to the Brotherhood of St Photius, and was under no institutional constraint (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, Paris: Brotherhood of St Photius, 1936; see Vladimir Lossky).

What Florovsky Did Not Say

Two clarifications that the polemical literature tends to lose.

He did not call Bulgakov a heretic. The minority report he signed said the views “provoke great anxiety” and endangered Orthodox thinking — a serious charge, and not the charge of heresy, which the commission’s majority and then the bishops declined to sustain (Evlogy’s Commission and the 1937 Conference).

He did not dismiss Bulgakov’s stature. Ways of Russian Theology treats the religious-philosophical renaissance as brilliant and spiritually serious, and its verdict is that this brilliance was captive, not that it was worthless. The word Florovsky reached for in analogous cases was soblazn, temptation — the thing that attracts because it is partly right (see The Break and “The Eurasian Temptation”).

The Modern Complication

Two developments have made the picture harder, and both belong here.

Bulgakov has been substantially rehabilitated in the academy. Rowan Williams, Paul Valliere, Brandon Gallaher and others have argued that Bulgakov was read unfairly, that his disclaimers were meant and largely coherent, and that sophiology addresses questions Orthodox theology still has not answered (see The Reappraisal: Williams, Valliere, Gallaher). This does not touch the acts of 1935, which stand as ecclesial acts; it does bear on how Florovsky’s critique reads today.

And Florovsky’s own independence from Bulgakov has been questioned. Gavrilyuk’s central historical claim is that Bulgakov’s sophiology supplied the polemical subtext for Florovsky’s theology of creation — that the essay everyone reads as pure patristic exposition is in fact shaped throughout by an argument with a colleague it never names, and that Florovsky’s theological agenda was set, negatively, by the very movement he was repudiating (Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, chs. 5–6 and conclusion).

[Disputed: how far Florovsky's constructive theology is independent of the sophiological controversy. (a) The traditional reading holds that "Creation and Creaturehood" is a patristic exposition that happens to exclude sophiology, and that its Athanasian and Maximian argument stands whether or not Bulgakov ever wrote. (b) Gavrilyuk argues that Bulgakov's system is the polemical subtext throughout, so that Florovsky's own theology is shaped by the Russian Religious Renaissance in the act of rejecting it. The two readings are not strictly incompatible, and the literature has not settled their relative weight; see [Section 08](../08-the-critique/README.md).]

“In Peace Let Us Love One Another”

The relationship’s final register is worth recording. Bulgakov died in 1944, while Florovsky was still stranded in the Balkans, and Florovsky outlived him by thirty-five years. He did not, in that time, publish an attack on his dead colleague, and he continued to speak of him as a great man whose theology had gone wrong — a distinction he maintained with some consistency.

The two men’s relations have been the subject of a specific scholarly literature, some of it framed by the liturgical exhortation “In peace let us love one another” (cf. the study of that title on the Florovsky–Bulgakov relationship, academia.edu). The framing is apt in more than one direction: it names both what they managed and what they did not.

See Also

References

  • Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya. Paris, 1937.
  • Florovsky, Georges. “Creation and Creaturehood.” In Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976.
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Chs. 5–6: sophiology as the polemical subtext of Florovsky’s theology of creation.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii. Paris: Brotherhood of St Photius, 1936.
  • Bigham, Stéphane. “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?” stephanebigham.com. (The 1933 intercommunion dispute.)
  • “Georges Florovsky and Sergius Bulgakov: ‘In Peace Let Us Love One Another’.” academia.edu. (Study of the personal and theological relationship.)