How Much Sophiology, and the Counter-Reading

Evdokimov was Bulgakov’s student, and the categories that have drawn most criticism — the ontological feminine, Wisdom, the theological weight of beauty — belong to the sophiological family of ideas. This file asks the genealogical question precisely: how much sophiology did Evdokimov actually carry, what did he leave behind, and what is the standing of a theologian whose teacher’s central doctrine was censured? It then sets out the counter-reading — the case that Evdokimov is a prophetic voice on the laity, marriage and beauty whose worth does not depend on the disputed machinery.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Question, Stated Carefully

Sophiology — Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s doctrine of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, as the ground of the relation between God and creation — was censured by the Moscow Patriarchate in two ukazy of 1935 and declared heretical by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad in the same year; those acts have never been rescinded, and it is equally part of the record that Moscow did not pronounce Bulgakov personally a heretic, that no pan-Orthodox condemnation was issued, that the Ecumenical Patriarchate never condemned him, and that in his own jurisdiction the charge of heresy was examined and found unproven though his formulations were judged seriously flawed. This repository’s authority on the whole matter is Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, and where anything in this file might seem to conflict with that collection, that collection governs.

Evdokimov’s situation is materially different, and three facts fix it.

First, he was never censured. No Orthodox Church has issued any act concerning Paul Evdokimov or any of his writings, in his lifetime or since. He died in good standing, a professor of the St. Sergius Institute, having represented Orthodoxy at the Second Vatican Council. What is reported in this section is theological criticism, not ecclesiastical action.

Second, he never wrote a sophiology. Evdokimov produced no doctrine of Sophia, no treatise on the Divine Wisdom, no equivalent of Bulgakov’s great trilogy. Sophia appears in his work — notably in the title of his essay on modern art, “L’art moderne, ou la Sophia désaffectée” — but as a theme and an idiom, not as a systematic principle from which the rest is deduced.

Third, he deliberately took on board the criticism of sophiology. The characterization that recurs in the scholarship is that Evdokimov was “a disciple of Bulgakov who incorporates key aspects of the neo-patristic critique and thus points the way to a new articulation of sophiology firmly rooted in patristic tradition” (Wisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology, chapter “Modern Russian Sophiology and Its Discontents,” Oxford University Press). The neo-patristic critique in question is that of Vladimir Lossky, Fr. Georges Florovsky and Fr. John Meyendorff. Evdokimov “had links with both trends” — the Russian religious renaissance and the neo-patristic synthesis — and this bridging position is exactly what distinguishes him.

The standard summary of his project puts the same point positively: his theological thought “is marked by the attempt to synthesise two important currents in twentieth-century Orthodox thought, namely the ‘neo-patristic’ renewal and the insights of the Russian religious philosophers” (Michel Stavrou, “Paul Evdokimov, un témoin du Ressuscité,” La Croix, 18 September 2010; the same judgement in Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov,” which names Berdyaev and Bulgakov alongside the patristic tradition).

What He Did Take

Four inheritances are visible, and it is fairer to Evdokimov to name them than to leave them implied.

  1. The refusal of a dualism between God and the world. The animating impulse of sophiology is the conviction that creation is not alien to God, that grace and nature are not two sealed compartments, and that the world is capable of God. Evdokimov holds this throughout, and it is the premise of his theology of beauty, of matter transfigured, and of the layman’s sanctification of ordinary life (see The Art of the Icon and the Theology of Beauty). He grounds it, however, in the Palamite essence–energies distinction rather than in Sophia — which is precisely the substitution the neo-patristic school urged.

  2. Beauty and Wisdom as theological categories. The seriousness with which he takes beauty, and the sense that Wisdom is not a rhetorical ornament but names something, are Bulgakovian in temper.

  3. The theological weight of the feminine. This is the contested inheritance. The line runs from Vladimir Soloviev — whose visionary Sophia and whose reception of Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche stand behind the whole Russian Symbolist and religious-philosophical treatment of the feminine — through Bulgakov, to Evdokimov. Critics of Orthodox gender essentialism place him explicitly in that genealogy: while Bulgakov’s broader sophiological project fell into controversy, “the ideas that only together do male and female express the image of God, or of an association between women and the Holy Spirit on the one hand and men and the Son on the other, continue in a line of Orthodox thinkers, including Russian-diasporic lay theologians Pavel Evdokimov and Sergei Verkhovskoy” (Bryce E. Rich, “Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality,” Public Orthodoxy, 18 November 2019).

  4. A generous, synthesizing, philosophically literate style of theology — the opposite of the manual, and the opposite also of a purely archaeological patristics.

What He Did Not Take

Equally, four things Evdokimov did not carry over:

  1. No hypostatic or quasi-hypostatic Sophia. The specific proposals that drew the 1935 censures — the status of Sophia in relation to the divine essence and to the divine hypostases — have no counterpart in his work.
  2. No Sophia-based christology or ecclesiology. His christology is patristic and Chalcedonian in its idiom; his ecclesiology is drawn from Afanasiev’s eucharistic model and from the doctrine of the royal priesthood (see Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev).
  3. No indifference to the Fathers. The subtitle of his major spiritual work is Des Pères du désert à nos jours, and his central idea is presented as a recovery of Nilus, Chrysostom and Theodore the Studite (see The Idea of Interiorized Monasticism).
  4. No polemic against the neo-patristic school. He worked alongside Lossky, was written up with him as one of the “two passeurs” by Olivier Clément, and drew on Palamas as freely as Lossky did.

[Disputed: whether Evdokimov's mediating position is a genuine synthesis or an unresolved inconsistency. (a) The sympathetic reading — that he achieved the reconciliation the Paris school needed, keeping the religious philosophers' breadth while accepting the neo-patristic discipline — is the reading of Stavrou, of the *Encyclopædia Universalis* notice, and of the Oxford study which sees him as "pointing the way to a new articulation of sophiology firmly rooted in patristic tradition." (b) The sceptical reading — that the deep structure of his anthropology remains sophiological and romantic while the surface citations are patristic, so that the patristic material decorates conclusions reached on other grounds — is the burden of the critique traced in [Behr-Sigel and the Critique of the Eternal Feminine](behr-sigel-and-the-critique-of-the-eternal-feminine.md) and of the gender-essentialism literature. The collection adjudicates neither.]

The Counter-Reading

Against all of this stands a substantial and serious case for Evdokimov, which this collection is bound to state at full strength.

Michael Plekon is the principal advocate in English. His Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church (Notre Dame, 2002) devotes a chapter to Evdokimov as one of a series of modern Orthodox figures in whom the tradition became visible as a life and not only as a doctrine; his study of interiorized monasticism in the American Benedictine Review (48:3 [1997]: 227–253) made the key idea available to a wide Western readership; he edited and translated the principal English anthology, In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader (SVS Press, 2001, with Alexis Vinogradov) and the revised Ages of the Spiritual Life (SVS Press, 1998); he wrote the Cambridge University Press chapter on Evdokimov in Christianity and Family Law (2017) and the essay on his marriage theology in the Sophia Studies volume (2013). Plekon’s case is that Evdokimov’s abiding contribution lies where the disputed machinery is not load-bearing: in the universal vocation to holiness, in the sacramental dignity of ordinary life and of marriage, in the recovery of the layman as a full member of the laos, and in the insistence that theology’s proof is a transfigured person.

Olivier Clément is the principal advocate in French. Clément — a convert, a historian, the most widely read Francophone Orthodox writer of the later twentieth century — paired Evdokimov with Lossky in Orient–Occident: Deux passeurs, Vladimir Lossky et Paul Evdokimov (Labor et Fides, 1985), presenting the two as the men who carried the Orthodox tradition across into Western language and thought. That pairing is itself an argument: it places Evdokimov not as a sophiological survival but as one of the two founders of French Orthodox theology, alongside the neo-patristic school’s own leading French-language voice. Clément also wrote the foreword to the English Orthodoxy, describing it as an original synthesis engaging the Fathers creatively while drawing in Russian religious philosophy and the theology of the divine energies (Clément, foreword to Evdokimov, Orthodoxy, New City Press, 2011; see Olivier Clément).

The Western Christian reception is a third element of the case, and an unusual one. Evdokimov was received warmly by the French Dominicans of the Istina centre and by the Benedictines of Chevetogne, the Belgian monastery dedicated to Christian unity, whose editions published his essay on interiorized monasticism in the Mount Athos millennium volume of 1963; the Chevetogne circle, of which Dom Olivier Rousseau was a leading figure, was the principal Catholic point of contact for the Paris Orthodox theologians and helped bring both Evdokimov and Afanasiev to Vatican II (Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council,” Theological Studies 79/1 [2018]: 95 and n.39, on the St. Sergius contacts with Istina and Chevetogne and on Rousseau’s advocacy of Afanasiev). [Disputed: whether Dom Olivier Rousseau published a substantial appreciation of Evdokimov specifically. Rousseau's documented advocacy in the accessible sources concerns Afanasiev, whose *L'Église du Saint-Esprit* he prefaced. His role is reported here as that of the Chevetogne milieu which received the Paris theologians, not as a specific published defence of Evdokimov, which this guide could not verify.] The memorial issue of Contacts in 1971 gathered fourteen contributors — Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant — which is a measure of the breadth of that reception (Contacts XXIII, nos. 73–74, 1971, Témoignages sur Paul Evdokimov).

Where That Leaves the Reader

The honest summary is that the critique and the counter-reading are not fully in contact, because they are about different parts of the corpus.

The critique bites hardest on the constructive machinery of La Femme et le salut du monde: the ontological difference, the Son–Spirit correlation, the archetypes. On those, Behr-Sigel’s objections are serious, they are made from within Orthodoxy, and they have largely carried the field in academic Orthodox theology.

The counter-reading rests on Le Sacrement de l’amour, Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, L’Art de l’icône and the essays on the lay vocation — where the disputed apparatus is largely absent and where Evdokimov’s influence has been deepest and least contested.

A reader may therefore, without inconsistency, hold that Evdokimov’s theology of woman rests on foundations that cannot bear the weight, and that he remains one of the most valuable Orthodox writers of the twentieth century on marriage, the laity and beauty. A number of his readers hold exactly that. The collection notes it as a coherent position and does not require it.

See Also

References

  • Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics.” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106, at 95 and n.39. (St. Sergius contacts with the Dominican centre Istina and the Benedictines of Chevetogne; Olivier Rousseau’s preface to Afanasiev.)
  • Clément, Olivier. Orient–Occident: Deux passeurs, Vladimir Lossky et Paul Evdokimov. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1985.
  • Clément, Olivier. Foreword to Paul Evdokimov, Orthodoxy, trans. Jeremy Hummerstone. New City Press, 2011.
  • Contacts: Revue française de l’Orthodoxie XXIII, nos. 73–74 (1971). Témoignages sur Paul Evdokimov.
  • Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).”
  • Evdokimov, Paul. “Le monachisme intériorisé.” In Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–1963: Études et mélanges, tome I. Chevetogne: Éditions de Chevetogne, 1963.
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
  • Plekon, Michael. “‘Interiorized Monasticism’: A Reconsideration of Paul Evdokimov on the Spiritual Life.” American Benedictine Review 48, no. 3 (1997): 227–253.
  • Plekon, Michael, and Alexis Vinogradov, eds. In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
  • Rich, Bryce E. “Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality.” Public Orthodoxy, 18 November 2019.
  • Stavrou, Michel. “Paul Evdokimov, un témoin du Ressuscité.” La Croix, 18 September 2010.
  • Wisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology, chapter “Modern Russian Sophiology and Its Discontents.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Evdokimov as a disciple of Bulgakov incorporating key aspects of the neo-patristic critique; his links with both trends.)