Florensky, Bulgakov, and the Assessment of Sophiology

Florensky and Bulgakov were close friends, and Bulgakov called Florensky’s influence on his return to the Church and on his own sophiology formative. But their sophiologies are not the same thing, and the difference matters for the record: what the Moscow Patriarchate censured in 1935 and what the ROCOR Council of Bishops declared heretical in the same year was Bulgakov’s developed system, named as his. No official act of any Orthodox Church has ever condemned Florensky by name. This file sets out the friendship, the differences, the precise scope of the 1935 acts, and — per METHODOLOGY §4.2 — how the tradition has assessed Florensky’s sophiology, with the parties named and nothing adjudicated.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Theological Academy; the Russian religious renaissance)

The Friendship

Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) was eleven years Florensky’s senior — a former Marxist economist and Duma deputy who was making his way back to the Church in the years when Florensky was at the Moscow Theological Academy. They met in the religious-philosophical world of Moscow around 1905, and the friendship became one of the most important in either man’s life. Bulgakov credited Florensky with a decisive role in his return to Orthodoxy, and both the repository’s hub essay and the Bulgakov collection record it (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy; From Marxism to the Priesthood).

They were divided in 1922 by the Bolsheviks. Bulgakov was expelled from Russia in the deportations of that year and spent the rest of his life in Prague and Paris; Florensky refused to emigrate and stayed (see The Refusal to Emigrate and the Cassock). They never met again. Bulgakov wrote about Florensky repeatedly in the emigration, with admiration and with grief.

The Two Sophiologies Are Not the Same

Four differences are worth stating carefully, because in the standard shorthand — “Florensky and Bulgakov, the sophiologists” — they disappear.

Scale and form. Florensky’s sophiology is one letter in a book of twelve, plus scattered material elsewhere. Bulgakov’s is a system, worked out over thirty years across the minor and major trilogies, with a Christology, a pneumatology, an ecclesiology, and an eschatology built into it. Florensky never systematized his, and on his own methodological principles he could not have (see Antinomy as Method).

The “fourth hypostatic element.” The phrase is Florensky’s. Bulgakov acknowledged that it and his own early language in Unfading Light (1917) had invited the “fourth hypostasis” charge, and the mature trilogy is structured around the explicit denial that Sophia is a hypostasis at all (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, Gracewing, 2005, ch. 3; Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, Lindisfarne Press, 1993, ch. 2; and see Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia). So on the single point that generated the most heat, Florensky is the more exposed of the two — and it is Bulgakov who was condemned.

Divine and creaturely Sophia. Bulgakov’s mature distinction between Divine Sophia (the divine nature as it relates to creation) and creaturely Sophia (that same Wisdom as expressed in the created order), with its attendant apparatus, has no exact counterpart in Florensky. Florensky’s Sophia is described predominantly from the creature’s side — creation in its ideal integrity, the Church, the Theotokos — and he does not build the Christological and Trinitarian architecture that Bulgakov built and that his critics attacked.

Method. Bulgakov argues systematically and defends himself in the same register; his memoranda of 1935–36 are dogmatic-theological documents. Florensky argues by accumulation — icons, feasts, etymologies, liturgical texts — and would have regarded the demand for a single consistent definition as a category mistake. Whether this makes him harder or easier to criticize is itself a matter on which his readers divide.

What 1935 Did and Did Not Touch

The record must be reported exactly, and the detail belongs to the Bulgakov collection, which carries it in full: see The Condemnations of 1935.

Moscow Ukaz No. 1651 of 7 September 1935, issued by Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), called the teaching of Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov alien to the Orthodox faith.
The Determination of the ROCOR Council of Bishops at Sremski Karlovci, 17/30 October 1935, declared Bulgakov’s teaching on Sophia heretical.
Moscow Ukaz No. 2267 of 27 December 1935 confirmed the first and extended the criticism to Bulgakov’s kenotic Christology.

Florensky is not named in any of them. He had been dead — or, more exactly, in the camps and about to be shot — for years by the time the sophiology controversy reached its climax in the emigration; he had no opportunity to reply, and no Church body examined his letter as such. Two inferences must both be refused: it would be wrong to say that Florensky’s sophiology has been condemned, and equally wrong to say that its absence from the condemnations amounts to approval. What can be said is narrow and exact: the acts of 1935 addressed Bulgakov’s system by name, and Florensky belongs to the same current without having been the object of the acts.

The Assessment — Both Sides (METHODOLOGY §4.2)

The theological status of sophiology remains a genuinely live intra-Orthodox dispute, on which the Church has issued no pan-Orthodox judgment. The Bulgakov collection reports it at length in The Modern Reappraisal. What follows concerns Florensky specifically.

The critical position. Sophiology, in Florensky’s version as in Bulgakov’s, imports a mediating principle between God and creation for which there is no patristic warrant, and does so under the influence of German idealism (Schelling) transmitted through Solovyov. Florensky’s “fourth hypostatic element” is the most exposed formulation the whole movement produced. The tradition already possesses adequate resources for what sophiology claims to supply — the logoi of creation in St Maximus and the uncreated energies in St Gregory Palamas — so that sophiology is not merely dangerous but unnecessary. The whole enterprise exemplifies the “Western captivity” of Russian theology. So Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) (Novoe uchenie o Sofii, 1935), Vladimir Lossky (Spor o Sofii, 1936), and Fr. Georges Florovsky, whose Ways of Russian Theology (1937) treats Florensky as a chief exhibit (Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, OUP, 2013; see The Patristic Revival, Vladimir Lossky, Fr. Georges Florovsky).

The sympathetic position. Florensky’s Letter Ten is not a dogmatic proposal but an attempt to give a theological account of a documented liturgical and iconographic fact — the Russian Church’s veneration under the name of Wisdom — and it should be read as the exploratory, antinomic essay it is rather than as a system. Its governing concern, the integrity of creation and of the person, is patristic in substance whatever one thinks of its vocabulary. The neo-patristic critique, on this reading, was itself a polemically shaped construction that flattened the renaissance into a story of deviation; and the more recent scholarship has argued that the sophiological and neo-patristic currents belong to one twentieth-century Orthodox renewal rather than to two camps. So, in various ways, Robert Slesinski (Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love, 1984), Andrew Louth (Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3), and Paul Ladouceur (Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019); Paul Valliere and Brandon Gallaher argue the parallel case for Bulgakov (see The Reappraisal).

This collection adjudicates neither, because the Church has not. What it does assert, because it is not in dispute, is the Creator–creature distinction itself: God is uncreated and creation is created, and no principle stands between them as a third kind of being. That is dogma. Whether Florensky’s Sophia violates it, gestures inadequately toward something the tradition says better, or names a real feature of the created order in an unfortunate vocabulary, is the question — and it is open.

Why It Matters for His Canonization

The sophiology is one of the two considerations that appear in discussions of Florensky’s possible glorification — the other, and in the published statements of the Canonization Commission the operative one, being his 1933 depositions (see The State of the Question). It should not be over-read: a theologian’s contested opinions are not automatically a bar, and the Church venerates saints who held positions later judged mistaken (see What the Church Received). But it is part of the discussion, and this collection reports it as such rather than pretending otherwise.

References

Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Trans. Boris Jakim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. (Letter Ten.)
Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, ch. 3.
Bulgakov, Sergius. Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993.
Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Sofia, 1935.
Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii. Paris: Brotherhood of St Photius, 1936.
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Collected Works vols. 5–6. Belmont, MA / Vaduz, 1979–1987 (orig. Paris, 1937).
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Slesinski, Robert. Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3.
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Moscow Patriarchate, Ukaz No. 1651 of 7 September 1935 and Ukaz No. 2267 of 27 December 1935; Opredelenie of the ROCOR Council of Bishops, 17/30 October 1935. (Reported in full in the Bulgakov collection.)