From Livny to Marxism

Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was born on 16/28 July 1871 at Livny in Oryol province, the son of a cemetery-church priest and the heir of six generations of clergy. He left the Oryol seminary in his teens having lost his faith, took a degree in law and political economy at Moscow University, made his professional name as a Marxist agrarian economist with the two volumes of Capitalism and Agriculture (1900), and was elected to the Second State Duma. This file covers the losing of the faith and the years in which he was, by his own later account, in exile from it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Imperial Russia)

Livny and the Six Generations

Bulgakov was born on 16 July 1871 by the Julian calendar — 28 July by the Gregorian — in the small town of Livny in Oryol province, in the Russian black-earth country (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3; Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, Part III). His father, Nikolai Vasilievich Bulgakov, was a priest serving a cemetery church, and behind him stood, on Bulgakov’s own reckoning, six generations of priests — a levitical family in the exact Russian sense, the hereditary clerical estate that supplied the Church’s rural parishes and its seminaries generation after generation (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki [Autobiographical Notes], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1946; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, Part III; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3).

The detail is not decorative. In the Autobiographical Notes Bulgakov returns repeatedly to the Livny of his childhood — the bells, the poverty, the smell of the cemetery church, the rhythm of the services — as the substratum that survived the loss of faith and made its recovery possible (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki, 1946; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III, on the autobiographical writings). He would later describe his priesthood not as a career change but as a return to what he was born to, delayed by some twenty-five years.

At the age of fourteen he entered the Oryol Theological Seminary, the ordinary path for a priest’s son (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3; Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, ch. 1). He did not finish it.

The Seminary Crisis

What happened at Oryol was, in Bulgakov’s later telling, a straightforward loss of faith — the collapse, in an adolescent of unusual intellectual force, of a religion he had received as custom under the pressure of the radical and positivist literature that circulated in every Russian seminary of the 1880s (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki, 1946; Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 1). He left the seminary about 1888, in his late teens, and completed his secondary education at a secular gimnaziya in Yelets before entering the Law Faculty of Imperial Moscow University, from which he graduated in 1894, having concentrated on political economy (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3).

Bulgakov never treated this episode as youthful noise to be forgiven and forgotten. He treated it as a real apostasy, and he treated the seminary system’s failure to hold him as a diagnosis of something wrong in the way the Russian Church had been transmitting the faith — a theme he shared with a whole generation of ex-seminarians who left for radicalism, of whom the most consequential was Stalin (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki, 1946; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III; on the wider crisis of the Russian clerical estate, see The Synodal Period). His mature insistence that theology must engage the actual intellectual world of its age, rather than repeat formulae, has one of its roots here.

The Marxist Economist

Through the 1890s Bulgakov was a Marxist — not a sympathizer but a working Marxist economist, and one of the “Legal Marxists” who published within the bounds of imperial censorship alongside Peter Struve and Nikolai Berdyaev (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, chs. 1–2; Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology, 1999, introduction and the translated early essays). From 1895 he taught political economy at the Imperial Moscow Technical School; he studied abroad, chiefly in Germany, in the later 1890s (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 2; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3).

His major economic work of this period is O rynkakh pri kapitalisticheskom proizvodstve (On Markets under Capitalist Production, 1897) and, above all, the two-volume Kapitalizm i zemledelie — Capitalism and Agriculture — defended as his master’s dissertation in 1900 (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 2; Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999, introduction). The book is important for his biography because of what it concluded. Bulgakov set out to demonstrate the Marxist thesis that capitalist concentration would work in agriculture as it had in industry, driving out the small producer; the evidence, as he read it, did not support the thesis. Agriculture, tied to land, to season, to the irreducible particularity of soil and living things, would not be reduced to the industrial model (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 2; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III; Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999, introduction).

That is the seam along which his Marxism split. The failure was not primarily moral or religious but empirical and then metaphysical: the world of living, growing, particular things resisted the schema. Bulgakov’s later theology of creation — the world as more than raw material, as bearing a form and dignity not conferred by human labor — grows directly out of the economist’s discovery that the earth would not behave (Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999, introduction; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III; and for the mature statement, Bulgakov, Filosofiya khozyaystva [Philosophy of Economy], Moscow, 1912/1913, trans. Catherine Evtuhov, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

In 1901 he took up a chair as professor of political economy at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, with a concurrent appointment as privatdozent at Kiev University (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 2; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3). He returned to Moscow in 1906, where he taught at the Moscow Commercial Institute and, from 1913, at Moscow University, having defended Philosophy of Economy as his doctoral dissertation (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, chs. 2 and 4).

The Second State Duma

In the elections held under the imperial franchise, Bulgakov was returned as a deputy for Oryol province to the Second State Duma, which sat from February to June 1907 before Stolypin dissolved it (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 3; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3). [Disputed: sources differ on whether to date his election to the campaign of late 1906 or to the balloting completed in early 1907; the Second Duma itself convened on 20 February / 5 March 1907 and was dissolved on 3/16 June 1907. Reference works give both 1906 (election campaign) and 1907 (session); the substantive fact — that he sat in the Second Duma and only the Second — is not in dispute.]

He sat as a non-party deputy, having declined to join either the Kadets or the socialist fractions, and described his political position at this period as Christian socialism — an attempt to give the social question a specifically Christian rather than a materialist grounding (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 3; Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999, which translates several of the political essays of these years). The experiment was not a success and he knew it: the Duma experience left him with a lasting distrust of party politics and of the Russian intelligentsia’s capacity to govern, a disillusion that fed directly into his contribution to Vekhi two years later (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 3; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).

What the Marxist Years Left Him

Three things carried over into the theologian.

First, a permanent seriousness about economics and matter. Bulgakov never treated the material world as theologically inert. Philosophy of Economy (1912/1913) argues that economic activity — the human transformation of nature through labor — is a real relation between the human person and the cosmos, and that it requires a metaphysics to be intelligible at all (Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans. Evtuhov, Yale University Press, 2000, translator’s introduction; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III). The mature sophiology is in large part an answer to the question that book poses.

Second, a specific quarrel with Marxism rather than a general piety against it. Bulgakov’s later critique of socialism is that of a man who had done the reading. He held that Marxism was a Christian eschatology with the transcendent removed — a secularized chiliasm that promised the Kingdom and could deliver only the state (Bulgakov, “Karl Marx as a Religious Type” [Karl Marks kak religioznyi tip], 1906; English in Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).

Third, the habit of system. Bulgakov had been trained to build a total account and to defend it against evidence. When he turned that training on dogmatic theology, the result was a system of a scale and ambition that Orthodox theology had not attempted since the medieval summae — which is precisely what his critics would hold against him (Georges Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology], Paris, 1937, on the systematizing impulse in Russian religious philosophy; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100).

References

Bulgakov, Sergius. Avtobiograficheskie zametki [Autobiographical Notes]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1946. (Livny; the priestly family; the seminary crisis; his own account of the years away from faith.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. Kapitalizm i zemledelie [Capitalism and Agriculture]. 2 vols. St. Petersburg, 1900. (The master’s dissertation whose findings broke his Marxism.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household. Translated and with an introduction by Catherine Evtuhov. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. (Original Filosofiya khozyaystva, Moscow, 1912; defended as his doctoral dissertation in 1913.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. “Karl Marx as a Religious Type” (1906). English translation in Rowan Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999.
Evtuhov, Catherine. The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. (The standard scholarly account of the Russian period: seminary, Marxism, Kiev, the Duma, Vekhi.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3 on Bulgakov: the life and the shape of the theology.)
Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Part III on Bulgakov: the biography, the economic writings, and the continuity between them and the theology.)
Williams, Rowan, ed. Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999. (Translations of the early political and economic essays with introduction and commentary.)
Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology]. Paris, 1937. (The critique of the systematizing tendency in Russian religious philosophy.)
Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.