From Marxism to the Priesthood

The return journey: the 1903 collection From Marxism to Idealism, the Vekhi (Landmarks) essay of 1909, the friendship with Pavel Florensky, the first sophiological book Unfading Light (1917), participation in the Moscow Council of 1917–18, and ordination to the priesthood in Moscow in June 1918 — followed by the Crimean years and the deportation of 30 December 1922.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (late Imperial Russia and the Revolution)

“From Marxism to Idealism”

The title of the 1903 collection of Bulgakov’s essays — Ot marksizma k idealizmu (St. Petersburg, 1903) — named a whole generation’s trajectory as well as his own (Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, ch. 2; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3). Bulgakov had already contributed to Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism, Moscow, 1902), the manifesto in which a group of former Marxists — Struve, Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Bulgakov — announced their turn from positivist materialism to a metaphysics that could accommodate the person, freedom, and moral absolutes (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 2; Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, Part III).

The move was philosophical before it was ecclesial. What Bulgakov found in Kant, in Schelling, and above all in Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) was a way of holding together the reality of the material world and the reality of the absolute — Solovyov’s “all-unity” (vseedinstvo) and the figure of Sophia through which he articulated it (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Parts II–III; see The Sources of Sophiology). Solovyov is the single most important intellectual influence on Bulgakov’s theology, and the debt is one he never concealed.

Vekhi (1909)

In 1909 Bulgakov contributed the essay “Heroism and Asceticism” (Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo) to Vekhi (Landmarks), the collection in which seven former radicals — Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Izgoev, Kistiakovsky, Struve, Frank — turned on the Russian intelligentsia and accused it of a maximalism that was religious in form and destructive in effect (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 3; Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, Moscow, 1909; English: Landmarks, various translations). Bulgakov’s argument was that the intelligentsia’s “heroism” — the posture of the individual savior who will remake the world by an act of will — was a counterfeit of Christian asceticism, which begins instead with obedience, self-suspicion, and daily fidelity in a given task (Bulgakov, “Heroism and Asceticism,” in Vekhi, 1909; Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 3).

Vekhi made its authors notorious. It also marks the point at which Bulgakov’s critique of the revolutionary intelligentsia became explicitly a critique made from within Christianity rather than from a philosophical idealism. He contributed again to the successor volume Iz glubiny (Out of the Depths / De Profundis, Moscow, 1918) — the collection written in the first year of Bolshevik rule, whose print run was largely suppressed — with the dialogue “At the Feast of the Gods” (Na piru bogov), a bleak and prophetic exchange on what had just happened to Russia (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).

Florensky and Unfading Light

The decisive personal friendship of these years was with Fr. Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), mathematician, priest, polymath, and author of Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Moscow, 1914) (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, chs. 2–3; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III). Florensky’s book contained a long letter on Sophia that treated Wisdom as a real, quasi-personal reality — “the fourth hypostatic element,” in a phrase Florensky ventured and Bulgakov would spend his career trying not to need (Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans. Boris Jakim, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, the letter “Sophia”; see Pavel Florensky). Bulgakov later said that Florensky’s influence on him was formative and irreversible.

Bulgakov’s own first major religious-philosophical work, Svet Nevecherniy — Unfading Light (Moscow: Put’, 1917; trans. Thomas Allan Smith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012) — appeared in the year of the revolutions. It is the book in which the sophiological system is first laid out at length, still in the register of religious philosophy rather than dogmatics, and it contains the material that a later generation of critics would treat as the primary evidence against him (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3; Aidan Nichols, Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, ch. 1).

The Moscow Council and the Ordination of 1918

Bulgakov took part in the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 in Moscow — the council that restored the Patriarchate and elected St. Tikhon — as a lay delegate, and served on its drafting work (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III; see St. Tikhon of Moscow). It was in the middle of the Council’s second session, with the Bolshevik state already moving against the Church, that he was ordained.

He was ordained deacon and then priest in Moscow in June 1918 (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1946; Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3). The most commonly reported detail is that the priestly ordination fell on 11 June 1918 (Old Style) — the Day of the Holy Spirit, the Monday after Pentecost — with the diaconal ordination on Pentecost itself the day before, at the hands of Bishop Theodore (Pozdeevsky), and at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. [Disputed: the ordaining hierarch and the exact venue are given as Bishop Theodore (Pozdeevsky) at the Danilov Monastery in the biographical literature and reference entries; some popular accounts instead place the ordination at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra. The month and year (June 1918) and the Pentecost/Holy Spirit dating are consistently reported; the venue is not uniformly attested and is given here as the majority report rather than as settled.]

What is not in doubt is the timing and its meaning. A professor of political economy, a former Duma deputy and a public intellectual, put on the cassock in the summer of 1918, when to be a priest in Russia was becoming a capital liability. Bulgakov described the act as the fulfillment of what his birth had intended (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki, 1946; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III). Within a decade a great many of the men ordained beside him would be dead (see The New Martyrs of Russia).

Crimea, 1918–1922

In the autumn of 1918 Bulgakov travelled to the Crimea and was cut off there by the civil war. He remained in the south through the White period and into Bolshevik rule, serving as a priest, teaching at the university at Simferopol until he was dismissed from the chair for his religious position, and writing (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3). Two of his most difficult and original books belong to these years: Filosofiya imeni (Philosophy of the Name) and Tragediya filosofii (The Tragedy of Philosophy), both written around 1920 and both published only much later — The Tragedy of Philosophy in German in 1927 and the Philosophy of the Name in Paris in 1953 (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3).

The Expulsion of 1922

In 1922 the Soviet government carried out the mass deportation of religious philosophers, scholars, and writers that came to be known as the “philosophers’ ships” (filosofskiy parokhod): more than a hundred and fifty intellectuals, including Berdyaev, Frank, Ilyin, and Lossky’s father Nikolai Lossky, were stripped of citizenship and put out of the country in the autumn and winter of 1922, chiefly on two German steamers sailing from Petrograd to Stettin in September and November (Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, London: Atlantic Books, 2006).

Bulgakov belonged to this expulsion but not to those sailings. Arrested in the Crimea, deprived of citizenship, and expelled from the country, he sailed from Sevastopol to Constantinople on 30 December 1922 (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, 2006). [Corrected: general accounts, including the repository’s own hub essay, say that Bulgakov was expelled “on the philosophers’ ship.” He was expelled in the same operation and is rightly counted among its victims, but his own departure was a separate sailing from the Crimea at the very end of December 1922, not one of the Petrograd–Stettin voyages of September and November.]

He never saw Russia again. The rest of his life — twenty-one years of it — was lived in the emigration, and the entire theological system for which he is remembered was written there (see The Founding of St. Sergius).

See Also

References

  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Ot marksizma k idealizmu [From Marxism to Idealism]. St. Petersburg, 1903.
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. “Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo” [“Heroism and Asceticism”]. In Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii [Landmarks: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia]. Moscow, 1909.
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. “Na piru bogov” [“At the Feast of the Gods”]. In Iz glubiny [Out of the Depths]. Moscow, 1918.
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations. Translated by Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. (Original Svet Nevecherniy, Moscow: Put’, 1917 — the first extended statement of the sophiology.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Avtobiograficheskie zametki [Autobiographical Notes]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1946. (His own account of the return to the Church and the ordination.)
  • Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters. Translated by Boris Jakim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. (Original Moscow, 1914; the letter “Sophia.”)
  • Chamberlain, Lesley. The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. London: Atlantic Books, 2006. (The 1922 expulsions; the Petrograd sailings and the separate Crimean deportations.)
  • Evtuhov, Catherine. The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. (Chs. 2–6: idealism, Vekhi, the Council, the ordination, Crimea, expulsion.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3.)
  • Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Parts II–III: Solovyov’s legacy and Bulgakov’s appropriation of it.)
  • Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (Ch. 1 on the pre-emigration writings.)