02 — The Paris School and St. Sergius

From Constantinople to Prague to Paris: the founding in 1925 of the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute on the rue de Crimée, where Bulgakov taught dogmatic theology for nineteen years and which he served as inspector and then as dean; and the wider world of the Russian religious emigration — YMCA-Press, the journal Put’, the Russian Student Christian Movement, the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, Berdyaev, Mother Maria Skobtsova, and the colleagues who would become his critics.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration, Western European exarchate)

What This Section Covers

The Paris of the 1920s and 1930s is where modern Orthodox theology was largely invented, and Bulgakov stood at its center — as the senior theologian of an institute whose faculty and students included Georges Florovsky, Nicholas Afanasiev, Vasily Zenkovsky, Anton Kartashev, Cyprian Kern, Paul Evdokimov, and, at one remove, Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorff and Alexander Schmemann of the next generation. Two of these men would be among his most serious critics. The intellectual density and the internal conflict belong to the same story and are told here together.

This section also covers Bulgakov’s ecumenical work, which is inseparable from his Paris career: his central role in the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius from its foundation in 1928, and the controversial 1933 proposal for a limited Anglican–Orthodox intercommunion that hardened opinion against him well before the sophiology decrees.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Founding of St. Sergius Constantinople, Prague, the purchase of the rue de Crimée property in 1924, the Institute’s opening in 1925, Bulgakov’s chair, inspectorate and deanship, and the faculty
The Paris School and the Fellowship YMCA-Press and Put’, the Russian Student Christian Movement, Berdyaev and Mother Maria, the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, and the 1933 intercommunion proposal

See Also