The Founding of St. Sergius

Deported from the Crimea at the end of 1922, Bulgakov spent some months in Constantinople and two years in Prague before moving to Paris in 1925 to help found the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute on the rue de Crimée. He held the chair of dogmatic theology there for the rest of his life, served as the Institute’s inspector and later as its dean, and made it the most consequential Orthodox theological faculty of the twentieth century — including for the men who would attack his own theology from inside its walls.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration; Metropolitan Evlogy’s Western European exarchate)

Constantinople and Prague

Bulgakov reached Constantinople from Sevastopol at the very end of December 1922 (Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, ch. 6; Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, London: Atlantic Books, 2006). He remained in the city into the spring of 1923 — a period he recalled with intensity because of Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom, which he was able to enter and whose effect on him he described as a confirmation of everything he had been trying to say about Sophia (Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki [Autobiographical Notes], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1946; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this is his own testimony about his own experience and is reported as such.

In May 1923 he took up a professorship in Prague, teaching church law and theology in the Russian Juridical Faculty attached to Charles University — one of the institutions supported by the Czechoslovak government’s generous “Russian Action” program for émigré scholars (Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 1997, ch. 6; Antoine Arjakovsky, The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940, trans. Jerry Ryan, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, ch. 1). Prague was a waystation. The center of the Russian religious emigration was forming in Paris.

The Rue de Crimée

The St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-Serge) was created in 1924–25 under Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), the hierarch responsible for the Russian parishes in Western Europe (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1; Donald Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute, London: SPCK, 1954). Its home was an extraordinary piece of providence or luck, depending on the reader: a former German Lutheran church and its outbuildings on the rue de Crimée in the nineteenth arrondissement, seized as enemy property after the First World War and put up for auction, which was bought for the Russian emigration in 1924 with funds raised largely through American Protestant philanthropy — the YMCA and the associated networks that also funded YMCA-Press (Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954; Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1). Metropolitan Evlogy consecrated the church to St. Sergius of Radonezh, and the compound, still standing, has been the Institute’s home ever since (Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954; see St. Sergius of Radonezh).

The Institute opened for its first academic year in 1925 (Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954; Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3). Metropolitan Evlogy was its rector; Bulgakov, who had come from Prague expressly for the purpose, took the chair of dogmatic theology, which he held until his death (Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3; and see the repository hub, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

He became inspector of the Institute — the office corresponding to dean of studies, with day-to-day academic and disciplinary responsibility — in 1931, and dean in 1940, holding that office until he died in 1944 (Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy; Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954). He is very commonly described in the literature simply as “dean of St. Sergius” for the whole Paris period, which compresses the offices but conveys the substance: from 1925 he was the Institute’s dominant theological personality (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3; Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, ch. 2).

The Faculty

What made St. Sergius extraordinary was the concentration of talent that the catastrophe of 1917 had swept into one small compound. Alongside Bulgakov taught:

  • Fr. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), patrologist, from 1926, the architect of the “neo-patristic synthesis” and the author of Ways of Russian Theology (1937) — and Bulgakov’s most formidable internal opponent (Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, chs. 2–4; see Georges Florovsky).
  • Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966), canonist, whose “eucharistic ecclesiology” would shape Vatican II’s interlocutors and the next Orthodox generation (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002; see Nicholas Afanasiev).
  • Fr. Cyprian (Kern), liturgist and patrologist; Anton Kartashev, church historian and former minister in the Provisional Government; Vasily Zenkovsky, philosopher and historian of Russian thought; Archpriest Sergius Chetverikov, spiritual writer, later chairman of the commission that examined the charges against Bulgakov (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1; Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954).
  • Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970) as a student of the first generation (see Paul Evdokimov); and in the next cohort, Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, who studied and taught there before carrying the Paris inheritance to St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York (see Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff, and The Orthodox Church in America).

Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), who became Bulgakov’s sharpest lay critic, was not on the St. Sergius faculty: he belonged to the Moscow Patriarchal jurisdiction in Paris and to the Brotherhood of St. Photius, which is precisely why he was free to publish against Bulgakov as a St. Sergius colleague was not (Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii, Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100; see Vladimir Lossky).

Bulgakov as Teacher and Priest

Bulgakov’s students describe a lecturer of unusual power — slow, heavy, unrhetorical, and capable of holding a room by the sheer weight of what he was saying (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 2; Sergei Hackel, Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981, chs. 4–5). More important to those who knew him was that he was a working parish priest and confessor throughout, serving in the Institute church and hearing confessions; his pastoral formation of individuals, most famously Mother Maria Skobtsova, is as much a part of his record as the trilogy (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, 1981, chs. 4–7; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, chs. 2–3; see Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle).

Mother Maria — glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004 as St. Maria of Paris, martyred at Ravensbrück in 1945 — took Bulgakov as her confessor and spiritual father; he guided her toward her monastic tonsure and blessed her unusual vocation of “monasticism in the world” (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, 1981, chs. 5–7; see St. Maria of Paris). The relationship cuts both ways in the reception of both figures, and the repository treats it explicitly in her collection: her closeness to Bulgakov is one of the grounds on which some Orthodox have held her contested, and she is not on record as advancing the censured sophiological propositions herself (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, 1981, ch. 7; Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle).

An Institute Divided

By the mid-1930s the Institute contained, in a single small faculty, both the sophiological program and the neo-patristic program that was designed to replace it. Florovsky arrived in 1926 as Bulgakov’s junior colleague and spent the next decade developing an account of Russian theology’s “Western captivity” in which Solovyov’s and Bulgakov’s sophiology figures as the culminating symptom (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology], Paris, 1937; Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, chs. 4–6; Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005). Florovsky never published a direct refutation of Bulgakov — a restraint variously read as collegial decency, as institutional prudence, and as evasion — expressing his opposition instead in essays on the doctrine of creation and, in 1936, by signing the minority report of Metropolitan Evlogy’s commission (Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005; see Evlogy’s Commission and the 1937 Conference).

That the two programs coexisted at St. Sergius, and that the Institute survived the crisis of 1935–37 with both men on its staff, is one of the more remarkable facts of modern Orthodox institutional history. Bulgakov remained dean until his death; Florovsky left for the United States after the war and shaped a generation there (Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, chs. 8–9; Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, conclusion).

The Jurisdictional Position

One structural fact governs everything in Sections 05 and 06 and belongs here. In 1931 Metropolitan Evlogy’s Western European archdiocese, unable to function under the demands of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) in Moscow and unwilling to join the Karlovci Synod, was received by the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a temporary exarchate (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1; and see Twentieth-Century Fragmentation for the wider pattern of Russian jurisdictional division abroad). Bulgakov was therefore, from 1931, a priest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s exarchate — not of the Moscow Patriarchate and not of the Russian Church Abroad. When Moscow and ROCOR acted against his teaching in 1935, neither body had disciplinary jurisdiction over his person. This is why the 1935 acts, real and unrescinded as they are, produced no canonical consequence for him, and why the question of his standing fell to Evlogy (see The Moscow Ukazy of 1935 and Evlogy’s Commission and the 1937 Conference).

See Also

References

  • Lowrie, Donald A. Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute. London: SPCK, 1954. (The institutional history: the 1924 purchase of the rue de Crimée property, the 1925 opening, the faculty.)
  • Arjakovsky, Antoine. The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940. Translated by Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. (The definitive study of the Paris milieu; ch. 1 on the founding of the Institute and the jurisdictional situation.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Avtobiograficheskie zametki [Autobiographical Notes]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1946. (Constantinople and Hagia Sophia.)
  • Evtuhov, Catherine. The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. (Ch. 6: expulsion, Constantinople, Prague.)
  • Chamberlain, Lesley. The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. London: Atlantic Books, 2006.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3.)
  • Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Florovsky at St. Sergius; the development of the neo-patristic program against the sophiological one.)
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 2 on Bulgakov as priest and teacher; ch. 3 on Mother Maria and the circle.)
  • Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Bulgakov as her confessor and spiritual father.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology]. Paris, 1937.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii [The Sophia Dispute]. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.