The Paris School and the Fellowship

Around St. Sergius stood a whole ecosystem: YMCA-Press, which published almost everything Bulgakov wrote after 1925; the journal Put’, edited by Berdyaev; the Russian Student Christian Movement; and Mother Maria Skobtsova’s Orthodox Action. Beyond the Russian world stood the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox society founded in 1928 in which Bulgakov was the leading Orthodox voice — and in which, in 1933, he made a proposal for limited intercommunion that scandalized much of Orthodoxy two years before the sophiology decrees.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration); with material on Anglican–Orthodox relations

YMCA-Press and Put’

The Russian religious emigration in Paris had, improbably, a publishing house and a serious journal, both funded in significant part by American Protestant money channelled through the YMCA — an arrangement that its critics in the Balkans never let it forget (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; Donald A. Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute, London: SPCK, 1954).

YMCA-Press, relocated to Paris in the mid-1920s, published nearly the whole of Bulgakov’s mature corpus: the minor trilogy (Kupina Neopalimaya, 1927; Drug Zhenikha, 1927; Lestvitsa Iakovlya, 1929), the major trilogy (Agnets Bozhii, 1933; Uteshitel’, 1936; Nevesta Agntsa, posthumously in 1945), the 1935 brochure O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei containing the Moscow ukaz and his replies, and the posthumous Avtobiograficheskie zametki (1946) (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3).

Put’ (The Way), the journal edited by Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) from 1925 to 1940, was the emigration’s principal theological review and the forum in which the sophiology controversy was largely conducted in public (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013 — the book is a study of the journal). Berdyaev and Bulgakov were old associates from the Legal Marxist and Vekhi years; they differed sharply in temperament and in theology — Berdyaev the philosopher of freedom, hostile to system and to ecclesiastical authority; Bulgakov the systematizer and the priest — but Berdyaev’s defense of him in 1935 would be ferocious (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013; Sergei Hackel, Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981, ch. 5; see Bulgakov’s Replies and the Berdyaev Polemic).

The Russian Student Christian Movement and Orthodox Action

Bulgakov was a central figure in the Russian Student Christian Movement (Russkoe Studencheskoe Khristianskoe Dvizhenie, RSKhD), founded in 1923, which gathered young émigrés for conferences, retreats, and catechesis and served as the recruiting ground for St. Sergius (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1; Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, ch. 2). His conference addresses to the Movement were, for many of the emigration’s young, their first encounter with theology as a living discipline rather than a school subject.

In 1935 he was among the founders, with Mother Maria Skobtsova, Berdyaev, and Konstantin Mochulsky, of Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe Delo), the philanthropic organization under Metropolitan Evlogy’s exarchate that coordinated Mother Maria’s houses of hospitality, canteens, and pastoral care of the destitute (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, 1981, ch. 6; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3; see Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle). Its theology — that Orthodoxy must be deed, that the Church bears responsibility for the actual suffering of the actual city — was Bulgakov’s as much as hers, and under the German occupation it became an apparatus of rescue for which Mother Maria, her son Yuri, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, and Ilya Fondaminsky died (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, 1981, chs. 8–10; see St. Maria of Paris).

It is worth stating plainly, because the sophiology controversy tends to swallow everything else: the man censured in 1935 as a speculative innovator was in the same year helping to found one of the most concretely charitable enterprises in the history of the Russian emigration.

The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius

The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius was founded at a conference at St. Albans, in England, in 1928, growing out of Anglican–Orthodox student conferences of the preceding years; its purpose was mutual knowledge and prayer between Anglicans and Orthodox, and its patrons — the British protomartyr and the Russian abbot — expressed the pairing (Brandon Gallaher, “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought,” Sobornost 24, no. 1 [2002]: 24–55; Nicolas Zernov and others were among its founders and long-term organizers). Bulgakov was from the beginning its leading Orthodox theologian, and the Fellowship’s conferences — with their characteristic pattern of Anglicans and Orthodox each attending the other’s liturgy without communicating — were the setting of his most sustained encounter with Western Christianity (Gallaher, “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought,” 2002; Gallaher, “Bulgakov and Intercommunion,” Sobornost 24, no. 2 [2002]: 9–28).

Out of this work came a series of Bulgakov’s English-language and ecumenically framed writings, including The Orthodox Church (first published in French and English editions in the 1930s; English trans. rev. by Lydia Kesich, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), his most accessible book and still in print; and The Wisdom of God: A Brief Summary of Sophiology (New York: Paisley Press; London: Williams & Norgate, 1937; revised as Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993), written expressly to explain sophiology to an English readership after the condemnations.

The 1933 Intercommunion Proposal

In 1933 Bulgakov put to the Fellowship a proposal for a limited, partial intercommunion between its Orthodox and Anglican members — a sacramental sharing, under episcopal blessing, that would anticipate rather than presuppose full reunion (Gallaher, “Bulgakov and Intercommunion,” Sobornost 24, no. 2 [2002]: 9–28; Gallaher, “Sergii Bulgakov, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Intercommunion and Sofiology,” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 1 [2004]). His theological rationale drew on his ecclesiology: that the Church’s unity is a given reality of grace rather than an administrative achievement, and that a “partial” sacramental communion could be a real if incomplete realization of it, blessed by the bishops and undertaken in penitence rather than in triumph (Gallaher, “Bulgakov and Intercommunion,” 2002; Bulgakov, “Ways to Church Reunion” and related Fellowship papers, published in Sobornost, 1930s).

The proposal was not adopted. It was met with opposition from Anglicans as well as Orthodox, and among the Orthodox it caused real alarm — including from Florovsky, who regarded it as ecclesiologically incoherent, and from the conservative Russian episcopate abroad, for whom it was proof of exactly the tendency they suspected (Gallaher, “Bulgakov and Intercommunion,” 2002; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100; Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. 6).

Its importance for the 1935 story is chronological and atmospheric. By the time the ukazy and the ROCOR determination were issued, Bulgakov had already spent two years as the emigration’s most conspicuous ecumenical risk-taker. Scholars of the controversy have argued that the intercommunion affair materially hardened the disposition of his critics and helped create the constituency for the condemnation (Gallaher, “Sergii Bulgakov, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Intercommunion and Sofiology,” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 1 [2004]; Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005). The formal acts of 1935, it should be said clearly, were directed at his teaching on Sophia and (in the second Moscow ukaz) on Christ, not at the intercommunion proposal; the connection is one of context and motive, not of the documents’ content (see The Moscow Ukazy of 1935).

The Ecumenical Question in the Repository’s Frame

Where Bulgakov stands in the long Orthodox argument about ecumenism is itself contested, and the repository treats that argument on its own terms in The Ecumenism Debate. Three things can be said without adjudicating it.

First, Bulgakov’s ecumenical engagement was doctrinally maximalist, not minimalist: he did not propose to set aside the dogmas held in common or to reduce Orthodoxy to a lowest common denominator, and he wrote at length in defense of Orthodox teaching, including on the Filioque, to his Anglican interlocutors (Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, rev. trans. Kesich, SVS Press, 1988; Gallaher, “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought,” 2002; and see The Filioque).

Second, the intercommunion proposal was nevertheless a genuine departure from the received Orthodox discipline that sacramental communion presupposes full ecclesial communion, and Orthodox critics who describe it so are describing it accurately, not polemically (Gallaher, “Bulgakov and Intercommunion,” 2002).

Third — the point on which the repository’s methodology insists — the theological question of whether Bulgakov’s ecumenical ecclesiology is a legitimate Orthodox position or an error is a live intra-Orthodox dispute, treated under METHODOLOGY §4.2 alongside the sophiology question in The Modern Reappraisal. This collection reports the positions and does not settle them.

See Also

References

  • Gallaher, Brandon. “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought.” Sobornost 24, no. 1 (2002): 24–55.
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “Bulgakov and Intercommunion.” Sobornost 24, no. 2 (2002): 9–28.
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “Sergii Bulgakov, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Intercommunion and Sofiology.” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 1 (2004).
  • 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.
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. The Orthodox Church. Revised translation by Lydia Kesich. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. (First published in the 1930s; his most accessible book, written substantially for a Western readership.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993. (First published as The Wisdom of God: A Brief Summary of Sophiology, trans. Patrick Thompson, O. Fielding Clarke, and Xenia Braikevitc. New York: Paisley Press; London: Williams & Norgate, 1937.)
  • Lowrie, Donald A. Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute. London: SPCK, 1954.
  • Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Ch. 6 on the founding of Orthodox Action in 1935.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.