The Sources of Sophiology

Where Bulgakov’s Sophia came from: the Wisdom literature of Scripture, the patristic identification of Wisdom with the Son, the dedication of Hagia Sophia and the Russian Sophia icons of Kiev and Novgorod, Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy of all-unity and his visions, Pavel Florensky’s letter “Sophia,” and — the point on which his critics insisted most — the German idealist tradition, above all Schelling.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) — expounding a modern theologian’s sources, not the Church’s dogma

Scripture

The name is biblical. Wisdom — Hebrew ḥokmâ, Greek sophia — is personified at length in the Old Testament, and in a way that has always resisted flat reduction. In Proverbs 8 Wisdom cries in the streets, declares that “the LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old” (Prov. 8:22), and describes herself as present at the creation, “as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him” (Prov. 8:30). The Wisdom of Solomon calls her “the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty” (Wisd. 7:25), and Sirach 24 has her taking root in Israel. In the New Testament, Christ is called “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24).

Bulgakov took these texts as data that any Orthodox dogmatics must account for, and complained that most modern dogmatic manuals simply did not (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993 [first published 1937], ch. 1; Aidan Nichols, Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, ch. 2). Whether the sophiological construction is the right way to account for them is the disputed question; that the texts exist and are not obviously exhausted by “a poetic figure for a divine attribute” is not disputed.

The Fathers

The patristic tradition, faced with Proverbs 8:22 in the Arian crisis, identified Wisdom overwhelmingly with the Son. Arius had used “the LORD created me in the beginning of his ways” (LXX ektisen me) as a proof text for the Son’s creaturehood; the Nicene fathers, above all St. Athanasius in the Orations against the Arians (esp. Orations II), answered by distinguishing what is said of the Son in his eternal generation from what is said of him in the economy of the Incarnation (Athanasius, Orations against the Arians II.18–82; trans. NPNF II/4; see St. Athanasius and Christology). The settled patristic reading is that Wisdom is Christ, the Logos — and that the “creating” of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22 refers to the created humanity assumed by the Son (Athanasius, Orations against the Arians II; and see the treatment of Wisdom in the Cappadocians and in St. John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa).

This matters for a fair statement of the debate in two directions. Bulgakov knew the patristic identification perfectly well and did not deny it; his claim was that it is insufficient rather than false — that Wisdom is revealed pre-eminently in the Son but is not simply reducible to the Second Hypostasis, since Scripture also associates Wisdom with the Father’s counsel and with the Spirit’s life-giving (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, chs. 1–2; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 2). His critics answered that in departing from the settled patristic identification he had left the Fathers behind precisely where they had spoken most carefully and at greatest cost (Archbishop Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Sofia, 1935; Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii, Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936).

The other patristic resource in play is the doctrine of the divine ideas or logoi of created things — the eternal divine willing and knowing of each creature, developed above all by St. Maximus the Confessor, for whom the logoi are the preexistent divine intentions of all things, contained in the one Logos and not constituting a reality between God and creation (Maximus, Ambigua 7; Ambigua 41; see St. Maximus the Confessor). Bulgakov’s “world of divine ideas” is deliberately continuous with this, and both his defenders and his critics engage it — defenders as showing his patristic anchorage, critics as showing that the Fathers had already answered his question without needing Sophia (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, chs. 2–3; Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100).

Hagia Sophia and the Russian Icons

The Great Church of Constantinople, dedicated in 537, is the Church of the Holy Wisdom; so are the cathedrals of Kiev (eleventh century) and Novgorod. In Byzantine usage the dedication is to Christ the Wisdom of God, and the feast kept at Constantinople was accordingly a feast of Christ (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 2). In the Russian reception the picture became more complicated: the Novgorod Sophia icon type depicts Wisdom as a crowned, winged, fiery-red angelic figure enthroned between the Mother of God and St. John the Forerunner, with Christ above — an image that does not straightforwardly read as a portrait of Christ, and around which a distinct devotional and interpretative tradition grew up (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 2; and on the Russian icon tradition generally, see Holy Icons). At Kiev and Novgorod the temple feasts of Holy Wisdom came to be kept on Marian feasts — the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kiev, the Dormition at Novgorod — associating Sophia with the Mother of God in liturgical practice (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 2).

Bulgakov appealed to this material constantly, as evidence that the Russian Church’s own worship had preserved a Wisdom-consciousness that the manuals had lost, and that sophiology was recovering rather than inventing (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 1; Bulgakov, Kupina Neopalimaya [The Burning Bush], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1927). Critics replied that iconographic idiosyncrasy and local liturgical usage are not dogmatic sources and cannot bear the weight he placed on them (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii, 1935; Georges Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris, 1937, on the Russian Wisdom cult).

Vladimir Solovyov

The immediate ancestor is Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), the most influential Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century, whose system of all-unity (vseedinstvo) sought to overcome the divorce of God from the world characteristic, as he saw it, of both Western rationalism and a merely negative apophaticism (Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, Part II; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 1). Sophia in Solovyov is the world-soul, the ideal unity of creation, the eternal feminine in God turned toward the world; and Solovyov reported three personal visions of her — in childhood, in the British Museum, and in the Egyptian desert — which he set down in his poem “Three Meetings” (1898) (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part II; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 1). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, these are Solovyov’s own testimony about his own experience and are reported as such.

Bulgakov’s debt is direct and acknowledged, and so is his divergence. He held that Solovyov had identified the right problem and had failed to solve it Orthodoxly, leaving Sophia hovering ambiguously between a divine hypostasis and a cosmic principle; the mature trilogy is in part an attempt to give the sophiological intuition a properly Chalcedonian and Trinitarian discipline that Solovyov never supplied (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 1; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 1). His critics regarded the attempt as failing for the same structural reason Solovyov’s had (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936).

Pavel Florensky

Fr. Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), who died in the Solovki camps and was later numbered by many among the new martyrs, gave the Wisdom theme its most arresting modern statement in the letter “Sophia” in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Moscow, 1914), where Sophia appears as a real, quasi-personal reality — Florensky ventured the phrase “the fourth hypostatic element” — participating in the life of the Trinity from the creature’s side (Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans. Boris Jakim, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, the letter “Sophia”; see Pavel Florensky).

Bulgakov called Florensky’s influence on him formative. He also spent the rest of his life trying to avoid that particular phrase and everything it implied — a fact of some importance for reading the “fourth hypostasis” charge, since the charge originates in Florensky’s vocabulary and was pressed against Bulgakov, who had rejected it (Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 1993, ch. 2, where he explicitly denies that Sophia is a hypostasis; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3; and for the charge, Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii, 1935).

German Idealism

The final source is the one his critics made most of. Bulgakov was formed philosophically in the German tradition — Kant, and behind Kant, F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), whose later philosophy of the divine potencies, of the ground in God, and of nature as the unconscious self-manifestation of spirit supplies much of the conceptual furniture of the Russian sophiologists (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Parts II–III; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, chs. 1 and 3). Bulgakov did not conceal this; he engaged Schelling explicitly and critically.

Florovsky built his whole indictment of Russian religious philosophy around it: that what presented itself as a recovery of the Orthodox mind was in fact the last phase of a “Western captivity” — Orthodox material processed through post-Kantian German categories, in which the philosophy determined the theology rather than the reverse (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology], Paris, 1937, concluding chapters; Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005; Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, chs. 4–6; see Georges Florovsky and The Patristic Revival).

[Disputed: whether Bulgakov's sophiology is essentially German-idealist thought in Orthodox dress or an Orthodox theology that uses idealist vocabulary as a servant. (a) The critical reading — Florovsky's, and after him a broad current of neo-patristic theology — holds that Schellingian and Solovyovian categories govern the system from the inside, so that Sophia is required by the philosophy rather than given by revelation (Florovsky, *Ways of Russian Theology*, 1937; Klimoff, 2005). (b) The defending reading — argued by Valliere, by Rowan Williams, and by Brandon Gallaher — holds that Bulgakov transposes idealist material into an explicitly Chalcedonian and Trinitarian frame, subordinates it to dogma, and is doing what the Fathers themselves did with Hellenistic philosophy (Valliere, *Modern Russian Theology*, 2000, Part III; Williams, ed., *Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology*, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999, introduction; Gallaher, *Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology*, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). This collection does not adjudicate between them; see [The Modern Reappraisal](../08-the-modern-reappraisal/README.md).]

See Also

References

  • 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, New York: Paisley Press; London: Williams & Norgate, 1937 — his own compact statement of the sources and the doctrine.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Kupina Neopalimaya [The Burning Bush]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1927. English: The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, trans. Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Orations against the Arians, esp. Book II. Trans. NPNF II/4. (Proverbs 8:22 in the Arian controversy; Wisdom identified with the Son.)
  • Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua 7 and 41. (The logoi of created things.)
  • Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Trans. Boris Jakim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. (Original Moscow, 1914; the letter “Sophia.”)
  • Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Part II on Solovyov; Part III on Bulgakov’s transposition of him.)
  • Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (Chs. 1–3 on the sources: Scripture, the Fathers, the icons, Solovyov, Florensky.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 1 on Solovyov; ch. 3 on Bulgakov.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology]. Paris, 1937. (The “Western captivity” thesis and the critique of the Russian Wisdom cult.)
  • Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii [The Sophia Dispute]. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
  • Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei [The New Teaching on Sophia the Wisdom of God]. Sofia, 1935.
  • Williams, Rowan, ed. Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999.
  • Gallaher, Brandon. Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Scripture: Proverbs 8:22–31; Wisdom of Solomon 7:22–8:1; Sirach 24; 1 Corinthians 1:24.