04 — The Major Trilogy

Bulgakov’s system stands in two trilogies. The “minor trilogy” of 1927–1929 — The Burning Bush on the Mother of God, The Friend of the Bridegroom on St. John the Forerunner, Jacob’s Ladder on the angels — approaches the sophiological themes through concrete figures of the creature’s nearness to God. The “major trilogy,” On Godmanhood (O Bogochelovechestve) — The Lamb of God (1933), The Comforter (1936), The Bride of the Lamb (1945, posthumous) — is a full dogmatic system running from Christology through pneumatology to ecclesiology and the last things.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) — expounding Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s own works

What This Section Covers

Together the two trilogies run to several thousand pages, all of them written in Paris, all published by YMCA-Press, and all now available in English. The scale matters to the controversy in a specific way: the first Moscow ukaz of September 1935 and the ROCOR determination of October 1935 were issued when only the first volume of the major trilogy, The Lamb of God, had appeared; The Comforter was published in 1936, after the acts, and The Bride of the Lamb only after his death. The condemnations therefore addressed a system that was not yet finished (see The Moscow Ukazy of 1935). This is a fact of chronology, not an argument about the merits, and both sides of the modern dispute make use of it.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Minor Trilogy The Burning Bush (1927), The Friend of the Bridegroom (1927), Jacob’s Ladder (1929) — the Theotokos, the Forerunner, and the angels as figures of creaturely Sophia
On Godmanhood: The Major Trilogy The Lamb of God (1933), The Comforter (1936), The Bride of the Lamb (1945) — the dogmatic system in full

See Also