On Godmanhood: The Major Trilogy

O Bogochelovechestve (On Godmanhood) is Bulgakov’s dogmatic system in three volumes: The Lamb of God (Paris, 1933) on the Incarnation and the kenosis; The Comforter (Paris, 1936) on the Holy Spirit; The Bride of the Lamb (Paris, 1945, posthumous) on the Church, history, and the last things. Some two thousand pages in Russian, all three now in English translation by Boris Jakim, it is the most ambitious work of Orthodox systematic theology attempted in the twentieth century, and the work on which the case for and against Bulgakov is chiefly argued.

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

The Title and the Program

Bogochelovechestvo — “Godmanhood,” “divine-humanity,” “the God-man-hood” — is Solovyov’s term, and Bulgakov’s adoption of it announces the program (Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, Parts II–III; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3). The thesis is that the union of God and humanity in Christ is not an isolated miracle inserted into an otherwise God-less world but the disclosure of what creation always was for — and that the whole of dogmatics can be organized around it. Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, eschatology are then successive articulations of the one Godmanhood.

The three volumes were published by YMCA-Press in Paris: Agnets Bozhii in 1933, Uteshitel’ in 1936, and Nevesta Agntsa posthumously in 1945. Boris Jakim’s English translations appeared from Eerdmans in reverse order — The Bride of the Lamb (2002), The Comforter (2004), The Lamb of God (2008).

Chronology matters for the controversy. When Moscow issued Ukaz No. 1651 in September 1935 and the ROCOR Council its determination in October 1935, only The Lamb of God of the three had been published; the second Moscow ukaz of December 1935 extended its criticism to the Christology of that volume. The Comforter appeared in 1936 and The Bride of the Lamb only after his death (see The Moscow Ukazy of 1935).

The Lamb of God (1933)

The first volume is a Christology, and it is where Bulgakov’s most demanding and most criticized proposals are made.

The sophiological ground of the Incarnation. Bulgakov opens with a long historical survey of patristic Christology — Alexandrian and Antiochene, Chalcedon, the post-Chalcedonian debates, the monothelite controversy — and argues that the Church’s dogmatic definitions are true and binding but negative in form: Chalcedon tells us that the two natures are united without confusion, change, division, or separation, and does not tell us how the unity is possible (Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, Part I; Aidan Nichols, Wisdom from Above, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, ch. 9). His answer is sophiological: the divine and human natures can be united in one hypostasis because Divine Sophia and creaturely Sophia are the same divine content in two modes of being; the human is already, in its ground, the image and creaturely correspondence of the divine (Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Part I; see Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia).

The kenosis. The book’s second great theme is the self-emptying of the Son. Reading Philippians 2:5–11 with maximal seriousness, Bulgakov argues that in the Incarnation the divine Word genuinely renounced the exercise of the divine glory and the divine mode of life, entering a real human consciousness with real limits and a real, growing human knowledge — and that this kenosis is not a temporary economic device but reaches into the eternal life of the Trinity, whose very being is self-giving love (Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Part II; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 9; Brandon Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, ch. 3). He extends the kenotic principle to creation itself — God’s making of a free other is already a divine self-limitation — and to the Father’s begetting of the Son.

This is the material that the second Moscow ukaz, No. 2267 of 27 December 1935, singled out, extending Moscow’s criticism from Sophia to Bulgakov’s teaching on the two natures and the single hypostasis of Christ (see The Moscow Ukazy of 1935). The Orthodox difficulty is plain: divine immutability and impassibility are patristic commonplaces, Chalcedon’s asynchytos forbids any diminishment of the divine nature in the union, and a kenosis understood as real divine self-limitation appears to strain both (see Christology and The Seven Ecumenical Councils). Bulgakov held that he was affirming Chalcedon and interpreting it, not amending it; his critics held that the interpretation was a material amendment (Bulgakov, O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935; Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii, Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936; see Kenosis, Christology, and Mariology).

The work of Christ. The volume closes with the redemption: the Cross as the culmination of the kenosis, the descent into hell, the Resurrection and Ascension, and the “prophetic, priestly, and kingly” ministries of Christ continued in the Church (Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Jakim, 2008, Part III; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 9).

The Comforter (1936)

The second volume is one of the very few extended Orthodox monographs on the Holy Spirit written in the modern period, and it has been more warmly received than its companions (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, chs. 10–11; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3; see Pneumatology).

It contains a long, technical historical treatment of the Filioque, in which Bulgakov reviews the patristic and medieval material and concludes that the Latin addition to the Creed was and is inadmissible — an unauthorized alteration of a conciliar text — while arguing that the underlying theological question of the Spirit’s relation to the Son is more subtle than the polemical tradition on either side has allowed (Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, Part I; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 10; and for the Church’s position see The Filioque). Some readers have found in this discussion an insufficiently firm rejection; others regard it as one of the most serious Orthodox engagements with the question in the century. What is not in doubt is that he rejected the interpolation.

The constructive core presents the Spirit as the hypostatic Love and Glory of God, the one in whom the Father’s self-revelation in the Son becomes living actuality — Sophia in the mode of life, beauty, and reality, as the Son is Sophia in the mode of meaning and content (Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Jakim, 2004, Parts II–III; see Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia). Pentecost is treated as the counterpart of the Incarnation: as the Son took flesh, so the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, and the two “hands of the Father” (Irenaeus’s image) accomplish the one Godmanhood (Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Jakim, 2004, Part III; cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.1, and see St. Irenaeus of Lyons).

The Bride of the Lamb (1945)

The final volume, finished under the German occupation and published a year after his death, is the largest and in the judgment of many readers the greatest of the three (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, chs. 12–14; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3). It has three parts.

Creation. Bulgakov’s fullest treatment of creation ex nihilo, of the relation between Divine and creaturely Sophia, of freedom, of evil as the creature’s self-assertion in the nothing out of which it was made, and of providence and human freedom (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, Part I).

The Church and history. Ecclesiology as the realized Godmanhood: the Church as the Body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit, the Bride of the Lamb, coextensive in some sense with the sophianic ground of the world; and a theology of history that takes seriously both the Church’s presence in history and the impossibility of identifying any historical order with the Kingdom (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part II; see Ecclesiology).

The last things. The final part is the most discussed. Bulgakov treats death, the intermediate state, the Parousia, the resurrection, the judgment, and the final state — and argues at length against the eternity of hell as commonly understood, developing a doctrine of the ultimate restoration of all things whose relation to Origen’s apokatastasis he examines carefully and does not simply accept (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part III; Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Boris Jakim, New Haven: Variable Press, 1995, which excerpts this material). The relevant Orthodox context — the fifteen anathemas associated with the Fifth Ecumenical Council and the 553 condemnations of Origenism, and the modern debate — is set out in the repository’s Origen, Nyssa, and the 553 Condemnations and The Modern Universalism Debate; Bulgakov’s own position is examined in Ecclesiology, Eschatology, and Universal Salvation.

How to Read the Trilogy

Three practical notes.

It is a system, and it fails or stands as one. Bulgakov’s individual proposals — kenosis, the Marian doctrine, the eschatology — are held together by the sophiological ground, and detaching one from that ground generally distorts it. This is as true for critics as for admirers.

It is unfinished in an important sense. The trilogy was written across twelve years in exile, under condemnation for the last two of them, and completed by a man who had lost his voice to cancer and was working through an occupation. Bulgakov revised his positions; the mature denials in The Lamb of God and Sophia, the Wisdom of God are not identical with the formulations of Unfading Light (1917), and reading the early book as the system’s definitive statement is a recurrent error in the polemical literature (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, chs. 1 and 3; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).

It is not the Church’s dogma and never claimed to be. Bulgakov himself, in his replies to Moscow, characterized his sophiology as theological opinion offered to the Church’s judgment rather than as her teaching (Bulgakov, O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Paris, 1935; and see Bulgakov’s Replies and the Berdyaev Polemic). The distinction between dogma and theologoumenon — set out in METHODOLOGY §4.2 — is the right frame for the whole trilogy.

See Also

References

  • Bulgakov, Sergius. The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. (Original Agnets Bozhii, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1933.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. The Comforter. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. (Original Uteshitel’, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1936.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. The Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. (Original Nevesta Agntsa, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1945.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Apocatastasis and Transfiguration. Trans., ed., and with an introduction by Boris Jakim; with a memoir by Sister Joanna Reitlinger. New Haven: Variable Press, 1995. (Excerpts the eschatological material of The Bride of the Lamb.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935.
  • Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (Chs. 9–14: the fullest English commentary on the major trilogy.)
  • Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Part III.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3.)
  • Gallaher, Brandon. Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. (Ch. 3 on Bulgakov’s kenoticism.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies IV.20.1. (The “two hands of the Father.”)
  • Scripture: Philippians 2:5–11.