The Minor Trilogy

Between 1927 and 1929 Bulgakov published three studies that he came to treat as a unit: The Burning Bush on the Mother of God, The Friend of the Bridegroom on St. John the Baptist, and Jacob’s Ladder on the angelic world. Each takes a concrete figure of the creature’s nearness to God — the Theotokos, the Forerunner, the guardian angel — and asks what that nearness reveals about creation’s capacity for God. The trilogy also contains Bulgakov’s sharpest polemic against a Roman Catholic dogma and his most attractive writing.

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

Why a “Minor” Trilogy

The three books were written before the great dogmatic trilogy and were later grouped together by Bulgakov himself and by his interpreters as the malaya trilogiya — the minor trilogy — on the ground that they treat, in the order Theotokos–Forerunner–angels, the created world’s highest instances of participation in God (Aidan Nichols, Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, chs. 6–8; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3). All three were published by YMCA-Press in Paris: Kupina Neopalimaya (The Burning Bush) and Drug Zhenikha (The Friend of the Bridegroom) in 1927, and Lestvitsa Iakovlya (Jacob’s Ladder) in 1929. [Disputed: some catalogues and reference entries date The Burning Bush to 1926 rather than 1927; the YMCA-Press Paris imprint is standardly cited as 1927, and the English translation gives 1927. The one-year variation is a bibliographical discrepancy, not a substantive one.] All three were translated into English by Thomas Allan Smith for Eerdmans (2009, 2003, and 2010 respectively).

They are, for most readers, the best door into Bulgakov. The theology is the same theology, but it is carried by figures and by liturgical texts rather than by abstract argument, and the prose is warmer.

The Burning Bush (1927)

The title is the Marian type: the bush that burned and was not consumed (Exodus 3:2), read by Orthodox hymnography as the figure of the Virgin who bore the divine fire without being destroyed — the Russian Neopalimaya Kupina icon of the Mother of God (Bulgakov, The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, trans. Thomas Allan Smith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009; and see The Theotokos and St. Mary the Theotokos).

The book has two movements.

The polemical movement is a sustained Orthodox critique of the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus (1854) (Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, trans. Smith, 2009, Part I; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 6). Bulgakov’s argument is the standard Orthodox one, pressed with unusual force: that the dogma rests on an Augustinian doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt which the East does not hold; that in exempting the Virgin from the common condition it separates her from the human race she was chosen to represent; and that Orthodox veneration of her all-holiness (panagia) is stronger, not weaker, for affirming that she was of our fallen race and was sanctified progressively, culminating at the Annunciation (Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, trans. Smith, 2009, Part I; and for the Church’s position see The Theotokos and Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism). This is Bulgakov at his most straightforwardly and conventionally Orthodox, and it is worth noticing that the man condemned in 1935 had in 1927 written one of the century’s more vigorous Orthodox defenses of the Church’s Marian teaching against a Western innovation.

The constructive movement is sophiological, and it is here that the difficulties begin. Bulgakov presents the Theotokos as the created Sophia in person — the creature in whom creaturely Wisdom attains its full realization, the “heart of the Church,” the personal center of the sanctified creation, and in the glorified state a creature so fully deified as to stand at the boundary of the divine and created worlds (Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, trans. Smith, 2009, Part II; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 6). He connects this with the Russian Sophia icons and their Marian feasts, and with the Church’s hymnography of the Mother of God as “more honourable than the Cherubim.”

Critics have found in exactly this section the sophiological system’s most dangerous move — the assimilation of the Theotokos to a quasi-divine principle — and Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) treated the Marian material as evidence of the error (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Sofia, 1935). Defenders answer that Bulgakov nowhere deifies her, insists throughout on her creaturehood, and is elaborating the Church’s own liturgical maximalism about her (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 6; see also Kenosis, Christology, and Mariology, where this question is treated at length).

The Friend of the Bridegroom (1927)

The companion volume takes St. John the Baptist and Forerunner, whom the Gospel calls “the friend of the bridegroom” who “rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice” (John 3:29), and of whom Christ said that “among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist” (Matt. 11:11) (Bulgakov, The Friend of the Bridegroom: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Forerunner, trans. Thomas Allan Smith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

The book is an extended meditation on the Forerunner’s place in the Deesis — the central iconographic composition in which the Theotokos and the Baptist stand on either side of Christ in intercession, the image over every Orthodox iconostasis (Bulgakov, The Friend of the Bridegroom, trans. Smith, 2003; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 7; see Holy Icons). Bulgakov reads the pairing structurally: the Theotokos represents the created world’s receptivity, the Forerunner its prophetic and ascetic self-offering; together they are humanity’s two answers to God, and the Deesis is therefore a picture of redeemed creation standing before its Lord. He treats the Baptism of Christ at John’s hands, and the Forerunner’s descent to preach to the dead, as the hinge points of the Old Covenant’s passage into the New.

The book is less controversial than its companions and is generally regarded as among his finest writing (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 7; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3).

Jacob’s Ladder (1929)

The third volume takes its title from Genesis 28:12 — the ladder set up on the earth with the angels of God ascending and descending — and treats angelology: the nature of angels, their relation to the created world, guardian angels, the angelic ministry in the liturgy, and the relation of angels to human beings (Bulgakov, Jacob’s Ladder: On Angels, trans. Thomas Allan Smith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010; and see The Bodiless Powers for the Church’s teaching).

Bulgakov’s characteristic thesis is that the angelic and human worlds are not two unrelated orders but complementary aspects of one creation: the angel is the creature as pure spirit and pure ministry, the human being is the creature as spirit embodied and as microcosm; each requires the other for creation to be complete, and the guardian angel’s bond with the human person is an ontological, not merely a functional, relation (Bulgakov, Jacob’s Ladder, trans. Smith, 2010; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 8). He also treats — with some speculative freedom — the question of the angelic fall and of the relation between the names of angels and the names of persons.

Here as elsewhere the sophiological frame is doing the work: angels and men are two modes in which the created Sophia has personal existence (Bulgakov, Jacob’s Ladder, trans. Smith, 2010; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 8). Readers should note that the book contains theological opinions well beyond anything the Church has defined about the angelic world, and Bulgakov generally says so.

The Place of the Minor Trilogy in the Controversy

Two observations, both of them relevant to Sections 05 and 08.

First, the minor trilogy is where sophiology entered Orthodox devotional territory. An abstruse doctrine of the divine ousia is one thing; an account of the Mother of God as the created Sophia is another, because it touches what the faithful pray. Much of the alarm that produced the 1935 acts was generated here rather than by the technical chapters of The Lamb of God (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii, 1935, which draws heavily on the Marian material; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100).

Second, the minor trilogy is also the strongest evidence for the defenders’ claim that Bulgakov was working from within the Church’s liturgical and iconographic life rather than imposing a philosophy on it. The books are saturated in hymnography, feasts, and icons; whatever one concludes about the system, the material Bulgakov is trying to account for is the Church’s own worship (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, chs. 6–8; Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, Part III).

See Also

References

  • Bulgakov, Sergius. The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. Trans. Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. (Original Kupina Neopalimaya, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1927.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. The Friend of the Bridegroom: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Forerunner. Trans. Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. (Original Drug Zhenikha, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1927.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. Jacob’s Ladder: On Angels. Trans. Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. (Original Lestvitsa Iakovlya, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1929.)
  • Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (Chs. 6–8 on the minor trilogy.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3.)
  • Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Part III.)
  • Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Sofia, 1935. (The indictment, drawing heavily on the Marian material.)
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Pius IX. Ineffabilis Deus. 1854. (The Roman Catholic definition of the Immaculate Conception, which The Burning Bush opposes.)
  • Scripture: Exodus 3:2; Genesis 28:12; Matthew 11:11; John 3:29.