The ROCOR Determination and Seraphim Sobolev

Between the two Moscow ukazy, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, meeting at Sremski Karlovci under Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), issued its own Determination (Opredelenie) dated 17/30 October 1935. It went further than Moscow: it declared Bulgakov’s teaching on Sophia the Wisdom of God heretical, identified specific errors, and asked Metropolitan Evlogy to admonish him with a view to a public renunciation. The theological case behind it was supplied above all by Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar, whose Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei (Sofia, 1935) remains the fullest indictment ever written.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR)

The Council and the Determination

The Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia met at Sremski Karlovci in Yugoslavia — the seat of the Karlovci Synod since the emigration’s first years — under the presidency of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), the founding first hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad. Its Determination (Opredelenie) concerning the teaching of Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov on Sophia the Wisdom of God is dated 17/30 October 1935 (Old Style / New Style) (Opredelenie of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, 17/30 October 1935; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100; and the repository hub, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

A chronological note that the hub essay makes and that this collection repeats, because it is often got wrong: criticism of sophiological currents had circulated in ROCOR circles earlier — the polemics of the 1920s around the émigré brotherhoods and sophiological piety — but the formal conciliar condemnation dates to 1935, not earlier (Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

What the Determination Said

The ROCOR act went further than Moscow’s, in three specifiable ways (Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy; Opredelenie, 17/30 October 1935; Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005).

It explicitly declared Bulgakov’s teaching on Sophia the Wisdom of God to be heretical. Where Moscow had said “alien” and had stopped short of the word, the Karlovci Council used it.

It identified specific errors: the introduction of a mediating principle between God and creation that is neither fully divine nor fully creaturely; the tendency toward a “fourth hypostasis”; the confusion of the Creator–creature distinction; and departures from the definitions of the Ecumenical Councils.

It requested that Metropolitan Evlogy admonish Bulgakov with a view to a public renunciation of the teaching. This is a request addressed to another hierarch, not a canonical sentence on Bulgakov’s person: ROCOR, like Moscow, had no jurisdiction over a priest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Western European exarchate. Evlogy did not comply in the form requested; he opened an inquiry instead (see Evlogy’s Commission and the 1937 Conference).

Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)

The theological case behind the Council’s decision was supplied above all by Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar (1881–1950), the Russian hierarch resident in Sofia who administered the Russian parishes in Bulgaria, whose book-length critique Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei (The New Teaching on Sophia the Wisdom of God, Sofia, 1935) formed the basis of the ROCOR determination (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Sofia, 1935; reprinted Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1993; Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

Seraphim was the sharpest of Bulgakov’s critics, and his book is the most systematic. Its central argument, in the hub essay’s precise formulation, is that Bulgakov’s Sophia, despite his disclaimers, functioned in his system as a quasi-divine entity that was neither clearly God nor clearly creature — thus violating the fundamental ontological distinction between Creator and creation that is axiomatic in patristic theology (Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy; Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii, 1935).

The book proceeds by extensive quotation — from Unfading Light, from The Burning Bush, from The Lamb of God — and by measuring each excerpt against the Fathers and the councils. Its recurring method is to accept Bulgakov’s denials as sincerely meant and then to argue that the system does not honor them: that a Sophia who is said not to be a hypostasis is nonetheless addressed, loved, and assigned agency; that a Sophia said to be simply the divine nature is nonetheless said to be posited outside God, which no one says of the divine nature; and that the resulting reality is a tertium quid by function whatever it is called by definition (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii, 1935; and cf. the same objection as pressed by Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii, Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936).

Seraphim followed the first book with a second, Zashchita sofianskoi eresi protoiereem S. Bulgakovym pered litsom Arkhiereiskogo Sobora Russkoi Zarubezhnoi Tserkvi (Archpriest S. Bulgakov’s Defense of the Sophianic Heresy before the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad, Sofia, 1937), answering Bulgakov’s memoranda point by point (Seraphim [Sobolev], Sofia, 1937). Whatever one concludes about the merits, no one who has read these books can maintain that the condemnation was made in ignorance of the texts.

Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) was himself glorified as a saint by the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church on 3 February 2016, meeting at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow with a delegation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church present, on the strength of his ascetic life, his pastoral labors among the Russian emigration in Bulgaria, and the long veneration at his tomb in Sofia; he is commemorated as St. Seraphim of Sofia, and reposed on 13/26 February 1950 (Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, act of glorification, 3 February 2016; reported by the Moscow Patriarchate and by the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad, 3 February 2016). [Disputed: what bearing, if any, his glorification has on the standing of his theological polemic against Bulgakov. Canonization attests holiness of life, not the correctness of every theological judgment a saint made, and the Orthodox tradition contains disagreements among canonized saints; but for many Orthodox the glorification of sophiology’s principal accuser is a material fact in the case. The two readings are both current, and this collection reports them without deciding between them.]

The Standing of ROCOR’s Act

Two things are true at once and both belong in an honest account.

The determination is a conciliar act of a body of Orthodox bishops, and it is unrescinded. ROCOR’s Council of Bishops examined a teaching, judged it heretical, and said so. That judgment continues to be the position of the Russian Church Abroad, and it is treated as authoritative by a substantial constituency in world Orthodoxy — the constituency whose theological world the repository describes in its treatment of the traditionalist current (see Fr. Seraphim Rose and The Ecumenism Debate).

Its scope was and is limited. ROCOR had no jurisdiction over Bulgakov’s person, and its determination requested action from a hierarch who did not take it; the Karlovci Synod’s own canonical standing was at that date contested by both Moscow and Constantinople; and no pan-Orthodox act followed (Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005; Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy; on the jurisdictional divisions, Twentieth-Century Fragmentation).

Neither of these observations cancels the other, and the temptation to let one swallow the other is the characteristic failure of the polemical literature on both sides.

The Convergence of Moscow and Karlovci

The fact that Moscow and ROCOR acted within weeks of one another has always been read as significant, and it is. In 1935 the two bodies were in open and bitter conflict: ROCOR had broken with Metropolitan Sergius over the Declaration of 1927 and regarded his administration as compromised by the Soviet state; Moscow regarded the Karlovci Synod as a schismatic political body. That two hierarchies with almost nothing else in common independently censured the same teaching in the same autumn lent, in the hub essay’s words, “significant weight to the theological objections” (Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

The convergence is not total, and the difference is exactly the one this section exists to preserve: Moscow said “alien” and did not say “heretical”; ROCOR said “heretical.” Any account that collapses the two acts into a single “1935 condemnation” has lost the most important distinction in the record.

References

Opredelenie (Determination) of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia concerning the teaching of Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov on Sophia the Wisdom of God, 17/30 October 1935, Sremski Karlovci, under Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky).
Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei [The New Teaching on Sophia the Wisdom of God]. Sofia, 1935. Reprinted Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1993. (The theological case on which the ROCOR determination rested.)
Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Zashchita sofianskoi eresi protoiereem S. Bulgakovym pered litsom Arkhiereiskogo Sobora Russkoi Zarubezhnoi Tserkvi [Archpriest S. Bulgakov’s Defense of the Sophianic Heresy before the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad]. Sofia, 1937.
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.
Bulgakov, Sergius. O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935.
Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. (Ch. 12.)
Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. Act of the glorification of Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar as a saint, 3 February 2016, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow. (Reported by the Moscow Patriarchate and by the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, 3 February 2016.)