Ecclesiology, Eschatology, and Universal Salvation

Bulgakov’s ecclesiology — the Church as the realized Godmanhood, the Body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit, the Bride of the Lamb — underlies both his most accessible book, The Orthodox Church, and his most controversial ecumenical proposal. His eschatology, in the final part of The Bride of the Lamb, argues against the eternity of hell as commonly understood and toward a universal restoration. This is the point at which his theology meets the apokatastasis question, on which the Orthodox tradition has spoken with some severity and on which the modern debate is live.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) — a modern theologian’s own positions, measured against the Church’s dogma

The Church as Realized Godmanhood

For Bulgakov the Church is not primarily an institution, nor primarily a society of believers, but the Godmanhood realized: the union of the divine and the human that took place in Christ, extended into history and into the many (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, Part II; The Orthodox Church, rev. trans. Lydia Kesich, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988, chs. 1–3; Aidan Nichols, Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov, Leominster: Gracewing, 2005, chs. 12–13). She is the Body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit — Bulgakov insists that a Christological ecclesiology without a pneumatological one is incomplete — and she is, in the imagery of the Apocalypse from which his last volume takes its title, the Bride of the Lamb.

The Orthodox Church (first published in the 1930s; revised English translation by Lydia Kesich, SVS Press, 1988) remains the most widely read thing he wrote, and it is a straightforward, largely uncontroversial presentation of Orthodox faith, worship, hierarchy, and sacramental life for a Western readership. Readers who know Bulgakov only as the sophiologist are often surprised by it; it is a catechetical book, and a good one, and it contains almost nothing that a hostile reader could object to (Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, rev. trans. Kesich, 1988; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3).

The characteristic Bulgakovian claims come in the technical works: that the Church is coextensive in some manner with the sophianic ground of the created world, so that her boundaries are not simply identical with her visible frontiers; that grace is genuinely at work beyond the canonical borders; and that ecclesial unity is a given of grace rather than an administrative achievement (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part II; Brandon Gallaher, “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought,” Sobornost 24, no. 1 [2002]: 24–55). These are the premises of the 1933 intercommunion proposal (see The Paris School and the Fellowship), and they are precisely what Orthodox critics of ecumenism reject — the repository sets out that spectrum of positions in The Ecumenism Debate, and this collection does not adjudicate it.

He also wrote substantially on the Eucharist — including a late study of the eucharistic sacrifice — and on icons, in Ikona i ikonopochitanie (The Icon and Its Veneration, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1931; English: The Icon and Its Veneration, trans. Boris Jakim, Eerdmans, 2012), where the sophiological framework grounds the possibility of depicting the invisible God in his incarnate humanity (Bulgakov, The Icon and Its Veneration, trans. Jakim, Eerdmans, 2012; and for the Church’s teaching, Icons and Iconoclasm and Holy Icons).

The Eschatology of The Bride of the Lamb

The third and final part of The Bride of the Lamb is Bulgakov’s eschatology, and it is the boldest thing he wrote (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part III; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 14).

He treats death and the intermediate state; the Parousia; the general resurrection; the Last Judgment; and the final state. Two moves shape everything.

The Judgment as the disclosure of what each person is. For Bulgakov the Last Judgment is not the imposition of an alien verdict but the revelation of the truth of each life in the light of Christ — and therefore the same divine love experienced as blessedness or as torment according to the state of the one who receives it (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part III). This much is thoroughly traditional and is the Orthodox account set out in the repository’s The Same Love Experienced Differently.

The rejection of an eternally fixed hell. Bulgakov argued that an everlasting punishment with no term is incompatible with the victory of Christ, with the sophianic ground of every creature, and with the doctrine that God is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28); that the torment of gehenna is real, purifying, and possibly of immense duration, but that it is not the last word; and that creation will finally be restored — an apokatastasis whose relation to Origen’s he examines carefully and does not simply endorse, since he insists throughout on the reality of the creature’s freedom and of the suffering involved (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Jakim, 2002, Part III; Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Boris Jakim, New Haven: Variable Press, 1995; Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 14).

The Church’s Position and the Live Dispute

The Church’s own position must be stated before Bulgakov’s is weighed.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) and the anathemas against Origenism associated with the period condemned the Origenist doctrine of the pre-existence of souls and of a universal restoration that would end the punishment of the wicked and of demons; the Church’s liturgical and scriptural language — “these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matt. 25:46) — has been read by the tradition overwhelmingly as teaching an unending state (see Origen, Nyssa, and the 553 Condemnations and Eschatology). At the same time the tradition contains figures — above all St. Gregory of Nyssa, a canonized Father and a doctor of the Church — whose language points toward universal restoration and who were never condemned for it, and it contains St. Isaac the Syrian’s teaching on the mercy of God toward the damned; the repository sets the whole question out in The Apokatastasis Question and reports the modern debate in The Modern Universalism Debate.

[Disputed: whether Bulgakov's eschatology falls under the Church's condemnations of Origenism. (a) The critical position holds that a doctrine of universal restoration which denies the endlessness of gehenna is precisely what the sixth-century anathemas exclude, that it contradicts the plain sense of Matthew 25:46 and the Church's liturgical language, and that Bulgakov's careful distinctions do not save it (the position of the traditionalist reception generally; cf. the framing in [Origen, Nyssa, and the 553 Condemnations](../../orthodox-eschatology/08-the-apokatastasis-question/origen-nyssa-and-the-553-condemnations.md)). (b) The defending position holds that the 553 anathemas target a specific Origenist system — pre-existence of souls, cyclical restoration, the dissolution of bodies — which Bulgakov does not hold; that St. Gregory of Nyssa's universalism was never condemned; and that his position is a *theologoumenon* of hope rather than a dogmatic assertion (Nichols, *Wisdom from Above*, 2005, ch. 14; and cf. the survey of the modern debate in [The Modern Universalism Debate](../../orthodox-eschatology/08-the-apokatastasis-question/the-modern-universalism-debate.md)). This collection does not adjudicate; readers should note that the Moscow and ROCOR acts of 1935 were directed at his sophiology and Christology and not at his eschatology, which was published only in 1945.]

It should be said that Bulgakov’s eschatology has had a very long afterlife precisely here. His treatment is one of the principal Orthodox sources for the contemporary universalist argument, and the twenty-first-century revival of that argument — associated in the English-speaking world with David Bentley Hart, who wrote the foreword to the 2021 translation of Bulgakov’s eschatological essays — has brought The Bride of the Lamb back into active theological circulation (Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal, trans. Roberto J. De La Noval, foreword by David Bentley Hart, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021; and see The Modern Universalism Debate).

“The Sophiology of Death”

The essay “The Sophiology of Death” (Sofiologiya smerti), written in 1939 after his cancer operations, occupies a place of its own. In it Bulgakov gives a first-person account of what he experienced during the illness — a state he describes as a real passage through death and a suspension between life and death, in which he underwent what he took to be a divine forsakenness and a subsequent restoration (Bulgakov, “The Sophiology of Death,” in The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology, trans. De La Noval, Cascade Books, 2021; and see Assessment).

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this is reported here as Bulgakov’s own testimony about his own experience, pinned to the essay in which he sets it down, and is not asserted as documented fact or as a certified mystical experience. It is nonetheless important for reading the eschatology: the doctrine of the universal restoration in The Bride of the Lamb was written by a man who believed he had been through something of the kind himself, and who read his own dying as a participation in Christ’s descent.

References

Bulgakov, Sergius. The Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. (Original Nevesta Agntsa, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1945; Part II on the Church and history, Part III on the last things.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Orthodox Church. Rev. trans. Lydia Kesich. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988.
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Icon and Its Veneration. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. (Original Ikona i ikonopochitanie, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1931.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal. Trans. and ed. Roberto J. De La Noval; foreword by David Bentley Hart. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021. (Contains the 1939 essay “The Sophiology of Death.”)
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.
Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (Chs. 12–14 on ecclesiology and eschatology.)
Gallaher, Brandon. “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought.” Sobornost 24, no. 1 (2002): 24–55.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3.)
Second Council of Constantinople (Fifth Ecumenical Council), 553, and the anathemas against Origenism associated with it.
Scripture: Matthew 25:46; 1 Corinthians 15:28; Revelation 21:2, 9.