The Critics: Lossky, Florovsky, and After

The case against sophiology, stated at its strongest and in the words of those who made it. Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) supplied the theological indictment behind the ROCOR determination. Vladimir Lossky’s Spor o Sofii (1936) is the most formidable philosophical critique and the source of the “fourth hypostasis” argument in its sharpest form. Georges Florovsky’s objection was methodological: sophiology is the culminating symptom of a “Western captivity” of Russian theology, and the cure is a return to the Fathers. Behind all three stands the argument from the essence–energies distinction: Orthodoxy already had what Bulgakov was trying to build.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox — the critics of sophiology

Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)

The most systematic and the sharpest of the critics was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar (1881–1950), whose Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei (The New Teaching on Sophia the Wisdom of God, Sofia, 1935) supplied the theological case on which the ROCOR Council of Bishops acted in October 1935 (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei, Sofia, 1935; repr. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1993; and see The ROCOR Determination and Seraphim Sobolev).

His central charge, in the formulation the repository’s hub essay uses: 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 method is forensic: extended quotation from Bulgakov’s own books, followed by measurement against the Fathers and the councils. Seraphim accepted that Bulgakov meant his denials and argued that the system did not honor them — that Sophia is spoken of with agency, addressed, and loved in ways proper to a person; that a “divine nature posited outside God” is a description no Father would recognize; and that the Marian material of The Burning Bush assigns the Theotokos a cosmic-ontological role the Church never gave her. He answered Bulgakov’s memoranda in a second volume in 1937 (Seraphim [Sobolev], Zashchita sofianskoi eresi protoiereem S. Bulgakovym pered litsom Arkhiereiskogo Sobora Russkoi Zarubezhnoi Tserkvi, Sofia, 1937).

Vladimir Lossky

Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) was thirty-two when he published Spor o Sofii: “Dokladnaya zapiska” prot. S. Bulgakova i smysl Ukaza Moskovskoy Patriarkhii (The Sophia Dispute: Archpriest S. Bulgakov’s “Memorandum” and the Meaning of the Ukaz of the Moscow Patriarchate, Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936) — a direct answer to Bulgakov’s defense, as the subtitle announces (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100; see Vladimir Lossky). Lossky belonged to the Moscow Patriarchal jurisdiction in Paris and to the Brotherhood of St. Photius — which is why he, unlike Florovsky, was free to attack Bulgakov by name.

His arguments run along three lines (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; and, for the constructive alternative, Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, chs. 2–4).

The fourth hypostasis. Lossky pressed the charge in its sharpest form. If Sophia is the content of the divine life, the world of divine ideas, and is spoken of in quasi-personal terms — Wisdom “herself” — then the doctrine of the Trinity has effectively been expanded, whatever the author’s disclaimer. The coinage “hypostaticity” (ipostasnost’) is, on this reading, a term invented to occupy a position that has no place in the Church’s grammar (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; and see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

The Creator–creature distinction. The patristic tradition insists on an absolute ontological distinction between the uncreated God and created being. A two-aspect Sophia — Divine and creaturely — that bridges the gap appeared to Lossky to compromise divine transcendence and to make creation something other than the free act the Fathers insisted it is (Lossky, Spor o Sofii, 1936; and cf. the argument as summarized in the hub essay).

The essence–energies alternative. This is Lossky’s decisive move, and it is the most important single argument in the whole controversy. Orthodox theology, in the councils of the fourteenth century that vindicated St. Gregory Palamas, already possesses a way of affirming that God is genuinely communicated to creation without being confused with it: the distinction between the utterly transcendent and unknowable divine essence and the uncreated energies — grace, light, life, and indeed wisdom — in which God really gives Himself (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1957, chs. 2–4; see St. Gregory Palamas and Theosis). Sophiology, on this account, is an unnecessary and dangerous substitute for a settled conciliar framework: it does the same work worse, in language the Church has not received, at the cost of the very distinction it was supposed to preserve.

Georges Florovsky

Fr. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) made a different kind of objection, and made it — characteristically — without ever publishing a direct refutation of his St. Sergius colleague (Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005; Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, chs. 5–6; see Georges Florovsky).

His argument is methodological. In Puti russkogo bogosloviya (Ways of Russian Theology, Paris, 1937) Florovsky told the story of Russian theology as a long “Western captivity” — Latin scholastic categories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, German idealist ones in the nineteenth — in which the Orthodox mind was repeatedly formed by borrowed philosophy rather than by the Fathers. Solovyov’s and Bulgakov’s sophiology, on this reading, is the last and most brilliant phase of that captivity: Schelling and Böhme processed through Solovyov and given an Orthodox vocabulary (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris, 1937, concluding chapters; Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, chs. 4–6; and see The Patristic Revival).

The remedy Florovsky proposed was not a counter-system but a neo-patristic synthesis: the recovery of the mind of the Fathers, not as an archive of quotations but as a living method — “Christian Hellenism” as the permanent form of Orthodox thought. Where Bulgakov asked how creation can be grounded in God, Florovsky answered with the Fathers’ own doctrine of creation ex nihilo by the free will of God, and with the logoi of St. Maximus, and held that the question needed no sophiological supplement (Florovsky, “Creation and Creaturehood,” in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976; Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” 2005; see St. Maximus the Confessor).

Florovsky’s indirection is itself contested. He signed the 1936 minority report of Metropolitan Evlogy’s commission, holding that Bulgakov’s views “provoke great anxiety” and endangered Orthodox thinking (see Evlogy’s Commission and the 1937 Conference), and he made his case in essays that refuse the sophiological alternative without naming it. Readings of this conduct range from collegial restraint to institutional prudence to evasion; the literature does not settle it (Klimoff, 2005; Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, ch. 6).

The Traditionalist Reception

Beyond the three principals, the critical case has been carried forward as a settled matter across a substantial part of world Orthodoxy — in ROCOR, on Athos, in the monastic and traditionalist currents generally, and in the English-speaking world through the constituency around Fr. Seraphim Rose and the Jordanville publishing tradition, which reprinted Seraphim (Sobolev)’s book in 1993 (Seraphim [Sobolev], Novoe uchenie o Sofii, repr. Jordanville, 1993; and see Fr. Seraphim Rose and The Ecumenism Debate).

For this constituency the argument is not chiefly technical. It is that an ecclesial judgment was made by bishops in council, that the judgment stands, and that a subsequent academic reappraisal — however learned — has no authority to reverse it. Sophiology’s rehabilitation in the universities is, on this reading, an instance of exactly the problem: theology conducted as a scholarly enterprise answerable to guild standards rather than as an ecclesial one answerable to the Church.

The strength of this position should not be underrated by readers who find the modern scholarship persuasive. It rests on a claim about where doctrinal authority lies that Orthodoxy takes very seriously, and it is not answered by demonstrating that Bulgakov has been read unfairly.

The Charge in Summary

Set out as a list, so that the reappraisal in the companion file can be measured against it:

Sophia functions as a tertium quid between God and creation, whatever the disclaimers.
The coinage “hypostaticity” has no patristic warrant and conceals rather than solves the problem.
Identifying the divine ousia with the ground of the world threatens the freedom and gratuity of creation.
The Marian application assigns the Theotokos a cosmic-ontological status the Church has not given her.
The kenotic Christology strains the Chalcedonian without change.
The eschatology tends toward a restoration the Church has condemned in its Origenist form.
The essence–energies distinction already answers the question sophiology was invented to answer.
The method is post-Kantian and Schellingian rather than patristic.
Two Russian hierarchies acted, and the acts stand.

References

Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Sofia, 1935. Repr. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1993.
Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Zashchita sofianskoi eresi protoiereem S. Bulgakovym pered litsom Arkhiereiskogo Sobora Russkoi Zarubezhnoi Tserkvi. Sofia, 1937.
Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii: “Dokladnaya zapiska” prot. S. Bulgakova i smysl Ukaza Moskovskoy Patriarkhii. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. by members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957. (Original Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient, Paris: Aubier, 1944; chs. 2–4 for the essence–energies alternative.)
Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology]. Paris, 1937. (English: Ways of Russian Theology, Collected Works vols. 5–6, Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt.)
Florovsky, Georges. “Creation and Creaturehood.” In Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976.
Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Opredelenie of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, 17/30 October 1935.