The Reappraisal: Williams, Valliere, Gallaher

Since the 1990s Bulgakov has been the object of a sustained scholarly rehearing. Rowan Williams’s edition of the early political writings (1999), Paul Valliere’s Modern Russian Theology (2000), Aidan Nichols’s Wisdom from Above (2005), Brandon Gallaher’s work on freedom and necessity (2016), Andrew Louth’s chapter in Modern Orthodox Thinkers (2015), and Antoine Arjakovsky’s history of the Paris milieu (2013), together with Boris Jakim’s and Thomas Allan Smith’s complete English translations, have put the whole corpus in front of readers for the first time. This file states the reappraisal’s arguments — and states equally clearly what it has not established.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox and pan-Orthodox — a live intra-Orthodox dispute

What Changed

Three things made the reappraisal possible, none of them theological.

The texts became available. Until the late 1990s a reader without Russian could not read The Lamb of God, The Comforter, or The Bride of the Lamb. Boris Jakim’s translations of the major trilogy (Eerdmans, 2002, 2004, 2008) and Thomas Allan Smith’s of the minor trilogy (Eerdmans, 2003, 2009, 2010), together with Unfading Light (2012), The Icon and Its Veneration (2012), and The Sophiology of Death (Cascade, 2021), made the corpus accessible. Much of the polemical literature had been written by people working from the pre-1925 books or from summaries.

The archives opened. The fall of the Soviet Union released Russian-language materials, and the documentary history of the controversy became researchable — Alexis Klimoff’s 2005 study being the standard English result (Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100).

An institutional base formed. The Sergij Bulgakov Research Centre at the University of Fribourg, under Barbara Hallensleben and Regula Zwahlen, has since the 2000s produced critical editions, translations, and a bibliography of the corpus, and the Bulgakov anniversary year of 2021 generated a substantial body of new work.

Paul Valliere

Paul Valliere, in Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), made the reappraisal’s foundational historical argument: that the “Russian school” of Bukharev, Solovyov, and Bulgakov is not a deviation from Orthodox theology but an alternative and legitimate tradition within it — a theology addressed to the modern world, to history, to culture, and to the social question, over against the neo-patristic school’s turn to the sources (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Introduction and Part III).

Valliere’s claim is not that Bulgakov was right. It is that Florovsky’s account of Russian theology has been accepted too easily as the description of the field — that Ways of Russian Theology is a partisan narrative that made itself the standard history, and that the Russian school deserves to be assessed on its own terms rather than as the pathology Florovsky diagnosed (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Introduction; ch. 12 on the condemnation). This historiographical argument, more than any particular defense of Sophia, is what reopened the case.

Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, then Bishop of Monmouth and later Archbishop of Canterbury, edited Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), a selection of the early political and economic writings in translation with substantial introduction and running commentary (Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999). Williams also contributed an introduction to Nichols’s Wisdom from Above.

His contribution was to show a Bulgakov the theological polemics had almost entirely obscured: a serious political thinker whose critique of Marxism, of the intelligentsia, and of the sacralization of the state was worked out over decades, and whose theology of creation is continuous with that political work rather than an eccentric flight from it (Williams, ed., Sergii Bulgakov, 1999, introduction). Williams writes as an Anglican, which some Orthodox readers will regard as material to how his advocacy should be weighed; the repository notes the fact rather than treating it as disqualifying, in line with METHODOLOGY §4.1’s rule that heterodox scholarship is cited on its merits.

Aidan Nichols

Aidan Nichols OP, a Dominican, produced in Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov (Leominster: Gracewing, 2005) the fullest English exposition of the whole system, working through both trilogies with extensive translated extracts and running commentary (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005).

Nichols is not an apologist. He states the difficulties — the strain on Chalcedon, the problems in the Marian material, the eschatology — and his judgment is characteristically qualified: that Bulgakov is a theologian of the first rank whose system contains real errors and real gold, and that the appropriate response is critical engagement rather than either dismissal or discipleship (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, conclusion). His book is the standard place for an English reader to find out what Bulgakov actually said.

Brandon Gallaher

Brandon Gallaher, an Orthodox theologian, has done the most rigorous technical work on the specific charges. His Sobornost articles of 2002 established the documentary history of Bulgakov’s ecumenical thought and of the 1933 intercommunion proposal; Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) examines Bulgakov alongside Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar on precisely the question the critics press — whether a theology that grounds creation in the divine life thereby makes creation necessary (Gallaher, “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought,” Sobornost 24, no. 1 [2002]: 24–55; “Bulgakov and Intercommunion,” Sobornost 24, no. 2 [2002]: 9–28; Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, 2016, ch. 3).

Gallaher’s conclusion — offered as an argument, not a verdict — is that Bulgakov’s kenotic and antinomic method is more defensible than the standard charge allows: that Bulgakov holds freedom and necessity together as an antinomy rather than resolving one into the other, and that the accusation of importing necessity into God misreads the structure of the argument (Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity, 2016, ch. 3). Gallaher writes as an Orthodox theologian who takes the 1935 acts seriously and does not claim they were void.

Andrew Louth and Antoine Arjakovsky

Andrew Louth, in Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (London: SPCK, 2015), places Bulgakov in a single narrative alongside Solovyov, Florensky, Florovsky, Lossky, Stăniloae, Sophrony, and Ware — which is itself the argument: that the sophiological and neo-patristic currents belong to one twentieth-century Orthodox renaissance rather than to a story of orthodoxy and deviation (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, chs. 1–3; and see Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae and Kallistos Ware). Louth is an Orthodox priest and patrologist, and his sympathetic chapter on Bulgakov carries weight for that reason.

Antoine Arjakovsky, in The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940 (trans. Jerry Ryan, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), supplied the archival history of the milieu — who said what, when, in which issue of Put’, and under what political pressure. His work is the reason it is now possible to describe the controversy as a sequence of documented events rather than as a morality tale (Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013).

Two further strands should be noted. Jennifer Newsome Martin‘s Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) traces Bulgakov’s substantial influence on twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology, above all on Balthasar’s theology of the divine kenosis and of Holy Saturday. And David Bentley Hart, who supplied the foreword to the 2021 translation of Bulgakov’s eschatological essays, has made The Bride of the Lamb one of the principal sources for the contemporary universalist argument (Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology, trans. Roberto J. De La Noval, foreword by David Bentley Hart, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021; and see The Modern Universalism Debate).

The Reappraisal’s Arguments, Set Against the Charge

Measured against the nine-point charge in the companion file:

On the “fourth hypostasis” and tertium quid — that the charge attaches to Florensky’s vocabulary and to Unfading Light (1917) rather than to the mature trilogy, in which the denial is structural (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Part III).
On freedom and necessity — that Bulgakov’s antinomic method holds both, and that the charge misreads it (Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity, 2016, ch. 3).
On method — that transposing philosophical categories into a dogmatic frame is what the Fathers did with Hellenism, and that Florovsky’s own “Christian Hellenism” concedes the principle (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, Introduction).
On the essence–energies alternative — that Bulgakov did not reject Palamism and that his question (why creation is capable of the energies) is not the question the distinction answers (Nichols, Wisdom from Above, 2005, ch. 3).
On the acts of 1935 — that they were issued without a hearing, by bodies without jurisdiction over him, and were not sustained by the only competent authority; but not that they were void or that they can be reversed by scholarship (Klimoff, 2005; Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 2000, ch. 12).

What the Reappraisal Has Not Established

This file would be dishonest without the following, and the section’s symmetry requires it.

No Orthodox Church has rescinded anything. The Moscow ukazy and the ROCOR determination stand. No synod has revisited them, and no scholarly consensus has any power to.

No Orthodox body has received sophiology. It remains what Bulgakov himself called it: a private theological opinion. The reappraisal’s most sympathetic participants — Nichols, Gallaher, Louth — do not claim otherwise.

The reappraisal is not unanimous, and is not confined to defenders. Much of the new scholarship is critical; Klimoff’s study, the standard reference for the events, is written from within the ROCOR scholarly tradition and is not an apologia for Bulgakov.

The confessional composition of the reappraisal is a fact readers may weigh. Its most prominent voices include an Anglican archbishop, a Dominican, and Protestant and Roman Catholic academics, alongside Orthodox scholars. Whether that matters is itself a matter on which Orthodox readers differ, and this collection reports the composition rather than drawing a conclusion from it.

The underlying question is unsettled and remains so. Whether sophiology is heresy, a salvageable insight, or a flawed but licit theologoumenon is exactly what has not been decided — by the acts of 1935, by the finding of 1937, or by anything since. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2 this collection names the parties and adjudicates nothing.

References

Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Williams, Rowan, ed. Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999.
Nichols, Aidan. Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. Leominster: Gracewing, 2005. (With an introduction by Rowan Williams.)
Gallaher, Brandon. Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Gallaher, Brandon. “Bulgakov’s Ecumenical Thought.” Sobornost 24, no. 1 (2002): 24–55; and “Bulgakov and Intercommunion.” Sobornost 24, no. 2 (2002): 9–28.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.
Arjakovsky, Antoine. The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940. Trans. Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
Martin, Jennifer Newsome. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
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.
Sergij Bulgakov Research Centre (Forschungsstelle Sergij Bulgakov), University of Fribourg, directed by Barbara Hallensleben and Regula M. Zwahlen. (Critical editions, translations, and bibliography of the Bulgakov corpus.)