Assessment

The last years: throat cancer diagnosed in 1939, the operation that cost him his voice, the writing of The Bride of the Lamb under the German occupation, the stroke of early June 1944, and death in Paris on 13 July 1944 after some five weeks without regaining consciousness. Then a closing weighing of a legacy that no Orthodox consensus has settled — reported with the acts of 1935 standing, the finding of 1937 standing, and the theological question open.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Illness of 1939

In 1939 Bulgakov was diagnosed with throat cancer. He underwent surgery, and the operation destroyed his voice: he had thereafter to learn to speak without vocal cords, in the laborious esophageal manner, and did so well enough to continue lecturing, hearing confessions, and celebrating the Liturgy (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3; Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, ch. 2). For a priest, a preacher, and a lecturer, this was a specific and cruel loss, and the fact that he went on serving is the plainest datum of his last years.

Out of the illness came the essay “The Sophiology of Death” (Sofiologiya smerti, 1939), in which he set down a first-person account of what he had undergone: a state he describes as a real passage into death and a suspension between life and death, in which he experienced what he took to be a divine forsakenness — a participation in Christ’s own dereliction — followed by a restoration (Bulgakov, “The Sophiology of Death,” in 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).

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this is reported here as Bulgakov’s own testimony about his own experience, pinned to the essay in which he gives it. It is not asserted as documented fact, and it is not a certification of a mystical grace. He had reported something comparable after a grave illness in 1926, and both accounts reach us through his pen alone (Bulgakov, “The Sophiology of Death,” 2021; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3).

The Occupation and the Last Book

Bulgakov remained in Paris under the German occupation from 1940. He was dean of St. Sergius throughout, and continued to teach in a city where the Institute’s survival was precarious, its students dispersed, and its Russian community exposed. Among his own circle, Mother Maria Skobtsova, her son Yuri, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, and Ilya Fondaminsky were arrested in 1943 for sheltering Jews and died in the camps (Sergei Hackel, Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981, chs. 8–10; see St. Maria of Paris). He wrote against racism during these years, and completed The Bride of the Lamb and the commentary on the Apocalypse. He was awarded a mitre in 1943.

The Death, 13 July 1944

In the first days of June 1944 — sources give 5 or 6 June, the days of the Normandy landings — Bulgakov suffered a stroke. He never fully regained consciousness. He died in Paris on 13 July 1944, some five weeks later, and was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois south of Paris (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 3; Sister Joanna Reitlinger, memoir of Bulgakov’s last days, in Sergius Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Boris Jakim, New Haven: Variable Press, 1995).

[Disputed: the date of death is given as 13 July 1944 in most reference works and in the biographical literature, and as 12 July 1944 in others — including the repository’s own hub essay, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy, which gives 12 July and notes that some accounts give 13 July. The one-day discrepancy is not resolvable from the available sources and both dates are in circulation; the substance — death in occupied Paris in mid-July 1944, some five weeks after a stroke — is not in dispute.]

The Deathbed Account

Sister Joanna Reitlinger (1898–1988), the iconographer who had lived as part of Bulgakov’s household in Paris from 1925 and who painted the frescoes of the St. Sergius chapel, was present at his deathbed and wrote an account of his last days (Reitlinger, memoir in Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Jakim, Variable Press, 1995).

In it she describes watching his face change through the final day, and reports that around midday, for a period she and Mother Theodosia estimated at roughly two hours, his face became filled with light — she writes that it “had become completely illuminated,” “a single mass of real light,” with the features still discernible beneath it — and that others who came in afterward remarked that he was giving forth light (Reitlinger, memoir, in Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Jakim, 1995). She also left a drawing of his face on his deathbed.

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this is reported strictly as Sister Joanna Reitlinger’s eyewitness testimony, pinned to her published memoir, and is not asserted here as documented fact. It is a memoirist’s account, set down by a devoted disciple, of a phenomenon of a kind the Orthodox tradition reports of the reposing of holy people and does not adjudicate case by case. It is not evidence of sanctity in any canonical sense; the Church has made no judgment about it; and this collection makes none.

The account is nevertheless part of the record, and it is part of the record in both directions: for those who honor Bulgakov it is precious, and for those who regard him as having taught error it is an eyewitness impression that changes nothing about the doctrine. Readers may weigh it as they judge right.

What He Left

A corpus. Two trilogies, a large body of shorter theology, an important pre-revolutionary body of economic and political work, and a catechetical book still in print — nearly all of it now in English (see The Corpus in English).

An institution. The St. Sergius Institute, which he helped found and led, survived him and remains. Its alumni carried the Paris inheritance into Britain and North America — Schmemann and Meyendorff to St. Vladimir’s, Evdokimov and others across Western Europe (see Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff, Paul Evdokimov, and The Orthodox Church in America).

A method of question. Whatever one concludes about Sophia, Bulgakov made the relation of God to the created world — to matter, to labor, to history, to culture — a question Orthodox theology could not go on ignoring. Even his critics have conceded this: the objection is to his answer, not to his having asked (as the repository’s hub essay puts it, “Bulgakov’s questions remain worth asking”; Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

A wide influence outside Orthodoxy. His theology of the divine kenosis and of Holy Saturday shaped Hans Urs von Balthasar and, through him, a good deal of twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology (Jennifer Newsome Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

A permanent argument. The dispute over his work has run for ninety years and is not over.

A Sober Weighing

Four things can be said at once, and the honest position is that all four are true.

He was censured, and the censures stand. Moscow called his teaching alien to the Orthodox faith in September 1935 and extended the criticism to his Christology in December; ROCOR called it heretical in October. Nothing has rescinded them. A reader who takes Orthodox ecclesial authority seriously cannot treat this as a footnote (see The Condemnations of 1935).

He was not condemned by his own Church, and he died in her. The bishops of his own jurisdiction examined the charge of heresy in 1937 and found it unproven, while finding serious flaws requiring correction; no formal condemnation followed; he was never suspended, deposed, or excommunicated; he remained a priest in good standing and dean of St. Sergius; he died in the Church he had served for twenty-six years as a priest (see Evlogy’s Commission and the 1937 Conference).

Sophiology is not the Church’s teaching and never has been. It is a theologoumenon — Bulgakov said so himself — and this collection has expounded it as his, never as hers.

The theological question is open. Whether sophiology is heresy, a salvageable insight, or a legitimate if flawed theological opinion has not been settled by any Orthodox authority, and it is currently argued by serious people on both sides (see The Modern Reappraisal). Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, this collection names the parties and adjudicates nothing.

What the collection will say is a narrower thing, and it concerns conduct rather than doctrine. Bulgakov received a public censure without a hearing, answered it through his bishop rather than around him, submitted his work to the commission his hierarch appointed, did not recant what he believed to be true, did not leave the Church, did not found a party, and went on serving the Liturgy after cancer had taken his voice. Whatever one concludes about Sophia, this is not the record of a man in rebellion, and it deserves to be said as plainly as the condemnation does.

He is not a saint, and this guide has not treated him as one. He is a priest of the Orthodox Church who taught something that two Russian hierarchies judged to be outside the faith and that his own hierarchy judged to be seriously flawed but not heresy, and who died in the Church, in Paris, in the summer of 1944.

References

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 written after his cancer operations.)
Reitlinger, Sister Joanna. Memoir of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s last days. In Sergius Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration. Trans., ed., and with an introduction by Boris Jakim. New Haven: Variable Press, 1995. (The eyewitness account of the deathbed, including the reported light.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 3: the illness, the loss of his voice, the occupation, and the death.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 2 on Bulgakov’s last years as priest and dean.)
Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Chs. 8–10 on the arrests of 1943 in Bulgakov’s circle.)
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.
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy. Repository hub essay, ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/bulgakov-sophiology.md.