Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle

Mother Maria’s collaborators and confessors: Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the great and controversial theologian who was her spiritual father; Nikolai Berdyaev, the philosopher of freedom and the person; Konstantin Mochulsky, the literary scholar who was among her closest co-workers; and Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe Delo), the philanthropic organization they founded together in 1935. This file describes the circle, and honestly registers that her closeness to Bulgakov is one of the things that make her contested.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Her Spiritual Father

The most important figure in Mother Maria’s spiritual life was Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), the former Marxist economist turned priest and theologian who was dean of the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris and the most creative — and most controversial — Orthodox theologian of the century (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4–5; see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy). Bulgakov became her confessor and spiritual father, guided her toward tonsure, and blessed and supported her monasticism in the world; she in turn revered him and defended his vision of a Christianity engaged with the world (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5–7; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3).

This closeness is a fact of central importance for reading her, in two ways. Positively, Bulgakov’s theology of the Church’s active, incarnational responsibility for the world — his insistence that Orthodoxy must not retreat into a museum piety but must take up the burdens of the age — was the intellectual soil of her whole enterprise (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5–7). But the same association cuts the other way in the matter of her contested reception. Bulgakov’s distinctive teaching, sophiology — the theology of Divine Wisdom (Sophia) as a principle mediating between God and creation — was formally condemned in 1935 by both the Moscow Patriarchate and the ROCOR Council of Bishops (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy, and, for the traditionalist wing that pressed the censure, the world of Fr. Seraphim Rose). For those who regard sophiology as a serious error, Mother Maria’s discipleship under and loyalty to Bulgakov is a mark against her — a point taken up at full strength in the contested-saint section (see The Contested Saint — Methodology). It should be said, in fairness, that Mother Maria was not herself a systematic theologian of sophiology and is not on record as advancing the censured doctrines as such; her debt to Bulgakov was pastoral, spiritual, and broadly theological rather than a technical adherence to the disputed Sophia-teaching (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). [Disputed: the extent to which Mother Maria’s own theology is “sophiological” is a matter of interpretation — some read a sophianic sensibility in her cosmic and incarnational vision, while others (and Hackel) stress that she was a practical and poetic rather than a systematic theologian and did not defend the specific propositions that were censured; the sources do not settle the question.]

Nikolai Berdyaev

The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) — the emigration’s most famous religious thinker, the philosopher of freedom, creativity, and the person against every collectivism — was a friend and collaborator (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5–7; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Berdyaev’s exaltation of the human person and his hostility to a Christianity of mere rule and enclosure resonated with Mother Maria’s own instincts, and he was among the founders of the organization through which she worked. His personalism forms part of the intellectual background of her theology of the neighbor as an infinitely valuable person and icon of God (see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

Konstantin Mochulsky and Other Co-Workers

Among her closest practical and intellectual co-workers was the literary scholar and critic Konstantin Mochulsky (1892–1948), best known for his studies of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and the Russian Symbolists, who threw himself into the work of Orthodox Action and was devoted to Mother Maria (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–7). Around the rue de Lourmel and its organization gathered others of the emigration’s talent: the publicist and administrator Fedor Pianov, who managed much of the practical work and would be arrested with her; and, as a supporter and eventual fellow-martyr, the essayist and editor Ilya Fondaminsky (see The Four Glorified Together). From 1939 the priest Fr. Dimitri Klépinin joined as chaplain (see Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis).

Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe Delo)

In 1935 Mother Maria and her circle gave their charitable work an institutional form by founding Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe Delo, literally “the Orthodox Cause” or “Orthodox Deed”), a philanthropic and social-Christian organization under the umbrella of Metropolitan Evlogy’s exarchate (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Mochulsky, and others were associated with its founding; its purpose was to coordinate and undergird the houses of hospitality, the canteens, and the pastoral care of the destitute and the marginal — including the mentally ill and the imprisoned — across the Russian emigration (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6). The name itself encapsulated the program: Orthodoxy as deed, faith embodied in action. Under the occupation, this apparatus of mercy became, almost seamlessly, an apparatus of rescue (see Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis).

A Circle, Not a Solo Sanctity

It is worth insisting, against a certain hagiographic tendency to isolate the saint, that Mother Maria’s achievement was that of a circle. She was its driving heart and its eventual martyr, but the theology she voiced was developed in conversation with Bulgakov and Berdyaev, the work was carried by Mochulsky and Pianov and many others, and the rescue was a joint enterprise with Klépinin, her son Yuri, and Fondaminsky (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–9). This communal character is why the glorification of 2004 was a glorification of four together, and why the story is properly told as the story of a community and not of a lone heroine (see The Four Glorified Together).

References

Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Ch. 4–9 for Bulgakov as confessor, Berdyaev and Mochulsky, the founding of Orthodox Action in 1935, and the circle of co-workers.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the Paris circle and Orthodox Action; and its treatments of Bulgakov and other figures of the emigration.)
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy — ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/bulgakov-sophiology.md. (The 1935 Moscow and ROCOR condemnations of sophiology, bearing on the reservations about Mother Maria’s association with Bulgakov.)
Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Her theological essays, developed in this circle.)