The Unfinished Question: Imiaslavie After 1913

The condemnation of 1913 was not the end but the middle of the story: the 1914 mitigation, the Moscow Council of 1917–18 that took the question up and never finished, the philosophers — Florensky, Bulgakov, Losev — who made the Name a theme of Russian religious thought, and the sober present status: a dogmatic question the Church has adjourned, which this collection reports per METHODOLOGY §4.2 with both readings named and neither adjudicated.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (intra-Orthodox dispute, formally unresolved)

1914: The Condemnation Mitigated

Within a year of the deportations (see The Athonite Dispute of 1912–1913), the Russian church authority softened the practical regime while leaving the doctrinal text of 1913 standing. In 1914 the Moscow Synodal Office under Metropolitan Makarii (Nevsky) examined the confessions of faith submitted by Antony (Bulatovich) and other exiled imiaslavtsy and found them compatible with Orthodoxy; the monks were admitted again to the sacraments — and in Bulatovich’s case, permitted to serve as a military chaplain at the front from 1914 — without being required to renounce their formulas, the dogmatic substance being explicitly reserved to a future council (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina Tserkvi, 2 vols., Aleteia, 2002, which prints and analyzes the 1914 acts; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, OCABS Press, 2013). The ambiguity thus created was real and was felt on both sides: the imiaslavtsy could say the Church had tacitly withdrawn the charge of heresy; the Synod’s defenders could say discipline had been relaxed by economy while the condemnation stood. Both readings of 1914 persist in the literature, and per §4.2 this file asserts only what the documents show: communion restored, formulas unrenounced, question deferred (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002).

The Council of 1917–18: The Question Adjourned

The All-Russian Church Council of 1917–18 — the same council that restored the Patriarchate — received the imiaslavie file as unfinished business and referred it to a subcommission for conciliar examination; materials were prepared, Sergius Bulgakov among those drafting, but the Council, cut short by the Bolshevik revolution’s escalating persecution, dissolved in September 1918 without reaching the question (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, on the conciliar subcommission and Bulgakov’s role; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 2019). Bulatovich, who had broken communion with the Synod in protest at the continuing ambiguity, was murdered by robbers at his family estate of Lutsykovka in December 1919; Ilarion had died in the Caucasus in 1916; the movement’s remnant survived in Caucasian hermitages and scattered communities into the Soviet decades, entangled thereafter in the catacomb church’s history (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013). No subsequent council of the Russian Church — nor any pan-Orthodox instance — has resumed and completed the examination. That is the entire juridical state of the question, and this collection declines to improve upon it in either direction.

The Philosophers: Florensky, Bulgakov, Losev

The controversy’s intellectual afterlife proved extraordinary. Three of the most considerable minds of the Russian religious renaissance took the imiaslavtsy’s side in substance, each transposing the monks’ confession into a developed philosophy of the Name — while the fact of their sympathy is uncontested, their arguments are theirs and are reported here as positions, not endorsed:

Pavel Florensky, who had anonymously prefaced Bulatovich’s Apologia in 1913, developed in the essays gathered in U vodorazdelov mysli (“At the Watersheds of Thought”) a general onomatology in which the name is the energy and manifestation of its bearer — the imiaslavie formula read as a special case of a universal semiotics of presence (Florensky’s imiaslavie texts, discussed in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).
Sergius Bulgakov defended the monks in 1913 in the press, prepared the conciliar materials of 1917–18, and left a full treatise, Filosofiia imeni (“The Philosophy of the Name,” written in the 1920s, published posthumously, Paris, 1953), arguing that in the Name of God, God Himself is present and active — the Name as divine energy — and reading the 1913 Epistle as theologically inadequate (Bulgakov, Filosofiia imeni, Paris, 1953; Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).
Alexei Losev, philosopher and (as later became known) secret monk, constructed in Filosofiia imeni (Moscow, 1927) and related works a dialectical philosophy of the name with explicit imiaslavie sympathies; his arrest in 1930 was connected in part with his ties to name-glorifier circles (Losev, Filosofiia imeni, 1927; the biographical connection in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

The philosophical revival cuts both ways in the assessment, and both ways should be stated: to the movement’s sympathizers it shows that the monks had hold of a deep truth about symbol, energy, and presence, prematurely crushed by an unphilosophical Synod; to its critics it shows precisely the danger — that the confession of praying monks was speculatively inflated into systems (name-ontologies, sophiological alignments) that wander far from the sober Palamite frame both parties claimed (the double assessment is drawn in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, whose own conclusion — that the question merits genuine conciliar resolution — is itself a position within the debate, and in Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

The Two Readings, Stated Fairly

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the substance of the unresolved question, with its proponents named:

The reading favorable to the 1913 condemnation. The divine names are revealed, holy, and instruments of God’s real action toward the believing; but they are creaturely signs — human words in human languages — and to say “the Name of God is God Himself” collapses sign into referent, courts a magical theory of efficacious syllables, and has no clear conciliar or patristic warrant in that form. The Synod therefore taught rightly, whatever the faults of tone and enforcement. So, in 1913, the reports of Archbishops Nikon and Antony (Khrapovitsky) and S. V. Troitsky, and the Halki assessment behind the Constantinopolitan condemnations; so also those later assessments that treat the Epistle as substantially sound (the 1913 corpus in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013).

The reading favorable to the imiaslavtsy. Rightly parsed, the confession identifies the Name not with sounds or letters (which Bulatovich expressly denied deifying: “God is not a name”) but with God’s energy of self-revelation — and by the conciliar teaching of 1351, God’s energy is truly God (see Barlaam, Palamas, and the Hesychast Councils). On this reading the monks stood in the Palamite line; the Synod’s theology, formed in a scholastic idiom weak on essence-and-energies, condemned a thesis the fathers of 1351 would have recognized; and the experiential ground — what the one praying actually meets in the invocation — was better described by the hermits than by their judges. So Bulatovich’s Apologia; Florensky, Bulgakov, and Losev in their several idioms; and, among modern treatments, those that find the imiaslavtsy’s core defensible while faulting formulations on both sides (Bulatovich, Apologiia, 1913; Bulgakov, Filosofiia imeni, 1953; the sympathetic modern assessments surveyed in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, and Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

This collection does not adjudicate between these readings, because the Church has not: the question was condemned synodally, mitigated administratively, referred conciliarly, and never concluded. What the collection does assert — because it is the shared ground of both parties and of the whole praying tradition — is stated in Section 02: that in the believing invocation of the Name, Christ Himself, true God, is really encountered; and that the sounds and letters, apart from faith and repentance, are nothing (Acts 3:16; 19:13–17).

Why the Episode Belongs in This Compendium

It would have been easier to omit this chapter; it is included because the methodology requires it and the subject is the better for it. First, the episode is the extreme test of the theology of the Name: it shows what happens when the tradition’s boldest devotional language (“the Name is God”) is pressed into ontology without conciliar digestion — and equally what happens when a synod answers mystical theology with administrative force. Second, it disciplines this collection’s own language: the “sacrament of presence” idiom used of the prayer (see The Invocation of the Name) is flagged there as theologoumenon precisely because 1913–present shows the cost of confusing levels. Third, it is a live instance of §4.2’s category of the formally unresolved: students of Orthodoxy should be able to see that the Church possesses such questions — adjourned, awaiting a council — and that honest reference work reports them as open rather than forcing closure. The Jesus Prayer itself, it should finally be said, was never in dispute: both parties prayed it, both parties defended it, and the tradition’s practice passed through the storm unchanged (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002).

References

Alfeyev, Hilarion. Sviashchennaia taina Tserkvi: Vvedenie v istoriiu i problematiku imiaslavskikh sporov. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2002. (The 1914 acts; the 1917–18 conciliar subcommission; the philosophers; the survey of assessments; the author’s own concluding position.)
Dykstra, Tom. Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Name-Glorifying Dispute in the Russian Orthodox Church and on Mt. Athos, 1912–1914. St. Paul, MN: OCABS Press, 2013.
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019. (The controversy in the Russian religious renaissance; Florensky, Bulgakov, Losev.)
Antony (Bulatovich), Hieroschemamonk. Apologiia very vo Imia Bozhie i vo Imia Iisus. Moscow: Religiozno-filosofskaia biblioteka, 1913.
Bulgakov, Sergius. Filosofiia imeni [The Philosophy of the Name]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1953 (posthumous).
Losev, Alexei. Filosofiia imeni [The Philosophy of the Name]. Moscow, 1927.
Holy Synod of the Russian Church. Epistle of 18 May 1913. Tserkovnye vedomosti, 1913.
Scripture: Acts 3:16; 19:13–17.