Lossky Against Bulgakov

Lossky’s theological case against Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s sophiology rested on four claims: that Sophia functions in Bulgakov’s system as something very like a fourth hypostasis; that it blurs the absolute distinction between Creator and creature; that its real ancestry is German idealism by way of Solovyov rather than the Greek Fathers; and that Orthodox theology already possesses, in the Palamite distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated energies, everything Bulgakov wanted Sophia to supply. This file sets out the case as Lossky made it, and records the objections that Bulgakov and his defenders raised in return.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Setting

By the early 1930s Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944) was the most productive and most conspicuous theologian of the Russian emigration: professor of dogmatic theology at the St. Sergius Institute in Paris, author of the great trilogy The Lamb of God (1933), The Comforter (1936) and The Bride of the Lamb (posthumous, 1945), and the developer of a theological system organized around Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, understood as the divine nature in its relation to creation, existing in a “divine” and a “creaturely” aspect (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy, on the system and the sources).

Lossky was thirty-two, a layman, a medievalist by training, and belonged to the small Moscow Patriarchal jurisdiction rather than to Bulgakov’s Paris archdiocese under Constantinople. He had published nothing of theological substance. What he had was a formidable grasp of the Greek Fathers, an equally formidable grasp of Latin scholasticism, and a settled conviction that the Russian religious philosophy of the previous generation had substituted metaphysical construction for the mind of the Fathers.

The Four Charges

1. The Fourth Hypostasis

The central objection was that Sophia, whatever Bulgakov’s disclaimers, functions in his system as a quasi-personal divine reality alongside Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Bulgakov insisted that Sophia is not a hypostasis but the divine ousia considered under the aspect of its self-revelation; his critics replied that the language he actually uses — Wisdom who is loved, who responds, who is the “eternal feminine” of the Godhead — is irreducibly personal, and that a non-hypostatic “content of divine life” spoken of in these terms has effectively become a fourth term in the Trinity. Lossky pressed this argument with particular force (the repository’s hub essay records the objection and attributes it to Lossky’s Spor o Sofii: Bulgakov and Sophiology, “The ‘Fourth Hypostasis’ Problem”). The same charge stood at the head of the list of errors identified by the ROCOR Council of Bishops in its determination of 17/30 October 1935 (ibid., on the ROCOR determination).

2. Creator and Creature

The second charge was ontological. Patristic theology, on Lossky’s reading, rests on an absolute and unbridgeable distinction between the uncreated God and everything that is not God; there is no third thing, no intermediate ontological register, no principle that is neither Creator nor creature. Bulgakov’s two-aspect Sophia — Divine Sophia in God, creaturely Sophia in the world, the two related by participation — seemed to Lossky to install precisely such an intermediate principle, and so to compromise both divine transcendence and the gratuity of creation. Lossky characterized sophiology as erasing the division between Creator and creation and as gnostic in tendency (Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” SJT 66/3 [2013], summarizing Lossky’s charge that sophiology “erased the division between the Creator and creation” and was gnostic; cf. Bulgakov and Sophiology, “Blurring the Creator-Creature Distinction”).

The stake here is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and by will. If Sophia is the eternal ideal content of the world within God, and the world is Sophia in her creaturely mode, then — the objection runs — creation begins to look necessary to God rather than freely willed, and the Fathers’ insistence that God creates in freedom, not from any inner requirement of his own being, is placed under strain.

3. German Idealism, Not the Fathers

The third charge is genealogical, and it is the charge Lossky shared most closely with Fr. Georges Florovsky. Sophiology, on this account, is not a development of patristic theology at all but the latest form of a Western philosophical system naturalized in Russia: Schelling and the German idealists, mediated through Vladimir Solovyov and Pavel Florensky, dressed in patristic vocabulary. It is, in Florovsky’s celebrated phrase, an instance of the “Western captivity” of Russian theology (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology], Paris, 1937; the repository’s hub essay attributes the argument to both Florovsky and Lossky: Bulgakov and Sophiology, “Departure from Patristic Methodology”).

For Lossky this was not a debating point but the heart of the matter. His whole programme — the programme that would produce the Mystical Theology eight years later — was the recovery of theology as the Fathers practised it: not a system constructed from a first principle, but a discipline that begins from the confessed dogma of the Church and moves toward union with God. A theology that begins from Sophia begins in the wrong place (see Theology and Mysticism Inseparable).

It is worth noting that Lossky was fully aware of the awkwardness of this charge coming from him. He was himself the son of a religious philosopher of exactly that generation, and he took explicit pains to deny that he was a descendant of the Russian “religious philosophy” (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” on his insistence that he was not a direct heir of that tradition; see Göttingen, Petrograd, and the Philosophers’ Ships).

4. The Palamite Alternative

The fourth move is the constructive one, and it is the most important for understanding Lossky’s later work. His argument was not simply that sophiology is wrong but that it is unnecessary: Orthodox theology already has a doctrine of how the transcendent God is genuinely present to and participable by creation without either collapsing into pantheism or receding into deism. That doctrine is the distinction, confessed by the Constantinopolitan councils of the fourteenth century, between the divine essence — absolutely unknowable and imparticipable — and the uncreated energies, which are God himself in his act and self-communication, truly given to creatures (see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas; St. Gregory Palamas; and the same point in Bulgakov and Sophiology, “The Palamite Distinction”).

This is the pivot of Lossky’s career. Everything he wrote afterwards can be read as the working-out of the claim that the Palamite distinction, not any sophiological mediation, is the Orthodox answer to the question Bulgakov was asking — how the world can be genuinely related to a genuinely transcendent God.

The Other Side

Methodological honesty (METHODOLOGY §4.2) requires that Bulgakov’s position be given in its own terms, since the Church’s censure of his teaching was not a censure of his person and no pan-Orthodox condemnation of sophiology was ever issued.

Bulgakov and his defenders answered, in substance:

On the fourth hypostasis: that the charge misreads him. Sophia is expressly not a hypostasis; she is the ousia as revealed, and personal language about Wisdom is scriptural (Proverbs 8) and traditional before it is Bulgakov’s. He set this out formally in his memoranda to Metropolitan Evlogy and in the brochure O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935).
On procedure: that he had not been heard before the first Moscow ukaz was issued. Nikolai Berdyaev attacked the ukaz on precisely this ground in “The Spirit of the Grand Inquisitor” (1935) (see Bulgakov and Sophiology).
On the outcome: that the commission appointed by Metropolitan Evlogy divided, that its majority report of June 1936 rejected the charge of heresy while registering serious objections, and that the bishops’ conference of November 1937 concluded that heresy was unproven. Bulgakov remained a priest in good standing and continued to teach until his death (ibid., “The Paris Jurisdiction’s Response”).

The repository’s settled framing is that the acts of the Moscow Patriarchate and of ROCOR are reported precisely and allowed to stand, that no pan-Orthodox condemnation was ever issued, and that Bulgakov’s Sophiology has the status of his personal theological opinion rather than of the Church’s teaching (ibid.). This collection does not go beyond that framing.

What the Dispute Cost

The episode did lasting damage to relations within the Russian emigration, and it is not to be narrated triumphally. A young layman of a rival jurisdiction supplied the theological case on which a distant hierarchy censured, unheard, the leading theologian of another jurisdiction. That the theological objections were serious — serious enough that ROCOR and Moscow, at bitter odds on everything else, converged on them in the same autumn (see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935) — does not make the manner of it edifying, and later Orthodox scholarship has said so.

It should also be recorded that Lossky’s later work is markedly free of polemic against Bulgakov by name. The Mystical Theology does not prosecute sophiology; it simply builds elsewhere. Whether that silence represents a settled victory, a decent reticence, or something more complicated is the question taken up in the next file.

References

Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii: “Dokladnaya zapiska” prot. S. Bulgakova i smysl Ukaza Moskovskoy Patriarkhii [The Dispute about Sophia]. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957. (French orig. Paris: Aubier, 1944.) Especially chs. 2–4 on the essence, the energies, and created being.
Bulgakov, Sergius. O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei [On Sophia the Wisdom of God]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935. (Contains the first Moscow ukaz and Bulgakov’s memoranda in reply.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Lamb of God; The Comforter; The Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, 2004, 2002.
Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya [Ways of Russian Theology]. Paris, 1937.
Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298. (Lossky’s charge that sophiology was gnostic and erased the Creator–creature distinction; his role in the affair.)
Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov — Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
“Vladimir Lossky.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Lossky’s opposition to the sophiological theories of Bulgakov and Solovyov, and his denial of descent from Russian religious philosophy.)
Repository: Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy. (The three official acts of 1935; the ROCOR list of errors; the Paris commission and the 1937 bishops’ conference; the absence of any pan-Orthodox condemnation.)