Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935

What Lossky actually did in the sophiology affair: as vice-president of the Brotherhood of St. Photius he supplied Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow with the theological reports that lay behind the ukaz of 7 September 1935, and in 1936 he published Spor o Sofii, a defence both of the substance of the condemnation and of Moscow’s right to issue it. This file pins the documented facts, keeps the three official acts of 1935 distinct as the repository’s hub file does, and reports the modern reassessment — including Brandon Gallaher’s argument that Lossky’s own apophaticism is structurally indebted to the sophiology he attacked.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Three Acts of 1935: What They Were

The repository’s hub file establishes the framework, and this collection agrees with it exactly. Three distinct official acts, issued within four months of one another, must be kept separate (Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy, “The Condemnation”):

  1. Ukaz No. 1651 of the Moscow Patriarchate, 7 September 1935, issued by Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) as deputy locum tenens. It characterized Bulgakov’s teaching as “alien” (chuzhdoe) to the Orthodox faith and as an arbitrary perversion of its dogmas, warned clergy and faithful against it, and called on Bulgakov to correct his views — while stopping short of a formal charge of heresy (ibid., citing Klimoff).
  2. The determination (Opredelenie) of the ROCOR Council of Bishops, 17/30 October 1935, meeting at Sremski Karlovci under Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), which went further and declared the teaching heretical, listing specific errors, and rested substantially on Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)’s book-length critique (ibid.).
  3. Ukaz No. 2267 of the Moscow Patriarchate, 27 December 1935, addressed to Metropolitan Eleutherius of Lithuania and Vilnius, confirming the first decree and extending the criticism to Bulgakov’s kenotic Christology — again without pronouncing him a heretic (ibid.).

The Paris jurisdiction under Metropolitan Evlogy responded quite differently: a divided commission, a majority report of June 1936 rejecting the charge of heresy, a minority report of 6 July 1936 signed by Fr. Georges Florovsky, and a bishops’ conference of 26–29 November 1937 concluding that heresy was unproven. No pan-Orthodox condemnation of sophiology was ever issued (ibid., “The Paris Jurisdiction’s Response”).

Lossky’s Part

The Brotherhood and the Reports

Lossky was at this date vice-president of the Paris-based Brotherhood of St. Photius, the lay confraternity loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. His epistolary reports on Bulgakov’s theology were the material that lay behind Metropolitan Sergius’s ukaz, and they were subsequently set out in formal published shape in his 1936 pamphlet (Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” SJT 66/3 [2013]: 278–298, describing Lossky as vice-president of “the Moscow loyalist Paris-based Brotherhood of St Photios,” whose “epistolary reports concerning Bulgakov’s theology” were formally set out in Spor o Sofii, which “served as the background to Metropolitan Sergii’s ukaz”).

Scholarship has put the point still more sharply: that the “Sophia affair” of 1935 was instigated by Lossky, who persuaded Metropolitan Sergius to condemn Bulgakov’s doctrine, and that Lossky “both provoked the controversy” and afterwards “justified the essence of the condemnation and Sergii of Moscow’s right to pronounce such judgment on Bulgakov, even in his absence” (Gallaher 2013, and the reception of that argument in subsequent literature).

This should be stated plainly and without either exculpation or scandal. A layman of thirty-two, holding no office in the Church, put a theological case before a hierarch, and the hierarch acted on it against a priest of another jurisdiction who had not been heard. That is what the documented record shows. Lossky did not regard it as improper; he defended it in print. His critics at the time — Berdyaev above all — regarded it as a grave procedural wrong, and said so (see Bulgakov and Sophiology, on Berdyaev’s “The Spirit of the Grand Inquisitor,” 1935).

[Disputed: whether Lossky "instigated" the 1935 ukaz or supplied material to a process already under way. The strong formulation — that Lossky provoked the affair and persuaded Metropolitan Sergius to act — is found in the scholarly literature on the controversy (Gallaher, *SJT* 66/3 [2013], and the studies that follow it). A more restrained reading, consistent with the same evidence, is that the Brotherhood of St. Photius forwarded critical reports to Moscow in the ordinary course of its activity and that the decision was Metropolitan Sergius's own. What is not in dispute is that Lossky's reports lay behind the ukaz and that he publicly defended both its substance and its authority.]

The Pamphlet

The published statement of his case is:

Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii: “Dokladnaya zapiska” prot. S. Bulgakova i smysl Ukaza Moskovskoy Patriarkhii [The Dispute about Sophia: Archpriest S. Bulgakov’s “Memorandum” and the Meaning of the Ukaz of the Moscow Patriarchate]. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.

The title states the argument. The pamphlet is a reply to Bulgakov’s own dokladnaya zapiska — the memorandum he had submitted to Metropolitan Evlogy in his defence — and an exposition of what the Moscow ukaz meant and why it was justified. It is thus two things at once: a theological refutation (see Lossky Against Bulgakov) and a canonical-ecclesiological defence of Moscow’s competence to judge.

It was Lossky’s first substantial theological publication. It remains untranslated into English in full, which has had the odd effect of making the most consequential act of his early career the least read part of his corpus.

On the Moscow-Side Commission

The Moscow Patriarchate’s jurisdiction in Western Europe was exercised through Metropolitan Eleutherius (Bogoyavlensky) of Lithuania and Vilnius, to whom the second ukaz of 27 December 1935 was addressed (see Bulgakov and Sophiology). Lossky’s institutional position within that jurisdiction was as an officer of the Brotherhood of St. Photius, and it is in that capacity that his reports reached Moscow (Gallaher 2013). [Disputed: the sources consulted for this collection document Lossky's role as author of the reports behind the ukaz and as vice-president of the Brotherhood, but do not establish his formal membership of a named commission on the Moscow side comparable to the Chetverikov commission appointed by Metropolitan Evlogy in the Paris jurisdiction; that detail is therefore not asserted here.]

The Modern Reassessment

Two lines of later scholarship have changed how the episode is read.

Florovsky’s Position, and the Contrast

The first is the recovery of what Fr. Georges Florovsky actually did. Florovsky, Bulgakov’s colleague at St. Sergius, shared many of the theological objections but never published a direct refutation of him; he expressed his opposition indirectly, through scholarly essays on the doctrine of creation and through his signature on the minority report of 6 July 1936, which stated that Bulgakov’s views “provoke great anxiety” (Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” SVTQ 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100; see Bulgakov and Sophiology). The contrast with Lossky’s public, jurisdictionally weaponized intervention is instructive, and the literature has drawn it.

Gallaher: The Sophiological Origins of Lossky’s Apophaticism

The second, and more startling, is Brandon Gallaher’s argument that the “common narrative” opposing Lossky and Bulgakov as theological contraries is false at the level of method. Gallaher contends that

“the origins of Vladimir Lossky’s apophaticism, which he characterised as ‘antinomic theology’, are found within the theological methodology of the sophiology of Sergii Bulgakov: ‘antinomism’”

— the procedure by which two equally necessary affirmations, thesis and antithesis, remain logically contradictory and must be held together in faith rather than resolved. On Gallaher’s reading, Lossky and Bulgakov share this fundamental common ground despite their evident differences about reason, philosophy, and metaphysical distinctions, and Lossky may have been “consciously appropriating the ‘positive intuitions’ of Bulgakov’s thought” while masking the debt; Gallaher concludes that Bulgakov’s sophiology is the “skeleton key” for modern Orthodox theology (Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 [2013]: 278–298, abstract and argument).

This is a scholarly thesis, contested like any other, and it is reported here as such. What can be said without adjudicating is that the antinomic structure Gallaher identifies is genuinely and conspicuously present in Lossky — most obviously in the Filioque essay, where he insists that Orthodox triadology preserves “the fundamental antinomy between the essence and the hypostases” and charges the Filioquist alternative with suppressing it (Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God [SVS Press, 1976], p. 80). Whether that structure is Bulgakov’s bequest, a common inheritance from Florensky and the wider Russian tradition, or an independent reading of the Cappadocians is exactly the question in dispute (see The Divine Darkness).

Andrew Louth’s chapter on Lossky in Modern Orthodox Thinkers belongs to the same reassessment of the “common narrative” that sets a sophiological strand against a neo-patristic one as though they were sealed off from each other (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present [London: SPCK, 2015], ch. “Apophatic theology and deification: Myrrha Lot-Borodine and Vladimir Lossky”).

How This Collection Reports It

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2:

  • The acts of the Church are reported precisely and allowed to stand. Moscow censured the teaching twice in 1935 without pronouncing heresy; ROCOR declared it heretical; the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s jurisdiction did not condemn it; no pan-Orthodox act was ever taken.
  • Lossky’s part is reported as documented, including the parts that do him no credit, and the strong claim that he instigated the affair is flagged as disputed rather than asserted.
  • The theological question is not adjudicated here. Whether sophiology is a legitimate theologoumenon that was unfairly handled, or a genuine error rightly censured, remains a live intra-Orthodox question, and the repository takes no side in it beyond reporting the Church’s acts.
  • The reassessment is reported as scholarship, not as verdict. Gallaher’s thesis is a serious argument by a serious scholar; it is neither endorsed nor dismissed here.

See Also

References

  • Lossky, Vladimir. Spor o Sofii: “Dokladnaya zapiska” prot. S. Bulgakova i smysl Ukaza Moskovskoy Patriarkhii. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ch. 4. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976 [1974], pp. 71–96. (The antinomy between essence and hypostases, p. 80.)
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298. DOI 10.1017/S0036930613000136. (Lossky as vice-president of the Brotherhood of St. Photius; his reports as the background to the ukaz; the antinomism thesis.)
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Chapter on apophatic theology and deification: Myrrha Lot-Borodine and Vladimir Lossky; the reassessment of the “common narrative.”)
  • Bulgakov, Sergius. O Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1935.
  • Berdyaev, Nikolai. “The Spirit of the Grand Inquisitor” (1935).
  • Seraphim (Sobolev), Archbishop. Novoe uchenie o Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiei. Sofia, 1935.
  • Repository: Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy. (Ukaz No. 1651 of 7 September 1935; the ROCOR Opredelenie of 17/30 October 1935; Ukaz No. 2267 of 27 December 1935; the Chetverikov commission and the reports of June and 6 July 1936; the bishops’ conference of 26–29 November 1937; the absence of any pan-Orthodox condemnation.)