BULGAKOV, SERGIUS

BULGAKOV, SERGIUS, priest, theologian, educator, ecumenist (16 June 1871–12 July 1944). S. Bulgakov was professor of national economy in the Polytechnical Institute of Kiev in 1901, then lecturer at the University of Moscow, 1906, from which post he resigned in 1911 in protest of government policies in the university. He was also a member of the Duma in 1906.

Although he began as a Marxist, he eventually returned to his roots in the Orthodox Church and produced a stinging indictment of Marxism and “scientific” atheistic socialism (From Marxism to Idealism, 1904, et al.). At the same time, he sponsored journalistic endeavors (Novy Put, Voprosy Zhizni) with Nicholas Berdiaev (q.v.). In 1917 he was an active member of the All-Russian Church Council, serving on its Supreme Church Board, and wrote his primary religio-philosophical work, The Unfading Light. He took holy orders in 1918 and left Moscow for Sympheropol, where he taught at the university. The Soviet government banished him in 1922 with other writers and politicians, and he relocated to Prague to teach political economy at the Russian Graduate School of Law.

In 1925 he moved to Paris to teach dogmatic theology at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (q.v.), later to become its dean. While in Paris he became instrumental in facilitating ecumenical dialogue, especially with the Anglicans. His philosophy of language, sympathetic to imiaslavie (“glorification of the Name”), is contained in The Philosophy of Words (1924/1930). While at St. Sergius he became involved in controversy over his attempt to interpret all Christian doctrine through the perspective of Sophia or Holy Wisdom, similar to Vladimir Soloviev (q.v.). The political climate with Moscow and with other emigres, e.g., the Synod in Exile (q.v.), made open theological discussion unlikely, and complex theological speculation about metaphysics impossible. His most important books in English include The Wisdom of God, A Brief Summary of Sophiology (1927) and The Orthodox Church (1935). He is remembered as one of the outstanding speculative Russian theologians of the 20th c.