In recent decades, there has been increasing interest in the theological, philosophical, and political legacy of Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944). This is especially true in the English-speaking world.

When I was studying for my PhD, I remember a priest asking me, in the back of the sanctuary of my father’s parish in the Chicagoland area, “What are you studying?” I told him, “contemporary Orthodox theology.” He repeated my answer in a sardonic tone, somewhat incredulous that such a thing as contemporary Orthodox theology even existed. The subtext of his response, of course, was that there is no such thing as contemporary Orthodox theology: there are the fathers of the Church, as if all thinking in Orthodoxy stopped in the fifteenth century, and today there are the gerontes, who are examples of the living experiential theology of which the fathers speak.

Sergii Nikolaevich Bulgakov is still, for many Orthodox Christians, a somewhat ambiguous figure. In conservative circles, he is seen as one of the main architects of what is oddly called the “Paris School” of supposedly liberal (revisionist, ecumenically-minded) theological thinkers; in more mainstream discussion, he is still very often read through the lens of “neo-patristic” writers, Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky above all, who were sharply critical of some of Bulgakov’s distinctive ideas.

Autobiography and theology do not necessarily belong together. There are many theologians who reveal nothing directly of themselves in their writings. There are, however, exceptions, beginning with the Apostle Paul, who reveals something of himself in his letters to the churches. These exceptions do not, so far as I can see, constitute a tradition; they are rather singular, luminous examples. The most famous is Augustine. Although his Confessions do not constitute an autobiography, they give us access to his inner life, which can then be discerned in his other works, not least the homilies on the Psalms. Other writers in the West followed, or were inspired by, Augustine’s example.

Sergii Bulgakov’s great love for the biblical figure of Sophia, or holy Wisdom, a love that shines from so many of his writings, was a natural outworking of his life’s journey as a priest and spiritual father. Bulgakov was an accomplished scholar, to be sure, but he was also a dedicated pastor.

Theosis is defined by Dionysius the Areopagite as “the attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as possible.” Sergii Nikolaevich Bulgakov came to his mature understanding of theosis as a result of a personal spiritual journey that took him from Marxist materialism (although he was to deny that he had ever been an atheist), via German philosophical idealism, to a recovery of the Church’s faith strongly colored by the sophiology of Vladimir Solovyev.

Everything is more than itself. Everything shines. It shines because all things are transparent; and beauty, glory is the shining of God through all things: theophaneia. Our essay will explore in Bulgakov’s theology the structure of this shining, in both God and creation, in both the Divine and the Creaturely Sophias. This structure is the fundamental iconicity of all of reality. For Bulgakov, iconicity and beauty, considered together, are quite simply the process of salvation as divinization.

The artist Wassily Kandinsky and the theologian Sergii Bulgakov, two great figures of twentieth-century Russian culture, knew each other well. They became acquainted in the 1890s at Moscow University Law School, where both attended the classes of Alexander Chuprov. Even though Kandinsky was five years older than Bulgakov, they quickly became friends.

During World War II, toward the end of his life, Sergii Bulgakov spoke about the “revolutionary spirit of Revelation.” With this phrase, he meant that divine “judgement is not only on individual persons, but also on the social and political system, all kinds of despotism, both state and economic.

Our society was built on the racial segmentation of personhood. Some people were full humans, guaranteed non-enslavement, secured from expropriation and given the protection of law, and some people—blacks, Natives, and other nonwhites—were not. That unequal distribution of personhood was an economic reality as well. It shaped your access to employment and capital; determined whether you would be doomed to the margins of labor or given access to its elevated ranks; marked who might share in the bounty of capitalist production and who would most likely be cast out as disposable.
—Jamelle Bouie

Sergii Bulgakov considered the problem of the relationship between faith and reason, including scientific knowledge, in a number of works, especially in Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household (1912), in Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations (1917), in his so called great trilogy—The Lamb of God (1933), The Comforter (1936), and The Bride of the Lamb (1945)—and above all in his succinct essay “Religion and Science” (1919).

The relationship of Christianity and Judaism was a perennial theme for Sergii Bulgakov, from his 1906 essay on the antisemitism of Karl Marx, to his horror at the destruction he attributed to the Jewish leadership of the Bolshevik revolution, to his polemic against Nazi ideologues, to his final and decisive eschatological conclusions.

Since the beginning of the Church, Christian thinkers have pondered the question, What does it mean to be created in the image of God? But at the end of the nineteenth century, new questions began to emerge among Russian religious thinkers: What is the purpose of woman? And what might it mean to be created male and female in the image of God? Among the Orthodox theologians who have pondered this question, Sergii Bulgakov offers not only the fullest response, but inspiration for a series of later thinkers who draw from his work.

This new translation of Sergii Bulgakov’s The Tragedy of Philosophy is a most welcome edition to the continuing series of translations of Father Bulgakov’s books. Thanks to the enormous efforts of Boris Jakim but also Thomas A. Smith and now Stephen Churchyard, we are close to having most of Bulgakov available in English.

When Sister Ioanna [Reitlinger] was commissioned by the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius in 1945 to decorate their chapel at Ladbroke Grove, London, she had come to a crossroads in her life. Father Sergii Bulgakov—her teacher, spiritual director, and friend for twenty-five years—had died the previous
year.