Russian Religious Philosophy/Sophiology

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Russian religious philosophy names the body of speculative Orthodox-rooted thought that took shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until the Bolshevik state drove most of its thinkers into exile. Its central preoccupation was the relation between God and the created world, and its most distinctive — and most disputed — thread is sophiology: an attempt to give philosophical and theological standing to Sophia, the figure of Divine Wisdom. What sets the current apart from ordinary academic theology is the order of its loyalties. It does not begin from a problem in the textbooks and reason outward; it begins inside the liturgy, inside the icon, inside an Orthodox piety it never proposes to leave, and from there asks the largest possible questions about being, freedom, and the union of the divine and the human. The result is theology written with the ambition of metaphysics and metaphysics written with the gravity of prayer.

Solovyov and the turn from materialism

The movement’s founder was Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), who turned away from the materialism of the Russian intelligentsia toward a systematic religious metaphysics. The son of the historian Sergei Solovyov, he passed in his teens through a fashionable atheism, read his way out the other side, and devoted a short, restless life — he was dead at forty-seven — to building a philosophy in which faith and reason would not be rivals but a single coherent vision. He built it around vseedinstvo, “all-unity” — the conviction that all things cohere in God and that reality is a single living whole rather than a heap of separate substances. Nothing real, on this view, is finally isolated; every being holds its place in an order that is graded yet continuous, and the task of thought is to recover the unity that fragmented experience hides. The kinship with the older metaphysics of the source is deliberate: a single first principle from which the many proceed without the one ever being divided, an architecture that runs from Neoplatonism and the doctrine of the One through every later system of emanation.

Within that frame he developed the idea of Bogochelovechestvo, usually rendered “Godmanhood” or “the humanity of God”: the claim that the union of the divine and the human accomplished in Christ is also the destiny of the whole created order. He set it out most famously in a course of public lectures delivered in St. Petersburg in 1878, where the incarnation is presented not as a single anomalous event but as the hinge of a cosmic process — the divine descending into matter and history, and creation ascending, freely, back toward its source. Godmanhood is at once a christology, a philosophy of history, and a program: Solovyov spent years on schemes of “free theocracy” and on the reunion of the churches, convinced that the union of God and humanity had social and political consequences and could not remain a private devotion.

Solovyov reported, in poems and private accounts, encounters with Sophia as a luminous feminine presence — three meetings, by his own telling, the last in the Egyptian desert near Cairo. How much weight such experiences should carry, and how literally he meant them, is debated by his interpreters; what is not in doubt is that Sophia entered his thought as something more than a metaphor. She is the unity of the all considered as ideal and beloved, the world held together in God before it is scattered into separate things, and through her the language of Divine Wisdom — drawn from the Wisdom who plays before God at the world’s founding in Proverbs, from the Logos of Hellenistic theology, and from the great churches dedicated to Holy Wisdom — re-entered serious philosophy.

Florensky and Bulgakov: sophiology as system

Solovyov’s successors carried the project into formal theology. Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov, both ordained priests, made sophiology the cornerstone of large constructive systems. Florensky — mathematician, physicist, and priest at once — published The Pillar and Ground of the Truth in 1914, a vast, deliberately unsystematic book that approaches the truth of the Trinity through friendship, doubt, antinomy, and the iconography of Sophia, weaving theology together with set theory and the symbolism of the Russian icon. He did not flee after the Revolution; he stayed, worked as a Soviet electrical engineer in his cassock, and was shot in 1937. Bulgakov took the longer road of the émigré, arriving at sophiology after an early career as a Marxist economist and a celebrated return to the Church. Between them they held that Sophia is the wisdom and ideal content of God, the eternal pattern of creation through which the world is grounded in the divine — neither a fourth person added to the Trinity nor a mere created thing, but a reality mediating between Creator and creature. Bulgakov in particular distinguished a divine Sophia, the self-disclosure of God turned toward the world, from a created Sophia, the same Wisdom as the ground and soul of creation — one reality on two sides of the line between uncreated and created.

This mediating status was exactly what their critics found intolerable, because it seemed to insert a term where Orthodox theology insisted on a clean break: God is uncreated, everything else is made from nothing, and a reality “between” the two threatened to soften that boundary into a graded descent. The grammar of the objection is old. The same suspicion had attached, for centuries, to every scheme in which the world flows out of God by stages rather than being summoned from nothing — the structures studied under gnosticism as systems and under gnosis as the saving knowledge such systems promised, the sefirotic descent of Kabbalah and its Christian afterlife in Christian Kabbalah, and the visionary Wisdom speculation of Boehmean Christian theosophy, in which the divine Sophia is the mirror in which God beholds himself. The sophiologists knew these resemblances and did not disown them; what they denied was that a graded order between God and the world necessarily compromised the freedom of creation or the simplicity of God.

The condemnations of 1935

In 1935 Bulgakov’s sophiology was formally condemned. The Moscow Patriarchate, under the locum tenens Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), issued a decree in September of that year finding that the doctrine made Sophia into something like a fourth hypostasis and so distorted the doctrine of the Trinity. Separately, and from a jurisdiction bitterly at odds with Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad — the Karlovtsy Synod — issued its own condemnation, resting on a critique by Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) that branded the teaching a revival of gnosticism. That two churches otherwise unable to agree on almost anything should converge on the same verdict gave the condemnation unusual weight. The charge in both was, at bottom, the same: that sophiology imported an alien speculative principle into the doctrine of God.

Bulgakov replied that he had only made explicit what the tradition already held — that Wisdom is named in scripture, sung in the liturgy, written into the icons, and that he had done no more than think through, in the open, what the Church had always confessed in worship. He submitted to examination; commissions appointed within his own jurisdiction in Paris, under Metropolitan Evlogy, studied the case and declined to find him a heretic, and he continued to teach and to celebrate the liturgy until his death in 1944. The dispute that ran from roughly 1935 to 1937 — sometimes called the Sophia Affair — was never settled by agreement, and it divides Orthodox theologians still. Its most consequential opponents were not the conservative bishops but a younger generation of theologians, Georges Florovsky above all, who answered sophiology with a rival program: a “neopatristic synthesis” that called Orthodox thought back to the Greek Fathers and away from what it regarded as the German-idealist scaffolding of the Russian systems.

The wider current and the Paris exile

The current ran beyond sophiology proper. Nikolai Berdyaev developed a philosophy of freedom and creativity that sat uneasily with all church authority; for him freedom was not a property within being but a groundless abyss prior to being itself, and the human person a creator in the image of the Creator rather than a creature merely obeying. Semyon Frank elaborated a metaphysics of all-unity in a more sober register, closer to the philosophical mainstream and to the negative theology of Nicholas of Cusa, holding that the absolute is known precisely as the incomprehensible that grounds all comprehension — a debt to apophatic theology, the way of approaching God by saying only what God is not. Others — Nikolai Lossky on intuition, Lev Karsavin on personhood and history, the brothers Trubetskoy — worked on knowledge, suffering, and the meaning of the Russian historical vocation. The whole was less a school with a doctrine than a generation with a temper: a shared conviction that philosophy must answer to the real, that the real is finally personal and divine, and that the cleavage between thought and faith the modern age took for granted was a wound to be healed rather than a fact to be accepted. It belonged to the same effervescence — the religious wing of the Russian Silver Age — that produced the symbolist poets and the occult revival, though the philosophers kept their distance from the séance and the lodge.

What survived the catastrophe survived by leaving. In the autumn of 1922 Lenin ordered the expulsion of scores of intellectuals judged incurably hostile to the new order; the steamers that carried them from Petrograd — the Oberbürgermeister Haken sailing on 29 September, the Preussen in November — became known as the philosophers’ ships, and among the more than a hundred and sixty deported were Berdyaev, Frank, Bulgakov, Lossky, and Ivan Ilyin. The deportation that was meant to silence the religious philosophers instead transplanted them. Berdyaev settled near Paris and made it the capital of Russian thought in exile through his journal Put’ and the YMCA Press; Bulgakov became dean of the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, founded in Paris in 1925 under Metropolitan Evlogy, and it was there — on émigré soil, in a Church cut off from its homeland — that sophiology received both its fullest elaboration and its formal condemnation. Through St. Sergius and the figures trained around it, the questions and the vocabulary of the Russian thinkers entered the bloodstream of twentieth-century Orthodox theology and, through the ecumenical contacts of the emigration, parts of Western Christian thought as well.

Scholarship and sources

The standard narrative history remains Vasily Zenkovsky’s A History of Russian Philosophy, written in emigration and translated into English by George L. Kline in 1953; it reads the whole tradition as a working-out of the relation between God and the world and gives sophiology a central place. The most influential modern reappraisal in English is Paul Valliere’s Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Eerdmans, 2000), which treats the sophiologists not as eccentrics but as a coherent “Russian school” attempting Orthodox theology in a new key, and recovers Bogochelovechestvo as its governing idea. The primary texts are increasingly available in English: Solovyov’s 1878 Lectures on Divine Humanity and his late Justification of the Good; Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth; and Bulgakov’s great trilogy, The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb. The dossier of the 1935 controversy — the Moscow and Karlovtsy condemnations, Bulgakov’s apologia, and Florovsky’s neopatristic reply — is surveyed in the documentary record of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and the circumstances of the 1922 expulsion, the event that made the Paris chapter possible, are documented under the philosophers’ ships. Specialist studies by Michael Meerson, Catherine Evtuhov, and Rowan Williams have placed the school in its philosophical and historical setting.

The deeper architecture of the tradition is by now well mapped. Its vocabulary is Orthodox and its loyalty is to the Church, yet its structures of emanation and descent, its feminine Wisdom, and its insistence on a single graded order of being draw it close to Neoplatonism and to the older Wisdom speculation that runs through Gnostic, Kabbalistic, and Boehmian sources — a kinship the sophiologists treated as confirmation rather than embarrassment, reading Sophia as the thread that bound the Church’s own scripture and liturgy to the wider metaphysics of Wisdom. The doctrine itself, the figure of Sophia as such, is pursued at length under Russian sophiology, and Bulgakov’s life and system under Sergei Bulgakov.

There is a closing irony the history itself supplies. The doctrine that two Russian churches condemned in 1935 had its richest hearing not in Russia, where it was banned, but in the Paris emigration, where it was both written and condemned — and the institute that housed the condemned doctrine became the training ground for the very neopatristic theologians who would spend the next half-century arguing it down. The Wisdom that Solovyov said he met three times, once in the desert, had become, by the end, a quarrel conducted entirely among exiles: Orthodox thinkers cut off from their own soil, divided over whether the Wisdom named in their liturgy could also be named in their dogma, carrying the whole inheritance westward in trunks and on borrowed steamers.

→ Related: Russian Silver Age Esotericism · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Emanation · The One · Sergei Bulgakov · Russian Sophiology · Gnosticism · Logos · Apophatic Theology · Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Christian Kabbalah · Kabbalah