The Political Theology of Sergius Bulgakov: Correcting Milbank and Papanikolaou

by James R. Wood

The two major political theologians in the West who have recently deployed the thought of Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) take his thought in radically conflicting directions: John Milbank, the leading figure in the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy, perceives Bulgakov to align with and furnish his opposition to secularism and liberal democracy; Aristotle Papanikolaou argues that Bulgakov’s theology necessarily terminates in an enthusiastic endorsement of liberal democracy. Each ignores key texts of Bulgakov. A close reading of the relevant texts and properly situating them in Bulgakov’s overall corpus leads to two conclusions regarding his political theology. First, it cannot be simply labeled either “liberal” or “anti-liberal.” Second, it has an explicitly ecclesial center. Milbank and Papanikolaou err with regard to the first, while the important work recently done by Papanikolaou’s student, Nathaniel Wood, neglects to account for the second. 

Milbank’s Radical Retrieval

Milbank has displayed an increasing interest in the Russian theologian.¹ The appeal of the Russian Orthodox sophiological tradition,² of which Bulgakov was a leading figure, is largely due to its apparent resources to critique the division between sacred and secular which has come to prevail in modern Western societies.³

Milbank’s appreciation for the sophiology of Bulgakov focuses on two themes: deification and ecclesiology. Creation is granted existence so that it might be deified, and thus there can be no such thing as a purely natural society that is self-sufficient and devoid a telos in theosis. Milbank connects these insights with his own views on the ecclesial centering of the political. For Milbank, all genuine social theory is first and foremost ecclesiology.⁴ This means that contemporary political theology must recover an emphasis on the Church as the site of graced life, as the unique telos toward which humanity is lured. Social life is fulfilled therein, and thus Milbank seeks to direct political power to support and promote the Church. The goal is the “gradual subsumption of the secular polity . . . into the ecclesia.”⁵

It is striking that Milbank’s engagement with the Russian theologian never directly discusses Bulgakov’s texts that are devoted to explicitly political themes. To do so would complicate matters, since Bulgakov is much less anti-liberal than Milbank. Though the sophiologist rejects the nature-grace dualism, Bulgakov does not collapse the social to the ecclesial or demonize liberal democracy. True, the Church is central in Bulgakov’s non-dualistic metaphysic, and thus he eschews any sharp division between sacred and secular; but he explicitly denounces Christendom and calls for greater openness to liberal democracy. 

Papanikolaou’s Liberal Interpretation

Papanikolaou is regarded as the single author who has most successfully incorporated modern liberties into Orthodox theology, thereby justifying some form of compatibility between Orthodox faith and liberal democracy.⁶ In his groundbreaking work,The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy,⁷ Papanikolaou makes a case that a political theology grounded in the Orthodox emphasis on divine-human communion is compatible with liberal democracy. Discussing Bulgakov, Papanikolaou argues that his sophiology leads to a robust endorsement of an American-style form of democracy, as a “necessary precondition” for the fulfillment of divine-human communion (53). The communion with God for which the world was created requires a free response, and thus Christians should seek a political order that secures such a free response. Papanikolaou argues that this necessitates some form of secularism, and further posits that union with the divine can be realized “only through a political form in which [C]hurch and state are separated” (38). Furthermore, Papanikolaou conceives of collaborative public efforts by Christians and non-Christians as iconically mirroring the divine human communion even though they remain distinct from the Church (144, 161, 199).

In all of these ways, Papanikolaou is clearly at odds with Milbank. Though he attends more closely to Bulgakov’s explicitly political writings, there are two main issues with Papanik­o­laou’s account. First, his conclusions are far more positive than Bulgakov’s on the merits of liberal democracy. Whereas Bulgakov offers a qualified, provisional affirmation of the broad contours of liberal democracy, calling it the “most favorable” among the contempo­rary options,⁸ he was also transparent about its endemic flaws and problematic tendencies. Papanikolaou goes much further by saying that an Orthodox political theology that is grounded in divine-human communion “must be one that unequivocally endorses a political community that is democratic in a way that structures itself around the modern liberal principles” (12); or, in other words, “a liberal democratic form of political commu­nity” is the “inevitable result” of Christian theosis (80). This leads to a second concern. As one reviewer has noted, Papanikolaou “evacuates [theosis] of ecclesial content,” rendering it separable from “its ecclesial and sacramental matrix”⁹ in ways that radically diverge from Bulgakov. Papanikolaou even goes so far as to argue that seeking to draw persons into the Church should not constitute a primary objective of Christians. Such ideas are only conceivable if one ignores, as Papanikolaou does, Bulgakov’s major ecclesiological text: The Bride of the Lamb. In Bulgakov’s introduction, he declares that particular book to constitute “the most important part of this trilogy of Divine-humanity,”¹⁰ and the translator describes it as “the greatest sophiological work ever written.”¹¹ Therefore, failure to incorporate the arguments of that text for the explication of the social and political implications of Bulgakov’s sophiology seriously undermines Papanikolaou’s argument. As we will see below, this work clarifies the prominent place ascribed to the Church in Bulgakov’s theology, and puts it in conflict with Papanikolaou’s particular political vision.

Nathaniel Wood’s Careful Corrective

Nathaniel Wood has recently emerged as a voice of reason as it pertains to this debate regarding the Orthodox political theology which flows from Bulgakov’s corpus. Wood declares that his primary aim, in alignment with his doctoral supervisor, is “to ensure that the critics of liberalism do not control the narrative about the political implications of theosis.”¹² But he offers some important correctives. Wood admits the centrality of the Church as Christ’s Body in Bulgakov’s social vision, and accounts for Bulgakov’s language of the “churching” of society,¹³ and similar such statements.¹⁴ He also deals with Bulga­kov’s explicit criticisms of secular liberalism and the false anthropology which often undergirds it. Bulgakov’s positive comments about American liberal democracy, Wood explains, are set alongside much more sobering assessments of liberalism.¹⁵ Though a politics of theosis can celebrate advancements within liberal democracy toward a free, dignified humanity as well as championing the general protections it affords to ensure the possibility of full development in divine-human communion, Orthodox political theology must also recognize “the innate danger of secular society to slide toward an exclusive, atheistic humanism that cuts this development short.”¹⁶ Bulgakov clearly states that Christians “cannot close their eyes to the less desirable results” of political liberalism.¹⁷ So it is evident that Bulgakov does not offer an uncritical endorsement of liberalism, especially the secularism that often attends it.

While Bulgakov would certainly share with Milbank many concerns about the underlying philosophy of much contemporary secular liberalism, he would not, as a result, collapse the political into the ecclesial or seek to restore the privileging of the Church. Bulgakov’s dual-emphasis on theosis and personalism lends itself toward greater openness to political liberalism. Bulgakov exhibits far more hope that liberal orders can be christianized. The principal theological concept that enables Bulgakov to avoid Milbank’s antagonism between the Church and liberal democracy is, according to Wood’s analysis, Chalcedonian Christology.¹⁹

According to Bulgakov, the sophianic transformation of culture must take on christological contours. He argues that it is imperative to extend Chalcedonianism in order to tease out its positive, humanistic implications for Christian ethics and political theology.²⁰ The Church’s relationship to the broader society “must conform to the manner in which Christ, as God, united himself to his own humanity, raised it up to himself, and made it into an instrument of divine action in history.”²¹ This entails an “inward overcoming” of the distance and alienation between humanity and God.²² Therefore, there can be no contra­diction between human freedom and divine sovereignty. The politics of theosis, explicated in terms of Chalcedonian Christology, thus preserves the difference between God and man, Church and the secular structures of society, all the while seeking the elevation of the purely human to its proper deification.²³ This rules out any political Nestorianism, which would separate the realities and abdicate Christian responsibility. It likewise rules out any political monophysitism, which would attempt to subsume society into the Church, absorbing the former through domination.²⁴ In contrast to these, Bulgakov, makes clear his conviction that “if the state can be penetrated by the spirit of the Church, it must be from within, not from without, not from above but from below.”²⁵ Rather than dominate or separate, the Church must overcome the secular through kenotic elevation.

As Wood summarizes, the implications of this are that the following two dynamics complement one another in Bulgakov’s political theology: the liberalizing of the Church’s political action in the world AND the “churching” of liberalism.²⁶ Because of Wood’s primary objectives, he foregrounds the former in his writings. For the remainder of this essay, I intend to elaborate on the other half of the dialectic in order to more fully capture the ecclesial center of Bulgakov’s political theology. While the liberalizing component, manifest in the foregoing analysis, indicates that Bulgakov cannot be identified with Milbank’s radical anti-liberalism, this element will reveal that neither does he perfectly align with Papanikolaou’s apologia for liberalism.

The Ecclesial Center of Bulgakov’s Humanism

Bulgakov’s political vision has an ecclesial center which cannot be denied and should not be obscured in any political theology in his name. The social vision which arises out of his understanding of humanity’s vocation to divine-human communion is an “ecclesial humanism.”²⁷ For Bulgakov, the politics of theosis finds its telos in the Church; this is because theosis is essentially an ecclesial calling. In Bulgakov’s life, he became increasingly disillusioned with political activism and instead turned his attention to the Church. He returned to Orthodoxy in 1907, after his brief stint with the Second Duma, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1918. This corresponds with his rejection of “godless humanism” in preference for a more explicitly “Christian humanism.”²⁸ His mature theology conceives of such a humanism as fundamentally beginning with the doctrine of the Church. At this point, he is intent on explicating the convergence between humanism and the Church of divine-human communion which was established through the incarnation. Thus, the theme of his major trilogy focuses on the incarnation and its implications. One of the primary conclusions of this dogmatic exploration is the ethical injunctive of “churching” the culture, mentioned above.

The culmination of his trilogy on divine-humanity is The Bride of the Lamb — an explicitly ecclesiological text.²⁹ Therefore, any political theology which attempts to build upon the sophiology and theology of theosis as developed in Bulgakov cannot neglect to account for the prominence which this text ascribes to the Church — a motif which is already expressed in various ways in earlier works.

Bulgakov identifies the Church as the embodiment of sobornost, the society of love that gathers humanity (262). Only in the Church does one find true love, which is the product of the Holy Spirit gifting the Body of Christ with the love for which humanity was created — i.e., “churchly love.”³⁰ “Churchly sobornost” brings about “real human unity-in-plurality,”³¹ and thus upholds the proper balance between person and whole as opposed to any forms of false individualism, oppressive collectivism, and hostile racism.³² In his important essay, “The Soul of Socialism,”³³ Bulgakov argues that this qualifies the Church as the sole possessor “of the principle of true social order.” It is “living sobornost” — the culmination of social life. This entails, Bulgakov provocatively declares, that “the ordering of society . . . must be overcome and dissolved in ecclesial life.” Therefore, ecclesiology must be at the center of social theory, and a personalist politics must find its telos in ecclesial sobornost.

As the true society of sobornal love, it is not an “alternative society,” but society’s ful­fill­ment. The Church is “deified humanity” — the site of divine life “revealing itself in the life of the creature,” and thus “the deification of the creature” (258). Sophiology explains this by presenting the Church as the ground and goal of creation.³⁴ The Church is both the “sophianic foundation of the world” as well as the fulfillment of God’s eternal plan con­cern­ing creation” — i.e., the “sophianization of the world,” the realization of creation’s “inner entelechy” (253ff). The inherent “sophianicity” of the world and humanity is actualized in the incarnation and through the Church as Christ’s Body in the world (404). The Church, as creaturely Sophia deified, is the peak of creation (525). As such, she is the foundation of a new humanity and a new world, as well as being the primary instrument for the eventual deification of all of creation.

As the Body of Christ, the Church is Christ’s humanity and the site of the Spirit’s life and work in the world. It can, accordingly, be described as the incarnation itself, or the “deifi­ca­tion of human nature.”³⁵ Because all human beings belong to Christ’s humanity, it can also be asserted that to the Church, as the Body of Christ, belongs all humanity (266). The Church cannot love Christ’s humanity without loving all of humanity (520).

Bulgakov thus rules out any sort of sharp division between Church and world as well as ecclesiastical triumphalism. It is neither possible nor permissible to identify the Church with a single empirical body in history (271). But at the same time, the Church cannot be simply equated with humanity, which would dissolve the Church into a vague humanism. It is critical to “distinguish the Church (and the churches) as an institution of grace from the rest of the world that lies outside the Church” (267f). While the whole of creation belongs to the Church, this reality is eschatologically conditioned. Ultimately, the domain of the Church will coincide with the limits of humanity; but the dissolution of these limits awaits the parousia when the kenosis of Christ and the Spirit will cease, the glory of the Lamb and His Bride will be revealed, and the world will be glorified (419-424). In the interim, the Spirit sanctifies man through the Church and her sacraments, moving the world “invisibly . . . toward its transfiguration” (419). At the same time, the Church is “opposed to what is anti-church,” for such forces seek to undermine the world’s own inner entelechy to receive glorification (523).

The Church is properly conceived, then, as a sacrament; rather, as the sacrament of sacra­ments — the “all-sacrament” (272f). The Church has a “symbolic being in the world, as the divine in the human, the invisible in the visible, as Divine-humanity” (272). She is a unique realization of God’s original design for all of humanity. Ultimately, the whole of creation will reflect what is represented already in the sacramental reality of the Church. This enlists the Church to co-operate with the sophianic transfiguration of the world, which is grounded in the sacramental life of the Church. If the Church is to sophianize secular society, she must bear witness in her own social life to another politics as she sacramentally receives God’s gifts and becomes a community of kenotic love and sobor­nost.³⁶ It is also imperative, pace Papanikolaou, to draw persons into the Church. This visible Body is indispensable and accessible to all. The Bride is “the repository of the gifts of grace;” and, as such, her sacramental life constitutes “the divinely instituted path of the life of grace. One cannot transcend this path” (290f).

All of the foregoing discussion of the centrality of the Church in Bulgakov’s social human­ism provides the necessary backdrop against which one can then properly interpret the meaning of his conception of “‘churching’ the culture.” That particular phrase appears in the context of Bulgakov’s inquiry regarding the possibility of reforming culture according to Christian wisdom. He cites the witness of the early Church as exemplary. Christianity proved to bring about a new social order beyond the boundaries of ecclesiastical life, serving as the “spiritual leaven”³⁷ of humanity. Following this paradigm, the Church must be “the conscience of a society,” struggling to achieve “victory from within.”³⁸ This mode is distinct from theocratic domination, which Bulgakov attributes to medieval Catholicism, as well as passive acceptance of the privatization of the faith, which he declares is characteristic of Protestantism. In contrast to the former, Christianity must recover its sense of the Church as the hidden energy of the world.³⁹ Against the latter, the Church should not limit its concerns to the inner life of man, but must retrieve the conviction that the “influence of the historical ecclesiality on the history of culture can inwardly transform the elements of the world” (331). He labels this vision “ecclesial humanism.” Through her distinctive, communal, sacramental life of sobornal love, the Church bears witness to the higher mode of social existence to which society can and must strive. In a liberal democ­racy, the Church, then, is called to reveal in her own life the “inner goal of liberalism, the fulfillment of liberal society’s own deepest humanistic commitments.”⁴⁰ To capture this dynamic, Bulgakov provocatively pairs two images for the Church’s creative force in history: she is both the Ark which saves those inside her from the flood of corruption as well as the Leaven that transforms the whole dough of humanity. This means that human history is truly the history of the Church — provided it is understood that the Church is the “inner spiritual force that accomplishes Divine-humanity” (334), which is the destiny of the world (525).

Conclusion

Bulgakov’s thought cannot be simply assimilated into the political-theological projects of either Milbank or Papanikolaou. He is neither radically “anti-liberal” nor an enthusiastic, uncritical proponent of liberal democracy. His theology can conceive of democratic societies being deified, on the condition that the centrality of the Church is not obscured. Any political theology in Bulgakov’s name must capture these complex dynamics which constitute his “ecclesial humanism.”⁴¹

 

Footnotes

[1] Milbank’s most sustained engagement of Bulgakov appears in his essay, “Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon,” in Encounter Between Eastern  Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word (edited by Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).
[2] For a concise explanation of the key contours of sophiology, see Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015), 58. “The fundamental intuition of sophiology is relatively easy to enunciate; it is that the gulf between the uncreated God and Creation, brought into being out of nothing, does not put Creation in opposition to God; rather Wisdom constitutes a kind of metaxu, ‘between’, between God and humans/Creation, for Wisdom is that through which God created the universe, and it is equally through wisdom that the human quest for God finds fulfillment. Wisdom, one might say, is the fact that God turns towards his Creation, and the face that Creation, in humankind, turns towards God. Creation is not abandoned by God, it is not godless, for apart from God it would not be at all; it is not deprived of grace, for it owes its existence to grace. Rather Creation is graced, it is holy; in Creation God may be encountered.”
[3] Milbank flagged this interest earlier in a book on Henri de Lubac: The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
[4] See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 382.
[5] John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 256.
[6]  See Kristina Stoeckl, “Modernity and Political Theologies,” in Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges and Divergent Positions (edited by Kristina Stoeckl, Ingeborg Gabriel, and Aristotle Papanikolaou; New York: T&T Clark, 2017), 21; Vassilio N. Makrides, “Political Theology in Orthodox Contexts: Specificities and Particularities in Comparison with Western Latin Christianity,” in Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity, 46.
[7] Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Citations in text.
[8] See Sergei Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church (translated by Lydia Kesich; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 161ff; “Social Teaching in Modern Russian Orthodox Theology,” in Williams, Towards a Russian Political Theology,” 282; and “Heroism and the Spiritual Struggle,” in Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology (edited by Rowan Williams; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999) 78.
[9] Vigen Guroian, “Godless Theosis: A Review of The Mystical As Political,” First Things (April 2014); http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/04/godless-theosis; accessed April 5, 2019.
[10]  Sergei Bulgakov, “To the Reader,” in Sergei Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (translated by Boris Jakim; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), xvii.
[11]  Boris Jakim, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Sergei Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (translated by Boris Jakim; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), xiii.
[12] Nathaniel Wood, “Deifying Democracy: Liberalism and the Politics of Theosis (PhD dissertation: Fordham University, 2017), 8.
[13] See Sergei Bulgakov, “The Soul of Socialism,” in Sergii Bulgakov, Towards a Russian Political Theology (edited by Rowan Williams; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 256.
[14] See Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 159ff.
[15] See Nathaniel Wood, “‘I Have Overcome the World’: The Church, the Liberal State, and Christ’s Two Natures in the Russian Politics of Theosis,” in Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine (edited by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou; New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 155.
[16] Wood, “Russian Politics of Theosis,” 156f.
[17] Bulgakov, Orthodox Church, 163.
[18] Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 109ff.
[19] See Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 211.
[20] See Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 7. Wood argues that Milbank misses the way the way that Chalcedonian Christology shapes Bulgakov’s political theology, informing the relation between Church and society.
[21] Wood, “Russian Politics of Theosis,” 160.
[22] See Wood, “Russian Politics of Theosis,” 164f; Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 231f; Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, 331.
[23] See Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 229ff.
[24] See Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 232-243; Wood, “Russian Politics of Theosis,” 165. See also Sergei Bulgakov, The Comforter (translated by Boris Jakim; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 220ff.
[25] Bulgakov, Orthodox Church, 159.
[26]See Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 186.
[27]See Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, 331.
[28] See Bulgakov, “Social Teaching,” 278f.
[29] References provided in text.
[31] See Bulgakov, Comforter, 317ff.
[32] Bulgakov, “Soul of Socialism,” 259.
[33] See Williams, Towards a Russian Political Theology, 178.
[34] Bulgakov, “Soul of Socialism,” 264. The following quotations come from that page. All emphasis is original to Bulgakov as represented in the Jakim translation.
[35] See Bulgakov, Orthodox Church, 6; Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, 265f.
[36] See Bulgakov, Orthodox Church, 1f.
[37] See Wood, “Russian Politics of Theosis,” 167; Wood, “Deifying Democracy,” 181.
Bulgakov, “Soul of Socialism,” 254.
[38] Bulgakov, “Soul of Socialism,” 256f. Emphasis Bulgakov’s.
[39] See Williams, Towards a Russian Political Theology, 270.
[40] Wood, “Russian Politics of Theosis,” 168. Emphasis Wood’s.
[41] This article is an abridged version of “Neither Radical nor Liberal: The Ecclesial Humanism of Sergei Bulgakov,” Logos 60 (2019): 9-41 (with permission).

* * *

James R. Wood is a doctoral candidate in theology at Wycliffe College (University of Toronto). His research interests focus on political theology, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology. James is currently working as an editor at First Things Magazine. His writings have appeared in a variety of academic theological journals as well as popular publications. This summer he will begin teaching at Redeemer University in Ancaster, ON.