Sergei Bulgakov
Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, and economist. Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart has named Bulgakov "the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century." Father Sergei Bulgakov also served as a spiritual father and confessor to Mother Maria Skobtsova. Sergei Bulgakov is best known for his development of a theological system centered on Sophia, the Wisdom of God.
Biography
Early life: 1871–1889
Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was born on 16 July 1871 to the family of a rural Orthodox priest in the town of Livny, Oryol Governorate, in Russia. The family produced Orthodox priests for six generations, beginning in the sixteenth century with their ancestor Bulgak, a Tatar from whom the family name derives. Metropolitan Macarius Bulgakov, one of the major Eastern Orthodox theologians of his days, and one of the most important Russian church historians, was a distant relative.In 1884, Bulgakov graduated from the Livny Theological School. At the age of fourteen, Bulgakov entered the Oryol Theological Seminary. In 1888, however, Bulgakov quit the seminary after a loss of his faith. In the same year, he attempted suicide. Bulgakov later noted that his passion for priesthood waned as he grew disenchanted with Orthodoxy because his teachers were unable to answer his questions. After Bulgakov quit the seminary, he entered Yelets Classical Gymnasium to prepare for the law faculty of the Imperial Moscow University. Among his teachers there was Vasily Rozanov.
Legal Marxism: 1890–1897
In 1890, Bulgakov entered the Imperial Moscow University where he chose to study political economy and law. As he reflected years later, however, literature and philosophy were his natural inclination and he had no interest in law. Bulgakov only chose to study law because it seemed more likely to contribute to his country's redemption. After his graduation from the in 1894, he began graduate studies at the university and taught for two years at the Moscow Commercial Institute. It was during his graduate studies when Bulgakov studied with the economist Alexander Chuprov, on whose recommendation Bulgakov was retained at the Department of Political Economy of Statistics to prepare for the professorship. Bulgakov's thought during his studies with Chuprov has generally been seen through the lens of the Marxist-Populist debate. From this perspective, he has been labeled a "legal Marxist."In 1895, Bulgakov began teaching political economy at the. In the same year, he published a review of Karl Marx's unfinished third volume of Das Kapital, and authored an essay in 1896, "On the Regularity of Social Phenomena." In the following year, Bulgakov published a study "On Markets in Capitalist Conditions of Production." It was these writings that originally established Bulgakov as a significant representative of Marxism in Russia. During his years as a legal Marxist, he had met with Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Victor Adler, and Georgi Plekhanov.
From Marxism to Idealism: 1898–1902
On 14 January 1898, shortly before embarking for Western Europe, Bulgakov married Yelena Tokmakova, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Yelena was the daughter of, owner of the in Crimea.In 1898, Bulgakov received a scholarship for a two-year internship in Western Europe. He left for Germany, where he tested the results of his research in personal correspondence with representatives of German Social Democracy. The result of his research was a two-volume dissertation, Capitalism and Agriculture, released in 1900. The dissertation was intended to test the application of Marx's theory of capitalist societies to agriculture. Bulgakov examined the entire agricultural history of Germany, the United States, Ireland, France, and England. The thesis ended by declaring that Marx's analysis of capitalism, limited by features of the English economy, did not integrate this system with an economic theory of agriculture, and was not a realistic, universal account of capitalist society. Originally intended to be defended as a doctoral dissertation, the work did not receive the highest rating from the Academic Council of Moscow University and was defended as a master's thesis.
In 1900 Bulgakov presented his finished dissertation for examination. It was this examination that led Bulgakov to being a privatdozent at the Kiev University of St. Vladimir and Professor of Political Economy at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1901. It was evident in lectures such as "Ivan Karamazov as a philosophical type" delivered in Kiev that Bulgakov had already distanced himself from Marxism. At the time of Bulgakov teaching about Dostoevsky, the counterweight to Marxism in 20th century Russia was neo-Kantianism; heavily influenced by neo-Kantianism, Bulgakov returned to idealism and believed in the significance of the historical role of the values of goodness and beauty. However, it was the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, who he began to read in 1902, that Bulgakov considered to be the highest synthesis of philosophical thought; this philosophy considered the vital principle of Christianity to be the organizing principle of social creativity. Bulgakov's idealism eventually led him back to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Bulgakov presented the individual stages of his philosophical development in his collection From Marxism to Idealism, published in Saint Petersburg in 1903.
Political turmoil: 1903–1909
Together with Pyotr Struve, Bulgakov published the journal Liberation; together, they were co-founders of the illegal political organization Union of Liberation in 1903. After the Revolution of 1905, its members formed the Constitutional Democratic Party, which held the most seats in the representative assemblies, the First and Second Dumas. Bulgakov did not join the Kadets and instead unsuccessfully attempted to form his own organization, the Union of Christian Politics, which advocated Christian socialism and collaborated with the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle.Amidst the chaos of 1905, Bulgakov made the acquaintance of Pavel Florensky, with whom he would establish a long-lasting friendship. Bulgakov and Florensky were among founding members of the Vladimir Solovyov Memorial Religious-Philosophical Society, which was founded in Moscow at the end of 1905.
In 1905 Bulgakov, along with the Brotherhood of Christian Struggle, bishops, priests, and many others, supported the call for a council of the Orthodox Church in support of social reforms. In 1906, a preconciliar commission prepared six volumes of information for the council. Nicholas II thwarted the planned council, but the information would be put to use when it eventually did convene eleven years later.
In 1906, Bulgakov was editor of the Kiev newspaper Narod. After its closure, he returned from Kiev to Moscow. He taught at Moscow University as a privatdozent in the department of political economy and statistics of the Law Faculty, and was also professor at the Moscow Commercial Institute until 1918.
He was elected to the Second State Duma in 1906 as a non-partisan "Christian socialist" deputy from the Oryol Governorate. In June 1907, the Second State Duma dissolved after barely five months in session.
After the dissolution of the Second State Duma, Bulgakov lost what remaining zeal he had for direct political involvement. Another major factor in his eventual separation from the Union of Liberation was the increasingly anti-Christian direction being championed by leading representatives of left-liberal politics.
During 1904–1909, his focus shifted to an explicitly Christian perspective. Bulgakov also changed his attitude towards the controversial Nicholas II. He believed Nicholas II was responsible for the social problems plaguing Russia. However, Bulgakov also did not appreciate the increasing radicalization of the leftists in Russia and their abandonment of Russian Orthodoxy in favor of a purely secular state; on the contrary, it caused him to uphold the positive value of governance by Nicholas II, even as he continued to detest him, accusing him of promoting the revolution and bringing about the demise of the royal family. Bulgakov continued to struggle with the meaning of political power as he wrote Unfading Light.
File:Nesterov Florensky Bulgakov.jpg|thumb|left|Mikhail Nesterov's Philosophers, Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov
In the summer of 1909, Bulgakov's four-year-old son Ivan died. At the funeral, Bulgakov had a profound religious experience that is generally regarded as his final step in his journey back to Orthodoxy. Bulgakov would later contemplate the meaning of death in his later works, including Unfading Light.
Academia and journalism: 1910–1917
In 1911, Bulgakov left the Moscow University among a large group of liberal-minded university teachers in protest against the policies of the Minister of Public Education Lev Kasso. The following years were the period of Bulgakov's greatest social and journalistic activity. He participated in many endeavors that marked a religious and philosophical revival, such as the journals Novy putIn 1911, Bulgakov was elected fellow chairman of the and a member of the Commission on Church Law at the Moscow Law Society.
In 1913, Bulgakov defended his doctoral dissertation on political economy, Philosophy of Economics, at Moscow University, in which he put forward Christianity as a universal process, the subject of which is Sophia – the world soul, creative nature, ideal humanity. He was elected full professor of political economy at Moscow University.
In 1917, Bulgakov became a delegate of the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity and a member of the All-Russian Local Council of the Orthodox Russian Church, the Religious and Educational Conference under the Cathedral Council, the Commission for Familiarization with the Financial Situation of the Council, and the VI, VII, IX, and XX Departments. He was an author of the Patriarchal Message on Accession to the Throne. From December 1917, he was a member of the.