Review of Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal

Bulgakov, Sergius. Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal. Translated by Roberto De La Noval. Introduction by David Bentley Hart. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021, pp. 228, $41, hardback.

This is an exceedingly challenging volume, not only for the technical sophistication of Bulgakov’s theological and philosophical arguments, but also because of the breadth of the streams of thought that flow together in his reasons, the opacity of Bulgakov’s own cultural moment to modern Western readers, and the obscurity of the concept of Sophiology itself.

Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) was a Russian Orthodox priest, economist, theologian, and professor. After being deported from Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, he settled in Paris, where he helped found the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, and where he was widely engaged in ecumenical work. He is most well-known today for his focus on Sophiology, in which Sophia, or the Wisdom of God, is the divine essence in relation to the world that is created in the image of God. For Bulgakov, Sophia is both divine, being identical to the divine essence and life, and created, as the unifying presence of trinitarian action in the creation, redemption, and glorification of the world that grants and fulfills the world’s destiny of unification with the life of God. Central to Sophiology is the idea of ‘co-imaging’ between God and creation, which is based upon the incarnation of the Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within the Church as his body.

While this idiosyncratic approach engenders fresh and rich reflection on any and all theological topics, Sophiology also earned Bulgakov the suspicion and eventual condemnation of various factions within the Russian Orthodox Church. Bulgakov’s thought has more recently become known and celebrated within the Anglophone world, being lauded as one of the “true titans of twentieth-century theology” by David Bentley Hart (p. ix). This recently published volume, filled mostly with heretofore untranslated essays now given to us in English through the efforts of Roberto De La Noval, is remarkable simply for the breadth of theological topics and the depth of reflection gathered around the topic of death, a concept not normally focused on for its own theological luminescence. The fact that the entirety of Bulgakov’s thought is thoroughly shaped by his concept of Sophia makes this a profoundly unique body of work with the promise of generating truly fresh insights into the nature of death, the relationship between our world now and the kingdom of God, and even the experiences of faith and suffering.

At the conceptual center of Sophiology of Death is an extended essay of the same title, which argues that death “must be understood not negatively … but positively … [as] the gate of immortality” (pp. 157–158) because of the unification of the death of fallen, created Sophia (the world as image of God) and the Divine Sophia of the Son who was resurrected from this death. This concept is ultimately at the center of each essay regardless of topic, as Bulgakov sees death as united to the Son of God, in whom Divine and Created Sophia are united together, making a proper understanding of death necessary to understand the relation between the life of this world and the life of the kingdom of God to come.

The essays can be divided into two groups. The first three chapters comprise the first group, which lay the conceptual groundwork for the main exploration of the concept of death by exploring the framing concepts of much of the contemporary eschatological discussion: the difference between Millenarian and eschatological thought (“The Foundational Antinomy of the Christian Philosophy of History”), the relationship between the Church, the Kingdom of God, and the imperial powers of the ‘kingdoms’ of the world (“On the Kingdom of God”), and the question of how to “enchurch the culture” (p. 38) without slipping into cultural partisanism or nostalgia for the old Christendom (“The Soul of Socialism (Part II)”).

For Bulgakov, Sophia is both divine, being identical to the divine essence and life, and created, as the unifying presence of trinitarian action in the creation, redemption, and glorification of the world that grants and fulfills the world’s destiny of unification with the life of God. Central to Sophiology is the idea of ‘co-imaging’ between God and creation, which is based upon the incarnation of the Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within the Church as his body.

The second group, which is the main part of the compilation, enters into the concept of death through the question of how many will be saved. Chapters 4 (“The Problem of ‘Conditional Immortality'”) and 8 (“Augustinianism and Predestination”) confront the main theories which attempt to limit the number of those who will be saved, while chapters 5–7 engage directly with the concept of apocatastasis, or the universal reconciliation of all things, including the evil spirits. Throughout these five chapters, Sophiology functions largely in the background, with the result that the reader unfamiliar with the nuances of the concept might miss the way in which it shapes Bulgakov’s entire method. The titular essay, however, provides the clearest and most expansive explanation of Sophiology in the book, specifically in reference to how the concept of death is transformed in its light. It is the sophianization of the human nature of Christ, that is, the perfection of humanity in the person of the God-man, that enables the sophianization of our own natures, as well as that of the whole world (see p. 123). And here, too, death takes its proper place in the process of the glorification (that is, the sophianization) of the world—it is not the undoing of humanity’s imaging of God but the path to its fullest expression in the resurrection. Though death’s “true source is original sin,” the fact that Christ united himself to our nature (that is, created Sophia) and plumbed the depths of the fall reveals death as “the gate of immortality … disclosed in this light as a necessary and thus a grace-bestowing and joyous event in the sophianization of the world” (p. 158). This “necessity” of death, as well as Bulgakov’s strong insistence that Christ would have become incarnate in the absence of the fall, may mark the only truly unique assertions about the nature of death and immortality found in these essays. As most of the rest of his arguments can be found in other kenotic theologies, such as that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, this “necessity” highlights the contribution of Bulgakov’s Sophiology.

The last two chapters are a sermon Bulgakov preached on the death of the Virgin Mary (“Homily on the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God”) and the brief note of instructions left by him concerning the method of his burial. The inclusion of these two pastoral and personal elements complements the surprisingly personal excursus in the middle of the titular essay, “Sophiology of Death.” There, after a section of the most theologically rigorous discussion in the volume, Bulgakov tells the story—and in great detail—of his emotional, physical, and spiritual state surrounding his diagnosis with and subsequent surgery upon advanced throat cancer. One comes away from reading this volume with the impression that it is an exceedingly rare example of intensive theological thought that is thoroughly integrated with the personal and pastoral realities implicated in the task of theology and then applied to a topic that is perhaps often shied away from precisely because of its most personal nature—that is, the death that is unavoidable for each individual.

This is an exceedingly challenging volume, not only for the technical sophistication of Bulgakov’s theological and philosophical arguments, but also because of the breadth of the streams of thought that flow together in his reasons, the opacity of Bulgakov’s own cultural moment to modern Western readers, and the obscurity of the concept of Sophiology itself. Before reading this volume, the reader would do well to read Bulgakov’s smaller volume Sophia: The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, which provides a much more succinct introduction to Sophiology than Bulgakov’s other works, including the present collection of essays.