The Sophiology of Sergei Bulgakov: Divine Self-Revelation and the Grammar of Love

Abstract

The last twenty-five years have seen an explosion of interest across English-language theology in the thought of the émigré Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944). In its maturity this thought is defined by its distinctive use of the term Sophia. But the eccentric and multivalent ways Bulgakov deploys the term have so far defied any adequate, unified conceptualization of Sophia’s meaning and function in his philosophical theology. Working inductively from Bulgakov’s theological corpus, with an emphasis on the recent English translations thereof which have fueled the growing interest in him, and drawing particularly from his philosophy of language—which has been so far very little attended to—I argue in this dissertation that the most adequate and fruitful way Bulgakov’s own thinking offers for conceptualizing Sopha is as God’s revelatory self-predicate. I substantiate this claim first with respect to God’s immanent Triune life by explicating the correlations among Sophia identified as love, Sophia identified as the revelation of the Father in the Dyad of Word and Spirit, and Sophia identified as Ousia. Following the logic that God is love, and that love characteristically posits itself through another, I show that for Bulgakov, God’s Triune life constitutes a grammar of love whereby God reveals Himself to Himself in Sophia, God’s all-verbal all-reality. Then I turn to the relation between God and the world, arguing that inasmuch as Creation is a Divine self-repetition ad extra, a reflection in nothingness of the content of God’s loving all, in Bulgakov’s thought the creaturely Sophia represents not God’s revelatory self-predication, but the revelation of God’s sophianic predicates in Love’s self-positing through another—which other is nothing, given its own becoming-being as a gift of participation in the Divine Sophia. Creation, in other words, is the work of God’s love, revealing the same grammar of love inherent to the Triune life, but doing so dialogically, from a position of genuine otherness seeking genuine unity. This otherness is centered on the human being as microcosm, logos of the world, and image of God. Human faith, Bulgakov contends, comprises the subjective corollary of God’s objective self-revelation. Therefore it too manifests also the sophianic grammar of love. But more than this passive mirroring, human persons are called to active, artistic creativity—to the realization in the creaturely Sophia of the Divine Sophia which is its foundation and telos. Most particularly, Bulgakov believes this entails that humans are called to the creative labor of language, to the art of the logos, which strives to express things through their ultimate other—that is, through their sophianic rootedness in the Divine Logos, the not-world in the world, the Word of God’s self-revelation whose words are creation’s being and life. In other words, for Bulgakov, humanity is called to poetry, or to the poetic posture. I argue, finally, that because in Bulgakov’s schema human grammar realistically symbolizes the Divine grammar of love, human poetry offers a unique point of contact with the poetry of God’s own life—Sophia.