Early life: 1871–1889 Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was born on 16 July 1871 to the family of a rural
Orthodox priest (Nikolai Bulgakov) 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 (1816–1882), 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 (Kadet) Party, which held the most seats in the representative assemblies, the
First and Second Dumas (1906–1907). 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 (1882–1937), 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. 's
Philosophers (1917),
Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov (right) 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 put' and
Voprosy religii, the collections
Questions of Religion,
About Vladimir Solovyov,
On the Religion of Leo Tolstoy,
Problems of Idealism, and
Milestones, the works
Religion of the Vladimir Solovyov Memorial Philosophical Society, and the publishing house
Put', where the most important works of Russian religious thought were published in 1911–1917. In his work during this period, he transitioned from lectures and articles on topics of religion and culture (the most important of which he collected in the two-volume book
Two Cities, published 1911) to original philosophical developments. In 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 .
Priesthood and October Revolution: 1917–1921 Peter Kropotkin (
collections of ''L'Éphéméride anarchiste'') In June 1918, Bulgakov was ordained a deacon and then a priest. He quickly rose to prominence in church circles. He took part in the All-Russia
Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church that elected
patriarch Tikhon of Moscow. Bulgakov rejected the
October Revolution and responded to it with the dialogues
At the Feast of the Gods ("На пиру богов", 1918), written in a style similar to the
Three Talks of Vladimir Solovyov. In July 1918, Bulgakov left Moscow, first going to Kiev then joining his wife and children in
Koreiz in
Crimea. For the next two years, he was a member of the Tauride Diocesan Council in Simferopol and a professor of political economy and
theology at the
Tauride University in
Simferopol. In the works
Philosophy of the Name (written in 1920, published in 1953) and
The Tragedy of Philosophy (written in 1920, published in 1928), written at that time, he revised his view of the relationship between philosophy and dogmatics of Christianity, coming to the conclusion that Christian speculation can be expressed without distortion exclusively in the form of dogmatic theology. When the Bolsheviks captured Crimea in 1920, Bulgakov was dismissed from his teaching position at the university. In 1921, Bulgakov became archpriest and assistant rector of the
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in
Yalta. In September 1922, he was arrested on charges of political unreliability.
Emigration to Prague: 1922–1924 In 1922, Bulgakov was included in a list of scientific and cultural figures subject to deportation, compiled by the
State Political Directorate on the initiative of
Vladimir Lenin. On 30 December 1922, he was deported to
Constantinople on one of the so-called
philosophers' ships without the right to return to the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After a short stay in Constantinople, he arrived in
Prague. In May 1923, with the blessing of Metropolitan
Eulogius Georgiyevsky, he served in Prague's St. Nicholas Cathedral and took the position of professor in the department of church law and theology at the Law Faculty of the in
Berlin. Bulgakov involved himself in the spiritual leadership of Russian youth and participated in the
ecumenical movement. He was founder and leader of the , created with the blessing of
Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, and an organizer and participant in the congresses of the (RSCM). He participated in the first congresses of the RSCM in
Přerov,
Czechoslovakia and Argeron,
France, and continued to supervise it.
Paris: 1925–1944 In July 1925, Bulgakov moved to
Paris. He was a member of the Committee for the Construction of the Sergius Metochion and an assistant to its organizer. He helped found the
St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (''l'Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge''), where he worked until his death. He taught courses on "Holy Scripture of the Old Testament" and "Dogmatic Theology". Bulgakov became involved in the work of the ecumenical movement in 1927 at the World Christian Conference "Faith and Church Order" in
Lausanne. Until the end of the 1930s, he took part in many ecumenical endeavors, becoming an influential figure and ideologue of the movement; in 1934 he made a trip to the
United States. The most promising direction in the ecumenical sphere turned out to be with the
Anglican Church. At the end of 1927 and beginning of 1928, an Anglo-Russian religious congress was held, which resulted in the establishment of the bilateral
Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius. While living in Paris, he completed two dogmatic trilogies on
Sophiology — the first,
The Burning Bush (1926),
The Friend of the Bridegroom (1927),
Jacob’s Ladder (1929); the second,
The Lamb of God,
The Comforter,
The Bride of the Lamb (1939). It is in
The Bride of the Lamb that Bulgakov argues for
apokatastasis. Bulgakov states that humankind will "ultimately be justified." He also argues in this book for a
supramundane fall, saying that "empirical history begins precisely with the fall, which is its starting premise." In 1935, after the publication of his book,
Lamb of God, Bulgakov was accused of teachings contrary to Orthodox dogma by the Metropolitan
Sergius I of Moscow, who recommended his exclusion from the Church until he amended his "dangerous" views. The Karlovtsy Synod of the
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia also joined in this condemnation. Metropolitan Evlogy set up a committee in Paris to investigate Bulgakov's orthodoxy, which reached a preliminary conclusion that his thought was free from heresy. However, an official conclusion was never reached. In 1939, Bulgakov was diagnosed with
throat cancer. He underwent surgery, after which he learned to speak without vocal cords. He served early liturgies in the chapel in the name of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and continued to lecture on dogmatic theology, carry out his pastoral care, and write. Although the outbreak of
World War II limited Bulgakov, he did not stop working on new works and performing services. In 1943, he was awarded a miter. In
occupied Paris, he wrote the work
Racism and Christianity, debunking the ideology of fascism. He finished his last book,
The Apocalypse of John, shortly before his death. On the night of 5–6 June 1944, he had a stroke, after which he remained unconscious for forty days. He died on 13 July 1944. He was buried in the
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery in the southern suburbs of Paris. == Selected works ==