Condemnation of the teachings of Rev. S.N. Bulgakov about Sofia. Decree of the Moscow Patriarchate of September 7, 1935

Metropolitan Eleutherius of Lithuania and Vilna Listened to: the sentence of his Beatitude with the following content; "I have received information that a professor of dogmatic theology at the Russian Theological Institute in Paris, a famous writer, Archpriest S.N. Bulgakov, in his published works and lectures, develops a special teaching about Sophia - the Wisdom of God. Some are carried away by this teaching and themselves begin to understand and interpret the Christian teaching in a “Sophian” way; others are confused by its originality and often obvious disagreement with the teachings of the Church. I asked the Governor of our foreign churches in Western Europe, the Most Reverend Metropolitan of Lithuania, to provide me with information about the teachings of Bulgakov. On the instructions of the Metropolitan, A. Stavrovsky compiled a detailed outline of the teachings of Bulgakov. systematic clarification of Bulgakov's opinions. The delivered material makes it possible to draw the following conclusion about Bulgakov's teachings. First of all, it seems inappropriate to indicate individual points of Bulgakov’s teaching, where it clearly contradicts church teaching, sometimes repeating heresies already condemned by the Church. Bulgakov’s characterization is not in such particular contradictions. These are only the details of his system, only direct consequences of the main principle on which his entire teaching about Sophia - the Wisdom of God - is built. This very principle is not ecclesiastical, and the system built on it is so independent that it can either replace the teachings of the Church or yield to it, but cannot merge with it. It must be said that Bulgakov himself does not seem to insist on the “churchliness” of his teaching. On the contrary, as a true intellectual, he looks at church tradition somewhat from above, as a stage that has already been passed and left behind. Theological thought that had become dead in Byzantium for Bulgakov has recently begun to flow again as a living stream in the heterodox West, in particular in Protestant, so-called kenotic theology (“kenosis” - exhaustion of the Divine). Bulgakov wants to proceed from this revival of theological thought in order to take a further (in comparison with the so-called school dogmatics, and, perhaps, with Orthodoxy itself) step in the development of Christian teaching. With all this, both in his rank (archpriest) and in his position (professor of dogmatics at the Orthodox Theological Institute), Bulgakov is in some way an official representative of the Orthodox Church, and the latter is by no means indifferent to what he preaches as Her teaching. In general, Bulgakov’s system resembles the semi-pagan and semi-Christian teachings of the first centuries, the Gnostics, etc. Moreover, the doctrine of Wisdom, the Logos, or the mediation between God and the created world was the main problem of the Gnostics. Coming to Christianity with the remnants of pagan philosophy, the Gnostics could not help but encounter church teaching. True to the Gospel word: no one has ever seen God (John 1:18), the Church did not demand: Show us the Father (14:18) in order to know Him with our earthly knowledge. The glory of God is that He is God ineffable, invisible, incomprehensible (Eucharistic prayer of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom). The revelation about the Heavenly Father cannot be reduced to the level of ordinary curiosity, much less unceremoniously transported, mixing wheat with tares (Jer. 23:28–29). For a believer, this is a shrine, which can only be approached by wearing out one’s boots (Exodus 3:5), having cleansed oneself not only of sin, but also of all sensual, material images (impregnable darkness in vision). The Gnostics sought philosophical knowledge, and since the frank teaching about the incomprehensible God did not provide concrete material for their philosophical constructions, the Gnostics filled in what was missing with imagination, giving imaginary sensual images to the invisible, imageless existence. Sometimes the result was a poem of grandiose scope, striking in its depth and beauty. But this was not the truth, but imagination, “deception,” deception and self-deception (deceiving and deceiving, 2 Tim. 3:13). The special danger of this delusion was that it was hidden behind terms and concepts borrowed from the Church. Caution was needed so as not to be carried away by a beautiful mirage and not to deviate from “sound teaching” into “vain talk” (1 Tim. 1:10; 6:10). A tangible revelation of prelest was that the habit of giving spiritual existence a sensual image and presenting spiritual relationships under the guise of sensual sometimes went so far that in the proper sense, carnal movements were mistaken for spiritual and even for those inspired by God. Of course, not everyone got to this point; but the very possibility of such fruits speaks volumes about what the tree was like. Bulgakov's system was also created not only by philosophical thought, but also by creative imagination. This, too, is a poem, captivating both in height and in its appearance: it operates with terms and concepts common in Orthodox dogma, in Holy Scripture, and so on. But here’s the question: is it the church content that Bulgakov puts into this new form? Can our Orthodox Church of Christ recognize Bulgakov’s teaching as its teaching? To solve this issue, there is no need to present and analyze Bulgakov’s entire system. In order not to be hypnotized by it, let's approach it from the outside: let's take a few basic provisions of Orthodox dogma and see what they turn into in Bulgakov's interpretation. I. God is one in essence and threefold in Persons How one pure, absolutely uncomplicated and indivisible Spirit can have three Persons, i.e. three consciousnesses or three “I”s, not reducible to one another, will remain a mystery to us. In the same way, the statement: “The single beginning of the Divinity in the Trinity - the Father begets the Son and gives birth to the Holy Spirit” is more likely a subtle hint at new secrets within the Divinity than an attempt to reveal them. According to the teachings of Bulgakov, in the Holy Trinity, in addition to the three hypostases, it is necessary to distinguish Sophia - the Wisdom of God. Sophia is God’s thought about the created world, inherent in God from the ages, the ideal image of the world. And since the thought of God cannot remain only a thought without implementation, only a ghost of existence, then Sophia is a spiritual reality, a being and, moreover, a living one. Sophia is not only the object of God’s love, but also responds to God with love, loves God. As a living being capable of spiritual love, Sophia should have consciousness, a hypostasis. At first Bulgakov taught this way, stipulating in every possible way that this is a hypostasis of a different kind, different from the Three Hypostases of the Divine. But even with all the reservations, this meant clearly denying the Christian teaching about the Holy Trinity. Now Bulgakov identifies Sophia with the non-hypostatic “usia”, with the being of God. As a non-hypostatic, Sophia responds to God’s love only passively, only with surrendering, or feminine love. She is the “eternal feminine” in God; Heavenly Aphrodite, as Plato and Plotinus called her. The names of Plato and Plotinus show quite clearly the true nature of Bulgakov's system. According to the Christian view, love, even feminine and passive, in order to be spiritual, much less Divine, must be conscious, i.e. belong to the Hypostasis, and not to a hypostatic being in nature. Otherwise, it will already be an instinct, a “wordless” movement uncontrolled by the mind, completely unthinkable in the Absolute Spirit. Even Eve was sent such unconscious, natural love, attraction to her husband (Gen. 3:16), only after the Fall. Speaking about the relationship of the Three Hypostases to Sophia (“usia”), Bulgakov considers Sophia to be inherent in all three Hypostases, but distinguishes between the self-revelation of the Second Hypostasis, when Sophia is the Logos, or Wisdom in the proper sense, and the self-revelation of the Third Hypostasis, when Sophia is the Glory of God, the joy of God about Himself. Further, justifying his anthropocentric point of view, on which he builds his entire system (as if forgetting that the history of mankind does not exhaust even the life of the entire created world, for example angels, much less the life of the Divine), Bulgakov argues that the initial axiom of revelation is the conformity between the Divinity and humanity. Hence Sophia is the pre-eternal Humanity in God as the Divine prototype and the basis of human existence. Bulgakov again wants to understand the difference between the Son and the Holy Spirit in their relationship to Sophia as Humanity in God as the difference between two spiritual principles in God by analogy with the two principles in man: male and female. Just as the hypostasis of the Logos is the hypostasis of Christ, who was incarnated in a male child and became a “perfect man” at the age, so the hypostasis of the Spirit is most fully revealed to us in the Mother of God and becomes reality for us in the Church, which is the Spirit and the Bride. For the Orthodox consciousness, this appropriation of Sophia as the Glory of God to the Holy Spirit is unexpected (after all, the Son of God is called the radiance of the glory of the Father), and it is also unexpected that the Holy Spirit, the Finisher of the work of Christ, this self-commanding power, autocratically going out into the world (the service of Pentecost), spoken in the prophets, acting in the sacraments of the Church, is called the passive, or feminine, principle in God. In general, it is difficult to say what specific benefit in the sense of understanding for us the secrets of the life of the incomprehensible Divinity this unknown-from-where distinction between two principles in the simple being of God gives us: male and female. The riskiness of such discussions about God and their extreme seductiveness is emphasized by the fact that Bulgakov wants to see the image of God in man precisely in the duality of the sexes. From here it is not so far from the deification of sexual life, as it was among some of the Gnostics, or among the so-called “spiritual Christians,” or among some of our secular writers like V.V. Rozanov. We do not at all want to say that Bulgakov teaches this way. But everything tends to develop: what the teacher did not finish, the student can finish, and can come to conclusions from which the teacher tried with horror to deviate. This is where the temptation lies. It is hardly necessary to add that Bulgakov’s teaching about the essence of God has nothing in common with church tradition and does not belong to the Orthodox Church of Christ. II. On the Incarnation of the Son and the Word of God We believe that the fall of man, which the Son of God came to correct, was by no means included in the plans of the Creator. Man was created, it is true, with the theoretical possibility of falling, as free, but this possibility was more than balanced by the positive possibility of remaining in primordial sinlessness, and in the latter, primordial people were always expected to receive the support of God’s special providence for them. If man had resisted, the entire history of mankind would have turned out completely differently than it does now. Like the angels who did not sin, man would normally grow in the likeness of God, would unfalteringly reveal all the good principles inherent in his nature, and would steadily overcome the theoretical possibility of fall until, like the angels, it would turn into an impossibility. Being healthy, a person would not require a doctor (Matthew 9:12), and therefore the incarnation of the Son of God would not have taken place. This was the original plan for the structure of the earthly world, proposed by the Creator to human freedom and not implemented by it. Of course, as the omniscient One, the Lord from all eternity foresaw the fall of man, and also provided for the plan of salvation - the incarnation of the Son of God. But to foresee does not mean to will or predetermine. In this sense, from the point of view of God’s intentions or desires, the fall of man and the resulting incarnation of the Son of God can be called an accident, introduced into the original plan of the universe by a free creature. Without holding the Creator responsible for the fall of man, Revelation does not consider man to be the initiator of the fall. The devil sinned first (1 John 3:8); man fell through the envy of the devil, who fell earlier and then deceived people. This, on the one hand, reminds us that our earthly world with man at its head by no means constitutes the entire universe; that next to our world there is also a world of other intelligent beings, that, therefore, initially man was by no means created to occupy such an exceptional, central position in the creations and providence of God, which he occupied only later, with the incarnation of the Son of God. Hence the special warmth of Orthodox teaching in revealing the mercy of God, who did not disdain my last poverty (Octoechos), who condescended to save one of the hundred details of His universe. On the other hand, the intervention of the devil makes our ulcer not as incurable as the ulcer of the evildoer himself. That is why, leaving the already incorrigible evildoer to his freedom and his fate, the Son of God came to men in order to destroy the works of the devil in them (1 John. 3:8), in order to win back from him, if possible, all the people caught in his net. This war will continue until the number of those ordained (ordained) for eternal life is fulfilled (Acts 13:48), until they all submit to the Son. Then the Son Himself will submit, hand over the kingdom to God and the Father... and God will be all (all things in all) (1 Cor. 15:24–28). However, we must not forget that the devil can no longer turn, and likewise all those who have completely surrendered to him. This means that next to the city of God and outside it (Rev. 22:15) there will forever remain an area of ​​rejection, the second death (21:8). Revelation does not know the apocatastasis of all creation, but only the resurrection of those who will be with Christ. God will be all only in the sons of the Kingdom, all in all, whose will is consciously and completely identified with the will of God. This is being in God, Christian enthetism. According to Bulgakov, the incarnation of the Son of God is not only not an accident in terms of the universe; but, on the contrary, it was for the sake of incarnation that God created the world. Driven by the need for love, God creates the world out of nothing, i.e. from His own nature, since there was no other material. In the act of creation, God is exhausted (kenosis), moves out from his inherent eternity into an alien, unnatural for him realm of existence, time. Next to the eternal Sophia of God there is a created Sophia, suffering from created limitations, but also Divine. The same necessity of love draws God to deliver created Sophia from created imperfections and return her to the fullness of Divine life. This is what happens in the Incarnation. The Logos, the Hypostasis of Sophia of God, takes into itself man, the hypostasis of created Sophia, and, gradually deifying through this all creation, leads to the ultimate God all in all. Let us note that when discussing the method of uniting two natures in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, Bulgakov deliberately repeats the heresy condemned by the Church and attributed to Apollinaris (whether they are attributed correctly or incorrectly, we will not argue here). The possibility and even necessity of the incarnation of God is inherent in the very nature of things, since there is a conformity between Divinity and humanity. The Divine Sophia as an organism of ideas is the pre-eternal humanity in God. It seems as if the Divine Logos would not have fully realized Himself if He had not become human on earth. The Logos became flesh not at all because man fell. True, among the goals of the Incarnation of God, Bulgakov, of course, also points out the salvation of fallen man. But this some kind of secondary goal completely fades in front of the main and infinitely more grandiose goal - to return all created Sophia to the Divine (which, not hypnotized by Bulgakov’s system, can only be called the correction of the mistake made by the Creator during the creation of the world). The question of the possibility of the fall of man is also very unclearly resolved in Bulgakov’s system. It is one thing if, together with the Church, we understand the humiliation of God during creation (kenosis) in the sense that the Almighty descends to self-restraint, placing next to His creative will the freedom of self-determination of created spirits. And it’s a completely different matter when the world is Sophia, although created, but still Divine, when man is the hypostatic center of created Sophia, even a created God. According to Bulgakov, the human spirit (soul) has not a created, but a divine origin, the divine nature of this spirit is coeternal with God. He even himself participates in his creation: the biblical let's create (in which the tradition of the Church sees an indication of the Trinity of Persons of the Divine) Bulgakov turns to what is being created. The Creator, as it were, asks him whether he agrees to be created, and the spirit, with its answer “yes,” itself fulfills the Creator’s intention. On the basis of church teaching, it is difficult to understand how the created spirit, i.e. who begins his existence only from a certain moment, can choose and express his will before his appearance. But Bulgakov, obviously, here too does not take into account the Church, which condemned the hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls. In general, in Bulgakov’s system, man is not only not considered inferior to angels (and even then, according to the Apostle, here is an indication not of an ordinary person, but of the God-man, Heb. 2:8–9), but is placed far above all of them. Even less clear is the presence in the world, i.e. in created Sophia, the devil, a spirit higher and more powerful than man, although the latter is a hypostasis of created Sophia. The final fate of the devil is also unclear. If he remains the devil forever, it means that the final apotheosis of everything (God is all in all), if understood according to Bulgakov’s system, will not come true. If in this system the repentance of the devil is recognized as possible, then, again, Bulgakov does not take into account the teaching of the Church, which condemned Origenism at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. If Bulgakov does not consider the fall to be the only reason for the incarnation of the Logos, if these reasons are laid, one might say, in the very “depths of God,” then the redemption of fallen man can only be some appendage to the incarnation. It is necessary,” says Bulgakov, “to accept the “kenosis” of the Incarnation in all the terrible seriousness of this act, as the metaphysical Golgotha ​​of the self-crucified Logos in time, which only had the consequence of the historical Golgotha, making it possible and real. Next to the experiences of the Divine Logos during the Incarnation (even then He had to bear the burden of a world that was not only createdly limited, but also already infected with sin), His experiences on the historical Golgotha ​​were neither new nor the most difficult for the Logos. The identity of the villain, the devil, who is generally unclear in Bulgakov’s system, remains unclear in redemption. The struggle between good and evil, presented in the Church as the struggle of the Redeemer with the personality of the devil, is transferred by Bulgakov from the objective realm to the inner world of the Redeemer, becoming His struggle with Himself, a struggle, for example, of compassionate love, calling for heroic deeds, and absolute holiness, horrified by the assumption of sin and under. Of course, all such descriptions of the inner experiences of the God-Man, with all their psychological depth and meaningfulness, do not go beyond guesswork from the obscure to the incomprehensible, i.e. Again, they give imagination, and not frank truth. By the way, trying to reveal the psychological content of the “Chalice of Gethsemane,” Bulgakov paints an imaginary picture of a new meeting of the Holy Trinity, similar to the one that took place at the creation of man. At the same time, voluntarily or involuntarily, a thought is expressed that was vaguely floating in other parts of Bulgakov’s system: not one person is responsible for the fall, but also the Creator Himself, who created him this way and not otherwise. God in the Holy Trinity, as it were, again speaks in Divine Council about man: having created man, who in his creation was manipulative and now fallen, we will recreate him, taking upon ourselves the satisfaction of the Truth. And this truth is that the Creator of human existence Himself takes upon Himself the consequences of His act of creation. With the Son of God... the entire Holy Trinity suffers from sin; The Father, as a righteous Judge, judging His Son, and in Him Himself, as the Creator of the world... We emphasize the places where emphasis is placed precisely on the creatureliness of man as the reason for his fall, on the imperfection of the nature given to him by the Creator. From this it seems as if the conclusion is that it was almost impossible for a person placed by the Creator in such conditions not to fall. But isn’t that what Adam also says: The woman whom You gave me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate (Gen. 3:13)? However, the Church, in this attempt by Adam to make God a participant in the fall, sees a sign of the distortion of human conscience caused by sin... For redemption, the God-man, according to Bulgakov, endures two deaths: spiritual and physical. Since the place of the human spirit in the God-Man was taken by the Divine Logos Himself, then spiritual death for Him is “Divine”, consisting in some kind of rupture of the Son with the Holy Trinity, His “abandonment of God.” The new sinless Adam, with His compassionate love, identifies Himself with the sinful old Adam. The Beloved Only Begotten Son took upon Himself sin, and with it and in it He took upon Himself the wrath of God against sin, God's enmity, and in it, as it were, He was separated from the Father. So this “Divine death” occurred on the night of Gethsemane, when Christ “suffered and outlived all the sins of all humanity and every person, committed in the present, past and future, with which satisfaction was given to the Truth of God, a “ransom” was brought (“the equivalent of hellish torment”), reconciliation took place, then, naturally, Gethsemane comes to the fore and almost obscures Golgotha. All that remains for Golgotha ​​is physical death, the death of the human nature of the God-man (without spirit), as an additional act to the spiritual death of Gethsemane. This replacement of the traditional church Golgotha ​​with Gethsemane, again, cannot but be called arbitrary and unfounded. The entire gospel story, one might say, is directed, as its main focus, towards death on the cross and the subsequent resurrection. At the Last Supper, saying goodbye to the disciples, the Lord clearly said that He would have to suffer torment (Luke 22:15), that it was time for them to go, because the prince of this world was coming (John 14:30). Finally, the very institution of the Sacrament of Body and Blood is precisely in remembrance of bodily death (1 Cor. 11:6). Where then does the temptation of the cross come from (Gal. 5:11) in all the apostolic preaching? Where do I come from, such a widespread faith in the Church in the power of the cross and the sign of the cross, a weapon given to us against the devil, that trembles and shakes, unable to bear to look at his power (Octoechos)? And essentially speaking, for every sufferer, preparations for suffering, no matter how painful thoughts and experiences they may be accompanied by, are still not the same as suffering itself. Let us not forget that the Son of Man suffered and, of course, humanly; because He, by Divine nature, is free from all suffering (Rite of Hierarchical Confession). The helplessness of the “slave” before triumphant malice and all the horror of its triumph over the innocent, with all their tangibility, were presented to Jesus Christ, of course, not in Gethsemane (in thoughts), but on Calvary (in deed). Therefore, “God-forsakenness”, i.e. The fact that God does not interfere in the triumph of malice over the innocent, He experienced not in Gethsemane, but precisely on Golgotha, where He cried out: God, My God, you have forsaken Me. Replacing Golgotha ​​with Gethsemane is possible for Bulgakov only because the Logos Himself suffers, and even the entire Holy Trinity, as She suffered during the incarnation of the Word and even during the creation of the world. That is why Bulgakov makes such relief images of the “break” in the Holy Trinity during suffering possible. Therefore, Bulgakov is ready to attribute the spirit (for the Church - human) to the Divinity of the Son and even says that after this the Divine Trinity again closes into an indivisible unity. Let us assume that such reasoning is possible as a simple poetic license or artistic picture; but when we meet them in a theological work, which, moreover, the Orthodox teaching wants to give, the church song involuntarily comes to mind: applying passion (suffering) to the Divine, become numb to all strange things (Octoechos). With the above we will finish testing the system of Professor Rev. S.N. Bulgakov. This test shows with sufficient conviction that Bulgakov’s teaching: 1) by design, it is not ecclesiastical, it does not intend to take into account the teaching and tradition of the Church, but in some points it clearly takes the side of false teachings, conciliarly condemned by the Church; 2) in its content, it introduces so much original and arbitrary into the understanding of the basic dogmas of faith that it resembles Gnosticism (also condemned by the Church) rather than Christianity, although it operates (like Gnosticism) with concepts and terms familiar to Christians; 3) according to the possible practical conclusions from it, the more dangerous it is, the more attractive it is by the apparent depth of its conjectures and its general thoughtful and reverent tone. By giving the idea of ​​the possibility of transferring responsibility for the fall to the Creator, this teaching lowers the consciousness of sinfulness in a person, i.e. shakes the very foundation of spiritual life. By presenting human salvation in the form of some kind of world Divine process in created nature and, in particular, in man, it opens the door to direct distortions of this life. Reference: teachings of prof. Archpriest S.N. Bulgakov about Sophia the Wisdom of God is set out in his writings: The Light of the Never-Evening, Moscow, 1917; Peter and John, Paris, 1927; Burning Bush (about the veneration of Our Lady), Paris, 1927; Friend of the Bridegroom (veneration of the Forerunner), Paris, 1928; Jacob's Ladder (about angels), Paris, 1929; Icon and icon veneration, Paris, 1931; Lamb of God (about the God-man), Paris, 1933 By its resolution dated August 24, 1935 No. 93 I. Teachings of prof. prot. S. N. Bulgakov’s unique and arbitrary (Sophian) interpretation often distorts the dogmas of the Orthodox faith, in some of its points directly repeating false teachings already collectively condemned by the Church, and in possible conclusions from it, it can even be dangerous for spiritual life, recognize the teaching as alien to the Holy Orthodox Church of Christ and warn against being carried away by it to all Her faithful servants and Chad. II. The Orthodox Bishops, clergy and laity who had the imprudence to become carried away by the teachings of Bulgakov and followed him in their teachings, in written or printed works, are called upon to correct the mistakes made and to unwavering fidelity to “sound teaching”. III. About the prot. S. N. Bulgakov, as being outside of communion with the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, does not have a special judgment at the present time, but in the future, if a case arises regarding the admission of Archpriest. Bulgakov into communion, to make the condition of such acceptance, as well as the permission of sacred rites, his written renunciation of his Sophian interpretation of the dogmas of faith and his other doctrinal errors and a written promise of unwavering fidelity to the teachings of the Orthodox Church. This is what this decree is sent to Your Eminence. Deputy Patriarchal Locum Tenens, Sergius, Metropolitan of Moscow. Administrator of the Moscow Patriarchate, Archpriest Alexander Lebedev. September 7, 1935 No. 1651.