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The Bulgakov Blog Conference hosted by The Land of Unlikeness blog is currently underway through October 13, 2008. This is significant contemporary discussion for anyone interested in the life and work of Sergius Bulgakov.
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The following is an excerpt from an address by Rowan Williams, Archibishop of Canterbury, given at the Hereford Diocesan Conference, Sharing the Story. This address, concerning the relevance of our stories to theology, is dated Thursday, June 5, 2008.
Sergei Bulgakov
The twentieth century was a terrible century in many ways, especially on the continent of Europe. Those of us who've grown up in Britain probably still don't quite understand what the corporate trauma of twentieth-century Europe meant to many people on the continent. And it's worth bearing that in mind. Millions of people in Europe lived through the end of their world and millions of people lived through that not once, but twice. In the tearing up of the map of Europe that followed the First World War: in the massive displacements as well as the unspeakable suffering and slaughter that characterized the Second World War and the years immediately afterwards. Jesus' preaching and the first witness of the early Christians took place in a world where the end of all things was expected. And a great deal of what Jesus teaches is about how to live through the end of the world, when all that you think familiar, controllable and reliable disappears. And that's why it's not surprising that so many figures of spiritual and intellectual depth in the twentieth century rediscovered Christian faith at a completely new level of depth as they lived through the ends of worlds. ( Read more... )
The Archbishop of Canterbury
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The following new writing by Madonna Sophia Compton is placed here by kind permission of the author. We have previously called attention to Ms. Compton's Wisdom-Sophia and the Role of Mary in the Early Church. A forthcoming book by Sophia Compton, More Glorious Than the Seraphim, which relates to Theotokos, is being prepared for publication.
The Burning Bush and the Glory of God:
The Feminine Dimension in the Kataphatic Theology of Sergius Bulgakov
By Madonna Sophia Compton (all rights reserved)
Introduction
It has been noted that Sergius Bulgakov’s sophiology was not a doctrine or even his personal theory, but the light “in which he sees the transcendent and immanent aspects of Divine Being.” (1) Bulgakov once said, “The calling of our time is a neo-Chalcedonian theology, which would resurrect for us and continue the creativity of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, with all the fullness of their problematics, which may be generalized in one, indeed Chalcedonian, problem: Divine-humanity.” (2) For Bulgakov, the Chalcedon formula gave only apophatic parameters for talking about Christ as Logos, and the challenge for theologians of our age is to express a more kataphatic or positive side to this dogma; in essence, this is what I perceive his sophiology to be all about. Kataphatic theology can and must talk about God, because God is simultaneously an Absolute and an Immanent Divine Being.
There are numerous approaches to discussing the dimensions of Bulgakov’s kataphatic approach, but my focus in this paper is on the feminine dimension of the Immanent Spirit as embodied in Mary, Theotokos; that is, in Bulgakov’s Mariology. In order to understand Mary’s intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, I will briefly trace the historical development of pneumatology in the early Church, and contrast that with the understanding of the Spirit in the Old Testament. I will then examine Bulgakov’s emphasis of the Holy Spirit’s movement in the world, and his notion of the Mother of God as Spirit-bearer. I will conclude with a short symbolic analysis of the icon called, Mother of God, Burning Bush.
Initially, however, in order to better understand Bulgakov’s kataphatic approach, I will first sketch a brief overview of apophatic theology, using the examples of three theologians and spanning the historical development of the Church (both East and West) from the 4th century to modern times. ( Read more... )
The Burning Bush
Courtesy of Sophia Compton
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In the following, David J. Goa reports on presentations last year at the Chester Ronning Centre, University of Alberta (Canada), by Clinton Timothy Curle. The presentations were based on Dr. Curle's recent book, Humanité: John Humphrey’s Alternative Account of Human Rights (University of Toronto Press, 2007). This book is an important resource for anyone concerned with the philosophy of human rights. David Goa is Director of the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life, University of Alberta, Augustana Campus.
Ronning Lecture Explores the Roots and Meaning of the Human Rights Movement
by David J. Goa
In 1980, the esteemed literary critique, Sir Geoffrey Elton, wrote in an article about the great medieval humanist Thomas More, author of Utopia:
"Anyone so deeply conscious of the unhappy state of mankind in the mass is always likely to do what he can for particular specimens of it. Believing that man has cast away grace does not necessarily make the believer into a misanthrope; and in his courteous and considerate behavious towards all and sundry More was only testifying to the compassion of his conservative instincts. Genuine conservatives despair of humanity but cherish individuals, even as true radicals, believing in man's capacity to better himself unaided, love mankind and express that love in hatred of particular individuals. To avoid any rash inferences touching the author of these remarks, I had better add that most of us oscillate between those extremes most of the time. More was more consistent."1
Rewind thirty-two years, to heady 1948, and you will see players on the world stage--still reeling from the realities of Hiroshima--seeking out a path that would transcend "conservativism," and "radicalism," for one of consistency. If totalitarianism, ultimately, could only be defeated by wholesale destruction, what would the future hold? Under such circumstances, could a meaningful "future" even be imagined? Such were the questions posed as the fledgling United Nations envisioned a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the topic of this year’s Ronning Centre Distinguished Lectures, given October 10-11, 2007 by Dr. Clinton Timothy Curle. ( Read more... )
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Fr. Deacon Gregory Wassen, at his On First Principles blog, has called attention to the following by Sergius Bulgakov.
Freedom of Thought in the Orthodox Church
by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov
I do not wish to consider the actual question of my own particular case. I will only try to explain to you the general principles of freedom in the Orthodox Church. Can freedom of thought exist in a Church which has obligatory formulae? Is there not a contradiction between free seeking for truth and the revealed dogma dispensed by the Church? I am convinced that no such contradiction exists. The dogmatic teaching of the Church must become real in in the personal thought and experience of everybody, for dogma does not only represent an abstract doctrinal statement; it is primarily a fact of our inner mystical life; apart from that it is dead. But this personal experience is impossible without freedom of thought, and freedom of the spirit. We have to comprehend dogma within the general context of our thinking, of our spiritual life, of our scientific development. ( Read more... )
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov
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The following is an excerpt from An Impossible Ideal: The Transformation of the Divine Sophia into a Russian Symbolist Mytho-poetic Concept, a paper by K. Alexandra Nevarez that appeared in the (University of Alabama) McNair Journal, Volume 8, Spring 2008. Krysten Alexandra Nevarez, from Seabrook, Texas, is an English major at the University of Alabama.
Alexandra Nevarez summarizes her paper this way: "The Divine Sophia is a religious icon that can be traced back to the pages of the Bible as a representation of God’s wisdom. The writers of the Russian Symbolist movement used her likeness in their nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and poetry, allowing her to become a cultural symbol of wisdom, piety, and femininity. This study seeks to identify the characteristics that persist in the journey from a holy female figurehead to the role of an impossible ideal in literary works and, ultimately, secular culture."
The Divine Sophia in Philosophy and Theology
The Russian philosophers Sergius Bulgakov and Vladimir Soloviev are decisively the most influential philosophers of the Symbolist movement. Their works regarding the Divine Sophia explore the concept of the Divine Feminine and her controversial association with God and the Holy Trinity. One symbolist researcher describes Soloviev as “the spiritual father of the mystic trends in Russian modernist literature” (Maslenikov 28). His Lectures on Divine Humanity and his collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Love elucidate the concept of the Divine Sophia and provide a philosophical foundation for the characterizations of her in the works of the poets and novelists. Like the Symbolist authors, Sergius Bulgakov was influenced by the writings of Soloviev, although he went one step further and developed Sophiology in order to provide a theological understanding of Sophia. Bulgakov’s detailed explanation of the Divine Sophia eventually incriminated him within the Orthodox church, but his doctrine continued to serve as a reference point for authors and contemporary researchers. ( Read more... )
K. Alexandra Nevarez
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Both Frs. Sergius Bulgakov and Alexander Men are referenced in this 1999 essay by Georgia Jansson Williams (Moscow).
A Dispassionate Guardian of Church Unity
by Georgia Jansson Williams
“Predaniye” in Orthodox Theology
Fr. Sergei Bulgakov wrote that “Pharisees of all times have wanted to turn ‘predaniye’ into either dead archaeology or superficial laws — dead letters which jealously demand respect for themselves.” Below is an attempt to explain how Orthodox theology views the work of the Holy Spirit in the era of the Church of Christ – the era of the New Covenant.
Over the centuries traditions and predaniye have formed the backbone of the inexpressible riches that can be found in Orthodox worship. But we must not stop with pleasantries; the paragraphs below discuss why the Orthodox believe it a theological necessity to recognise the significance of predaniye as the Spirit lead tradition of a living organism — the Christian Church. Several Orthodox fathers and theologians have expressed this view with unmatched eloquence and are therefore heavily drawn upon for purposes of explanation. ( Read more... )
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A short version of this article by Alexander Negrov was presented in a paper read at the annual meeting of the New Testament Society of South Africa, held from 9-12 April 2002, at the North West University (Potchefstroom Campus). Dr. Alexander Negrov is Rector of St. Petersburg Christian University (Russia) and a research associate of Professor Jan G. van der Watt, Department of New Testament Studies, Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria. Footnotes have been omitted from the text as displayed below.
An Overview of Liberation Theology in Orthodox Russia
by Alexander I. Negrov
Abstract
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the presence of a theological system of socio-critical and socio-pragmatic strands within Russian Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century. The political and social situation in Russia at that time was reflected in a reading of the New Testament that went far beyond the more customary ecclesiastic, dogmatic and ethical issues that had traditionally concerned Russian Orthodox theology. Among the Orthodox thinkers there were two camps that focused on anti-oppression issues. Some combined these issues with the liberationist ideology of the Russian Marxists and Socialists; while the other regarded these liberation movements as an anti-Christian way of interpreting Christianity. This article further claims that certain modern developments in Liberation Theology can be found in the period during which the Russian religious thinkers attempted to develop a theological perspective which paid attention to the social and political dimensions inherent in social democracy (Marxism). ( Read more... )
Valery Badakva: Trinity Sunday
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Available for Amazon pre-order: Sergius Bulgakov, The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God (Eerdmans, November 2008) as translated by Thomas Allan Smith, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto
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The following paper by Margaret Barker was delivered as one of the Lincoln Cathedral lectures in March 2004. Mrs. Barker is a former President of the Society for Old Testament Study and is author of numerous books, including The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy. She has concentrated on the study of the Jerusalem Temple and what this implies for understanding Christian origins. This paper is both begun and concluded with reference to Sergius Bulgakov.
Wisdom and the Stewardship of Knowledge
Bishop’s Lecture Lincoln 2004
by Margaret Barker
‘Happy is the man who finds Wisdom’, wrote one of the wise ones of Israel: ‘She is the tree of life to those who lay hold of her (Prov.3.13, 18). The benefits of Wisdom are then listed: she is better than silver and gold, more precious than jewels, she gives long life and ‘all her paths are peace’. In fact, had our wise ones known Cecil Spring-Rice’s hymn ‘I vow to thee my country’, they would have recognised the last lines as a hymn about Wisdom.
And soul by soul and silently, her shining bounds increase
And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.
We know these lines as a description of the Kingdom of God, but Wisdom, as we shall see, is a closely related idea.
What, or rather Who, is Wisdom? Many of the great cathedrals of the Orthodox Christian world are dedicated to The Holy Wisdom, and yet she has become a stranger to the theological discourse of the West. In the ikons of the East she is depicted as a fiery angel, crowned and enthroned, surrounded by great rings of light, and with the foundation of the earth beneath her feet. But who is she? Bulgakov, the controversial Russian theologian who died in 1944, observed that since these ikons had been accepted by the Church, their meaning must have been clear when they were made. ‘The time has come’, he wrote in 1937, ‘for us to sweep away the dust of ages… and to reinstate the tradition of the Church, in this instance all but broken, as a living tradition.’ (‘The Wisdom of God’, reprinted in A Bulgakov Anthology ed. J Pain and N Zernov, 1976, p.146.). It was time, he believed, to rediscover the Holy Wisdom. ( Read more... )
Margaret Barker
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Antoine Arjakovsky: The Journal Put': History and Memory
The journal Put' (The Way) was the main religious-philosophical journal of the Russian emigration in Paris in the first decades after the 1917 Revolution. Edited by the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, nearly all of the prominent scholars and thinkers of Russia Abroad published on its pages. Arjakovsky will discuss topics from his major historical study The Generation of Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration: The Review, The Way/Put' (1925-1940).
Antoine Arjakovsky received a doctorate in history from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. He served for several years as a French diplomat, both in Moscow and in Kyiv. He is currently a professor of theology and Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
MONDAY, MAY 5, 2008
3:30 p.m.: Presentation and information session for the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv (Ukraine)
4:30 p.m.: Lecture "The Journal Put': History and Memory"
Reception to follow
Information session for The Sophia Institute, International Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture, Union Theological Seminary (New York)
Location: 1219 International Affairs Building, Columbia University, New York City
Co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute and the Ukrainian Studies Program
Informational poster - Please help publicize
Antoine Arjakovsky
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Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity's New Paradigm
by Clinton C. Gardner
From the Preface:
"Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my academic friends—George Kline, Jim Scanlan, Andrzej Walicki, Caryl Emerson, and Jonathan Sutton—for helping me re-enter their world of Russian philosophy, as I do in Part II. And a special debt to my Russian academic friends whose welcome of my little book Between East and West: Rediscovering the Gifts of the Russian Spirit made possible the story told there. Sergei Averintsev, Alexei Bodrov, Tanya Blagova, Sergei Horujy, Konstantin Ivanov, Vitaly Makhlin, Volodya Maliavin, and Sasha Pigalev played critical roles in that story."
From the Front Cover of Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity's New Paradigm
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The following essay by António Braz Teixeira (University of Lisbon; Portuguese Academy of Sciences) was written in 2007. Footnotes have been omitted from the text as it appears below.
Russian Thought and Contemporary Portuguese Thought: Affinities and Convergences
by António Braz Teixeira
1. I believe it was António Quadros (1923-1993) the first person in Portugal to point out the deep and significant parallelisms between russian and portuguese thought, culture and religiosity, which clearly began in the eighteenth century. In several texts published in the 60s and in the beginning of the following decade , he called the attention to the decisive and unusual importance assumed, in the spirituality of these two peoples of the extremities of Europe, by the cults of the Virgin Mary and of the Holy Spirit, established an opportune parallelism between the thought of the Enlightenment that inspired Peter, the Great, in the construction of St. Petersburg, and Marquis of Pombal, in the reconstruction of Lisbon, and pointed out the obvious similarities between the cultural attitude of Puskine (1799-1837) and the one of Garrett (1799-1854) and the popular inspiration of the romantic renovation that played an important role in their own cultures, the deep affinities between Raul Brandão's (1867-1930) romantic creation and the ones of Gogol and Dostoyevsky and between the theurgies of Soloviev (1853-1900) and of Sampaio Bruno (1857-1915) and the creationist philosophies of Berdiaev (1874-1948) and of Leonardo Coimbra (1883-1936). He could still have referred the serious consideration given to the paradoxical thought of Chestov (1866-1938) mentioned by philosophers as Vieira of Almeida (1888-1962), Sant'Anna Dionísio (1902-1991) and José Marinho (1904-1975), as well as the confluence or analogy between the paracletism of Agostinho of Silva (1906-1994) and the doctrine of Sergei Bulgakov's Sophia (1871-1944). ( Read more... )
António Braz Teixeira (b. 1936)
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Call for Respondents - The 2008 Sergei Bulgakov Blog Conference
from Dan McClain
I’d like to thank everyone who has offered to participate in the 2008 Bulgakov Blog Conference. We’ve had a ton of really positive response in the last week, and AD and I are really exciting about what we think is going to be a brilliant event due to the fantastic essays that we already have slated. However, with so many papers, some dealing with similar topics, we’ve decided to go with a session format to accomodate two papers for each theme. It will probably go something like this: each day, two essays will be presented, followed at the end of the day with a response. This way, I think we will be cover a lot of ground quickly. Of course, we will most likely have some single paper sessions, which will proceed in the usual style.
What we really need now is for folks to sign up as respondents. Again, you’re welcome to shoot me an email, or just respond to this post [at The Land of Unlikeness blog]. Please include your name as you’d like it to appear, the session you’d like to respond to, and whatever university or website you’d like your name linked to… woops, hanging infinitive… to which you’d like your name linked.
Click here and scroll down for current session roster
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Dan McClain and Aron Dunlap at The Land of Unlikeness invite papers for their projected Bulgakov blog conference, September 2008. Following is the text of their announcement.
Call for Papers - Sergii Bulgakov Blog Conference - September 2008
In his aptly titled essay, “On the Holy Grail,” Sergei Bulgakov meditates on the meaning of the verse in John where Christ’s side is pierced with a spear and “blood and water flow out.” Bulgakov’s thesis is straightforward: It is not the legendary grail of Western mythos that is interesting or vital, but rather the fact that when Jesus spills his blood upon the earth, the earth is charged and changed and maintains the seeds of its own transfiguration even when Christ dies, descends, and ascends to heaven. Clearly, the church has always maintained that Christ is present in the Eucharist and in the Spirit which he bequeaths, but Bulgakov thinks that the fact that this presence resides also in the earth itself, which is the holy grail, needs to be thought about much more seriously. He argues that this seed of transfiguration is none other than the Heavenly Sophia getting to work in nature, achieving her destiny in her Creaturely Image. This destiny reaches its origin and goal in the perfect picture of creation which exists with God eternally (and which is the essence of God). In the West it is talked about as the goodness of nature beneath the bentness of man’s will.
Here at The Land of Unlikeness, we could think of no better way to break into Bulgakov’s Sophia thesis than to join forces with the rest of you and throw a Sergei Bulgakov Blog Conference to be held in September later this year. The details are still sketchy, but we already have a few participants and many others are pondering. More participation is welcome, both in the form of a 1500 word contribution or in the form of a response to a post. Please send your contribution ideas to editor at thelandofunlikeness.com, or simply reply to this thread. Stay tuned for more details in the very near future.
The (Tentative) Lineup [as of 3/17/08]:
Cynthia Nielsen (Per Caritatem): An introduction to Bulgakov
David W. Congdon (The Fire and the Rose)
Brendan Sammon (The Well at the World’s End)
Matthew J. Aragon Bruce (Princeton Theological Seminary)
Ben Boswell
Gregory Voiles
Aron Dunlap (The Land of Unlikeness)
Dan McClain (The Land of Unlikeness)
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The following is an excerpt from Susannah Herzel, "The Body is the Book," itself an excerpt from Man, Woman, and Priesthood, edited by Peter Moore, SPCK, London, 1978. Susannah Herzel (b. 1939) studied English literature at Stanford University, taught for five years at Lahore, and subsequently spent time as research assistant for religious programming at BBC Television.
Sophia: The Body of God
by Susannah Herzel
"We impart a secret and hidden wisdom, of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification . . . For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God."
The emergence of a personified feminine figure called Wisdom occurred during the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon, when patriarchs and prophets lived day by day in the environment of their enemy—a great whoring people. Just as in Greek myth the warrior Theseus was dependent on the braided thread of Ariadne to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth of his own animal confusions, so it appears that these exiled Jews were dependent on the illuminative presence of Wisdom to lead them back into their own muddled history, their own depths—and to light these up into universal meaning. Babylon became a mirror image, a reflector. Moon to their sun, she had always seemed to them an essentially feared female city with all the ‘lewdness’ or ‘looseness’ of which they were suspicious. Yet while they were in the harlot’s midst, surrounded by her pagan myths and earth-goddesses, they discovered the fertility of their own imaginative gifts and wrote much of the Genesis account and Wisdom literature. ( Read more... )
Josephine Wall: Breath of Gaia
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The following is the abstract of a paper published by Priscilla Hunt in Symposion: A Journal of Russian Thought, vol. 4-5, (2000), 1-41. The full essay (forty pages in PDF) can be found at the link below.
The Novgorod Sophia Icon and “The Problem of Old Russian Culture” Between Orthodoxy and Sophiology
by Priscilla Hunt
This study will show that Florovsky’s hidden polemic against Sophiology, and particularly his opposition to the sophiological writings of his mentor, Father Sergius Bulgakov, influenced his vision of Muscovite culture and the Novgorod Sophia icon. Florovsky embodied this hidden critique in a group of writings between 1926 and 1932--a 1926 letter to Sergei Bulgakov, a 1928 article "Creation and Creatureliness,” a 1930 article, “The Dispute about German Idealism,” and the 1932 article, "On the Worship of Sophia the Wisdom of God in Byzantium and Rus.” His famous 1962 article, "The Problem of Old Russian Culture" built from the 1932 intepretation of the icon. There he asserted that, like the Novgorod Sophia icon, Muscovy departed from the “existential approach to the problem of man” expressed in the great art of the 14th and 15th century. Implicitly he saw the icon as a herald of Muscovy’s self-conception as “political-cultural utopia in which the desire to achieve the “perfection, completeness, and harmony of Byzantine civilization,” resulted in an “enormous synthetic effort was the most conspicuous sign and symptom of decline….” The first part of this article elucidates the critique of Sophiology hidden in Florovsky’s writings between 1926 and 1932, and especially in his “Dispute about German Idealism.” After exposing his hidden agenda, I describe how his analysis of the “illusory Sophia” in the Novgorod Sophia icon reflects his hidden critique of Sophiology. I then identify Florovsky’s conception of the “true Sophia.” I argue, that, if read in its own cultural context, the Novgorod Sophia icon embodies this “true Sophia,” as mediated through the poetics of the hesychast age. Rather than a symptom of stasis and decline, this icon’s innovations draw on the creative sources of Orthodox theology. Thus, the icon’s actual meaning invalidates the categories that Florovsky derived from his battle against Sophiology to explain Muscovy’s betrayal of the vigor of Byzantine civilization and descent into “intellectual silence.” Rather, the icon establishes the language in which Muscovite theocratic ideology will use Orthodox values to sanction the state.
Keywords: George Florovsky, Sophiology, Orthodox theology, humanism, intellectual silence, the Novgorod Sophia icon, German idealism, Sergei Bulgakov, hesychast poetics, Muscovite culture, Patriarch Philotheos, Dionysius the Areopagite, Byzantine civilization, Council of Trullo
Priscilla Hunt
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Mikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. We have previously called attention to other writing by Professor Epstein, including his Culture-Culturology-Transculture and his Daniil Andreev and the Russian Mysticism of Femininity. For a more extended development of this topic of what philosophy has been and what it has become, see Borna Bebek's The Third City.
Filosofia (vs. philosophy)
by Mikhail Epstein
Each national tradition has its own system of humanistic disciplines and its own criteria for determining what it considers philosophy. Spanish, Italian and Russian word for philosophy is "filosofia." Perhaps this word can become part of English terminology to emphasize the variety of traditions constituting the intellectual heritage of the West: in this case, the distinction between the analytical-critical approach spead in the English speaking world, and the synthetic-constructive approach more characteristic of Continental thought. The difference between philosophy and filosofia is roughly analogous to the difference between a scholarly symposium and a Platonic symposion: the participants in the latter not only correctly discuss ideas but "totally" give themselves over to them, with all their body, soul and mind. The Russian filosofer Pavel Florensky (1882 – 1937) observed: "Philosophy, as an academic discipline, never took root in Russia, just as it did not exist in the ancient world. Our filosofers have strived not so much to be intelligent as wise, not so much to be thinkers as sages…. An ethical striving, a religious consciousness, an activity not only of the brain but of all the organs of the spirit; in a word, it is only life outside the study that seems to us of ultimate seriousness and completely worthy."[1] ( Read more... )
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Following is Section 3 of a longer paper by Hamutal Bar-Yosef, poet, translator and literature researcher living in Jerusalem. We commend the full text of the entire essay.
Section 3 of
Sophiology and the Concept of Femininity In Russian Symbolism and in Modern Hebrew Poetry
by Hamutal Bar-Yosef
At the turn of the twentieth century Sophiology, a new concept of femininity, apparently unique to Russian culture, was being created by the Symbolist writers and artists. It was formulated by the philosopher, theologian and poet Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), the central source of inspiration for the writers of Russian literary Symbolism , and for the whole neo-mystical movement for “A Revolution of the Spirit” in pre-revolutioanry Russia. Sophiology underwent further developments in the poetry and prose of Valery Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Biely, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Boris Pasternak, and in non-fiction – philosophical and theological - writings of Georgy Chulkov, Vasily Rozanov, Elis-Kobylinsky, Nikolay Minsky, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolay Berdiaev. Many of these writers were banned during the Soviet period, because or their neo-Christian anti-Marxist visions. Sophiology was part and parcel of the Russian intellectual and poetic atmosphere at the beginning of the twentieth century. Solovyov revived the ancient Jewish-Christian myth of Sophia as part of his effort to confront what he saw as the rampant positivism, materialism and atheism in nineteenth-century Russian intellectual thought. Solovyov transformed ancient Sophia into a rich, complex, and intentionally enigmatic symbol of unity, which transcends sexual and cultural tensions. ( Read more... )
Hamutal Bar-Yosef
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The portion of text excerpted below concerns the first essay by Sergius Bulgakov that appears in The Holy Grail and The Eucharist (Lindisfarne Press).
An excerpt from
The World and the Holy Grail
by Frederica Mathewes-Green
... When our Lord ascended, he took his body with him. But he did leave something behind. At his crucifixion, the Gospel of St. John tells us, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and there came out blood and water” (John 19:34).
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, an émigré from Soviet Russia who became dean of the Russian Orthodox seminary in Paris, published an essay reflecting on that verse in 1932. It’s titled “The Holy Grail,” but he makes clear that he’s not talking about the Grail of medieval legend, the cup that St. Joseph of Arimathea supposedly held to catch the blood flowing from Christ’s side. Bulgakov says that the myth of the Grail is nevertheless trying to tell us something. It “expresses precisely the idea that, even though the Lord ascended in His honorable flesh to heaven, the world received His holy relic in the blood and water flowed out of His side.” ( Read more... )
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