Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
| PentecostalTheology.com
116
Book Reviews / Pneuma 35 (2013) 87-156
Sergius Bulgakov, Jacob’s Ladder: on Angels , translated by Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rap- ids MI/Cambridge UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010). xiv + 169 pp., ISBN 978-0-8028-6516-8. $25 paper.
Sergius Bulgakov, Relics and Miracles: Two Theological Essays, translated by Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids MI/Cambridge UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011). xi + 116 pp., ISBN 978-0-8028-6531-1. $24 paper.
The publication of the works of Sergius Bulgakov in English translation continues with some of the smaller pieces that he wrote. Of the two volumes reviewed here, one is the final vol- ume of what is generally called his ‘small trilogy’, and the other two brief essays. The small trilogy is a collection of short books written soon after his arrival in Paris in 1925. On the face of it, they construct an approach to theology around the icon or set of icons called the Deisis, ‘Supplication’, which consists of an image of Christ, enthroned in majesty, flanked by images of the Mother of God and St John the Baptism (or Forerunner), with angels appearing above the figure of Christ. It is an icon that generally appears as part of the iconostasis, the icon screen that separates the sanctuary from the nave in an Orthodox Church; as one looks up towards the East, in the direction of prayer, this set of icons is one that attracts one’s atten- tion. It both depicts prayer — the intercession of the saints, led by the Mother of God and St John the Forerunner (on an iconostasis, these saints lead various other saints, usually apostles, in their prayer to Christ) — and invites one to join one’s own prayers with those of the saints. In taking this as the focus of his first systematic work after his arrival in the West, Bulgakov puts prayer, and more specifically liturgical prayer at the heart of his theology. In all the volumes of the trilogy, Bulgakov draws on liturgical texts to provide the basis for his theology; he sees theology as unfolding the nature of the liturgical prayer of the Church. At another level, there are other motives behind the works that constitute the trilogy. The Burn- ing Bush (1927, Eng. trans. 2009), the first volume, on the Mother of God, is largely taken up with a criticism of Roman Catholic Mariology at the heart of which is a rejection of the Catholic notion of created grace. Bulgakov’s theological position here is very close to that expressed later by Henri de Lubac in his treatise Surnaturel (1946), for which he suffered ecclesiastical censure. Anti-Catholic polemic is not absent from the second volume, The Friend of the Bridegroom (1927, Eng. trans. 2003), on John the Forerunner. There is a further element in The Burning Bush and Jacob’s Ladder. Both works relate to Bulgakov’s own per- sonal experiences: in the former, the enormous impression made on him by Raphael’s Sis- tine Madonna, which he had seen in the Zwinger Gallery in Dresden while still a Marxist, and which opened his heart to the Orthodox faith that he had abandoned as a young man; in the latter, to his experience of his guardian angel after a near-fatal heart attack suffered in 1926, just after his arrival in Paris — ‘the voice of a companion’ within, telling him “that we had gone too far ahead and it was necessary to return” (p. xi). Bulgakov’s theological devel- opment was based on personal experiences of God’s presence through saints and angels and indeed in nature itself, and also affected by his attempts after his arrival in Paris to articulate what it was that was distinctive about Orthodoxy, in relation to the friendly but alien Cathol- icism he encountered in Paris. Bulgakov’s method — in Jacob’s Ladder, as elsewhere — com- bines reflection on Scripture and the liturgical texts with themes drawn from traditional
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700747-12341290
1
Book Reviews / Pneuma 35 (2013) 87-156
117
theology. They are also concerned with genuine encounter between God and human beings, an encounter that involves exploration of the middle ground between God and human kind: the realm of the angels, the ‘in-between’ out of which his preoccupation with Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, grew.
These constituent elements of his theology are manifest in the two short essays included in the other book reviewed here. They belong to very different periods: On Relics was written in 1918, at the very beginning of the Russian Revolution; On Miracles in 1932. On Relics is a response to the desecration of the relics of the saints, especially the relics of St Serafim of Sarov that followed on the Communist Revolution. Relics were and are a source of solace and miraculous healing. How could they be desecrated so wantonly and with impunity? Bulgakov’s response, both here and in sermons, is to develop an understanding of the power of the saints manifest in kenotic love, not in signal revenge: kenosis, self-emptying love, being a theme that runs throughout Bulgakov’s theology. On Miracles takes further such reflection on the nature of the miraculous; one theme in particular, that he develops, is that the miracles of Christ related in the Gospels are not so much signs of his divinity as of his perfect humanity. The power of love, the power of healing is something that belongs to what humans are meant to be, so that the miraculous is something we should expect and recog- nize, as the image of God in which we humans are created becomes more and more a reality in the lives of those who follow Christ. That is, in the lives of the saints — lives that are not bounded by death but effective in our world beyond death.
These shorter works of Bulgakov introduce important themes of his theology in an unsys- tematic way, and often help one to understand more fully the major themes he broached in his major trilogy, On Divine Wisdom and Godmanhood , that he was still occupied with at his death in 1944. In both kinds of works we can trace what it is that makes Bulgakov one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century.
Reviewed by Andrew Louth University of Durham, United Kingdom [email protected]
2
