Modern Russian Sophiology and Its Discontents

Abstract

This chapter explores the origins of modern Russian Sophiology including proximate and more general sources from neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism to Jakob Boehme and German Idealism. It introduces the principal Sophiologists: Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, and Sergius Bulgakov and provides an outline of their distinct articulations of Sophiology and understanding of tradition. It shows the arc of Sophiology’s ‘unmodern turn’—its increasing appeal to Church tradition, especially the Church Fathers and discusses principal patristic sources used and appeals to other aspects of the tradition, notably iconographic. It particularly focusses on Bulgakov including his immediate philosophical context and the notion of antinomy. Close treatment is given of the growing emphasis on the Church Fathers in Bulgakov’s works above all in relation to St Gregory Palamas; the ‘Sophia Controversy’ of the 1930s with its attendant condemnations of Bulgakov; neo-patristic and neo-Palamite criticisms of Sophiology in Vladimir Lossky, Georges Florovsky (including the notion of the ‘Sophia of the Church’), and John Meyendorff; and Pavel Evdokimov, a disciple of Bulgakov who incorporates key aspects of the neo-patristic critique and thus points the way to new articulation of sophiology firmly rooted in patristic tradition.