Sergii Bulgakov, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Intercommunion and Sofiology

Abstract

Sergii Bulgakov and Georgii (Georges) Florovskii – arguably the two most influential Russian theologians of the twentieth century – cut their theological teeth during their work in the 1920s and 1930s for the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. A history of the Fellowship suggests the degree to which twentieth‐century Russian theology was informed and defined by its interaction with Anglican theology and demonstrates the seriousness (and difficulty) with which Russian Orthodox émigrés in Western Europe approached the question of Orthodoxy’s relationship to other confessions. Bulgakov’s 1933 proposal for intercommunion brought to a head questions about Russian Orthodoxy’s attitude towards theological development that had long consumed Russian Orthodox émigrés, and widened political and theological divisions among intellectuals in the West and their more conservative émigré colleagues in the Balkans. Moreover, an examination of Bulgakov’s proposal sheds new light on his ‘Sofiology’ – a commitment that informed much of his life and work, and an ideal which his critics found overly romantic and influenced by ‘Westernising’ tendencies that called into question Russian Orthodoxy’s unique commitment to ‘the Truth’.