The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy,1890–1920 9781501724022

Citation preview

THE

CROSS

AND

THE

SICKLE

Sergei Bulgakov with his sons, Ivashechka and Fedia, in 1909. On the back Bulgakov wrote: "Ivashechka at the time of his nephritis." Photo courtesy of YMCA Press, Paris.

0

THE

ss

KLE

THE

SERGEI BULGAKOV AND THE FATE OF

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY

CATHERINE EVTUHOV

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

ITHACA

AND

LONDON

PRESS

Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1997 by Cornell University Press.

Printed in the United States of America This book is printed on Lyons Falls Turin Book, a paper that is totally chlorine-free and acid-free.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evtuhov, Catherine. The cross and the sickle : Sergei Bulgakov and the fate of Russian religious philosophy I Catherine Evtuhov. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-3192-1 (alk. paper) 1. Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich, 1871-1944. I. Title. B4238.B8E98 1996 230' .19' 092-de2o 96-23239

CONTENTS

Preface Author's Note

Vll

ix

Introduction: The Silver Age as History

1

PART I. SOCIAL ORIGINS OF A GENERATION

1

2

Son of a Provincial Priest University and Marxism, 1890-1897 Moments: Visions and Shattered Illusions

21

28 38

PART II. WHEN IDEALISM MET PRACTICE: PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS,

1901-1907

3 4 5 6 7

Idealism in Philosophy: Dawns Responses: The Landscape of Social Thought on the Eve of 1905 Idealism in Politics: Revolution Christian Socialism Constitutional Politics or Religious Reformation? The Second Duma Moments: Ivashechka's Death v

49 66 83 101

115 127

Contents PART III. PERCEPTUAL REVOLUTION: BULGAKOV'S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY

8 What Is the Sophie Economy? The Agrarian Question Transformed 9 The "Spirit of Synthesis"

145

PART IV, A NEW RUSSIA?

10 11 12

The Lid Comes Off: The Church Council of 1917-1918 Orthodoxy Renewed: Neo-Hesychasm Failure: Church and State Part Ways Moments: Hagia Sophia Epilogue: From Moscow to Paris Conclusion Chronology of the Life of Sergei Bulgakov Selected Bibliography Index

vi

189 207 219

230

234 243 251

253

273

PREFACE

W:

en I began work on this book, Sergei Bulgakov was an obscure 1gure whose name was known only to a select few. He shared this ate with many of his contemporaries-writers, poets, artists, and philosophers who had participated in the cultural explosion of the early twentieth century that we have come to know as the Russian Silver Age. By an extraordinary twist of historical fate, one of the richest cultural movements of modern European history had been eclipsed from our memory, crowded out by the grim but equally fascinating social and aesthetic utopias of the 1917 Revolution. Fortunately for my book, and I hope for Bulgakov as well, its publication coincides with yet another historical turning point: the end of the Soviet experiment has brought the Silver Age alive in a new way. The religious philosophy of the Silver Age is the first place many Russians turned in their search for new values as the Soviet system collapsed; readers are devouring new editions of Nikolai Berdiaev, Vladimir Soloviev, Vasilii Rozanov, Lev Shestov, Pavel Florensky, and Sergei Bulgakov. How useful these thinkers will prove for post-Soviet society is a moot point; but their revival will have been doubly valuable if it reminds us of the cultural epochnot just a list of "forgotten names" but a plurality of intersecting cultural, religious, and political currents-in which they lived and worked. Financial support for my research in the Soviet Union was provided by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). I thank the Fulbright Program of the Institute of International Education, the Finnish Ministry of Education, and the Renvall Institute of Helsinki University for the chance to live and work in Helsinki. Grants from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Hoover Institution (Title VIII) at Stanford vii

Preface University facilitated the writing and completion of the book. My research was conducted at a time when the assistance of Soviet librarians and archivists was not something one could take for granted; therefore I am all the more grateful to Serafima Igorevna Varekhova, of the Russian State Historical Archive (formerly TsGIA). My deepest gratitude is to Nicholas Riasanovsky and to Martin Malia: from both I have had the good fortune to receive not only guidance but inspiration. In the Soviet Union and then Russia, friends and colleagues Nikolai Kotrelev, Albin Konechnyi, Ksana Kumpan, and Irina Rodnianskaia helped immeasurably by sharing their own research and insights. Modest Kolerov is always ready with new and valuable materials; it is a pleasure to share with him, as with Brian Horowitz and Philip Swoboda, the sense of our "common task." All or parts of the manuscript have been read, at various stages, by Terence Emmons, Boris Gasparov, Simon Karlinsky, Bernice Rosenthal, Richard Stites, and Reginald Zelnik. I am grateful to Paul Valliere for his careful and sympathetic reading. Special thanks go to Vladimir Brovkin for friendship and encouragement, and to my Georgetown colleague David Goldfrank for his unique and helpful combination of enthusiasm and piercing skepticism. At Cornell University Press, I have enjoyed working with an editor who is also a colleague: John Ackerman's insights and criticisms have tangibly improved the text in its final stages, as has Barbara Salazar's patient and professional editing. I have neither a cat nor a wife, but I thank Boris Gasparov, whose dishwashing and clothes laundering are among the least known but most praiseworthy of his many accomplishments. Finally, the most obvious of all acknowledgments-to my family, who bear more responsibility than they may suspect both for this book's existence and for its contents. CATHERINE EvTUHOV

Washington, D.C.

viii

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Transliteration I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration in the spelling of Russian names and words, with the exception of names widely known by other spellings, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used in the notes and text:

d. f. FES GARF (formerly TsGAOR) IRLI

KD l., ll. op. RGALI (formerly TsGALI) RGB (formerly GBL)

delo (file) fond (collection) Free Economic Society Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii dom) (Institute of Russian Literature [Pushkin House]), St. Petersburg Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party list, listy (folio, folios) opis' (inventory) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), Moscow Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (Russian State Library), Moscow ix

Author's Note

RGIA (formerly TsGIA) RNB (formerly GPB) SD SR SSPRT

TNEO

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Russian State Historical Archive), St. Petersburg Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka (Russian National Library), St. Petersburg Social Democratic Party Socialist Revolutionary Party Sviashchennyi Sobor Pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi Tserkvi: Deianiia [Holy Council of the Russian Orthodox Church: Acts], 9 vols. (Moscow, 1918) Tmdy Imperatorskogo Vol' nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva [Works of the Imperial Free Economic Society] (St. Petersburg, various years)

X

THE

CROSS

AND

THE

SICKLE

INTRODUCTION

The Silver Age as History

T

he Russian Revolution of 1917 was a cataclysmic event that shattered the foundations of both the old autocratic regime and the new society of the postemancipation period, plunged Russia into the horrors of an extraordinarily brutal and bloody civil war, and-drawing on the utopian visions of nineteenth-century socialists and twentieth-century avant-garde artists and writers-took up the Promethean task of constructing a millennia! society to be inhabited by a new man. The very magnitude of this major event in European and indeed world history, its appeal to universal human dreams and aspirations combined with the brutality and inhumanity with which it was executed, have made the Revolution an object of fascination for historians, intellectuals, revolutionaries, and ordinary people. This book, which focuses on the critical period at the turn of the twentieth century, is not about the Russian Revolution. Concurrently with the dramatic social and economic changes and political upheavals of the early twentieth century, Russia experienced a spiritual and cultural movement of great intensity-the so-called Silver Age. In the 1900s, Russia's national and provincial capitals became the sites of a complex and vital network of journals, exhibitions, theaters, literary salons, and philosophical meetings. Sharing a mood of creativity and of new beginnings, the cultural and intellectual elite perceived the whole of world culture, from ancient Greek paganism and early Christianity to Eastern philosophy to contemporary European decadence, as an immense, pulsing spring whence they could draw inspiration for their 1

Introduction

own artistic experiments. One is hard-pressed to find a single piece of Russian art, poetry, or even music from the 187os that did not make at least oblique reference to "the people" and to social problems; the culture of the Silver Age, in contrast, dazzles with its diversity, with the lack of any single theme or obsession. No student of Silver Age culture could fail to sense its energy and intensity, whether in the "life-creating" experiments of Symbolist poets, the awe-inspiring leaps that catapulted the dancer Vaclav Nijinsky into an eternal place in the popular consciousness, or the Futurists' rash calls to "throw the old art overboard from the ship of modernity." The burst of creative activity in Russian literature, art, music, theater, and ballet soon erupted on the European scene. The Silver Age was not only about new artistic schools or intellectual currents; it was also about their creators' mutual and self-perceptions, both in Russia and abroad. European audiences and intellectuals were fascinated by a culture that clearly built on the same techniques in music, literature, and art as their own yet had an exotic edge that came from the incorporation of Russian folk motifs and Byzantine and medieval Orthodox traditions. The Russian literary and artistic intelligentsia, for its part, overcame its long-standing sense of Russia's inferiority to Western Europe: by no stretch of the imagination could Russian literature, ballet, or music any longer be deemed backward; new artistic movements such as Symbolism and Futurism developed on a par with their counterparts in France, Germany, and Italy. The inspiration behind this book has been a desire to understand this cultural explosion as a historical phenomenon in its own right-to approach the Russian Silver Age as one would any other cultural movement in European history-the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the French Enlightenment, or German Romanticism-and thus, while in no sense denying the power or the ultimate triumph of the Revolution, to rescue the Silver Age from its shadow and to penetrate into the swirling cauldron of ideas, images, and modes of behavior that were Moscow, Kiev, and St. Petersburg in the early twentieth century. The Silver Age has been the subject of a steadily growing number of excellent literary and art-historical studies. Even its name has been borrowed from the literary sphere. Long used by literary historians, "Silver Age" evokes the cultural ages of ancient Rome. In Russia, too, the Silver Age is supposed to have followed the Golden Age of Pushkin and the poets of the early nineteenth century.! Historians, usually eager to claim all aspects of human life as 1

The term "Silver Age'" is most frequently used to describe the literature of the period

2

The Silver Age as History their legitimate terrain, have evinced a remarkable willingness to leave the Silver Age to the philologists, confining themselves to an artificially narrowly conceived social or political history. As a result, though aesthetic aspects of the period have been thoroughly studied, few efforts have been made to trace connections and interactions between culture and political and social life. This is a task that only historians can undertake. It may seem obvious to the point of absurdity to argue that art, literature, philosophy, and religion are as much a part of history as state policy, economic developments, strikes, and uprisings; but in the case of Russia's Silver Age, precisely such a reminder is in order. Even when historians have ventured onto the terrain of the Silver Age, their efforts have, I think, been hampered by the omnipresent shadow of the 1917 Revolution. Russia may seem to have fulfilled an implicit quota of epoch-making history when it produced the Revolution; and until quite recently, students of the period have felt obliged to demonstrate how the social, cultural, or political processes they were exploring played into this most overpowering phenomenon. Studies of Silver Age figures from a historical perspective have been few and far between; even in the best ones the authors have tried to squeeze their conception of the period into the parameters established by social and political historians. 2 As a result, the figures and movements they study appear marginal to history's "mainstream." Another tendency is seen in chroniclers who themselves participated in or witnessed the Silver Age: these writers have been nostalgic and celebratory, billing their from roughly 1890 to 1920, and sometimes is extended to art or even the decorative arts (Faberge, etc.). Here, however, I have sought to broaden its definition: I use it to refer more generally to the complex of ideas, literature, art, philosophy, and politics thre broadly distributing higher education and attracting popular sympathies to science and knowledge." 4 But his courses of lectures-on the history of political economy, on the agrarian question, on the history of nineteenth-century social thoughtwere at first as vague and uncertain as his writings in the press. Bulgakov's 1908 discussion of the agrarian question, for example, still took as its point of departure the apparent dependence of man on nature which eight years earlier had made him realize the inapplicability of Marxist laws of capitalist development to agriculture; his response to Stolypin's reforms, at this early stage, was resentment and confusion. Bulgakov's disillusionment, combined with a quiet and rather vaguely directed determination, was symptomatic of the mood of educated society immediately after 1907. Bulgakov's overarching resentment of Stolypin's closing of the Second Duma, his disappointment and inability to accept legislation introduced in the new atmosphere, found an echo among both politicians and those agricultural specialists most intimately involved in Russian agrarian life. Bulgakov's quiet mood, however, was punctuated by some sharp influences. He had met Pavel Florensky in 1905 in the Brotherhood of Christian Struggle, and the influence of the younger man's ideas became immediately discernible in Bulgakov's writings. 5 Bulgakov's Christian thought was still profoundly colored by its connection with social problems, but his view of society occasionally took on more radical tones, and Florensky was perhaps responsible. Florensky had already begun work toward the conception of all-unity, the idea of the entire universe as sacred which would eventually become the guiding theme of his work; his imprint is unmistakable in Bulgakov's 1906 essay "Tserkov' i kul'tura," uncharacteristic of a man who

3

Bulgakov was one of some

300

professors who resigned from Moscow University in

1911 in protest against the abolition of university autonomy. He was reinstated, briefly, only

after the February Revolution. 4 "Universitet," in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Granata, 7th ed. (Moscow, n.d.), col. 362. 5 Irina Rodnianskaia, "P. A. Florenskii i S. N. Bulgakov: K fuosofii druzhby," paper delivered at the conference "P. A. Florenskii i kul'tura ego vremeni," Bergamo, 1988.

129

Moments argued for a "free church in a free state." Here Bulgakov advanced the idea of the "sacralization of culture," a precise echo of Florensky's thought: The division oflife into "wordly" and ecclesiastical-the extra-ecclesiastical and extra-religious (and partly anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious) character of contemporary culture, and the removal from culture (or even anticulture) of the contemporary church, introduce chaos, and a divided accounting system, even into the souls of those who are conscious of the historicaL relativity and inner abnormality of this duality. To create a truly Christian ecclesiastical culture and to stimulate life within the gates of the Church, to overcome from within this opposition of ecclesiastical and worldly,-such is the historical task for the spiritual creativity of the contemporary Church and contemporary humanity. 6 Religion and society must be coterminous; there must be no cultural space not subject to Christianity's spiritual influence. "There must be nothing that is in principle 'secular,' there must be no neutral zone that would be religiously indifferent, that would not have one or another religious coefficient."7 Lev Shestov greeted Bulgakov's religious fervor of this moment with the venomous remark that Bulgakov was the only one of the "religious intelligentsia" who was even remotely tolerable, because he now pronounced the name of Christ with the same passion he had reserved for the name of Marx a moment before. 8 Bulgakov continued to draw inspiration from his German contemporaries as well. Most of his essays on religion and society fit into the fashionable discussions of early Christianity, church history, and the historical Jesus which gripped German (and to a lesser degree French) academic circles. The works of Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, and Albert Schweitzer marked the culmination of a trend that involved dozens of scholars (and such politicians as Karl Kautsky and Friedrich Naumann), and in which Bulgakov immersed himself fully, though in his own essays he never took a dear position or consistently explained the interrelation of the sacred and secular spheres of life. In the midst of tl1is uncertainty, however, hints of the notion of the sacralization of culture began to appear in his writings. Echoing his earlier statement of this theme, Bulgakov wrote in 1907, "Religious society, reSergei Bulgakov, "Tserkov' i kul'tura," in Dva grada, p. 308. Ibid., p. 309. 8 Lev Shestov to Aleksei Remizov, 25 April1906, in RNB, manuscript division, f. 634, d. 240, I. 34· 6

7

130

Ivashechka's Death ligious culture, inner unity underneath a visible multiplicity,-this is the fruit that is ripening in history, though perhaps its final ripeness already lies outside its limits, under a 'new sky' and in a 'new land.' " 9 Two years later, he began to speak of the religious bases not only of culture or society but of economy as well: "Religion, as a factor of economic development, insofar as it is a factor in the formation of the personality, thus enters into the study of economic life." 10 Yet such remarks were merely scattered observations; we find no hint of a unifying idea. The sensational collection of articles Vekhi (Landmarks), which appeared in March 1909, expressed a mood of introspection, self-blame, and stubborn yet vague commitment to social engagement that echoed Bulgakov's own emotions. This enterprise was conceived primarily by Gershenzon in the fall of 1908 and given its dramatic title after its contributors rejected "Intelligenty on the Intelligentsia" (Gershenzon); "Up the Hill!" (Struve); "Moscow Reflections," "To the Russian Intelligentsia," and "To Russian Society" (Bulgakov); and "Boundaries and Landmarks" (Frank). Its authors were united by their history of infatuation with Marxism and active participation in the Union of Liberation and the 1905 Revolution, followed by disillusionment in socialism and political constitutionalism narrowly defined. In this environment, as Modest Kolerov has commented, "Gershenzon's apolitical and asocial attitude animated and systematized the rich experience of spiritually inspired politics and social engagement of the other Vekhi authors." 11 Rather than present a unified program, Vekhi expressed its contributors' ideas "in the negative form of criticism of the intelligentsia's worldview." 12 Vekhi's intellectual tone was set by Berdiaev, Bulgakov, and Gershenzon. Poor Struve was so.disappointed in Western constitutionalism that his own article was a weak and uncertain echo of his more confident collaborators' thoughts. In the Preface, Gershenzon wrote: Their common platform is the recognition of the theoretical and practical primacy of the spiritual life over the external forms of community. They mean by this that the inner life of the personality is the sole creative force of human existence, and that this inner life, and not the self-sufficient principles of the political sphere, is the only solid basis on which a society can be 9 10 11

Sergei Bulgakov, "Srednevekovyi ideal," in Dva grada, p. 176. Sergei Bulgakov, "Narodnoe khoziaistvo," in Dva grada, p. 183. Modest Kolerov, "Arkhivnaia istoriia sbornika Vekhi, Vestnik moskovskogo univer-

siteta, ser. 8 (History), 1991, no. 4, p. 13. 12

Semen Frank, Biografiia P. B. Struve (New York, 1956), p. 87.

13 1

Moments built. From this point of view the contributors see the Russian intelligentsia's ideology, which rests entirely on the opposite principle-recognition of the unconditional primacy of social forms-as inherently erroneous in that it contradicts the nature of the human spirit, and in practice futile because it does not lead to the goal which the intelligentsia has set for itself-the liberation of the people.l3 Gershenzon had concisely formulated the central theme of the collection: the failure of politics to achieve social reform. Like his co-authors, Gershenzon perceived the new locus for reform in the religious rather than the secular life of the Russian people. Criticizing the intelligentsia for their arrogance, Bulgakov suggested that the primary reason for the perennial gap and even conflict between them and the people was that they subscribed to a different set of beliefs. What the intelligentsia, in all their years of "going to the people," had in fact brought them was the destruction of their innate faith; they had merely succeeded in deflecting the people from their age-old, intuitively sensed traditional path. In destroying popular religion, they were destroying the popular soul. Like virtually all the other Vekhi authors, Bulgakov believed the solution lay in the religious consciousness of the intelligentsia. An ecclesiastical intelligentsia that united true Christianity with enlightenment and a dear understanding of its cultural and historical tasks (which is so often lacking in contemporary clerical figures), if such were to come into being, would respond to a pressing historical and national necessity. And even if it were at this point subject to the same persecution that the intelligentsia has suffered in the name of its atheistic ideals, then this would have tremendous historical and religious-moral significance, and would find an extraordinary response in the popular soul. 14 Instead of assuming their superiority to the rest of the nation because of their higher level of education, the intelligentsia should realize that the people had as much to teach them as they had to teach the people. In Gershenzon's version, this message acquired almost mystical overtones as he spoke of "fusing with the people": there would no longer be "I" or "we," "but every objective good will become a personal necessity." 15 13

Quoted in Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, The "Vekhi" Debate and Its Intellectual Background (London, 1979), p. 107. Sergei Bulgakov, "Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo," in Vekhi (Munich, 1967), p. 67. Mikhail Gershenzon, "Tvorcheskoe soznanie," in Vekhi, pp. 89, 96.

1900-1912: 14 15

132

Ivashechka's Death Like Bulgakov, who questioned the utility of politics yet reaffirmed his faith in the "great calling" of Russia, the Vekhi authors reiterated their ultimate goal of the "liberation of the people." For all of these authors, the ultimate end of the "turning inward" which is supposed to be Vekhi's,main characteristic remained social change: the turn to religion in no way signified abandonment of the ultimate aim of social transformation. The idea now was to incorporate personal religious conversion into larger social goals. "Every social movement exists in two forms: in society as a whole it is an elemental process of the collective soul; in the individual person, it is a free moral effort, in which the main role belongs to the individual consciousness."16 If the liberation movement, with its concentration on~ the "external," "phenomenal" mechanisms of politics, had failed to solve social problems, the task became to attack those same problems on a deeper, religious level. Vekhi had a liberating effect on its participants. The volume contained no single prescription, outlined no new "common task"; 17 instead, it released individual members of the intelligentsia to pursue their own spiritual paths. True to form, Bulgakov took his own instructions extremely seriously. By 5 August he was so engrossed in personal and religious tragedy that he could not even attend to Vekhi's second edition, which :was causing a tremendous scandal. 18 By Bulgakov's own account, the death of his four-year-old son in the summer of 1909 was one of the crucial moments of his spiritual evolution. More than any purely intellectual discovery or political experience, the boy's death became a critical landmark in Bulgakov's spiritual return to the church. Usually extraordinarily reticent with respect to his personal life, Bulgakov spoke and wrote of this particular event over and over, in letters to friends and colleagues, in his autobiographical sketches, and even in his philosophical work. The boy's funeral brought yet a third revelation of the existence of God. Ibid., p. 96 An effort was actually made to produce a collection of articles outlining a positive program a year later. 18 His note to Gershenzon on this day, from Oleiz, reads, "Dear M.O., Only yesterday I sent you a note about the grief that has stricken us. In answer to your card I add that I delegate to you all authority regarding the new edition of Vekhi, you know better, and I am in no state to enter into all the details. My work, on the verge of breaking off all summer, has now been completely interrupted. Regards to your family. Yours, S.B." In Modest Kolerov, "V ozhidanii Palestiny: 17 pisem S. N. Bulgakova k M. 0. Gershenzonu i ego zhene, 18971925 gg.," Neizvestnaia Rossiia, XX vek (Moscow), 1992, no. 2, p. 131. 16

17

133

Moments Oh, my lovely, my pure boy! As we carried you up the steep hill, and then followed the hot and dusty road, we suddenly turned off into a shady park, as if we had entered into the Garden of Eden; suddenly, after the unexpected turn, the church, as lovely as you, looked at us with its colored windows as it waited for you. I had not known it before and, like a miraculous vision, the church stood before us, sunk in the garden below the shadow of the old castle. Your mother fell, crying, "The sky has opened!" She thought she was dying and saw heaven. . . . And the sky had opened, it had witnessed our apocalypse. I felt, almost saw, our rise to heaven. Pink and white oleanders surrounded you like the flowers of paradise, waiting to bend over you, to guard your coffin. . . . So this was it! Everything became clear, all of the suffering and the heat dissipated and disappeared in the heavenly azure of this church. We thought that events took place only below, in the heat, and didn't know that these heights existed and were, it turns out, waiting for us .... And far below, far away we left the heat, suffering, pain, death-and really that was not important, for there is this, and it is now open to us.l 9 In a recapitulation of the moments in the hills of the Caucasus and before the Sistine Madonna, Ivashechka's death provoked one of those direct encounters with God of which, as Bulgakov was later to hold, man's life in religion is woven. Like Vladimir's envoys, Bulgakov "knew not whether he was on earth or in heaven" during the liturgy, and saw the angels as they took part in the service. 20 But whereas his earlier "moments" had been brief insights, this new event was the closest Bulgakov ever came to a full-blown mystical experience. In his account to Gershenzon soon after the event, Bulgakov unambiguously identified his small son with the Christ child: This boy of ours was entirely extraordinary, not of this world, "not an inhabitant," as was said about him. (In fact he was born on Christmas Eve and this was always very important for me.) Kind, gifted, advanced beyond his years, with big wonderful eyes. One could always look at him and love him only with a piercing pain and anxiety in one's heart. 21 To Grigorii Rachinskii a month later Bulgakov repeated, "The boy was quite unusual, extraordinary, with [?] light in his eyes.... I always remember Sergei Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii (Moscow, 1917), p. 13. Ibid., p. 14; 21 Bulgakov to Gershenzon, 29 August 1909 in Kolerov, pp. 131-2. 19

20

I34

Ivashechka's Death that he was born on Christmas Eve, when the bells were ringing for the liturgy." This time Bulgakov took the identification a step further: "The messenger of heaven has risen to heaven." 22 His son's death became a direct and personal experience of Christ's Resurrection. Bulgakov's feelings at the boy's bedside betrayed elements of classic mystical experience. His precise emotions remained ineffable and incommunicable, and he felt at a loss to explain to friends precisely what he had gone through; 2 3 he did know that it was something momentous and meaningful. He wrote to Rachinskii: How can I express to you what we lived through? I shall say one thing: I have never experienced such agony in my life, which, though not free from loss, has in general been rather untroubled.... But the revelations I experienced by his coffin cannot be compared with anything. I will tell you briefly that what I lived through this summer was the most [?] event in the series of my life experiences, and "this world" became for me [?] not an empty place.... I so little trust myself and the constancy of my moods that I dare not draw any general conclusions, particularly since this is probably impossible. Bulgakov's experiences in these moments also shared the life-transforming capacities of religious ecstasy, and he feared more than anything that he might lose, in the dull regularity of daily existence, the apprehension of higher truth that he felt so immediately and intimately. But the hour of death was so wonderful, God's presence was so tangible, his eyes raised to the heavens so lit up, that I experienced not the horror of a last parting but religious excitement, almost ecstasy. And after, by his coffin, two emotions struggled or alternated or rather united within me: a hymn of religious joy, victory, light, and the grief that you know. And my entire life was illumined by this light, all the corners of my sinful soul, so that I was as if blinded by this light and [?]. In general, in my, or rather our, life, an event of such immeasurable importance has taken place that its results must, I think, affect everything: opinions, feelings, values, life. And I fear one thing, pray for one thing, that I may not forget, that the lighthearted, bustling, weak part 22 23

Bulgakov to Rachinskii, 29 September 1909, RGALI, f. 427 Rachinskii, op. 1, d. 2689. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1958).

135

Moments of my soul, burdened with life's concerns, may not give in and harden itself once more. 24 No less significant, those who "understood" not so much the boy's death itself but the religious ecstasy that accompanied it became initiated into a mystical cult of friendship, binding its participants into a sort of apostolic brotherhood around the Christ figure of the boy. As Bulgakov had remarked to Gershenzon, "a sort of wave has spread through the spiritual world, touching human hearts and igniting them, and the source of this wave is the departure to God of a pure childish soul. ... How much more understandable, closer and dear you have become for me since, with this letter, I have looked into the sanctuary of your soul and learned something of the genesis of your faith." 25 With time, the brotherhood became more important than its oriiginal source, and by 1913 Florensky, at least, seems to have found a new image of Christ in his own newborn son, Vasilii, whom he described in much the same language Bulgakov had used in speaking of Ivashechka. 26 Then we took to walking in the evening. We knew that the Angel was bringing us joy in his careful embrace-our V. We somehow remembered the lost Eden, previously unthinkable, in our boy. And the evening Star was our boy, descended to us through the heavenly spheres, "come into the world," and our boy was the Evening Star, carried by the heart. We gave him the Star as a gift, it became his Star, but also remained our heart. A transparent half-dusk was descending over the world but, thickening in the heart, coalesced there into the Morning Star: into a Pearl. The lost Paradise glimmered in our little son; in our little son the sorrowful Tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forgotten. Our sufferings did not vanish-they merely softened and melted and spread out in the heart in a boundless sea. But over the vale of sorrow the Morning Star shone under the vaults of the heart, and in its rays the waves scattered in a long pearly stripe. And all was good: the sorrows and the joys. And all was sad. 27 24 RGALI, f. 427 Rachinskii, op. 1, d. 2689. To Gershenzon, Bulgakov wrote on 29 August 1909, "His last sufferings cannot be described, I will only say that I have never before

experienced such agony, and though I do consider myself partly at fault (spiritually), this trial was marked for me by some religious temptation, and this could not have been otherwise." In Kolerov, "V ozhidanii Palestiny," p. 132. 25 Ibid. . 26 On the "philosophy of friendship" between Bulgakov and Florensky, see Rodnianskaia, "Florenskii i Bulgakov." 27 Pavel Florenskii, "Na Makovtse," in Sobranie sochinenii (Paris, 1985), 1:37.

136

Ivashechka's Death The Christ child, first Bulgakov's son and then Florensky's, came from and returned to heaven as the messenger of redemption. The men with whom Bulgakov shared this mystical bond of friendship, who together had been initiated into the cult of the Resurrection personally relived and experienced, were also his closest collaborators in this period in his life. An intense philosophical fellowship between Bulgakov and Florensky continued until Bulgakov left Moscow for the Crimea in 1918, and was captured on canvas in Mikhail Nesterov's 1917 painting The Philosophers. In 1910 Bulgakov added publishing to his already long list of public activities, creating the Moscow publishing house Put' and becoming its main editor in chief. Rachinskii, until this point a relatively obscure figure who worked at Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, became, together. with E. N. Trubetskoi, Berdiaev, Ern, and the establishment's patron-founder, Margarita Morozova, one of Put"s intimate inner circle. 28 Gershenzon also became one of the more prominent figures who gathered around Bulgakov in the latter's campaign, as publisher, to resurrect the religiousphilosophical tradition of Russian thought; Gershenzon's fascinating and sensitive biography of Chaadaev was written as a volume in Bulgakov's Russian Thinkers series. Like many publishing houses of the period, Put' was also a society with a definite orientation; Bulgakov's co-editors and authors were his ideological fellow travelers and accepted his editorial concern with "Orthodoxy and its relation to the contemporary world." 29 The spiritual crisis caused by his son's death and the new sense of fellowship it created helped to redefine Bulgakov's public role, and he plunged into religious-philosophical publishing with the same enthusiasm he had given to Christian Socialist politics a few years earlier. If Ivashechka's death proved the central spiritual event of these years of Bulgakov's life, rereading the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev became its intellectual counterpart. Whereas Bulgakov the idealist had been attracted to the general characteristics of wholeness and a religious worldview in Soloviev's philosophy, his new reading involved genuine philosophical analysis, and drew on and developed specific ideas he encountered in Soloviev's thought. Instead of seeing in Soloviev a set of instructions for the intel28 GPB, f. 352, I. S. Knizhnik-Vetrov, d. 1305, "Idei S. N. Bulgakova o religioznoi obshchestvennosti." 29 Sergei Bulgakov, ed., 0 Vladimire Solovieve (Moscow, 1911), p. ii. Apart from the series to which Gershenzon contributed, Put', taking the position that "Russia's general religious task and her calling to serve in thought and in life the many-sided realization of the universal Christian ideal" lay "beyond question or doubt," published the works of Ivan Kireevskii and Chaadaev, as well as collections of articles sucli as those on Vladimir Soloviev (1911) and on Tolstoy's religion (1912).

137

Moments ligentsia as he had done in 1903 ("Chto nam daet filosofiia Vladimira Solovieva?"), he imm~rsed himself so completely in Soloviev's philosophy that it became an inseparable part of himself. In short, he continued Soloviev's work in the way Soloviev had intended: he did not undertake abstract philosophical criticism, but became engaged in Soloviev's philosophy . with his entire being. For Bulgakov Soloviev became material for his own reinterpretation; in his contribution to the collection of articles on Vladimir Soloviev (Bulgakov's was once again the lead article), he paid homage to his model. Bulgakov worked "in the tradition" of Soloviev; in other words, he used his philosophy as a scaffolding for his own work, no longer as a guiding spirit for the intelligentsia as social actor. In Bulgakov's new reading Soloviev's philosophy posed problems that together defined the structure of Bulgakov's own philosophical interests. First, Bulgakov believed that Soloviev had found an original and necessary resolution to the "two nightmares" of contemporary philosophy"mechanistic materialism" and "idealistic subjectivism." Modern philosophy, argued Bulgakov, suffered from the alienation of subject and object introduced by Enlightenment rationalism, yielding the equally unsatisfactory approaches of materialism, which turned the world into a "soulless machine," and idealism, which merely avoided the problem by retreating into the safety of the philosopher's study and refusing to make contact with the external world. The problem of finding a synthetic solution to these two approaches was soon to become a central axis of Bulgakov's thought. Is it possible to have a worldview on whose basis one might be a materialist-that is, conceive oneself as in real unity with nature and humankind-yet at 1he same time affirm the independence of the human spirit with its particular needs, its postulates about supernatural, divine being, illuminating and making sense of naturallife?3° Second, Bulgakov felt that Soloviev had sketched at least the outlines of an answer in his view of nature. By returning to the Christian basis of philosophy, which rationalist humanists had abandoned, Soloviev made it possible to treat nature as a living, breathing entity rather than the dead mechanism perceived by the materialists or the irrelevant detail perceived by the idealists. "The fate of nature, suffering and awaiting its liberation, is henceforth connected with the fate of man, who 'subdues' it; the new heaven and new earth now enter as a necessary element into the composi30

Sergei Bulgakov, "Priroda v filosofii V. Solovieva," in 0 Vladimire Solovieve, p. 4·

138

Ivashechka's Death tion of Christian eschatology."31 Bulgakov the Marxist had sought to apply the theory of capitalism to agriculture; now his concern with nature and agriculture continued in a new form. The image of a living nature in constant interaction with man, no longer merely an inert object to be conquered, captured his attention. This fascination with Soloviev's image of nature provided the kernel of the worldview that was gradually taking shape. Finally, Bulgakov for the first time picked up Soloviev's discussion of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, soon to become a cornerstone of his own philosophy of economy. Everywhere in Soloviev's philosophy Bulgakov saw "Her, the Eternal Feminine, the Divine Sophia, the Soul of the world." Without yet formulating an interpretation of Soloviev's Sophia, Bulgakov fully appreciated its importance, quoting, among others, Soloviev's passage: "Sophia is the body of God, the matter of Divinity, permeated with the essence of divine unity. Christ, realizing this unity or carrying it within himself, as a whole divine organism-universal and individual at the same time-is both Logos and Sophia." Bulgakov also recognized the philosophical importance of Soloviev's poetry, which he saw as reiterating the same "mystical experience of nature as the World Soul, as Sophia." 32 Bulgakov's new reading coincided with a broader reinterpretation of Soloviev among the intelligentsia in general-a phenomenon that his publication of 0 Vladimire Solovieve did much to encourage. Like Vekhi, this volume functioned as an index of the path traveled by its contributors: the new epoch was developing a new vision of Soloviev. The philosopher, whose "religious materialism" Bulgakov saw as his main epistemological innovation, began to replace the poet and moral thinker who had fascinated the Symbolists and idealists of the turn of the century. The general effort among the intelligentsia to take Soloviev "more seriously" was reflected in Bulgakov's careful interpretation of Soloviev's philosophy of nature, but also in Vladimir Ern's (rather uninteresting) endeavor to study Soloviev's epistemology. At the same time, Berdiaev addressed the problem of East and West in Soloviev's philosophy; E. N. Trubetskoi studied Soloviev's life and work;· Blok called him a knigl).t-monk, capturing the simultaneously "decadent" and Christian aspects of Soloviev's personality. Viacheslav Ivanov's interpretation, which acknowledged the paramount importance of Soloviev for the religious renewal of the 1900s, was perhaps most interesting. 31

32

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 17,

IS.

139

Moments Dostoevsky and Vladimir Soloviev powerfully turned the thought of our society toward questions of faith. Their impulse, like mountain ice, feeds the current, which, while its bed is not broad, is directed and undrying, and which we are accustomed to designate as the "search for a new religious consciousness." Lev Tolstoy's turn to the deed of the inner self, coinciding with Dostoevsky's withdrawal, marked the third decisive moment of our religious awakening.33 But Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had been limited by their literary form of expression, and had been able to create only a "musical basis" for the struggle of the current time; "the true creator of our religious strivings, the singer Orpheus, carrying the principle of a creative order, was Vl. Soloviev." Not only all of the slogans of the later movement but, more important, the renewed attention to the church could ultimately be traced to Soloviev. Soloviev was the inspiration of the Symbolist movement as well. "With his poetry he initiated a whole movement, perhaps an epoch in poetry. When the Eternal Feminine is called, like a child in the womb a certain god will · play in the lap of the World Soul; and then singers begin to sing. Thus it was after Dante, thus it was after the one who said, 'Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan? " 34 Soloviev defined true art as a theurgical service. Ivanov, like Bulgakov, read Soloviev as a Christian prophet and philosopher. Through Dostoevsky the Russian people psychically (i.e., in the action of the World Soul) realized their idea as the idea of all humanity. Through Soloviev the Russian people logically (i.e., through the action of the Logos) recognized their caJling-to serve the principle of the universal church until the individual soul loses itself. When the anticipated kingdom draws near, when the dawn of the City of God comes, the chosen, and those who are true to the City, will remember Soloviev as one of its prophets.35 The mystical experience that accompanied his son's death and his new reading of Soloviev had an integrative function. The disjointed remnants of Bulgakov's turn-of-the-century worldview, scattered by the disappointment of 1907, gradually recrystallized in a new pattern as the varied aspects of his public activities began once more to interact and feed into one another. It is 33 Viacheslav Ivanov, "0 znachenii VI. Solovieva v sud'bakh nashego religioznogo soznaniia," in Bulgakov, 0 Vladimire Solovieve, p. 33· 34 Ibid., pp. 35, 44· 35 Ibid., p. 44·

140

Ivashechka's Death clear that by 1911 the dominant theme of Bulgakov's thought had become the interpenetration of religion and economy. If the social engagement of Bulgakov's religion had been apparent enough in the political doctrine of Christian socialism, the interrelation of religion and social and economic life now became articulated in philosophical form. Bulgakov's academic work began to incorporate his growing philosophical interests, and his lectures on political economy drew increasingly on social theory and the history of ideas. Eventually his account of the history of political economy turned into a history of approaches to economic life, of a succession of worldviews or "philosophies of economy" which he believed underlay the evolution of economic systems. 36 Marxism with its "modes of production" became but one of a variety of historical approaches to political economy. The problem of the philosophy of economy itself was embedded in an increasing conviction of the fundamental religious basis of society, and of man's life in society as a function of his religious nature. "Religion is the yeast of society, the 'base' on which different 'superstructures' are erected."37 Around this conviction a growing belief in Russia's national religious calling began to take shape. Unlike the earlier religious insights Bulgakov had experienced-triggered by nature, art, or love-the one at his son's funeral centered on a specifically Christian and classically Russian imagethe lovely, jewellike church set in a drab countryside. In keeping with this image, Bulgakov's thought of this period sought its roots in Russian history, Russian culture, Russian philosophy, and Russian life. From Bulgakov's writings in these years, whatever their particular or immediate purpose, a single preoccupation emerges-what might be termed a myth or story about Russia: 38 this was his sense of the essential religiosity of the Russian people and Russian society. In one way or another, all of his work during this period touched on a religious spirit that hovered somewhere between an intellectual ideal and a concrete, spontaneous emanation of a "fundamentally religious" Russian people-including, this time, the intelligentsia. On the one hand, Russia, like the rest of the modern world, suffered from the mechanistic orientation, materialism, and excessive rationalism of post-Enlightenment European civilization, and thirsted for a renewed spirituality and wholeness that harked back to the Middle 36 Bulgakov made this most explicit in his lectures to his students. See, e.g., Ocherki po istorii ekonomicheskikh uchenii (Moscow, 1913). 37 Bulgakov, Preface to Dva grada, p. vii. 38 The term "myth" is used here in a value-neutral sense, not as an avoidance of reality but as a codification of concepts or attitudes intrinsic to a given institution or social group.

141

Moments Ages or even early Christianity, and that only the Christianization and sacralization of culture could provide. On the other hand, the Russian people and the Russian intelligentsia shared an intrinsic religious nature, a natural, intensive, and unceasing search for the Kingdom of God, which, despite its perversion and misdirection in recent years, endowed them with "the highest religious potential" and made them "the new historical flesh awaiting the spirit to be breathed into it."39 Religion and spirituality were the essence of Russia-a proclamation that would have beern anathema to Belinsky's heirs, the secularized intelligentsia of the 1870s and Bulgakov's own youth in the 1890s. Even in February 1909, Bulgakov clearly intended to shock his educated audience by concluding a public address in Moscow with the exclamation "Holy Russia!" 40 Shock value aside, Bulgakov was perfectly serious in his contention that religion and spirituality would define Russia's national mission. By the second decade of the century, Orthodoxy once more stood at the center of Bulgakov's universe. Yet this creative return to the church provided no easy answers, and by no means signaled blind acceptance of the existing institutional church. 41 Bulgakov and his religion existed in constant living irnteraction, a constant playing off of Orthodox belief and practice against the experience of economy and society. This productive tension set the parameters for Bulgakov's articulation of his Christian vision as the "sophie economy." Bulgakov, "Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo," p. 68. Sergei Bulgakov, "Pervokhristianstvo i noveishii sotsializm," Voprosy filosofii i psykhologii, 1909, no. 98, p. 268. 41 Bulgakov's evolution stands in interesting contrast to the Romantic pattern of a return to Christianity, which for Wordsworth and Coleridge signaled an end to poetic creativity. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (Oxford, 1992). 39

40

142

P

A

R

T

I

I

I

PERCEPTUAL REVOLUTION: BULGAKOV'S

RELIGIOUS

PHILOSOPHY

C H

A P T E R

E I

G H

T

What Is the Sophie Economy? The Agrarian Question Transformed

T

he Russian intelligentsia were obsessively convinced of their responsibility for Russia's fate. Yet they have often been accused of "opting out," of retreating into religion, mysticism, and the world of the inner self at a crucial moment in their country's history, 1909. Even more striking is their apparent lack of response to Stolypin's agrarian reforms, in view of the paramount importance of the "agrarian question" both in the debates that followed emancipation and in the confrontation of government and political parties which led to the dissolution of the Duma in 1907. Nothing seems further from the gripping debates on statistics and grain prices in the 189os 1 than Frank's inquiry into the human soul, Florensky's disquisitions on the pillar and affirmation of truth, Berdiaev's theorizing on the meaning of history and creativity in the 1910s. Without presuming to answer for "the intelligentsia" as a whole, I propose that at least one of the abstract religious theories of the 1910s in fact engaged fully the political and agricultural events of its time, formulated an original response to them, and so can be of use to us as we try to understand relations between government and society in the crucial years between 1905 and 1914. 1 Richard Pipes describes the excitement Struve's listeners experienced: "Female students worked themselves into frenzy over Struve's remarks on bimetallism, and collapsed in dead faints hearing him discourse on cereal prices": Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 149.

145

Perceptual Revolution

This is an idea that Sergei Bulgakov published in 1911, and to which we may refer as the "sophie economy" (sofiinost khoziaistva). What a sophie economy might be is hardly self-evident to a contemporary reader, so a few observations are in order. Khoziaistvo in Russian means both "economy" and "household," and hence is semantically closer to the original Greek oikonomia than our "economy" is today. Khoziaistvo as "economy" refers not merely to attributes of economic life proper-GNP, budget, interest rates, taxes-but to life in society more generally; "national economy" has connotations of the life of a giant household. Khoziaistvo, furthermore, is not a static term, for it refers equally to the processes of economic activity and life in society. Bulgakov began by posing a novel question: How is economy possible? By this he meant simply that khoziaistvo, the economic process and the labor it involves, is a fair subject for philosophical reflection. In Bulgakov's view, the discipline of economics, with its inherent tendency to practicality, was badly in need of theoretical reconceptualization; and philosophy, which had retreated into the sterile, self-absorbed obscurities of neo-Kantian idealism, could benefit from turning to the real-life concerns of life and work in the world. Bulgakov therefore set out to construct a philosophy of economy-a philosophy that would account not merely for an artificially imagined thinking subject (such as Kant's) but rather for humanity as it was in its daily life-working, thinking, eating, playing, and so on. Khoziaistvo, then, could be defined in terms of the interaction between man and nature: economy was "man's struggle with the elemental forces of nature in order to defend and expand the sphere oflife, to conquer and humanize nature"; or, more simply, economy was the activity of labor. 2 In formulating his philosophy of economy, Bulgakov sought to understand the world as a household, as an object of labor, in which millions of people everywhere engage in various kinds of work in the struggle for their daily existence. Yet this multitude of disparate economic acts, this constant struggle with nature, had meaning beyond the mere struggle for survival. First, each working individual was not alone, for he was engaged in a common task with all of humanity; participants in the economic process were all part of a single "transcendental subject" of economy. Second, his labor was part of a single grandiose process in which man, the transcendental subject, resurrected a dead, mechanized nature and endowed it with human qualities, with life and joy. Both of these moments in the economic process are "sophie"one possible name for the transcendental subject is Sophia, and it is Sophia, 2

Sergei Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva (Moscow, 1912), pp. 43, 45·

146

What Is the Sophie Economy? as well, that suffuses the otherwise meaningless process of struggle with nature with joyousness and beauty. The economic process has meaning because it partakes of the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, which was present with God at the creation (Prov. 8:22-23) and "shines in the world as the primordial purity and beauty of the universe, in the loveliness of a child and in the gorgeous enchantment of a swaying flower, in the beauty of a starry sky and a flaming sunrise."3 The sophie economy was inscribed in the cosmic drama of Fall and Resurrection. According to Bulgakov's vision, man and nature originally lived in perfect harmony in an "Edenic economy"-in other words, in the world as it was before original sin. The Fall, however, dragged all of creation into a sinful state, in which man must struggle for survival, eking out a painful existence from an unfriendly, mechanized nature. This is the world in which we live now, prisoners of our material needs; and this is the world that Marx took to be the only real one, basing his doctrine of economic materialism on this current, "fallen" state of humanity. But, according to Bulgakov, the world we live in potentially has a much deeper meaning than the mere labor "in the sweat of our face" which characterizes our current existence: actually, the world even in its present imperfect state potentially partakes of the Divine· Wisdom. In rare moments of revelation, we catch a glimpse of what life was like in the Garden of Eden; in fact, the purpose of Christ's coming was to reveal to us this perfect, harmonious world that could be ours. We must find within ourselves this hidden potential for perfection and work to resurrect nature, to endow it once again with the life and meaning it had in Eden. As the economy became Christian and "sophie," all of nature and the world would be endowed with life and meaning, man had an active part to play in bringing this about. It was in our power to transform the world, to bring it to life, to return it to that perfect harmonious existence in love and labor from which Adam and Eve wrenched it with their original sin. This very beautiful vision sounds like no more and no less than an Orthodox . interpretation of the fundamental message of Christianity; it is echoed practically word for word by such twentieth-century Orthodox thinkers as Vladimir Lossky and Leonid Ouspensky, and it differs in subtle ways from a Catholic or Protestant vision of the same cosmic drama. Certainly it seems irrelevant or at least ambiguous with respect to the changes in politics and agriculture that consumed Russia in 1911, yet, in fact it can be seen as growing out of the contemporary discussion of Russia's agrarian question. 3

Ibid., p. 83.

147

Perceptual Revolution

We know that old-style populists, wedded to their beloved commune, greeted Stolypin's reforms with dismay and uncompromising rejection; we also know that Lenin hailed them as a positive step in the development of capitalism. But this is only part of the picture. The responses of many of the people most directly affected by the reforms-here I mean not the peasants themselves but zemstvo activists, agronomists, statisticians, some landholders, who had dedicated their lives to rural Russia and its improvementwere more complicated and, it seems to me, came in two stages. Their first reaction was a mixture of ambivalence and resentment: ambivalence because Stolypin had actually implemented some of the measures they had been advocating; resentment because in doing so he co-opted their ideas and forced them into "revolution from above," which preserved the status of the gentry while altering the organization of agriculture. This is quite clear in the papers of the Free Economic Society, which during the 1905 Revolution had completed its transformation from a gathering of enlightened landholders into a forum for zemstvo activists, agronomists, statisticians and radical intelligentsia. Only two months after the initial legislation of 9 November 1906, I. V. Chernyshev admitted that the decree represented "a partial liberation from the yoke of semifeudal [polukrepostnogo]legislation" but deplored the lack of attention to households with little land, the zemskii nachal' nik's right to interfere in the process of exit from the commune, ;;tnd the lack of a final resolution of the strip-farming problem. With the radical Second Duma still in session, Chernyshev maintained that these defects could be remedied only by a complete overhaul of centralized institutions, the abolition of the sosloviia and acknowledgment of peasants as full citizens with full political rights-in short, the replacement of the mir by a "free association of free agriculturists-citizens." Stolypin was trying to combat the creation of a landless proletariat by "medieval" means when a revolutionary solution was required. 4 Miliukov used a similar argument to explain why the Party of Popular Freedom (the Kadets) was voting against Stolypin's bill: The bill in the final form in which it is received by the Duma will not serve the economic needs of peasant agriculture or the political aims of implanting individualist ideas of landownership, for the means of accomplishing these aims are derived from the law of arbitration and coercion. Under such condi4 "Zadacha Gosudarstvennoi Dumy v oblasti reformy krest'ianskogo prava," Trudy Imperatorskogo Vol'nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva (TIVEO) (St. Petersburg), 1907, nos.1-2, p. 48.

148

What Is the Sophie Economy? tions the Party of Popular Freedom, with all its sympathy for the agrarian law when properly enacted, is forced to vote against this bill. 5 Bulgakov expressed the same ambivalence in his 1908 lectures on the agrarian question. He found it impossible to approve any part of Stolypin's program in toto. In drafting the Union of Liberation's agrarian program some six years earlier, he had himself advocated the transformation of the mir into a voluntary institution-a diminution of its role which Stolypin achieved instead by dictating its dissolution. Like most delegates at the Second Duma, he had favored expropriation of the gentry's land. He now concurred with the liberal colleagues who considered resettlement and the voluntary purchase of estate land inadequate solutions to the problem of land scarcity. 6 Stolypin's measures might have been steps in the right direction had they not been compromised by doing too little and by the wrong means. Gradually, however, the tone shifted from opposition and resentment to tacit acceptance of the government's incursion into agrarian affairs; new and positive themes began to emerge in the discussions of Stolypin's continuing legislation (although opposition, of course, also persisted). Such a reorientation might have developed for a variety of reasons. For one thing, nobody had much choice but to adapt-for example, the government tightened regulations on such harmful organizations as the FES after its subversive role in 1905-7-and the general economic expansion that began in earnest around 1909 made such a transition less painful.? The most plausible explanation is George Yaney's: at this stage, implementation of the reforms was turned over to agricultural specialists (agronomy-organizatory), many of them FES members. 8 In any case, Stolypin forced a change in the terms of discussion among Russia's agrarian interests, and within a few years revolutionary sentiment became noticeably less frequent as the new themes of the proprietor (khoziain), land organization (zemleustroistvo), and technical improvement-all "key words" of the Stolypin administration-began to take precedence. This discussion soon became prevalent throughout agricultural circles. By March 1909, for example, B. D. Brutskus had become one of many individ5 Ibid., pp. 51-52. 6 George Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma (Washington, D.C., 1981), pp. 4748. 7 See Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 109-12. 8 George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana, Ill.,

1982).

149

Perceptual Revolution

uals to take the government's program of land organization seriously. The government, he said, had substituted the question of land organization for land redistribution, thus depriving the radical opposition of its program and forcing through its plan of "transforming rural, communal Russia into a country of farms and private landowners." 9 Nonetheless, though land organization was justifiably considered a link in the chain of reactionary politics, it could have much to offer the Russian peasantry, and Brutskus saw it as agriculturists' task to identify those parts of the agricultural process where such policies could be most effective-the organization of single-household property, sometimes technical assistance to the communal peasantry, and, though in less "unimaginative" fashion than the government proposed, some forms of colonization. 10 Likewise, by the end of 1908 PES members were animatedly discussing the government's new meteorological stations and agricultural schools, though with more than a trace of resentment, for this educative function had once been the exclusive preserve of the zemstvo. In October 1908 they discussed the proper distribution and interrelation of government and zemstvo control over agricultural matters, concluding that local, bottom-up activity should take precedence except when the government's help was urgently needed (presumably in case of famine, for example).ll This shift in tone was particularly evident when Struve delivered a paper dramatically titled "Have We Entered a New Economic Age?" to the PES on 28 January 1909. Here he returned to the subject of grain prices, which had won him fame twelve years earlier; this time his conclusion was overwhelmingly optimistic. Without really answering the question posed in his title, he painted a picture of a worldwide economic expansion in which Russia, despite its initial cultural, agricultural, and political disadvantages, would blossom. Most important, these general changes would aid not large landholders or the poorer peasants but the strong peasant-producer. The crucial phrase in his presentation reads as follows. They would "facilitate and give a powerful push to those necessary and inevitable internal transformations in the structure of Russian agriculture which tend to make the Russian peasant into a true independent producer, a true proprietor [khoziain]." 12 This pronouncement, of course, caused a scandal. Struve was accused (most vociferously by Chernyshev) of everything from inconsistency to "sociological 9

p.

B. D. Brutskus, "Zemleustroistvo i rassclenie za granitsei i v Rossii," TIVEO, 1909, no. 3,

I. 10 11

12

Ibid., nos. 4-5, p. 45· TIVEO, 1908, no. 6, pp. 27-36. TIVEO, 1909, no. 1, p. 26.

ISO

What Is the Sophie Economy?

agnosticism" and "economic lyricism." Struve, his opponents argued, once so certain that Russia needed to learn from capitalism, no longer seemed to know what capitalism was or even what an "economic age" was, and was filling the void created by the lack of a coherent political-economic theory with an arbitrary scattering of"economic facts"; these "facts" then coalesced into a "familiar motif" -the argument Stolypin was advancing before the Duma. Having abandoned his old Marxist position, Chernyshev insisted, Struve had no coherent principle on which to base his outlook; he therefore lapsed into passive acquiescence in the government's policy of strengthening the independent proprietor, and was reduced to a poetic hopefulness with no real content.B Once Stolypin took control of agriculture, it was he who set the agenda for discussion. Willy-nilly the entire agricultural world became drawn into debates over land organization, technical improvements, and, above all, the strengthening of the independent peasant khoziain. Much as Bulgakov's 1908 lectures on the agrarian question had reflected a general confusion and resentment toward Stolypin's initial legislation, so the 1911 sophie economy crystallized out of the more positive discussion that had taken shape by the time the full-fledged law was passed on 14 June 1910. The sophie economy was a part of the new debate about agriculture; it corresponded with the new phase of the reforms' implementation, in which the "spe~ialists" became full-fledged participants and began to feel that they could influence as well as respond to the course of events. Bulgakov's fundamental concern was the same as that of Struve, Chernyshev, and Brutskus. His sophie economy was the single effort to conceptualize the problem of the new khoziain's task philosophically, to think through why what went on in this khoziain's mind was important, and to articulate the spirit in which he should conduct himself in his daily life and work. Bulgakov's contribution to the new discussion comprised two elements. First, even addressing the question of the individual proprietor's motivation required a "perceptual revolution" for an intellectual tradition that historically had been obsessed with the peasant commune.l 4 Bulgakov, as a philosopher as well as a political economist, was particularly well equipped to carry out this reconceptualization. Second, Bulgakov was able to formulate Ibid., pp. 30-31. I have borrowed the term "perceptual revolution" from David Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (De Kalb, Ill., 1987). Macey in turn borrowed it from Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). 13

14

15 1

Perceptual Revolution

an ethic or instruction to guide the new khoziain in his life and work; here his religious and literary sensibilities came into play. The need for a new ideology, a new political-economic approach to a rapidly changing agrarian reality, had become quite palpable among agricultural specialists by about 1909 or 1910. Struve the superpositivist was trying to formulate a new attitude in old terms, and the result was complete misunderstanding between him and his audience. This was not an isolated case: the literature of this period abounds with complaints about the inadequacy of old approaches. The statistician P. P. Maslov pointed out that Russian economic thought had been so much subordinated to the agronomists' and economists' struggle against the government that they ended up encouraging cottage industry as a countermeasure to capitalism, whereas anyone acquainted with basic economics would know that a strong cottage industry actually provided a foundation for capitalist development. In the 1890s and 1900s Russia's zemstvo statisticians, agronomists, and soil scientists had (in contrast to the less efficient government commissions) achieved an extraordinarily detailed description of peasant households, farming methods, soil types, and so on. Their work, however, had been carried out in such a radical spirit that Plehve equated zemstvo statisticians with revolutionary terrorists.l 5 Now many of them felt that the mass of statistical and descriptive material they had accumulated required a new organizing principle with a scientific rather than a political basis. Bulgakov set out to supply this principle with his philosophy of economy. And in the midst of the detailed and technical debates around the agrarian question, it seems like a breath of fresh air. Instead of talking about the distribution of rye, wheat, oats, and clover in a given peasant-owned field, the interrelation of political and economic statistics as disciplines, or ways in which new types of plows might improve peasant agriculture, Bulgakov spoke of such things as creativity, natural philosophy, the Platonic demiurge, and Sophia, the World Soul, the Pleroma, the natura naturans-all in the context of his account of the economic process. Bulgakov's sophie economy lifted discussion about agriculture out of an endless morass of practical detail to an emphasis on creativity and innovation. The sophie economy shifted the focus of economic theory from external social forms-institutions, "social ideals," forms of government, or modes of production-to the process and motivation of economic life; in other words, to what went on in the khoziain's mind. Explicitly and openly stating 15 Cf. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 (Oxford, 1967). Plehve apparently held the zemstvo statisticians responsible for the peasant uprisings of 1902.

152

What Is the Sophie Economy?

what Struve had only dimly implied, Bulgakov declared that the social institutions and ideals so important to Marxists and to his own revolutionary dreams before 1907 were illusory-mere shadows, so to speak, on the wall of the cave. To dwell on them was to neglect the higher metaphysical reality that was eternally present to guide and inspire, regardless of mode of production or political system. How one went about farming one's land might conceivably be more important than how much of it one had. Partly, this was making the best of a bad thing: Stolypin, in any case, had made sure that he alone was the one to control institutions. But more than that, Filosofiia khoziaistva asserted the socially creative and transformative power of the attitude with which economic life was conducted, rather than the governmental forms that it took. However constricting a political regime might be, people could still be, in fact had an obligation to be, free to live and work in accordance with "sophie" inspiration-and that process, he implied, would ultimately triumph over political unfreedom. (Incidentally, in this formulation Bulgakov followed the example of the Slavophiles, who had contrived to ignore the all-encompassing autocracy of their time by declaring that inner form and spirit were more essential than the abstract, logical, external factors of institutions or types of government-and that it had fallen to Russia, as opposed to the corrupt and rationalized West, to develop this principle and to express it for the benefit of humanity.) Bulgakov's shift of focus from external forms to inner spirit coincided with and was part of the Europe-wide intellectual revolution that historians summarize as the "revolt against positivism." Bulgakov's sophie economy shares what is perhaps the single characteristic that the many variants of the modernist rejection of positivism had in common: attention to things beyond the material world, an effort to look beyond the physical reality that surrounds us, to look through the material world to essences invisible to the naked eye. In keeping with this new recognition of the "disparity between external reality and the internal appreciation of that reality,"l6 the central feature of Bulgakov's sophie economy is its replacement of Marx's economic materialism, which described society in terms of "external forms" ---,.institutions, classes, forms of government-by a vision that, stressed instead the internal "spirit" of society. In this sense, Bulgakov's shift of focus was characteristic of his age: from "objective" and clearly visible forms to the more nebulous area of subjective motivation. Having placed the subject or khoziain at the center of his philosophy, Bulgakov went on to formulate more explicitly the spirit in which he should live 16 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1977), p. 16.

153

Perceptual Revolution and work. Labor was an essential element of Bulgakov's philosophy of economy. Defending and broadening the sphere of life, and to this degree its partial resurrection, is the content of man's economic activity.... The world as Sophia, having fallen into a state of falsehood and hence mortality, must once again enter into the wisdom of Truth [Jstina], and the means to this end is labor, or economy [khoziaistvo]P Marx, then, had been on the right track when he formulated his labor theory of value, but he had not gone far enough: economic materialism had reduced the importance oflabor to a theory of prices, whereas labor for Bulgakov had a philosophical and religious significance. Marx had caught only one phase of the world-historical process of Fall and Resurrection: economic materialism was an accurate description of our life as it exists in the fallen empirical world. For Bulgakov, Marxism expressed the· economic tragedy of human life, our subjugation to the forces of dead, reasonless nature. It was another expression of our need to eat bread in the sweat of our face, until we return to the earth of which we are made. Far less than a grand scheme of human history, economic materialism merely described the most pathetic chapter in the drama of the Fall and Resurrection, in which man has not yet understood the potentially profound meaning of economic activity, its capacity to resurrect all of creation and return it to life in Sophia. Instead of being painful and mechanical ("in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life" [Gen. 3:17 ]), labor could and should be sophie. Sophia, which Bulgakov was careful never to define explicitly, evoked layer upon layer of associations, from the Sophia of Scripture and medieval mysticism to the Eternal Feminine of the Romantics and Symbolist neo-Romantics. The Divine Wisdom consists of the totality of eternal ideas that confronted God at the creation; yet the notion of Sophia is in constant flux, it is joyousness, it is play, it is wisdom, it is love. Literary imagery proves more accurate than rational explication, and Bulgakov evokes the poetry of Angelus Silesius: "Die Rose, welche hier dein auj3res Auge sieht, I Die hat von Ewigkeit in Gott also gebliiht." 18 Sophia has qualities of eternity, of joyousness; again, in the uncanonical book of The Wisdom of Solomon: "With thee is wisdom, which knows thy deeds and was present when Thou didst create the world, and knows what is desirable before Thine eyes and what is right by Thy laws." Sophia appears not only as the wisdom present at the creation but as the 17 18

Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 155. "The rose which your outer eye now sees, I Has bloomed in God for all eternity."

154

What Is the Sophie Economy?

power that gave God strength to rule over everything, as the artist (feminine) who created everything, as an infinitely mobile and sparkling reflection of the eternal light. Bulgakov's instruction to treat economic activity as a creative process inspired by Sophia amounts to an ethic of joyful and creative labor. The economic process should be seen as analogous to the creation of a work of art, the joyous investment of the products of nature with their own essence. Bulgakov's instruction to the khoziain is an ethic oflabor infused with joy, for every stone he moves and every furrow he plows partakes of the divine Sophia and reproduces in microcosm the universal drama of Fall and Resurrection. Bulgakov's sophie economy reiterates a very old theme of Russian Orthodoxy. Just as a person attending the Orthodox liturgy and partaking of the Eucharist experiences the cosmic drama of Christ's Resurrection (a theme reiterated each year in the festival cycle), so each man relives the Fall and Resurrection as he works in his field. His labor resurrects the soil, redeems it from the inert, lethargic sleep into which Adam plunged it with his original sin. This was not far distant from the way Stolypin himself put it in a speech to the Duma in 1909: "It is necessary to lift our impoverished, our weak, our exhausted soil, for soil is the guarantee of our strength and future; soil-that is Russia." 19 Bulgakov had a message for the agronom-organizator as well, as he used his technical and scientific expertise to help in the process of agricultural change. Knowledge and science could be sophie, too, so long as they were understood as integral parts of the economic process. "Man stands in an economic relation to nature, holding a tool in one hand and the flaming torch of knowledge in the other." 20 But science should never become an end in itself, should never be transformed from the tool of economy to its ordainer. This, of course, is what Bulgakov believed had happened with positivism. Properly understood, science was an essential instrument in the sophie resurrection of nature by labor. Science introduces the light of differentiation and regularity into the dark chaos of inert matter, the confusion of cosmic forces and elements. It ideally organizes the world as an object, and permeates the chaos of phenomena with the light of ideas, of universal and reasonable laws. Science is the proprietorship [khoziaistvo] of reason in nature, the restoration through labor of the ideal cosmos as an organism of ideas or ideal regularities, which harmoniously 19 20

Quoted in Tokmakoff, Stolypin and the Third Duma, p. 45· Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 171.

155

Perceptual Revolution combines cosmic forces, or forms primordial matter and primordial energythe "foremother" of being. In the process of labor and economy science penetrates through the bark and pith of the chao-cosmos to the ideal cosmos, the cosmos-Sophia.zi Perhaps surprisingly, the new thinking about the khoziain and about the economic process was rather broadly reflected in contemporary discussion. N. N. Kazhanov, for example, used very similar terms in 1914: The cement that binds together these various elements of agricultural technology, the moment that unifies them in a single organized whole, is the intellect of the subject of the economic process [khoziaistvuiushchego sub' ekta], which manages to unite into one a particular kind of plow, furrow, planter, harvester, one or another kind of wheat, fodder, a definite species or breed of livestock corresponding to the individual agricultural enterprise. This intellect of the agriculturist [sel' skogo khoziaina], which organizes individual production, is in its essence identical to the collective intellect of all of humanity, which within certain limits organizes the economic [promyshlennuiu] life of the contemporary civilized [kul' turnogo] world in its totality into a single whole.ZZ Aleksandr Chaianov, the influential leader and thinker among the reforming agronomists, thought in much the same terms. George Yaney summarizes his approach: The agronom-organizator was on the front lines, as it were, of a profound psycho-spiritual transformation in which people who were living only to produce and receive their proper share of a limited range of locally available goods were to become willing instruments of an infinitely greater productive system. The agronomist was not himself a farmer. His basic task, rather, was to "advise and influence" farmers: to be the "yeast," as Chaianov put it, that would cause peasant society to ferment. His mission was to "replace old ideas in the heads of the people with new ones." "Social agronomy" was "a system of social measures." The agronomist "was creating a new human culture, a new popular consciousness, and he was allowing this new culture itself to create a new agriculture."23 Ibid., pp. zo8-9. N. N. Kazhanov, "Odna iz chert nauchnogo mirosozertsaniia A. I. Skvortsova, kak agronoma-myslitelia," in TIVEO, 1914, bks. 1-2, p. 45. 23 Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, pp. 396-97. 21

22

156

What Is the Sophie Economy?

Sergei Bulgakov's sophie economy takes its place as one of the original yet characteristic religious-philosophical ideas of the Russian Silver Age. He managed this achievement not by retreat from social responsibility amid the disappointments of 1907 but by constructive engagement with the new social and agricultural questions that took shape as the Stolypin legislation went into effect. The significance of the sophie economy for the social thought of the early twentieth century, it seems, is above all its articulation, in modern language, of a very old ethic implicit in lay Orthodoxy-an ethic of joyful labor, a reminder that the fundamental Christian message of Fall and Resurrection can suffuse the most trivial activities of daily life. Evoking what Florovsky has referred to as a "silence in Russian culture," Bulgakov used Sophia less as a concrete political concept than as a hint or evocation of a multitude of images, from the medieval iconographic Wisdom to Soloviev's "Tri svidaniia" and Blok's Nechaiannaia radost!. 24 As the Symbolists would put it, Sophia was a means of expressing the inexpressible-an "inexpressible" that yet radiated joy, beauty, and hope. At the same time, Bulgakov's message to the khoziain was a symptom of an incipient dialogue between the government and at least a part of the intelligentsia in the years 1909-13-a dialogue that had entirely broken down during the second half of the nineteenth century. For the first time since Chernyshevsky's open challenge to the government, some part of the thinking public was forced to enter into discussion with the administration, to reflect on the same issues and engage the same problems. What might have happened to Bulgakov's message to Stolypin's independent proprietor had the Revolution not intervened, we do not of course know. As it did happen, the notion of a sophie economy split in two. Bulgakov exported Sophia to Paris, where it became the foundation of his "sophiological" theology. Khoziaistvo remained behind: such holistic, organic notions of economy as Bulgakov's fed into the economic debates of the 1920s in the Soviet Union and left their mark on Stalin's transformative projects in the 1930s. Putting the two back together again in the forgotten context of the Russian Silver Age takes a certain amount of historical imagination. 24

Georges Florovsky, "The Problem of Old Russian Culture," Slavic Review 21

157

(1962): 12.

CHAPTER

NINE

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

I

f Bulgakov's sophie economy constituted a perceptual revolution in thinking about economic life, his playing off of the disciplines of economy and philosophy against each other resulted in an original contribution to philosophy as well. Bulgakov's unusual introduction of labor and economy as valid topics of philosophical reflection played into the most urgent contemporary philosophical debates-namely, the neo-Kantian discussion of epistemology and the more general effort to transcend positivism. With its new approach to economic life, Filosofiia khoziaistva (Philosophy of economy) takes a carefully argued philosophical position. Bulgakov sought above all to construct a "life-oriented" philosophy that could resolve a fundamental problem: how to explain man's relation to the external world, how to construct a bridge between the intellect and the practice of life? In formulating an answer, Bulgakov used all the resources available to him: contemporary philosophy, nineteenth-century Romanticism, Symbolist literature, the Christian tradition, Russian thinkers such as Soloviev and Fedorov, and even elements of Marxism or, more broadly, economic materialism. Bulgakov's vision of an active, working man participating in a common task of universal resurrection was articulated in philosophical terms as a transcendence of the gulf between subject and object through labor, and as a reiteration of the Christian drama of Fall and Resurrection. Filosofiia khoziaistva, which deals with man's economic existence, ostensibly has little in common with Bulgakov's other major work of this period, Svet nevecher158

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

nii (The unfading light [1917]), which addresses man's religious experience; yet together these works present a coherent answer to positivism and what Bulgakov considered its most virulent manifestation, Marxism.

The Labor Theory of Cognition In its philosophical aspect, Filosofiia khoziaistva was conceived first of all as a reply to neo-Kantianism. A century earlier, the Romantic poets and philosophers had reacted to the rationalism of the Enlightenment by turning their attention away from man and toward the uncontrollable forces of nature. German Romantic philosophy particularly sought to reconcile the thinking, knowing subject proposed by Kant with a world external to that subject. Bulgakov's reaction in the 1910s to his earlier idealism recapitulated Romanticism's reaction to Kant. In Filosofiia khoziaistva he reiterated a central concern of Romantic thought: how to account for the relationship between man (the thinking subject) and the external world (or object). 1 In general terms, Bulgakov accused Kant and his latter-day followers of excessive "intellectualism" or rationalism. From Descartes's "ultra-intellectualist" "Cogito ergo sum" up to Hermann Cohen's Logik der reinen Erkenntniss, the rationalist tradition in European thought had taken logic as the sole organizing principle of being. Being, for rationalist philosophy, was nothing more than thought thinking itself in a closed and self-sufficient system. 2 It seemed to Bulgakov that Kant's inquiry into the possibility of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason had artificially isolated the thinking subject from external reality. Kant had explicitly concerned himself with transcendental knowledge, "which is occupied not so much with objects, as with our manner of knowing objects, so far as this is meant to be possible a priori." 3 But in thus excluding experience from his investigation and concentrating solely on the subject of knowledge, Kant had unwittingly sealed his subject behind a glass wall and constructed a one-sided philosophy of pure, quietistic reflection. Idealism had proved incapable of dealing with any reality that lay outside the thinking subject. If Kant erred by concentrating exclusively on the thinking subject, the neoKantians exacerbated and vulgarized this emphasis. In a variation on Schel1 The centrality of this problem is generally accepted by scholars of Romanticism, e.g., M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971); N. V. Riasanovsky, The Eme1gence of Romanticism (Oxford, 1992); Rene Wellek, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," in Ronumticism Reexumi11ed, ed. Stephen Nichols (New Haven, 1962). 2 Sergei Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva (Moscow, 1912), pp. 12-13. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Muller (New York, 1966), p. 16.

1 59

Perceptual Revolution

ling's Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, which had been a response to the Critique of Pure Reason, Bulgakov argued that the neoKantians' effort to establish a "professional" critical method applicable to various branches of science was misconceived. 4 For Bulgakov, knowledge in its practical dimension was largely a spontaneous process, whose precise procedures could not be determined in advance. In their overriding preoccupation with methodology, the neo-Kantians put the cart before the horse, for they insisted that a theory of knowledge must precede knowledge itself. As a result, they lost sight of the object of knowledge. Both Kant and the neoKantians failed to distinguish between science, which should concern itself with the general forms of knowledge, and philosophy, whose task was rather to explain the fact of knowledge itself. Fundamentally, idealism in both its Kantian and its contemporary critical form, in its concentration on the knowing subject and the procedure of knowledge, had no means of accounting for a world external to the subject. It could ask "How is knowledge possible?" but not "How is nature possible?" This aspect of Bulgakov's criticism corresponds with the concerns of Schelling, who took as his point of departure the necessary coincidence of objective and subjective in order for knowledge to be possible. Schelling objected to the narrow limits Kant had imposed on his investigation of knowledge, and sought to expand transcendental idealism until it became what it ought to be-a general system of knowledge. This total philosophical system had to include two parts. The first, the Naturphilosophie, took the object-natureas a given, and sought to explain its relation to the subject. Through reflection, nature ultimately became its own object, as man's study of it endowed nature with reason. Conversely, transcendental idealism-the second part of Schelling's philosophical system-began with the subject, and sought to explain how it was connected with the object. In other words, the system of transcendental idealism was an effort to justify our basic perception that there are things outside ourselves. The problem of the relationship between subject and object permeates Schelling's writings, for he considered an explanation of the coincidence of subjective and objective as the basic task of philosophy. 5 Bulgakov acknowledges his debt to Schelling, crediting him with "breaking the wall" between subject and object by means of two "profound and powerful ideas": the identity of subject and object and the understanding of Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, pp. 33-38. F. W. J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen idealismus, (!Boo), in Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schroter (Munich, 1927), 2:339, 234. 4

5

160

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

nature as a living, growing organism. 6 The philosophy of identity had argued that ultimately, the spirit within us and nature outside of us were one and the same; that is, subject and object were penetrable to each other. By the same token, evolutionary development in a nature suffused with reason acquired metaphysical, not merely mechanica1, significance. According to Bulgakov, the philosophy of identity permits Schelling to ask how objective action is possible; that is, to address the problem of the existence of a world external to the subject. How does the intellect act on nature? How can anything transcend itself in order to interact with the external world? Still worse, according to Bulgakov, Kant had posited an inadequate subject. This criticism is more fundamental than the first, for while Kant had consciously set up his investigation to avoid addressing the object itself, the positive aspect of his philosophy was now also found to be lacking. Kant's "error" lay in his "epistemological individualism or atomism." His transcendental subject of knowledge, the epistemological I, was assumed to be an individual, although of course not a concrete empirical person. But then there must be a multiplicity of such epistemological subjects, impenetrable to one another; and this Bulgakov held to be irreconcilable with a universally valid transcendental subject. For such subjects would be transcendental with respect to each other: each subject would possess its own version of truth, and the resulting universe would be a multiplicity of competing truths. The universal validity so central to Kant's epistemology would then be completely impossible/ Kant's subject, moreover, was a creature of dubious identity. "Kant's epistemological subject-around which the world turns in Kant's philosophy (this is his notorious 'Copernicanism')-exists neither in empirical reality, for it is concrete, psychological, and therefore not 'clean; nor outside the experience of this reality, for entry into the transcendental realm is forbidden." Because Kant's subject was so unequivocally abstracted from real existence, it had become a mere device, a "methodological fiction" invented for the purpose of philosophizing; it bore little relation to any concrete metaphysical problem. "Kant's Critique destroys much more than he intended; it subjectivizes not only the object of knowledge, transforming it into a mere representation, but also its subject, placing it somewhere in a transitional area between the empirical and the transcendental, in the middle between yes and no. This nail, hammered into the air, would not suffice to support so much as a feather, let alone the entire universe that 'Copernicus' Kant wants 6

7

Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 59. Ibid., p. n6.

1 61

Perceptual Revolution to attach to it." 8 Kant's painstaking definitions and limitations of his problem had trivialized it. In the end, his system not only failed to account for experience, which it did consciously, but also proved dependent on a subject that was nothing more than an invented methodological device. Bulgakov suggests that the only legitimate transcendental subject must be supra-individual. The transcendental subject of knowledge is a function of knowledge and is realized through separate individuals, but is supra-individual both in its task and in its significance, as well as in its potential. Individuals are only the eyes, ears, organs of the single subject of knowledge, which possesses all the force of knowledge, its energy, its depth, and its products.... It is this subject that brings the infinite multiplicity of experience together in one space, organizes it in subsequent moments of a unified time, ties it with an unbroken causal connection.9 Only a somewhat mystical collectivity that is more than the sum of its parts can function adequately as a transcendental subject. This subject is not an abstract hypothesis: the subject really exists, and knowledge is really integrated in this subject. Individual acts of cognition ultimately coalesce into a whole in the course of the cognitive process. It could perhaps be argued that Bulgakov's definition of the transcendental subject again has its source in Schelling's philosophy: the universal subject explicitly resembles the world soul of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, the principle that organizes the world into a system.I 0 But in a more direct sense, Bulgakov in this case draws on those aspects of Romanticism emphasized by its Russian exponents, particularly some of the Slavophiles. Bulgakov remarks that emphasis on the collectivity, on humanity as a whole, has become a "distinguishing characteristic" of Russian thought. 11 Bulgakov reacted to neo-Kantianism as the Romantics had reacted to Kant at the turn of the nineteenth century; and he did so for similar reasons and in similar terms. In Filosofiia khoziaistva, he posed the question "How is economy possible?" This amounted to a reformulation of the Romantics' "How is objective action possible?" His aim was to reach an understanding of the R

9 10 11

Ibid. Ibid., pp. 117-18. Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Schellings Werke, Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 120.

162

1:418,

637.

The "Spirit of Synthesis" world as the object oflabor and economic activity; this, he believed, was the basic metaphysical question addressed, though not clearly formulated, by the current philosophies of economism, criticism (i.e., neo-Kantianism), pragmatism, and mysticism. But the choice of economy as an orientation was not arbitrary. The specific terms in which Bulgakov restated the Romantic problem of the relationship of subject and object reflected his assimilation of the experience of nineteenth-century positivism. He accepted his epoch's concern with wealth and material well-being. Our epoch, he was saying, has been characterized by "economism"; in other words, in contrast to ascetic periods of history, the present period loves wealth and perceives the world in economic terms. For our time, the world is a giant household, and human power is measured in terms of wealth. His intention in the first part of Filosofiia khoziaistva was precisely to establish the validity of such a view, to examine the world as household. He looked at the world as the object of economic activity. The basic subject matter was fundamentally in accord w:ith his earlier concerns: this was, after all, a book about economics. Bulgakov did not abandon his work in political economy; he continued it and brought to it the new elements that emerged from his other interests of 1900-1910. This book resulted from his application of new approaches and attitudes to old material, and was therefore representative of the way his involvement in religious questions, politics, journalism, and literature helped him to resolve the problems of positivism which had paralyzed his economic researches in 1900. And indeed, although the subject matter of Filosofiia khoziaistva resembles that of his earlier work, he approached it in a radically different way. He was thinking in an entirely new way after his search of the first decade of the century. He acknowledged that this work constituted a summation of a part of his life that had been colored by his adherence to the philosophy of economic materialism, which he now sought to put into perspective. Positivism for Bulgakov personally had meant economic materialism, and thus Marxism. The doctrine of economic materialism, in this context, was merely the most radical and perfect formulation of the general attitude of the epoch-that economic processes lay at the foundation of life in society. Economic materialism merely articulated and radicalized those presumptions implicit in the study of political economy generally. The "scientific" doctrine of economic materialism became subsumed in the philosophy of economic life. On a still deeper level, Bulgakov's philosophy fused the Romantic subjectobject question with the perception, so crucial to Russian positivism, of the pervasive struggle of man against nature. To conflate neo-Romanticism and

163

Perceptual Revolution

positivism in this manner was not particularly difficult, given Romanticism's identification of the subject with man and the object with nature_l2 His initial formulation of his central idea constituted an amalgam of neoRomantic imagery and language with a radical statement of the positivist vision of the world as the arena of a struggle for survival. We have seen Mikhailovsky's view of Darwinism (the emblem of positivism) and the struggle of man against nature, and Lunacharsky's radicalization and vulgarization of the positivist position. Perhaps the most dramatic, because most exaggerated and strained, version of positivism's preoccupation with the struggle for survival belongs to Fedorov, in whose thought man's battle with nature results ultimately in the resurrection of the fathers and thus a victory over death. In Bulgakov's neo-Romantic version, the positivist struggle of man against nature looks more or less like this: Although life is absolute and extratemporal in its essence, it exists in the empirical world only in a constant struggle with death. Paradoxically, life finds itself a prisoner of the blind necessity of death even though, ultimately, there is only life, and everything, including death, is really an attribute of life. In the empirical world life is necessarily mortal (though this is a contradiction in terms). A death mask of materiality lies upon nature, and man is condemned to a constant search to satisfy his material needs; in other words, to the Darwinian struggle for life. Bulgakov defines the economic process as man's struggle with the elemental forces of nature in order to defend and widen the sphere of life, to conquer and "humanize" nature, to transform dead matter-subject to absolute necessity-into a living organism. Economic activity is the struggle oflife to overcome death; the world as household is the world as an object and hence also a product of labor. Economic activity is thus in a sense antithetical to nature, for it strives to bend nature to its needs; yet at the same time, nature cannot realize itself fully without the efforts of labor. Nature provides the material for culture, for the expansion of life through the economic process. In an even more explicit fusion of positivism with neo-Romanticism, Bulgakov goes on to say that every economic act involves the interaction of man with the external world, the effort of the subject (man) to change and organize its object (nature). Man seeks to anthropomorphize nature, to adapt nature to his ends; this fusion of subject and object is what we call conquering nature. Here Bulgakov actually states the positivist idea of con12 The extent to which Russian positivism was a product of Romanticism, or at least incorporated elements of Romantic thought, is an interesting question that invites investigation.

164

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

quering nature in Romantic terms, equating positivism's "man" and "nature" with Romanticism's "subject" and "object." The resulting problem was the relationship between subject and object, a neo-Romantic question that incorporated or subsumed positivism's concern with material experience. Bulgakov's answer to neo-Kantianism brought him back to the deeper problems of positivism. He faced the rather extraordinarily ambitious program of simultaneously refuting and transcending both Kant and Marx. This he bravely set about to do, combining neo-Romantic language and metaphor with the Russian philosophical tradition and with Christianity to propose an original Christian modernist solution. The only source intellectually powerful enough to succeed in such an ambitious enterprise proved to be Christianity. As we have seen, Bulgakov's "How is economy possible?" fused the Romantic question of the relationship between subject and object with the positivist effort to understand the relationship between man and nature. Bulgakov's question restated both the positivist and the Romantic problems. But to restate these problems was to transform them: each changed in contact with the other, and the result was a completely new question. In 1900 Bulgakov had criticized positivism for its dependence on external experience, and hence neglect of the inner self; its unequivocal belief in linear progress in history; its determinism, pointing to a lack of individual freedom; its glorification of man ("mangodhood") to the point of deifying him; its conversion of science into a faith, and hence reluctance to address real problems of metaphysics and religious belief; its preoccupation with phenomena, resulting in a pluralism and fragmentation ofknowledge. The effort to confront these difficulties head-on had led only to an intermediary solution in the form of idealism. Bulgakov's neo-Romantic formulation, however, posed the problem in a new way that made its resolution possible; it performed the feat that haunted all creators of modernist thought and science, namely, how to restate the question so that it could be answered. 13 The new question enabled Bulgakov to transcend positivism from within by finding a solution to the problems it posed rather than by putting it aside in favor of a different approach. The new formulation also transformed the problem of subject and object. For Bulgakov, the manner in which the Romantics had posed the problem of the relationship of subject and object had retained the basic shortcoming of Western "cabinet" philosophy. Even Schelling assumed the "artificial" stance 13

Cf. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London, 1989), esp. p. 23.

165

Perceptual Revolution

of a "transcendental philosopher" 14 in constructing his system. His philosophy, with its two separate parts, remained abstract and static. And indeed, the ultimate possible interaction of subject and object resulted for Schelling in the work of art, just as for Novalis it had transformed the world into a poem. By incorporating positivism's concern with material existence, Bulgakov's "How is economy possible?" changed the philosopher's task from abstract contemplation to active involvement in the process of life and shifted philosophy's consequences from the sphere of art to that of life. "How is economy possible?" was no longer a question about philosophy or art or evolution; instead, it was a question about life. This, in short, was the fundamental question addressed by religion. Curiously enough, the assimilation of materialistic nineteenth-century philosophy into the Romantic problem led to religious questions by transforming the Romantic concern with Art into a modernist concern with Life. In addressing this new question, Bulgakov was able to draw on the tradition of Russian thought to propose an original Christian philosophical solution. From the standpoint of his new endeavor, the Romantic opposition of subject and object could be resolved relatively easily. Once the artificial "methodological device" of an epistemological subject had been abandoned, subject and object ceased to stand in opposition to each other. In Bulgakov's schema, the subject-object relationship is immersed in the economic process; that is, in life itself: subject and object fuse and penetrate each other in the course of active involvement in economic life. The subject cannot be isolated; it exists only in a dynamic readiness for action in the world. This philosophy Bulgakov calls "economic realism"; and it is based on acknowledgment of th(~ central importance of labor as a philosophical concept. In brief, economic realism as a worldview was an effort to understand man and his life in the world instead of concentrating on an artificially conceived thinking subject. When Bulgakov set out "to reach an understanding of the world as the object of labor and economic activity," his aim was simultaneously modest and grandiose. On the one hand, he wished to explore a very limited and clearly defined area of philosophical thought-the question of man as an economic actor. How can we describe the economic aspects of man's life in the world, how does he consume and produce, what is his relation to the material world that surrounds him and to the products of his labor? On the other hand, Bulgakov had a larger claim to make for the object of his investigation: he believed that the philosophy of economy held the key to 14

Schelling, System des transzendentalen idealismus, p. 343.

166

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

certain general questions of metaphysics, and that the economic relation of man to the external world was of primary philosophical importance. 15 Economic activity, according to Bulgakov, held the key to the relationship between subject and object. The perspective of economic realism permitted a resolution of their opposition. In the economic process, the world exists for us only as the object of our activity. It is our constant interaction with the world that convinces us of its reality; the division between the thinking subject and an abstract external world posited by philosophy is false, for in real life we exist in constant contact with external reality. Subject and object do not exist separately; rather, they constantly interact, and this is the process that constitutes life. The interaction of subject and object in the economic process takes place through two functions-consumption and production. Consumption is a process of mutual interaction between man's organism and nature's mechanism; eating represents the initial interaction of man and nature. In the economic process, the active living principle (subject) constantly works on and organizes dead matter (object) into a living body. This relationship of organic and mechanized matter is summarized in food, the means of interpenetration.16 Eating is the process by which the deadened, mechanized material of nature is used by the living body and thus transformed into a living organism. We eat the world, partake of the flesh of the world. Not only with our mouths or digestive organs, but also in the process of seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, of general muscular sense. The world comes inside us through all the windows and doors of our senses and, coming in, is accepted and assimilated by us .... Life itself is in this sense the ability to consume the world, partake of it, whereas death is the exit outside the boundaries of this world, the using up of the ability to interact with it; and finally, resurrection is the return to the world, with the restoration of this ability, albeit in an infinitely expanded degree.l 7 Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, pp. 104-5. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde (1799; Stuttgart, 1963), p. 17: "Certainly! it lies deep in the nature of man, that he wants to eat everything he loves, and he carries every new object he comes across immediately to his mouth, so he can dismember it into its constituent parts." 17 Bulgakov, Filosojiia khoziaistva, pp. 83-84. Bulgakov also expressed the essential relationship between the living organism and the dead mechanism through a sexual metaphor: "Life organizes material in innumerable points and centers; the active male principle fertilizes the receptive feminine principle, the lifeless Meon. The Eros oflife is born of Poros and Penia, wealth and poverty, activity and passivity" (p. So). 15

16

167

Perceptual Revolution

But if eating was the initial means of interaction between man and nature, labor represents the conscious, active action of man upon nature in the economic process which ultimately will lead to the reflection of nature in man. Production is filrst of all a system of objective actions involving the interaction of subject and object; it is the action of the subject on the object. The product of economic activity is a subject-object; that is, an item from the natural world that has been invested with human energy. Labor-objectified human reality-is the indestructible link connecting the subject with the object. 18 Man's conscious work with nature becomes the means for the final part of the economic process to come about: n·ature becomes whole, realizes her entire being, only through this interaction, which is initiated by man. Although man remains immeasurably far from control over nature, the way to it is open to him. Nature is the passive, receptive, feminine principle, man the active, male, conscious principle. Thus nature, with the blind intellect or instinct that reigns in her, comes to know herself only through man. Nature becomes humanized, she is capable of becoming the peripheral body of man, submitting to his consciousness and realizing herself in him. 1 9 Bulgakov's sexual metaphor, his image of a "marriage" between man and nature, illustrates his conception of harmonious union through labor (in contrast, for example, to Lunacharsky's campaign to conquer nature by force). Labor becomes the bridge from the "I" to the "not-1." 20 Labor stands for the action of the subject on the object; it is the second way, after the partaking of food, in which the living and nonliving worlds interact. The concept oflabor is more than merely a concrete aspect of production. Taken as an epistemological concept, labor overcomes the division of subject and object, for it posits the fundamentally active nature of their relationship. Kantian philosophy, with its passive subject, entirely neglected the philosophical importance of labor; and while economists recognized its importance, they failed to perceive its philosophical implications. Up to now, political economy had seen labor solely in its practical dimension; economic materialism's labor theory of value anticipated the importance of labor but failed to formulate its philosophical presuppositions. It reduced the importance of labor to a theory of prices, whereas what was really significant was the philosophical understanding of labor as a bridge between man and the external world. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 106. The conception of the relationship between man and nature in terms of masculine and feminine principles, of course, has its roots in Romanticism. 20 Ibid., p. 95. 18

19

168

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

An apprehension oflabor as a philosophical concept permits us to perceive

the relationship between subject and object as an active one. "Philosophy should not take an invented epistemological subject as its point of departure; instead, it should begin with the active subject, engaged in the economic process, which we know through experience." Subject and object are not static givens; they change constantly in the course of their mutual interaction. "This changing relation between subject and object, the unfolding of the I in relation to nature, is life. In other words, it is growth and action; it is dynamic rather than static." 21 Such an approach accepts man's intuitive relation to the world; as Bulgakov puts it, no critical philosopher has been able to convince people that the external world does not exist. "This active relation to the world as the object of economic activity forms the basis of that 'naive realism' which is the general natural epistemology of humanity prior to any philosophical reflection, and which is preserved in practical life regardless of any destructive, skeptical conclusions of philosophical solipsism." The "naive realism" is actually simply acceptance of man's active stance in the world-in other words, a description of life. 22 The problem of the existence of the external world arose from an artificial concentration on an invented thinking subject; it can be avoided entirely when man is accepted as an active being, existing in constant interaction with nature. "Labor, as the foundation of epistemology, therefore removes the problem of the existence of the external world (and also of the other I) as an idealistic invention, the phantom of alienated thought." 23 Such an approach, of course, had implications for the status of the philosopher. Bulgakov proposed a reinterpretation of the enterprise of philosophical reflection. The living, active "I" must be the point of departure for philosophy. There is no such thing as "pure" reason, no such thing as an abstract epistemological subject, invented by the philosopher in the sterile isolation of his study. Philosophy, said Bulgakov, likes to think of itself as "pure" and independent contemplation, and balks at the idea of a philosophy of economy; even the combination of these two words sounds odd. But philosophy is actually always oriented toward something outside itself, it is always somehow related to life. For life is prior to everything: science and philosophy are born in its womb, and time and space are but manifestations of life. Life is simultaneously rational and irrational. The intellect is capable of constructing a tremendous abstract edifice, wholly rational and "transparent," or intelligible, alongside the concrete world; but this construction of 21 22 23

Ibid., pp. 96, 97. 94, 103. Ibid., p. 103.

Ibid., pp.

169

Perceptual Revolution

reason always remains deeply rooted in life, and has its source in life's reflection upon itself. No contemporary philosopher claimed to construct an absolute philosophical system; they all tried to shed light on various questions by orienting their thought toward one particular aspect of life. The manner in which Bulgakov plunged the subject/object in life and asserted the necessity oflooking at man in his life in the world instead of as an artificially defined "thinking subject," while addressing problems of cognition fundamental to German philosophy, at the same time drew heavily on the tradition of Russian thought. In arguing thus, Bulgakov articulated a characteristic attitude of Russian thought, which he shared, and which was largely implicit in the writings of earlier thinkers. One of the most salient and distinctive characteristics of Russian thought in the nineteenth century had been what we might call its "directedness," its categorical refusal to operate in a contemplative vacuum, removed from the concerns of life in society. This frequently observed tendency of Russian thought was perhaps most in evidence from Chernyshevsky onward, but was equally perceptible in the ideas of the Slavophiles, whose inclination to formulate social categories (the commune, the people, etc.) as philosophical concepts evinced their continual engagement in the social process, their inability and unwillingness to divorce philosophy from life.24

Neo-Romanticism and Christianity

So far we have been able to follow Bulgakov's argument by means of philosophical analysis, but that method now brings us to a dead end. Economic realism, or the plunging of subject and object in life, provided a satisfactory account of the relationship of subject and object; but this was still only a partial resolution of the larger religious question raised by the fusion of positivism and neo-Romanticism. Economic realism provided little more than the intuitive acknowledgment of man as an active creature, functioning in the world and inextricable from this dynamic attitude. The fundamentally secular framework of Filosofiia khoziaistva (or at any rate of its first part) proved inadequate to resolve the religious questions that this work raised. There is a clear break in Bulgakov's argumentation: in confronting the question of faith, his work ceases to be philosophy and shifts from argument by 24

This style of philosophy is particularly characteristic of Soloviev and Fedorov.

170

The "Spirit of Synthesis" logical sequence to metaphor.25 The central Christian notions of the Fall and Resurrection replace philosophical discussion of subject and object as the organizing principles of his work. Although a Christian solution is adumbrated in the text of Filosofiia khoziaistva, Bulgakov's full solution emerges only when this book is read in conjunction with the one he wrote soon afterward, Svet nevechernii. This solution is a vision, heavily dependent on neo-Romantic language and imagery, of a meaningful economic process immersed in the religious-mystical principle to which Bulgakov gives the name Sophia. The preface to Filosofiia khoziaistva describes its first volume, on the world as household, as an effort to uncover the ontology of economy, or the general foundations of the economic process. Bulgakov perceived this effort as a part of a general Christian philosophy. Christianity, he argued, needed to be taken seriously in its ontological and cosmological dimension, and the philosophy of economy uncovered a part of this dimension. The second volume was to look at its justification-its "axiology and eschatology." It was to include an investigation of the problem of the relation between flesh and spirit (the ethics of economy) and of the meaning of history and culture. Volume 2 was never written. Instead, in 1917 Bulgakov published a religious-philosophical work that summed up his religious evolution over the preceding decade. At first glance, Svet nevechernii seems an entirely different sort of work from Filosofiia khoziaistva, with unrelated goals. Strictly religiousphilosophical in its conception, Svet nevechernii was to explain or elaborate upon the beliefs of an Orthodox Christian. It was supposed to be a sort of literary-"musical" evocation of Orthodoxy-not an exposition of Christian dogma but a compendium of the myths of which, according to Bulgakov, a religious system consists. Thus, following a lengthy introduction that explains the basis of Bulgakov's approach to religion and to religious philosophy, the book goes on to develop what he saw as the central myths of Orthodox Christianity. In contrast to standard works of theology, which focus on the dogma of the Godhead, this book elaborates a way of perceiving God, the world, and man in their interrelationship which Bulgakov held to be intrinsic to Orthodox Christianity. A short work composed between Filosofiia khoziaistva and Svet nevechernii (December 1915-January 1916) provides a clue to the relationship between these two works, and indicates that in fact Bulgakov resolved the problems reserved for volume 2 in Svet nevechernii. The introductory paragraph of 25 On this interpretation, religious philosophy is a qualitatively different enterprise from philosophy proper.

171

Perceptual Revolution

Osnovnye motivy filosofii khoziaistva v platonizme i rannem khristianstve (Fundamental motifs of the philosophy of economy in Platonism and early Christianity) states that the argument that economics is essentially the active, creative, working relation of man to the world-that is, economic ontology-rests on a particular understanding of the nature of the world and of man, that is, on a particular cosmology and anthropology. What is the essence of the world? What is the essence of man? How do we understand the world, the "transcendental object" of economy, and what is man, its "transcendental subject"? A particular system of cosmology and anthropology is implicit in every philosophy of economics, and this is why we must before all else distinguish and establish the corresponding cosmological teachings as we study the worldviews that interest us.26 In other words, a teaching about economy must not merely be self-consistent and self-sufficient; each conception of economy also rests on a deeper understanding of the world and of humanity. This little book investigates the "cosmology" and "anthropology" of the economic worldviews of Platonism and of early Christianity. Logically, Bulgakov's own economic system, developed in Filosofiia khoziaistva, must thus also rest on a corresponding cosmology and anthropology. In fact, Svet nevechernii constitutes precisely such an attempt to construct a supporting system, anchored in Orthodox Christianity, for Bulgakov's philosophy of economyP Only together, then, do Filosofiia khoziaistva and Svet nevechernii present a full Christian vision of the world in response to the question "How is economy possible?" The picture painted by economic realism of life as a dynamic interaction of subject and object forms a part of a larger world-historical drama; and here we come to Bulgakov's Christian vision, the crux of his philosophy of econ26 Sergei Bulgakov, Osnovnye motivy filosofii khoziaistva v platonizme i rannem khristianstve (Moscow, 1916), p. 1. 27 The very structure of Svet nevechernii confirms the reasonableness of such a contention: pt. II sets out a cosmology, pt. III presents a vision of man. In further support of this hypothesis, Bulgakov indicates in a footnote that "the present work develops and deepens the basic ideas of [Filosofiia khoziaistva], and also examines those questions that had been designated for the second part of Filosofiia khoziaistva [namely, the ethics and eschatology of economy]. For this reason, although formally [the present composition] docs not constitute the promised second part, still in essence I consider my obligations before the reader of Filosofiia khoziaistva to be de facto fulfilled here": Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii (Moscow, 1917), p. 354n.

172

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

omy. The subject -object relationship that we see in the process of production also occurs on a macrohistorical level, in which the actors in the world drama are collective humanity as the transcendental subject and nature as the object. Bulgakov agrees with the nineteenth-century positivists that our life in the world is a constant struggle for survival (Darwinism) and that material well-being is our fundamental concern (Marxism). But where the positivists were inclined to see this state of things as necessary and eternal, Bulgakov says it was not always so. The imperfect world in which we live is contingent: on the one hand, it is the result of the primordial fall of collective humanity through original sin; on the other, we will transcend and rise above it in the ultimate redemption and resurrection. Bulgakov's Christian vision, then, involves the two central hypotheses of the Fall and Resurrection. The difficulty of our life in the world, which Bulgakov perceives as an ongoing struggle between the forces oflife and death, is a result of the Fall of collective humanity through original sin, which destroyed the primordial unity of man with the universe in general and with nature in particular; the "metaphysical Fall" is a central hypothesis of the philosophy of economy. Bulgakov interprets the biblical account of Adam's original sin as a sort of cosmic catastrophe: both history and economy, with the struggle for survival and need to "eat bread in the sweat of our face," followed from man's exile from Eden. Originally, economic activity was the harmonious interaction of man with nature. Before the Fall, which Bulgakov sees as a metaphysical rather than a historical event, man and nature coexisted harmoniously in a perfect Edenic economy lying outside of and prior to history. "The current economy was preceded by a different type of economic process, a different type oflaborfree, selfless, loving, in which economic activity merges with artistic creativity." Economic activity began in such a state, when man was the natural lord of the world and was bidden by God to name the animals according to their species. Man did not fear death or hunger, for the tree of life was accessible to him. "In this sense we can speak of the Edenic economy as the selfless loving effort of man to apprehend and to perfect nature." 28 This vision of the original Edenic economy is reminiscent of the Romantic alte Zeiten as depicted, for example, by Navalis: "I once heard talk of the old days, how animals and trees and rocks would speak with men"; "In the old days all nature is supposed to have been more alive and full of meaning than in our day." This was a world in which man lived in the full realization of his unity with the whole universe, the "wonderful harmony" in which the world 28

Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 156.

173

Perceptual Revolution was created. 29 In this original state, every living organism is inextricably connected with the universe as a whole: everything finds itself in everything else, every atom is connected with the entire universe. 30 Or, in Navalis's words, "Everything must be joined together, each must thrive and ripen through the other; each is reflected in the whole." 31 Another way of putting it would be to say that the original Edenic economy partook of the Divine Sophia. The original sin, however, caused the empirical world to fall away, to separate from ideal Edenic existence. Since the Fall, nature exists as if in a faint: it has become deadened, mechanized, and inimical to humanity, "forever now severed from the whole." 32 "The Fall," writes Bulgakov, "was a tremendous religious catastrophe. The direct and immediate relation to God which the forefather enjoyed in Paradise was broken. God became distant from the world and from man ('transcendent'), and man was left alone-his own master: 'Be as Gods.' "33 The ontological sin, furthermore, expanded to include all people; Adam's sin became internalized in all of humanity. Although the fundamental unity of humanity meant that original sin affected all equally, the Fall in fact destroyed this unity. Here both history and the struggle for survival began. In the present imperfect reality this multiplicity [of individuals] often takes the form of discord, of conflict among individual egos. Selfishness throws its heavy veil over all of life, transforming it into a vale of tears and sorrow, implanting deep melancholy, sadness, and dissatisfaction. This state of things originated with the Fall, which is the basis of the entire historical process.... The struggle of individuals, groups, classes, and nations-homo homini lupus est, the law of struggle for survival-becomes a general rule in the human world as well as in the animal kingdom. "Men as brothers" realize their brotherhood only like Cain and the Cainites, and the earth is red with the blood of brothers.34 In this cosmic catastrophe, man dragged all of creation, including nature, down with him. Life becomes a struggle between entropic and organizing forces, in which "the metaphysical center of being becomes displaced, and a general illness of being results; this metaphysical decentralization results in 29 3q

31 32 33

34

Navalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 39, Bulgakov, Filosofiia klzoziaistva, p. 75· Navalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, p. 162. Navalis, Hymnen an die Nacht (Stuttgart, 1987), p. 21. Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii, p. 318. Ibid., pp. 133-34.

174

54,

64.

The "Spirit of Synthesis" the world's being plunged into the process of becoming, of subjection to time, to contradictions, evolution, economy." 35 History, evolution, and economy as we experience them at present are a result of a general illness of creation: in empirical reality, nature exists in a lifeless, mechanical state, and the cosmic "economy" is a process of the struggle oflife and death. Nature in its fallen state is "sleeping," "lethargic," "inert," "frozen," "mechanical," "deathlike, "plunged in a deathlike faint," "a calcified skeleton." The Fall brought death into the world: "Together with sin, death also entered into the world, as a destructive principle, antagonistic to being.... As soon as the dam of being was broken by the act of original sin, non being poured into the world and flooded all of existence: death became the ultimate and general enemy." 36 As a result, the meaning and motivations of economic activity changed dramatically after the Fall. The heavy shroud of economic need descended upon economic activity and its sophie character; the struggle for survival became the goal of economy, and economic materialism became its natural ideology. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Gen. 3:19). God's judgment upon Adam defines the change that took place in man's position in the world: from the lord of nature he becomes its prisoner, and from an artist or gardener in God's Paradise becomes a proprietor and agriculturist. Man is condemned to economic activity [khoziaistvo], there arises "labor in the sweat of one's face," everything partakes of economics and laborY This state of affairs, which nineteenth-century Marxists and Darwinians took for granted, is in fact a result of the separation of our current imperfect reality from God and from Sophia; and this imperfect empirical world came about after the metaphysical catastrophe of original sin at the beginning of history. If original sin resulted in the metaphysical fall of all creation, bringing about an imperfect world in which nature is deadened, mechanized, and inimical to man, we can transcend and rise above empirical imperfection through a powerful countermeasure: for Bulgakov, the resurrection of nature 35 36 37

Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 146. Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii, p. 261. Ibid., p. 317.

175

Perceptual Revolution

is the essence of the economic process. The purpose of economic activity is to restore life to a mechanized, inert nature. The drama of the economic process as resurrection involves the restoration of what Bulgakov calls life "in Sophia" through the interaction of a passive but receptive nature and an active man, or "demiurge." In the world after the Fall, economic activity has most often been reduced to a painful struggle for material existence against an inimical nature. Yet, in its essence, the economic process is a deeply meaningful one, which, by means of an ultimately harmonious interaction between man and nature, transcends the reigning struggle oflife and death and imbues nature with life, beauty, and wisdom. To this perfectly harmonious existence Bulgakov gives the somewhat elusive name of life "in Sophia," or "partaking of the Divine Sophia." In the economic process, nature is the passive, receptive feminine principle and man is the active, male, conscious principle; nature becomes anthropomorphized, "humanized," in an effort to restore the primordial unity of man and nature which was destroyed by the Fall. Through economic activity, man works to bring nature to a higher state, to free it from its material captivity, to invest it with living energy. In other words, economic activity is a sophie process, which gradually raises the world to a higher level until at last the Sophia that now shines in the beauty of a flower or of the starry sky becomes fully realized. 38 Economic activity, or man's constant labor upon nature, painful and laborious though it now is, is ultimately part of a grand resurrective function. The purpose of economic activity is to defend and spread the seeds oflife, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia upon the universe in an effort to restore it to being in Truth. Economic activity overcomes the divisions in nature, and its ultimate goal-outside of economy proper-is to return to life in Sophia. In the course of the economic process, an objectified nature regains its subject-abjectness as the struggle between life and death is overcon1e. 39 The triumph oflife is possible because, even in the fallen empirical world, the actors in this drama are ready and willing participants. In Bulgakov's scheme, nature stands poised for its restoration to being in Sophia. Even in its fallen state, nature contains the potential for sophie existence. While the world is chaotic in empirical reality, in the sphere of extratemporal existence it in fact is Sophia, shining with the light of the Logos. The world is alienated from Sophia in its current condition, but not in its essence. Even in its 38

39

Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, pp. 108, Ibid., pp. 155, 124.

151-52.

176

The "Spirit of Synthesis" chaotic state it partakes of the light of Sophia, and man retains his sophie roots and becomes the instrument for bringing Sophia to nature. 40 Economic activity, in its essence, is thus a creative act. 41 Through economic activity, man is capable of transforming nature according to his will; he constantly creates a cultural reality alongside the "natural" world that is given to him. And, as Bulgakov notes in an aside, this capacity for economic and cultural creativity is particularly evident in our day, when the limits of the possible seem practically to have disappeared. 42 But the limitations on human creativity are of equal importance to Bulgakov's conception of the economic process. Since man obviously is not allpowerful, he cannot create from nothing, but must draw on the existing world in the process of recreating his new, artificial world, the world of culture. There must be images, model ideas on which he bases his creative activity. These he finds in Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. Here Bulgakov argues against both Nietzsche and Kant: human creativity is not a result of chance, manipulated by a superman, nor is it the "nothing, creating from nothing" implicit in Kant's fictive epistemological subject. Instead, it is Sophia that endows the world with divine forces and raises it from chaos to cosmos. Man can "conquer" nature only insofar as he potentially contains all of nature within himself. Thus knowledge is really remembrance, and human creativity is really a re-creation of that which preexists in the metaphysical world. There is nothing metaphysically new in human creativity; we can only reproduce a likeness of the images that are divinely given to us. The creative resurrection of nature through economic activity is a gradual and incremental realization of Sophia, which, if never fully attainable in this world, still remains as the model and inspiration for the economic process. 43 Bulgakov resolved the question raised by the fusion of positivism and neoRomanticism, first, by formulating the doctrine of economic realism, in which subject and object are fused in the process of life; and, second, by painting a Christian vision of the process as a drama of Fall and Resurrection, in which man as collective humanity labors constantly, through economic activity, to restore the world to life in Sophia. Yet we have not fully understood Bulgakov until we have recognized that his argument is as much one of moral instruction as of metaphysical contemplation, that it is prescriptive as well as descriptive. 40 41

42 43

Ibid., p. 146. Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii, p. 357· Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 135. Ibid., pp. 135-138, 140.

177

Perceptual Revolution It was here that Bulgakov finally parted ways with the Romantics. The Romantic enterprise had centered on man's effort to regain unity with the universe through love; for Bulgakov, it was unceasing active labor, engagement in the productive process, even, literally, work upon the land that would bring complete satisfaction and harmony. Romanticism's ideal had been the perfect union of the masculine and feminine principles, in which each partner realized him or herself through the other. As Friedrich Schlegel expressed it, "We have only now come upon the true meaning of the world. You have come to know the endlessness of the human spirit through me, and through you I have attained marriage and life and the magnificence of all things." For Schlegel, humanity's longing to fuse with the universe takes a passive form. "To summarize: the more divine a man or man's creation is, the more it resembles a plant; plants are, of all forms of nature, the most moral and the most beautiful. And thus the highest, most fulfilled life would be nothing other than pure vegetativeness [ein reines Vegetieren]." 44 For Bulgakov, of course, striving for a plantlike existence was anathema: man must work to endow nature with human meaning rather than identify himself with the lower orders of creation. "Human history is a struggle for widening the consciousness of life not only to all of humanity but extending to nature as well, so that ultimately the world of dead, inert material becomes transformed into living energy."4s Of all the Romantics, Navalis comes closest to an adumbration of Bulgakov's ideal, in the parable of the mineworker; yet even here the ultimate purpose of creative labor is the creation of art, whereas for Bulgakov it is the creation of life. The economic process permits a fusion of nature's feminine principle with man's masculine principle; in a way analogous to the Romantic ideal, in which man and woman bring out and reflect each other's qualities, realizing themselves in love, man should strive to make each product of his activity into a work of art, "glowing with its own idea." In the economic process the demiurge organizes nature, transforming its mechanistic character once more into an organism, changing nature, which has become merely an object, once more into a subject-object, reestablishing the forgotten link between life and death. In so doing, he makes the economic system into a work of art, in which each product glows with its own idea, and this is the meaning of the maxim that art will save the world. 46

45

Schlegel, Lucinde, pp. 89, 35· Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 155.

46

Ibid., p.

44

124.

178

The "Spirit of Synthesis"

Life and art are ultimately part of the same process of life in harmony and beauty. 47 Correspondingly, Sophia, or the acknowledged inspiration for creative activity, artistic or economic, has a different meaning for Bulgakov than it did for the Romantics. The mystical concept of Sophia, which came to Romanticism from Gnosticism through the medieval German mystics, can have many interpretations. Pavel Florensky notes that "while for some researchers Sophia is the Word of God or even the Holy Trinity, others see in Her the Virgin Mother; a third group, the personification of Her Virginity; a fourth, the Church; and a fifth, the whole of humanity, the 'Grand Etre' of A. Comte." 48 For Florensky, Sophia is "the Great Root of collective creation," the creative God's love, the bride of the Word of God, Christ's body, Creation, the Church. Indisputably, Sophia is ontologically prior to creation; Sophia has a feminine nature (is associated with the Eternal Feminine); Sophia stands in a close relation to the Trinity. Of these aspects, the Romantics and their Symbolist heirs chose to emphasize the Eternal Feminine. The feminine ideal, for the Romantic and Symbolist poets, stood as the inspiration for their creative and artistic enterprise. Although the Eternal Feminine is certainly not missing from Bulgakov's interpretation of Sophia, he concentrates rather on the original biblical connotations of Sophia as Divine Wisdom. "And the whole world is really the artistic re-creation of those eternal ideas that together make up the ideal organism, the Divine Sophia, that Wisdom which existed with God before the creation," and whose joy is "with the sons of men." 4 9 The clearest scriptural description of Sophia is found in the eighth chapter of Proverbs: 22.

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of

old. 23. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. 24. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no

fountains abounding with water. 25. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: 26. While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. 27. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: 47

Bulgakov, Svet neveclzcrnii, p. 358.

48

Pavel Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (Moscow, 1914), p. 385.

49

Bulgakov, filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 128.

179

Perceptual Revolution 28. When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the foun-

tains of the deep. 29. When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: 30. Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; 31. Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men. But perhaps the most significant ofBulgakov's departures from Romanticism is the shift of emphasis from a projected Golden Age to the process of economic activity, and hence life itself. The conclusion of the Nicene Creed, anticipating resurrection and the life of the future world, has historically aroused considerable impatience in many believers. Millenarian movements, apocalyptic sects, Romantic political ideologies have from early Christian times evinced a fascination with the "life of the future age" and longed for its more or less immediate earthly realization. Some utopian currents of the late nineteenth century, such as Marxism and Fedorov's philosophy, inclined toward a quite literal interpretation of the resurrection doctrine. An otherwise positive review of Filosofiia khoziaistva in 1913 criticized its author for advocating, in contrast to Fedorov, a "partial resurrection," for hovering in an unclear realm between epistemology and moral prescription. 50 The Romantics lived in the expectation of a coming Golden Age. Again Navalis: Their expectations were fulfilled and exceeded. They all noticed what they had missed, and the room became a refuge of the blessed. Sophie said: The great mystery is revealed to all, and remains forever unfathomable. From suffering the new world will be born, and the ashes, as they dissolve in tears, will become the elixir of eternal life. The heavenly Mother resides in everyone, to partake in the birth of every child. Do you feel the sweet birth in the beating of your heart? 51 Bulgakov's central notion of the economic process as a resurrection of nature, in contrast, provides an ethic for life in this world while avoiding the temptation of utopianism. Bulgakov's idea of joyful and creative labor in Sophia concentrates on life as a process, leaving the definition of an ultimate 50

S. Golovonenko, review of Filosofiia khoziaistva in Bogoslovskii vestnik, December 1913,

p. 847· 51

Navalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, p. 156. 180

The "Spirit of Synthesis" Golden Age to Scripture. In Bulgakov's Christian vision of the economic process, man brings himself and creation asymptotically closer to perfect existence in Sophia through his sophie labor upon a receptive nature. We can occasionally glimpse the perfection of Sophia through revelation, with Christ as agent; but the "life of the future age," after the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse, lies in a "new earth and new sky," inaccessible to our present consciousness. sz What distinguishes Bulgakov's "life in Sophia" from a utopia? Above all, it is his emphatic distinction between a heavenly kingdom on earth and one in heaven. Again and again he repeats that Sophia lies outside our comprehension. The life of the future age is so far removed from our consciousness that it is even subject to a different time. Life in Sophia thus exists eternally, as an ever-present idea, as an image or model to be imitated; yet only in moments of revelation can we attain even an intimation of this perfection. The ideal of theocracy is not a prescription for an earthly order; it is merely an attempt to put into words that perfect existence, known only to God, which is outside of history and empirical human life. Only at one point does Bulgakov speak of the kingdom of Christ on earth, and this is in that flash immediately preceding the end of the world. The final, apocalyptic transfiguration of the world lies entirely outside our control; the only thing we can do in this life is strive toward the greatest possible perfection in our daily creative tasks. Here we see the significance of Bulgakov's having written Svet nevechernii instead of a second volume of Filosofiia khoziaistva. As Bulgakov repeatedly emphasizes, there is no eschatology within the economic process. "The ultimate goal of the economic process is beyond its limits, this process is only the way of the world to realize Sophia, the transition from the false condition of the world to the true, the restoration of the world through labor." Analogously, truth is "beyond" knowledge, and can be attained only by revelation-that is, through religion, philosophy, or art. 53 Truth belongs to the unspoken, and the only path to this truth is through religious deeds. Because the empirical world, fallen though it is, still in its essence partakes of Sophia, we can have access to the Divine Wisdom through revelation. The economic process and the process of knowledge take place in the empirical world; yet their ultimate end is outside that world. In other words, Bulgakov is refuting the positivist notion that increasing knowledge leads finally to Truth. Truth, he maintains, can only be revealed; no matter how much we know, the progressive accumulation of knowledge will never bring us to 52 53

Cf. Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii, p. Ibid., pp. 369, 155, 158.

410.

181

Perceptual Revolution Truth. In the same way, the economic process we know can reveal nothing about the truly sophie economy. We can work hard to attain the true union of man and nature, but the ultimate goal lies outside the economic process. The Last Judgment and the end of the world are beyond our knowledge or comprehension. Nonetheless, in this very unideal world, men continue to seek principles that will substitute for the ideal unity of all humanity; they search for a social ideal in an effort to find a "normal" structure for society. The entire world seeks constantly to return to the ideal state it knew before the Fall; and in the imperfect present, "social ideals are the hypothetical formulation of that higher unity and harmony which actually exist in the metaphysical world." 54 Thus Bulgakov postulates an ideal state of complete unity, but acknowledges that fallen humanity cannot regain that state. People try to compensate for its loss by formulating social utopias and striving to realize them. This rejection of utopian thinking is peculiar to Bulgakov: he was the only one of his contemporaries among the intelligentsia to submit so willingly to the authority of the Orthodox Church. But this in no way diminishes the strength of his formulation of the central maxim of the Silver Age: creativity is a joyous process, whether in art or in the labor of life. Bulgakov and the Silver Age How did Bulgakov finally transcend the problems of positivism that he set forth in 1900, and what in his solution defines his thought as "modernist"? First, and most important with respect to modernism, Bulgakov's thought contains an implicit philosophy of history that refutes positivism's linear conception of the historical process. Russian thinkers, inhabitants of a "backward" country, had always been uncomfortable with the strict linearity of the theory of progress. Mikhailovsky's formulation of man's opposition to nature and later Fedorov's heroic effort to neutralize forward movement by a resurrection of the fathers are the more prominent examples of resistance to this theory. Bulgakov's substitution of eschatology for the perceived teleology of positivism, however, finally provided a positive alternative to the theory of progress, and one that answered positivism from within. The Christian model of a Garden of Eden from which man was expelled and to which he will be restored in the ultimate resurrection at the end of the world replaces the ideal of an achievable earthly Golden Age at the end of history. For positivism, at least in its unadulterated version, the goal of history lay at the end of a long process oflinear progress, in which humankind gradually 54

Ibid., p. 134.

182

The "Spirit of Synthesis" approached and finally achieved a perfect world. This basic model might or might not include a Hegelian element of revolutionary transformation at key moments in the process of historical development. Bulgakov's philosophy of history is different in that it posits an ideal world in Sophia which exists simultaneously with human history, but which is subject to different parameters of time and space. This hypothetical ideal existence is accessible to us in brief moments of revelation, and particularly through revelation's main instrument, Christ. But, although we must constantly work to reflect the model provided by Sophia in our daily lives, we have no guarantee that our labor will bring us any closer to a perfect existence. The end of the world will come, as Scripture tells us; but the realization of the life of the future age remains ultimately independent of the earthly goals of humankind. This Christian, eschatological philosophy of history is modernist in its relativization of time and space; it was later reiterated and popularized by Berdiaev. Second, a position on the problem of freedom and necessity, also of primary concern to the defectors from positivism, followed from Bulgakov's thought. Students of the prerevolutionary period, perhaps because of their concentration on Vekhi, have focused on the Silver Age intelligentsia's concern with individual freedom as a political issue. Yet the formulation of the goal of human freedom, as at least Bulgakov's example demonstrates, was a consequence of the Silver Age's assimilation of Romanticism rather than of political ideas, although it did later become applied to politics. For Bulgakov, the apparent antinomy of freedom and necessity disappears together with the opposition of subject and object: freedom and necessity complement each other, as the subject of the economic process confronts a real object that imposes limits on his freedom and that he strives to humanize, penetrate, make his own. And in direct contrast to the usual interpretation, Bulgakov in fact argues against the individuating tendency of freedom. Freedom ostensibly individuates, for it is an affirmation of the concrete, particular I. But these many I's are united in the common relation to the object, in interaction with which the subject loses itself and its sense of sharply defined self, becoming one with Sophia. Necessity greatly limits freedom, but the individual overcomes necessity through action. The self is an active, real principle, not a passive, contemplative one. Therefore it does not merely accept the non-I like an empty room with open windows, but refracts and bends the non-I as it assimilates it. The non-I becomes the field of the I's self-realization, and we recognize ourselves only through life experience. Life, then, is the living synthesis of

freedom and necessity, where we have the capacity to make decisions that affect our lives; forI-ness is life, it is energy, it is self-definition. 183

Perceptual Revolution

Freedom and necessity form an antinomy, but in real life the boundary between them is overcome by the process of economic penetration of the subject into the object. In an affirmation of human dignity, man must first free himself economically, for wealth is power, a plus for the subject, while poverty is impotence, a plus for the object. Once humanity has achieved economic self-sufficiency, it becomes free to wish anything. At this point, freedom becomes the freedom to reflect Sophia and thus to participate in the creation of the world. 5 5 Third, Filosofiia khoziaistva placed Bulgakov in the current French and particularly German debate on the methodology of the social sciences. This debate played itself out largely on the pages of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft, to which Bulgakov was a contributor, and Logos, a joint German/Russian neo-Kantian publication of the 1910s. Bulgakov took up a position very similar to that of Weber: science represented the contemplative moment in economic life, and ·social science, by analogy, represented the contemplative moment of social policy. Though he did express some doubt as to the right of sociology to exist, because it reduced the complexity of history to models and formulas, Bulgakov finally concluded that the unquestionable existence of the subject that sociology studies-social lifelegitimizes this discipline. The only danger comes when a social-scientific hypothesis begins to be taken as an ethical imperative or, in Weber's words, when an empirical science begins "to provide binding norms and ideals from which directives for immediate practical activity can be derived." 56 This is, in fact, what has occurred with the doctrine of economic materialism, which, though potentially useful as a heuristic device, loses its validity when it makes a claim for universality. Economic materialism, despite its many shortcomings, is important as a first attempt to formulate a philosophy of economy, and its philosophical importance is generally underestimated. It does, however, make claims to being a total and absolute system. Marxism is teleological, despite its claims to the contrary. In historical materialism, the base is the noumenon of history, and the superstructure is the phenomenon. Economic materialism has, however, been vulgarized by being turned into a "science," whereas it is actually a metaphysics of history.57 The main idea of economic materialism, from Bulgakov's standpoint, is that the world is a giant household, that economics has the determining role Ibid., p. 410. Max Weber," 'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York, 1949), p. 52. 57 Bulgakov, Filosofiia khoziaistva, p. 307. 55

56

184

The "Spirit of Synthesis" in history and in life. In a sense, we can say that all culture is economic activity. But instead of investigating the economic side of life as a problem of the philosophy of economics, economic materialism strives to subjugate all aspects of human life to its iron schema. It tries to be a philosophy of history; but its method is sociological, not historical. It claims it can prescribe the future. Economic materialism is also self-contradictory in its radical sociological determinism combined with radical, action-oriented pragmatism. 58 Finally, Bulgakov's philosophy brought out and emphasized the creative elements of Christianity and the church. At various moments in history, of course, the Christian spirit has inspired great deeds of creativity; but the nineteenth century was not such a moment. Bulgakov affirmed and expanded Aleksei Khomiakov's notion of creative theology, in which all members of the church and not only clerics could participate. In Bulgakov's thought, Christianity became a stimulus for creative activity in this world, in both an aesthetic and a material sense. What, then, does Bulgakov's philosophy tell us about his place in the culture of the Russian Silver Age? To what extent is he a "representative" figure? Does our focus on his thought bring out any particular key characteristics of the intellectual life of his period? Bulgakov was a sufficiently independent thinker to permit his ideas to stand for themselves; yet a strong ethical sense, a religious spirit, and a pervasive sense of joy in the creative process are common features of Silver Age thought. Bulgakov's Christian ethic expresses an indisputable "spirit of the age," one shared by such diverse contemporaries as Berdiaev, Blok, Scriabin, Ivanov, Frank, and Khodasevich, among many others. Though many of them would have or did disagree violently with the precise content ofBulgakov's ideas, there can be no question that he touched a central vein of the intellectual mood of the epoch. 5 9 Bulgakov was, it is true, distinguished from his fellow intellectuals by his sense of moderation, his anti-utopianism, his acceptance of the Orthodox Church. Perhaps partly responsible for this individual stance was his dedication to certain ideals of his childhood, his rootedness in the deeply religious worldview of the middle intelligentsia. This originality, this sense of a social background different from the urban-intelligentsia past of, say, Berdiaev or Ibid., p. 315. Cf., e.g., N. P. Antsiferov's comments on Filosofiia khoziaistva and its connection with "the fate of Russia" in a diary entry for 11 February 1918: "Brest has been signed. In the evening, I read Bulgakov's remarkable book, Filosofiia khoziaistva. I thought of the powers concealed within the Russian soul, and of the abyss into which the Russian people have plunged" (unpublished manuscript; I thank Albin Konechnyi for this reference). 58

59

185

Perceptual Revolution

Bely, may have contributed to the particular depth and precision of his thought. Many of Bulgakov's original ideas found few admirers until the more flamboyant Berdiaev and Florensky popularized them by expressing them in more accessible form. Further, the clarity with which Bulgakov situates his thought with respect to contemporary intellectual currents helps us to understand the Silver Age as a productive interaction of neo-Kantianism, the Romantic tradition, Christianity, and the nineteenth-century tradition of Russian thought, particularly Soloviev, Fedorov, and Dostoevsky. The ferment of intellectual and cultural activity that was the Silver Age was built on a quite extraordinary blend of contradictory yet somehow complementary strains of thought. The "spirit of synthesis," so much discussed in this period, was much more than simply a synthesis of musical, literary, and visual art forms; it represented an integration of the ideas of the European nineteenth century through the prism of an original Russian philosophical tradition to create a new and explosive culture to which the European twentieth century has been the heir. Finally, the course of Bulgakov's intellectual development suggests a particular periodization of the Russian Silver Age. It seems that we should divide this epoch into two periods: the initial burst in 1900, the initial questioning of positivism and sense of a new dawn; and a mature phase, after 1910, in which the revolt against positivism led toward positive alternatives as ideas became crystallized and developed. In fact, Bulgakov, Berdiaev, Bely, and others wrote their seminal works immediately after 1910-works that expressed the ethical, religious, and metaphysical "spirit" of the age. It was . perhaps these thinkers' final transcendence of positivism that cleared the way for the rich creative activity of the Russian avant-garde.

186

P

A

R

T

V

A NEW RUSSIA?

C H A P T E R

T E N

The Lid Comes Off: The Church Council of

T

he political ferment and reevaluations of the 1900s gave way to a new type of intellectual and cultural activity in the 1910s. In the introduction to his Vozmezdie, Blok hailed the year 1910 as the end of an epoch, signaled by the "crisis" of Symbolism and the death of Tolstoy, Mikhail Vrubel', and Vera Komissarzhevskaia. The new decade saw an explosion of Russian cultural life: the founding of the post-Symbolist poetic schools of Acmeism and Futurism, as well as the less prominent but equally vital Imagism, Clarism, and so on; the establishment of OPOIAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetry and Language) and the Moscow linguistic circle, both precursors of Russian Formalism; the flourishing of sectarian, heretical, and mystical movements. All of these developments involved redefinition of the Symbolist, neo-Romantic concept of the Word, or Logos, and drew participants into heated debate on the meaning and nature of language. The same period saw the beginning ofKazimir Malevich's Suprematism and the avantgarde art of Kandinsky, as well as of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova; Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat; the opening of Vsevolod Meyerhold's theater and the first foreign tour of the Ballets Russes. The stark images of the avant -garde, symbolized by Malevich's black square on a white background, replaced the muted tones and mystical atmosphere ofVrubel"s Princess-Swan and Scriabin's tone poems.

From the standpoint of the completed Russian Revolution, the behavior of an intelligentsia that had traditionally felt the weight of responsibility for 189

A New Russia? Russia's fate looks at least peculiar in the face of oncoming catastrophe. The intelligentsia combined an acute apocalyptic sense with an intensification of apparently abstract debates on language and an increasing preoccupation with mysticism and religion. Andrei Bely is perhaps the most colorful emblem of this moment: his fascination with Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy and his concoction of fantastic pyramids to diagram human knowledge coexisted with his image of history as a bomb about to explode, when "there should be time no longer." 1 Interpretations of the intelligentsia's attitude in 1917 have ranged from an assertion that culture was a sphere entirely separate from politics, and that the burgeoning art and literature of the Silver Age were brutally cut off by the Revolution, 2 to a view of Silver Age culture as "the development of a revolutionary mentality", 3 to an accusation that the intelligentsia "retreated" into mysticism out of a sense of political impotence,4 to a belief that at the last moment the renegade intelligentsia rediscovered their roots in Orthodoxy and Russian culture-but too late.s In retrospect, it is true, it is difficult to refrain from the judgment that the intelligentsia's response to the political crises of the 1910s was inadequate: their engagement in linguistic and religious contemplation instead of politics does not seem easily justifiable. 6 Yet I suggest that the relationship between culture and politics as 1917 approached was in fact a good deal more complicated than any of those interpretations admits. In turning their attention to the turn of the twentieth century in Russia, historians have naturally enough been preoccupied by the search for the origins of one of the great events of modern history-the Russian Revolution. Yet historical epochs seldom, if ever, have a single, unified direction, in which a plurality of political and intellectual currents converge to bring about a single significant event. In this sense, our concentration on the origins of the Revolution has created a distorted image of the period that preceded it, has shifted our perception of the period's "center" to those Rev. 10:6. This view has been frequently expressed by writers of the Russian emigration. See, e.g., Iurii Elagin, Temnyi genii (London, 1982). 3 Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age (The Hague, 1975). 4 This Marxist view was summed up in Gorky's phrase pozornoe desiatiletiie, (shameful decade), a standard formula in Soviet works on the period 1907-17. 5 Nicholas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1

2

1963).

6 This is the question posed, obliquely and by analogy, by Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii in "Spory o iazyke v nachale XIX v. kak fakt russkoi kul'tury," in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, vo!. 24 (Tartu, 1975), pp. 168-254.

190

The Lid Comes Off features that tie into the prehistory of the Revolution. In studying the period 1890-1920 in its own terms, we inevitably begin to perceive "origins" of events or perhaps more accurately nonevents quite other than the Revolution: powerful and directed impulses that never achieved culmination because the Revolution happened instead. I suggest that it is in this context of interplay between what happened and what didn't happen that we can productively study the Russian intelligentsia and its historical role in this period. From this perspective, while the intelligentsia's behavior seems irresponsible in light of the approaching Revolution, we can reconstruct a different, "imaginary" or "pluralistic" historical context in which they behaved both responsibly and reasonably, if ultimately "incorrectly." In the summer of 1917, as the chaos of the revolutionary period intensified, Sergei Bulgakov was completing the religious-contemplative essay Svet nevechernii, serving as delegate to the All-Russian Church Council, and beginning a new and extensive philosophical endeavor, Filosofiia imeni (The philosophy of the name). In January 1918, when the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly, Bulgakov took priestly orders and immersed himself in the theological studies that were to become the focus of his life in emigration. Yet at no point was he unaware of the exigencies of the contemporary political situation; nor did he or his fellows show any sign of relinquishing the self-assigned role of Russia's conscience. Before we engage in wholesale indictment of Bulgakov and his fellow intelligenty, or absolve them as artists and philosophers and therefore not of this world, it is worth trying to reconstruct a context in which this behavior is intelligible; this means paying attention to what didn't happen as well as to what did. One of the most significant and grandiose "nonevents" of 1917 was the AllRussian Church Council that opened on 15 August in Moscow. If the revolutions of February and October in Petrograd marked the culmination of the Russian revolutionary movement, contemporary developments in Moscow, less immediately engaged in revolutionary events, also represented a culmination of sorts, and one of national significance. The All-Russian Church Council, convoked by a 15 July order of the Holy Synod and its overprocurator, Prince V. N. L'vov, crowned the powerful impulse for renewal in the church which had been shared by intelligentsia and clerical reformers for two decades. For Sergei Bulgakov, participation in a body that at long last gave concrete meaning to the long-discussed sobornost' was a completely obvious and consistent course of action. The term sobornost' -defined variously, but well summed up as "the organic synthesis of multiplicity and unity in the Orthodox Church" and 191

A New Russia? "the . organic unity of all in love and freedom as the essence of the Church" 7 -received quite a specific interpretation as it came into contact with historical reality. Peter the Great had substituted a collegial system of church administration for Muscovy's councils under the patriarch's leadership. No church council met during the Petrine period, and the principle of· sobornosi was unfulfilled by a bureaucratic Holy Synod largely controlled by the state-appointed overprocurator. 8 Gregory Freeze has convincingly argued that, far from serving as the handmaiden of the state, the Orthodox Church functioned as a strong and independent social force in the imperial period. 9 Yet, so far as the turn-of-the-century intelligentsia were concerned, to argue thus would be to sidestep a central issue: independent or not, the Orthodox Church was not fulfilling its mission until it fully expressed the Orthodox principle of sobornosf. The purpose of the church council, when it finally met in 1917, was to rectify this situation, and to restore the Orthodox Church to harmony and organic unity. The conditions in which the 1917-18 church council met, of course, put serious constraints on its ability to fulfill its aims; yet it functioned with remarkable efficiency in its most significant action of restoring the patriarchate, and in general provides us with at least a sketch of how sobornosi was supposed to work. As embodied in the church council, this principle as political reality meant two things: first, both symbolically and in actual fact, the council was supposed to be a national institution, truly representative of the Russian people as a whole; second, following the Orthodox tradition expressed in Justinian's sixth novella, the sobornaia church was to stand in a symbiotic or "symphonic" relation to the state in the shape of a constituent assembly. The autocracy's fall enabled the mechanisms for calling a council, thoroughly . worked out and developed in the various preconciliar commissions of the preceding years, to come into play. Though for us the drama of an allRussian church council has been eclipsed by that of the Revolution, for contemporaries the council represented the culmination of years of research and preparation; it was also the product of various ideological currents of the turn of the century. The church council was now convoked for the first time since Peter's establishment of his system of colleges, of which the Holy Synod 7 Riasanovsky, quoted in J. A. Loya, "Theological Clarifications of Lay Status in the Russian Church Pertaining to the Moscow Reform Council ofi917-1918" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1986), p. 47· 8 The rhetoric of sobornost' was used in an effort to legitimize the synod, but this semantic rationalization was quite transparent to all. 9 Gregory L. Freeze, "Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (January 1985).

192

The Lid Comes Off formed a part; this event thus signified a substantial change in the organization of church governance. The council was an elected body, representing members of the church throughout the empire; it shared administrative power with the Holy Synod. An elected committee, the Higher Church Conference (Vysshyi Tserkovnyi Sovet), screened matters to be put before the council. Bulgakov was a prominent member of the Higher Conference. Issues were first raised and worked out in section meetings, whence they proceeded to the plenary meeting. The council's decisions were subject to final approval by an episcopal conference. The council also had great symbolic significance, since the pre-Petrine councils had played not only an ecclesiastical but also a national role. The 1917 council placed itself in the tradition of the church councils of Muscovy, most notably the 1551 Hundred Chapter Council (Stoglavyi Sobor), called by Ivan IV, and the council of 1666-67, which deposed Nikon while confirming his reforms. The councils of Muscovite Russia had played a much more significant part in national life than a purely ecclesiastical designation might imply; the Stoglav, for example, which was to regulate spiritual life, had been conceived as a complement to Ivan's Sudenbnik, which resolved secular questions. The councils formed a sort of institution of self-government and worked in concert with the ruler to order the people's lives in their various dimensions. In this context, the calling of a new council in 1917 was in some measure analogous to a reconvocation of the Estates General in France after almost two hundred years. The inclusion of the laity in the council's membership and an electoral procedure that involved all of the nation's dioceses made the council a true representative institution and one that had the support of the mass of church members. The council comprised 564 members (of whom 427 remained by the end of its session), divided almost evenly into clergy and laity, with a slight majority of the latter. Members were elected by parishioners in their dioceses. On 15 August, as Petrograd prepared for the elections that were to give the SRs and Bolsheviks an impressive majority in the City Duma, magnificent processions from all of Moscow's churches converged on Red Square. 10 The address of the metropolitan Tikhon, the future patriarch, was accompanied by a specialliturgy.l 1 One of the council's delegates, S. P. Rudnev, a lawyer from Simbirsk, described the opening ceremony. Not only did he meet many 10 This date also marked the closing date of the Moscow State Conference, during which the conflict between Kornilov and Kerensky came into the open. 11 For a description of the ceremony, a list of Moscow churches, and the text ofTikhon's address, see the acts of the Church Council, Sviashchennyi Sobor Pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi Tserkvi: Deianiia (Moscow, 1918), bk. 1 (hereafter SSPRT).

193

A New Russia? of his acquaintances from the All-Russian Zemstvo and other such active figures, all of whom seemed to be in Moscow for the council; but the city participated wholeheartedly in this dramatic gathering. Upon leaving the church [the Uspenskii Cathedral] we stretched out in a long chain on the Tsar's Square and began moving, to the peals of Ivan the Great and all the Kremlin churches, toward Chudov Monastery. There, after kneeling before the relics of Saint Aleksei, we passed into the Nicholas Palace, and thence to the Gates of the Saviour and onto Red Square. Red Square was by this time jammed with people, all come with their cross-bearing processions from all of the Moscow churches. These processions formed unbroken living walls, stretching from the Spasskie to the Nikol'skie gates, forming something like a spacious corridor through which the main procession of the All-Russian Church Council moved, greeted and accompanied by liturgical music and incense from the collected churches; then it returned, through the Nikol' skie gates, back into the Kremlin, back to the Uspenskii Cathedral. 12 A. V. Kartashev also speaks of "tens of thousands of people" crowding the entire Kremlin and all of Red Square.B On the next day, the Church of Christ the Saviour was once again thronged with people. The enormous Church of Christ the Saviour presented a magnificent, unforgettable, and completely unusual picture when, after the liturgy and prayers, all of the bishops of the Russian land began to emerge in pairs from behind the altar. Clothed in violet robes, whose melodic little bells were the only sound to disturb the silence that had descended on the crowd, in omofory14 and miters, they occupied places according to their rank on the benches and the priest's pulpit, where the metropolitans and higher archbishops were sitting; while we, the elected members of the council, occupied chairs or, if there weren't enough, sat on the steps of the archpriests' pulpit. All around us, in the entire church and in the choirs, the people stood in a dense and solid mass. 15 The council sessions, both plenary and sectional, were held in the Moscow Diocese House, in Likhov Passage. The council's twenty-three sections dealt with such matters as higher church governance, diocesan governance, and 12 S. P. Rudnev, Pri vechernikh ogniakh (Kharbin, 1928), p. 152. 13 A. V. Kartashev, "Revoliutsiia i sobor 1917-1918 gg.," Bogoslovskaia mysl', (Paris), 1942, no. 4, pp. 89. 14 15

An outer garment, symbolic of the status of bishop. Rudnev, Pri vechemikh ogniakh, p. 153.

194

The Lid Comes Off

ecclesiastical courts.l 6 Altogether, from 15 August 1917 until September 1918, there were three sessions (15 August-9 December 1917, 20 January-2o [7] April 1918, 20 [7] June-20 [7] September 1918), comprising 129 acts ( deianiia). The proceedings of the plenary meetings were published in nine volumes. A movement for church renewal had been going on for at least twenty years. As we have seen, the intelligentsia's renewed interest in religious questions can be traced to the turn of the century; Merezhkovsky's "discovery" of the problem of the church dates from 1898, and the Petersburg ReligiousPhilosophical Society began to meet in 1901. It is significant that the country's last overprocurator (appointed to the reconstituted Provisional Government after the July Days), under whom the council was convened, was the former president of the Religious-Philosophical Societies, Anton Kartashev (later, in Paris, author of several works on church history). Some of the intelligentsia most visible in the religious movement in the 1900s either participated in the council or polemicized with it. Not least among them were Sergei Bulgakov, Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, and Pavel Astrov, a lawyer. 17 Astrov's Wednesdays had been a popular feature of the Muscovite intelligentsia's social life in the years after the 1905 Revolution.l 8 Merezhkovsky and D. V. Filosofov had since taken their leave of this movement, and speakers at the council explicitly referred to and criticized them. Not least among the prominent members of the church council was M. V. Rodzianko, recently president of the (involuntarily) revolutionary Duma. At the same time, the council marked the culmination of a movement for reform within the church. This movement, in existence in one form or another since the mid- or late nineteenth century, had borne its first fruit in 16 The council's twenty-three sectjons: administration, higher church governance, diocesan governance, ecclesiastical courts, parish administration, the legal position of the church in the government, liturgy, church discipline, internal and external missions, edinoverie and Old Belief (see n. 23 below), monasteries and monks, theological academies, theological schools, parish schools, catechism (Zakon Bozhii), church property, the legal status of the clergy, Orthodoxy in the Caucasus, publishing, membership, editorial matters, biblical matters, and the reunification of churches. 17 Astrov was a member of the Moscow District Court and a deputy member of the Higher Church Council. A resident of Moscow, he was known for his association with modernist circles, including the Symbolist poets. 18 Cf. Andrei Bely, Nachalo veka (Moscow, 1990), pp. 392-98. According to Lavrov, after 1905 the Argonauts' center shifted from Bely's Sundays to Astrov's Wednesdays. These Wednesdays, organized by the poet Ellis, lasted for several years, and were attended by I. M. Gromoglasov (seen. 20), Berdiaev, V. Ivanov, V. P. Polivanov, and others. ·see A. V. Lavrov, "Mifotvorchestvo 'Argonavtov;" in Mif, fol'klor, literatura, ed. B. G. Bazanov et a!., (Leningrad, 1978), pp. 149-50.

195

A New Russia? the 1905 reforms and the effort to convoke a council in 1906. Although the effort failed, the preconciliar meeting produced six volumes of thoroughly researched materials that were to form the basis for the council's decisions when it actually met. A poll of bishops revealed that Russia's clergy was much more receptive to the idea of reform than anyone had thought. 19 Efforts to convoke a council had been renewed in 1911-12, once more unsuccessfully, but they resulted in five more volumes of materials. Among the clergy and prominent scholars who had participated in this movement over the intervening years and who now took part in the council were Konstantin Aggeev, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Boris Titlinov, and Il'ia Gromoglasov. 20 By July and early August, when elections to the council were held, the controversial issue of lay representation had been resolved in favor of participation and full voting rights; the result was a body representative of the church's membership throughout the empire. The decision to include laymen as full-fledged members was both difficult and contrary to tradition: in both the seven ecumenical councils recognized by the Orthodox Church and the Muscovite local councils, bishops alone were full members, although laymen were allowed to attend some of councils in the early church. Even such reformers of the end of the nineteenth century as Ivantsov-Platonov had envisioned only episcopal councils; the majority opinion at the preconciliar meeting of 1905-6 gave voting rights only to the clergy, although a significant minority dissented. 21 It was the vast majority of Russia's provincial educated public or zemstvo intelligentsia (neither the urban elite nor the mass of peasants and workers) that found a voice in the church council of 1917-18. These were people who had been only superficially touched by the positivism and evolutionism of the 1870s, and whose deepest consciousness continued to be shaped by the beliefs and rituals of the Orthodox Church, despite the new social roles created by the Great Reforms. 19 See John Meyendorff, "The Russian Bishops and Church Reform," in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis G. Stavrou (Minneapolis, 1978), pp. 170-82. 20 Aggeev, of Petrograd, was a priest, president of the Education Committee of the Holy Synod, and deputy member of the Higher Church Council. Kuznetsov, a Moscow attorney who specialized in church law, was the author of several works on ecclesiastical reform. Titlinov was a professor of church history at the Petrograd Theological Academy. Gromoglasov was a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy and a member of the Higher Church council. See SSPRT; bk. 1, issue 1, pp. 60-96. 21 See A. M. Ivantsov-Platonov, 0 russkom tscrkovnom upravlenii (St. Petersburg, 1898); Loya, "Theological clarifications"; Franz Jockwig, Der Weg der Laien auf das Landeskonzil der Russischen Orthodoxen Kirche, Moskau, 1917/18 (Wiirzburg, 1971).

196

The Lid Comes Off Though Bulgakov was better known than most delegates to the council, he was otherwise quite typical of them. He could have been appointed to the council by virtue of his participation in preconciliar commissions, but instead he won election in the Tauride diocese, where he was to reside until his emigration in 1922. He was forty-six at the time, about the average age of council representatives. Perhaps it was his status as professor at both the Moscow Commercial Institute and Moscow University, as well as the many academic and philosophical works he had published, that won him easy election to the Higher Church Commission (the highest organ of church governance within the council, subject only to the patriarch) and made him one of the three principal speakers on the crucial issue of the restoration of the patriarchate. In contrast to the quite peripheral role he had played in the Second Duma, Bulgakov's position at the council was one of the most prominent. He was a member of several commissions, including the council's delegation to the Provisional Government and the committee to appeal to the Orthodox people about elections to the Constituent Assembly. 22 He was also given a special appointment to investigate the problem of Bolshevism in the church, and to research the implications of socialism for the church. Thus Bulgakov's involvement in the council reflects the most central and important issues the council addressed. He was one of the main speakers on the church's relation to a rapidly changing state and its various emerging institutions-the Provisional Government, the Constituent Assembly, the new Bolshevik Soviet state-and on the restoration of the patriarchate, which was the council's greatest achievement. He also took most seriously the dogmatic aspect of the council's program, which was directly connected to the endless Christological debates in turn-of-the-century secular circles, but which became largely obscured by the revolutionary turmoil. The council, unlike the Duma, was a comfortable milieu for Bulgakov; the issues it confronted were largely those to which he had dedicated his intellectual life since 1900, and its delegates shared many of his views as well as the deep religious sense that pervaded them. Who were these delegates to the church council? According to the rules set down by the council, it was to be a governing body that met on a regular basis, every nine years in full session and every three years in partial representation. In its full version, the council was to consist of 400 delegates-2 clerical, 3 lay, and a bishop from each of 65 dioceses, plus 10 more bishops representing the vicariates. Then the members of the Holy Synod and the 22

SSPRT, bk.

1,

issue 3, p.

155;

bk.

2,

issue

1,

p. 86.

197

A New Russia? preconciliar conference added 46; there were to be 20 representatives of the monasteries, 26 of the military clergy, 22 from the vicariates and Old Believers,2312 from the theological academies, 15 from academies of science and universities, 20 from the State Duma and State Council. Altogether, then, there were supposed to be 564 members: 8o bishops, 149 presbyters, 9 deacons, 15 psalmists, and 299 laymen. The laymen accounted for about threefifths of the total-314laymen to 250 clerics. 24 Elections took place in three stages: parish councils chose electors to superintendents' (blagochinnicheskie) councils, which in turn selected electors to diocesan meetings, which actually elected delegates. This rather complicated system ended by electing quite a broad spectrum of delegates, despite a marked shift to the right on the part of a previously left-inclined parish clergy after the Bolshevik uprising in July. 25 A breakdown of the members elected in their dioceses (exclusive of appointed members and representatives of universities, Old Believers, and vicariates) yields the figures shown in Table 1. Membership was weighted toward provincial rather than urban Russia (although nonelected members to some extent compensated for the disparity), with the urban classes as underrepresented as they were in the population as a whole. Socially, the distribution tended toward the layers of the middle intelligentsia, with a preponderance of teachers (a notoriously poor group), lawyers, and petty functionaries ( chinovniki), and few members of either the landowning elite or the poorest peasantry. The significant representation of the peasantry came, of course, from its more highly educated stratum: all were at least literate, and a few had some formal education. Although council members represented the middle layers of Russian society in an economic sense, they had a higher-than-average level of education. Seventeen lay members had no formal education, though they were of course literate; 46 had attended elementary school or seminary; 8 had gone to an elite training school (such as the Page Corps or the Demidov Legal Lycee) or secondary school; 64 had a university education, and 64 had 'a higher degree (usually candidate in theology). Among the clergy, 2 had had a home education, 2 had other elementary education, 73 had attended a seminary or theological school, 13 had a university education, and45 had a higher degree, again usually candidate in theology. Ninety-seven were priests or archpriests, of whom 38 were also teachers or school inspectors; 33 were deacons, protodeacons, or psalmists; and 5 were bishops or archimandrites. 23 It is significant that, in a reversal of the action of the last council in the seventeenth century, the present council accepted some Old Believers back into the church as edinoveretsy (co religionists). 24 Kartashev, "Revoliutsiia i sobor," p. 87. 25 Ibid.

198

The Lid Comes Off Table 1. Lay delegates to church council elected from dioceses, by profession or status Profession or status

Number of delegates

Teacher, school or seminary inspector, school director Professor, university instructor Judge, juror, procurator, other legal personnel Peasant Petty functionary* Parish officer, missionary Landowner Merchant/trader Doctor, veterinarian Cossack, retired army personnel Zemstvo activist Other or unknown Total

77 9

23 36 17 10

3 5

5 5 4 10 204

*Forester, railway functionary, tax collector, notary, consistory bureaucrat, prison inspector, poorhouse director, etc. Source: "Obschii spisok chlenov Sviashchennogo Sobora," in Sviaschennyi Sobor Pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi Tserkvi: Deianiia (Moscow, 1918), bk. 1, issue 1, pp. 60-96.

If the church council was representative of Russia's population, the manner in which it represented "ns million Orthodox" was most emphatically not meant to be democratic. As the council defined it, sobornost' had particular administrative and organizational implications. On 28 October 1917 the delegates voted decisively to restore the patriarchate, for the first time since Peter the Great eliminated it. The justification that emerged repeatedly from lengthy and heated debates was that the patriarchate was compatible with the principle of sobornost'. Some delegates even argued that the administrative combination of council and patriarch was necessary to realize the harmony of unity and multiplicity contained in the notion of sobornost', dismissing others' fears that a strong patriarch might take matters into his own hands and usurp the powers that rightfully belonged to the council. In the imperial period church governance had been entirely the province of the synod; now administrative responsibilities were shared by the patriarch, synod, and church council. But if there was no contradiction between sobornost' and a restored patriarchate, sobornost' as a political principle was explicitly distinguished from parliamentary democracy. It was supposed to express the spiritual essence of the nation, and that was by no means compatible with the existence of conflicting interest groups or parties. Sobornost' and a patriarch were compatible; sobornost' and parties were not. Afanasii Vasil' ev equated a democra199

A New Russia? tic parliamentary system with the Petrine system of colleges, counterposing sobornosf to both. These systems only seem similar in that they both involve discussion. But sobornost! is a moral, spiritual principle, whereas the colleges are based on a strictly formal principle. In sobornost! the individual and the authority of power acknowledge and reinforce each other; in the colleges authority is abolished and the individual disappears. Decisions are made by a faceless and indifferent majority. Sobornost! calls us to mutual love and goodwill, to unity and peace, to agreement and unity of purpose: "Let us love one another, and think as one!" Sobornost! calls us to sacrifice our private rights if necessary for the good of others, for the general good and for peace, for the benefit of the whole. In the collegial system or, what is the same, parliamentarism, each party insists on its private rights, and the majority treads on the needs, desires, and will of the minority. This system based on parties [partiinost!], this principle of division, is the common evil of all of Western parliamentarism; transplanted to Russian soil, it inevitably leads to disintegration of the sort we now see in our unhappy fatherland, in our army, and God forbid we should see the same thing in the Church. 2 6 Ostensibly speaking in favor of the patriarchate, Vasil' ev in fact ended by proposing a particular model of social organization based on sobornost; sobornost was to function as an organizing social principle in opposition to parliamentarism. The argument for restoring the patriarchate merely fitted into this larger scheme. Vasil' ev's arguments were echoed in various forms throughout the debates. In short, far from being a last-ditch and pathetic effort for survival on the part of the church, the council perceived itself as at least the attempted embodiment of a uniquely Russian political system, different from and perhaps superior to European parliamentarism. The delegates' greatest fear was the emergence of political groupings or "parties," on the one hand, or of a single strong individual on the other. Decisions were to be reached collectively, with "truth" rather than the rule of the majority as the (at least theoretical) ideal. To what degree did the council's practice conform to this ideal? Kartashev speaks of a majority of conservatives, with an almost equally large center led by Evgenii Trubetskoi and Sergei Bulgakov; a minority left was represented by the presbyter Georgii 26 A. V. Vasil'ev, "Patriarchestvo i sobornost'," in SSPRT, bk. 3, pp. 28-37. Vasil'ev, a prominent figure in Petrograd, was a member of the Council of State Control and president of a society called Sobornaia Rossiia. He was known for his articles on legal and ecclesiastical questions, his Slavophilism, and his Christian socialist views with respect to land policy.

200

The Lid Comes Off

Shavel'skii and the Moscow archpriests Nikolai Dobronravov and Nikolai Tsvetkov.27 Yet the debates on the restoration of the patriarchate point to the dangers of overestimating the importance of political orientations. Kartashev comments that, despite some division between right and left, in fact the council functioned peacefully and reasonably, with mutual discussion of all issues. And if a right and left can indeed be discerned in the voting on this particular issue-Kartashev notes the left's fear of episcopal despotismdivisions among the delegates seem mostly to have been on nonpolitical matters. 28 On the issue of the patriarchate, for instance, the majority of the lay members voted for the patriarchate, as did the bishops, while the white clergy was divided and most of the professors voted against it. 29 Perhaps this distribution is less important than the fact that many of the most active and vocal participants had sought a "reformation" in church and society but had not been represented at the 1905-6 preparations for a council or at other early sessions; this factor had little to do with divisions between political left and right. Although voting was decidedly not unanimous, as one of the members has claimed, 30 the atmosphere was one of efficient and active discussion with immediate and concrete results. The debates on the patriarchate, which took place in the very days of the October Revolution, resolved the transformation of higher church governance for the first time in two hundred years with lightning speed and impressive ease. The council resolved such all-embracing questions much more easily than the Second Duma had decided daily political matters ten years earlier. For the issue of the patriarchate, the mechanisms of the council worked very well, though one might argue that this would not have been the case in less pressing circumstances. In this sense, too, the council seems to have fulfilled its mission of embodying the principle of sobornosr. Sergei Bulgakov expressed the distinction between sobornosr and democracy in more extreme and dramatic form in a speech to the AllRussian Congress of clergy and laity in Moscow in June 1917, as well as in an address to the church counciJ.3 1 He warned against the dangers of Kartashev, "Revoliutsiia i sobor," p. 91. See Catherine Evtuhov, "The Church in the Russian Revolution; Arguments for and against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917-1918," Slavic Review 50 (Fall 1991): 497-511. Dobronravov and Tsvetkov were among the few to speak (and presumably to vote) against the patriarchate. 29 Igor Smolitsch, "Die russische Kirche in der Revolutionszeit vom Marz bis Oktober 1917 und das Landeskonzil1917 bis 1918 (zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Staat und Kirche in Russland)," in Ostkirchliche Studien, no. 14 (Wiirzburg, 1965), p. 27. 30 I. S. Vasil'chikov, "To, chto mne vspomnilos'," Nashe nasledie, 1990, no. 2, pp. 118-22. 31 Cf. RGIA, f. 833, d. 35, ll. 166-67. 27 28

201

A New Russia? democracy. The February Revolution, he claimed, had transformed not just Russia but the world; few people realized that in fact the church question was now of primary importance, it was the "hour of marriage" ( brachnyi chas) of the Orthodox Church. Democracy was a temptation for the church; but the church should be the measure of democracy, not the other way around. Now in the East the connection of autocracy and Orthodoxy had been broken; but the danger was that the Orthodox would put themselves under the power of a new lord-democracy. This was a danger the Orthodox Church, with its sobornost (so close to populism, narodnost), did not share with the Roman Catholics, who were ruled by a hierarchy. Orthodoxy had nothing to learn from democracy; a majority vote was fine, but it did not ensure a decision in accordance with God's will. According to Bulgakov, there was no inherent virtue in democracy as such. History had known different types of democracy; so far the best had been that of the English reformation (the origin of American democracy), which, after all, had been permeated by a religious spirit. The French Revolution, in contrast, had been inspired by anti-Christian sentiments, while German social democracy-to which Bulgakov himself had once fervently adheredwas, judged by this new religious criterion, nothing more than stupid and self-satisfied atheism. The real decision facing Russia was not for or against democracy but a deeper question: Would Russia take its stand with Christ or against him? Would Russia's secular government, whatever its justification in social or political theory, be filled with the Christian spirit? So the relations between democracy and the church are extremely complicated, and we can by no means equate the two. The church is the higher, uncontingent principle of life, the kingdom not of this world, although it strives to raise the world up toward itself, while democracy is only natural humanity in its sinful state, sometimes enlightened and inspired, at other times taking on an animal image. Democracy inevitably requires spiritual guidance. The laws oflife in the church as a divine society and in democracy as human society are deeply different. In the first, the law of love, self-denial, obedience holds sway; in the second, the solidarity of interests, the struggle for rights and their limitations. The church is the body of Christ, an organism made up of many and different members. 3 2 A positive example was early Christianity, which was popular (narodno) without being democratic in the modern sense. Postrevolutionary Russia could succeed only if it, too, accepted Christ as a guiding principle. From 32

Sergei Bulgakov, Tserkov' i demokratiia (Moscow, 1917), p. 13.

202

The Lid Comes Off here it was but one step to asserting the need for the entire society, including the political system, to become penetrated by the Christian spirit. "If the imminent new Russia is built without the name of Christ, if Russian democracy turns out to be in a spiritual schism with holy Russia, then what is its price, who needs it, of what use is a Russia that has denied Christ?"33 The council, in short, functioned as a representative yet not directly democratic body; its expression of the "national will" meant representation of the views primarily of educated rural society, which formed a social base for a renewed conciliar church. The gathering of delegates in Moscow in the summer of 1917 constituted precisely the sort of "counter-organization of popular weight and significance" on the part of the Russian "middle class" whose existence historians, following William Henry Chamberlin, have denied. 34 Its chances for success, naturally, are another question; yet the very fact of such an organized, thoroughly planned, and basically effective gathering on a national scale in these summer months points to the inadequacy of our assumption of the middle intelligentsia's essential passivity and political impotence in the face of revolutionary events. The lag in the course of the revolution between Petrograd and Moscow made Moscow the scene of alternative political action, and indeed the implementation of original political ideas. The church council did not lay claim to self-sufficiency as a representative institution. Originally it was conceived as working in tandem with the projected Constituent Assembly: it has been a fundamental tenet of the Orthodox Church since the times of Justinian that the sacred and secular powers are inextricably connected and interdependent, and while the February Revolution had broken the tie of "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality," the church never voluntarily conceived its power as entirely separate from that of the state, whatever form the latter might take. The Second Duma had been supposed to work with a projected church council. Now the council was supposed to be to the church what the Constituent Assembly was to secular administration.3 5 The church shared in the country's general anticipation of an Constituent Assembly where pressing political issues would at last be resolved. The precise relationship between the council and a rapidly changing government, or, more generally, that of the church to the state and of sacred to secular power, was one of the most complicated issues confronting the 33

Ibid., p. 15.

34 William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1965), 1:109. 35 Cf. Kartashev, "Revoliutsiia i sobor."

203

A New Russia? church in 1917. This relationship worked itself out in the major questions addressed by the council: the administration of church schools, the regulation of marriage and divorce (a prerogative taken away from the church by the Provisional Government for the first time in Russian history), ecclesiastical courts, and the seizure of church property. After two hundred years of relative subordination, the church found itself emancipated from the state yet on the brink of sharp conflict with it. All the same, the church, following the Byzantine tradition of symphony and the order established over the course of Russian history, not only maintained good relations with the secular government but considered itself inextricably connected to it. Bulgakov was quite active in the process of ecclesiastical self-definition. Speaking nostalgically of the Constituent Assembly under Oliver Cromwell as "permeated with religious currents and similar to a prayer meeting," Bulgakov argued that the council had an obligation to participate in elections to the Assembly and to encourage voting. "The church cannot be indifferent to the spirit with which the Constituent Assembly will be permeated.... It must be built on immutable religious-moral foundations, without which governments are destroyed and not built." 36 Bulgakov, however, spoke against temporary adjournment to allow members to participate in elections in their dioceses; the council must participate as a body, working jointly with the state to build a national government. Bulgakov's position had changed radically since the days of the Duma. Then he had seen religious reformation as going hand in hand with political liberation; now he saw work in the church as taking precedence over political forms. Once he had taken it for granted that solutions to social problems were to be sought in the political sphere now the church seemed the proper place to seek them. The intervening ten years, the perceptible shift after the reaction of 1907-8, and the working out of his idea of the sacralization of culture account at least in part for this difference. The question of political forms had become secondary to that of church governance; like others in the middle social stratum, he saw the church as the key to the improvement of Russian life, and its strengthening and the fight against corruption among the clergy as essential to avoidance of political catastrophe. With respect to election both to the preparliament and now to the Constituent Assembly, Bulgakov feared most of all a party system (partiinost'), in which the church would become only one of many parties competing for a voice. The church must instead participate as a national institution on an equal footing with the 36

SSPRT, bk.

2,

issue 1, p. 84.

204

The Lid Comes Off

Assembly. The worst possibility was the formation of a "church party" that would stand not for spiritual regulation of the nation's life but for simple clericalism. "The council may limit itself to pronouncing a blessing and to the instruction that it is not party slogans that must influence elections, but conscience and faith, and that in setting up a list, we must be guided not just by political but also by ecclesiastical considerations and must elect faithful and honest people." 37 This speech set the tone for the entire discussion of this issue, and all the subsequent speakers referred to Bulgakov. Together with E. N. Trubetskoi and Professor P. P. Kudriavtsev, Bulgakov was elected to the committee to put together a proclamation to the Orthodox people about participation in elections to the Constituent Assembly; he also spoke on the council's role in politics.3s Up to January 1918 the council perceived itself as a spiritual sanction for any secular government. Any political form was potentially acceptable to the church, Bulgakov said, "if only it is filled with the Christian spirit, or at least seeks to be so." It was the age-old function of the church to maintain the spiritual side oflife; any government that did not conflict with this function could work with the church. The Church of Christ fills the world with the light of truth, it is the salt that salts it. There can be no limit to its sphere of influence. It is a new yeast, transforming all the stuff of human life, and there exists no element completely inaccessible to this yeast. For the Lord Jesus Christ was truly incarnated and unambiguously became human. He took upon himself all the burdens of human life and thus called us to bear them in the name of Christ. In all human affairs we must strive equally to seek the will of God and to realize it through our free will; such is the immutable demand of the Christian faith. The Christian co~tscience is indivisible; by it alone man must determine his actions and beginnings, motivated by Christian inspiration, enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit Comforter. 39 The council thus had a responsibility to take part in the formation of a new government, and to ensure that, at least in its general outlines, it conformed to the rules of life in Christianity. Bulgakov's speeches, however, are filled with apprehension that events may take another turn; he constantly warns of the dangers of an anti-Christian government, the reign of the Antichrist. A government that does not have the 37

38 39

Ibid. Ibid., bk. 2, issue 2, p. Ibid., bk. 4, p. 14.

131.

205

A New Russia? sanction of the church "is transformed into the kingdom of the beast, depicted by the Divine Seer, and is made into the playground of self-love, whether on a personal or class level." 4 For Bulgakov the church's struggle was more than a political battle; it was part of a larger battle of good and evil, of Christ against Antichrist, just as the intelligentsia had foreseen at the turn of the century. Bulgakov's appointment to compose a proclamation against the evils of socialism and Freemasonry4 1 fitted into this perception and was a natural outgrowth of his earlier Christian socialism. The notion of a Christian politics took on real meaning at the time of the council, for the struggle was seen to be against an atheist secular power: the polarization, the valuation of everything in the period after 1907 was an anticipation of the struggle that in fact erupted in 1917.

°

This perception of the council's function, of its position as the culmination of the debates of the turn of the century, was not shared by the intelligentsia as a whole. Some ofBulgakov's friends from Put' and the Moscow ReligiousPhilosophical Society shared his sense of the council's importance, but other prominent members of the intelligentsia had found other directions for their social concerns. E. N. Trubetskoi, K. M. Aggeev, P. I. Astrov, I. M. Gromoglasov, A. V. Kartashev, and others played active roles in the council, serving with Bulgakov on the committee on Bolshevism in the church and others. But Filosofov, for example, took a position openly antagonistic to the council, and Blok and Bely evinced no interest in such institutional outlets for their religious quest. The council served as a primary focus for such less prominent thinkers and writers as N. D. Kuznetsov and B. V. Titlinov, who had devoted their lives to church issues as they related to society. The council's primary support came neither from the intelligentsia nor from the people, but from that body of church members who participated in elections and who continued to be immovably Christian despite war and revolution. As Bulgakov and his fellow delegates conceived it, the new Russia would be under the joint administration of a secular parliament and a conciliar church headed by a patriarch. The new government would be suffused by the spirit of Christianity, and church and state would exist in harmonious symbiosis. In this vision, partly sketched out in the 1917-18 church council, Russia's political system was to be based on the social ideas of sobornost' and symphony. 40

41

Ibid. RGIA, f. 833, d. 30, I. 38; d. 33, I. 33; d. 72, I. 36.

206

CHAPTER

E L E V E N

Orthodoxy Renewed: Neo-Hesychasm

T

he council's function was not limited to social organization. The notion of a regularly meeting council was also a proposition for an active role for the church in society. It was not only an administrative but a religious culmination of the movement for a reformation that had begun years earlier. The council, despite the difficult conditions in which it was meeting, actually did produce some doctrinal innovation. The council projected in 1905 had been conceived as an administrative reform of the church. Bulgakov had seen it as a necessary but secondary concomitant of political change, as part of the hoped-for reformation in Russian society. The intervening years, however, had led him to take the council more seriously in its own terms, and to see in it the potential resolution of the problems of heresy and sectarianism which so profoundly colored the first two decades of the century. Most participants in the council were convinced of the intrinsic religious and ecclesiastical meaning of their activities: Scripture, canon law, and ecclesiastical precedent formed the fundamental points of reference in the council discussions. The purely religious meaning of the council is less than adequately reflected in existing documentation, probably for two reasons. First, the original mechanisms for organizing the council, set in place by the various preconciliar commissions, had a bureaucratic and administrative bent, and focused more on church organization than on dogma. These were the mechanisms that came into play when the council was actually convened. Second, 207

A New Russia? and more important, the council met at the height of the revolutionary period. Eventually responses to demoralization at the front, the takeover of ecclesiastical presses by revolutionary cadres, and the Bolsheviks' seizure of church property displaced more leisurely discussions of Trinitarian dogma and canon law. Even so, some of the debates in the council's plenary sessions and preparatory section meetings did show concern with such timeless issues. The presence of large numbers of theologians and professors trained in church law and doctrine bears witness to the prominence of such considerations. The administrative issues of the restoration of the patriarchate and the structure of the council became linked to purely theological ones: in the council discussions, a particularly Orthodox interpretation of the Trinity served as a model for church organization, and ultimately had implications for the structure of society as a whole. Some of the debates concerning the restoration of the patriarchate produced clear references to dogmatic discussions of the ecumenical councils and to turn-of-the-century Christological debates. A majo.r line of argumentation on the issue of the patriarchate, for example, relied on metaphysical principles and evoked the central dogmatic questions-the nature of the Trinity, the meaning of God as Logosaddressed by the ecumenical councils in the early church. A. V. Vasil' ev's presentation in the Section on Higher Church Governance contains the essential points necessary for a dogmatic justification of the institution of the patriarchate. Vasil' ev bases his argument on two scriptural propositions. First, he says, the very statement that God is love implies the Trinity because love cannot be contained in itself but flows out to others ( izlivaiushcheesia na drugogo). If there is one who loves, there must also be one who is loved, and also that which unites them. The implication of God as love is thus simultaneously unity and trinity. Second, both the statements "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God" and "God created man in his own image" imply the person of God and the plurality of his faces. The Word may be only between two reasoning entities (razumy), from individual to individual ( ot litsa k litsu) in a dialogue of equal divine hypostases; man is created in the image of this "discussion." The dialogue of God's hypostases is thus the archetype of sobornost' . Upon these propositions Vasil' ev bases his main argument: sobornost' is the expression in unity and multiplicity of the spirit of God's love and unites the individual and collective principles. All human organizations should be modeled on this perfect principle. The individual is free, but only in submitting to a higher authority, as is true even for Christ. According to this principle, everything is and should be a combination of the collective (sobornoe) and the hierarchical. Vasil' ev goes on to postulate an 208

Orthodoxy Renewed

analogy with the human body: both the soul and the body consist of various members subjugated to a higher spiritual authority, so that hierarchy is actually an attribute of sobornost', and without it the body falls apart.! In sum, then, Vasil' ev uses the unity of the one and the many contained in God-that is, the Trinity-as a model for the earthly organization of the church, claiming the intrinsic harmony of the hierarchical and collective principles. This type of argumentation placed the Russian church council in the historical tradition of the first ecumenical councils; the unity of multiplicity embodied in the Trinity had occupied a central place in the philosophical and dogmatic discussions at Nicaea and the subsequent councils (the Nicene Creed, the argument against Arianism, etc.). While others, such as Iakov Galakhov, echoed Vasil' ev's argument more or less literally, Nikolai Bogoliubov and Ivan Iordanskii picked up and extended his analogy with the human body, creating a sort of modernized version of the medieval organiC metaphor. 2 Ultimately, the organization of the church has a scientific justification. Iordanskii sets up the analogy of the living organism, which is arranged on a hierarchical principle even at the lowest level of atoms and molecules. The atom is to the body as each individual is to the church. On the next level, where the molecule is the initial collective, the family is the domestic church. Several families together form a diocese, and the dioceses together form the local church, with the patriarch as center. Thus, once again, sobornost' includes the notion of the patriarchate, which then functions as the symbol of wholeness and the source of God's grace. Bogoliubov argued, similarly, that the body is a hierarchy and the church is Christ's body. In revering his pastor, the worshiper affirms Christ. This desire to accept the church as Christ's body is the basis of sobornost'. Of course this structure is imperfect in any one church, so there emerges a need for councils with a primary hierarch as a wider expression of the Christian spirit. Therefore, by extrapolation, the only true expression of the church is the Universal Church, whose head can only be Christ. Freeing the individual is at the root of sobornost', and the patriarchate is a necessary part of sobornost'. Whereas Vasil' ev took the Trinity as a point of departure and model, Iordanskii and Bogoliubov create a mixed scientific and organic metaphors to arrive at the same conclusion: the necessary concomitance of the hierarchical and collec1 RGIA, f. 833, op. 1, d. 38, 11. 143~73-

Galakhov, an archpriest and professor at Tomsk University, published many theological and other works. Bogoliubov, a professor of theology at the University of St. Vladimir in Saratov, was also an archpriest and writer. Iordanskii, a lay member elected in Kostroma diocese, had a university education and taught at a women's gymnasium in the town of Kologriv. 2

209

A New Russia? tive principles finds its concrete embodiment in the institution of the patriarchate in a church governed by councils. 3 These arguments reflect not only ecclesiastical considerations but also the concerns of secular modernist culture of the turn of the century: the discourse of Symbolism and the offspring literary movements of the avantgarde had been dominated by the definition and redefinition of the Word or Logos, evoking Christological and Trinitarian motifs; at the same time, various cultural currents, including the neo-Kantian idealism subscribed to by many members of the intelligentsia, "discoverers of religion," had evinced a fascination with developments in modern science such as the theory of the atom. The most systematic elaboration of dogma at the council belongs to Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov was appointed a member of the commission established to address a heresy that had arisen among the monks of Mount Athos in the 1912-13-the "name of God" heresy. Bulgakov's assignment was to outline the council's stand on the Christological question posed by the intelligentsia debates of the 1900s and made urgent by the pervasive heretical notions of the Athos monks, Symbolism, Tolstoyism, Rasputinism, sectarianism. The result was a treatise that Bulgakov worked on over the next twenty years, Filosofiia imeni (The philosophy of the name), justifying the church's stand on the revived debate of nominalists and realists. In developing a philosophy of the Word, Bulgakov ended by proposing a theory of prayer with implications for the role of individual members of a sobornaia church. The book grew out of the controversy over the "name of God" heresy, in which Bulgakov was the most important lay participant. The "heresy" of the Russian monks on Mount Athos consisted in their claim that the name of God was itself God. This teaching was set forth in two major texts, Na gorakh Kavkaza (On the mountains of the Caucasus), by the monk Ilarion, and Apologiia very vo imia Bozhie i vo imia Iisusa (Apology of faith in the name of God and the name ofJesus), by the monk and priest Antonii Bulatovich. The discussion was started by Ilarion, who had moved to the Caucasus as a hermit after twenty-one years on Mount Athos. He proposed a theory of prayer, or "mental activity" (umnoe delanie), and postulated the intrinsic power of the repetition of God's name. Eventually this theory split the monks at Mount Athos into two factions: the imiabortsy, represented by Ieronim, the chief Russian hierarch at Mount Athos, and the "name-worshipers" (imia3

RGIA, f. 833, op. 1, d. 38, II. 143-73-

210

Orthodoxy Renewed slavtsy), who proceeded to depose him. 4 Ilarion sent his book to various monasteries, and his teaching provoked controversy throughout the Russian monastic world. s The controversy soon spread to Moscow, as Antonii Bulatovich, in secular life a city official and explorer of Abyssinia, defended Ilarion by appealing to Tikhon Zadonskii and Ioann Kronshtadtskii (who was a name-worshiper). Ilarion was supported by many monasteries and some Russian archpriests, including the former rector of the Petersburg Theological Academy. Initially the Moscow clergy, as well as the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society, also supported him. Against Ilarion were Archbishop Antonii Volynskii and his followers at the Pochaevskaia Lavra. The synod split between Antonites and Ilarionites, as Volynskii sought to have name-worshiping acknowledged as heresy. A commission was established and an appeal to the universal patriarchate was issued. 6 The controversy raised two fundamental issues: on the level of dogma, the "heresy," as members of the intelligentsia and theologians were quick to recognize, recapitulated the Western medieval controversy between nominalism and realism and the Eastern Hesychast controversy, specifically the argument between Gregory of Palamas and the Barlaamites, concerning divine "energies" emanating from the Godhead. On this plane, there should have been no issue of heresy, since, if the theory of the name of God merely repeated Gregory's fifteenth-century teaching that the name Jesus, was God himself, "on the strength of the divine energy contained in this name," it should have been as acceptable as Hesychasm itself. 7 Instead, the controversy played itself out on the institutional level, and the issue became less a fundamental rethinking of the essential nature of the Trinity or of Christ than a battle over who had the right to formulate dogma-a responsibility that is not clearly defined in the Orthodox Church. 4 Ieronim refused to give up and was forcibly expelled from his cell. A complaint was sent to the patriarch, Joachim III, who could not read Russian but condemned the tendency to heresy. Joachim was replaced upon his death by German, who limited himself to condemning the forcible expulsion of the monastery superior. 5 A second edition of the book was published in 1910 (in the Moscow parish of Martha and Mary) and approved by the clerical censor; a third edition appeared at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves after the beginning of the controversy. The schism began at the Pochaevskaia Lavra; subsequently, the monk Chrysanthos called Ilarion's book heresy in a review in the monastic journal Russkii inok. The belief in the name of God was "pantheism," he claimed. Then Archbishop Antonii Volynskii associated it with flagellant sectarianism in a thunderous article (in which he also accused Ilarion ofliking wine). 6 A. Pankratov, "Raznoglasie v russkoi. tserkvi," Russkoe slovo, 25 April/8 May 1913, p. 2; and other articles on this topic in the same newspaper. 7 Ibid.

211

A New Russia? The lines were quickly drawn, as the church's main spokesmen, the archbishop Nikon and the seminary teacher S. V. Troitskii, insisted on taking the controversy at face value and ridiculed the teaching as ignorant and naive. Troitskii apparently took the teaching seriously enough to publish a seemingly endless series of articles on the subject in Tserkovnye vedomosti (14 September-21 December 1913, nos. 37-51/52); in 1914 they appeared as a book, Ob Imenakh Bozhiikh i imiabozhnikakh (On the names of God and the name-worshipers). The synod issued an official response condemning the new doctrine, in concurrence with the Constantinople patriarchate, as "blasphemous and heretical," and establishing that (1) the name of God is holy insofar as it serves as the verbal signification of the holiest of all beings, but it cannot be equated with him, nor is it God's energy; (2) pronouncing God's name can bring about miracles, but not through some power of its own but because it provokes a response from God, who hears the prayer; (3) the validity of the holy sacraments depends not on the belief of the one who administers them or on the saying of God's name but on faith in the church as the medium between the worshiper and God. The church's quick response demonstrates its unwillingness to admit the right of any but the official establishment to have any say at all in dogma. Heresy had once been sufficient reason to call an ecumenical council; now the church, while claiming heresy, used the sheer force of its bureaucracy to squelch it instead of addressing the issue in a more serious fashion. This discussion provided Bulgakov with a means to express his theological position. Denying any heresy-imiabozhie, he argued, was a theory of prayer, and neither departed from dogma nor claimed the status of dogma for personal thoughts-, Bulgakov nonetheless insisted that the Athas monks had raised an issue absolutely central to Orthodox dogma: the distinction between God's essence and energy-that is, the same question that had provoked the Hesychast controversy. Whether the name of God was in fact divine energy was a question that deserved further theological attention; in the meantime, there was no serious theological basis for judging the imiaslavtsy. 8 More important, Bulgakov used this occasion to point out once more that because Orthdoxy recognized no infallible pope, it needed councils. Citing the authority of an odd assortment of"theologians" -Bukharev, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, Fedorov, Tiutchev, Tolstoy, Leontiev-Bulgakov stated 8 Sergei Bulgakov, "Afonskoe delo," Russkaia mysl', 1913, no. 9, p. 40. In "Smysl ucheniia sv. Grigoriia Nisskogo ob imenakh," Itogi zhizni, 1914, nos. 121l3, pp. 15-21, Bulgakov argued that the theological system of Gregory of Nyssus supported the name-worshipers. Nameworshiping was not equivalent to Eunomianism, but was philosophically inadequate and required systematic elaboration.

212

Orthodoxy Renewed

his belief in the right of every Orthodox believer to participate in the formulation of dogma. Orthodoxy needed the dogmatic creativity of all its members. Affirming his belief in a living, active Christianity, he advanced the notion that "through its members Orthodoxy constantly finds itself (or rather, ought to find itself) in the process of seeking the creation of new dogmas; in the church's development of dogma a single truth reveals new and different sides." 9 Incidentally, the "name of God" controversy proved as productive for the artistic and literary elite as for Bulgakov, though for a different reason: they seized immediately on the debate as a reflection of their own discussions about language and the nature of the word. They perceived the nameworshipers as standing for the mystical investment of the Logos with meaning or divine energy. On this theory, language as such has mystical content. The official church maintained that God exists independently of human language, which is nothing but signs we use to express the independent reality of essences. These essential terms of the debate corresponded quite neatly with the secular debates over the nature of the word (Word), particularly at this moment when Acmeism and Futurism were variously asserting their emancipation from the mystical interpretation of the word in Symbolist linguistic and literary theory. 10 The controversy on Mount Athos fitted neatly into these wider discussions. Bulgakov's Filosofiia imeni, then, constituted a broader and more elaborate articulation of his basic position on the Mount Athos controversy. It is impossible to classify the book as either philosophy oflanguage or theology: like much of the Symbolist tradition in which Bulgakov composed it, this treatise fails to make a clear distinction between the word as a linguistic entity and the Word as the incarnation of God, or the Logos. Taking as his point of departure the controversy between the name-worshipers and their opponents, Bulgakov sets out a theory of the noun, or name, which was supposed to resolve the controversy and establish a new stance for the Orthodox Church. He avoids the bipolarity of the two parties by defining words, following Viacheslav Ivanov, as symbols. "This mysterious, intellectually difficult, and aurally disturbing growing together of the ideal and the real (material) and the phenomenal, cosmic, and elementary we call symbol. Thus we have Bulgakov, "Afonskoe delo," p. 40. See Irina Paperno, "On the Nature of the Word: Theological Sources of Mandel' stam's Dialogue with the Symbolists," in Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, Irina Paperno, and Olga Raevsky-Hughes, vol. 2, Russian Culture in Modern Times (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 287-310. 9

10

213

A New Russia?

reached our endpoint: words are symbols. The nature of the word is symbolic, and the philosophy oflanguage thus enters into the makeup of a symbolistic worldview." As symbols, words are living entities, bearers of energy and power rather than simply shells for concepts. And names are more than just words: "The name is energy, strength, the seed of life." 11 All names contain energy and thus have content as well as form. What, then, is the distinction between a word and a name? Bulgakov's philosophy oflanguage is founded on the notion of an essential discreteness of subject and predicate. 12 Denying the need for genetic explanations of psychological linguistics, Bulgakov postulates the essential unity of thought and language and the need for an ontological explanation of the word, rather than one that focuses on the process of becoming. The essential act of both linguistic and intellectual activity, then, has to do with the distinction between subject and predicate. The primordial act of thought and knowledge is contained in the distinction between the noun and the verb, the subject and the predicate; from this point critical epistemology-that is, what strives to observe the consciousness and self-accountability of thought-ought to begin its work. Here appears the fundamental and primary act of knowledge, from which thought then develops as from a seed.... The noun demonstrates, bears witness by its existence, that something not only is said-that is, is a quality or idea-but also is, whatever this existence may be.... And this act-the birth of the noun-is completely indivisible and immediate; we do not bring it about, but it comes about in us. 13 There exist two spheres, the subjective and the predicative, and "on the side of the subject we have, apart from general verbal meaning, also an impenetrable nucleus of being, while on the side of the predicate-pure meanings, ideas, lacking this nucleus, though by their form they belong to the class of nouns." 14 Neither can stand by itself; each requires the other for completeness. Hence naming becomes the act of connecting the subject with the predicate, and it is this connection that becomes the focal point of Bulgakov's theory. "Logos is not merely the word or thought, but the connection of things." Naming is the process by which subject and predicate become con11 Sergei Bulgakov, Filosofiia imeni (Paris, 1953), pp. 26, 160. 12 13

14

Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 49· Ibid., p. 81.

214

Orthodoxy Renewed nected, and which transforms the word into a name. "By whatever mechanism the psychologically given act of verbal cognition becomes realized, taken on its ontological plane, its meaning also contains our ascription to the word or words of the quality and strength not just of an idea or meaning with merely abstract-cosmic significance but also a name, standing for being, pointing to a concrete place in the world." 15 Naming is for Bulgakov the essential function of language, and it is this process, this connection of subject and predicate and hence of all things, that transforms the potential energy of the word into the real energy of the name. The perception of language and hence of thought in terms of subjectness/ predicateness and their connection provides Bulgakov with the instrument for an original interpretation of the name of God. On the one hand, the name of God partakes of the qualities of all names, and can is encompassed by Bulgakov's philosophy of language; on the other hand, it has certain transcendent features that endow it with unique characteristics "connected with its theophoric nature." In an extrapolation of the philosophy of naming, God becomes a sort of supreme subject and his names become the predicates. In a sentence, for Bulgakov, the subject is not equivalent to the predicate: the predicate pertains to and describes the subject, in fact is contained in it, but can never do so exhaustively. Some essence in the subject always eludes complete expression in the predicate: "The noun, the subject ... is not equal to its predicates, is developed but not exhausted by them, remains transcendent to them in its ontological nucleus. The noun is something transcendent-immanent, thanks to which predicativity is possible in relation to it, as its revelation about itself, its il}1manent development." 16 So while God is the supreme and unknowable subject, the names men apply to him constitute the predicate. The subject of all subjects, the basis of all predication, the subject of all predicates, the Divinity, reveals itself as transcendent-immanent, the revelation of God; each theophany is a new predicate, a new name for the unsaid and unnamable. God reveals himself to man and in man, and man names God, gives him names, by analogy with the way he gives them to those who are like himY

The process of naming brings about a connection of everything with everything else; in this case, naming (presumably in the process of prayer) brings 15 Ibid., pp. 45, 51. 16 Ibid., pp. 178, 179. 17 Ibid., p. 179.

215

A New Russia? about a connection of man and God. God's names are the discovery of his energies, and man legitimately attains God by naming him. This in fact constitutes one of the mechanisms of incarnation of the Word, "not just in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ but also in the namings that are undertaken by man in answer to God's action." 18 God's names are thus of necessity more than mere labels invented by man, but partake of divine energy. This human activity of naming God is not a presumption on man's part. "It may seem (as it did to Feuerbach and many before and after him) that man creates God in his own image, as an objective projection of himself. This illusion is possible precisely because the naming of God comes about in man and through man, is his activity, the awakening of his theophoric and theophanic potentials, the realization of the image of God contained in him, his primordial Godmanhood." God's name is a sort of verbal icon, and as such can be interpreted, according to the decisions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, as "the incarnation of divine energies, theophanies, which carry upon themselves the stamp of divine revelation. Here the ·divine energy and human power of speech are connected indivisibly and yet discretely [nesliianno], as in an icon: man speaks, he names, but that which he names is given and reveals itself to him." 19 Bulgakov thus avoids the simplistic equating of God with his name common to the more vulgar name-worshipers: the reflexivity of the relation of equality transforms the idea that the name of God is God himself into heresy, for it cannot be argued that, conversely, God is his name. Instead, he deals with an issue that is central to distinctions between mysticism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy: the question of human participation, of the possibility of the divinization of man, of the possibility of union with God. His theory, while avoiding the mystical yearning for complete flowing together with God, presents a quite un-Catholic version of Christian belief which would permit active participation in the religious process by all members of the church. According to his vision, in each act of prayer the Christian engages in a creative act, that of naming God anew. Had this proposition been adopted by the council, it would have been a sort of modernist approach to Orthodoxy in which the church as a whole collectively (soborno), constantly rethought, recreated, and renewed itself and its beliefs. Revelation would have become something not given once in Christ's coming but attainable every day and for every individual member of the church through the 18 19

Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 179, 186.

216

Orthodoxy Renewed

process of individual and collective prayer, or the process of naming the Supreme Subject. This is in a sense an updated version of A. S. Khomiakov's description of individual participation in a church that conforms to the principle of sobornost. In his catechism Khomiakov wrote: You understand Scripture insofar as you are faithful to tradition and insofar as you act in accordance with the wisdom living in you. But the wisdom within you is given not to you individually but to you as a member of the Church, and is given to you only partially, retaining in part your individual untruth; this same wisdom, however, is given to the Church in the fullness of truth and with no admixture oflies. Therefore do not judge the Church, but obey it, in order that you may continue to possess wisdom.zo Bulgakov's theory incorporated contemporary linguistic theories to restate Khomiakov's notion of participation in the church in new terms. Prayer, for Bulgakov, is a bridge between empirical human reality and God, or perhaps life in Sophia. The word-name, Logos in man, is the bridge across which the transcendent can open up without destroying the immanent, without tearing it to pieces. The aural entity of the word in this case hides the sun and protects man from blindness and scorching: as we look at the sun through darkened glasses, so the NAME of God is hidden for us, and yet reveals itself in our human word, the phonetic word, which turns out to be a certain absolute icon of the unfittable, unbearable, transcendental Name, the being of God, the I of God. 21 The name of God is the path to God himself. "But in the name of God, God names himself in us and through us; the thunders and lightnings of Sinai sound and flash for us in it; the energy of God is present, which [in accordance with the conclusion of the Council of Constantinople concerning the Palamite discussion] is inseparable from the Divinity itself, although also not identifiable with him."22 While Bulgakov's theory of the name of God represents the natural outcome of the dogmatic controversies of earlier years and is thus the culmina20 A. S. Khomiakov, "Opyt katikhizicheskogo izlozhaniia ucheniia o Tserkvi," in his Polnoe sobranie sochincnii, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1914), 2:7. 21 Bulgakov, Filosofiia imeni, p. 191. 22 Ibid., p. 190.

217

A New Russia? tion of some of his work in the 1910s, it has wider significance in that it shows the clear and immediate connection of the council with modernist theories of the turn of the century. Had the church council proceeded as planned, it would have marked the concrete historical working out of theological issues posed by the secular modernist movement of the 1900s. Bulgakov united modern "scientific" thinking about language with the theological dilemmas of the church fathers (Dionysius the Areopagite, Theodore the Studite) to create a dogmatic position that would be acceptable to thinking men of the twentieth century: it was "legitimized" by appeal to modern theories of language. Bulgakov's treatise in a sense realized the desires of Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and others to rethink Christian doctrine in a way that would appeal to adults in the twentieth century. The result was a vision of participation in the Orthodox Church which, though never officially promulgated before the council ceased to function, gradually became an accepted part of modern Orthodox theology_23 In Bulgakov's view, the church council was a major event in modern religious history, and no longer simply a by-product of political reform. He proposed that it adopt a new attitude toward prayer and toward its members' participation by adopting the contemporary view of the word as symbol, and thus establish a new interpretation of church doctrine. Theological creativity was to become the province of all members of the church. Both the arguments put forth in the discussion of the patriarchate and Bulgakov's formulation of the transformed Church's projected official position on the creation of dogma incorporated elements of the modernist debates on language of the preceding decades. These debates intersected with theological and ecclesiastical issues, and provided the intellectual material for the church council and for the restoration of the patriarchate. The renewed Christological discussion of the turn of the century posed anew the issue of the meaning of the Word or Logos, supplying dogmatic arguments for the legitimacy of the patriarchate; this same discussion, fusing with the heretical "name of God" movement, permitted Bulgakov to advance an Orthodox theory of prayer that gave each member of the church the possibility of participating in the creation and re-creation of his relation to God through the church. Physical participation in the church council would have been irrelevant to the literary vocation of Bely, Ivanov, Blok, and others, but their ideas about the nature of the Logos and theories of sobornost' made a significant contribution to the elaboration of church dogma. 23

E.g., Vladimir Lossky's Introduction to Orthodox Theology (Crestwood, N.Y., 1978).

218

CHAPTER

TWELVE

Failure: Church and State Part Ways

T

he church council with its sobornost' and symphony, its proposal of a particularly Orthodox notion of participation in the church, operated in a breathing space created by the lag between revolutionary events in Petrograd and in Moscow. It existed in an imaginary context, that of a future Russia governed by a church council and some form of secular elected body, in which the entire Orthodox people participated in a conciliar spirit rather than through direct democracy. It was a matter of months before this vision collided with the exigencies of revolutionary politics; this final confrontation between what didn't happen and what did can be traced rather precisely to January 1918, though, needless to say, revolutionary events began to intrude on the council's activities a good deal earlier. The first explicit confrontation took place in the days around the October Revolution, and found expression in the council debates on the patriarchate. Whereas discussions in the sections had tended to address directly the substantive aspects of the restoration of the patriarchate, in the council debates themselves, questions of dogma and history took second place to what became the most pressing and immediate argument in favor of the patriarchate: the imperative to restore this post because of the current turbulent events. The main debates on the patriarchate took place at the very moment the Bolsheviks seized power; these discussions occupied the council sessions

of 11-28 October. The increasing disorder in the country-the Kornilov coup in August, the third reconstitution of the cabinet of the Provisional 219

A New Russia? Government on 25 September, the September electoral successes of the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, along with a disastrous decline in the economy and demoralization at the front-gave the council delegates additional reasons to restore the patriarchate. The revolutionary situation prompted the formulation of a new set of arguments. The mood of the discussion shifted from rational argumentation to highly rhetorical persuasion, and the subtleties and harmonies of dogmatic and canonical justifications yielded to a single-minded preoccupation with the issue of leadership to guide the church in the current crisis. The opening speech by Bishop Mitrofan of Astrakhan set the tone: "We need a patriarch as a spiritual leader and adviser, who will lift the hearts of the Russian people, will call them to an improved life and to great deeds and will himself lead the way." He had led up to this rather high expectation by asking rhetorically: Will the church council be capable of stopping this destruction and directing church life into the proper channel? Looking upon the past with alarm and having little hope for the future, the Russian people have come to the conclusion that a collegium will not save them, considering their lifelessness and irresponsibility, lack of great deeds and daring. The times imperatively demand a heroic deed, daring, ai1d the people wish to see a dynamic individual who can gather the living forces of the people at the head of church life. And the voice of such an individual will doubtless find a response in the heart of the people. And how we need this voice, this call to repentance, rectification, and renewal!l The patriarch, clearly, is to be much more than a mere administrative head of the church: he is to be a leader in troubled times, a light to guide the Russian people out of their crisis. One can hardly blame cooler heads for objecting that the discussion strayed all too often from the concrete canonical and ecclesiastical issue of the patriarchate. The rhetoric employed by Bishop Mitrofan appears again and again in the course of the debates. We are in a state of war (Count Pavel Grabbe), we are in a state of struggle with an antagonistic government (Grabbe, Astrov, and others), and we absolutely must have a strong leader in order to wage this struggle. 2 Thus the image of the patriarch imperceptibly shifts from an adminstrator to a figure of strength and constancy in difficult 1 2

SSPRT, bk. 2, issue 2, p. 229 (sess. 24, 11 October 1917). Count Grabbe, a colonel the of Kuban' Cossack army, was a lay member elected in

Vladikavkaz diocese.

220

Failure times. The patriarch gradually becomes a symbol of leadership-vozhd' (leader), otets (father), molitvennik (intercessor), even bogatyr' (an epic hero); these terms surface again and again. This shift in the perception of the patriarch is seen clearly in a speech by Dmitrii Volkov. At first Volkov had opposed the patriarchate because he feared that any individual who occupied the post would be either too weak or too strong in relation to the synod. But a delegation sent from the council to the Provisional Government to protest the decree that removed church schools from the jurisdiction of the clergy (this was a key point in the redefinition of church-state relations) had convinced him otherwise. "And when I learned from this presentation that the government holds explicitly antichurch and antichristian views, then I saw that the Church is left on its own and must have its strong protector and benefactor. Only in the patriarchate can there now be salvation for the Church and for the Orthodox faith." 3 The patriarch was thus expected to be an instrument of salvation as well as head of the church. The institution of the patriarchate became a natural, if accidental, focus for the increasing desire for strength and leadership as the October Revolution gathered strength. Some speakers saw the crisis as deeper than political, and even as a struggle against the powers of Satan. The priest Vladimir Vostokov proclaimed: We are living in a time when a mysterious and frightening power has gathered against the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. A world-powerful antichristian organization is actively striving to entangle the entire world and is aiming for Orthodox Russia, which, despite all its moral decline, despite all its sins, still carries within itself the germ of eternal truth, of pure truth. And it is this germ which is so hateful to the servants of Antichrist. It is clear to all that a bane has been declared on the cross of Christ, a merciless war has been raised.... 4 And again, the need was for a leader to fight the forces of the Antichrist. Similarly, Emilian Bekarevich argued that the world, and particularly Russia, was being overtaken by a satanic religion of reason. Spiritism, under Combes, was introduced into the schools instead of the teaching of the catechism. Ancient gnosticism, spiritism, the Kabbala, theosophy, denial of Christ are becoming widespread. This is the religion that is 3 SSPRT, bk. 2, issue 2, p. 270 (sess. 25, 14 October 1917). Volkov, a merchant in the village of Tal' dom, was a lay member elected in Tver' diocese. He later resigned from the council. 4 Ibid., p. 304 (sess. 27,19 October 1917). Vostokov, a priest at Ufa Cathedral, was a clerical member elected in his diocese.

221

A New Russia? imminent! And I think we need a patriarch heading the church, who would take upon himself the struggle with the new religion. 5

As the tension increased with the progress of the Revolution, the patriarch came to be seen as the preserver of Orthodoxy against Masons, Jesuits, sectarians, atheists. "For our time we need a father of fathers, we need a defender, an intercessor-patriarch." 6 The patriarch was supposed to be the defender of good in the cultural battle with evil, as well as the defender of the church in the political battle with the state. These arguments convey a sense of the delegates' mood on the eve of October more convincingly than would sober academic exchanges. The desire for a strong leader at the head of the church points to a curious circumstance: the members seemed increasingly willing to set the church against the state, as well as against the cultural carriers of"satanic" ideas. The church, insofar as it was represented by the council, began to make a claim for political and cultural independence from the state, began to assert itself in what looks like a bid for power in the vacuum created by the fall of the monarchy and the weakness of the Provisional Government. By the same token, a leader in the form of a patriarch was supposed to be what the people wanted. In an appeal to the legitimizing rhetorical principle that had surfaced in every political discussion since the 186os, the delegates claimed that they had a mandate from the Russian people to restore the patriarch, that the people had always objected to having to pray for a faceless synod, that the interests of the people were represented at the council. A peasant speaker, begging pardon for his ineptness at the podium, made the requisite argument that was echoed by others. Adding a bit of color to the generally drab speeches, Tikhon Garanin claimed to be speaking for the people he represented: Peter the Great left the Church widowed for two hundred years. If we, too, leave the Church widowed, then to which court shall we be subject? They say that we can do without a patriarch. You yourselves are almost patriarchs, but the simple people, the majority, they can't, well, not exactly can't take a step without a patriarch, but they're very sorry about it. Maybe some will say, what's wrong with the Synod set up by Peter? That is the business of historians, but I shall say: during the governance by the Synod over two hundred 5 Ibid., p. 312 (sess. 27, 19 October 1917). Bekarevich, archpriest and vicar of Lublin Cathedral, was a clerical member elected in Kholm diocese. Justin Combes was a French politician, long a senator and premier of France in 1902-5, who followed a strongly anticlerical policy. 6 Ibid., pp. 345-46 (sess. 28, 21 October 1917; the missionary A. G Kuliashev speaking).

222

Failure years, how many over-patriarchs did we have, like Uklein, Pobirokl1in, and various vons and barons? They alone moved Russia forward. This is all the fruit of various obers.' Garanin's arguments lacked something in coherence, but in general he supported the other speakers who claimed that the people had in fact elected representatives to the council because they wished to have a patriarch. As evidence, Lev Kuntsevich cited the words of a Cossack with whom he had spoken, who had asked him to make sure there were no major changes in the Orthodox faith and liturgy. Kuntsevich interpreted this request as support for the restoration of the patriarchate. 8 These arguments are not entirely convincing, but the political code of the period demanded ritual obeisance to the will of the people. Furthermore, the patriarch was supposed to provide a leader, a focus of attention that the people would find more comprehensible than the faceless synod. As Archbishop Anastasii argued, The Russian people know what they expect from a patriarch. When the peasants chose their representatives to the Council, did they set conditions that a future patriarch must fulfill? They said only one thing: Give us a father, give us a pastor, who can gather all that has been lost, who, as God's shepherd, would stand up armed for all of God's flock. 9 Again, the individual principle was held to be more in keeping with the needs of the people. The proposal to restore the patriarch had actually been supported by telegrams from all over the country, from Petrograd to the Ukraine to the Far East, mainly from parish churches and their members. 10 Yet the extent of 7 Ibid., pp. 313-14 (sess. 27, 19 October 1917). Garanin, elder of the cathedral in the town ofNovouzensk, was lay member elected in Samara diocese. His language is worth reproducing: "IleTp BeJIMKMH ocTaBMJI U:epKOBb B.D;OBCTBYIOJI(ero Ha 200 JieT. EcJIM ern:e M Mbi OCTaBMM QepKOBb B.ll;OBCTBYIOIIJ;eiO, TO KaKOMY cy.n;y Mhi 6y):leM ITO.D;Jie:LKaTb? foBopHT, 'ITO M02KHO o6o:i1:TMCb 6e3 rraTpwapxa. Bhl caMM ITO"'ITM rraTpwapxw, HO rrpOCTOM Hapo.n; J13 KpeCTbJIHCKOH cpe):lhi, JI BaM CKa:LKy, 'ITO 3TOT rrpOCTOM Hapo.n;, ero 60JibiiiJ1HCTBO, OH 6e3 ITaTpMapxa He CKa:LKy, 'ITO 2KHTb He MO:LKeT, a 2KaJieeT O"'IeHb. Mo:LKeT 6biTb, HeKOTOpbre CKa:lKyT, " 97-100, 102, 107, 109-10, 112-1}, 11819, 148 creativity, 15, 145, 152-53, 155, 177, 182, 185, 216, 218 Darwinism, 70, 164, 173, 175 David, Eduard, 35 death, 69, 72, 109, 164, 175, 235-37 Descartes, Rene, 159 Diaghilev, Sergei, 5, 9, 1i Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 25-26, 67 Dobronravov, Nikolai, 201 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 5-7, 4=~, 49-50, 53-54, 56, 6o-64, 69-70, 140, 186, 212, 238 Duma: First, 116-17, 120-22; Second, 10, 83, n8-19, 124-27, 129, 148-49, 197, 201, 203 "economic realism," 166-67, 169-70, 177 Elcts (Ore! province), 22; Elets zemliachestvo, 86-87 emigration, 234-37, 241-42 Engels, Friedrich, 30, 103

Ern, Vladimir, 54, 137, 139, 245 Eternal Feminine (ewig Weibliche), 9, 52, 55, 77-78, 84, 139, 154, 179, 239-40. See also Sophia; World Soul "ethic of joyful labor," 155, 157, 239, 249 Fall, 173-75, 176, 182; and Resurrection, 147, 154-55, 157-58, 171, 173, 177, 238. See also resurrection famine of 1891, 28-29 Fedorov, Nikolai, 6, 7, 72, 94, 106-7, 158, 164, 180, 186, 212 Pet, Afanasii, 8 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 26, 102-5, 108 Fichte, Johann Gottlob, 59 Filosofov, Dmitrii, 54, 74, 195, 206 fin de siecle, 4-5, 16, 50-52. See also modernism Florensky, Pavel, 129-30, 136-37, 145, 179, 186, 245 Florovsky, Georges (Georgii Florovskii), so, 237> 240, 246 Formalism, 8, 189, 248 Frank, Semen, 10, 29, 52, 57, 64-65, 85, 88, 116-17, 131, 145, 185, 234> 245 freedom and necessity, 31-33, 61, 183-84 Free Economic Society, 85, 115-17, 148-51 free will, 31, 70, 177 Freud, Sigmund, 7 Futurists/Futurism. See avant -garde Galakhov, Iakov, 209 Garanin, Tikhon, 222-23 Garden of Eden, 147, 173, 182 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 40-41, 52, 58, 131-32, 134, 136-37, 245 Gippius, Zina"ida, 10, 12-13, 52-54, 79-80, 85, 112, 116, 240, 244 Glinka-Volzhskii, A. S., 109 God-builders, 14 Godmanhood/mangodhood, 53, 73, 103-6, 109, 128, 165 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 55, 62, 69 Golden Age, 180-82. See also Romanticism Goncharova, Natalia, 189 Grabbe, Pavel, 220 Gromoglasov, Il'ia, 196, 206 Gurevich, Liubov', 116

274

Index Haeckel, Ernst, 7 Herzen, Alexander, 28, 42-43, 45 hesychasm, 211-12; and divine energies, 211-12, 215-16. See also naming history, 30-33, 58, 6o-62, 70, 145, 171, 17375, 178, 182-85; and causality, 30-31, 33; and teleology, 30, 182, 184; and backwardness, 32, 69, 75, 82, 182. See also progress, theory of Holy Synod, 192-93, 199, 247 idealism, 9-10, 12, 14, 16, 51-52, 57-58, 6o, 62, 64-82, 88-89, 93-94, 102, 146, 1596o; vs. materialism, 7, 138. See also neoKantianism Ilarion, 210-11 Institut Saint -Serge de Theologie Orthodoxe, 234, 237 intelligentshchina, 24-25, 27 intelligentsia, 7-8, 11-14, 16, 42, 50-54> 5660, 62-64, 66-67, 75-76, 84-85, 88, 94, 96-97, 100, 117, 119, 126, 131-33, 141-42, 145, 183, 189-92, 195, 206, 210, 228, 232, 237-40, 244, 247-48. See also "new people" Iordanskii, Ivan, 209 Ivan Karamazov, 49-50, 60-63, 68-70, 86 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 9, 14, 52, 78, 85, 139-40, , 185, 213-14, 218, 244 Ivantsov-Platonov, A. M., 196 Iz glubiny, 9, 54, 231 Justinian, Emperor, 192, 232, 246 Kandinsky, Vasily, n, 189 Kant/Kantianism, 14, 30-32, 37, 73, 123, 146, 159-62, 165, 168, 177, 235. See also neoKantianism Kartashev, Anton, 54, 67, 194-95, 200-201, 206, 234> 244 Kaufmann, Moritz, 102 Kautsky, Karl, 30, 36, 40, 130 Kazhanov, N. N., 156 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 185 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 185, 217 Kiev Polytcchnical Institute, 49, 6o, 92 Kingsley, Charles, 102, 109

Kistiakovskii, Bogdan, 57, 65, 88, 117 khoziain (proprietor), 149-57, 238-39; peasant, 34-36 khoziaistvo (household/economy), 146, 15455, 157> 175-77 Kliuchevsky, V. 0., 22, 42 Kokovtsev, Vladimir, 92 Komissarzhevskaia, Vera, 189 Kudriavtsev, P. P., 205 Kuntsevich, Lev, 223 Kuskova, Ekaterina, 88 Kuznetsov, Nikolai, 196, 206 labor, 146, 154-55, 157, 164, 168-69, 178, 181 Lamennais, Felicite Robert de, 102 Larionov, Mikhail, 189 Lavrov, Petr, 96 Lenin (Ulianov), Vladimir, 10, 12, 29-30, 36, 40, 98-99, 148, 228, 248 Leontiev, Konstantin, 212 liberalism, 10, 12, 76-77, 84-86, 97, 113 liberation movement, 84-85, 88, 91. See also Union of Liberation Liebknecht, Karl, 40 Livny (Ore! province), 21-22, 25 Logos, 9, 104, 139, 176, 189, 208, 210, 213, 217-18, 239, 244. See also Word Lossky, Vladimir, 147 Lueger, Karl, 113 Lunacharsky, Anatolii, 10, 68-73, 164, 168 L'vov, V. N., 191, 227 Mach, Ernst, 7 Makovskii, Sergei, 54 Malevich, Kazimir, n, 189 Mann, Thomas, 15 markets, 29, 32-34 Marx/Marxism, 7, 16, 29-37, 45, 59-60, 67-68, 72-73, 75, 82, 85-88, 102-4; 12829, 141, 147, 151, 153-54, 158, 163, 173, 175, 180, 184, 248-49. See also materialism Maslov, P. P., 152 materialism: economic, 29, 33, 147, 158, 163, 184-85; historical, 30-31, 33, 6o, 184; "religious," 139 Matfei, Archimandrite, 227 Medtner, Nikolai, 9

275

Index Merezhkovsky, Dmitrii, 5, 8, 10, 13-14, 27, 52-54, 56, 64, 74, 77-81, 85, 90, 102, 112, l17, 121, 195, 218, 229, 240, 244, 247 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 189 "middle intelligentsia," 13, 93, 113, 185, 2034,248 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 29n, 70-71, 164, 182 Miliukov, Pavel, 85, 102, 148-49 Miliutin, Dmitrii, n6 Minskii, Nikolai, 54 Mir iskusstva (World of art), 5, 8 Mitrofan, Bishop, 220 modernism, 14, 165, 182-83, 210, 216, 218, 232, 248 moments, 39, 45, 134 Morozova, Margarita, 137 Moscow Commercial Institute, 28, 128-29, 197 Moscow Psychological Society, 57 Moscow University, 27-28, 87, 129, 197, 230 Name of God, 210-13, 217-18 naming, 213-17 narod, 2, 8, 96-97, 99, n1, 113, 132, 170, 231, 247-48. See also populism/populists Narod (newspaper), 109-n, 119, 121 nationalism, 63-65 nationalities, 121, 229 nature, 107, 160-61; conquering, 68, 71, 164; man and, 34-35, 70-71, 75, 138, 146, 16365, 168, 176-78, 249 Naumann, Friedrich, 113, 130 neo-Kantianism, 10, 15, 51, 146, 159-62, 165, 184, 186, 210 nco-Romanticism, 15, 55, 154, 162-66, 17071, 177, 189 Nesmelov, V. I., 245 Nesterov, Mikhail, 137 "new people," 12, 51-52, 54, 77, 82, 118 new religious consciousness, 10-12, 52, 7781, 84, 88-91, 94 Nietzsche/Nietzscheanism, 7, 14, 50, 52-53, 57, 62, 70-71, 73, 177 Navalis, 166, 173-74, 178, 180 Novgorodtsev, Pavel, 57, 65 Novoe slovo, 40 Novoselov circle, 54, 102, 244 Novyi put, 79-81, 117, 244

Orthodox dogma, innovation in, 11, 77-79, 82, 91, 118, 142, 171, 185, 207, 211-13, 21618, 244-45 Orthodoxy, lay, 155, 157, 248 "other worlds," 45, 54, 56-57, 67, 83, 240 Ouspensky, Leonid, 147 patriarchate, n8, 192, 199-201, 219-25, 244 . peasant commune, 94n, 148-51, 170 Peshekhonov, A. V., 74 Petrunkevich, Ivan, n6 Plekhanov, Georgii, 30 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 27, 54, 84, 90, 112, 117' 247 populism/populists, 12-13, 29, 32, 63, 6768, 70-75, 82, 89, 96-97, 148. See also narod; "special path"; subjectivism positivism, 5, 7, 15-16, 29-30, 51, 56-61, 66, 74> 152-53, 163-66, 170, 173> 177, 181-83, 186, 246 "positivists," 68-73, 75 Posnikov, A. S., 28 Problemy idealizma, 9, 52, 57-58, 64, 73-74, 88, 231. See also idealism production, 167-68. See also labor progress, theory of, 58-59, 61, 68-69, 103, 108, 128, 182 Prokopovich, Sergei, 88 Provisional Government, 197, 204, 220-22 Rachinskii, Grigorii, 134-35, 137, 245 realism, 5, 55-56 "realists," 68, 75 Religious-philosophical societies, 11, 14, 54, 77, 79, 90, 102, 128, 195> 211, 244 Rerum novarum, 112, 247 resurrection, 109-10, 113, 128, 135, 147, 155, 164, 175-77> 180, 182 Revolutions: ofi905, 13-14, 83-86, 94-100, 115-18, 244-45; ofl917, 1-3, 17, 189-91, 192, 201, 219-22, 232, 236, 248 Rickert, Heinrich, 7, 32 Rodzianko, M. V., 195 Romanticism, 7, 15, 55, 57, 65, 82, 154, 15859, 162-66, 173> 178-80, 183, 186, 239-40. See also nco-Romanticism Rozanov, Vasilii, 52, 54, 74, 77, 85, 218, 245 Rudnev, S. P., 193

276

Index Ruskin, John, 107 "Russian reformation," 54, 81-82, 243-46 Russian Student Christian Movement, 237 Russo-Japanese War, 85, 94, 115 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 7 Savinkov, Boris, 10, 85 Schelling, F. W. J., 55, 159-61, 165-66, 240 Schlegel, Friedrich, 178 Scriabin, Alexander, n, 185, 189 self, 183-84; and human dignity, 10, 58, 6o61, 64, 184, 245; individual, s8, 61, 6s, 76, 89, 103, 107, 165; and personal responsibility, so, 59, 62. See also liberalism; soul seminary reform, 25-27 Shaniavskii University, 129 Shavel' skii, Grigorii, 201 Shchapov, Afanasii, 67 Shestov, Lev, 84, 130, 245 Shipov, D. N., 89, 99 Silver Age, 1-17, so, 52, 78, 85, 117, 157, 18283, 185-86, 190, 232, 234, 237-38, 240, 243-44> 248 Simferopol', University of, 230 Simmel, Georg, 7, 40 Sistine Madonna, 44, 134 Slavophiles, 7, 153, 162, 170 Slavophilism, 231, 233 sobornost', 191-92, 199-202, 206, 208-10, 216, 218-19, 229; and democracy, 200202 Social democracy, 107-8, 128 Social Democratic Party (Russia), 10, 12, 36-37, 73, 85, 87, 93, 95, 107, 113. See also Bolsheviks Social Democratic Party (SPD; Germany and Austria), 40, 86, 108 socialism, 61-62, 107, 128 Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), 10, 12, 14, 8s, 93, 95, 97, 193, 229 Soloviev, Vladimir, 6-9, 15, 55-56, s8-6o, 64, 74, 85, 88, 104-6, no, 113, 137-40, 157-58, 186, 212, 231, 238-40, 244 Sophia, 9, 14, 55, 104, 139, 146-47, 152, 15455, 157> 171, 174-77, 179-81, 183, 217, 232, 238-40, 244 sophie economy, 15-16, 142, 146-47, 151-53, 158, 182, 238-39

Sophiology, 237, 239-41 soul, 10, 59, 64, 102, 145, 236-37 "special path," 29, 32. See also populism/ populists Stammler, Rudolf, 30, 40 Steiner, Rudolf, 14, 190 Stolypin, Petr, 124, 127, 151, 153, 155, 245; and land organization [zemleustroistvo], 149-50 Stolypin reforms, 17, 129, 145, 148-49, 151 Stravinsky, Igor, 189 Struve, Petr, 10, 29, 32-33, 52, 54, 57, 85, 87-90, 94-95, 98-99, 102, 131, 150-53, 245 subject, 15, 153; grammatical, 214-15; transcendental, 146, 161-62, 172 subjectivism, 29 subject-object, 7, 159-70, 172-73, 176-77, 183 Svet nevechernii, 158, 171-72, 181, 191 Symbolism, 2, 7, 9, 14, so, 55-56, So, 117, 154, 157-58, 179, 189, 210, 213-14, 238, 244 Ternavtsev, Valentin, 54, 245 Teslenko, N. V., n6 Tikhon (Patriarch), 193, 224-25 Titlinov, Boris, 196, 206 Tiutchev, Fedor, 212 Tkachev, Petr, 98-99 Tokmakova, Elena, 41-42, 86 Tolstoi, Dmitrii, 25 Tolstoy, Lev, 5-7, 42-43, 45, 53, 64, 91, 112, 140, 189, 210, 212 Trinity, 78, 179, 208-10 Troeltsch, Ernst, 130, 246-47 Troitskii, S. V., 212 Trubetskoi, Evgenii, 99, 137, 139, 195, 200, 205, 206 Trubetskoi, Sergei, 57, 107 Tsvetkov, Nikolai, 201 Tugan-Baranovskii, M. I., 29 Union of Christian Politics, 10, 101-2, 113 Union of Liberation, 10, 12, 85-95, 99-101, 117, 131, 149 Union of Russian People, 123 universal church, 7, 14, 53

277

Index "urgent task," 97-99, 101 Uspenskii, Glcb, 43-45

Vrubel', Mikhail, 9, 11, 189 Vvedenskii, Aleksandr, 57

Vasil'ev, Afanasii, 199-200, 208-9 Vekhi, 9, 57, 64, 88, 131-33, 139, 183, 231, 247

Weber, Max, 7, 51, 59, 113, 184 Windelband, Wilhelm, 32 Word, 189, 200, 210, 213, 218. See also Logos Wordsworth, William, 39 World Soul, 55, 139, 162, 239. See also Eternal Feminine; Sophia

Vengerov, S. A., 87, 127 Verhaeren, Emile, 7 Vladimir's envoys, 134, 233 Vodovozov, V. V., 86, 116 Volkov, Dmitrii, 221 Voprosy zhizni, 117, 123, 244 Vostokov, Vladimir, 221, 225

zemskii sobor, 116-17, 121, 124 Zenkovsky, V., 234

278