64 Facts About Sergei Bulgakov

Sergei Bulgakov is best known for his teaching about Sophia the Wisdom of God, which received mixed reception; it was condemned by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1935, but without accusations of heresy.

Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was born on 16 July 1871 to the family of a rural Orthodox priest in the town of Livny, Oryol Governorate, in Russia.

Metropolitan Macarius Sergei Bulgakov, one of the major Eastern Orthodox theologians of his days, and one of the most important Russian church historians, was a distant relative.

At the age of fourteen, Sergei Bulgakov entered the Oryol Theological Seminary.

In 1888 Sergei Bulgakov quit the seminary after a loss of his faith.

Sergei Bulgakov later noted that his passion for priesthood waned as he grew disenchanted with Orthodoxy because his teachers were unable to answer his questions.

In 1890, Sergei Bulgakov entered the Imperial Moscow University where he chose to study political economy and law.

Sergei Bulgakov only chose to study law because it seemed more likely to contribute to his country's redemption.

Sergei Bulgakov's thought during his studies with Chuprov has generally been seen through the lens of the Marxist-Populist debate.

In 1895, Sergei Bulgakov began teaching political economy at the Imperial Moscow Technical School.

On 14 January 1898, shortly before embarking for Western Europe, Sergei Bulgakov married Yelena Tokmakova, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

In 1898, Sergei Bulgakov received a scholarship for a two-year internship in Western Europe.

Sergei Bulgakov left for Germany, where he tested the results of his research in personal correspondence with representatives of German Social Democracy.

Sergei Bulgakov examined the entire agricultural history of Germany, the United States, Ireland, France, and England.

At the time of Sergei Bulgakov teaching about Dostoevsky, the counterweight to Marxism in 20th century Russia was neo-Kantianism; heavily influenced by neo-Kantianism, Sergei Bulgakov returned to idealism and believed in the significance of the historical role of the valuese of goodness and beauty.

However, it was the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, who he began to read in 1902, that Sergei Bulgakov considered to be the highest synthesis of philosophical thought; this philosophy considered the vital principle of Christianity to be the organizing principle of social creativity.

Sergei Bulgakov presented the individual stages of his philosophical development in his collection From Marxism to Idealism, published in Saint Petersburg in 1903.

Together with Pyotr Struve, Sergei Bulgakov published the journal Liberation; together, they were co-founders of the illegal political organization Union of Liberation in 1903.

Sergei Bulgakov did not join the Kadets and instead unsuccessfully attempted to form his own organization, the Union of Christian Politics, which advocated Christian socialism and collaborated with the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle.

Amidst the chaos of 1905, Sergei Bulgakov made the acquaintance of Pavel Florensky, with whom he would establish a long-lasting friendship.

In 1906, Sergei Bulgakov was editor of the Kiev newspaper Narod.

Sergei Bulgakov taught at Moscow University as a privatdozent in the department of political economy and statistics of the Law Faculty, and was professor at the Moscow Commercial Institute until 1918.

Sergei Bulgakov was elected to the Second State Duma in 1906 as a non-partisan "Christian socialist" deputy from the Oryol Governorate.

Sergei Bulgakov believed Nicholas II was responsible for the social problems plaguing Russia.

However, Sergei Bulgakov did not appreciate the increasing radicalization of the leftists in Russia and their abandonment of Russian Orthodoxy in favor of a purely secular state; on the contrary, it caused him to uphold the positive value of governance by Nicholas II, even as he continued to detest him, accusing him of promoting the revolution and bringing about the demise of the royal family.

Sergei Bulgakov continued to struggle with the meaning of political power as he wrote Unfading Light.

At the funeral, Sergei Bulgakov had a profound religious experience that is generally regarded as his final step in his journey back to Orthodoxy.

In 1911, Sergei Bulgakov left the Moscow University among a large group of liberal-minded university teachers in protest against the policies of the Minister of Public Education Lev Kasso.

In 1911, Sergei Bulgakov was elected fellow chairman of the Alexander Chuprov Society for the Development of Social Sciences and a member of the Commission on Church Law at the Moscow Law Society.

In 1913, Sergei Bulgakov defended his doctoral dissertation on political economy, Philosophy of Economics, at Moscow University, in which he put forward Christianity as a universal process, the subject of which is Sophia - the world soul, creative nature, ideal humanity.

Sergei Bulgakov was elected full professor of political economy at Moscow University.

In 1917, Sergei Bulgakov became a delegate of the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity and a member of the All-Russian Local Council of the Orthodox Russian Church, the Religious and Educational Conference under the Cathedral Council, the Commission for Familiarization with the Financial Situation of the Council, and the VI, VII, IX, and XX Departments.

Sergei Bulgakov was an author of the Patriarchal Message on Accession to the Throne.

In June 1918, Sergei Bulgakov was ordained a deacon and then a priest.

Sergei Bulgakov took part in the All-Russia Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church that elected patriarch Tikhon of Moscow.

In July 1918, Sergei Bulgakov left Moscow, first going to Kiev then joining his wife and children in Koreiz in Crimea.

In 1921, Sergei Bulgakov became archpriest and assistant rector of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Yalta.

In 1922, Sergei Bulgakov was included in a list of scientific and cultural figures subject to deportation, compiled by the State Political Directorate on the initiative of Vladimir Lenin.

Sergei Bulgakov involved himself in the spiritual leadership of Russian youth and participated in the ecumenical movement.

Sergei Bulgakov was founder and leader of the Brotherhood of St Sophia, created with the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, and an organizer and participant in the congresses of the Russian Student Christian Movement.

Sergei Bulgakov participated in the first congresses of the RSCM in Prerov, Czechoslovakia and Argeron, France, and continued to supervise it.

Sergei Bulgakov was a member of the Committee for the Construction of the Sergius Metochion and an assistant to its organizer.

Sergei Bulgakov helped found the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, where he worked until his death.

Sergei Bulgakov taught courses on "Holy Scripture of the Old Testament" and "Dogmatic Theology".

Sergei Bulgakov became involved in the work of the ecumenical movement in 1927 at the World Christian Conference "Faith and Church Order" in Lausanne.

In 1935, after the publication of his book, Lamb of God, Sergei Bulgakov was accused of teachings contrary to Orthodox dogma by the Metropolitan Sergius I of Moscow, who recommended his exclusion from the Church until he amended his "dangerous" views.

Sergei Bulgakov underwent surgery, after which he learned to speak without vocal cords.

Sergei Bulgakov served early liturgies in the chapel in the name of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and continued to lecture on dogmatic theology, carry out his pastoral care, and write.

Sergei Bulgakov finished his last book, The Apocalypse of John, shortly before his death.

Sergei Bulgakov was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois Russian Cemetery in the southern suburbs of Paris.

Sergei Bulgakov condemned the basic view of political economy of the early 20th century, according to which the growth of material needs is the fundamental principle of normal economic development.

Sergei Bulgakov viewed economic progress as a necessary condition for spiritual success, but warned against the inclination to replace universal human and cultural progress with economic progress alone.

Sergei Bulgakov viewed the inability to be satisfied with the increase in external material benefits and to come to terms with the deep-rooted forms of social untruth, the desire for universal human ideals, and the insatiable need for conscious and effective religious faith as the most characteristic and happiest features of the Russian spirit.

Sergei Bulgakov set out to show in the history of agrarian evolution the universal applicability of Karl Marx's law of concentration of production, but came to the exact opposite conclusions.

Sergei Bulgakov's journalism came to the fore at critical moments: the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the beginning of the First World War in 1917.

Sergei Bulgakov's views changed greatly in response to the issues in Russia.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Sergei Bulgakov became disillusioned with Marxism because he considered it incapable of answering the deep religious needs of the human personality and radically changing it.

Sergei Bulgakov warned that the path of heroism would lead Russia to a bloody tragedy.

In 1935, Sergei Bulgakov's teaching was condemned in the decrees of the Moscow Patriarchate, and in 1937, by the foreign Council of Bishops in Karlovci.

In polemics with the tradition of German idealism, Sergei Bulgakov refuses to consider reason and thinking as the highest principle, endowed with the exclusive prerogative of connection with God.

The justification of the world thus presupposes the justification of matter, and Sergei Bulgakov sometimes defined the type of his philosophical worldview by the "religious materialism" of Vladimir Solovyov.

Sergei Bulgakov says that God created the world from His own essence, placed outside of Himself.

Sergei Bulgakov explores the philosophical foundations of language in another book of the same period, The Philosophy of the Name, dedicated to the apology of imiaslavie and related to similar apologies by Florensky and Losev.

Sergei Bulgakov concludes that an adequate expression of Christian truth is fundamentally inaccessible to philosophy and is achievable only in the form of dogmatic theology.