Relics and Miracles: Two theological essays
Sergius Bulgakov, author
Boris Jakim, translator
Eerdmans £16.99
(978-0-8028-6531-1)
Church Times Bookshop £15.30 (Use code CT374 - free
postage on UK online orders during August)
Icons and the Name of God
Sergius Bulgakov, author
Boris Jakim, translator
Eerdmans £19.99
(978-0-8028-6664-6)
Church Times Bookshop £18 (Use code CT374 - free postage
on UK online orders during August)
SERGIUS BULGAKOV is best known for his Lesser and Greater
Trilogies. But he wrote a number of shorter works, conveniently
listed in the translator's introduction to the first of these two
books. The essay "On Holy Relics" was written in 1918 in response
to the Bolshevik desecration of relics immediately after the
Revolution. Much more than a protest, it is perhaps the first
attempt to set out a theological justification for the veneration
of saints' relics. Bulgakov sees such veneration as rooted in the
incarnation and the consequent deification of humanity in its
entirety, including the body. Within the corruptible relics of the
saints are their incorruptible risen bodies.
The incarnation is central, too, to the later essay, written in
1932, "On the Gospel Miracles". Bulgakov rejects the distinction
made by the Tome of Leo, read at the Council of Chalcedon in 451,
between what Jesus did as God and what he did as man, as dividing
his two natures, divine and human. He insists it was the one person
of Jesus Christ who in his divine humanity worked such signs of
God's love for humankind.
The essay on "The Icon and its Veneration" was written in 1930.
The practice of making and venerating icons was declared legitimate
by the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787. But it provided no
dogmatic definition of icons or justification for their veneration.
Bulgakov was unhappy with the arguments of both iconoclasts and
iconodules, based, he believed, on an inadequate understanding of
the incarnation. Here, too, he argues that there can be no
separation between the divine and human natures in Christ. An icon
of Christ does not depict his human nature only: it depicts the one
divine humanity of the incarnate Word, and a properly blessed icon
radiates divine energy.
That energy is contained, too, in the Name of Jesus. The essay
included in the second of these books is the sixth chapter of
Bulgakov's "The Philosophy of the Name". It was written in the
1920s, commissioned by the All-Russian Council of 1917-18 as a
response to the controversy that sprang up on Mount Athos in the
decade before 1914, when the doctrine that the Name of God is God,
and so can be worshipped, became popular among Russian monks on the
Holy Mountain. It was declared heretical by the Holy Synod in St
Petersburg, and more than 600 monks were forcibly repatriated from
Athos to Russia.
Bulgakov was one of the theologians who defended the
imyaslavtsy, the "worshippers of the Name". The chapter
included here provides a theological justification for the belief,
with extensive references to the Name of God in the Old Testament,
and also to the New Testament Name of God, Jesus. Readers may be
surprised to learn that "Jesus" is not only the Name of the Second
Person of the Trinity, but, because of the inter-relationship of
the Three Persons, also the Name of the triune God. God is present
in his Name, and so the Name, like the icon and like relics,
radiates the divine energies, which, as Gregory Palamas argued in
the 14th century, are consubstantial with God's essence and
inseparable from it.
Running through all four essays is Bulgakov's insistence on the
unity of the human and divine natures in the one person of Jesus
Christ and the consequent deification of human nature, and on the
penetration of the material creation, too, by the divine energies.
Coming occasionally to the surface is his controversial doctrine of
divine Sophia; and the second of these books concludes with
Bulgakov's "Post Scriptum" to "The Name of God": "A Sophiological
Interpretation of the Dogma of the Name of Jesus".
Boris Jakim is to be congratulated on making available to
English-speaking readers these four essays, which illuminate
specific aspects of Orthodox theology and provide further insights
into the thought of the most creative of 20th-century Russian
Orthodox theologians.
Canon Hugh Wybrew was formerly Vicar of St Mary Magdalen's,
Oxford.