Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations by Sergius Bulgakov (review)

Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s leading Orthodox theologian. In 1917 he published Unfading Light, an essential work of Russian religious philosophy that is now available in English translation for the first time. Thomas Allan Smith’s edition is superb. The translation is accurate throughout and the prose lucid. His introduction places the treatise in the context of Bulgakov’s life and thought. He has provided a bibliography of Bulgakov’s sources, carefully annotated the text, and supplemented Bulgakov’s copious notes. To have rendered this fundamental work into an eminently useful, authoritative edition in English is a major contribution that will long enrich the study of Russian religious philosophy and Orthodox theology.

The book contains a short preface from the author, a lengthy introduction on the nature of religious consciousness, and three main parts: “Divine Nothing,” “The World,” and “The Human Being.” The overarching theme is that the basis of religion is human experience of the divine. Abstract thought and theory can follow from but not replace religious experience, which remains, Bulgakov writes, “the sole path for real, living comprehension of God” (18). The very possibility of experiencing the transcendent God in immanent reality is a mystery that he deeply felt and one that inspires his book from beginning to end.

The transcendent-immanent distinction is difficult to preserve. Human beings tend in one direction or the other: either to make the transcendent everything, to dissolve the immanent into it and thus to devalue the world, or else to collapse the transcendent into the immanent, resulting in the loss of authentic experience of the divine and its reduction to mere ideas or concepts. Bulgakov thought the second tendency was more widespread and the greater danger. Writing in the midst of the Great War, he associated immanentism with the “Germanic ethos” and its false deifications of humanity. Yet he acknowledged that the first tendency, world-denial for the sake of the transcendent, had certain manifestations in Russian religious consciousness. His hope was to “unite the truth of the one and the other” and “in lived experience to know God in the world and the world in God” (xli).

The introduction is an indispensable guide to Bulgakov’s whole approach to religion. He emphasizes that religious experience is utterly authoritative, immediately credible, and convincing “by a different higher persuasiveness than the facts of external reality” (17). Though it can be indubitably convincing, faith is not knowledge. Bulgakov connects this difference to what it means to be a person. In contrast to empirical knowledge, faith comes from within and depends on human freedom. “To impose the truths of faith from the outside,” he writes, “would not meet the fundamental requirements of religious consciousness; to coerce our person, whether by logical constraint or force of knowledge, would not correspond to the dignity of the Divinity who respects our freedom” (29). The content of faith is transcendent reality, which is not given as an object but posed as an ideal. “It is identified not by the coercion of external senses, not violently, but by the free, creative aspiration of the spirit, by the quest for God . . . In other words the element of freedom and personhood, i.e., creativity, is irremovable from religious faith” (35). Any radical immanentism (Hegelianism is Bulgakov’s example) that eliminates the transcendent also erases the distinction between faith and knowledge and hence undermines the very foundations of personhood.

Transcendent and immanent form Bulgakov’s most basic binary. Another is concrete and abstract, the first term one of approval for religious experience and faith, the second term one of reproach for rarefied intellectual constructs. Immediate, concrete religious experience is expressed in symbolic and conceptual forms (myth and dogma). Philosophy, by contrast, is abstract because its source is human reason. Nonetheless, it can be consciously grounded in religion (faith, myth, dogma) and freely pursue the philosophical...