Abstract

Abstract:

This article examines Fr. Sergii Bulgakov’s writings on the Eucharist. It argues that these texts, written at critical junctures at the beginning, middle, and end of his career, constitute a “eucharistic horizon” against which one can envision continuity across Bulgakov’s wide-ranging corpus. Contrary to the scholarly narrative that Bulgakov abandoned his mission to justify Orthodox social action after his exile to Western Europe in the early 1920s in the interest of building an abstract dogmatic edifice, this article argues that at the core of his thought lies a commitment to the importance of the material world and concomitantly an abiding commitment to collective social action within it. It is argued that the entirety of Bulgakov’s thought can be viewed a resource for restoring a spirit of collective Orthodox social action (as opposed to individual contemplation and ascesis alone) for the transfiguration of human and non-human creation: what Bulgakov called the “common task” of humanity.

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