This paper was part of a roundtable discussion at the international symposium, “Russian Literature and Philosophy: Religion, Nationalism and Dissidence,” which took place at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, November 2022. The roundtable included Caryl Emerson, Gary Saul Morson, and the author of this paper, Paul Contino.
In his earlier remarks for this session, Saul has described some of the dehumanizing horrors wrought by Lenin and Stalin, whereas Caryl, shifting back to the nineteenth century, has shown us the way the humanizing “dissidence of radical love” takes form in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Leskov. In my brief remarks, I would like to speak about the “dissidence of humility.” Christian humility “prays downwards” (to borrow Caryl’s phrase), even as it embraces the cross, and is given witness in the life and thought of Father Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944). Bulgakov is now recognized as one of the major theologians of the twentieth century, but I won’t discuss the systematic theology that comprises the final twenty years of his life – his explorations of Godmanhood, the Trinity, Sophia, and the Church. I’m a Bulgakov beginner, and in my brief remarks will focus on the theme of humility, especially as it appears in two of his earlier works: his 1909 contribution to Vekhi (Landmarks) and the Spiritual Diary he kept during his 1924–25 exile in Prague (published in English translation earlier this year).
In the 1909 essay “Heroism and Humility,” Bulgakov articulates his disenchantment with the radical left intelligentsia of which he’d been a member. (I use Paul Valliere’s translation of the title from his Modern Russian Theology; the title in Rowan Williams’ excellent anthology is “Heroism and Spiritual Struggle.”) As a young man he had left the Church – he’d come from a family with a long line of priests – and became a Marxist professor of economics. But he came to see the utter inapplicability of Marxist theory to Russia’s agrarian economy. He witnessed the disappointing aftermath of the 1905 Revolution and served in the Second Duma. By 1909, Bulgakov had become convinced that the most serious obstacle to social change in Russia was the intelligentsia’s “deafness to the religious message of Dostoevsky” (Bulgakov in Williams, 77). They posited a “belief in the natural perfection of the human” even as they held to a materialistic conception of the person and “a crudely mechanistic understanding of historical process” (81). In their heroic maximalism they asserted that “everything is permitted” and posited themselves as “supermen” (86). They thus held in disdain the common people of Russia (whom Bulgakov thought were actually more spiritually enlightened), viewing them with “incomprehension and even contempt” (106). One thinks of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, who claims to love the people he calls “weak and vile.” The intelligentsia “rejects Christ and turns away from his face” (111). Lacking a “consciousness of obligation and personal responsivity” (91), or any absolute norms and values necessary for cultivating an ideal, they strive for “self-deification” (92). They recall the ego-driven “love in dreams” described by Zosima – “greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in sight of all” (Book 2, ch. 4).
In contrast, the humble believer, the Christian podvizhnik to whom Bulgakov exhorts the intelligentsia to attend, practices the slow, prosaic work of what Zosima calls “active love.” In “spiritual labor” (99), the humble person’s “attention is concentrated on his immediate task, his concrete obligations and the fulfilling of them with strict fidelity and without delay” (93). In humility, one struggles “to transform one’s own life by the imperceptible process of self-renunciation, obedience; to perform one’s work with whole-hearted endeavor, self-discipline, self-mastery, but also to see both it and oneself as an instrument of providence” (100). Anything but passive, this humble person shows both “the greatest possible energy and the greatest degree of selflessness in discerning what constitutes [her] duty” (97). She is permeated by the figure of Christ, the Godman (100).
In the year he wrote this essay, 1909, Bulgakov suffered the loss of his four year old son Ivashechka. As Thomas Allan Smith writes, “At the funeral Bulgakov had a profound religious experience, mystical and ecstatic, that can be regarded as the final act in his long journey back to Orthodoxy” (trans. introduction, Unfading Light, xxv). The vision – described in Unfading Light (1917) – recalls the harrowing yet Christological scenes in The Brothers Karamazov, of the father Snegiryov with his little Ilyusha. Bulgakov addresses his son, and sees his innocent suffering in the light of Christ: “My holy one, at the sanctuary of your remains, beside your pure body, my fair one, my radiant boy, I found out how God speaks, I understood what ‘God spoke’ means! In a new and never-before-known clairvoyance of heart , along with the torments of the cross heavenly joy came down into it, and with the darkness of divine abandonment God reigned in my soul. My heart was opened to the pain and torment of people . . . [and] I understood what it means to love not with a human, self-loving, and mercenary love, but with the divine love with which Christ loves us” (Unfading Light 14).
Bulgakov was ordained a priest in 1918 and exiled in 1922. He lived in Prague before settling in Paris where he would found the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute and write his great trilogies of systematic and speculative theology.
Before all this, while in Prague Father Sergei kept a Spiritual Diary. In it, we see him becoming a starets, a spiritual father. The parallels with Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima are striking, especially the persistent tone of what Zosima calls “loving humility.” Near the end of his discourse, Zosima observes, “At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. . . . Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it” (Book 6, ch. 3). Reading the Diary, we discern Father Sergei’s exercise in “loving humility,” perhaps especially in the grief and sense of responsibility he feels for the horror that has overtaken his homeland, which he describes as “dying spiritually, it stinks like Lazarus four days in the tomb” (97). He rejects despondency – “flies from dejection” in Zosima’s words – and resists judgment. Roberto de la Noval puts it well in his “Theological Introduction” to the Diary, recalling
the refrain of The Brothers Karamazov: we are each of us, “guilty before everyone for everyone and everything.” Or in Bulgakov’s words “Upon each of us hangs the fate of the entire world.” Our individual deeds enter into world history, and we are each a crucial factor in the historical causality that joins all humanity together. [Recall Zosima: “All is like an ocean . . . a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.”] In Bulgakov’s mind, for example, it was his generation that bore the blame for the fate of the children currently being raised in an atheist Russia, deprived of their birthright of a Christian upbringing. These children could not be personally guilty of the blasphemies they would imbibe with mother’s milk, just as the children of previous generations had no special merit for the contingency of being baptized and raised by Christian parents. For this reason the Lord commands us not to judge – we are too quick to assign personal guilt when we cannot possibly know the true culpability of another. But God can judge, and He will judge all humanity together, for God alone can grasp the sundry ways in which our fates are intertwined and by which we are responsible for one another. (36-37)
Father Sergei’s sense of sin is strong, but his sense of grace is stronger. As the feast of the Nativity approaches, he recognizes a “new Gethsemane” in Russia. But rejecting despondency, he prays for the humility that will sustain his work: “It is humility – a profound and definitive humility – and not disillusionment that our present experience is teaching us” (108). He looks to the example of the blessed starets Seraphim, who exhorted: “Acquire a peaceful spirit, and thousands around you will be saved” (100). He is painfully aware that if he falls into “resentment and annoyance” he will be “in captivity, and that his lack of peace will ‘drag others with [him] into perdition’” (101). He prays, “Lord, teach me the prayer of the Publican [Luke 18.9-14]”; near the end of his diary he simply recites the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” (163).
A few days later he writes, “Your days are coming to a close. There is a silent grief in your heart because you have not completed your work before the Lord and have vainly squandered the life He has given you” (163). With a sense of divine irony, one reads these words knowing that over the course of the next twenty years, Father Sergei will continue his pastoral work of sacramental worship and attention to the sick – and will write his most important works of systematic and speculative theology.
One of his “spiritual children,” Sister Joanna Reitlinger, remembers Father Sergei’s exemplary humility, but cautions that “nowhere is outward imitation of an example more off-key than in the virtue of humility.” I will give Sister Joanna the final words, as she recognizes the way in which humility proved integral to Father Sergei – both in his call to holiness and greatness:
Fr. S. never imitated outward forms of humility. His humility was woven into the fabric of his life and was well-earned. The humility of his final years, this was primarily the humility of the man before God, of time before eternity. It is linked with dying. So little really matters anymore when you have one foot in the grave. But before that – what a path of humility he walked! How difficult for those whom the Lord has thus singled out to bend the knee. He could not sincerely submit to anyone entirely. And indeed it was unnecessary! But how obediently, and how sincerely did he submit when this was necessary. (Diary, 172)
Works Cited
Bulgakov, Sergius. Spiritual Diary. Translated and introduced by Mark Roosein and Roberto J. De La Noval. Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2022.
—–. Towards a Russian Political Theology. Texts edited and translated by Rowan Williams. Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1999.
—–. Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations. Translated, edited, and introduced by Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012.