ABSTRACT

Among the Russian émigrés who settled in Paris in the 1920s, Bulgakov was already an established theologian and, as Dean of the newly-established Institute of Orthodox Theology dedicated to St Sergii (the Institut St-Serge), he rapidly assumed theological leadership (equally famous contemporaries among the émigrés, such as Nikolay Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, were not such committed theologians). He became one of the voices representing Russian Orthodoxy in the burgeoning ecumenical movement, and was particularly active in the newly-founded Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, and during this period his theological interests predominated, issuing in two trilogies that represent a comprehensive attempt to set out the theological perspective of those Russian theologians who had sought to respond to the intellectual concerns of the nineteenth-century West, and who had been profoundly affected by German idealism (and also by the Kierkegaardian reaction, something of which can be found, quite independently, in Dostoevsky). In these theological works, Bulgakov sought to engage with the theological world of the West, particularly as he encountered it among the Western intellectuals who welcomed him in Paris. Bulgakov’s œuvre, then, represents a distinctive moment in an engagement between Russian Orthodoxy and the West, at the point at which the Russians of the emigration found themselves established there, and anxious to seize the opportunity to communicate to their Western contemporaries, in terms they could understand, the distinctive vision of Russian Orthodoxy.