A BULGAKOV ANTHOLOGY: From Marxism to Christian Orthodoxy

Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) was, the editors assert, ""one of the most gifted theologians of the Russian Church."" Born into a line of priests, he lost his faith at fourteen and went on to become a political economy professor; but the enchantment of the secular religion of progress and of Western culture soon faded, and he gradually made his way back from Marxism to Russian spirituality, a process which culminated in his ordination and exile in 1923. At his death he was Dean of the Russian Orthodox Academy in Paris. This sampler from his memoirs, essays, and sermons illustrates the stages of his development. Bulgakov, an accomplished religious writer, exhibits his formidable opposition to the pseudo-religion of Communism and the institutional corruption of Christianity, and his eloquent advocacy of Orthodoxy as the fullest embodiment of the Christian tradition. Still, though he was a pioneer in many areas (ecumenism, religious analysis of science and of ideologies), his very conservative and Russian viewpoint seems dated find alien now. The anthology does, nonetheless, give a rich feeling for the religious world from which writers like Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn have come.