Eschatological Resurrection and Historical Liberation
The Church must not be a part but a public conscious that permits neither political accommodation nor indifferentism under the pretext of humility.
- The Sophiology of Death
What is history to the Christian consciousness? Is there even such a thing as “Christian history” in the current geopolitical state of unrest and clashing definitions of tradition and secularity increasingly writhing their way into political discourse? With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we have born witness to the violent destruction of people and spaces previously considered “sisters” in the Slavic Orthodox world. A similar kind of political ideology can be seen in the continued oppression of Palestinian people, both Christian and not, whose suffering, albeit similar to that of Ukraine, does not benefit from the same kind of support from interested parties such as the United States.
A significant and complicated category often neglected here is that of the religious, more specifically, the eschatological. At least in the case of Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has done everyone the favor of speaking his own personal apocalypse out loud:
Поэтому то, что сегодня происходит в сфере международных отношений, имеет не только политическое значение. Речь идет о чем-то другом и куда более важном, чем политика. Речь идет о человеческом спасении, о том, где окажется человечество, по какую сторону от Бога Спасителя, приходящего в мир как Судия и Мздовоздатель,—по правую или по левую.
Therefore, what today is occurring in the sphere of international relations does not only have political meaning. This speech is about something different, much more than simply politics. This speech is about human salvation, about where humanity will be, and on which side of God the Savior, who comes into the world as Judge and Creator—on the right or on the left.
In other parts of this sermon-turned-war-address, Kirill uses the situation of Donbas, and their alleged refusal to host gay-pride parades, to describe the alleged “persecution” of faithful Russian Christians by the secularized West. This straw man falls quickly to the wayside when one sees this statement for what it is: a demonstration of eschatological ideology used to condone the killing of other Christians and innocent peoples: “Вокруг этой темы сегодня идет реальная война”—“around these topics today is a real war.”
At the start of this year, Foreign Policy columnist and director of The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies, Janine di Giovanni wrote that opposition to Kirill from other Eastern Orthodox leaders, such as the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, “suggests [that] Kirill’s support of Putin is less an ideology of the church and more an ideology of the state—specifically, Putin’s state.” Here di Giovanni fails to notice the key point of the conflict between the Patriarchs. While Kirill’s support of the war may not be an ideology of the “Church” at large, it is certainly one of theological and religious significance. Kirill’s appeals to human salvation and the preservation of tradition cannot be divorced from the eschatological vision he clearly espouses.
Theologian and philosopher Sergii Bulgakov
The eschatological was ever present to the mind of twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergii Bulgakov. The questions of sin, death, resurrection, and restoration guided much of his theological corpus. While his major dogmatic works certainly operate beneath an intricately woven eschatological veil, Bulgakov elsewhere addresses his vision of humanity’s restoration to God head-on. In the newly printed Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal, Roberto J. De La Noval presents a collection of Bulgakov’s essays in translation which address the connection between eschatology, political action, and spirituality in the face of that universal apocalypse: death. In twelve stunning chapters, including a brief note regarding his own impending funeral, Bulgakov contemplates the tragic political state of his world, the salvation of creation, and his own experience with death and dying. One of the most significant themes throughout these essays is how the Christian’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the public square is determined as much by her eschatological commitments as it is by political.
Bearing witness to the violent socialism of the Soviet Union and the developing spirit of fascism in the West, Bulgakov considered carefully how one’s eschatological understanding may influence political disposition. He understood there to be two poles of eschatological politicism that the Church has tended towards: utopianism (which tends towards disheartening delirium) and realism (which often results in apathetic pragmatism). Each relies on a material economism which “leads to fatalism, because it is not personhood with its creative strivings but rather the impersonal economic process that determines the paths of history.” The Kingdom of God is not exhausted by any finite form of mere economic process. Revelation is “apocalypse in process,” ushering in reflections of the eschaton, albeit often inverted or mirrored in their distortion of it.
History, religiously experienced, is the apocalypse in the process of accomplishment, apocalypse here understood not as eschatology but as historiosophy connected with the feeling of striving towards the future, with the consciousness of pending tasks and continuing historical work.
Bulgakov understood history not as triumphant progress but as tragic process.
It is not the task of the Church to instate neo-empire, pусский мир (“Russian world”), integralist policy, or any such religious state authority. To realize the Kingdom of God on earth is to recognize the turning of history as the unfolding of new tasks for theology and political action. The memory of tradition is that breath which recalls to oneself the witness of all things, horrific and holy. It cannot abide the historical amnesia typical of utopianisms or pietistic ascetics’ rejection of the “world.” Using Bulgakov’s analysis, one might identify Kirill as strategically incorporating both extremes of the spectrum; espousing an unequivocal rejection of the “world” (which is always the Western, secularized world) in an appeal to piety and false humility, while simultaneously exhibiting a callous political pragmatism in his attempts to manifest the heresy of pусский мир by means of war.
Of what, then, does Bulgakov’s notion of eschatological responsibility consist? The eschatological in the historical requires the critical question to remain: What is the content of our history, personal and social, from which life may emerge—or from which death is already rising? As much as creation co-suffers with the Crucified, it is equally invited into the co-creation of new life. Death and suffering have been “conquered by death,” governed eternally by the resurrected flesh of God incarnate. Bulgakov is often read and understood to be an eschatological theologian, and rightly so. There is, however, a temptation to understand his work on redemption, death, salvation, and politics simply as an exercise in realized eschatology or completely oriented towards an unknown future. His is a social Christianity, engaged in ecumenical dialogue, aware of the incomplete state of history (Vorgeschichte), leaving room “for what does not exist but must yet arrive, for an ideal and for hope.” It is the realized and the not yet, an eschatology understood as historiosophy. The condition of dying without the finality of death, bathed always in the light of resurrection hope. It is the willing embrace of the historical-chiliastic and transcendent-eschatological. It is both the personal and meta-historical truth of the prayer “Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 20:20), in which lies the promise of Divine-Humanity.
The fundamental eschatological promise, the union of Creator and creation in Jesus Christ, is grounded in Bulgakov’s doctrine of Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, a doctrine fundamentally concerned with the relation between the eternal Logos and humanity. Divine and creaturely Sophia are constitutive the God’s being and the inner substance of creation, respectively. Sophia is the theological category used by Bulgakov to provide cataphatic content and coherence to the nature of that relationship, the elucidation of the eternal Divine-Humanity as “the foundation of the Incarnation” (Lamb of God). Because Chalcedon provides only negative (apophatic) definitions about the way Christ’s humanity and divinity relate to one another, Bulgakov sees the next theological task as being the extraction of a positive definition of the “interrelation” between the two. The dogma which emerges from Chalcedon is, at its heart, marked by the following four negative definitions: “asugchetōs, atreptōs, adiairetōs, achōristōs [inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably].”
In order to provide a positive definition as the theologically appropriate counterpart to these four no’s, Bulgakov develops his theology of Divine and creaturely Sophia. First and foremost, there must be an understanding of the “unity of the life of the God-Man,” and the unifying principle between the two natures in this one life is the sophanicity of both the Divine world (i.e., of Christ’s divine nature) and of the creaturely world (i.e., of His human nature).” This hinges on Bulgakov’s identification of Divine and creaturely Sophia, which he holds while still maintaining the ontological distinction between eternal and created being. What Sophia highlights for Bulgakov, however, is the ultimate union of Creator to His creation not by an arbitrary soteriological act in the mood of deus ex machina, but because there is an intimacy always already inscribed in both.
As the All-Humanity, Christ defines the very concept of created personhood, orienting all of creation towards this end. Christ’s kenosis took upon itself death and mortality, revealing creation’s capacity for deification in a sophiological register. Bulgakov writes, “The very possibility of resurrection presupposes the sophianicity of Christ’s nature in the union of the two natures of Sophia, the divine and the created.” The resurrection, then, is the most natural end of sophianic humanity. Created Sophia longs for her return to Divine. Creation yawns, the Anthropocene gapes for her most natural end: union with the trihypostatic divinity. History, then, is defined not by protology, space, or time, but by the eschatological union of all things in the singular life of the God-Man. The universality of the resurrection and the restoration of creation to her sophianic state comes from her very origins as Created Sophia: “The destruction of satanism, of hell, of the lake of fire, of the second death, signifies their overcoming from within, their dissolution in the common sophianicity of being in the fulfillment of the promise: ‘God will be all in all.’” In the face of this promise, finitude and political tragedy remain only as those absences and negations of life in whose faces we may dare to utter, “Come.”
The collected essays of The Sophiology of Death masterfully knit together Bulgakov’s understanding of eschatology, economy, and theology of resurrection not merely as an extension of his sophiological project, but as the political testimony of his life’s work. The Church must not remain indifferent to political injustice, questions of the age, or economic bondage. Her eschatological hope for restoration and resurrection does not recommend her self-isolation but requires the opposite. The Church “must strive not to isolate herself from society (which results in secularization).” Her task is instead to participate spiritually, which always already assumes her praxis in the world which God so loved.
Eschatological resurrection begins with historical liberation and Christianity must evaluate her practical failure to participate appropriately (participation is not optional). “Out of panic or spiritual laziness or fatigue, false eschatologism rejects responsibility for history while nonetheless in practice it participates in history.” The religious asphyxiation and political fanaticism of the current Russian administration—state and ecclesial—has revealed this singular truth observed by Bulgakov: flight into false eschatological commitment does not relieve historical panic, nor do appeals to interior spirituality exonerate the fabricated prophecies of those would-be ascetics. There is no place for death except in its transfiguration towards life, and there is no need for the inner man if the outer refuses to conform to his wisdom. True Christian freedom and authentic “fidelity to tradition” is found not in static conservatism nor in historical amnesia, but in the dynamic effectiveness of prayer and action. Only here may liturgy and communion be recognized as living memory, animated by “the victory of good on the path of world-historical tragedy leading to the final separation of light and darkness.”
Sarah Livick-Moses is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Boston College.