Abstract
Sergius Bulgakov,
Icons and the Name of God
, trans. Boris Jakim, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK, 2012; 192 pp.: 9780802866646, £19.99 (pbk)
This volume contains two works by Bulgakov, written at different times: his work Icons and Their Veneration, written in 1930 and published the next year, and the final chapter of his Philosophy of the Name, written in the early 20s (together with an appendix, translated here, written in 1942), but not published until 1953, nine years after his death. It was a brilliant idea of Boris Jakim, the translator, to publish the translations together, as, despite their dates of composition, they belong together and are mutually illuminating. The first work was written in the wake of the so-called first trilogy, three works that take their inspiration from the icon, the Deisis, or ‘Supplication’, which depicts a seated Christ, flanked by the Mother of God and John the Baptist, who are beseeching him for the world. Bulgakov now turns his attention to the icon itself, what makes an icon and how its veneration is justified. It is in many ways a curious and unsatisfactory work.
Owing to the efforts of the Spiritual Academies, especially in this case the Academy of Kazan, Russian theologians had unparalleled access to Russian translations of the Fathers; for this work, Bulgakov could draw on the acta (not just the decrees) of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, as well as the writings of the iconophile Fathers, John Damascene, Germanos (called in this translation Herman), Nikephoros and Theodore the Studite – only a fraction of this was (indeed is) available in any other European language. But he makes very odd use of this wealth. He picks up ideas here and there and seems to me to misread the texts he cites more or less consistently. This may have something to do with the Kazan translation, which it would be no surprise to learn was archaic to the point of impenetrability, but I expect the reason was rather different: Bulgakov already knew what he thought, and this was bound up with his doctrine of sophiology, of which he finds scant awareness in the eighth- and ninth-century Fathers.
Here the link with the philosophy of the name comes in, for this was a live controversy; Bulgakov’s book had in fact been commissioned by the 1917–18 Moscow council. In the years before the First World War, there had been controversy over veneration of the Name (of Jesus), and the practice of the Jesus Prayer, on Mount Athos. It ended with condemnation of the ‘worshippers of the Name’, and the brutal removal from the Holy Mountain of something like 1,000 monks by Tsarist troops. Bulgakov and other intellectuals (Florensky, Losev) backed the monks. The Philosophy of the Name is an immensely learned (and not a little impenetrable) discussion of the nature of naming – from Plato’s Cratylus onwards. It is the final concluding chapter that Jakim has translated. It is an impressive study of the name as not just a label, but a word that, uttered, makes present what it signifies, especially in the case of the name of Jesus: ‘[A]s for the Name Jesus, all of us are called, in the capacity of the royal priesthood, to enter into the Holy of Holies in our hearts, to proclaim His Name there and to call him, and He is present in His Name’ (p. 156). The name belongs to Plato’s metaxu (in between), that domain between God and the created order (including the human), that is the realm of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. So, too, does the icon, which explains why the icon brings the one who prays before it into the presence of God.
Icons and Their Veneration is a rich and profound work, though also deeply annoying in its misuse of the iconophile Fathers. It is unquestionably important for understanding the development of Bulgakov’s thought.