From antimony to sophiology: Modern Russian religious consciousness and Sergei N. Bulgakov's critical appropriation of German idealism

Within the modern religious philosophical tradition in Russia the concept of the Divine Sophia played a significant role during the Silver Age (1870s-1917). In the late 1800s Vladimir Solov'ev expounded this concept, which he inherited from ancient, medieval and early modern theosophy, and literary traditions concerning the eternal feminine as found in German romanticism. This study focuses on Sergei Bulgakov's appropriation of the Sophia both within the context of his own religious and intellectual development and within the context of pre-Soviet Russian religious philosophical debates. Contemporaries of Bulgakov, including Tolstoy, Struve, Shestov and Florenskii offered positions and arguments that led to Bulgakov's unique articulation of the project of Sophiology. Ultimately Bulgakov's concept of Sophia attempts to express how the problem of the cosmological antinomies, as articulated by Immanuel Kant, relates to religious consciousness. Sophiology attempts to accomplish this by seeking to avoid the "onesided rationalism" of Solov'ev and other modern thinkers, while preserving the authority of religious faith, tradition and human reason. While Bulgakov took a keen interest in the thought of Solov'ev, his alternative religious philosophical project called Sophiology expressed Sophia as a duality, an antinomic being, which had both a divine and a creaturely aspect. He believed that while German idealism provided helpful insights into the nature of religious consciousness, it also led modern religious consciousness into the perils of pantheism and "immanentism". Thus Sophiology is Bulgakov's attempt to address religious philosophical problems in a manner that retains insights from the German idealists while transforming, rather than transgressing, the modern Orthodox tradition of religious thought.