The Burning Bush
On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God
By Sergius Bulgakov
Trans. Thomas Allan Smith
Eerdmans, pp. xxiv+191 $28
The Burning Bush, completed in Prague in 1924 and published three years later, is the first volume of Bulgakov’s minor trilogy, and his first book-length foray into dogmatic theology. The major trilogy, consisting of The Comforter, The Lamb of God, and Bride of the Lamb, has recently been made available in translation by Eerdmans, as has now the minor: Friend of the Bridegroom, and, most recently, Jacob’s Ladder.
Though a thin volume, The Burning Bush presents the same density and structural challenges that characterize the larger trilogy. The four chapters do not build up to any clear and explicit argument, and the final one, where the author gives his “positive illumination of the question” (3), comes in the form of 60 pages of unbroken text. Following this, we find three excursuses that will only bear upon the question of the Theotokos for those already familiar with Bulgakov’s central theological arguments: Glory and Wisdom in the Old Testament, and Wisdom in Athanasius and the Fathers.
Once one overcomes these obstacles, however, prepare for a torrent of theological ideas like floodwaters over a dam. Once Bulgakov bid farewell to his earlier phases of atheism, pan-religious idealism, and Bolshevism, there was, by the mid1920s, nothing holding back his stormy intellect. Orthodoxy, and here the Orthodox veneration of Mary, provided a creative channel.
The “positive illumination” of Mary that Bulgakov offers is grounded in two mutually supporting arguments. First, she represents “the summit of human ascent” (33), the ultimate conquering of sin in human history. Sin affects us as both a constant and a variable, an infirmity and a habit. The first is the common inheritance of all Adam and Eve’s children — not as a biological effect of procreation (“theological thought, from blessed Augustine down to our own days, wears itself out clarifying this transfer of Adam’s sin to his heirs” [19]), but as the original fragmentation of the all-human into individuals. The will to survive within this fractured individuality, Bulgakov hints, is each individual’s unconscious compliance with the sin of Adam and Eve; that is the constant. The variable is the struggle against sinfulness within this individuated creature. The history of Israel with God is a long preparation for Incarnation, a necessary overcoming of sinfulness, so that one person might manage, one day, to devote her entire being to God by these words: “May it be unto me as you have said.”
The second argument central to the text is more subtle and more profound, though it may at first appear to reflect an unattractive hyper-piety: Mary is the “hypostatic shrine to the Holy Spirit” (89). Bulgakov begins already here the line of trinitarian thinking that marks his later work as among the most complex and fertile of all 20th-century theology. The Son and Spirit are two Persons who originate in the Father, but this double origin is also a common project, so that a single “thing” is happening in God when the Son and the Spirit go out from the Father. A common relational act binds together the interchange of three. Specifically: the Spirit mediates the immediate begetting of the Son from the Father, and mediates the growth of the Son back to the Father. And what the Spirit does in the eternal Trinity Mary does on earth: she proceeds from Father to Son, she possesses the Son for the Father, she gestates the Logos that is generated by the Father. Mary is not the Incarnation of the Spirit, Bulgakov is careful to say. She is rather the “Pneumatophoric human” (81), the Spirit-filled human who can thereby play the mediating role of the divine Pneuma.
The three excursuses expand this argument. The first shows that every appearance of God in the Old Testament comes by means of a mediation, a womb from which the divine Word is brought forth: the cloud atop Sinai, the throne in Isaiah, and, iconically, the burning bush on Horeb, out of which God spoke to Moses. The second argues, somewhat against the Fathers (as Bulgakov was never shy to do), that Wisdom is not simply the Logos by another name, but is the joint activity of Son and Spirit emerging from the Father. Wisdom is the “house” built by the interchange of the processions: the womb within the triune God that takes shape on earth in the Virgin. The third makes use of a highly original yet plausible reading of Athanasius to suggest that the act of creating itself requires mediation, since an immediate creation of a world by God would connect the two as mutually necessary poles of a single activity. Both in the Godhead and in the world, God relates via a mediating womb.
Along the way, there are numerous insights and controversial asides, too many to recount here. Among the most significant is a critique of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, grounded perceptively in a larger critique of the late Scholastic reconstrual of grace. If grace were not already understood inadequately as a superadded gift to human beings that was subsequently lost in Eden, he suggests, there would be no question of Mary needing to get it back at her conception. Grace is rather more natural than this, even as it waits upon the divine initiative. (Bulgakov here makes the point that de Lubac will make a decade later, but then links it, beyond de Lubac, to Mariology. At the same time, Bulgakov does not fill out the issues as completely as the Roman Catholic historian will. Specifically, Bulgakov does not seem to fully grasp the aporia of Baianism, whereby a naturalized supernature defeats the very graciousness of grace!)
This book will only grow in importance in years to come, not only as the gateway into Bulgakov’s mature theology, but also as one of the most profound accounts of the Mother of God in modem theology, with forays into Trinitarian theology, biblical studies, and liturgics as well. Professor Smith’s fine translation makes Bulgakov’s archaic Russian sound easy. Eerdmans has done us a great service with these translations, now giving to English readers the entire magnum opus of one of the greatest of modem theologians.
Review by Dr. Anthony D. Baker; Clinton S. Quin Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas.
Anthony D. Baker, PhD is a Guest Writer. He is Clinton S. Quin Professor of Systematic Theology at Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas. Dr. Baker is the author of several books including Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (Veritas, 2011) and Leaving Emmaus: A New Departure in Christian Theology (Baylor, 2021).
