The Comforter

by Sergius Bulgakov, Boris Jakim (Translator)

Sergius Bulgakov is widely considered to be the twentieth century's foremost Orthodox theologian, and his book The Comforter is an utterly comprehensive and profound study of the Holy Spirit.

Encyclopedic in scope, The Comforter explores all aspects of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, as they are viewed in the Orthodox tradition and throughout church history. The book has sections on the development of the doctrine of the Spirit in early Christianity and on the development of the doctrine of procession in the patristic and later Byzantine periods. It also touches on the place of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity and explores Old and New Testament notions of the Spirit of God. A concluding chapter deals with the mystical revelation of the Holy Spirit. Made available in English through the work of Boris Jakim, today's premier translator of Russian theology and philosophy into English, Bulgakov's Comforter in this edition is a major publishing event.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Christianity, Religion

414 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2004

About the author

Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (/bʊlˈɡɑːkəf/;[1] Russian: Серге́й Никола́евич Булга́ков; 28 July [O.S. 16 July] 1871 – 13 July 1944) was a Russian Orthodox Christian theologian, philosopher, and economist.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who Should Read This Book – This is a work of deep and profound, yet poetic and beautiful theology so I’d say it is for readers with some grounding in theology who want to think deeply on the things of God (i.e. its probably not for beginners).

What’s the Big Takeaway – For me, this is the best book on the Holy Spirit I have ever read and there’s way too much in here to pick one takeaway.

And a Quote – “The very being of God is love. This definition can be understood in the light of the dogma of the Holy Trinity, according to which the absolute divine personality is true with all the power of sacred trinitarity, as three distinctly personal subjects, while at the same time having one substance and even one life. This identification of trinity in unity is precisely Trinitarian love. Hypostatic love, completing the trinity in unity, is the Holy Spirit. This is what makes possible the identification of God and love” (314).


20th century Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov has now vaulted to the top of my all-time favorite theologians list, even though this is only the second book of his I have read. As I said above, this is not a book for beginners in studying theology as its a hefty 400 page work on the Holy Spirit. But if you’re someone who has some grounding in the subject and wants a deep dive, this book is brilliant. For what its worth, recognizing there are countless books of theology out there that I have never read, this is the best book on the Holy Spirit I’ve read.

With that in mind, I cannot do it justice in a review. I’ll try to offer a few points.

First, writing from the Eastern Orthodox position, Bulgakov addresses the filioque debate. In case you don’t know, the Western church inserted the filioque clause into the Nicene Creed, thus modifying it to say the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father “and the Son.” This is one of the causes for the schism between East and West. Bulgakov’s argument is critical of both sides, of the whole historical argument really, for he says the entire argument goes wrong right from the beginning because it is an argument about the origination of the Holy Spirit. So the West argues the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son and the East develops their theology of the Spirit in contrast to this, but on these terms, saying the Spirit proceeds only from the Father.

He writes, “the dogmatic controversy concerning the Spirit was deprived precisely of spirit, and its result was therefore sterility and emptiness” (149).

If I recall (and forgive me for not taking a fine-tooth comb back over the arguments, this is a brief review not a sholarly one) Bulgakov would affirm the Orthodox version of the creed. I think his main point is there is SO MUCH more to say about the Holy Spirit than this debate has reduced it too.

Second then, and this goes to what I said above about there being too much here to write a brief takeaway – this book is a feast. Bulgakov deftly writes about the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit as the one God, eternally equal while also explaining their different roles. I love how he continually connects the Spirit and the Son, such as how the Spirit comes into the world upon the Virgin Mary to inaugurate the incarnation. Then as the Son ascends back to the Father, the Spirit is sent to bring to fullness the work of the Son in the incarnation. One of the most valuable points here is Bulgakov’s discussion of Pentecost and how the Spirit was always present on earth even prior to this (a question I’ve been asked by students often).

Along with that, a big theme I’ve seen in Bulgakov (and others, maybe its an eastern thing) is that matter/flesh was made for spirit (and in regards to my use of “spirit” there, Bulgakov does talk about the similarities and differences between “spirit” and “Holy Spirit”…again,there’s a lot here). I think our implicit assumption in the west is that matter is contrary to spirit. Thus, the incarnation is a sort of invasion that seems to make little sense, for how (why?) could God take on flesh. Or more practically, we think to become more spiritual is to leave flesh behind. But Bulgakov writes of God creating the cosmos (and he talks a lot about creaturely Sophia and divine Sophia which I still can’t get my head around) in such a way that matter is made for spirit. The two go together. Sure, sin has broken this. But in being restored, matter is restored to what it is made for.

The creation is divinized – filled with God’s Spirit through the Incarnation and the Coming of the Spirit…though there is still more to come as this has not yet been fully realized.

Another thing I loved about this book is what Bulgakov said about the spirit’s presence in all creation and how this relates to philosophy and religion and even science. He writes, “What other energy, if not divine energy, gives life to the world?” (200). This means that it is the spirit who has inspired the philosophers and even religious leaders (what Bulgakov says about religions is better than books I’ve read on the subject which, again, shows how much he touches on and how good this book is!). It also means, contrary to mechanistic western science, nature itself is infused and guided by spirit. There is a fullness of Spirit in the revelation of God in Christ that these other works of the spirit lack. But there is no place absence God’s presence.

There is so much more I could say. (Have I said that already?) By the end of the book, I felt drive to worship and pray which just might be the best thing one could say about a work of theology. Bulgakov ends the book with an epilogue about God the Father. He writes of those who argue for the divine as pure transcendence, some sort of impersonal absolute (such as in both some eastern religions and some forms of Christian mysticism as well as western philosophy). Even some Christians speak of God as ultimately impersonal Absolute who then becomes or is revealed as personal. Bulgakov strongly argues against this, emphasizing God is ultimately personal:

“The Absolute loves, He is the FatherThat is the idea that unites the entire absoluteness of the Heavenly God and the entire power of HIs revelation in the relative, for this power is Love. Metaphysics finds fulfillment in this divinely revealed doctrine, for it actual ideas all its postulates int he latter. But this is also the only possible and true fulfillment of the postulates of the religious consciousness which simultaneously requires that the heavenly God be remote from us and that He br near and accessible to us. These two things are harmonized in the revelation of God and the Father, heavenly by His Divinity and near us by His Fatherhood.

All that we know and love in the Son is the Father, for as the Son is also is the Father. All the love and inspiration that we have in the HOly Spirit are also in the Father, for as the Father is, so also is the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from Him, His own Spirit.In loving the Son and the HolySpirit, we love the Father, we know the Father, we contemplate His Holy Person.” (394).

Poetic. Beautiful. Inspiring. Worshipful.

Read Bulgakov. You won’t be sorry.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

God is Love because the Holy Spirit is God. As the Son stands eternally before the Father within the Divine Trinitarian immanence as His coequal Word and Truth, the perfect Icon of the Father, revealing to the latter in absolute transparence the full ideal content of His Ousia-Sophia, presenting, as it were, the self-knowledge of the Father in His nature; so too does the Holy Spirit, proceeding pre-eternally from the Father and reposing upon the Son, constitute the self-revelation of the Father—the Principal hypostasis, the “monarch” of the Holy Trinity, the intradivine Subject upon Whom the Son and Spirit are equi-divinely predicated—not as pertains to His self-knowledge, the ideal and abstract All of Divinity which is fully revealed by the Son and to which nothing can be added by the Spirit, but rather as pertains to His self-life, His Life for Himself in which the content revealed by the Word is lived out and realized in Beauty. The Father “is not only revealed in His Ousia-Sophia through the Son, but also lives in her by the Holy Spirit.” Both within the immanent life of the Holy Trinity and within the economy of creation, it is the dyadic bi-unity of Knowledge and Life, truth and beauty, “male” Ouranian ideality—the Logos of Being and the logoi of beings—and the “female” cultivation that “births” it, endowing it with reality and form, that reveals the Father: the Absolute Who Loves.

Love, which constitutes the life of the Holy Trinity, by which the Father kenotically sacrifices Himself in his self-revelation and the Son meets this kenosis with His own in recognizing Himself as begotten of the Father—as the Father’s Word and not His own—is none other than the Holy Spirit Himself: hypostatic Love. Love is eternally and perfectly concretized as an hypostasis of the Holy Trinity, one of the three personal centers of God’s Trihypostatic “I”. The Father and Son love the Spirit by the Spirit Himself, whose intradivine kenosis is to “proceed” Himself, “giving Himself, His hypostasis, for the service of Love, in order to be Love itself.” The Holy Spirit, as Love, is the accomplishment of God’s sacrificial self-revelation, the triumph of life over the death of kenosis—the Resurrection within God. In eternity and in history, the Son humbles Himself unto death, and the Spirit lifts Him up in life and glory. Sophia, the self-revealed Nature of God, “contains dying and resurrection, self-depleting ideality and self-accomplishing reality.”

Despite the obvious centrality of the Holy Spirit in the life of the early Church—namely, the fact that He was and is that life; despite the fact that the Apostles themselves were forgiven many times over for failing to understand who Jesus was and for abandoning Him at the hour of His Passion, and yet Jesus told them that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, unlike blasphemy against the Son of Man, would not be forgiven; despite the fact that Jesus performed His entire earthly ministry as the Christ—the One anointed precisely by the Holy Spirit: the Spirit-Bearer—from His baptism in the Jordan, to His defeat of temptation in the desert, to all of His miracles, to His self-sacrifice at Golgotha, wherein Christ “through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God,” (Heb. 9:14) to His resurrection and ascent to the right hand of the Father, whereby He restored human nature to its proper union with God; despite the fact that the Holy Spirit He sends to His saints is the same Spirit in which He performed all of His works, the “Spirit of adoption” whereby Jesus Himself in His human nature was “adopted” by God, and in which we too may become “joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:15-17); despite the fact that the entire history of Christianity has been recognized as the Age of the Spirit: that the Spirit alights on earth to this day: that the Spirit is God with us, continuing the Incarnation and bringing the work of Divine-humanity to its completion; there has never been, in the patristic era or later, any fully-realized dogmatic pneumatology, nor any complete account of the dyadic interrelation between the Son of God and the Holy Spirit.

It is tragically fitting that the unity of the Church was sundered between East and West due in large part to a failure by both sides to account for the proper place of the Spirit in the Divine triunity. The bitter falling out between the Latin partisans of the Filioque doctrine and the anti-Latin “Photians” over the procession of the Holy Spirit was conspicuous for its spiritlessness. The episode was defined by factionalism, haughtiness, superficiality, and a struggle for power; all of which are wholly inimical to the character of the Spirit.

The Western theory was the product of a perennial tendency within the Latin Church toward impersonalism and subordinationism. The West tended to define the Trinitarian Persons as relations of mutual opposition—predicates defined in distinction to one another rather than self-defined subjects Who have interrelations—emerging from an impersonal Ousia that in some sense “precedes” the hypostases. In the Filioque doctrine, as in many of the Latin theologians going back to Tertullian, the hypostases “emerge” from this primordial and impersonal Ousia in descending degrees of divinity. The Father, Who possesses the capacity for both engendering and procession, begets the Son, Who possesses the capacity for procession but not for engendering, while the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son, possessing neither the capacity for engendering nor that for procession.

This model relies on a false assumption that the Nature of God can in any way be extra-hypostatic: that the Divine Nature is not wholly transparent to each hypostasis, and that the hypostases are any less “original” a reality of God. It also falls into the trap of subordinationism by imagining the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Spirit to be a matter of origination or causality, neither of which can be ascribed to God. None of the Divine hypostases, neither the revealed hypostasis of the Father nor the revealing hypostases of the Son and Spirit, have any “origination”. They are equi-divine and coeternal; they are subjects of their relations to one another, but they are not the relations themselves. The Son and Spirit are not “caused” by the Father; rather, they eternally define the Father for Himself in His Ousia, as “two images of God” in “two images of love.”

The East argued that the doctrine of the dual procession of the Spirit introduced the notion of two hypostatic Principals in God, thus undermining the monarchy of the Father. The West countered that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son not as two Principals, but as one: una spiratione. Yet if this were the case, it could not be said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son as hypostases, but rather that He proceeds from the shared nature of the Father and Son, in which, according to the aforementioned Western impersonalism, the two hypostases are as one. If one accepted the Western premise that the hypostases have their being as relations of mutual opposition, it would follow from this that the Spirit could not exist as an hypostasis for the Father or the Son. This picture also leaves the Trinity incomplete; not as a real Trinity at all, but only as two dyads: the Father/Son dyad and the Father-Son/Spirit dyad.

Beginning in the ninth century, the Western adoption of the Filioque into the Creed and the universal pretentions of the Papacy compelled the East to take a defensive posture. But even as the Photians argued against the Filioque doctrine, they clandestinely accepted the Western premise that the relation of the Father to the Son and Spirit is one of origination. To the Western assertion that the Spirit originates from the Father and Son, the Photians countered that the Spirit originates from the Father alone: a claim no less foreign to the patristic tradition than the Filioque itself. The fatal impasse between the Western Filioque and the Eastern “ek monou tou Patros” represented a collision of two sides of a Western problematic that based itself on erroneous and superficial premises. If one abandons the notion of procession as origination, the Eastern and Western positions can be reconciled: the East can maintain, as it has always sought to do, the monarchy of the Father as the Principal of the Trinity, while the West can articulate a hypostatic relation between the Son and Spirit, completing the symbolic triangle, as it tried unsuccessfully to do with the Filioque doctrine. In the end, the Spirit Himself will transcend the fissiparousness of human pride and make the Church whole again.

If the Spirit is the Life-Love of God within the immanent Trinity, the Life in which the Father is realized for Himself in the Divine Sophia (the content of that realization being the Logos), then the same must be said of the Spirit’s work in the creaturely Sophia, which is creation as the Nature of God “submerged” in becoming. Whereas the Life of God is always perfectly realized for Himself in eternity, the work of the Spirit in creation takes on the character of generation, change, growth, creativity, becoming, completion, beautification—in a word, as life itself the way we typically understand it. The Spirit is the being of the world, containing the “seeds” of the Logos—the ideal content of all reality from which the logoi of every particular thing is derived—as in a great womb, birthing them in actuality and clothing them in beauty. The Spirit is the “Artist of the world, the Principle of form and the Form of forms”, as well as the life of this formedness; the energy of the world, the Giver of Life in Whom all things live and move and have their being.

“In the creaturely Sophia, the Spirit is a hearing and perceiving silence, in which the Word born from all eternity is born again for creation, as it were. . . . This Spirit is the being that contains all things in itself, although it does not add anything to this all from itself. This Spirit is the world in its extra-divine aseity. This Spirit is the meonic darkness of being just before dawn, the earth invisible and void, as if prior to the Word that will flame up in it, casting His seed in it; this Spirit is the perfect accomplishment of the transfigured world. This Spirit is the natural energy of the world which can never be extinguished or interrupted in the world, but always bears within itself the principle of the growth of creative activity. This Spirit is ‘our mother, the moist earth,’ out of which all things grow and into which all things return for new life. This Spirit is the life of the vegetative and animal world ‘after their kind.’ This Spirit is the life of the human race in the image and likeness of God. This spirit is that life-giving principle which pious paganism, without knowing Him, worshipped as the ‘Great Pan,’ as the Mother of the gods, Isis and Gaia. This Spirit is that which the impious paganism of our own day confesses as living and life-giving matter in the blindness of its ‘hylozoism,’ or attempts to capture in a test tube as the ‘life force.’ This Spirit is the world itself in all its being – on the pathways from chaos to cosmos.” (p.199)

If, in the absence of logos, reality would exist only as undifferentiated being, formless and void, like the earth before the will of the Father ordered creation through the Word; then in the absence of the Spirit, there would be no reality from which the ideal Word could derive its being. It would be nothing but empty abstraction, akin in some sense to the lifeless, disembodied discourse that comprises the internet, which can only ever be a false simulacrum of reality: a false, parasitic, and cannibalistic logos that tries futilely to absorb reality into its unreality.

The Spirit inspires us to realize Truth in Life. He communes with our natural and individual creativity, crowning and fructifying our personal gifts with His own gift, breathing Divine life and beauty through the uniquely-shaped conduits of our own particular capacities and proclivities. The gifts of the Spirit were manifest in the Old Testament as well as the New. In David and Solomon He inspired a natural gift for government; in Gideon and Samson, an innate martial prowess; in Bezaleel, a gift of artistry. And, of course, to each of the prophets was given the gift of declaring the ways of God to men, seeing the world from a Divine perspective and transmitting this vision in individuated human terms. He is the Life of all who seek the Truth, and as such He has inspired not only Christians and Jews, but also righteous gentiles, like Melchizedek and Balaam, and even such pious pagans as the great philosophers of antiquity; or, indeed, major figures in other great religious traditions, to the extent that these realized Truth through a creative endeavor inspired by the one Spirit, mixed as it may be with various forms of falsehood, or even with evil.

“It follows that all true religions, all religions that contain the experience of Divinity, necessarily have a ray of Divinity, the breath of the Spirit. This truth, as well as the falsehood with which it is mixed and by which it is complicated, can be perceived only on the basis of the fullness of Christianity. In this sense, one can say that all the true religions form a pan-Christianity, that is, that they find or at least can find their truth in Christianity, for the truth is one and comes from the spirit of Truth.”

Pious Jews and pagans embodied Truth as well as they could understand it, reposing as it did sophianically within the natural order of creation, waiting to be realized by humanity. But for Christians, Truth Itself has descended kenotically into creation in all its hypostatic glory, reconnecting the creaturely Sophia to the Divine Sophia by divinizing human nature through a human life of prophecy and self-sacrifice. Christ, in His human nature, received the “adoption” of the Spirit; and in the work of His ministry—culminating in His sacrificial death, resurrection, and ascent into heaven—His Divinity was kenotically humbled and His humanity divinized; and all of this was accomplished through the life of the Holy Spirit, which revealed in Jesus the depths of His own divinity. Having restored human nature to the Logos—having, in a sense, “become” the Word in time as He is in eternity—Christ received not only the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but the power to “send down” the hypostatic Spirit Himself. As Christ was lifted up to the hypostatic Logos, so did the hypostatic Spirit repose upon Him.

Christ is never separated from the Spirit—perfect Truth is never separated from the perfect Life in which it is realized—so in this sense the Pentecost, an ongoing event which will continue to the end of the age, is the return of Christ in the Spirit that reveals and glorifies Him in the fullness of His Truth. The hypostatic presence of the Spirit in the world continues the Incarnation, realizing the Divine-humanity as the Life in which the Church embodies Christ, becoming His members; or as, in Saint Maximus’s formulation, the Bride of the Father of the age to come, birthing the saints in love and knowledge. If Christ the God-Man has divinized our humanity in Himself, then He is the innermost depth of every man, uniting him eternally to the Logos. In each of us, the Spirit realizes Christ, Who is the content of all reality, transfiguring our unique and individuated selves and revealing them as Christ-selves, making us co-heirs of the Father with Christ, transforming us, with our own creative participation, into gods by grace. Through the grace of the Spirit we complete the Divine work of creation in and through ourselves: the most inspired feat of artistry.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bulgakov begins with a survey of how the early fathers understood the Holy Spirit. He goes a step beyond the typical statements that no one called the Spirit "God," not even Basil. Bulgakov's point is that no father had an in-depth pneumatology of any sort, and this would be a huge problem for Orthodoxy in the Filioque debates. He chides Roman Catholic thinkers for reading Filioquist doctrines into early Fathers, for example when the Fathers say the Spirit is ek tou hiou or dia (from and through). It's a highly strained reading to think they are advocating what was taught at Florence and Lyons. And again, this underscores the problem: what did the Fathers mean by these statements? We really don't know, since they don't say.

Monarchia of the Father: Dangerous and Undefined

Bulgakov is insistent we maintain the doctrine of monarchia, the Father as the principle of the Godhead. He notes, though, that when guys like John of Damascus refer to the monarchia, it's not clear what they mean. How does John use the term cause? He oscillates between two positions: cause of the other two persons of the Godhead, but this moves close to Arianism, which John rejects. He maintains the equi-eternity of the persons. One cannot get past the idea, though, that John is using cause in terms of origination.

An Inadequate Tradition

A few years ago Jay Dyer critiqued Anchoretic Christianity on the grounds of an inevitable doctrinal development (this is more problematic for Orthodoxy than it is for Rome). This is particularly evident in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Someone could respond, via Basil, that Basil said the unwritten tradition always said the Holy Spirit was "God." Besides begging the question, that's not really what Bulgakov is getting at. The early Fathers did not develop a thorough doctrine of the Holy Spirit, leaving a lot of prepositions unqualified which later Latin writers would exploit. For example, when Photius argued that the spirit proceeded ek patre monou, and claimed that such was the tradition of the Fathers, Latin writers quickly made short work of that: numerous Fathers said at the very least that the Spirit proceeded through the Son. I don't think that's a Filioquist reading, but neither does it line up with what Photius said.

A Shared Problematic

Bulgakov points out that both sides had the same presupposition: whatever one may discuss about the Holy Spirit and his relation to the other persons of the Godhead, it will be primarily in terms of his origination from either one or both persons. In either case, one is left with a dyad and never a triad: if the Father alone generates both Son and Spirit, then we have Father and Son/Spirit; or if we take the Filioquist route, we will have Father/Son and Spirit. Bulgakov notes that no side really got to the intratrinitarian relations.

Ousia as Spirit-Love

By contrast, Bulgakov sees the essence of God in a new way, free from Hellenistic constraints. God is Spirit (John 4). God is Love (1 John), and Bulgakov suggests that God's being is love. This definition points to three-ness and here Augustine was on the right track: Love implies more than one (and stop the analogy right there!). Therefore, God's essence is Spirit-Love (Bulgakov, 61).

Christianizing Hegel

The Hegelian overtones are heavy in the next few pages, and is my favorite part of the book. Bulgakov writes, "The Son then is the hypostatic self-revelation of the nature of tthe Father (Hebrews 1:3)...the self-consciousness or hypostatization of the divine ousia of the Father; the Son is present before the Father as his Truth and Word" (63). Bulgakov notes that these hypostases are mutually defined through their relation in the divine ousia. The Father is not only revealed in his ousia through the Son, but he lives in said ousia by the Holy Spirit.

I know that sounds weighty, but it's really not. In biblical revelation we understand God the father to be the first person of the to-be-yet-revealed-Trinity. In the New Testament we see Jesus saying, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father" (Jesus seems to be making positive affirmations about knowing God, contra the later tradition). We know that when Jesus ascends, the divine life lives in the church through the Holy Spirit. At this point this is simple Sunday School stuff and Bulgakov has nicely tied it together. Doesn't this make a lot more sense than simply speaking about "ousias" and "essences" in an abstract, Greek way? Yeah, I spoke of ousia, but I defined it the way the Bible defines it, as Spirit and Love: Spirit-Love.

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an easy read but well worth the effort.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will take time to read. That said, there is much to process. Good historical background into trying to explain what could be thought of as unexplainable. Also good how these thoughts can be brought into one's own spiritual journey.
I may not always agree with some of the authors conclusions, yet there are several points I would love to have a discussion with the author ~ but alas not to be.

[Brandon Kertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sergius Bulgakov, often considered a preeminent Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century, wrote The Comforter while exiled from Russia and teaching in Paris. This volume on the Holy Spirit is the second book of the trilogy “On Divine Humanity,” which includes The Lamb of God (Christology) and The Bride of the Lamb (ecclesiology and eschatology). Only recently translated into English, Bulgakov’s work is still somewhat new to American audiences thought it has initially been well received and in its emphasis on pneumatology provides an indirect dialogue partner for renewal theologians.
In The Comforter, Bulgakov is trying to fill a hole left by the Patristic literature that established the Trinity based on Trinitarian relationships involving the Father, but did not unify the Son and the Holy Spirit (50-51). In response, he develops a series of dyads (Father-Word; Father-Spirit; Word-Spirit) that demonstrate the Trinity’s united nature. While his work is a pneumatology, for Bulgakov, one must not understand the persons of the Trinity “on the basis of themselves alone, but on the basis of their Trinitarian union” (141). Given this, he does not give as thorough a treatment on the unique person of the Spirit as might be expected.
Throughout his work, Bulgakov is willing to expand and even correct Orthodox theology rather than rehearsing the patristic Fathers like many of his predecessors. One area where he is critical of both Orthodox and Catholic theology is on the filioque clause. He sees both sides as stuck in the idea of relation through origination which leads to the subordination of the Spirit rather than dyadic and complementary nature of Son and Spirit. Bulgakov does recognize a hierarchy within the Trinity, but only based on revelation, not origination (69-70). All three persons are co-eternal and inseparable from each other making origination superfluous (150). By moving the conversation beyond its previous sticking point, Bulgakov demonstrates a new way to think of the interrelation of the Trinity.
One other unique contribution by Bulgakov was his discussion of the Spirit’s kenosis within the economy of salvation, particularly sanctification (221). This kenosis takes the form of the Spirit coming down and interacting with the creaturely world, lifting it up toward the divine being, a realization of what he calls, “Divine-humanity” (222). This hints towards Bulgakov’s sophiology, which has been deemed the most problematic aspect of his theology for its imposition of a philosophy seen as foreign to the gospel, a problem Bulgakov himself later admitted. The primary problem I see here is the separation of the Spirit’s hypostasis from the Spirit’s work even at Pentecost (267). While his distinction is helpful in asking what the biblical authors are referring to by the generic term pneuma, a renewal theology would ask if the two can be so easily sundered and question Bulgakov’s assertion that humanity does not truly experienced the hypostasis of the Spirit in the Pentecost experience, but only in the eschaton.

[Philemon - · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eastern Orthodox and Western (Latin) Christendom parted company largely due to divergence in their respective interpretations of the Holy Spirit, the third Person or Hypostasis of the Trinity. The doctrinal conflict over Holy Spirit was long and involved, and Rev. Bulgakov, who David Bentley Hart has called the greatest 20th century theologian, has provided a magisterial account of it. I confess that I didn't properly read or study the whole history. I was too eager to get to the summation at the end.

As a lifelong but now lapsed Episcopalean, I've long been troubled by the Trinity as professed in the Nicene Creed. Though awed by Jesus as revealed in the Gospels, I've never been entirely comfortable with the idea of worshiping Him as God. According to the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit "proceeds" from the Father and the Son. This dual origination creates an identification of Father and Son as one co-equal God. But at the same time the Son proceeds from the Father, in which sense the Son appears to occupy a lesser hierarchical position. The tension between these two competing Trinitarian ideas has produced much confusion in me over the years.

As Bulgakov tells, the Eastern church leaders bridled against the Holy Spirit coming from both Father and Son. The Latin word filioque ("and son") had been inserted by the Western leaders, mostly as a way of countering heresies they felt were guilty of underestimating Christ's divinity. The Easterners felt the filioque lowered God the Father, which was likewise intolerable to them.

Where has this left us? In the Western church, Jesus is the only way to God. The Gospel of John has Jesus confirm this in His claims to being the One Light, the One Truth, the One Way.

The Eastern church has a variant role for Christ. As advocate and holy high priest, he stands eternally ready to help the postulant along the path, and as such earns the church's highest veneration. But the Eastern Christ is not an inevitable toll taker on that path. If the postulant chooses, and if God has jump-started the process with necessary grace, he may commune directly with the Father via the Holy Spirit, effectively bypassing Christ as intercessor. This allows the Eastern monk (unfortunately, invariably male) an intimacy with the Father from which the Western monk is generally discouraged. Not only that, but whereas the Eastern monk may aspire to complete "divinization," the Western monk tends only to advance through perpetual self-abasement.

For a Christian naggingly uncomfortable with the Western Christ as co-equal God, it is an eye opener, and perhaps ultimately a blessing, to discover the Eastern Trinity, with Christ enlisted there to steer the strayed; and beyond, one God in the Highest, God the known mystery, the sum of all our ignorance and hopes, God alone, made known without intermediation in the fullness of His Holy Spirit.

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following a translator's introduction and an author's preface, Sergius Bulgakov's introduction offers an extended discussion of the Patristic doctrines of the Holy Spirit, both East and West. Then, beginning with an exploration of the Spirit's place within the Trinity, he moves to the fundamental problematic" of procession and origination. Though he insists that the doctrine of the filioque is fatally flawed, procession was not a patristic issue, and if the church returns to the patristic formulas there is a way around one impasse separating East and West. From here he explicates the relationship of the "Spirit of God" and the Holy Spirit, which are not necessarily synonymous terms; thus, "the Holy Spirit actualizes the spirituality of God, without retaining it, exhausting it, or even defining it" (153). Johannine in his theology of the Holy Spirit—witness the choice of Comforter—he suggests that Acts and the epistles do not define the Holy Spirit as the Third Hypostasis of the Trinity, but instead speak of the gifts and actions of the Spirit. Bulgakov insists that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, but he focuses on their dyadic relationship, the Divine
Sophia, or the actualization of the "biunity of [two] hypostases" Word and the Spirit (126). Sophia is a central concept for Bulgakov, and with its increased usage in contemporary theology, this discussion bears reading. Sophia does not have hypostatic existence (not being part of the Godhead), but taken together the relationship of Son and Spirit can be understood as both inseparable and unconfused.

From the theoretical the text turns to the more practical, to a degree: the revelation of the Spirit of God in church and creation. Once again, Son and Holy Spirit are drawn together in their dyadic relationship, and the gifts are expressions of the Pentecost descent of the Spirit that actualize the presence of divinity in creation. It is here that the principle of Divine-humanity is revealed, for the principle of Divine-humanity is the deification of creation, the unity of divinity with creation. This is the purpose of incarnation and descent, "two aspects of one and the same act" (278). In an epilogue, Bulgakov returns to the Father, the origin of both Son and Spirit, and the Source of unity within the Trinity.

[Liam Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most profound theology of the Holy Spirit I ever read!! Highlights is Bulgakov’s exposition of the Creedal theology concerning the Holy Spirit, His exposition of Sophia (as revelation between the Triune persons that then become part of creation), and Bulgakov’s view of Pentecost and Tongues; Bulgakov submits that Pentecost is the beginning of the Church that is sustained through tradition and experienced throughout Church History. Every Theologian should have this Bulgakov work on their shelves!!

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pneumatology is extremely hard for me to get my head around, which is ironic because it’s such a huge part of my work. Bulgakov didn’t exactly make it easier, but his work and discussions of the ways that much trinitarian theology isn’t all that trinitarian fascinated me. Likewise I really do want to get more into sophiology.

[Saffron Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doing my best but really struggling with this one. I think the message is a good one but the way it is delivered, I just don't know most of the words.

There are a lot of words in here I don't know. I know some of the Greek ones but other words I have never heard of at all and can't even work out what they are - of the words i can understand I've picked out Latin and Greek so far but I have no idea about the rest - maybe some of them are Russian transposed into English? No idea and the Translator isn't helping me out any.
Still going (doggedly)... maybe I will have to come back to this one when I'm a million and three... but even then I don;t think I'd know all the words. I finally waded through the part I was having trouble with - and discovered it was just the introduction and I wasn't even on chapter 1 yet... the cruelty.

Got to the point where I was getting frustrated n thinking of taking it back to the library. Asked for guidance n hey presto the reason (I suspect) I was meant to read this book is on pages 120 through 147. I admire Mr Bulgakov's bravery in telling the Eastern n Western churches that they're both wrong (!!!). And he seems to make some excellent points as to why. So I'm glad I read this part of the book at least n still doggedly trying to flick through some of the rest (really need like a 3 month loan to do the reading of this book justice - it's not a very thick book just heavy going in understanding that's all).

[Lainie · Rating 4 out of 5]

He is a profound, yet difficult theologian to read. Wonderfully deep theology of Sophia wisdom of God. Excellent thought on the Holy Spirit.
Great book for a deeper "Orthodox" view