Sergii Bulgakov, socialism, and the church

The "Christian Socialist" period of Sergei Bulgakov included, literally speaking, his failed involvement in the political affairs of Russia in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. He continued to deal with the topic, trying to comprehend socialism as a phenomenon not strictly political but rather spiritual, and also trying to set the first theological conditions for Christian political witness. Throughout his life in exile, he insisted on his criticism of the simple political reaction and of the nostalgia for an authoritarian monarchy. Socialism, for him, had come to form a model of human self-understanding, which refuses to accept the reality of the Church. Bulgakov's argument seems to be that the "socialist" mentality that underlies a series of twentieth-century phenomena presupposes a specific anthropology and can easily be regarded as possessing absolute power. It is this belief that provides the pseudo-religious dimension that Bulgakov sees as the soul of modern anthropology and against which he identifies the need for resistance from the side of theology and ecclesiastical practice. This is a perspective that has remained relevant for almost a hundred years since the publication of the texts under discussion.