The Eternal Sacrifice

Abstract

Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two types of thinker, according to the contrast – offered by the Greek poet Archilocus – between the hedgehog and the fox. The fox knows many things, whilst the hedgehog knows one big thing; writers can thus be divided into those ‘who relate everything to a single central vision, one system’, and ‘those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way’. Where Sergii Bulgakov belongs in this distinction is surely obvious. What is he, if not a hedgehog? Bulgakov himself avers that his sustaining quest is for an integral worldview and his ‘Sophiology’ exemplifies such a passion for the unity of all things. It articulates an account of the coherence of the world that relies in turn upon a purported unity of the world with its creator, a unity which itself depends upon the tri-unity of God with God. But Bulgakov is not as simple as this sounds. Bulgakov certainly had a genuine vision – indeed, visions – of unity. But he was also aware of the reality of evil and suffering as more than merely formal challenges to his unifying theological vision. Bulgakov’s sensitivity to the pervasive disjunction in created life finds expression in an account of the intrinsically ‘tragic’ nature of created reality. In one of Bulgakov’s late works, his ‘Reflections on War’ (1940), the revelation of Sophia in history is ‘the confrontation of darkness and light’, a confrontation that is glossed most often as the opposition of good and evil, but is at other times presented as the confrontation of being with the ‘nothing’ ‘from which’ the world was made.