The Eucharistic Sacrifice

By Sergius Bulgakov

This first English translation represents Sergius Bulgakov’s final, fully developed word on the Eucharist.

The debate around the controversial doctrine of the Eucharist as sacrifice has dogged relations between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches since the Reformation. In The Eucharistic Sacrifice, the famous Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov cuts through long-standing polemics surrounding the notion of the Eucharist as sacrifice and offers a stunningly original intervention rooted in his distinctive theological vision. This work, written in 1940, belongs to Bulgakov’s late period and is his last, and most discerning, word on eucharistic theology. His primary thesis is that the Eucharist is an extension of the sacrificial, self-giving love of God in the Trinity, or what he famously refers to as kenosis. Throughout the book, Bulgakov points to the fact that, although the eucharistic sacrifice at the Last Supper took place in time before the actual crucifixion of Christ, both events are part of a single act that occurs outside of time.

This is Bulgakov’s concluding volume of three works on the Eucharist. The other two, The Eucharistic Dogma and The Holy Grail, were translated and published together in 1997. This third volume was only first published in the original Russian version in 2005 and has remained unavailable in English until now. The introduction provides a brief history of Bulgakov’s theological career and a description of the structure of The Eucharistic Sacrifice. This clear and accessible translation will appeal to scholars and students of theology, ecumenism, and Russian religious thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268201425

Sergius Bulgakov

 Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's leading Orthodox theologian. His other books include Relics and Miracles, The Unfading Light, The Burning Bush, The Lamb of God, The Comforter, Jacob's Ladder, and Churchly Joy (all Eerdmans).

Book preview

THE EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE

THE

EUCHARISTIC

SACRIFICE

SERGIUS BULGAKOV

Translated with an introduction by

Mark Roosien

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942362

ISBN: 978-0-268-20140-1 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20141-8 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20139-5 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20142-5 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

Translator’s Acknowledgments

Introduction by Mark Roosien

CHAPTER 1 The Eucharist as Sacrifice

CHAPTER 2 The Special Character of Old Testament Sacrifices

CHAPTER 3 What Is Remembrance ( anámnēsis )?

CHAPTER 4 Heavenly and Earthly Sacrifice

CHAPTER 5 The Eucharist and Its Institution

CHAPTER 6 Eucharistic Transmutation

CHAPTER 7 The Divine-Human Sacrifice I

CHAPTER 8 The Divine-Human Sacrifice II

CHAPTER 9 The Atoning Sacrifice (The Eucharistic Memorial)

CHAPTER 10 The Eucharist and the Mother of God

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This translation project has been many years in the making. It would not have been possible without the aid of several people, whom I wish to thank here. First, I am indebted to my Russian teacher, Olga Petrova, whose sound pedagogy and enthusiasm set me on solid ground early in my study of the language. I wish to thank Roberto De La Noval, Yaroslav Gorbachov, and Claire Roosien for their advice in translating difficult passages, and for many stimulating conversations about the text. My gratitude is due to the generous staff at University of Notre Dame Press, especially Stephen Little, Matthew Dowd, and Wendy McMillen, and to copyeditor Scott Barker. Thanks also go out to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention Boris Jakim and Thomas Allan Smith, whose marvelous translations of other works by Bulgakov provided a template for the present translation. While translating this book I was supported by the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and the Yale Institute of Sac red Music. I am grateful for their assistance. This translation is dedicated to Claire, with love and gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

Mark Roosien

What does the Eucharist have to do with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross? With his characteristically penetrating insight, Fr. Sergius Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871–1944) in this book cuts through long-standing polemics surrounding the notion of the Eucharist as sacrifice, and offers a stunningly original intervention rooted in his distinctive theological vision. Bulgakov argues that the eucharistic sacrifice is not another sacrifice offered in addition to the cross of Christ, but rather an eschatological manifestation of the primordial sacrifice that itself lies behind Golgotha: the self-giving love of God in the Trinity.

The text of The Eucharistic Sacrifice has a somewhat tragic history. Bulgakov wrote the book-length essay in 1939–40, but did not see its publication in his lifetime. It languished in the YMCA Press archive in Paris, virtually unknown, until its publication in Russian in 2005.¹ The book is the third and final part of what one could call his Eucharistic trilogy, following the essays The Eucharistic Dogma (1930) and The Holy Grail (1932), which were translated into English by Boris Jakim and published in 1997.² The Eucharistic Sacrifice, the longest of the three works, represents Bulgakov’s final, fully developed word on the Eucharist. The vision of the book is marked by the same maturity and passion as his other late works.

* * *

Sergius Bulgakov was born into the family of a poor priest in the Russian town of Livny. His father was the sixth in a long line of priests in the Bulgakov family.³ In childhood, he was deeply immersed in church life, enrolling in a local seminary at the age of fourteen. However, the failure of his dry, uninspired seminary education to answer his probing religious questions led him to a period of atheism. He embarked upon an academic career as a Marxist economist, holding a post teaching political economy at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute until 1900, whereupon he returned to Russia. However, Bulgakov grew disenchanted with Marxism. Under the influence of the works of author Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), Bulgakov made a sharp turn away from Marxian materialism toward idealism. It was at this time that he also rediscovered Christianity, and came under the influence of theologian and mathematician Fr. Pavel Florensky (1882–1937). For the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, Bulgakov mined Christian thought as a resource for social action and transformation, and in 1906 he held a short-lived post in the Second Duma as an independent Christian Socialist. His creative output took a definitive turn toward dogmatic theology with his book The Unfading Light in 1917, published just before the Bolshevik Revolution, an event that would permanently alter the trajectory of his life. Ordained to the priesthood in 1918, Bulgakov was exiled from Russia in 1922. He eventually settled in Paris in 1925, where he helped found the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. He wrote two theological trilogies and numerous other works on theological topics that would occupy him until his death from throat cancer on July 12, 1944.⁴

* * *

The Eucharist is an important but understudied aspect of Bulgakov’s thought, and of his life of faith.⁵ Those who knew him have quoted him as saying that his entire theological inspiration had its source in the eucharistic cup.⁶ According to his Autobiographical Notes, the Eucharist played a significant role in his return to Christianity in adulthood. Bulgakov recounted a momentous trip in 1908 to a solitary hermitage lost in the forest somewhere in Russia. He had secretly hoped that he would meet God on this trip, but felt greatly agitated during the evening church service once he arrived. He ambled out of the church in distress toward the guest house but stumbled upon the cell of an old elder, or holy man, by mistake. This chance meeting turned out to be a pivotal point along Bulgakov’s path to a full embrace of Christ and the Church. He wrote of his meeting with the elder, The Father, seeing his prodigal son, ran to meet me. I heard from the elder that all human sin was like a drop of water in comparison with the ocean of divine love. I left him, pardoned and reconciled, trembling and in tears, feeling myself returned as on wings within the precincts of the Church.⁷ Bulgakov resolved to attend the eucharistic liturgy the next morning and receive Communion:

The bells were calling to prayer. I listened to them as if I heard them for the first time in my life, for they invited me also to join the fellowship of believers. I looked upon the world with new eyes. The next morning at the Eucharist I knew that I was a participant in the Covenant, that our Lord hung on the cross and shed his blood for me and because of me; that the most blessed meal was being prepared by the priest for me, and that the gospel narrative about the feast in the house of Simon the leper and about the woman who loved much was addressed personally to me. It was on that day when I partook of the blessed body and blood of my Lord.⁸

Soon after this experience, Bulgakov commenced the intellectual project for which he is best known: the theology of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The first major articulation of his sophiological project, Philosophy of Economy (1912), includes an important section on the Eucharist, where the former Marxist economist articulated a mystical economics.⁹ He sought to ground human activity, in all of its routine mundanity, in the common task of humanizing or sophianizing nature, that is, transforming dead, inert matter into a living, organic body through labor and social action.¹⁰ Bulgakov described the simple act of eating as a richly symbolic way in which the world outside of us becomes humanized and is assimilated into the human body. All humanity must eat to live, but for Bulgakov eating is not primarily about survival: eating is a sign of the primordial unity of human and nonhuman creation, manifesting in a symbolic way the world brought to its proper telos. The world’s telos is entry into divine life, the life that Bulgakov called Sophia. Here Bulgakov inserted a short but engrossing discussion of the Eucharist: "As food maintains mortal life, so the eucharistic meal means to partake of immortal life, in which death is conquered once and for all, and the deathlike impenetrability of matter is overcome. . . . God’s incarnation created a new, spiritual flesh—the flesh of the world is raised to a higher, immortal potential, and we anticipate its imminent transfiguration in the sacrament."¹¹ At this early stage of his sophiological thought, Bulgakov discerned that the physical act of consuming the Eucharist contains a foretaste of the world as the eschatological garden of Eden. The Eucharist is the unique point of immanent contact between the immaterial and the material, the Creator and the created, the divine and the human.

Bulgakov continued to reflect on the Eucharist at key moments in his theological career. The 1930 essay The Eucharistic Dogma grew out of his encounter and love affair with Roman Catholicism a decade earlier, from which he emerged as a forceful and sometimes imbalanced critic of Catholic theology, attacking Scholastic theological method and certain dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.¹² In this essay, Bulgakov critiqued the notion of transubstantiation, arguing that its explanation of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is fatally marked by cosmological immanentism, an attempt to interpret the sacrament within the limits of this world.¹³ Instead of transubstantiation, which he saw as a naturalistic and crude explanation of eucharistic change, he developed a theory of transmutation (prelozhenie), drawing upon the Chalcedonian definition of the undivided and unconfused unity of two natures, divine and human, in Christ. Like Christ’s physical, earthly body, the physical Eucharist manifests union between the two natures. The eucharistic transmutation is thus a metaphysical, and not a merely physical, event.¹⁴

In the 1932 essay The Holy Grail, Bulgakov further developed his theology of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, arguing that that presence extends to the entire world throughout human history, symbolized by the outpouring of blood and water from Christ’s side at the crucifixion (see John 19:34). Christ’s abiding, eucharistic presence in the world means that the struggle for justice and unity in human history, though it seems to be a tragedy, like the crucifixion itself, will ultimately end in the triumph of the cross. Nevertheless, this struggle requires graceinfused, human effort.¹⁵ Here, Bulgakov adds a new, ecclesial dimension to the common task enunciated in Philosophy of Economy. To bring all things into a sophianic union of divinity and humanity, material and immaterial, is the task of a gracious, ecclesial, Christian community, whose foundation is the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the locus primus of the meeting of divinity and humanity.¹⁶

Having ended The Holy Grail on this ecclesial note, he then elaborated on the ecumenical and social implications of the Eucharist in a 1933 essay titled The Eucharist and the Social Problems of Modern Society for the Journal for the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, a publication of the joint Anglican–Orthodox initiative of which Bulgakov was a key figure.¹⁷ He wrote, "The ‘sobornost’ [conciliarity/ catholicity] of the Church, that is—union in love—thus becomes the Body of Christ which is being accomplished, and at the same time contains in itself the guiding principle and ideal for the fellowship of mankind.¹⁸ For Bulgakov, the Church embodies the ideal for the fellowship of mankind by welcoming all the baptized to the eucharistic banquet. Because of his conviction that the Eucharist represents ground zero of the common task of the world’s transfiguration by a gracious, ecclesial, Christian community, Bulgakov advocated for (limited) eucharistic intercommunion between Anglicans and Orthodox in hopes that further intercommunion among the churches might eventually be established.¹⁹ Intercommunion was for him not only an act of hope in the face of persistent theological disagreements, but indeed the Church’s duty in order to better serve the world. His proposal was ultimately rejected, but it was an attempt to put into action the principle that lay at the heart of his eucharistic thought: the Eucharist is the eschatologically realized union between God and humanity, the Church and the world, and human and nonhuman creation: The inspiration of the Eucharist ought to accompany us in all our creative activity in life, and the Liturgy—the ‘common [task]’ must be transformed into a liturgy celebrated outside the temple.²⁰ The eucharistic common task" for Bulgakov was cosmic and eschatological, social and liturgical, and transcended the all-too-human ecclesiological borders and divisions of the present day.

* * *

The Eucharistic Sacrifice belongs to Bulgakov’s late period. It was written around the same time as The Bride of the Lamb, the most mature statement of his exploration of the relationship between the divine and the human, and is focused on the Church.²¹ It is within the eschatological horizon of the Church that human beings, in all their materiality, encounter God most immediately in the Divine-human materiality of the Eucharist. But what is the specific nature and content of that encounter? That is the question addressed in The Eucharistic Sacrifice.

The primary thesis of The Eucharistic Sacrifice is that the Eucharist is an extension of the sacrificial, self-giving love of God in the Trinity. The eucharistic sacrifice unites heaven and earth, summing up and extending the three-fold sacrifice at work in the divine economy: first, the sacrifice of kénōsis within the Trinitarian life of God; second, creation itself as a self-limiting sacrifice of God’s Divinity and power; and third, the sacrifice of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection on earth.²² Throughout the book, Bulgakov returns often to the fact that the eucharistic sacrifice at the Last Supper (as signified by the words "this is my body, broken for you") took place in time before the actual crucifixion. Bulgakov concludes from this fact that the eucharistic sacrifice is an instantiation of a transhistorical and supratemporal sacrifice. It is a single moment, but one that reveals the sacrificial whole of Christ’s life, and indeed of God’s divine life in Trinitarian communion. The eucharistic sacrifice is thus always eschatologically available and endlessly repeatable through the Church’s liturgical ritual. It extends the effects of the kenotic sacrifice of Christ—healing, forgiveness, and the resurrection to eternal life—making the whole world an upper room. In this sense, for Bulgakov, the Eucharist is a premanifestation of the eschaton par excellence: it is not as though the eucharistic sacrifice will cease to