At the height of the Sophiology-controversy in the mid-1930s, Fr Sergii Bulgakov identified the basic aspiration of his theological programme as a ‘positive overcoming of Modernity’. In this, he was seeking to consummate the reconstruction of Christian thought and culture undertaken in the last two decades of the 19th-century, by Vladimir Solovyóv. In fact, Bulgakov had been carrying forward this project from the very start of his career as a Christian social theorist, at the turn of the century. Thus, despite his distancing from his mentor in the aftermath of 1917 and his exile first to the Crimea and then abroad, Bulgakov remains a Solovyóvian.

But Bulgakov’s reception of Solovyóv also involves a revision. This does not, at first, concern the doctrine of the divine Wisdom – the point at which his ‘break’ in the 1920s becomes apparent – but rather Solovyóv’s ‘residual Hegelianism’, which continually threatens to level out the natural and the supra-natural – reason and faith, the secular and the sacred. From the start of his pupillage, Bulgakov is consistently concerned to refuse any such levelling. He thereby does nothing more than extend and complete Solovyóv’s own late ‘apocalyptic turn’, which could not come to fruition due to his premature death in 1900.

Thus, if Bulgakov’s post-exilic thought is best understood as an overcoming of the deficiencies in Solovyóv’s speculative theology – the doctrine of Wisdom – this is itself only the last, decisive phase in a long revisionary process. Bulgakov’s move beyond any residual ‘immanent holism’ in his pre-Crimean period can be shown in relation to four crux-themes: first, ‘history’ and ‘science’, the focus of Bulgakov’s revision up to The Philosophy of Economy (1912); and then ‘theurgy’ and ‘theocracy’, both given extensive treatment The Unfading Light and texts from the 1920s that follow upon it.