Back to the Basics with Bulgakov on the Topic of Angelic and Human Falls

“The Fall of the Rebel Angels” from 1562 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Picking up again here on this languishing project to share reading notes from each section of The Bride of the Lamb, section 2 called “​Creaturely Freedom as the Possibility of Good and of Evil” inside of chapter 3 (entitled, simply, “​Evil”) provides a great opportunity to review some fundamentals of the fall with Bulgakov. This section is unusually easy to read and mostly involves some basic points with wide agreement in Christian theology. For example, evil is a parasite that only “exists” as a negation of the good given that, “even in revolt, creation ...remains only itself, but turned inside out, so to speak.” As Bulgakov wrote in the first section of this chapter, “it is insufficient to expose evil in its ontological nothingness before the face of God; one must also recognize its fatal, destructive force in creation ...for if in the higher, divine plane, evil does not exist, it exists in the lower, creaturely plane, as a positive and peculiarly creative force.” This active “capacity” of evil is a result of our creaturely freedom that extends even to a kind of resistance to our own creation and to an “ability” to try to give shape to self-referential realities that are shadows of reality and not ultimately part of God’s creation.

In considering how human and angelic creatures have come to exist in a world pervaded by such “inside out” distortions of God’s creation, Bulgakov gives a straight-forward and familiar narrative account of an angelic fall (with some distinct characteristics) followed by a human fall (that is connected to the angelic fall in a few ways and that gives rise to the kind of world that we find around us). Behind my subscription paywall below, I give a summary of these two falls and unpack a few ways in which Bulgakov sets his first treatment of this topic here a little apart from assumptions that some contemporary Christians would have (despite the overall recognizability of Bulgakov’s fall narrative in this section). I’ll also compare a few notes from what I see between Bulgakov’s accounts of these creaturely falls and the accounts given by David Bentley Hart that I have written about here. Finally, I also give some short and very basic thoughts of my own.