by Very Rev. Dr. John A. Jillions

We Orthodox need to ask ourselves some hard questions about the episcopal ethos that has come down to us from Byzantium and was then magnified in the Russian tradition. This was an aspect of Orthodoxy that for his entire life troubled Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944), one of the most prolific Orthodox thinkers of the 20th century. He came from a long line of priests in Russia but gave up on Christianity at age 14 because he despised the servility of the clerical world.
My revolt against my surroundings was morally right in so far as it was inspired by love of freedom and disgust at the servility which then reigned in the clerical world (and at that time it was the only world I knew). I did not want to be reconciled to it, indeed I could not be, and it would not have been right. I fled from it to save my spiritual integrity, and to this day I consider my flight justified.[1]
Bulgakov eventually returned to the Church and became a devoted priest, Professor of Dogmatics, and then Dean of St. Sergius Institute in Paris (we get a remarkable glimpse of his inner life in his Spiritual Diary, recently translated by Mark Roosien and Roberto J. De La Noval). He was devoted to the memory of Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin, 1865-1925) who blessed him to be a priest, and he was grateful to Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskiy,1868-1946) for his active support in Paris, especially in times of theological controversy. And theologically he understood the bishop’s authority “as a mystical reality as evident as daylight.” But he remained deeply frustrated by his personal experience of episcopacy and believed that the Orthodox Church could do better.
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